Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Hiatt said he didn’t get any experience trying that approach at Wal-Mart because of the world’s largest retail chain’s legendary resistance to any kind of loyalty program.

The sales pull from such efforts can be impressive, he said. For example, in a recent presentation in London, Hiatt said Wal-Mart achieves—on average–a 64 percent sales boost from endcap screens alone.

A pragmatic challenge with highly customized digital signage efforts—beyond the cost of local programming and potentially even video creation—is funding. Chain-wide, Wal-Mart is able to raise non-trivial amounts of cash from key suppliers—such as Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s and Hershey’s—for placing their 5-second to 30-second (most are 15 or fewer seconds) ads on its video network.

That Wal-Mart network has sufficient eyeballs to place it right below the major television networks (CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox), and its 140 million weekly visitors (not visits, but actual visitors) blows away any single media show. Compare that 140 million, for example, to the Super Bowl’s 80 million viewers, American Idol‘s 23 million, Desperate Housewives‘ 15 million and The Office‘s 5 million, Hiatt said.

Wal-Mart’s sales lift figures—attributed to the digital signage campaigns—are also impressive. According to the figures Hiatt used in his speech, laundry detergent saw an average sales lift of 12 percent, snack cake purchases increased 34 percent, cereals were boosted 60 percent and new mouthwash sales soared a stunning 87 percent. As you can imagine, the supplier ROI for those cereal and mouthwash campaigns was 147 percent and 121 percent, respectively.

That’s a very attractive buy nationally, but achieving such results is much more difficult regionally and certainly at the store level. “Pampers is not going to buy with the individual store,” Hiatt said. Store management can have leeway. But if a large number of individual store managers start going their own way, it may impact the revenue that can be earned chain-wide. Just something to consider, when the full ROI is being calculated.