Have you ever been shopping at Amazon.com and had the friendly little widget tell you, "those who bought that also purchased these..." and then there is a list of additional items to choose from? While this type of technology is not new, its application is being expanded by a company called Cognitive Match. Recently the company obtained more than $2.5 million for real-time content matching. While this technology is somewhat specific to online shopping carts, it could certainly work for more interactive displays as digital signage makes more headway toward interactivity.

Cognitive Match combines commerce match, content match, and advertiser match for e-commerce websites. The company boasts of the ability to match specific people and demographics with specific content to increase sales and drive revenue upward. Here is a little ditty from the company website explaining how the technology works:

1. A visitor arrives at your site or page

2. A message is sent to our server.  We retrieve any existing details from an anonymous cookie ID.  We look at all the variables and data available, and use that data decide which content option to display

3. That decision is sent back to the page, the content is retrieved from your existing servers or infrastructure.  And the visitor sees the option we selected.

Our software has been built as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, meaning that we host the backend processing and data we need to make decisions.

In the location where we manage content, we place a JavaScript tag.  Our tags operate either just like your existing analytics tags (so our solution can pick up visitor trends), but where we manage content that tag becomes a two-way communication - allowing us to pass back a content decision.  The content is then picked up from your servers, meaning we do not manage or host any of your content.

These decisions happen while the page is loading - so that the visitor is not exposed to any delay.  In the case of delay or failover, we have a set of scaled responses so that at no time is the visitor left with a "hole" in the page.

While the applications are currently focused toward online retail, I can see a mushroom into other industries as well--especially as out-of-home advertising becomes more interactive and integrated with RFID technology. Think for a moment about a digital sign installation in a retail location. When someone picks up a particular product, the database could query and give suggestions based on previous purchases as to what other individuals had preference for. While the technology is not new it is certainly something to look for as an eventual application in the digital signage world.