Episodes
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Meghan Athavale, LUMO Interactive
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point.
A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are things like fun, engaging games.
The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage.
The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD.
I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale.
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TRANSCRIPT
Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?
Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture.
Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.
When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are.
So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?
Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.
It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays.
So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.
So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend coding, how everything maps, but also, I think I saw there were something like 200 different apps in a library?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are 300 pre-made experiences, which they're constantly turning over. So we have some in there that have been there for 10 years that we will replace with something new. We're constantly rolling over those apps, and we take requests from our community, and that's one of the things that our business model gives us the freedom to do because we're not reliant on selling hardware and our community is very vast. We represent everything from education to large brands. Our community can make requests for new apps and we'll just make them and add them to our market. So we don't have the restrictions of having to charge through the nose for custom content development because we've developed these systems that make it very easy to pump out new content, and then the other thing that we offer as far as content goes, like out of the box content is we have an SDK for the companies that do have in house developers, and then we've got a number of different templates. So you can just say, I want to make a Koi Pond, and I want to throw my business's logo behind it, and you could whip something like that off in five minutes.
So are the templates purely done in-house or do you have third-party designers who are contributing?
Meghan Athavale: That's a great question. At this point, they're all done in-house. We are working towards outsourcing a lot of our content development just because it'll give us a wider breadth of content and make that content more available. We're just at the very beginning of seeing rollouts that are large enough to make joining a third-party content development team attractive.
We see this in gaming consoles all the time, where you'll have a new fantastic console that comes out, it's low cost, and they're trying to get game developers to create games for that console, but unless thousands and thousands of people have that console and are buying games for it, it's not really worth making a game for it so we're at the stage where we're starting to see enough of a widespread and permanent deployment of systems running on our platform that it makes sense to have those conversations with third-party development teams now and we're starting to have those conversations.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about scale because one of the particularly compelling things about your company and your offer is cost, in terms of, it's not very expensive at all to use this.
Can you walk through that and not really how the financials work, you're not charging a lot per instance of this on a monthly basis, so you need to have a lot of them out there, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's right. We still make a percentage of our revenue on five or six big custom projects a year. I would say that our MRR represents about half of our revenue. The goal is to reach a point in scale where we can just focus on the platform, but I do get asked pretty frequently why it costs so little.
There are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest one, I think, is just we want to make this, as you mentioned, democratizing the technology, we want to make this technology available and affordable to schools, that’s our primary business goal. I and my business partner, our moms were both special needs teachers, we've seen firsthand the struggles that teachers and educators have in getting technology into their classrooms they need it for kids with sensory issues or children with autism or ADHD, and we've seen how effective interactive digital displays can be in those environments, particularly for things like increasing social skills. A lot of these kids come in, and they're really stuck on screens. They're very stuck on virtual experiences, and so it becomes a bridge, where they can engage with one another and with their teachers socially while still having that digital feedback.
It's just very important to us that our pricing reflects our values as a company and that's one of our core values is making this accessible for education, but the other is that we really don't need to charge a lot for what we want to do. So at this point, our company's main work on the platform is around supporting hardware. So, as new devices come out, we're adding support for them so that you can download our software and you can plug in any of the commercially available 3D cameras, and it'll automatically recognize and calibrate that camera for you and take out the computer vision steps and specific requirements for each individual device, like DirectX. I think that would probably be the closest analog, you want something that you can plug and play regardless of which device you're using to achieve the tracking. So we want to focus on that.
We also want to focus on the tools that allow people to scale these projects to multiple locations. If you have an interactive display in a flagship store and you want us to put it into all of your stores, the step from running your proof of concept to scaling it to a hundred locations is very simple using our platform, and it's because we're constantly pushing updates and we do health management, we have a content management system, and those are the things that we want to focus on the long term. We don't necessarily want to focus on developing the individual games. We want to make the game development stuff as easy for other people to do as possible because we don't have all the ideas in the world, but we are really good at making sure that other people's ideas continue to run and don't go down.
Just so people understand, your top end cost is, if you work it out on a monthly basis, it's $74 a month, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's as high as it gets.
If I'm an agency and I decide I have a beauty brand client that wants some sort of activation that's an interactive floor or wall or whatever, that's going to cost like five-six figures probably, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, I mean, the part that determines the cost of any of these installations is the hardware you choose to use. If you're a brand and you're developing the content from scratch, maybe hiring our team or hiring a third party to develop custom content for you, there may be 3D modeling involved, there may be compositing, you might have multi-level programming, you might have second screen experiences, so all of those things add up.
But we can generally, when somebody comes to us and asks for a ballpark estimate, the only thing we really need to understand is where it is going and what kind of display you are planning to use, and we can generally come up with a range.
But if you're doing it, it's going to be a fraction of what it would cost if you just went to an interactive agency and said, “Build this, please!”
Meghan Athavale: Absolutely. But I think that something to keep in mind is that if you're going to an interactive agency and you don't have an idea yet, you're likely going to pay less. If you go to an agency and what you're paying them to do is to figure out what the activation actually should be, we're not an agency, and so we don't position ourselves as somebody that's going to do a lot of things like research and problem-solving. But what we can do is scale that.
You’re not Moment Factory.
Meghan Athavale: We are not and we don't want to fill that niche because it's a different skill set and it requires the ability to experiment with things on a one-time basis.
You may develop a solution for a brand or a display for the Super Bowl or something like that, where you're using a specific set of hardware just one time, and that's fantastic. I love that there are agencies in the world that get to do that, but that's not what we do. We look at it and go, how do we make this happen a thousand times, and that's a very different way of looking at things. So I think, if you want something that already exists, and you just want to put your stamp on it and create something that gives it a unique feel for your brand or experience, that's where you come to us. If you want something that's never been done before in the entire world and uses new technology that hasn't been proven long-term in the industry. TeamLab, and Moment Factory, are where you would go, but it is a lot more expensive for sure.
You're starting to use things like LiDAR and everything else.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. The risk is just so much higher, and you need people on the ground. You need to roll a truck if something goes wrong. However, with our systems, we're way past that point.
Yeah, because you've got the device management designed for scale and everything else, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we don't release anything into the market that hasn't been tested thoroughly in our labs for months and months at a time. We have the ability to guarantee things, whereas in some of these riskier projects, as long as you hire somebody that knows what they're doing, they're going to find a way to make it work, but they're not necessarily going to be able to tell you how from the beginning of the project.
So, for something like a classroom, what's the kit of parts, and what's the degree of complexity to put this in?
Meghan Athavale: Most classrooms either have an interactive floor, an interactive wall, or both.
Already?
Meghan Athavale: No, that's what they're putting in, and it's basically the same technology for either. We designed our software so it works with any projector, and a lot of classrooms already have projectors, so they'll just use what they have. So you've got your display, which in classrooms is typically a projector, a 3D camera, and a Windows computer.
We typically recommend that people use the sort of baseline specification on our site as an i5 or equivalent with a decent graphics card, you don't want something that's not going to be able to run games because that's basically what we're running, and the cost is usually like for including the projector for a classroom is usually around $2,000-2,500.
To set that up, is it the sort of thing that the school district or the schools, IT person, or people have to do, or is it simplistic to the level that if a teacher already got a projector pointed at a whiteboard of some kind, they can just do it themselves?
Meghan Athavale: So teachers can do it themselves, and we often help teachers do it themselves. But nowadays they're busy. Teaching is not an easy career right now, and we're typically dealing with the IT personnel for an entire division when these installations are going in.
If you're dealing with a full division or district, are they rolling out like that, or is it still onesie twosies?
Meghan Athavale: It's usually one per school across an entire district, is what we're seeing, and that's mostly in the U.S. We haven't really seen nearly the same traction in schools in Canada yet.
I didn't say at the outset, but you're in Montreal.
Meghan Athavale: Yes, that's right.
Why do you think that is just because of the way education works in Canada versus the US?
Meghan Athavale: I'm not entirely sure. I know that it's like that in all of our verticals. So it's not just education. I would say retail, events, and all of the verticals that we serve, we have faster pickup and larger rollouts in the US. It could be the population just much bigger.
I think we're just not risk takers, and I also think, to a certain extent, we're limited by things like weather and the accessibility of venues to having these types of, there are a lot more venues in the US that have built-in walls or built-in interactive components that we can just hop our software onto them. I don't think there are as many opportunities here.
You mentioned, in detail, education; what other vertical markets or segments are you seeing a lot of activity in?
Meghan Athavale: Events is the fastest growing segment, and this is like events of all different sizes and lengths, so it could be something that is like a week-long trade show, it could be like a birthday party for kids. It could be somebody who is a DJ, and they're bringing an interactive floor to all of their gigs.
It's really all over the map. We just did a pop-up in Times Square for a major chocolate brand. We've done interactives for movie launches, so like those short-term events where they're developing their own special content and it's on for less than a month, I would say that is our fastest growing vertical.
Interesting. We talked a little bit about planning before we turned on the recording, and I'm curious about how these things get planned out and how you ensure and how your users ensure that what they're putting up gets beyond just being eye candy/wow factor stuff because I often say that wow factor has a short shelf life.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you. I think there has to be a balance between the cost and the reward of experiences like this. One of the biggest mistakes that we see people making is they'll see something on the internet, they'll see something in video format, and they'll think, I need that at my event, or I need that in my museum, and they'll skip the part of like why they need it.
It'll be entirely like an emotional decision, and the challenge here is that there are so many more and more faked every single day. We get sent videos all the time with people asking us to do anamorphic illusions. People will see videos of that, and they'll be like, “I want that but interactive, can you make it?” And because they're seeing a video and the video is staged, and in some cases, the video is a complete composite. It's not even something that actually happened in the real world, they won't understand that it doesn't work from anything except for one very particular perspective. So, the person who's interacting with anamorphic content is not going to see what the person watching from across the street on a particular street corner is going to see, and the same thing with large-scale digital displays.
People will see these huge LED walls, and I think you saw this at our booth at LDI. When you walk right up to a big LED wall, you see the individual pixels, not the same image that somebody is watching from far away, so I think that those limitations are very difficult for people to understand and appreciate unless they've actually seen the installation in person. So I would say if you see something and you're planning to put it in an event, you're planning to use it in brand activation, go see that experience in person first. Don't make a decision about whether or not you need it until you've actually personally experienced it because seeing it on a video is not the same thing as what it's going to look like in real life.
And then the other advice that I give to people when they come to me with the wow factor criteria is like, what do you want the takeaway to be? Is this a shareable thing? Do you want a hundred people to come to your event to put up a hundred different videos and tag you in them? What is your metric for success? Because if that's it, then the content's going to be very different than if you want a hundred people to enter their emails in order to play a game or you need to know at the end of the day what you're walking away from after you've put that activation in place.
I've seen different iterations of this stuff. The applications in classrooms, I think, is fantastic and it plays to kids at their whims and everything else; they want to be involved. I find it's quite different.
A lot of the ones that I've seen in public spaces like shopping malls and so on, where you see the kids running around doing stuff, interacting with it, but you don't really see the adults, and that's fine if it's aimed at kids. But I wonder sometimes, when brands do these things, that the only real interest is with children and adults saying, “I'm not doing that, I'm not an extrovert. I don't want to do this trickery in front of other people.”
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think that's a very fair point. One of the things that we noticed when we first started putting particularly interactive floors into retail spaces was that we still have an entire generation of adults, and I would count my own generation in there; we've been trained not to step on screens like it's your impulse isn't to go running through the light. The generations who are comfortable with that and who grew up with touch screens and expect everything to be interactive, I think they're in their twenties and early thirties now, so we are seeing that change quite a bit. I would say that from about 35 years down, we aren't seeing that hesitancy to interact with things, but I do think that we still have a long way to go in discovering how the content can be used.
A lot of times, it's to augment like physical experiences is how you get adults to engage think like axe-throwing. Adding really cool interactive graphics to an axe-throwing experience is something that's going to really delight an older crowd. Same thing with bowling alleys, making those interactive. So I think…
So they're becoming Wii games.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think a lot of the time, people think that there's a choice between virtual experiences in VR and physical experiences like you would have with a traditional family entertainment center. But what our software allows you to do is combine the two, so you have a headset-free experience that does have digital interactive components, but you're also engaging with something physical. So we do a lot of Air Hockey tables, pool tables, and things like that where you're still playing pool and using physical paddles, but there are interactive digital visual elements on top of that. That's where we're seeing unquestionable pickup by older people.
Yeah, so where there's tangible fun or some sort of activity versus so often when I've gone to trade shows, if I see some sort of an interactive video wall thing, please walk up to this thing and dance in front of it or wave your arms, and there'll be light particles and that's nice, but I don't see the business case here, and I don't think it's interesting for more than 10 seconds.
Meghan Athavale: For sure, if you're in an environment where you're dancing anyway, having cool visual effects while you're dancing is like a good bonus, and I think that's how we have to think about it in terms of engaging an older audience, is you need to be augmenting something that they're doing anyways.
You can't expect them to do an activity that they wouldn't normally do just because it's like eye candy. But if they're doing something anyway if they're already in a curling league and you can make their curling more fun…
We’re getting really Canadian here.
Meghan Athavale: Right. I mean, I'm available for anyone who wants to try that. I've done soccer, I've done hockey, I haven't done curling yet. I would really like to make an interactive curling experience. But yeah, that’s where you attract adults by helping make something that they want to do anyway, much cooler.
Where did this come from, like why did you start this company?
Meghan Athavale: This is a very existential question. It's actually a pretty funny story. We started the company by accident. My co-founders, Keith Otto and Curtis Wachs and I, all worked at an agency together, and this was like 2010, back in the days when Instructables and a lot of those sorts of YouTube channels were just starting, and we started hanging out after work and just making stuff and it was all things that we would never get hired to make. We were designing our own touch screens. We created our own mist screen for projection. We did a lot of building projections and it was all for fun. We saw other people doing it all over the world. We thought it was really like a fun hobby. We started throwing parties to show off some of the things that we were making, and a friend of mine, Kayla Jeanson, who is an incredible videographer. She also has moved out to Montreal. This all happened back in Winnipeg, which is where my company is based.
So we're all back in Winnipeg. Kayla shows up at one of the parties. This was before Facebook, so it was an SMS-controlled wall where you were sending text messages, and it was making things happen on the wall. She took a video, and that video ended up going viral. We found out about it after the fact, and we started getting contacted by different businesses the University of Nevada, Reno reached out and said, “Hey, we'd really like to have something cool like this in our cafeteria.” and Curtis and I just looked at each other, we're like, wow, people will pay us to do this. We registered a business, and we all quit our jobs. We applied for CMF funding, and we launched as an agency designing these interactive experiences and, within the first two years, realized that the biggest challenge was once the experience was in place how do you maintain it? How do you make sure that it's going to continue running?
And that installation that we did back in, I think, in early 2011, in the cafeteria in Reno is still running, and part of it was just like starting by accident because a hobby that we were doing for fun led to some economic opportunities for us and the direction that we ended up taking was as a result of people liked what we did long enough to want to keep it running, to want to keep having us continue updating it. We've had a number of large-scale installations. There's one in Red Rock, Ontario, where they've done entire refreshes. We did our original installation for them in 2011 as well and just very recently replaced and updated a bunch of the software for them. The validation has been there, so the thing to focus on is how to make these experiences last, not how to make them cool for a week.
The company is quite small. I believe it's just like a handful of people, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. That's right. There are four of us.
And that's all you need to be because you're not getting into the weeds with the hardware, and I think you sell the hardware that you have through a reseller, Simply NUC?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we have a number of resellers, but Simply NUCis our preferred partner because they send us everything that they're selling so we can test it 24/7. So we're able to say with high confidence that anything you buy from Simply NUC is going to run long-term with our software.
I would like a bigger team. In all honesty, we had to let a few people go during the pandemic. I think one year in, we were like, okay, we're not going to be able to sustain ourselves with a larger team. So, I think we'd like to see some growth in the team within the next year or so. Because of the way that we've built our platform, we're able to outsource stuff that we can't do where we don't have enough work to bring somebody in-house for long periods of time, and there are also just amazing resources out there for outsourcing, now that didn't exist when we first started the company.
It's a small team. I don't anticipate that we'll ever be much more than 10 people.
But a few more wouldn't hurt.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, a few more wouldn't hurt. I'd like to build in a little bit more redundancy, and I'm getting older, and one of these days, I'm hoping that there will be some sort of a succession.
Because of the relationship that we have with our resellers and our installers, there's really not a lot of mission-critical stuff on our side. We push our regular updates. We create new content and respond to community requests and stuff. But not a lot of the work that we do is like on a deadline. It's a pretty chill working environment where we identify things that we think are going to be of value to the customer, and then we ask our customers, and then we build the thing. There's no pressure.
And there's also a knock on wood at this point: not a ton of competition because it's still a very niche market. We don't feel the pressure to be like the trade show that you and I met on; it was the first we've been in business for 13 years, and that was the first time we've ever done a trade show exhibit.
Oh, wow, and what was your takeaway from that?
Meghan Athavale: It was great. It was definitely time. We came away with quite a few new customers, and it was LDI. The reason we chose LDI as our first trade show is because there are so many companies that do events, and the total lifetime value of customers in the event space isn't as high as education would be or something where it's a permanent installation. There's just a lot more of them, and it's a lower-hanging fruit. We're hoping to bump up our revenue enough so that we can start expanding our team sometime mid-next year.
Do you have a reference case or a handful of reference cases? If people said, this sounds really cool. I can't really just walk into a classroom, obviously. Are there museums or public spaces or something like that where I could go see this?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are quite a few.
What we usually ask people to do is if they want to see an installation of ours in real life and they aren't able to set it up themselves, just contact us, let us know what city you're in, and we'll find somebody in your area that you can go visit. There are a lot of live public libraries and museums and buildings that are open to the public that have installations in them, and then the other thing that people can do is we have a free evaluation version of our software that you can just download and install.
So, for people who are getting into this on a commercial basis, it's a really good idea to set up a system for yourself, test it out, and play around with the tools. Don't pitch it to your customers until you've tried it, please!
So we make it possible for people to just install it for free and play around with it before they make any sort of purchase before they make any representations to their customers about what it can do.
Okay. All right. So, if people want to find you online, that's LUMOplay.com, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yep. That's right. LUMOplay.com, and if you reach out through the site, you will be talking to me. My name is Meghan.
All right, Meghan. Thank you very much.
Meghan Athavale: You're very welcome. Thank you, Dave.
Friday Oct 13, 2023
DSF Cocktails and Controversy, NYC 2023 - AI In Digital Signage
Friday Oct 13, 2023
Friday Oct 13, 2023
The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at Sony's NYC offices can have a listen.
Consider this a bonus podcast, and I have not added an intro or exit ... so it's a bit raw, but just fine for listening.
The topic was AI in digital signage, and you will hear from me, but much more usefully from Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, Jeffrey Weitzman of Navori and Jim Nista, who has a boutique creative agency out in LA.
We covered a lot of ground and tried to zero in, very much, on what AI means to digital signage and how it is already being applied.
Thanks to the folks at Sony for getting me the file!
Monday Jul 03, 2023
Jim Nista On Code Painting
Monday Jul 03, 2023
Monday Jul 03, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When a big LED video wall gets populated with fresh creative, the creatives and the people operating a display are likely going to have a conversation about the size of the finished file and how to move it – because there’s a good chance the rendered file is huge, and not something that can attach in an email.
So I was intrigued as hell when a creative guy told me the video wall creative he’d produced for a project could fit on an old-school floppy disk … because it was really just some lines of code.
A lot of people in the digital signage ecosystem will know Jim Nista. He started and ran the LA creative technology shop Insteo, before it was acquired by Almo. Nista worked for his new masters for a while, but eventually went off on his own, and is now spinning up a new boutique agency that’s doing creative for visual projects.
One of the things he’s been actively working on is what he calls Code Painting – a big visual that gradually builds in front of viewers and then self-destructs, replaced by a new visual that again starts to build. You set the file and visual instructions, and then forget it, as it will just run and run but always be a bit - or a lot – different.
It’s all done in programming instructions, and in the case of his current efforts, is focused on the familiar visuals of flowers.
Nista’s work was one of three used for the Sixteen:Nine Mixer at InfoComm last month. Having had a couple of explainers of what was going on, and the approach, I figured a podcast was the best way to help the industry understand what he’s figured out, and what he’s delivering to clients.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Hey Jim, can you explain what code painting is?
Jim Nista: Yeah, it's a fun new concept for me. I know that other people are doing some of the same types of things, but really, I have been trying to make a painting through either JavaScript or other coding techniques. I started with a more simple approach, and the goal truly was to create something that you're watching a painting come to life, and my own brief to myself was this needs to look good at every stage of the process. Sometimes a time-lapse at the beginning is. what are we looking at here? And so it's been a fun process for me to figure out a way to make something, not just paint itself through code, but to be interesting to look at through the entire process, however long it takes, but 30 seconds to a minute is what I'm usually trying to come towards.
But it is truly just code. There are no images, videos, AI, machine learning, or anything else. It's just a scripted process of creating a unique painting while you watch.
We were sitting in Orlando, chatting about this and you were describing it to me, and I was thinking, boy, this is a little bit over my head, but it sounded like it starts with almost like an armature. You start with some curves, and it just builds from there?
Jim Nista: Yeah. It starts from a very primitive drawing. It is almost like a child's drawing because some of the early pieces, and certainly some of the pieces that I showed down in Orlando, are flowers because those are shapes that are very recognizable to our eyes.
We can spot a flower-type shape almost as well as we can determine a human face style shape. I don't know why, and I don't know the evolutionary reasons behind it, but I realized that this is a pattern that we can determine very easily so behind the scenes, one of the very first things that this code does is to generate out some curves and if you think about the shape of a curve, if you flip that shape, it makes a petal or a leaf shape. So if you make a simple curve and then flip it, you end up with a leaf shape or a petal shape, and if you take that and rotate it around in a certain way and put a dot in the center, our eyes say “flower,” and we're really good at it, right?
It probably has something to do with our ability to find food and all the other things that we do as humans. But it becomes a shape that is very recognizable to us, and so once I have these very primitive drawn shapes stored in memory, then the real code takes over, which is the work that I spent so much time on over the last year and a half trying to make realistic-looking paint strokes come out of these primitive drawings that are stored in memory, and that's been really the fun part of the project is to invent a way to create something that comes to life that way, but is truly just based on the most primitive, basic line drawings you could possibly imagine. So there's some color encoded in that primitive. There are some rough shapes encoded in that primitive, but really it's just very simple and then works from there to create a painting while you watch.
We demoed this on a very large canvas down in Orlando, a 26-foot-tall LED video wall, 155 feet wide in terms of a curve and you had little vignettes, a number of these, I shouldn't say little, but they were substantially sized, maybe 15 feet tall or something like that, but you had a number of them and essentially, something would just build on this as you went and eventually show itself as a flower and evolve from there.
How long do these things take to build, and when they're finished building, is that what stays on screen, or does it erases off and you start over?
Jim Nista: The big idea that I started with for this project and just going back one step is this really came from before the pandemic when I started trying to learn oil painting again. I had done it in college and art classes and things like that, and it was always a fun passion. But I was struggling because when I was learning oil painting, especially during the pandemic-that was my hobby-I kept making paintings that were almost too realistic and I challenged myself. I was like, I know how to code too, so why can't I code a paint stroke that can teach me how to be more loose? And this is where the genesis of this came from, and from there, I let this take on a life of its own, but along the process, I decided I don't want this to look as organic as it could.
The overall idea is that it creates a piece as you're watching it and then destroys it and creates a new one, and then destroys that and creates a new one, and the idea came out of so many video walls, and we've all done them where you end up with a five-minute loop of stock footage, and there's a lot of fatigue that you can imagine from employees who have to visit, watch this screen every single day to, guests and visitors having to see the same content over and over again and just the boring factor of yeah, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this video while now we're gonna spend a thousand dollars on content. There are so many projects that are like that, and so I was thinking, how can I put together something that is eternal content, or at least, doesn't need to be changed as often?
And that was the genesis behind this. Let it create a piece, let it destroy it, let it make a new one, let it destroy that, and just eternally create work that hopefully carries some unique nature to it, and that's part of what this code carries, it will not just change the colors throughout the day and do dramatic colors at sunrise and sunset and things like that, but it also changes its colors and I even call it mood. It changes its mood throughout the year, so for running this on a video wall, it would be never the same image. There would be a lot of similarities from day to day. There would be a lot of similarities if you looked at something in one November versus next November, you'd see a lot of similarities, of course. But that content would constantly evolve and change throughout the day, the month, and the seasons, and with the idea that you just can truly set this and forget about it, walk away and let this run on a video wall indefinitely and truly never see the same thing twice.
What's the timeline?
I imagine there are all kinds of variables and parameters you can set, but typically, is it the sort of thing that builds over the space of four hours or four minutes?
Jim Nista: I've been playing around with it and I love the idea of letting these things run even longer. But right now I've found, at least from people watching some of the early samples and some of the places that I've installed it, that shorter time durations are better, so about a minute to create a piece and letting it linger for a little while after it's created and then destroying it, and that really does seem to be the sweet spot.
Now everything is just code. So if somebody said, I want it to run and build for four hours, I can certainly do that, but I was funny as I've been building this because it's code I can just run it in a web browser, that means I can run it on my phone, and so I've been able to annoy friends but demo this out in front of a lot of people as I've been working on it, and I noticed very early on that the slower pieces tended to have people looking away as opposed to looking at it, so capturing a performance of creating this piece within a minute and refining it and almost getting the rough sketch done sooner rather than later, really that's how it started to feel like it was creating a performance that people would wanna watch, and I think it can capture people's attention while they're transiting through space, which is a lot of these sorts of corporate AV installations take place. Nobody is expected to just stand there and look at it for a really long time. So it's tuned into that.
But I do know that even running it in my own space, I have a projector here and I can run it on a big wall from time to time just to see it, that sometimes when it is more ambient, letting it build for several minutes is a better approach. But in the public space, I think about always seeing, and when somebody first walks into this space, I don't know what point of the build, of the painting it's gonna be at, it's just continual, and so the goal is to just have it always look good, and that's been a very difficult goal to achieve because you think about something at the very beginning of it drawing, it might be very abstract, and it's hard for people to understand.
When you say, it builds, and then it destroys itself. What does that look like when it's in destruction mode, so to speak?
Jim Nista: I had to make the brushes move a lot faster during that mode so that it does attract attention like something's being wiped out. But I also found that leaving a lot, not completely erasing the canvas, leaving a lot of the underlying or previous painting adds a lot of character as well, and so it roughly washes over with larger brushes and lighter brushes, but it will leave pieces of the previous painting there, and that's a nice approach.
Now there's another version of this that was more prevalent in Orlando that we ran there, which is more of a continual mode where rather than creating an image behind the scenes, it's creating a 3D image and using that instead and so now that can constantly rotate or unfold or evolve, and so that's an alternative version. So in that one, the destruction is almost immediately where it is changing from, let's say, creating an orange flower to now evolving into creating a purple flower. That transition is a lot less noticeable than some of the other versions of this that I'm running, which are creating one painting, building that painting, and then destroying it.
So there are a few different ways that I've envisioned this, and one is truly continuous, but evolving where rather than Building and painting and destroying, it's constantly painting, and what it's painting is constantly changing, and so it's a different approach and that process requires a little bit more horsepower. So I've built one of these that I know, from having worked at digital signage, we don't necessarily always have the fastest media players in the world, and so one of these, I've tuned is low cost and even with previous generation media players, we're getting some really fast new media players that have GPUs built into them, so that's really going to be wonderful to take advantage of. But I built this before those were really available to me, and some of the versions of this are really designed for a sort of solid-state media player, like BrightSign players or SpinetiX players, that kind of thing, right?
Where I've been focused on turning this around, they're great HTML engines, they don't have a lot of memory, and they don't have a lot of horsepower, but how can we do generative art on that type of hardware, which is so prevalent around the industry?
So this doesn't need to be on a big-ass media server.
Jim Nista: There's a version that does, and that's the version that I was running in Orlando because of course we had a lot of horsepower there and a bigger screen too, to take advantage of. But yeah, there's a version of this that's just pure JavaScript and I've tested it all over the place, including on a 15-year-old laptop, and it runs fine there.
So I've written for a number of years now about visualized data, and that's evolved into the terminology of generative visuals and generative AI. But you skip past this really quickly when you're explaining things that this isn't AI. This is its own thing, right?
Jim Nista: Yeah, I could have used some machine learning techniques for this in terms of creating the underlying primitive image. But rather than doing that, given that I'm dealing with somewhat simple shapes like flowers and landscapes and hills and trees and things like that, code can easily create things like trees and landscapes and those types of things. So it didn't make sense for me to train this in a machine learning model to build those primitives for me, and certainly, machine learning wouldn't help with the process of coming up with the painting itself, but the idea of connecting this to live data or sensors in space is really where this is headed.
I've had other projects that are more interactive or immersive, especially involving the Microsoft Kinect from the Xbox Days before it evolved into this commercial tool toy. So now some of the new work around this is, reading what's happening in space. So if somebody is standing in front of this and they're wearing red, the flowers will be red, and so those are some of the pieces that are coming out within this because yeah, it's generative. I can pull weather data, I can pull any sort of information and add it to the mix of what I'm currently doing.
Oddly, some of the early versions of this were intended and requested to be offline, completely isolated from the internet, and run forever, and so really the only data that those have is the clock. They just know the time and the date, and that's the only data that they can use. So everything has been pre-programmed in and it's just following its script forever, but there's so much randomness to it has a tendency to never repeat.
So one of the things that were interesting about walking around the exhibit hall at Infocomm recently was seeing how a lot of the big display guys, particularly the LED guys, were using generative art on the displays instead of just like the stock videos and so on, which was what happened for a whole bunch of years.
It is the sort of thing that Refik Anadol pioneered; there may be another artist as well, but that's the one that most people would know. Is that the sort of thing you could conceivably do with this as well, or is it just a different track?
Jim Nista: No, a lot of the work that he's doing, and I don't mean to trivialize it because when I see some of the work that he's doing, he's pulling in these massive data sets, right? But a lot of the work itself is running through software that I use as well, like TouchDesigner, and a lot of the same type of effects are happening. What he's built, and a lot of people are copying, unfortunately for him, but what he's built is in some respects, a two-part process. He's pulling all of this data together and then from there, using his own code to render it, and that a lot of that is done in software, like TouchDesigner, Unity, Unreal Engine, those types of applications is where a lot of this happens. But yeah, I think that one challenge that we're facing is that an artist like him, his style is identifiable, but as I was walking around the shift floor, I'm seeing essentially what are either ripoffs, direct ripoffs of his work, or artists just copying it or inspired by his work.
At the end of the day, and again, I don't mean to trivialize what he's doing, but there are effects built into these software applications that sort of mimick his style. He was the first guy to come up with it and use those tricks and techniques and everything else. But a lot of people can just follow along a 30-minute YouTube tutorial and mimic a lot of the work that is coming from him and then some of these other generative artists as well. So there is danger in that, working this way becomes somewhat easy if your style becomes popular to mimic it, and it's sad to see that so many companies are either hiring somebody to copy this artist's style or just outright taking the work directly from other videos that he's published online.
But it's unfortunate. It happens. It's nicer to see though because most of the time what we see at these is somebody running movie trailers or worse, Big Buck Bunny or those blender foundation free videos, and those are very well produced, but they're now 15 years old, and it's like blenders have gotten better in the last 15 years, and so it's nice to see a little bit more creativity around the show floor, but at the end of it, it's not creative because a lot of it's just, “Hey, look at this popular artist. Let's take his work.” And there's a fine line with that. I certainly would love to have some of my demos made available, but, at the same point, if we start seeing it over and over again or people are copying it, it's a nice form of flattery, but it's also dangerous form of flattery as well.
One thing that you mentioned when you were finalizing this stuff for this big video wall was you said that the actual code package scripting or however you wanna describe it, and you'll do a better job than me obviously, was so light that you could have loaded this on a couple of floppy disc, which for the youngsters out there, look it up, and you'll see what a floppy disc is.
Jim Nista: It's the icon that we use when we save things on our regular software. Not that anybody has seen one in a while.
That canvas we were working on for the Orlando project is 18,000 by 3,000 pixels, so a lot of real estate, and of course, this was rendered out, we've given the nature of the project and everything, but if that had been delivered generatively, it's just shader code. That project was built using a concept called GLSL shaders, and it's code, it's a weird code language. It borrows a lot from many different types of scripting languages, but it's for creating visuals like that through code and the files that created those flowers, the individual code for some of those was 9 kilobytes. Just because it's just a little script running and doing all this creative. But what's funny in there is that along the way, as I was initially building some of these projects, I would go into graphics software like Adobe Illustrator for example. I'd go into that graphic software and I'd hand draw what I thought a paintbrush should look like.
And so now I've got this little chunk, not really code, but a vector graphic of what a paintbrush should look like, and over time, all of those little things that I did, I took them out and said, no, I need to code what a paintbrush looks like. I can't rely on having drawn something in advance and so all of these asset files initially part of this just to save a step or move faster were removed and just replaced with code. So there's just one file that builds these experiences that just has to be launched in and played back. Some of those are HTML and run in a web browser. Some of them are not HTML and would need a GPU to render out properly. But yeah, they're very small files that run.
Obviously if it's running in a web browser, the digital sign's just going to be playing its HTML content and the file that is uploaded to, for example, BrightSign players can go a few kilobytes. It's a fun different process versus hundreds of gigabytes of files and or these large dataset files that we see from some of these artists where they're saying, “I built this dataset analyzer that goes through a million photos of this city to create this art.” And I'm looking at it going, that's cool, I created some random noise channels to get my data to generate my randomness rather than having to go through millions of photos.
It's certainly a different approach and makes for fun stories as far as not having to deliver all of these massive files. I've had some surprises along the way. “I don't think you sent me everything.” “Yes, I did.” Just launch it on the BrightSign player and see what it does.
So operationally, there are implications it seems, in terms of data transmission times, and bandwidth consumption, although that's not as big an issue as it used to be, and local storage, things like that. Are there other kinds of operating implications or advantages of going down this path?
Jim Nista: Yeah, I think the biggest advantage is just being able to promise a client that the content's not going to get stale, right?
You can set it and truly forget it.
Jim Nista: Yeah, and that provides a big advantage to it. There are some other challenges to this, and so certainly some of the projects that I've done where we, after a while, realized that that particular circumstance and that particular hardware are not really conducive to running generative, and in those cases, I've rendered eight-hour-long movies, I just let my computer do the generative work and record it, and then upload a big, long movie. So that defeats the purpose and the idea of having to send a nine-kilobyte file, now all of a sudden, it's turned into a big, long movie. But for the most part, no, there's really not too much to consider with this, especially on the simpler version of this code, which certainly is not as dramatic as what we're seeing in museums, in some of the early days of some of the generative artists that are starting to get really well noticed.
But I'm also thinking in terms of the real-world applications of this, we have a lot of low-cost, low-power media players out there in the world that are well suited towards this and can handle a project like this without overheating or anything else like that. So that was a big driving factor for me that I know a lot of other artists wouldn't really even think to put limitations on themselves like that. They would just think, I don't care about the technology and then suddenly create a project that requires multiple of the latest, greatest expensive GPUs on a Windows device, which is nothing wrong with Windows, as we all know, it's not the biggest friend in digital signage. It's a noisy operating system, and it wants to make its presence known, and what we're looking for most of the time is all of that stuff to be in the background as far as possible.
Is this something that you came up with or was it technology that existed and some people were using and you've just adopted it and done your own thing with it?
Jim Nista: I think in terms of the work that I'm doing with GLSL shaders, and the more modern GPU process, I'm coming into a workflow that other people have been pioneering, and so I'm just getting more than my feet wet with that, but it really is newer.
But on the other side, building generative art on, essentially, think about some of the last-generation BrightSign players, we're talking about devices that were designed in 2015-2016. So seven years old and already intended for a solid state and not necessarily have any GPUs. That idea to create generative art on some of these older devices, is new, and I have not seen anybody building content that way. I don't know why you would, right? If you start on a project like this and you don't create limitations for yourself, your are going to want to have the best GPU, you're going to want the best system to run it on. You're going to aim for the highest caliber, and here I am going, no way, I got to aim for these devices that are out of date and not necessarily have the fastest horsepower, but I know I can count on them and I know I can rely on them and I know that they're going to do what part of this project's goal was for me, which is to run indefinitely, right? To be able to create something like this.
I think another idea that's always popped into my head, and just as an odd way, is if you go to a contemporary art museum or gallery and you see audiovisual art fairly often, it's a big part of it, and I was at one a couple of years ago, I went to one of those big art shows where they have the galleries come and I bought the tickets and I decided I wanted to go see this like the Art Basel but Frieze is the one that I went to, and I noticed a lot of the AV was very poorly running. So they're trying to sell us a million-dollar art project and there's a BrightSign player on the floor with cables, and the AV guys frame-shooting it and know it just isn't right. I know that device. I know what it's capable of. I know it could pull this off.
So a lot of that was what happens when somebody invests in one of these pieces or wants a work of art in their space. Now they have to keep it running, and they have to have an AV tech constantly going out there and patching it up and fixing it and keeping it going and all the other things and it really started to make sense as you look at it older AV art installations. There are a lot of AV artists from the 80s and 90s who used CRT devices, right? How do these museums keep that stuff running? And so it was also just a practical idea for me, having an understanding of the AV industry to think as an artist doing this work, I have to prepare for that. Who knows if anything I do will ever have longevity or maybe nobody will even look at it. But, it was an idea from the beginning. I want to help solve these things. I've been that guy on the floor fixing the BrightSign player and I don't wanna be, I don't wanna create that problem for somebody else.
So it was an idea just about born out of seeing how a lot of this audiovisual art becomes a technical nightmare, and how can I do something that is, from the beginning, avoiding those technical challenges. I've done projects until the pandemic like I had BrightSign players that had been on and running for 10 years for some projects and, if I can count on a device to just run that way, that makes this creative all the more impactful, at least easier to operate into the future, and just a fun little goal of myself to say, how can I challenge this to do something that attracts people that is interesting to look at, but then also is capable of running on much, much older devices.
So is this a product?
You've had a design agency in the past that you sold to Almo, then you went off on your own, doing your own thing, and you're spinning up an agency again. But is this something that if I could ring you tomorrow and say, yeah, I want five for five different venues, I could buy it, or how does that work?
Jim Nista: Yeah, that's part of the idea for me I wanted to do something as a creative project, but I also wanted to find a commercial space for it too, right? It's no fun just to build something and then walk away from it, and knowing and having a background in the commercial AV space, it it's designed for that, especially the more modern version that is a little bit more active. Both of them are really designed for the commercial AV space, and yeah, I've been working already with some architectural firms. I think that they're the ones that are going to get this right away. But then also there are some AV companies that are really specialists in building video walls in corporate residential spaces, right? And I think the residential spaces are going to be a big upcoming space for this, and also I think this is another factor around this type of work that it lends itself to is most larger cities in North America, have a percentage of a project's budget that has to go to art, and I've noticed more and more a lot of l led walls getting put in to satisfy that piece of the art budget, and so if I can productize this around some of the commercial AV companies that I know are getting those projects, right? They can say, oh, we spent all this money on art, but they're putting in an LED wall. You know exactly what the next step is. They're going to put the stock video on it and call it art, and so if we can have something readily available, somewhat off the shelf, and I say somewhat because I don't know too many clients who are going to just want this exactly as is.
This is custom creative. Everyone's gonna want a little bit of customization to it, and I always have known that in any of the template-type projects that I've done is that there's a piece of this that has to be still within the client's control. They feel that they drove some of the creativity, and they wanted certain colors or whatever, and I've left that as part of this. But yes it really truly is intended for this commercial AV space as a somewhat off-the-shelf product that you can just pick up and install into this as the primary visuals on an LED wall.
Some of the work that's been done by these generative artists, it's amazing and everything else, but there are six-figure projects. I don't want to put you on the spot, but can you give any sense of how this fits? Or people listening to this going, that would be amazing, but I don't have half a million dollars to buy this original creative.
Jim Nista: A lot of that comes with the name, and once you get to be a well-known and a well-identifiable artist suddenly, the prices go up. I'm not there yet, and you know a lot of projects have a tendency to fit into that magic sweet spot of the 10k budget, right? The $10,000 content budget. They're spending $250,000 on the LED and the installation and the content is still in the afterthought realm, and that's really the other idea that I've had around this.
What's very common, but when I'll get a phone call, we have an LED wall that's being built. This is the type of content, only sometimes clients are asking for generative. They come back, and they're looking for some sort of animated visuals, motion graphics, or edited video loops, and it typically comes in as a budget of around $10,000 for getting that content pulled together, and that's what I was aiming for with this is that it would fall into that sweet spot. Somebody’s looking for more or more customization, certainly, that's possible, and that would impact the price, but to just prep this and get it ready to go for your average installation is intended to be easy and also not half a million dollars, right?
At least not yet!
Jim Nista: No, and even then, if you reach that stage as an artist, there's another fun factor that comes along with it is now you have gallery exclusivity and all kinds of other things, and while it's fun, those big tickets are being shared amongst a lot of different greedy hands, and so you see something that sells for half a million dollars, the artist might have gotten 20% of that and as sad as that is, there's a lot of hands that get into those pies. So at least for now, by focusing this around a space that I know better, I don't necessarily know that gallery space so well, but I know the commercial AV space a lot better, and focusing on that, just makes a lot more sense to me.
I do interact with commercial art brokers, and that's been happening now for about the last six months or so, but, again, that space is different from the commercial art gallery space, which is very interesting.
I bet. So if people want to know more about this, how can they find you?
Jim Nista: My website is getting redone. I'm in the process of making it prettier, and I still need to put this work on there, because I have put very little on there, so this is all new for me as I'm getting this up this summer.
But yeah, it's nista.co, and I'll be enhancing that over the next couple of weeks to be showing some more of the work that I'm doing. I have a few projects that are wrapping up all around the same time, so I should get those wrapped up, get some photographers out to those locations, and then get this content on my website. If you look at it today, it could be showing off some of the generative work.
Okay. Thank you. That was terrific. I now understand it better, although I'm not ready to sit down and try to do it myself.
Jim Nista: No, it's fine. I appreciate this and the opportunity to talk a lot more. I'm having a blast with it. I can't wait to see what else is out there as I get more involved with this work.
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Brett Crossley, FanConnect
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are a lot of screens at sports and entertainment venues, and when it's possible to buy a 4K TV the size of a bus for a few hundred bucks, team owners and venue operators are having to work harder than ever to compel people to get off their sofas and come to games.
Whether it is college football or pro basketball, there's a big emphasis on maximizing the game-day experience for ticket-buyers, while also optimizing the investment sponsors have made in being at the venue and part of everything going on.
A Charlotte, North Carolina company called FanConnect is very specifically in the business of providing and supporting a platform and services that drive the game-day show, and the information on most or all of the flat screens around a stadium or arena.
FanConnect does in-venue TV programming that enhances live game broadcast feeds with things like real-time stats and sponsor messaging, and it also does IPTV for the suites and loge areas, as well as digital signage around the concourses and at concessions.
That last component is something most or all venues want and need, but the digital signage capabilities also track back to the roots of the company. I had a chat with Brett Crossley, FanConnect's VP of Product.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brett, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what FanConnect does?
Brett Crossley: So what we do is we work with the corporate partnership teams in sports venues, so in college and professional sports and we work with the partnership marketing, the sponsorship team if you think about it that way to put something on the TV screens. I'm talking about our primary product, so our biggest product is FanConnect TV. We make other things, but that's probably the biggest thing we have. It's also our biggest footprint, and what that does is it makes a private TV network for use in the venue that plays on all of the TVs that are in the venue that would've been showing just the live game feed. This feed was being produced for probably the video board in most cases. We turn that into something that fans are gonna want to look at because it's good looking and that fully integrates what the sponsors and what the corporate partners need into that experience.
So that's the main product that we supply, and then I'd say that all the related products are similar, right? They're all designed to operate inside of a large sports venue, inside of a stadium or an arena, and they work with TVs or video technology of some kind inside of that venue.
Do you get any pushback at all from venues saying why wouldn't I just use the broadcast feed that's already coming in that I've already been using on the TVs?
Brett Crossley: No, I don't think we don't face that pushback, and the main reason is if you think about our primary customer is a corporate partnership team. On the college side, that would be somebody that's a Rights holder, like a Leader field, a Playfly, a JMI, typically that's who that is. On the professional side, it's a group that's titled something like Corporate Partnerships for the Chicago White Sox, and prior to us getting there, they either didn't have any way to include their corporate partners in the TVs or what they had just wasn't working for what they wanted to do.
And so yeah, I don't think we faced any pushback there from people saying why not just use the existing feed? I think the other part of it is too tough, in our opinion, when we are done, it looks a lot better and it provides a better fan experience than before we got there. And I know we're on a podcast so you can't see this, but if people go to our website or if they look us up on LinkedIn. we're FanConnect.TV so that's our domain name. But if they look at what we do, it's designed to mirror a lot of what you would see with a professionally produced broadcast. So imagine somebody's in a truck and they're using tools from Ross and Grass Valley, et cetera, and they're building something to make it look broadcast quality, we're doing something similar. We just do it in software and without having people do it in real-time.
I assume one of the drivers here for the corporate sponsor people is they're looking for as many ways as possible to give their corporate sponsors some love and avoid any minefields of a TV broadcast, if, let's say, I don't know, Chrysler is the sponsor at a stadium or a sponsor at the venue, they don't want a Ford ad on TV or a Toyota.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what they're trying to do is they want to create something that works for a partner, and I will say, because we probably lead the world in this and I know that sounds like blowing our own horn here, but as far as companies that are really invested in understanding how corporate partnerships work and the needs of the teams that work with them, I think we probably do more of that than anybody.
I'm not talking about just the pure technology people doing an L bar, creating something that kinda adds to the video. But the other part of what we do is education about the best use of that technology to actually do what it's supposed to do, and so oftentimes prior to us getting there, if they did have something like, think just like an L bar, going back to Cisco Stadium Vision days. If they had something, there wasn't a lot of thought put into it, and in most cases, the experience wasn't great. It really looked like what it was, which is you just shrunk the amount of video space available to show the game and you put an ad wrap around it, and you're showing kinda nothing but a wall of ads, and if you see what our product looks like, if you saw it in the NFL, you're gonna see passing statistics and rushing statistics, and we're gonna interleave in photos from the team's official Twitter feed when those are appropriate, and just pulling in a lot of stats and engaging content and then embedding that with the sponsor assets in a way that looks really natural and not like we just put a wall of ads up there.
I've certainly heard through the years of very large technology companies like Cisco buying their way into these sorts of venues, and in order to do that, you have to use their technology. Are we past that where the venues realize, yeah, that was great, we got that for free, or very little money, but it didn't actually work for us?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say that is still something that is evolving. So if you look at the landscape today, certainly you've got teams that have invested in one IPTV system or another, right? So Cisco was one of the first of those. There are plenty of other technologies that do that, and that's something that we make as full IPTV as well. But if you look at the people that do it, I think that in most cases they certainly would show in their marketing something that looks like an L bar and they're all going to say words on their website like make more money from sponsors. But in terms of actually doing that, it's an exercise left to the reader, and so you see teams that have had some of those newer technologies and have had them for years, and we know because we talk to everybody that we work with and people that we don't, you'll see people that have had it for multiple years that have not gotten that to where it does something close to what we do, not even just a basic version of it.
So the content's hard. I think you probably know that as well as anybody, right? In the digital signage industry, content's also hard. But it's especially hard on the side where we play because you have a lot of things that you have to do well to make it look like what we're trying to make it look like. We want the scoreboard embedded in the same way it would be on the broadcast TV feed. We want the live clock that's coming, it's the same thing that's tied to the scoreboard controller that's in the stadium. We want to be able to show out-of-town scores. We want to highlight when something significant has happened in those out-of-town scores that lead to changes. We want to show sort of detailed stats, like in major league baseball, hit and pitch data, and so tying all of those things together and making it work well is not something that's easy, and so I would say that currently the positioning by. Most of the vendors that make something like IPTV is yeah, you can just use our stuff and go build something to your liking. In reality, we certainly work in a number of places where the vendor that is there would much rather that experience be them than be something created by us.
I'm curious about how deep you have to stitch your way into the operations of the venue and of the sports franchise, whether it's football, baseball, hockey, or whatever the case, you have to work with the scoreboard systems, like the statistical analysis systems, the people are doing things like reading how fast that fastball came in and all that sort of stuff. Is that a lot easier to do now than it was even five years ago?
Brett Crossley: I would say that parts of it are easier, but there are new technologies that come out and then essentially new APIs that you're having to deal with on the regular. It was much harder for us when we first started. So we started doing this way back in like, 2010, and I can share this now because it's just been so long, and it doesn't matter, but we really bluffed our way into it, and at the beginning, it was like, yeah we want to make something work here, can you work with our scoreboard controller? Yeah, sure. What is that? What brand?
And it was difficult, right? I think that when you think about the vendors that are in sports venues, a lot of them do not want to play well with others, right? Think about the people that made the scoreboard controller, and the people that made the stats, and I feel like there's another barrier to entry there, which is that the professional sports side, all have pretty tightly codified APIs that distribute all of their data. But if you haven't already got a team that's your customer, you won't get access to that data, and so it's not if you came up with a product idea, you can just build it, and they will come. You have to have something in the door to be invited to use the data. I think for us, it certainly got easier over time because as we saw one of every type of scoreboard controller, we would just chalk that up and write it down. We're like, oh, okay, they've got Dactronics, they have an OES, or whatever the thing was, and then we would figure out how to work with it. You can imagine some APIs represent abstraction for that so that t no matter which one of the controllers we're working with or which stats API, we can kind of create something more unified and easier to manage.
Sports entertainment venues are turning into experiential venues in many ways. Are you now having to also work with almost like show control systems?
Brett Crossley: So that's interesting. We do, in some cases, work with control systems, but interestingly enough, more of that is done during a live sports game for example, if you think about working with the production crew, they might have a Ross tool that is designed to trigger things on the video board, on the ribbon boards, et cetera and we can make it to work on the TVs that we operate on are one more thing that can be tied into those control systems and so imagine, somebody's just hit the third home run of the game, and so they want to put a special message up, they can send that message, and it'll activate all of the things at once. It's kind of a TV takeover, video board, and ribbon board. So that's where we see that.
On the sort of mixed-use venue side, I think that the requirements in general on the TVs are a little, and when I talk about the TVs, the bulk of the TVs, I'm not breaking it down to the very specific ones that are doing a job that looks much more like digital signage, right? Like concessions, menu boards, and sort of those things. But if you think about it, the bulk of the TVs that would've had the game on in that venue during a concert is probably still showing the concert feed. They might be doing a simple wrap, and the wrap is just giving some day-of-event information instead. So it's a little bit simpler just because nobody has a big vested interest in doing something special for a one-off like a concert.
You mentioned digital signage. You also have that as part of your kind of product suite, right?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, sure. We originally were a digital signage company, so if you went way back when we started doing what we did originally in college sports and then eventually in professional sports as well, FanConnect was a wholly owned subsidiary of 10 Foot Wave, which was a digital signage company and was split off in 2018 as part of the acquisition of 10 Foot Wave by Spectrio and so our roots were in that space, to begin with anyway. It's natural that as we split off and just focus on sports venues we wanted to be able to handle all of the small screens, you can think about them that way that are inside of a stadium, and so that includes the TVs that are showing the game, TVs that do the equivalent digital signage which is just informational, et cetera, as well as the concession, menu board, those types of things, and then the other kind of interesting one is like what we do at Ohio State, which is we make a tablet that's used in the lodge area. And so it's purpose-built, it does, IPTV, so it does videos so you can watch them out of town game or whatever that you're interested in. But it also has a bunch of functionality used by the kind of premium seat holders at Ohio State. So if they need to call an attendant, if they're trying to figure out the pricing of the mixed drinks or whatever, they can look that up what to do and all of that, look at rosters and team data, et cetera, on that purpose-built tablet.
So there's one at every seat?
Brett Crossley: There's one at every table, is the way that it works. So if you think about a lodge area, it’s a hybrid, right? So it's assigned seats in grouped sections as opposed to just you're in these five seats, so you've got a shared table for every three people or something like that.
So there'd be a lot of client entertainment happening?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, there's a lot of entertainment, and then those people paid a lot of money for those seats wherever they are. I mean sports venues are expensive, and so just trying to create a premium offering for those people is something that a lot of teams are working on.
Is there a lot of pressure to do more and more from one company in a sports and entertainment venue?
I talk a lot about the importance of a company being known as the guys who do this kind of work, and I wonder if you were just going into sports and entertainment venues, purely doing the concession digital signage, are you pressured also to be doing IPTV in the suites and elsewhere on the concourses and all that sort of thing? Or are the venues pretty much okay with you doing this piece of it, we'll have these other five companies do these other things?
Brett Crossley: I think that really like every industry that matures, the buyers in this case, the technology side of the stadium, they would rather have a smaller number of vendors to deal with than a larger number, and so as a practical concern, I think you're right, which is the way we think about it, we need to be able to do all of the things you would want to be able to do on anything that looks like a TV inside of a venue. That's part of what we have to be able to offer because, again, you are correct that people would rather have a single vendor, a single interface, et cetera, to deal with.
One place where I think that does break down a little differently is the content side because that’s just so complex on its own, and so we certainly have people that are leveraging us for the experience on the screens and all of that, who already have another vendor in as the IPTV solution who may have somebody different for menu boards, et cetera. And the one thing that they truly can't get anywhere else would be something similar to what we do with the content that's created on TV.
So you might have an IPTV service of some kind, and they're quite good at video networking, but they don't know much about the presentation side of it?
Brett Crossley: To be fair, I'm not going to say that they can't make something that's pretty, I think that you'll see, and I think it's been true of digital signage forever, which people will show you really pretty screens and, use that, whatever's on that screen as a substitute for, here's what you're going to have to do to get that to work. And the example I always give is, you look up at a concession stand or a digital menu board, and you can't really tell what you're looking at, is it just a static image? Is it an image over just an animation background? Or is it truly being rendered dynamically tied back to a point of sale? It's hard to tell.
So I think that at least on the content side, it becomes something where you would rather have something that works than be given a toolkit, especially when it comes time to actually build anything that's as close to as complex as what we do. You could build it, but you'd be spending a long time. It took us a long time to build what we have, right? And so if you just sat somebody down and you gave them a pile of tools, building that is going to take a lot of effort, and you're gonna have to hire people to do it and it's not like you get to build it once, you have to continue maintaining it and working on it, changing it out and adding to it over time. I think it's just difficult.
What's the business arrangement that you would have with a typical venue? Where do you start and stop?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, so our contractual arrangement most of the time is with, like I said, the corporate partnership side, right? If you think about whoever is in charge of making money from corporate partners or sponsors, that's usually who our contractual arrangement is with, and then a side part of that and really it happens in every deal that we're in and every stadium that we're in prior to the deal being signed, they bring in technology and those guys grill us and ask us, how are you gonna work with our system, and how do you do this? And we pull up diagrams because we've seen a lot of that before. And we're like, yeah, this is what we would do to work with you guys.
Once that's all done, we are working closely with the technical team to just make sure that everything is still operational. But then our business arrangements are with the corporate partnership side and we are paid kind of the way you think about it, just like anybody else, right? We get paid for things we build and put on the screen, and we don't have weird arrangements, I don’t know if you remember those guys like Arena Media Network, et cetera. There were multiple companies that would try to do that. We'll give it to you for free and we will keep some percentage of the inventory. In some cases, it was more like, we'll give it to you for free, we'll pay you to take it, and we'll keep part of the inventory.
We don't do anything weird like that. We're more of a direct business relationship with whoever is the equivalent of the rights holder and then they are the ones that are bringing the corporate partners.
Yeah. The whole build it, and they will come to things where we're putting screens in the washrooms and everywhere else, hoping that they could sell media time around it, there's been a legacy of failure there.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, and you still see it, and not to pick on people, right? But the classic one for me was the urinal TV, where you mount these TVs, individual screens up, I like to think that what we do is the opposite of that. What we want to do is to make something that we're a corporate partner, and when they see it on the screen, they are like, wow, that looks great.
We're active on LinkedIn, and my favorite thing is when somebody that works for the sponsor takes a picture of the TV screen, and they are on it, and it's the game-winner. You've just won the big game, and then their stuff's up, and they take that picture, and they throw that out on their LinkedIn. They like what they see there and the company they're keeping. As I said, if you just look at our product, it really does look good. In addition to kinda all the things that make fans want to be on it and the technology side, and I'm not saying that we wouldn't build something to work in urinals if a team wanted us to build that, but we certainly wouldn't go out of our way to do it without somebody really asking for it.
Yeah. If somebody's in trouble, they become the field maintenance guy for that. Do you do the deployment, hardware sourcing, or anything, or are you strictly on the software and automation?
Brett Crossley: We work on the hardware side as much as we need to, or as little as we have to.
We're not in the business of making players. We're not like a Brightsign. We try to remain pretty hardware neutral. We have preferences, of course, I think anybody who's been in this industry does. But if you think about the FanConnect TV product itself, it's a hybrid cloud solution, right? So there is a server installed on the premises. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. The server is responsible for compositing, pulling everything together, and building out what is going to really be a show and that's how that's going to work.
The rest of the hardware for FanConnect TV would be the video distribution system, so we work with whatever is there. In many cases, we were replacing, let's say, you had your stadium, you had Channel 10.2 digital, or if you're using IPTV, it's an IP stream, and you've got kind of a symbol for it. We're often just replacing that. That's the first thing that we are doing at most places. Now there are places where we're doing more sophisticated things, where you can imagine, if you're in the suites at American Airline Center, every channel, no matter which channels you are tuned into, would still be wrapped in kind of an L bar wrap so that's an example of something that's different and does require a device behind every TV. But in most cases, pretty straightforward, we're tied into the existing distribution system, pushing that out, and as I said, we try to remain relatively hardware neutral. Our server is, of course, just one U rack-mounted server that's hardened and does what it's supposed to do. But we can work with various kinds of player technologies regarding digital signage, our IPTV solutions, the things we do in suites, et cetera.
Yeah, I would imagine you're seeing a lot of smart displays in suites now.
Brett Crossley: It's starting to happen. It's expensive to replace everything in a stadium, and you’d think replacing TVs would be something that would be something done more actively than it is. Still, right now, I think what are people wait until there's either a big renovation or they're just going to build another stadium, and so they're waiting on one of those two things to go in and do the big upgrade on the TVs. But yeah, smart TVs, things with a system-on-a-chip capability are certainly starting to move out there, and I’m starting to run into them. And venues would like you to use them if you can, right? They would rather just have a smaller number of things to break and manage. If you can avoid putting a box behind every TV, then that would be better.
Does it make any business difference to you guys in terms of whether you're working with Major League Baseball, which is gonna have 80+ home games a year, versus football that might have six or seven home games?
I just wonder about some of these massive venues that really don't get used very often. Are they more reticent to invest in technology?
Brett Crossley: I don't think that's the case. I think that what you'll find is, if you take an NFL stadium or a big college stadium, right? That would get you closer to your six or seven games. The fact that there are so few games means that the games that you have are extremely important and really in their minds, they want to make sure that nothing is going to go wrong. Whoever's in charge of the technology side, just wants to make sure that it's going to work. That's their number one concern.
The corporate partnership people, again they care the way that I put it, and this is true of really anything in sponsorship, not just us, but if you're a baseball team, if something goes wrong and you don't do the activation for that corporate partner that you were supposed to do, you have a lot of other games to make that up to them and comp them. If something goes wrong at a football game and you mess up what you've committed to a corporate partner, then you're in a different position because that game represented a significant percentage of what you were trying to do for them for the season.
I don't think we've ever faced any pushback because of the number of games. It's more on the technology side. They just want to make sure that it's rock solid, and we've been doing this long enough, we can point to that, and we can go, we've done so many games, we can't get an accurate count of them. We've tried, but it's thousands upon thousands of live games that we've produced at this point and so I think it's really a trust issue probably more than anything else.
Is it a challenge for something like an arena that may have an NHL team, an NBA team, a WNBA team, and they all have different sponsors, and they may change from night to night?
Brett Crossley: So we do support those. If you think about a complex example of that, it would be Capital One Arena in DC, where we were working with the Washington Wizards, The capitals and also Georgetown is in that same venue, and so you've got, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and then concerts, things like that, and the way that we operate the way we operate FanConnect TV is a little different from the rest of the digital signage. So today, we operate that as a managed service for them, and so they tell us what they are trying to do, what they want to do, and then we just help fulfill it and actually make it all work on the screens.
The needs for the different sponsors are really a byproduct of who is running corporate partnership at the venue and for the teams as far as if they need something different. So we do something similar at Acrisure Stadium, right? We work with the Pit Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers, and there are two totally different corporate partnership teams. In some cases, it is the same team, whatever way they want us to work, we will work with that.
Tell me about the company. You're privately held?
Brett Crossley: We are privately held. We're not VC-backed. We have investors, and then many of us that are there are also investors, and we were as close to profitable as we want to be, right? And so if we're not profitable at any particular time, it's because we are intentionally spending more money. It's not because we have not yet achieved some measure of success.
Has all the weirdness of the last three years affected your industry or your business at all? I mean obviously, when nobody was going to games, that was a bit of a challenge, but it’s back.
Brett Crossley: Absolutely. Looking back on it, it was very difficult. I think when Covid hit, a bunch of people we worked with just shrugged to put their hands up and it was not good. One thing that was nice about that was we'd been working on kind of a full ground-up replacement of our core technology, and we went ahead and did that, and now we've seen that through to where we finalized that, right? So it's the third generation of this technology.
And we had the luxury of being able just to take our time, building it from scratch, knowing everything that we'd learned over this time, and so in some ways, I'd say that maybe was a little bit of a blessing, although it didn't seem like it at the time, watching the P&L statements for that time. But yeah, I'd say it was crazy for everybody.
Yeah, I've heard that story a few times. It's interesting when they say we didn't plan on this, but suddenly we have time to tear up the platform and start over, or do v3.
Brett Crossley: That work had already been started, right? And technology moves forward, right? And then we'd been looking at a number of things that we wanted to be able to do better in a kind of fully integrated way, and so the timing was good. We'd already started working on that effort. It's a lot of work, right? Replatforming is a significant amount of work.
What it allowed us to do, though, was to take our time and get everything right. There was no rush to try to get something in because the season was getting ready to start. So I'd say we've found some benefit. The one side note, though is things are bigger than they were pre-Covid in terms of what we do in live sports, in terms of attendance, in terms of the interest that we're getting, in terms of the way people view what they want to do inside of a stadium. I'd say that things are better now than they were pre-Covid.
I live in Canada, and I don't live anywhere near Toronto, but the Blue Jays just had their opener, and they did a huge refresh of a lot of the technology in that building, and one of the drivers said they have to up the game day experience. That's what people expect if they're going to be spending $14 on a beer and $80 on a ticket, that sort of thing.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, that's right, and it's not wrong when people say that sports venues are not competing with other sports venues. They're competing with the big-screen TV that's in your house, right? So putting something in front of the fans that is very impressive is really important, and we fit in well with that. During the off-season, when I say off-season, I'm really thinking of kinda the fall sports off-season, because we are running some games throughout the entire year, but when we had a chance, we went back and did a redesign of sort of the core of FanConnect TV, and we worked with graphic designers that have done work with Fox Sports, FX1, et cetera, to come up with something that was really polished and professional and look broadcast quality, because, that's what people wanna see, right? Especially when we come in, and we're like, we've got something that's better for your TVs, and they're like, okay, prove that, and that's what we ended up with.
I think one thing that's neat about our design is unlike an ESPN or somebody like that who has to essentially be neutral, right? Our broadcast is definitely themed for the home team, right? If you saw this at the University of Georgia, it is nice, and it's red and black, and it is bulldog television, and if you saw the same thing at the Chicago White Sox, it definitely looks like the White Sox, right? It's not trying to be neutral.
All right, Brett, thank you very much for spending the time with me.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it.
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
John Hoyle, Sook
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
If an entrepreneur or an established brand wants to open a temporary pop-up store on a busy retail street, there's a lot of planning, work and cost involved in making that actually happen.
So what if there was a retail space in a high profile location that could be rented for as short a time window as an hour ... that uses LCD video walls and software to establish the look and feel of the shop?
That's the operating premise behind Sook, an interesting UK start-up that has digital-first spaces for rent in attractive locations around the UK, including London's retail-lined Oxford Street.
I visited that Oxford Street location when I was in London recently, and had a good chat with Sook founder and CEO John Hoyle.
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TRANSCRIPT
John Hoyle: So it's really easy to quickly create a clean and bespoke environment and so that means you can literally do whatever you want in these places. It's a space that is as much about non-retail uses as it is about retail. It could be somewhere to have a screening of a movie, it could be somewhere to do yoga, pilates, or meditation or it's a shop in the more traditional form.
The whole rationale behind this is that if you facilitate hourly access to units like this, which would otherwise be empty, you can actually drive three to five times more revenue than a traditional lease because you are making use of the time before, you know, standard rent is over a 10-year period, deeply inefficient because someone sits in a space and expects there to be effectively making all of their money on in the peak hours whenever those are, which is like a Saturday. Using this you can drive your own footfall, drive different peaks across 120 hours of the week and generate more revenue, as well as make it much more efficient for occupiers to come and engage with the space.
It's completely modular. You can take this entire fit-out away and move it elsewhere. It's all free-standing so there's a selection of furniture. You can see the hanging rails and shelving units here which makes it super easy for someone to come and self-serve if they want to. So using QR codes, you can learn exactly what you need to do, full WiFi, utilities, audio, et cetera, anyone can come quickly turn this into a space to use for whatever they want. These modules obviously can be disassembled and moved to another space. So we don't take leases. We are just a device that operates as an asset management tool within specific spaces. If a landlord wants to move us, they can, there's a small cost associated with that, but it's much more economically and environmentally sustainable to have this fit-out that can be reused in multiple other locations.
This one is slightly compromised because we're over two stories and the rear loading is in the basement. It actually works better on one level with a big back of the house. It's a bit like a theater set. All of the physical preparation happens out back so that you can efficiently roll into the space for your activation.
I'll show you downstairs. Everything that’s here, we can take away. There’s storage out back, but this has been everything from a rave for Jaegrmeister who launched a party, to the launch of a High Streets Reports by a big industry insider to a salsa dancing class. So it's all about using the same space for multiple different activations and doing it in a way that allows digital content to drive how you make that place appropriate.
That's why it's interesting to me that they have started to add digital screens to retail kind of after the fact and now we're in the situation where you have people who look like this, that are setting up pop-up retail with digital as the enabling part of it. So you can change the feel of a store, change the message, and everything else with a few keystrokes.
John Hoyle: Absolutely. If you think about where the brands of the future come from, they are gonna predominantly start online because the barriers to entry are much lower. But they need that IRL engagement to have an authentic touchpoint with their customers. But they don't wanna scale as the private equity-backed retailers in the past have by taking 120 leases and then marketing them. They want to dip in and dip out and have an online-type solution that's agile to determine where works best for their product and to make use of the fact that they can drive their own footfall through social media.
So if you think about it, I suppose a good example in the UK might be a, let's say Superdry, a challenger brand that's had to play the game of real estate to get where it is, to become AN established brand. We believe that we can facilitate that happening for the brands of the future without them having to need a real estate department to negotiate leases, to deal with the portfolio of assets. In fact, there will be this agile solution that they can use as they see fit, and what's interesting about that is that suddenly you are changing the role of a shop as a static distribution channel for stuff, and you're making it much more of a point of engagement for customers to actually meet IRL, the people that sit behind their brand and the products, and that can happen everywhere. There's no need now for perhaps the flagship in Central London or the concept store in Coven Garden because the various entries are lowered by this solution, you could take your product to secondary locations around the UK, do it for a weekend drives an enormous reaction because the people in, let's say Northeast England are not used to seeing something like that and then get out without any of the legacy, liabilities or commitments that you would normally get through these.
It's a service in just about every respect, right?
If I'm a fashion designer, which is a very novel concept, if I wanted to open up a pop-up store for the weekend, I wouldn't have to worry about the AV. I wouldn't have to worry about any of that stuff, I just do a deal to have the space for six hours or whatever it is and you guys can take it from there, right?
John Hoyle: You can dice it in whatever way you want. So you could be completely absent and we would run the entire piece for you, including fulfillment, staffing, and even the design of your space, and you can obviously have complete control because using Canva, which is an Australian Photoshop unicorn, you can drag and drop whatever you want onto the walls and you can walk around in 3D before you come here. So you can be in the US and control space in Oxford Street without having to be here. So that opens up enormous opportunities where at a fraction of the cost we can serve you.
But it's more about just that flexibility for occupiers. It's also making physical spaces available for all sorts of uses that are not necessarily traditional retailers. Social media is becoming increasingly important as part of the customer shopping experience. So working with those sorts of brands to engage IRL, onboard customers online, and complement what they're trying to do online is really powerful.
But equally, if you think about amenities. In the UK, retail banking branches are closing down in record numbers because they just don't make any sense with the rise of online banking. There is a real community value to those places for some people. Could we run a banking offer in the lunchtime slot, which is when people wanna go to the banks and not be there the rest of the time? Can you bring digital art into play? Gaming, estate agency, car showrooms? A whole spectrum of retail uses that basically haven't existed in the physical high street for all sorts of reasons previously to be used in a much more agile way in our spaces.
Is there a typical time window, like the amount of time when you are seeing bookings?
John Hoyle: It completely varies. We've had a guy take the space for an hour, turn it into a shrine to his girlfriend and propose to her. Equally, we were a Corona testing center in one of our spaces for I think 14-15 months, which is a sign of the times. We have three-month bookings. We have three-day bookings, and that's the point, different people wanna do different things at different times and that really is the core of what we do. No one needs a shop seven days a week, hardly, practically, no one needs a shop for a decade. Think about the time that you need to do activations. Let us manage the headache of all of that, learn from it from analytics, and then get out and do something different.
The old mantra in real estate about location. I suspect that still applies, right?
John Hoyle: It does, but it's a mindset rather than a reality. My belief is that footfall is a flawed metric, and that's what really underpins that location piece. The way we've done retail traditionally is that you found a location that suits you. Adjacencies are important, but you are really basing it off the demographic in the area, and then footfall, and that's a deeply inefficient model when you think about it. To make a 10-year bet on a place based on a data set that you see at that period in time, sit there for a decade, and only make money on maybe a Saturday or a Sunday. The rest of the time you have a loss-leading asset. You can't be agile and change if something about that location changes, and you're not learning anything about customers elsewhere.
So what we are saying is why not be far more granular, why not figure out which hours of the week your product works in? So Greg's, which is an incredibly successful restaurant brand essentially, it's famous for its sausage rolls, and they sold more Greggs sausage rolls last year than there were Big Macs in the UK, to put some scale on it. So their biggest selling unit is at Birmingham New Street Station and its peak time is from 10:30 on a Friday evening. It's people who've been drinking in pubs, buying sausage rolls, and are out on their way home. The other time they do a lot of business for essentially the building trades very early in the morning. So they are completely different profiles to an apparel brand, for instance. What we're saying is why don't you blend all of those different uses into more concentrated, more efficient spaces?
Is it nimble enough that you could do multiple occupants in a day?
John Hoyle: Yes, absolutely.
Have you done that?
John Hoyle: Yes. When you think about it, most shops don't open till 10:00, and most close at about six. Then you've got four, maybe five hours in the morning, which lend themselves to wellness, for instance, and then in the evening when shops sit dormant, this could be an event space, and that's pretty lucrative. In fact, in its own right. I think we could hang our entire business model on what shops would see after hours in certain locations to use this amazing digital tool, to be a private room for a restaurant or could it be a Deliveroo restaurant for instance, or could it just be a party, but rather than renting a bar and having a minimum bar spend of a few thousand pounds, you can have something bespoke, where there is amazing digital content of the person whose birthday is, for instance. Children's parties, and meetups, there are limitless ways of effectively monetizing space when in normal retail times, it's just closed.
Yeah, I've certainly heard of restaurants that are daytime cafes that have realized, okay, we have a kitchen and everything else, but we shut down at 3:00 PM, why don't we have a breakfast place in the evening? It's a Mexican place or whatever, and they're using the same kitchen, but you're sweating the asset more.
John Hoyle: Absolutely. The same principle applies here, just we've gone to extra lengths to make it more versatile. The food and beverage pieces are probably our most challenging use case because of the infrastructure that's required. You can't just have bare walls and exact screens, so that's our limit.
Although you can cater in these places, you just can't really prepare food through cooking. But yeah, given that there are fast approaching a hundred thousand empty shops in the UK alone, and that problem persists throughout developed markets, why aren't we making use of these assets better and doing it in a way that can be financially sustainable?
If you do it, what's really interesting is that there is a market for people who want to use these spaces at the right price point, and in the UK, if you have an empty shop it becomes a business rate liability, which is like property tax in the US. So an empty unit isn't just an empty unit, it's actually a liability for landlords. So what we're saying is let's bring them back into the community, let's make them accessible. Let's engage with customers in a completely different way, to the risk-free basis that has been the important use of the real estate asset furniture for so long and engages with a whole new spectrum of occupiers that just didn't exist 10 years ago.
If you have a hundred thousand empty shops, is it a risk to you with that many available spaces, the rental property becomes commoditized, the price comes down, and it becomes a challenge for you to be competitive with that?
John Hoyle: Not really, because our model is an arbitrage on whatever the rental levels are. Right now empty shops are a huge opportunity for us, and when you think about it from our customer's point of view, actually rent shop occupation costs are only about 30% of the total costs of having a shop. When you think about the cost of staffing an empty shop. To my point where if your shop is only really profitable on a Saturday, It is really painful having to staff it for the other six days of the week and a landlord will demand that you do. If you're in a shopping center, you have to be open. That is part of the deal, and you think about the inefficiencies around stock, people buy, and there are billions of pounds of stock sitting on shelves around the UK. It's absurd. Why not lend an online demand model with an IRL activation?
Yeah, create a public showroom and get fulfillment on the back end.
John Hoyle: Exactly, so we believe that we are creating the opportunity for massive efficiency across the board. It is hard to get brands to think differently. There is a huge amount of inertia around some of the big established brands who just have always done things a certain way.
It's the, “I want that unit. I want it for 10 years with a five-year break, If we get X amount of football and we price our stuff at Y, that will convert into profit.” There are lots of guys that cannot think beyond that and that's one of the challenges of being changemakers like we are is getting the 10% of early adopters to think differently about and do stuff, right?
So where did this come from, this idea?
John Hoyle: I launched it out of an accelerator called Zinc, which is all about delivering social ventures for profit. My background is in real estate. I'm a landlord, formerly at Grosvenor in Central London. So I was deeply frustrated having been on the other side of the fence about the inefficiencies and the huge numbers of occupiers who are excluded from shops.
The reason there are a hundred thousand empty shops is partly price points, but partly accessibility. All the ancillary costs around lawyers, agents, and these guys are all set up to do deals that have to be at least a year, but generally five and ideally ten. That struck me as such an enormous opportunity for disruption. That we've seen in the office space. We've seen it in the huge residential space. Huge global unicorn businesses have disrupted those sectors, but no one has done that in retail yet, and it's slightly more complex. There are the customers of your customers to think about. There's stock, there's a brand, and that's why a fit-out is necessary to facilitate all of that.
So if I'm an apparel designer who has just come out of some fashion school and I wanted to open my own, the commitment to do so would be many hundreds of thousands of pounds to do that, and through this model, I can open up on Oxford Street where we are for a day and have a popup and it's gonna cost well, what would that cost for a day?
John Hoyle: It depends. So it's demand-based pricing, so it's cheaper on a Monday than it is on a Saturday. If you can drive your own footfall, then you might as well take a low-value retail allowance. But you can on a good day get this space for probably just under a thousand pounds on Oxford Street, which yeah, no commitment, no utilities, no legacy issues. You come, do your thing, and when you work it works, you've got clear evidence of that that it is really useful as part of your entrepreneurial journey in terms of building momentum, it's great for content, et cetera, and the halo effect that we all recognize of our engagement is massive for your future on mindsets.
Are you funding this yourself or have you got financial backers?
John Hoyle: We have done four funding rounds. We are fundraising at the moment as well. This is our seed round where it's running for the next three months.
We're likely to have strategic partnerships with big asset managers who are invested and some retail groups. To date, it's been largely angels in the UK. There's a really vibrant ecosystem of angel investment in the UK because the government gives some great tax breaks called EIS.
I'm curious if when you approach people if they give you when the tilted head looks or they get it quickly?
John Hoyle: I think as with anything that's new, there is a bit of adoption. So we find that for our first booking, we insist that there is someone in our sales or customer service team present to help people because there's an element of anxiety. It's a bit like if you organize a party for your other half or family member and you're a bit nervous about the caterers and are people gonna turn up, et cetera, then the party starts and you relax. We see that a lot from our first-timers, but we're at 40% repeat customers, and so for subsequent uses, when you know where it all lies, you know what to expect, it's much less stressful for people.
It's just like your first day at the office when you don't know whether the photocopier works or what your password is, all of that becomes far less scary. So I think the answer is that onboarding involves more friction than we hope will ultimately be the case, and we are very much pushing the envelope of change. There is a bit of a learning curve, and then you see the penny drop and the opportunity. People's heads essentially explode with opportunities to do things that they could do because everyone's got an idea of how they might use a space like this more.
I'm a digital signage guy, so that's what makes me awfully curious about it. How fundamental were the digital screens to make this work?
John Hoyle: Absolutely fundamental. So there is a business that is failing at the moment that I was a customer of. They are effectively a booking system for empty shops, and they're pioneers in many ways because they've pushed the idea of flexible occupation, but they really are no different from a normal real estate agent, and the problem with just being a booking system is that you don't provide any of the services that are absolutely essential to launching a shop.
They're renting an empty cavity. You gotta figure out the rest?
John Hoyle: Yeah, and if you do that, they'll only rent for a minimum of a week. You turn up. You spend the first day setting up, and the next couple of days, no one comes in because it's Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe you have a launch event on Thursday. A few people pick it up a bit Friday or Saturday, and then it's over. You spent probably 15,000 pounds. You've had to buy all of this deeply unsustainable, both financially and environmentally stuff in order to facilitate the fit-out, and you've got nothing really to retain from a legacy perspective With ours, the digital screens are utterly fundamental because that's your fit-out. That's what gives you the environment. You can take that content, you can reuse it on your socials, and can reuse it in other Sook spaces. You can send your stock around. But we will provide essentially the entire platform to allow your Sook to take place without you, wherever else you want.
Could you do these locations without the screens?
John Hoyle: It would remove a USP of ours, and of course, there is sometimes demand, but what we are trying to do is a hundred percent occupancy, and a big part of that is out-of-home media. So when we're not actively booked, we can be a billboard for your screen, which is a super light touch. It can operate when shops are closed throughout the night and generate revenue.
It is a really powerful, utilitarian way of squeezing revenue out of latent assets, and obviously, an empty shop's just an empty shop, and you can't do any of that.
Do you have a handle on what you're using for the displays? The screens are obvious, but, are you using a particular piece of software or…?
John Hoyle: You have to ask the AV guys. We've been through several iterations and in classic startup style we've tried lots of tools, we keep the ones that work, we discard the ones that don't and we're constantly iterating and I would describe that device upstairs, like a massive iPhone. Obviously, it's way less sophisticated than the iPhone today. But the principle is the same. Physically, it iterates just your Apple device and then the software behind it upgrades, but without you needing to change the device. So that is the process that we're constantly evolving.
When did the first Sook open?
John Hoyle: I opened one in 2019 as the sort of first MVP in Cambridge, and then we won a few prizes straight off the bat because it had such success in Cambridge.
Why Cambridge?
John Hoyle: That's where I live. I wanted to prove that there was demand, which we did, and enough so that Legal in General, the insurance company, and pension fund, gave us our first proper site in a shopping center in Cambridge, which we opened in January, 2020, but of course, we all know what happened a month later. We were pretty quiet op operationally throughout all of 2020 and quite a lot of 2021 for obvious reasons. But we emerged from the pandemic with this site on Oxford street, one on South Molton Street, and one in Edinburgh. So it was clear that we had identified a need from landlords and we've expanded.
Is it important to be on high streets like this, like really well-known ones?
John Hoyle: Yes and no. So at this stage in our business, the startup, people don't know what it is to your point, people wanna understand it and they wanna be in great places, and we have to prove that investing is a success, and then we can generate revenue. So it is really helpful being on Oxford Street as opposed to somewhere unrecognizable.
But our goal is for it to function everywhere and for it to be a platform where Nike can reach a customer in a place that is utterly undesirable from a profile perspective, but where there are still obviously many customers and we believe actually the impact in those places could be bigger, and you asked me earlier about whether the erosion of the retail market could affect us. Well, one of the things that brands will pay us for is the opportunity cost of being able to do this, which is often in less desirable retail locations with a much higher ROI for us than on Oxford Street.
I'll give you a good example. MasterCard used our space in the Metro Center, which is in the northeast of England, it's probably one of the least affluent areas in the UK. We're in big shops, bigger shops and regional shopping centers there, and they're paying us London prices in Newcastle for the opportunity to have those spaces.
My dream is that there can be a Sook on every high street and it can address all of the community goals in the same way that maybe a town hall does, as well as being a state-of-the-art retail space for brands to dip in and out to engage with those customers and create a halo effect.
Because a fashion designer can be in Newcastle and, doesn't have to come here to launch?
John Hoyle: No, it's bigger than that. Why can't they be in New York or Dubai or Beijing? Stock light, you can use physical stock, but so much of it can be digital, purchases get made online, which through using QR codes, it's not necessarily about leaving with physical stuff, but if you are a global brand on a mission to scale, what a brilliant way of dipping your toe in the water.
And because there are so many empty sites, landlords love something that is gonna delight, that's going to be good for placemaking and community and that in some instances is more important than actually a business case for the space. It's a tool for asset managers to drive footfall into assets.
You see lots of distressed real estate where somebody's put in a gift shop or a calendar shop or whatever, and they don't have a lot of money and it just looks sad and it doesn't lift the street. It takes it down.
John Hoyle: Exactly. We wanna be the opposite of that. And I really believe that constant rotation of activity is the way to bring life back. Because you could have the coolest brand in the world in your unit, I always use the fashion apparel one, but maybe there's a better example of that, but if its peak hours are only on a Saturday, the rest of the week is to all intents and purposes in an empty shop. So it isn't adding anything to those high streets.
But running up the costs.
So how many Sooks do you have now?
John Hoyle: We've got 11. We want to double it next year, and part of that is reliant on fundraising.
We're also allowing some other systems to list on our site, and we have our first overseas site agreed upon in South Africa, Johannesburg. Got opportunities in the UAE, the US, Canada, and Europe. As you would not be surprised to hear, I'm just balancing the amazing demand we have for our product with a fundraising environment that's a bit tepid, thanks to all sorts of reasons, not least in the UK because of very recent economic turmoil, which is completely self-inflicted.
Where is the business out overall, given what you just said about the economy and Covid?
John Hoyle: We doubled our sales last year on year. I'm really happy about that.
But that would be in an anomaly year.
John Hoyle: No, I think we will potentially quadruple it this year, and even if we don't add any more sites, we should double it again. The demand from global brands is through the roof. TikTok, Quikr,. Sonos, Universal Music Group, Uber, MasterCard.
So they're finding you, even though you're a startup in most respect?
John Hoyle: They're finding us so that's incredibly encouraging.
My challenge is not having today, although I expect to rectify that in February, the capital really to run at so many of these opportunities. This is a brilliant time for a disruptor to emerge. The sector is on its knees, asset managers are desperate for a solution. We have a solution. It's proven. It can get better, it can get more exciting. The fit-out you saw upstairs can evolve dramatically, and in fact, there's a very exciting space that I'll point you towards up Oxford Street, which we hope to take over quite soon, that you should go and have a look at, which is really the next generation of what Sook could be even more immersive.
Could you have a larger, almost like the department store, level place with multiple shops, like there are lots of department stores that I've shops within shops now.
John Hoyle: Yes. So we've talked to two department stores about providing that service.
My personal view is that the department store model is inherently inefficient because you go to some amazing stores that I love in New York, like SHOWFIELDS which is the new age department store, and just like every other shop it has a peak and then a massive drop when no one's in there, and that just to me, as a utilitarian, who is very focused on the revenues that real estate assets can yield, just seems a bit mad.
So the answer is yes, we could work in a department store, but we'd be in that instance much more beneficial to the department store than to us in terms of driving feet at times when they don't necessarily have customers.
If people wanna find out more about your company, where do they find you?
John Hoyle: www.sook.space. Everything is on our website. We're at Sook Spaces on social media, across all channels. Follow me on LinkedIn. I'm John Hoyle, and yeah, tell the world about Sook because it is coming to a street near you.
All right. Thank you.
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
Ben Maher, Outernet London
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I spent a few days in London, UK ahead of Integrated Systems Europe - in part to break up the trip and flights, but much more so to meet with several companies and see some projects that I'd only been able to see in photos and videos.
The one I particularly wanted to see was Outernet London, a very ambitious, multi-faceted development in the city's center that has, as its visual centerpiece, a huge set of wall and ceiling LED screens that are fully open to the public and positioned in such a way that they can't be missed as people flow from a main exit of the busy Tottenham Court Road Underground station.
I assumed, wrongly, that this exists primarily to run Digital Out Of Home advertising and compete with big screens like those in nearby Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. But there is much more to Outernet, as I learned walking and talking with the developments Chief Commercial Officer, Ben Maher.
The audio may be a bit hit and miss, as we did this on the go and in the crowds that were there even on a chilly January afternoon.
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TRANSCRIPT
Ben Maher: We have this incredibly famous set of assets on this side of the district, which is Denmark Street. So as a business, we've been a landlord on Denmark Street for over 25 years looking after the music stores and we've made, as we said, a huge number of acquisitions, meaning that we own nearly all of the property there by Parcel two or three, and we run a baker for Baker Policy. So if we lose a music store, we replace it with music because we wanna maintain it, sorry, I don’t know how familiar you're with Denmark Street, but as an asset, we wanna maintain this as one of the nice, iconic music streets in the world.
The first music store opened in 1911, Charlie Chaplin wrote the song, Smile here in 1926. The Melody Maker was founded here in 1954. The Enemy was found here. The owner of the Enemy went around the street with a ledger of all of the music that was sold, and that became the first-ever music chart, which was compiled on this street.
Elton John had his first job as a runner here, and it was the home of the labels, the writers, it was the home of the lawyers, and the management, so people would hang out here in the hope of being discovered. But importantly, talent would wanna be discovered and they'd hang out in the cafe here, this was called the Gioconda Cafe and you'll see Tim Hannaly, the home of British music. But importantly it would be people like Marc Bolan, it would be Jimmy Hendrick, and David Bowie moved and converted an ambulance onto the street and lived here. So it really was an incredible, authentic crucible for music. We’ve maintained the music stores. We put in a 55-room luxury hotel residence, so you stay in the rooms where Frankie Fraser, the Richardson, the Gangland fame, their bar, which was called the Pannaly Bar. Number six Here, out the back is the News House that Malcolm McLaren rented for the Sex Pistols. So you can now stay in that, that's the Anarchy Suite. It's complete with their original graffiti.
Did big pressure wash it down?
Ben Maher: No. For better or worse, it's there and it's good. It has a great two listings on it now, but again, in a building like this, incredible history, and Hypnosis were based here. They were the world leading album cover designers. So they created album covers for the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon was created in that room.
When you stay in the rooms, they have names. Like Hypnotized for that room, and then Kiss the Sky is the name of the room where Hendrick used to jam. This is the store where Bob Marley bought his most famous guitar, which was destined for a dustbin for a car mechanic from Essex. This is where the Stones did some of their first-ever recordings and people recorded here all the way through to the likes of the Brit Brats, Adele, and other incredible artists.
So all of this is part of the district, and as I said, we've not tried to Disney-fy this area. We've tried to preserve it. The area dates back all the way to about the 7th century when the church was created to support the Hospital. But once you build infrastructure, communities develop, so this became one of the first slums in London. It was home to 3000 residencies, and over 500 distilleries and this is where Hogarth depicted the Gin riots. So when you see things like that's where that occurred, and this is where it's depicted.
You have elements like Dickens who live down the road in Bloomsbury, wrote Oliver Twist here, and Robert Stevenson. There's incredible history to the area. That is all really important when you're creating platforms and telling stories so that you understand the context within which you exist, not just the recent history. I'll come to some of the other music venues.
So now we’re going to enter the district. Importantly, we have 30,000 square feet of offices, we have 18 retail units, we have popups. We have 13 bars and restaurants and we obviously have screen-enabled spaces. So this first space is the arcade, The Now Arcade. As you can see, it's a full-screen enabled, three-mill pixel-pitched laden environment. All are equipped with acoustic audio. So we have venue-quality audio in all our spaces.
And the audio is on the bars down below?
Ben Maher: The district as a whole, through all the spaces, is made up of 230 million pixels. It has 192 kilometers of CAT6 table enabling this and I think it is really important, we have positioned this as a canvas. We've positioned this as a storytelling platform, and that's really important to start with content first so that you can establish the context and the interest of the audience to allow you to tell better brand stories and deliver brand messages. So that has always been the ethos of what we're doing.
We don't stand with one editorial voice or polarizing thought around what we say. We try to democratize access to the platform. So we try to provide as many different interest groups and users to create for the platform because, in all honesty, screens are relatively cheap against the cost of actually feeding them, and creating environments that remain interesting all the time is the biggest challenge we have. So again, one of the things we want to do by using multi-sensory environments is to hand back some of that control to the audiences, not only to create for the platform but also to control their experiences. So although we start with audio-visual, we're on a sort of a technical journey on a path to bleed out new technologies and ensure that people can then interact and control generative experiences for themselves.
All of the spaces have cameras in them, for example, which will allow for interactivity. So you can come into this space, you might receive a standing ovation or trigger a Mexican wave. The joy of technology as it stands at the moment, and you won't hear talk of Covid. But the reality is people now understand better the reasons to be utilizing QR codes. So these screens can become a launchpad or anything: to commerce, obviously AR experiences, or anything else that we wanna leave. It makes data exchange a much cleaner and more natural sort of methodology. So really important for us to be able to control all of those elements.
As we head down, this provides a queuing function for our venue as well, we have a 1500-person capacity music venue underground, which is the largest new music venue built in central London in the 1940s. This is load in, load out, for the venue. So again, we've configured the streets so that we can have a clean, easy ecological load in, and load out so vehicles can come and jack power straight from the main rather than running their engines and things like that, which is smart.
As we come into the district now, you'll see that we have what was a very traditional maze of News Street. So this was Denmark Place, and we've got here the ability to gate and control the environment so we can create all sorts of experiences and fields and allow people to have events or dress a district in any interesting manner. So five different egress and ingress points across the district. On this side, we've got 14 more hotel rooms because the residences are based in 16 different buildings. So a really different unique point for the hotel.
Here we have what will be the Denmark Street Recording Studio which will be a pro bono recording studio, again, adding to the ecosystem that we have, bringing people and rewarding talent, just as Denmark Street always did. This is the more historical and music side of the district. This is the more modern screen-enabled place. On the rooftop here. We have an 8000-square-foot modern Chinese restaurant called Tattoo. We have another restaurant on the fourth floor, which will open later this quarter that's called Cavo. They have a rooftop garden here which is joined by a glass bridge, which leads over to the fourth-floor restaurant.
So what you'll see here is we have 2600 LEDs across the runway here. So when we create a red carpet leading to the venue, we can light it up through LED color hues so that we can control those environments.
So you've got show control, so you can orchestrate the whole thing?
Ben Maher: Brand colors, mood, you name it. We've obviously lifted up causes such as Holocaust Memorial and also for the Ukraine crisis and things like that, that's really important. We understand our environment, we understand the mood. If you think of the context of certainly out-of-home and. storytelling, smart cities, and IoT play a big part in city planning now, and our environment should be able to adjust to those needs and requirements. We shouldn't just be screaming at audiences. We should be creating dialogue and also understanding the context within which we sit.
So for example, or within GDPR, if somebody comes in, I know if they're looking for WiFi, where their SIM card originates. I know what their default language is. I don't need to invade their privacy. But I can assume when the 50th Dutch person or the 200th Canadian crosses the threshold, I might play the national anthem and change the color of the district. So that creates incredible surprise and delight.
And that would be data triggered?
Ben Maher: Completely. We can utilize a custom stack, which controls all of the programs for the district, and that proprietary technology allows us to configure different environments, to configure the different spaces, either in unison or alternatively to have them operate autonomously. And I think it's really important, our point of difference is having that versatility of space. It doesn't just do one thing. We do four core things. We can hold events in our spaces, so that could be a private or public events. We have 32s spots in our spaces, which is, essentially a standard TVC, monetization.
We can do sponsorship. BMW has been a sponsor of our art program. We've presented our wellness program in association with Panadol and importantly, this new stage is gonna be about branded content, telling stories in a slightly longer form in an audiovisual sense in the public domain, and I think it was one of the most incredible moments I've had since being here, reaffirming that we've got an environment that has that versatility and what we wanna do is bring that longer storytelling moment to the form because brands are doing things with brand advocates, with talent.
They're doing things based on purpose or the craft that they create. So we've had driving stories. We've had the launch of the Beatle's actual master Revolver album, the videos that went with that, and again, that creates a different environment. It creates a different context. We've done interactive games, so again, as I said, what you don't wanna be in any environment is a terrible magician. If you do your best trick on the first day, or second day, it's diminishing returns. You're not doing anything innovative or different.
That's a mistake made over and over again?
Ben Maher: Yeah, and I think it's also quite been quite cathartic knowing that we don’t know everything about this space because no one's ever done this anywhere in the world. So to say that we don't fully understand how the public reacts to work, we have to embrace versatility. So knowing, for example, on the left here we have popup two. On the back corner of the building, we have another popup, which is about twice the size.
These spaces are fully screen-enabled and audio enabled as you see here. If they're not being used for an event, they'll be programmed with our content so that they're relevant. TMP, for example, Take More Photos is a grassroots creative collective. They release briefs on social media and people can submit their photographs and then it curates an exhibition based on the brief. So they do one on Welcome to London. So this one's Welcome to Love in London. They'll do one for International Women's Month, or they'll do one for Black History Month. They did one for the World Cup, for example.
Now these are organizations that don't have budgets typically. So this is pro bono stuff, right?
Ben Maher: Very much, but again, it exactly comes down to what I said before, which is we want to give access to the platform. We wanna hear different voices to be representative and inclusive of our communities.
Was that part of the pitch as well to Westminster Town Council or something like that? Look, we're building, but it's going to have all sorts of community involvement?
Ben Maher: Good question. So importantly, when we were talking before, when I showed you everything in front of us, that's Westminster, the road here literally the line down the middle is Camden. So Camden has a very different approach to Westminster. They're just different borrows and it's what you expect, different councils. So we were applying to Camden for our licenses. This area historically had a number of late licenses and bar licenses for the different premises that were here previously and have historically been a musical district. So again, it's quite an entertainment-based space.
Yeah, I was gonna say they'd be in the mindset anyways for this.
Ben Maher: Importantly, they have embraced what we're doing, but they have also gone on the journey of understanding what we're doing. Because it's very new. So that is always a challenge. The building and its main purpose of it though is an interesting public space. So if we had created a new private, totally private and shut environment, I don't think we would've been received in the same manner.
If you've got a second, you might want to stop for a second only because we're gonna watch the Summer Palace and it's about two and a half minutes long and you'll want to see this, but this is a good example of our house content. Something we commissioned to play in the public domain, which allows brands to sit alongside incredible experiences, and as you can see, people naturally get their phones out to record.
I'll tell you the story about how it began. So we ran a camp home for Italian Airways before Christmas, they were one of the first brands to use the space for a commercial message, and they made us nervous. We didn't know what was gonna come cause no one had we've got best practice guides. We've got creative specs, and they created an experience where planes fly over the head of amazing landmarks in Italy and people applauded. For somebody who's worked for 25 years in advertising, yeah, that's an incredible thing to be able to say, quite a lovely experience.
But this was part of the commission that we did or RFP that we did for people to create for the space, and it's an ethereal journey through space-time. But interesting it uses the ceiling as the main communication plan.
I'm a big fan of these kinds of environments where you look at it and there will be any number of people here who will assume that that's real.
Ben Maher: Oh yeah, and the joy is we’re using a 3mm pixel pitch so you can create that depth of illusion. The total resolution size here is about 6k, so it's not without its challenges, and we have found it unforgiving for things like raw photo footage because it's just so unforgiving on talent so then we can use templating and things like that to accommodate lower resolution assets, but still have them looking credible in the space.
The use of negative space. So not always trying to fill every pixel is also incredibly powerful, so we're trying to utilize that as well. For this, I used to present this in VR, so people are presenting on teams and zoom in VR during the lockdown, trying to explain what we're doing because it's one. It’s one thing explaining a new ad format, but it’s a different thing explaining a new environment altogether.
Yeah, I'm somebody who's been around this medium, if you wanna call it the technology for 20+ years now and not seen something like this before, particularly the way it's stitched together with everything else, quite honestly, not just, here's this big screen. Be excited!
Ben Maher: Yes, and I think we have to create, as I said, multipurpose and interesting use environments because cities deserve them. You've got, as I said, as many on the weekends as 350,000 people coming through this area and it is becoming an attraction. You, we have six to eight hours of free art programming in this building on a Sunday.
And people email and go, can I see this? When is this happening? And that I think is a good testament to doing things the right way. It's new. We are learning. When we first opened the now trending space, which is the smallest of the spaces, that silver Line proved an incredibly challenging threshold for some people. Because it was like an anthropological experiment. They didn't know whether they could step in. They didn't know what the transaction was. Because they'd never seen a free public entertainment space like that, and as you'd expect children and people who'd had a drink were the first ones to cross the threshold.
But then interestingly put seating in there and people act completely differently. So the psychology of the spaces is also important. Another thing that may be of interest is that this hero screen here on the south wall and the east wall here is permanent deployments, as you can see the slight lines between the wall here, these screens on the north and west are on rails and they can completely retract ah, and the building can open up. So it's one of the first buildings in the world with kinetic staging built in.
You do have doors too, so you can close the area off for private events?
Ben Maher: You can see better with the white there. You can see the slacks between how they work. So we'll be bringing new appointments to view to city centers where you'll come with a real-time of day to actually see something happen. You can see, in fact, these ones are usually completely closed and they've been open today for windows. The small area here can operate as a retail unit. It's been a trainer store for Puma. It was a classroom for Mercedes F1 MG with Toto Wolff. It was a studio for the photographer ranking. It was a red carpet zone for Sky. It's been a party for Apple, and NBCU. So again, having addressable spaces that can do a lot, this pixel pitch at 3mm is akin to what they use in the Unreal Engine SFX studios. So that's essentially the backdrop that they shoot. White, shiny floor shows content. The resolution there, as I say, is 3mm-5mm pitch on the outside here because up higher which is still the highest resolution out of in Europe currently certainly at that scale.
Yeah, I've heard a few 6mm in New York, but not 5mm.
Ben Maher: So we're really pleased with it. But at that resolution, it's interesting. We do need higher-quality content. Because of that pitch, it can be unforgiving. You'll see Netflix is doing an incredible job. They're a very frequent client of ours, but the animation on here will always look incredible cause it obviously scales infinitely almost. But they produce beautiful output and the resolution is incredible.
That space, is it also leasable for if BMW wanted to launch a new electric vehicle or something, you could block off this?
Ben Maher: Absolutely. So we held the launch of the new FIFA 23 there and did the FIFA Women's Summit. We've done live boxing with DAZN and Matchroom, so we've held boxing there. We've done events for UNICEF. We've done events for Mothers of Gucci, which is a Gala event. So yeah, we can do private things, but the best way we like the district is having the public in because the more spaces that you privatize, the less inviting the world is, and we want people to come in, experience things free, be entertained, and create moments that ultimately they wanna share and create a destination In the cities we're in.
What would you do if there was a big England football match and I remember Lester Square got kinda destroyed, would you just close this off?
Ben Maher: So we face the challenges that any public destination would face, and we have to manage the environment. So we do risk assessments on anything. We have a really good security team and we do all of the listening and monitoring of those feeds to know what's happening.
We get advice from our partners like TFL, which are local. We've got Camden, and then we liaise with the greater London authorities and also the Emergency response services. So we got a good understanding of what's happening. But yes, we'll make a call based on what's going on to decide how we manage the district because we wanna keep people safe.
How many people work on this, setting aside security and all that, working with the canvas, and everything else?
Ben Maher: So the Outernet team as a whole is around 80 people. So that'll divide up between everything from the scheduling to the sales teams to the data and center people, creative teams, et cetera.
When did it open?
Ben Maher: Officially, the arcade and the trending spaces opened around late August, and what they’re now building came online from midday each day in November. So it's not been open for long, we're still very much in our infancy but it's nice as I said, to see the behavior of the public and have been here just over four years, to see it come to fruition is very rewarding.
Did it go through a lot of revisions?
Ben Maher: Yes, in terms of what you were good at? I think there were about 11 years of planning before I was even anywhere near this, and then once the planning is in place, you have to then reinterpret it as an experience as a platform, both for how stories are told, how stories are configured, how content is rendered out, how content is served and then how it can be taken to market for brands, storytellers, creators, you name it. So yes, a lot of revisions, and we're still revising.
There's a number of businesses, operating hotels, everything else. Is this element of it or its own business unit with its own P&L?
Ben Maher: Outernet is a media business, and we control the screen-enabled spaces that you see above ground here.
I'm gonna assume that you're not plugged into programmatic or anything like that because it's a very distinct kinda canvas.
Ben Maher: That is correct. We're not plugged into programmatic. It's not to say that we would never do it, but the reality is the way that the content needs to be served today, it is very unique. As I said, it's a proprietary stack. It uses lots of familiar techs but it's more programmed like a channel like a traditional broadcast channel as opposed to a media. There's a little bit of rendering that's required, let's just say.
I assume you know who was the LED supplier?
Ben Maher: The screens are from AOTO. We went and did an analysis globally of the best screen providers and for what we needed AOTO had a great product, and this is certainly the biggest one of the first in, certainly the biggest deployment that they've done of this product.
We're running one triple GPS and are now building a load. We did go as far as doing a sort of quality assessment. We visited factories. We even went as far as looking at where raw materials were mined, because of the importance of having single-batch silicon on a canvas of this scale to ensure that you didn't get that different, particularly obviously on the reds within this car, within this canvas was really important. Another important thing about the LEDs, we degrade panels at the same pace that they are running, so that if we need to replace them, we're replacing them either from our own environments or right into the environment. So again, they're in the same life stage of the panels to ensure high quality.
You have a pretty big spares pool, I would imagine?
Ben Maher: We try our best, it's a revolving. If you look at this, this is a drone shoot done by one of the Wrigley Scott Associate directors that we met, and he shot it on an Icelandic beach and it is a music video. But if you look at how some of the B rolls so creating doesn't need all new assets, it can come from existing architecture.
The supplier of this kind of creativity told you, here's what we would like you to do with it, or do they give you a license to say, look we'd like to do an edit, this is how it's gonna look?
Ben Maher: It depends on the creator, and it depends on where they are with them. If they're shooting for us, then we'd say, this is the brand kit and this is what you need to produce and this is how you need to play it out. We're always updating our learnings. We get new challenges and new opportunities and we learn from those. But as we see these mega canvases across the world. These sorts of fantastic pieces become more relevant because they'll play out across networks. Across other major cities. I think one of the questions you posed was, is London a model for elsewhere?
It is, and we're in discussions in New York, LA, the Middle East, and Asia, at launching these networks and then sharing experiences, interestingly, might always be this exact look and feel. This was put together over 26 years across a horizontal plane. If you go to Manhattan, you're probably gonna have to use a vertical plane, and so it becomes a completely different onboarding process and journey. So it's gonna be interesting how we take our learnings and then we utilize those in other environments.
If you're gonna take this to other locations, does it have to be multifaceted in the same way, and that there's a retail component, there's a hospitality component, there's a restaurant component?
Ben Maher: Every case is different. So if you look at environments creating a campus or a district in other cities, particularly New York, or more challenging real estate payment tables or even the planning commissions. So we have to look at them in each case often partnering with other established institutions is wise.
We're lucky enough to have a huge foot here. In places like Manhattan, you have those big footfalls. In the other cities, you don't necessarily have this natural footfall. So you have to create a different style of destination or with another key destination to ensure the right sort of, so yeah each case on its own and understanding the needs and nuances of those cities and audiences as well.
Yeah, because there are a lot of immersive attractions popping up now. They're almost all projection, but they're very much ticketed locations and it's programmed and it starts at this time and you're there for 45 minutes and exit through the gift shop.
Ben Maher: We're very happy to have you exit through the gift shop here as well.
And don't get me wrong, there is some incredible projection technology out there. We've looked at it in our venues and in other places. We have other locations with theaters and other things and, we would certainly consider projection there, but for the kinda canvas and certainly some of the gaming engines and things and future-proofing, we wanted to do this pixel pitch to create a very unique and beautiful canvas that to be fair, I don't think we could have achieved in the same way with projection.
Yeah, it's very interesting. I've written about it and but it's so much more interesting to see it in person, but I think more than anything else, to kinda understand the macro idea as opposed to, oh look, a very big set of screens.
Ben Maher: What are these guys doing?
Why did they do that?
Ben Maher: Which again, isn't a difficult question always, and I think just seeing the way the public interacts with it has been enough of a validation that cities deserve these interesting cultural spaces and they deserve to be free and in the public domain.
We're early in our journey. We need more brands coming and telling their stories as well, but telling them in a way that will ingratiate themselves to the public and, out-of-home has done an incredible job at providing public utility forever, in major cities. If we can this model out, certainly for multisensory spaces delivering that as well, I think it sets a good precedent for other cities and other developers across world.
Are you affected at all by energy conservation requirements or requests?
Ben Maher: Yes, of course.
We are obviously subject to the rising costs of energy as anyone naturally would be, but we have developed the most energy-efficient product that was available on the market. So the sort of coolness and the control of the environment, importantly, isn't prohibitive to doing this. We're not creating a huge carbon footprint that we cannot manage. We have all the relevant ESG scorecards. We're working with the ISO qualifications for energy and for our social corporate responsibilities.
But it's also this sort of magnet or those people who are concerned about all the voice energy on these things, do they really need them versus other stuff that's drawing way more energy, but it's not anything you think about?
Ben Maher: I think the fact that we're providing a storytelling platform and we're not just screaming at people in the public domain. We're supporting arts and culture everywhere. We have a charitable foundation that donates time, and money for different projects. So we've done projects around sustainability with Unger. We're doing things around social mobility. We've done things for AIDS charities, so we work with lots of different interest groups to provide them with platforms. We even audit the popups so that when we're looking at the brands we're working with, we're not just working with the same generic brands that you get on every high street in the world, right?
We wanna ensure that these spaces are different and unique. So whether it's non-white owned businesses, whether it's LGBTQ+ owned business, female-owned, sustainable business, so again, being a conscious member of society, we don't just wanna be a bastian for people who want a big ass billboard.
So I think we've gone around things in a very different way. There is some incredible landmark out home structures in the UK and across Europe. But I do think we have good USPs and we do complement what is already in the market but with enough points of difference, yeah. We wanna attract people to this space and not cannibalize out-of-home budgets by sticking the same offering up. So if we can get more AV budget and that encourages people to do better and more in out-of-home, then that's a fantastic thing.
That's very impressive. Obviously, people like it.
Ben Maher: We're getting there. There's a piece called Heaven's Gate that is the new art exhibition and it is on Sunday and it was absolutely crackers in here, it was just crazy to see how people enjoyed it and it just says conceiving something and then seeing it come to fruition is such a unique and pleasurable thing to be able to do. So we're very proud of what we've done here.
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Ted Romanowitz, Futuresource Consulting
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Ted Romanowitz has been around the commercial display and tech sectors for a whole bunch of years, and for the last two or so, has been an industry analyst for the research firm Futuresource Consulting.
Futuresource is in the UK, but Ted works out of the Portland, Oregon area - spending his time looking at professional display technologies, ranging from projectors to mini and microLED video wall products.
He was at CES and he'll be at ISE this week, meeting with manufacturers and walking the halls, seeing what's new and interesting.
We had a good chat about where the different display technologies are at, and how miniLED is seeing a lot of traction for fine pitch LED displays. We talk projection and we spend quite a bit of time discussing the state and vast potential for microLED.
One thing I particularly liked was his qualifier about "true" microLED, as all kinds of manufacturers market their premium products as microLED, when they're really miniLED.
Ted, thank you for joining me. Can you explain what you do for Futuresource and what Futuresource is all about?
Ted Romanowitz: Oh, I'd love to do that. I'm a principal analyst at FutureSource Consulting in our business-to-business (b2b) practice. I lead the entire professional display Segment. So we cover everything Projection, LCD panels, tiled LCD, and interactive displays, as well as my forte, as you may know, is LED. I have more than 10 years of industry experience in LED with Planar, Leyard and Christie Digital. It's wonderful. There's a lot going on in pro displays right now.
So what would you be doing primarily? Are you producing research reports? Are you talking to companies? You know, what's your day-to-day?
Ted Romanowitz: We do three really big things. One, we do quarterly trackers for all these technologies. So you can look at the data by company, by specification, by country, and comparatively by brand. We also do annual reports. We've just published a video wall report as well as a strategic market outlook. We've got a big digital signage report coming in the springtime. We're looking forward to publishing that, as well as a refresh of our true micro-LED report coming in the first half of the year.
So we do a lot of annual reports, and then the third bit is custom research. So if there are any companies out there that have a specific business need for the information, they can reach out to me and we'd love to talk to them about a one-off type of project to get the analytics that they need to make an informed business.
How hard is it to get the data from all the different display manufacturers and to talk about their sales and their market size?
Ted Romanowitz: It is definitely a challenge and I think, especially during the Covid timeframe, to keep relationships established has been challenging. We just came back from a major trip to the Asia Pacific in November, so we were literally the first company meeting these large pro AV vendors in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. We spent two weeks over there face-to-face and you just can't say enough about building face-to-face relationships and having those conversations and that's why we're so much looking forward to ISE this year, getting everybody back together.
So when you say you are the first company, what do you mean by that?
Ted Romanowitz: A lot of these vendors haven't had research companies or other people come and visit them face-to-face. So they were really glad, almost ecstatic to have us show up at their doorstep for a meeting. It was wonderful to rebuild a lot of relationships. It's so much different to do it face-to-face. It's more meaningful.
As opposed to at a table in a trade show booth?
Ted Romanowitz: That's also face-to-face, so I think those are good as well.
It's hard to get good data, setting yourself aside, there are one or two other companies that are focused on this, but there's this avalanche or a steady torrent of crap coming out of research factories from India. Do you have to fight against that?
Ted Romanowitz: I think what Futuresource is really good at is having these long-term relationships. We've been doing this for two decades. We have relationships with the brands. We're getting data, hard data. We're having not only quantitative discussions, but we're having qualitative trends impacting the industry, what's coming next, and those sorts of things, so it's much more robust practice that we do, and that's why people are coming to us wanting our research.
And part of your routine as well is going to the big trade shows, I believe you're just at CES and you're planning to go to ISE as well?
Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely. It was my 14th trip to CES in my career, and it's like a little bit of a family reunion for me actually. But it was amazing to see the energy and people actually queuing up to be able to get into some of the booths there, the larger booths because they were controlling the traffic for Covid and everything. But the energy was there, a lot of great new technologies. It was quite exciting, and as a little preview, I know we're gonna talk about micro LEDs at some point, but I was able to see the industry's first true micro-LED displays, so that was worth the trip, just that one thing.
Yeah, I get asked every year, am I going to CES? And I say, I've done it, don't want to do it again, too many people line up for everything. But the biggest thing is it's consumer electronics and it's pushing away to some degree it seems at least from displays into gadgets and cars and everything else, so I'm curious if you said that one thing alone was worth the trip, but for somebody who is maybe not as well versed as you, is it worth going to CES if you're in the digital signage industry?
Ted Romanowitz: There were digital sign signs everywhere, even in some of the smaller halls like North and West, there were LED signs in almost every single booth promoting different technologies and companies, brands. It was amazing. But yeah, I was also amazed at how some of the big consumer brands were starting to bring in LED technology in particular, and showing the consumer applications of that and it's still not gonna be sold through a CEDIA channel, it's going to be sold through pro AV consultants. So it's our heart and soul still for some years before it becomes priced for the mass markets if you will.
Do you get cues from CES about, a product that comes out for TVs whether it be OLED or QLED whatever the case may be, are those cues to what's gonna happen on the pro side or does it not necessarily track that way?
Ted Romanowitz: There's not one way or the other, but I definitely think, specifically to LED technology, that is primarily a pro-AV thing and it is starting to creep into CES and that's exactly why I was at the show.
Venetian had three floors of smaller companies, and it's amazing how much of our ecosystem is starting to show up there. Different companies looking for ODM and OEM arrangements were in the Venetian, showing prototypes and whatnot of not only LED but also see-through LED and transparent OLED.
I was curious about one of the announcements at CES where LG unveiled an OLED TV that was wirelessly powered. Now there was a box that you still had to plug in, but between the box and the display panel itself, there was no wire. It was being transmitted by IR or something or other, I forgot. Is that something that you see as coming or is it just an outlier that nobody would actually use?
Ted Romanowitz: LG had a wireless OLED display. But my understanding is that it was wireless connectivity on the data side and not necessarily on the power side. But that's certainly something I think it'll be interesting to see if that shows up at ISE, and definitely, a trend that we should all watch, especially in historic buildings across the east coast of America plus Europe, where you have a historical building and you wanna hang a display in this space, but you don't have power to it, and you don't want a god awful power cord, video signal cord running down the beautiful brickwork or whatnot. There could be some real applications for it.
Yeah. I know a company in Israel. I did a podcast with them and they now have wireless power technology and they insisted it’s safe and everything else, and you don't get fried if you walk in front of it, or anything.
Ted Romanowitz: Interesting. I'm not aware of that. I'll have to get the information from you so we can have a good look.
So what display segments are growing right now?
Ted Romanowitz: Overall, the pro display is growing over the next five years at about an 8% compound annual growth rate, which is healthy. That's really being driven primarily by direct view LED, which is, over 20% year-over-year growth. So that's really where the growth is. LCD is still showing basically flat growth over the next five years. It's very slow growth, but yet by 2026, it's still 50% of the pro displays marketplace, and we won't see that shift between LED and LCD until we have some of these advanced technologies like mini LED, as defined by flip chip COB, which I think we're gonna see some really interesting demos at ISE on this technology finally.
There have been technical and manufacturing issues that have held it back from mass production. So I think 2023 will be the year, we're predicting that 2023 will be the year when companies will come into mass production and resolve these manufacturing and technical issues. So that's where you get pixel pitches under 0.7, 0.6, perhaps even 0.5 with flip chip COB that will start to challenge LCD panels, which are really that close-up viewing experience really predominant.
Yeah, I remember Leyard’s CTO or he some kind of title like that, he was saying once you get to about 0.7, you're very close to the pixel pitch that you would have on an LCD.
Ted Romanowitz: That is correct. It's around 0.5-millimeter pixel pitch on an LCD screen. So yeah, LED is getting there, and then the really last bit is, once you have that close-up viewing experience, you can put it into, let's say small to medium room sized meeting rooms as well as digital signage, eye level, close up wayfinding, informational displays, those kinds of things. It gets really interesting for LED, but the price differential right now is still fairly substantial.
What is it now? I understand there are a whole bunch of variables.
Ted Romanowitz: That's a loaded question. I wish I could just say, oh, it's X percent but it depends. I hate that answer, but it's the truth. We're seeing these advanced technologies in LED come in the mass volume where you get economies of scale, you're gonna see that differential shrink. So that's first with this flip chip CEOB, mini LED and that gets you to around, 0.5-0.6 millimeter, certainly 0.7 so you're on the verge of competing with LCD panels and then with what we're calling true micro LED technology, that is sub-100-micron chiplets mass transferred onto a TFT backplane with an active driver technology.
So that is what one of the brands was showing at CES Samsung. They had from 55-inch to about 140-inch displays. They weren't able to give me pricing on that officially, but we know they estimated it last year at about $150,000 for a 4K display over 100 inches. And that's probably not gonna go into your house or mine, although we aspire to that. But over the years as they come into mass production in the next five to seven years, it's going to drop from $150,000 down to around $4,000 is what we're estimating and volume production, once you get under, let's say 40,000 or 30,000, it'll start showing up in the CEDIA channels. So it'll start shifting from pro AV consultants to the CEDIA channel but they'll need lots of help to figure out how to do it, and then once it gets into the $4,000 to $5,000 range, it's definitely more of a broad consumer electronic, still very expensive for you and I, a lot of people will really want to jump on this technology. It looks really beautiful.
The stuff that Samsung was showing at CES was that when you frame it as true micro LED, as the Samsung stuff part of the wall series and they're now doing genuine micro LED with that?
Ted Romanowitz: That's a great question, but they had the wall separately. These were consumer television sets that are true micro0LED, but they weren't ready yet to do an announcement in the pro AV space but one could reasonably assume that might be coming, that they'll offer this true micro-LED display, and whether they brand it ‘The wall’ or whatever else they're gonna call it, that's up in the air.
But it looks fantastic. It'll start to impede LCD panels in a significant way, and then shift the industry towards that where right now, LED is already in video walls the predominant technology that has the highest value. Within five years, it'll be three times the value of a tiled LCD. So LED is taking over the video wall. We see in the broader pro AV space, not in the next five years, but certainly, within the next 10 years, LED will be the number one display technology.
Yeah, I think there's always going to be a demand for LCD for some kind of meat and potatoes digital signage, like menu boards and ticketing information, all that sort of stuff, but you get into any kind of specialty application or something where shape needs to be flexible, they're gonna go to mini or micro-LED once the price is there.
Ted Romanowitz: Yes, true micro-LED eventually will also challenge LCD panels in that more, I guess what you would call hang and bang, on the commodity side.
I believe that it'll bring LCD prices down. There'll always be a place for LCD technology but LED will start to take over where image quality, where impact is really important and there's just a smaller uplift in pricing for that better experience where people and customers want that big impact, it's going to be LED.
I was at Touch Taiwan about four years ago, pre-Covid, and I left that trade show with a distinct impression from manufacturers that they saw mini-LED as kind of an interim technology, and it was mostly gonna be used for LCD backlighting like addressable zones, local dimming that, all that stuff. But it seems like mini-LED is getting a lot of take-up as a direct-view LED product as well.
Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely, and LG has a version of their consumer LED product showcased at CES. It was about a 150-inch display and had some really good features. I think it was 1.2 millimeters with beautiful image quality but it's $300,000. It's still the consumer market that is very expensive for them to get into. But, then again, personally, as a product manager for LED, I've worked in multiple companies where we have done high-end homes with LEDand, putting up a $750,000 wall in a Bel Air home wasn't a problem They have the budget. That's again, not my house as much as I would like that.
Yeah, as much as I'd like to be a midfielder for Manchester United, I'm too small and way too old, I don't think I'm gonna have that kind of salary.
Ted Romanowitz: I think you and me both, but we can still hope, can't we? It's not too late.
Oh, I think it is for me at least.
Ted Romanowitz: I think another important thing is with projection, you were talking about where the pro AV industry is going and all of that, projection both front and rear are in relatively steep decline, and some people would say, oh my gosh, that's super scary, there are so many projection companies out there, and we see so many demos at ISE and at CES, there are a lot of consumer protection companies displaying products. Even though projection is in decline, double-digit decline over the next five years, in the end, it's still a $4 to $5 billion market, it's massive, and so it's not like projection is gonna go away, it's just getting a little bit smaller.
So I think there's some hope there and we're seeing high brightness being a big thing over the last year. Already we've heard whispers from several of the projection brands that they're gonna be unveiling new high-brightness projectors. A lot of demos on projection mapping, blending, warping, and those sorts of things to support immersive, really engaging interactive displays.
Yeah, in the right physical environment and lighting conditions and everything else, projection is awesome because it's got that ability to surprise you. It just shows up and forms around things in a way you can't do with more conventional displays.
Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, and if you need to have a large display of information or whatnot, there's no more cost-effective way to do that, to show a big image, let's say in a theater or something other than projection, right? LED is just far too expensive to do that, although some brands are in customer-facing theaters. Some very large technology brands are putting in LED displays to impact their ecosystem, and their end customers in a very impactful way, but still, projection is wonderful. It has legs to continue for decades but LED is the up-and-coming thing.
Why is projection getting better, like they're able to do brighter, is it because of laser, or are there other factors?
Ted Romanowitz: Yeah, it's the laser technology that they're implementing. I think smaller form factors, are quieter, as well as the prices are coming down as well. Those are all factors that are gonna give it legs for quite some time. One other thing too, I think there are so many immersive exhibits that are happening now, right?
In Portland, Oregon, we get one every month or two where they're using projection and or a blend of projection in LED to provide a really amazing sensory exhibit. And when our team was in Japan, we went and saw the Team Labs exhibit there and it was wonderful that you actually took your shoes off, and put them in a locker. You roll up your pant legs and you're about knee-deep in warm water and, it was really cool, the projection map Koi onto the water that you're walking through, and the fish react to you. So you can reach out or, as you approach one of the fish, it'll look over at you and then scurry off as if it was a real fish. It was just an amazing experience to go do that.
I'm curious as well about OLED and light field displays and I recognize that light field displays are still probably a few years off, but are you seeing advances in that?
Ted Romanowitz: That's one of the things that we're going to be doing some further research on at ISE and it'll be interesting to see how that trend emerges, and OLED is really interesting. On the transparent side, a lot of companies have been working on that to help with merchandising or promoting products, putting them in an OLED box and putting marketing messages around the product even while you're able to reach in and touch the product.
Those are some super creative things, but at the LG booth at CES and a couple of others, they're showing transparent OLED and transparent LED applications where you can get a 10-foot high glass wall and cover it with an image. It's just cool. It's beautiful. It'll be interesting to see how corporations and other organizations invest in that, and what the adoption rate will be, and that's definitely an area where we're going to be researching further.
Yeah, the LED on film and LED embedded in glass particularly when micro-LED matures, that seems exciting as hell in terms of the amount of brightness you can get and the fact that you can just make it part of the building material.
Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, yes, and you look at all these big cities. I don't know when you were in China last, but you go to Hong Kong and you're sitting on the Calhoun side at night and the choreographer does some choreography with music and a light show of all the major tall office buildings on Central. It's just amazing. And Shenzhen, Shanghai, a lot of cities in China are doing these light shows and lighting up all the buildings and in America, we're starting to see that as well. Obviously, Las Vegas is a great example, but I think it'll be interesting to see how that evolves, not only in America but also in Europe with all of the historical buildings, what the regulations will be and you know how they'll allow technology to be used architecturally and artistically on some of these historic buildings, or if we'll just keep doing projection onto them.
Which you can do without affecting the building, which I'm sure makes the people who protect buildings happy.
Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely.
You're going to ISE, I assume. For somebody who's going and they're particularly interested in seeing what's new and what's emerging and what's important to know on the display side of things, what would you recommend? What should they be looking for?
Ted Romanowitz: I definitely think the big trends will be the flip chip COB, and mini-LED. I don't know if a true micro-LED display will be shown, but they're certainly, if not from one of the big brands, I would expect some of the manufacturers like BOE or Seoul Semi might be showing some things in their booth, so that's one thing to look for. I think projection is gonna be sexy. People are gonna be doing projection mapping and blending and warping and all of that. 8K displays, I think you'll see more and more of those out there. Yeah, those are some of the big things. There's the digital signage section as well. We're gonna be spending a lot of time out there.
As I mentioned, we are doing a digital signage report in the next few months. So we will be looking at that as well.
Would that be a display report or software?
Ted Romanowitz: It'll be both. It'll be the whole ecosystem.
This is great because it's so hard to get any credible research on the software side of this business.
Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, and It'll be hardware and not only just the displays itself but the media servers, players, the content in the cloud. All of the above. It's gonna be a really exciting report. We're very much looking forward to that one.
Good. All right. Ted, thank you so much for spending some time with me.
Ted Romanowitz: Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you in Barcelona.
Absolutely. Tapas!
Ted Romanowitz: Exactly. See you there!
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
DSE 2022 Mixer Panel: Mergers and Acquisitions in Digital Signage
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Ahead of the networking mixer that Sixteen:Nine pulls together during DSE week in Las Vegas, we tried a panel discussion in the hour before the actual mixer started.
I zeroed in on mergers and acquisitions as the topic, as I am aware of numerous companies either selling or buying. To get a sense of what's going on out there, and what companies are looking for, three CEOs of top software and solutions companies kindly volunteered some of their limited time to sit and field questions.
We had Kevin Carbone of Scala, Tamara Bebb of Spectrio and Rick Mills of Creative Realities.
My initial thought was that I'd be moderator, but I quickly realized that I was needed in 15 different places in the hour before the formal mixer started - talking to my check-in team and to staff at the venue. So I drafted Christian Armstrong of Spectrio, who has lived this both by looking for potential acquisitions when at Industry Weapon, to experiencing the transition after that company was acquired by Spectrio.
I didn't do a transcript for this as there are four people speaking, and it would take a bunch of time to assign names to comments from an audio file.
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Wednesday Nov 16, 2022
Sixteen:Nine’s DSE Preview
Wednesday Nov 16, 2022
Wednesday Nov 16, 2022
I already have an interview in the can, so to speak, for next week, but I wanted to do a short podcast that just features me droning on ... to provide some thoughts and ideas about the return of DSE.
Assuming my travel plans weren't seriously messed up, I'm in Las Vegas today, getting set for tonight's Sixteen:Nine networking mixer. More than 400 people have registered and I was writing all kinds of "No ... Sorry" notes to a lot of people who didn't register before it sold out.
I have been blown away by the interest in the event. It has always sold out, sometimes within 48 hours, but I had some doubts about what might happen this time around. It's been almost four years since I last did a mixer for DSE, and the show itself folded and then got rebooted by Questex.
Would I see 100 people? Maybe 200? I budgeted for 400, published the registration site, and sat back and watched as the tickets were quickly exhausted.
The demand seen for those mixer tickets reflects, I think, what DSE is all about - getting the industry together for an event that's JUST about digital signage. I have always thought the show was as much about efficient networking and meetings as it was about being a technology showcase. I used to joke that DSE was like a Rotarians convention, except instead of people coming to represent their local chapter, people were coming from their companies.
My sense is that's particularly true now, because a lot of people in this industry ecosystem have not seen each other in at least a couple of years. Yes, there have been trade shows going on, and yes lots of people are traveling again. But terrific shows like InfoComm and Integrated Systems Europe serve a lot of interests, and a hell of a lot of the people who attend have zero ties to digital signage.
I did a wholly unscientific reader survey after the original DSE went under, to ask what people thought and what they did and did not like about the old show. The comment that has stuck with me ever since was from someone who said he or she liked DSE because they'd get to Vegas, and know the people, the technology, demos and events were all JUST about digital signage.
There are a couple of Digital Signage Weeks, I know, in New York and London. I think the organizers do a good job of marketing the calendar of events, but it's kind of cobbled together with events that have somewhat tenuous ties. I have spoken with people who've gone to the DPAA conference, thinking digital signage, and left thinking they had no idea what the ad people were talking about. I've personally lived that.
It's a small industry. People know each other, and as much as they compete with each other for business, they're also friends.
An event like this is also super-efficient for people, whether they run a company or sell its pots and pans. You can fly all over the damn place to meet customers, prospects and partners, racking up air and hotel points. An event like DSE enables people to have a whole bunch of touches with people - dinners, drinks or chats in a hallway - out of one set of flights and a few hotel nights.
Because the show is a reboot, there was undoubtedly lots of skepticism and reluctance to invest serious money into organizing a stand and everything that goes with that. The exhibitor count may not hit 100, and walking the show floor will not take long. I suspect there are vendors sending people this time out to check it out and make decisions about whether they book a stand for 2023.
There are not, from what I can tell from the floor plan, any mega booths ... like what are evident at ISE and InfoComm. At the old ISE, Samsung had its own building! Some of the big display guys, like LG and PPDS (which is Philips), don't have any presence at DSE this year.
There are some LED display companies showing, but there won't be a sea of screens like you might see at other, larger shows.
Software companies had to adjust to new ways of marketing and selling during the pandemic, and I'm guessing a lot of them discovered that the demos they've traditionally done at booths were pretty effective using video conferencing and screen-sharing, and cheap as hell by comparison to a trade show booth. So I don't think we're ever going to see a DSE filled again with CMS company stands.
But I'd argue they were pulling back by 2019.
So why go?
Well ... there are always interesting companies that are new to the market - as start-ups or companies broadening both what they do and who they serve. At past DSEs, I always started off my walkabouts by going to the sides and back of the hall - where the start-ups with teeny budgets would get tabletops or 10 by 10s. I'd see companies I call head-shakers - because they clearly didn't do enough research before coming up with something that already exists. But I'd also bump into companies with interesting new takes on solutions.
I've poked around the exhibitor list and identified several unfamiliar companies I want to check out.
But I'm also eager to get updates and demos from well-established companies, and a small show means I have the luxury of time. I have left large shows, dead on my feet, knowing I never did see this or that.
I want to see what's new with Sony. I can compare what ARHT Media does with its transparent LCD set-up, versus what I've seen with Photo. I can finally see the Looking Glass displays, which are kinda sorta holographic. A startup called SapientX - which I assumed was related to Publicis Sapient but isn't ... I don't think ... is showing an AI-driven chatbot avatar thingie. Vestaboard is there with a split flap display. I can get a better sense of how Google and Chrome OS now fit in digital signage, as it has a stand and people at the show. I don't know what Esper does, or WindowGrin, or Antron ... but I will after this week.
And I'll be able to touch base and catch up with a pile of people and companies I know.
I don't think there has to be a choose one decision about digital signage and trade shows. If you're serious about the business, and assuming the travel budget and time is available, you should go to a big pro AV trade show like an InfoComm or ISE, because all the latest display tech and infrastructure are shown there. And if digital signage is your tribe, your people, events like DSE are just as important to attend.
If you are going to Vegas, safe travels and I'll see you around.
I hope to do some interviews while in Las Vegas, and as I said at the top, I already have next week's podcast done - with a hologram expert hopefully clearing a little fog with respect to that much-abused technology term.
Wednesday Oct 12, 2022
Marian Sandberg & David Drain, Digital Signage Experience
Wednesday Oct 12, 2022
Wednesday Oct 12, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Digital Signage Experience is coming up in four weeks and I suspect a lot of people are very curious about how the long-running show will be rebooted by its new owners Questex.
I certainly am, as I had long thought the old DSE was a dead trade show walking, and that something different was needed.
Is this it? I dunno, and I guess the industry will find out in a few weeks in Las Vegas.
I asked Marian Sandberg, who runs several shows for Questex, and David Drain, who was brought on by Questex to build the programming side of the event, to join me for a chat about what people can expect from a new and different DSE.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello, thank you for joining me. Maybe the first thing to do is: Marion and David, explain what your roles are at Questex and DSE.
Marian Sandberg: Sure. Thanks so much for having us, Dave. It's really an honor to be with you and your audience and to have an opportunity to talk about this.
I'm Marian. I am the Vice President and market leader for Questex. I oversee the DSE show, which we acquired last year, and we have not presented yet. It'll be presented in November, which is what we're gonna talk about, and I also oversee a show called LDI, which I know you'll have questions about.
And market leaders tend at Questex tend to have two or three or whatever number of shows that they have under their portfolio?
Marian Sandberg: Sure, yeah, that's exactly right, and tend to be in verticals that make sense together, if you will. So I oversee a couple of brands that have to do in some way with technology. We have verticals in hospitality, bars and restaurants so they're clumped together.
Okay, and David?
David Drain: David Drain. I'm the director of event programs for DSE. So DSE is my sole focus at Questex.
And a lot of industry people would know you from your dark past with Net World Alliance and The Digital Signage Association?
David Drain: Yeah, it changed the name to Digital Screen Media Association for a while.
So you've been around the industry forever?
David Drain: Yeah, I have. I attended the first DSE in 2007.
Yeah, that's early. I think the first one was in 2005 or something like that or maybe in 2004.
David Drain: 2004, but I wasn't there.
Yeah. I started in 2005, so I've been going even longer than you.
David Drain: Yeah, you win!
Marian Sandberg: I can beat you both, but not in the digital signage area with our LDI show. I've been with that brand since 2004, so a little one-upsmanship there.
There you go. You must be so proud. Alright. So how is planning going? As we're speaking, it's about four and a half weeks out.
Marian Sandberg: It's going great. We're super excited and when we get to this part of the year, frankly, because this has been more than a year in the making we're just ready to get out there and produce the show. We definitely have in the weeks rolling up still sales to do, and still registrations to bring in. But in terms of producing the show and the things that we know we're gonna offer that's mostly set, right? So we have all these great networking experiences we're excited to put forth, and as we're right across the hall from our LDI show, we're really excited to see the synergies there.
When we acquired this brand, we did a lot of due diligence. We spoke to tons of customers and tons of attendees, so those customers as well, to see what we should keep from the old show and what we should bring back, and I think the number one thing that we heard from people was maintaining the sense of community for the digital signage industry, that it's a dedicated show and that people still wanna come together in that community that maybe isn't addressed by other events. So that's been our number one focus, and we're in the home stretch now.
Yeah, I'd certainly got that impression as well when DSE went down. I thought that it was a show that for many years was in trouble. You could see it in the diminishing numbers and diminishing enthusiasm in a lot of ways. But the overarching thing I heard after it went down was a disappointment because there needed to be some sort of an annual event, at least in North America that really pulled together the industry, so to speak, and was the only thing people were talking about that week versus like an Infocomm or ISE or those kinds of shows, which certainly have digital signage as a component, but it's one component among many endings.
You could bump into people in elevators and see they were going to the same show and realize we have nothing in common other than we're both generally in AV.
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that was obviously one of our main focuses from the beginning in acquiring the brand is we immediately saw the value we knew of the show and of the market, although no one on our team back then had worked directly in it, and then bringing professionals on who were very much veterans of the market, like Brad Gleason, who joined us very early on, and David, of course, who has been running a curating and will be running a fantastic education and content program.
People have been really supportive of that effort and from the beginning saying, we absolutely want there to be a show in this market, specific to this market and there's a need for it.
Because the old show has had its hair, so to speak, there are things that people loved about it, things they didn't like about it.
I've been referring to this as a DSE reboot that maybe isn't all that fair, but it's what I'm going with, and I'm curious what you think in terms of how would you position the show? Is this DSE 2 or should people go with the idea of don't expect what you saw before?
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that's a great question because I think we would be really remiss if we did not acknowledge that we are bringing DSE back in a sense, right? We're not gonna abandon everything that DSE was and that we want it to be, and people have asked us for it to be. So we have no intention of reinventing the wheel in that case.
However, from our experience, and again from a lot of the outreach that we did, I think our intention is to put a new spin on it. Now, when you say, reboot, I absolutely agree, and I think that's gonna be maybe a little bit of a challenge for people to get their heads around.
David has said it quite eloquently, we wanna really hold onto the things that people liked and maybe not the things that they didn't. So some of the new things, for example, which I guess we consider new. We know that networking opportunities have always been super important. So now that we're right across the hall from the LDI show, we are really trying to leverage those two audiences without cannibalizing, and I don't think there's a lot of potential to cannibalize those two audiences anyway. We hope to bring in some new people and some new buyers, and we're tracking our registrations very closely, of course, and the kind of demographics that we have. And to date, I checked them just yesterday in preparation for this, of course, half of our registrations have never been to DSE before. Now I'm not talking about LDI people, I'm talking about people registered directly for DSE and as event people, as event producers. That number is super encouraging to us.
Now it could be in the last three years that we've just gotten more people in the industry. We all know that during the pandemic, on both sides of our business, people have left the industry, and people have come into the industry. It's just a natural ebb and flow when you haven't had a show in three years. But that number, even if you expect a lot of new people it is a great statistic for us that there are that many new faces. So we really hope that people coming to the network are gonna meet new people, but like-minded people like your reference before about having that sense of community and people who do similar things. But also that, of course, we want our exhibitors to meet new customers. So that's a really important thing for us.
For the people who don't know LDI, can you explain what it is? I've never actually been myself, even though I've certainly heard of it.
Marian Sandberg: LDI is a 30+ year organization and brand. It is a trade and show conference that addresses what we affectionately refer to as entertainment technology. So that would be basically everything in and around a stage except the performance. So concerts, touring, theatre, even clubs, venues, lighting, sound, staging all that kind of technology that goes around a performance or in a venue, and so a typical exhibitor at LDI would be moving light company, intelligent lighting as it's referred to in that in that sector or consoles. if you were at a concert and you wanna go up to the console guy or gal, ask for the set list, that stuff that's behind that in that pit is stuff that you would see at LDI.
So there's technology and creativity factor there that I think sits well along DSE so maybe there are people who do similar, are somewhat like-minded, but do different things. So I think it'll be interesting to see, who crosses over and comes together,
Yeah, I guess the crossover as you say, more than anything would probably be the backdrop displays that you increasingly see with touring acts and the technology that drives those displays like LED backdrops and transparent or semi-transparent, LED backdrops, all that sort of thing.
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and the sort of persona who would attend LDI could be anything from very creative type, Let's say a creative director for a show, a lighting designer, and then, someone those folks usually tend to be creative and technical, and then we'll have very technical people who are like tech technical directors at a theatre or production manager for a concert tour.
And just like the way that AV and IT are worlds that are converging. The live events world and digital signage are converging to some degree because I spoke on a podcast a few months ago with the guy who does the wow factor stuff at the new arena in Seattle for the NHL team there and he was talking about programming at building not just what you see at the pre-show. It's the whole darn building that's coming together. I suspect that plays into how live events will increasingly be done.
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, it’s interesting, we use the term, experiential, right? And immersive experiences and the thing that I think is so interesting, having come from that LDI world and that entertainment technology world is that, if you go to a theatre it, okay maybe immersive isn't the word, that kind of means something different. But experiential is what entertainment already is, right? You go to the theatre to experience something, you go to a musical or a concert tour, to be in this experience, and over the last few years, the way people are buying materials left and wanting to relish experiences. It's interesting how areas like retail and venue design and even museums are taking a cue from entertainment and that's what experiential really is, right? It's about being entertained more.
So in a way that sort of LDI world has been informing a lot of other businesses in our spaces. So exactly what you're saying is if you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you're seeing all this fabulous screen, that content is trying to draw you in. Cuz it's being paid attention to, cuz you have to work harder to get people's eyeballs these days.
Can we talk a little bit about where you're at in terms of numbers and how they would compare to the old DSE that we know?
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and I'm glad you brought up the reboot. We are thinking of it exactly the same way. So we don't have any intentions of trying to compete with the last 2019 DSE. We've had shows in our portfolio that was a record year and of course, the pandemic happening, we're cautiously optimistic about kind, trying to get back to those numbers. So especially with DSE that hasn't happened in three years, we don't think we're gonna replicate that in any way, and that's fine. Our goal for this show is to be between 4,000 and 5,000 registrations. We're absolutely on pace to hit those numbers. We're really pleased with the way registration has been picking up and people registering for content.
The new certification that Bron Consulting is running for us. It's not new, we've newly added it let me be clear. It's the same certification you all know and love. So yeah, the numbers are really encouraging to us and I think what we're gonna see, I think is gonna be surprising for people in the next four weeks is how much our registration picks up, right before the show, traditionally the last six, to eight weeks of the show or when Red registration really hits, and we saw that from the numbers in 2019 also, right? So when we acquired the brand that's just the way the show paces we're absolutely on pace to hit that 4,000 to 5,000 number.
Is that number unique registrations or is that roll up people from LDI who have opted to come over or whatever?
Marian Sandberg: Nope, that's absolutely DSE distinct registration. For the LDI show in 2019, we had 16,000 people registered for LDI. But like an average for LDI would be 12,000 to 13,000. So the numbers for DSE are unique.
So Potentially you could have a couple thousand or more people drifting over from the other show hall to wandering into DSE, cuz I think you have reciprocity, you can get into one or the other.
Marian Sandberg: Yes, your badge for DSE or LDI can get you into either one or the other as well as there are some great offers and discounts for the conference on either side, which are obviously, paid conferences. But also some of the networking events that are being offered on both sides I think is gonna be really nice benefits. Just an example. LDI has always had great after-hours nightlife offers. With your badge, you can get into a different club each night, and if you don't know, the clubs in Vegas are very expensive, right? It's not like your $10 cover charge to go see a band at your local club. They're very expensive. We have great deals with LDI that we've been able to extend to the DSE audience to go to a club, for example. Your badge gets you into the club, for free, which can save in some cases 70 to 100 dollars a night, and then we have some networking events. There's an on-floor party if you will, a networking reception for LDI that DSE guests will be invited to, and vice versa, LDI people will be invited to the DSE opening reception, and we were really careful, obviously, to not have them overlap or compete with each other.
Cause we want these two to come across the aisle, as it were. So I think that's gonna be interesting to see, and the LDI community, they're curious. They have that tech curiosity and that creative curiosity. So I think it is absolutely reasonable to think we might get a thousand or so people coming across.
So you're at parity or maybe even ahead of, ultimately ahead of what past DSE have done in terms of headcount, and with the spillover from LDI, almost certainly, where I sense that it's not going as swimmingly would be on the exhibitor signup side?
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, we are where we've expected to be. I know that you love to look at the show floor as you should, and when we were in South Hall, when the show was in Southall, before my time, obviously, the show floor looked different. But I think that our expectations for relaunching the show were exactly where we wanted to be.
We had expectations that were in line with, we have amazing exhibitors presenting, and we have over 90 varieties of exhibitor sponsors, people who are gonna be partners and presenting in some way, and I'm not talking about speakers, I'm talking about people on the show floor, and then I think probably in the next few weeks we're gonna see that number go over a hundred. So that's perfectly respectable, and we're proud of those numbers.
Yeah, in certain respects that's a reboot and it's a startup again cuz you're having to win the confidence of vendors who have had a rough couple of years anyways and when DSE went down, I don't know if all of 'em were left whole after that. That's somebody else's story in argument, but yeah it, you couldn't, I would imagine just expect that, hey, all you guys who used to do this, come on back.
Marian Sandberg: Yeah. There's so much more of a story to tell there too, isn't there?
We have to regain some trust. We have to have people, who really loved that event and kind of look at us and say, Who the heck are you guys? Which is all stuff we expected. Early on when one of the first things we did was form an advisory board, and I know that you've reported on that, now.
Probably everybody on our advisory board and really we wanted that input and that help, and that was just kind of part of the research we did from the beginning. What was good, what do we wanna change? And I just think that journey has also included spending a lot of time with customers and there's absolutely our sales team talking to people, 3, 4, 5 times. It's not a slam dunk and that's okay. We didn't expect it to be, We never came in here with. Some kind of ego that we're event producers. So we could just walk into a new industry and take over a brand and do it without thinking about it with our eyes closed.
We're good at producing events. We have a lot of leverage across our company with other verticals that we can look at to draw other buyers that maybe didn't come in from the acquisition, from our regular DSE lists, but we're really excited about presenting to those people. That kind of is where those first-time attendees are coming from.
I'm also curious, you've mentioned the community a number of times and the appetite and aspiration for the industry to get together. If you build an event around attendees, particularly if you're offering a lot of free passes to get into the show proper, then you really have to lean heavily on the exhibitor dollars and sponsor dollars and all that to do it.
So does that become a challenge long term, that you've gotta build up that trade show side of it for this thing to work? Or can it work the way it's positioned right now?
Marian Sandberg: We intend to grow the show? There's no question, and David can talk a little bit about the conference program also but, of course, we need to have a viable business here.
There's no question, and I think also, bringing in the right people and making sure that the audience is there was absolutely paramount for us, especially the first year. If you have the right people in the room and you have the right buyers in the room, the exhibitor's gonna be happy and they're gonna come back.
And I think it's a two-sided coin. You have to keep feeding both of them, right? To make everyone happy. The attendees wanna see certain exhibitors, the exhibitors wanna see more of, X, Y, and Z types of attendees. Yeah, our long-term plan is absolutely to keep growing. And we'll see how that goes. We have some plans we won't I won't reveal yet for next year, but I'm sure we'll wanna talk after the show.
That was one other question I wanted to ask you, Marian, just before we jump over to David on programming and so on: for 2023, is it in November in Las Vegas?
Marian Sandberg: Yes, and I bet you're gonna ask about the Formula One race.
It will be in November, we are gonna move it about a week early. Yeah, we looked at that and thank goodness, being in production, we were hearing from all kinds of production folks about that kind of thing before it was even officially announced.
We were talking to the LVCC about doing it earlier and, we could try to produce something during Formula One, which would just be crazy. But even just for our exhibitors and visitors, we don't want to position the show to make it cost-prohibitive for people even to stay in hotels or have hotels sold out. So just moving it about a week or so earlier is just gonna be the solution.
Yeah, that's gonna be like a CES week or something. Just insane pricing for everything and impossible to get around.
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, exactly.
Good move!
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, thanks.
David, tell me, you're somebody who has been to DSE many times, very familiar with it.
So if people are coming up to you knowing that you're involved now and they're asking, okay, what's different, particularly on the programming and education side, what are you gonna tell them?
David Drain: When I first joined Questex, really my first job was to think about the program and to focus on the conference and the education and the speakers. And so wanted to do that first, and that's, I would say, how we built the program and ort of the exhibitors came later, right? They needed to see what it is you guys are gonna do? What's your plan? And working with Brad and with Marian we looked at the flow of the event and so I think it's got a slightly different flow. There used to be a lot of conference programming before the show happened, and so what you're gonna see this year there is some programming in the morning, just before the show opens. Some, a bit of uninterrupted time during the show floor hours with some on-floor sessions and then ending the day with more sessions.
Really we have three keynotes. I don't know if DSE has done that before. So I think that's different. We will have one each morning. We're very excited about those, of course, Rafiq and Jason Cothern from SoFi Stadium talking about that 5 billion mixed-use development with the stadium and the retail and all that. Having everything from wayfinding to digital menu boards to of course the huge halo infinity screen by Samsung. So I think there's gonna be something there for everybody, and then, Nveen from Google, who you also interviewed for this podcast.
We've got a great lineup and the program came together in three ways. There were things that I developed. There were things that are Association partners like DSF and DPAA and OAAA developed, and then we got session proposals from folks, so we really tried to curate the best agenda that we could and so I think that people will see an increased focus and concentration on the content and the programming, and building on what Marion said earlier, I think just the number of networking events throughout the week and then the crossover with LDI, I think that's what's gonna feel different.
I heard there's a mixer on Wednesday night.
Marian Sandberg: Mixer. I'm so pleased that you're bringing it to our show. So we can't wait to attend and we're registered, so we're showing up.
Good. I'll make the bouncer aware.
One of the things as the education programming curator, person, organizer, whatever you wanna call it, is you, I suspect, have to walk a bit of a tightrope at times, because you have paying sponsors who perhaps have expectations, realistic or unrealistic around what they can say and do on the stage, and you have to balance those needs with the needs of the audience because God knows, maybe not in the most recent versions of DSE, but earlier year versions of it, one hell of a lot of the presentations were just like product pitches by sponsors, and I would sit down, listen for two minutes and I would go and leave, and that's a tough one to manage, isn't it?
David Drain: Yeah, and I've been managing these types of events for a number of years and so I certainly know about how important it is to make sure that it's got an education focused and so when I was building the program, really sponsorship had nothing to do with it. When I was building the conference program, what we determined as the best topics and the best speakers, and the program really came in process of building this show before the exhibitors that there really wasn't that kind of impact. We do have the on-floor sessions, and those are sponsored. We make that clear on the program.
Those are kinda product demos and things, right?
David Drain: They are product demos and even encouraging those speakers, those sponsors to have an education focus so they teach rather than pitch.
Yeah, I always tell people, look, if you just get up there and pitch, people are gonna leave. If you say smart things, you will leave the impression that this guy and or this woman and this company seem to know what they're talking about, so maybe I should have a chat with them after.
David Drain: Yeah, be a thought leader or present a case study, and then people will understand. You'll have an opportunity to tell them what your company does. You don't need to spend all that time going through the features and benefits of your product.
Without trying to put you on the spot, are there one or two sessions that you know that aren't keynotes but are ones that you think are gonna be particularly kick ass and ones that people should have a look at?
Marian Sandberg: You're asking to choose a favorite child. You're asking him to choose a favorite child, Dave.
David Drain: Yeah. There are just a number of great sessions and if you go to our agenda, there is a way to filter by type. So if you're into digital out of home, you can see the programming aimed at that, and I'm excited you know about the session you're moderating and I'm really not blowing smoke here.
Denny Levine came to me and proposed that session, and of course, he put together an all-star panel and people are very interested, obviously with these Vangogh experiences, immersive experiences that have popped up and been very successful around the world. So I think that will be similar, there's another session with Moment Factory and Dimensional Innovations on transforming lobbies into experiences, that's pretty exciting.
Yeah, you got some good people like Jackie Walker who was just like, when I talk to her, I just, I always hang up thinking, that's a smart person. She knows her stuff.
David Drain: Yes, and I listened to her podcast that she did with you and so certainly when she wanted to do a presentation, I'm like, yeah, I will just give you the room. You're gonna do great, and people will walk away with a lot of great information.
All right, so wrapping this up. This has been a great chat. If people are undecided and are on the fence, but hearing this and think, oh, maybe I will go, what do they need to do? Where do they go to find out more about DSE?
Marian Sandberg: Yeah, they can go to digitalsignageexperience.com. As we rebranded also, so it's digitalsignageexperience.com, or if you have any questions, you can certainly just email me, I'd be happy to answer, and my email is msandberg@questex.com. I would love to have your feedback,
I suspect it's ddrain@questex.com, right? I'm smart that way, it had to be something. All right. Thank you so much for spending half an hour with me. That was terrific.
Marian Sandberg: Thanks for having us. We're honored.
David Drain: Thank you, Dave.
Wednesday Apr 27, 2022
Jimmy Hunt, Spectrio
Wednesday Apr 27, 2022
Wednesday Apr 27, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Spectrio has been around the digital signage and on-premise media spaces for a bunch of years, growing both organically and through acquisitions, and increasingly making digital signage the main focus of the Tampa-area company.
I've known of the company for a long time, but REALLY came to know some of its people in the past year, when we got into discussions about Sixteen:Nine being acquired by Spectrio. That happened, and this podcast and publication are now part of Spectrio.
But my business partners have been fantastic about letting me continue to just do my thing, and make my own editorial decisions. I've wanted to do a podcast for a long, long time with Spectrio, way before this happened. We finally managed to make it work ... in a conversation here with Jimmy Hunt, who is the VP of Channel Sales for the company, working out of Dallas.
We had a great conversation digging into how the company's partner channel was formalized last fall and how it now works for Spectrio. We also get into what Hunt and his people are seeing and hearing in the end-user and reseller marketplace, notably how customers are now tending to fully understand and value the importance of well-executed and relevant content.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jimmy Hunt, thank you for joining me. Can you give me an idea of what your role is at Spectrio?
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. My role is VP, Channel Sales and Business Development.
Specific to the channel or overall?
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so my main focus is within the channel. I handle all of the indirect sales, so resellers, channel sales, the sales and the account management side, all roll up to me.
Okay. So you're nurturing a ton of partners?
Jimmy Hunt: A ton, yeah, and it's been very interesting to develop a good blend across media publishers, AV, IT, and the agency space.
You've formally launched the reseller program back in November, but I'm guessing that you had resellers prior to that?
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so I've been in the reseller space for about 15 years. My sole focus has been selling through the channel. Our methodology is pretty straightforward and simple. It's one-to-one-to-many. Previous to Spectrio, I focused mainly on the media and publisher world. So dealing with some of the largest media companies in the country across TV, radio, print, and digital. So we had a program in place yet, but it was great in Q3/Q4 to really formalize that and make it applicable to Spectrio moving forward, as well as the other industries, such as AV, IT, manufacturers, distributors, et cetera.
How many partners do you have it at this point?
Jimmy Hunt: So we are roughly over about 120. Prior to that announcement, we had about 60-65 meaningful partners. So we've doubled since then. It's been a busy Q4 and a busy Q1, but it's been great, really doubling down on the things that are working, and we've seen a lot of excitement across space.
I was curious about your qualification of meaningful. I have seen lots of partner pages on websites of companies where I'm looking at their partners and thinking, "I wonder if they even really know each other?"
Jimmy Hunt: That's a really good point. So for us, I always tell my team that we only win when our partners win. So if we're going to be a vendor and we're going to sit on the sideline, then expect for for that partnership to not be meaningful. So when I say meaningful, we really dig in with our partners. We try to position ourselves as true thought leaders to be consultants, to be advisors about our partnerships, but overall the space in general.
We have to make sure that we can not only address the day to day, week to week, month to month, but also help steer our partners and educate them on what's happening in the industry, and a lot of times, it's really just connecting other partners together. Maybe it's a product or service that we may not even sell or be interested in, but if we know partner X over here does this very well, and they're good people, we like working with them, then we'll connect them with a partner Y.
So this is a lot more than preferential pricing, or wholesale pricing, or whatever you want to call it. You're doing buddy-calling. You're doing support and training and all those sorts of things?
Jimmy Hunt: Oh yeah. A 100 percent. Again, the only way we win is when our partners win. So we have to make sure that they understand the products and services from a training perspective, from a server's perspective and workflow perspective, really understanding again, from the very first conversation to delivery of signage or whatever the product may be, that we at least have a hand in that. And there's some partners that want us to be super hands on, have things white labeled, and there's some that say, “Hey, we're going to sharpen the spear. We just want you to support us.”
The good thing about our leadership and the way we built the partner program is that we can cater to any type of scenario, right? So whether we're working with a global distributor or a local agency, we can find a way to dig in and be flexible and fluid to help their goals, and really it's at the end of the day it's understanding what benefits them, how can our product and services and moreover our partnership benefit our partner.
And when you're doing that, there's obviously a lot of digital signage CMS and solutions options on the market. How do you distinguish what Spectrio brings to the table versus the other guys?
Jimmy Hunt: It's three main things, especially in my role. Number one, it starts with that partnership. To be quite honest, when we're talking to new AV, IT resellers or anyone in the reseller space, we actually rarely lead with a product or service. We lead with our ability to be a good partner, and so everything you said earlier, all the training, all the collateral, certifications, et cetera. That's really what we lead with. And I've found that there's a lack of that partner support, partner management. So that means applying as an account executive on a particular partnership and everything under the sun there.
I'd say secondly, what I'm listening to more and more is content. I think Spectrio is really primed right now to set ourselves apart by not just providing a great software and a great service through digital signage, but then taking it a step further and saying what's going to be on the screen and asking that simple question. Do you have a strategy to showcase the highest quality video content or static imagery possible? And sometimes it's, yes, we have a strategy, but a lot of times it's no, and they haven't even really thought about it. They may have an internal marketing team. They may have an agency. Doesn't really matter to us. We can again work and fit into their strategy. So we're finding right now, one of the biggest things that's setting Spectrio apart is our ability to produce video content for digital signage and really for the partner itself and their clients at scale.
Dave, we're producing upwards of, I'd say 7,500 to 10,000 pieces of content a month for partners all over the world, and again, that's my background. A lot of the folks come from the reseller space at Spectrio, they come from digital signage background, but I come from a media and content background. So being able to blend those two has been really fun and really exciting, and I think third, to answer your question is, as you're aware, we've acquired a lot of different platforms, right? So now we have what we believe is the best in breed to say, okay this piece of this functionality really applies to this industry and this vertical with these types of clients versus just saying, Hey, we have one platform, use it or lose it. We can really customize our strategy and our solution to go across the board and help many different industries in many different verticals.
Yeah, I'm guessing that's a bit of a challenge in that, through acquisition, you've acquired a number of CMS companies that have different variations on the same thing, and how you sort out which is best for each. It must be helpful to say, let's build this around content and not worry about features and specs so much. Let's think about what's the best platform for that need is?
Jimmy Hunt: Exactly, and we have a lot of experience, first of all, for C-suite across the board is really specific and careful about who we're going after from an acquisition standpoint and they have made some really amazing choices, and allowing us to really highlight and compliment what we're doing today without being extremely disruptive and/or taking a 180. I would say, second, especially in my role in the Channel/BD world, it's really about leading the sales conversation with discovery, going back to that core value of what are your pain points, what are your roadblocks for you as a partner, but more specifically, and probably more importantly, for your clients, right? Whether it's working with the AV/IT reseller that focuses specifically in the finance category or whether it's a media company that has 25,000 automotive clients, it's really taking a step back and understanding how we can help you get from point A to point B and then from there that helps determine which platform and what pieces, and what pieces of the functionality we can apply to best help that partner.
So who's doing the discovery? Because you could have salespeople and channel salespeople who have pipelines to fill, they've got quotas to hit and they don't necessarily think of themselves as content and strategy consultants.
Jimmy Hunt: That's a great question. It's a unique blend between marketing, product and sales. Through some of our acquisitions, we've just obtained some of the absolute best, most brilliant brightest folks in the space, I'll speak about one specifically, Christian Armstrong came from Industry Weapon. Now he's been doing it for 16 years, and he manages our two largest partnerships, as well as our largest clients through those partnerships. So he has a unique role where he has taken on as a sales engineer as well as a product specialist role, and then we bring in our VP of Product who's just another wonderful hire from a couple of years ago, a guy named Brandon Mullins, who's just a genius.
He runs all of our product and BD efforts. So having him really scope out from the get-go, “Okay this is something that is viable for the Spectrio. This is a good target”, and then really once we do that, we really try to capture that and productize it. Now, every partner industry's different, but although we are flexible, we still like to put things in a “box” and then scale. For me, it's all about scale and volume. So it's finding the partners that have a lot of endpoints, a lot of clients that we can then go after, and a partner and produce a high volume of revenue as well as endpoints.
That's interesting because I would imagine some of the industry perception of Spectrio is, there's a company that's been growing through acquisition, they're acquiring IP and they're acquiring customers, but I don't know how many people think in terms of, they're acquiring human talent, as you just described.
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah. So I think that's honestly one of my biggest missions this year is to get the Spectrio name and the vision and our methodology out in space. I think you're right, Spectrio is sometimes seen as a big or a growing company that's growing through acquisitions, and we are, obviously, but we have really focused on getting the right people, and I think that allows us to do both. Having Christian, having Brandon and some others as well on board allows us to grow the right way. Even the folks from the ABN acquisition, they are surprising me, and in a good way, every single week. Just how they went to market, obviously focusing on the automotive industry, but how they went to market was different from how Industry Weapon went to market and very different from how I went to market. But we're trying to find the commonalities both from a strategy standpoint, and then also finding the right people to take what they've done in the past, tweak it for a future focus and really grow the partnerships that way.
What is the size of the company at this point?
Jimmy Hunt: We're a little over 400 people and growing. We have a headquarters in Tampa. I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and we have people all over, but a big population in that Tampa, Miami, Florida region, as well as Charlotte, North Carolina.
Oh, okay, and the Charlotte office, that was one of your acquisitions, going back 3-4 years, right?
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, the Charlotte offices mostly consist of sales, management and there's a handful of marketing folks there as well.
Are you active in other countries?
Jimmy Hunt: We are, yeah. So we are international, I would say a majority of our focus is US and Canada but we are active in other countries. It depends really on how we want to grow our international presence. It will be very specific and strategic and we'll most likely go through resellers and partners. Obviously, it's one of the easiest ways to get traction their fast.
But there are, I guess there's 30 million plus SMEs or small to medium size businesses across the US so there's plenty to have here. But some of our acquisitions in Canada have been very interesting and allowed us to have a different perspective and to really see growth there, as well.
Yeah, you bought Screenscape about a year and a half ago, two years?
Jimmy Hunt: Correct. Yeah, and talking about a couple of guys that have stayed on. One of my top top sellers that stayed on lives in Canada and really took on that whole channel market himself and has just done very, very well.
In terms of vertical markets, where are you guys seeing growth?
Jimmy Hunt: So I'll start with my team, and then I'll talk about the Spectrio at large, but really from our focus, again, from the channel side, we're are targeting resellers and channel partners in three main categories, and so that's media and agency, TV, radio, print, digital, etc.
Second and probably our largest and fastest growing is AV/IT. So that's where all the big players are and again, through the acquisitions, I would say we work with 60% to 70% of the top players in that space, but there's a whole bunch that we can also go after and then the third is an interesting mix, and these are more true partners than they are resellers, and that's every one from manufacturers of screens, mounts, et cetera. So think of Sony, LG, et cetera, all the way to a Brightsign and more of that player manufacturers. And those have been really interesting for me because it makes so much sense, right? If someone is out there securing deals and lots of endpoints selling their hardware, and they can have the conversation to say have you thought about a CMS provider? Have you thought about the software piece? That's where we've seen a lot of growth, and those partnerships were fun, right? Because like I said, it's less of a sale. It's more of a true value out of saying, okay, we have this 2,000 location retail chain that we're trying to chase, and we know that they need hardware, but they're also gonna need software. So let’s introduce the Spectrio folks at the right time.
So that's our chase from an industry perspective. From a vertical perspective, it's probably what you would imagine, it's healthcare, QSR, retail, automotive, higher education. For me, personally, higher ed has been super fun. I'm actually having a blast with that, just because I'm talking about an industry that could really use most of our services. You go on site to a big university or college campus. You can say their auditoriums and their stadiums and basketball arenas that have tons of screens that also need high quality content and as well as wayfinding capabilities for the campus itself. So it's been really fun trying to dig into that vertical more.
They can be messy though, can't they? The higher ed, because you have individual schools that have their own IT departments.
Jimmy Hunt: Oh my goodness, you're absolutely right. Not only that. It's the schools, it's also the athletic departments, and a lot of the build-outs of the various buildings and infrastructure are all different, right? As you know, you would have one part of the campus be renovated a year ago, and the other one hasn't been touched in 25 years. That's why having the product and sales engineers alongside with me pitching those types of clients has been crucial, and also just understanding what their needs are now versus what will be their needs in two or three years.
There's been endless discussion about how the IT & AV worlds are converging and they ought to be best friends forever and so on. I would say it's only been in the last couple of years when you've really started to see that happen. I was intrigued by Diversified bringing on a new CEO and their founder is not stepping away at all, he's going to be very reactive, but much more mentoring, but their new CEO comes out of IT Services. So they absolutely see where the future is.
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so without having specific details on why they did that, I think overall, that is going to be the trend we're going to see, and it's not just IT. I think you could slot in content there. I would not be surprised if there's some big changes in the C-suite across the various resellers, bringing in people that have strong content backgrounds as well as IT, I think we're going to see more of a blend, right?
We're getting to the position where it's almost annoying, I can't go anywhere without looking at screens, and I was in the airport yesterday. I probably sat in and it was technically my day off. I was visiting my family in DC and my team was like, please stop texting us. But I was in the airport just taking videos at the bar, at the restaurant or in the Concourse and all these different types of functionality and services and I think it's becoming so apparent and just consumptions and consumer behavior is really going to help drive this blend of, okay, AV actually needs more of a lock step with IT as well as content. So I'm not surprised by that move at all, and I think it's probably gonna work very well for them.
Yeah. It's interesting that in the last little bit, I haven't seen anybody stand up at a conference or publish something that says, “content is king”, which was an eye-roller for a whole bunch of time. But now it seems to be baked in there that people get it, that this is not about the screens, it's not about the software. It's about what's on the display and you've got to get that right.
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, David, I think that's absolutely right. I would even take it a step further. I think a lot of times, what I'm hearing is it's all about what's on the screen, but moreover, what story can you tell? And that kind of goes back to the “Mad Men” days of advertising, what story are you going to help that brand tell? It's actually really fun and exciting to see. You could see it come full circle with a new type of media, right? Signage is relatively new. I know it's not new, per se, but in terms of TV and radio, I think digital signage on site is a little bit different, and I think it's been really refreshing to hear people across the board, whether it's this type of industry or that, saying what story can you help us tell?
Because, in my opinion, I think that is the real value. Because it's not just pushing an ad, it's not just having a menu board. It's what story can you tell, which will then inflict some type of behavior or feeling for the consumers, and if we do that well, then you're going to see all the good things such as higher retention rates, probably higher sales at point of sale, et cetera.
When you're talking to particularly the IT Services people who lead with that sort of thing, what are the questions they're asking and how are they sorting through who they want to partner with? Because I'm guessing things like security come up as being quite important to them.
Jimmy Hunt: Oh, so I would say security is number one. I would say scale and not just scale within, again, there’s scale in a campus. There's also, if it's a multi location franchise that has locations all over the world or all over the country, can you reproduce this in 500 different cities? I think that in itself is a challenge. I think the installation piece and the survey piece is super important. Again, going back to the infrastructure of how something is built, whether it's a a financial service, it's going to be different than a college campus and that will be different than an attorney's office. So having the ability to not just be pigeonholed to one vertical is super important for us.
And do you have to, particular running channels, be careful about how you are establishing what your lane is and how you stay in it? Because there are lots of software and solutions companies out there who describe what they do as turnkey. “We can do the deployment, we can do the framing and consulting. We can do whatever you need us to do.” But if you have partners, that's what they want they do.
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, I guess that's been one of the positive challenges and roadblocks that we've had with growth. We start to have a little bit of growth in a particular industry or vertical with a certain reseller type, then you want to pursue that, but it all has to run in parallel to the overall goals, objective of Spectrio. So I would say, outside of my world, we're pretty aligned and locked in.
I would say with the channel and the resellers, first and foremost, we will always want to lead with being a software company. We want to provide the best CMS. But I think to your point, understanding where we can be flexible and be more fluid with particular partner requests or types, and it could be anything from, how we receive the orders. It can be that simple. It could be, “Hey, we have a certain CRM or some type of software tool that we use to capture orders and send out orders or, billing, et cetera.” But it's being very careful about how we move forward. I think, again, that when we first started the channel partner program officially in Q3, we still have more of a shotgun approach, and that was purposeful. That was a strategy that I wanted to pursue at first, just make sure I was covering all my bases to understand that we didn't leave anything out, and from then that focus has been more and more narrow.
So now we are hyper-focused on providing the best partnership experience to AV/IT, media and agencies, as well as those hardware providers.
Spectrio started out as doing stuff like music on hold, when people used landline phones and things like that, and in-store music, all those sorts of things, and those still exist within the company. Are they helpful in rounding out the offer for some of the jobs to try to do particularly in retail?
Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll answer that in two ways. First a 100 percent, we were started as this in-store on-hold music and messaging company and that allowed us to scale and scale quickly, and then it is still a really big part of our business today, especially when COVID hit it was hard for us to pick up the phone and try to sell signage when a lot of locations were closed, but there were certain products and services such as the on-hold that went through the roof, and it was because everyone was picking up the phone and trying to figure out if their local pharmacy was open or if their favorite restaurant had changed business hours, and people really trying to take advantage of that, saying, "Okay this is one way that we can actually continue to communicate, update our clients with some type of messaging."
But then I think now, to your point, yes, a 100 percent, if we can offer a more holistic solution, a full suite of services to our partners and to their clients, we absolutely do and I think taking a look at the broader partner world, the ones that are consuming multiple products are the ones that are staying longer, that have lower churn, that have higher ASP, that have higher overall MRR with us, and it just makes sense again, and that kind of goes back to how we started this.
Let's start the conversation with discovery. Let's understand what the pain points are and though signage may be the sharp end of the spear, what typically happens if we're being a good partner, if we're providing that training and collateral, not just sometimes, but all of our products and services. At some point, I bet we'll have a shot at selling in music or selling in content or selling in WiFi. That's been a charge from day one is let's win the business with what makes the most sense, which is 99% of the time signage. But also having the ability to go, what are you doing for music? And isn't that a pain point, and then really trying to find the commonalities between our products and services.
Yeah, and I assume your resellers and your end user customers are happy as clams if they ask that question, can you do in-store audio too and you say, yeah, we can, because if you don't, they have to go out and find another vendor.
Jimmy Hunt: Oh, yeah. You're a 100 percent correct there and it's been interesting talking to some of these some of the leaders in the space. Most of our conversations is around signage, but it's always interesting to see their perspective and to hear their delight saying, hey, obviously we're going to keep the conversations around players and signage, but oh, by the way this client or reseller is asking about music, can you also provide?
And from my perspective, again, it goes back to being a good partner, but what it does for our partners is it allows them product and vendor consolidation, which sounds just like a simple thing on paper, but it's really not because every vendor a partner brings on, that's typically another individual, another workflow, another billing unit, another escalation point, and so if we can help our resellers and their clients consolidate their vendors, that's sometimes is enough just to win the business. Then obviously the second thing that we really lean on in terms of multiple products and services is product diversification. So again, partnering with Spectrio allows, let's say just a typical AV/IT reseller to go, okay we can give you a signage, we can give you software. But now we can also provide you with music. We can now also provide you with content, and that was a big play for me in the media space, because you think others in the space, they started obviously selling just radio, just TV, just print, but over the years have gone digital and, having that digital component can encompass a lot of different things. So having us provide one or multiple products or services allows our partners just an easier path to success.
Last question: we're now starting to do trade shows again. Finally, I've actually got airplane tickets to a trade show for the first time in two-plus years. Where will people in the signage industry be able to find you guys in the next few months?
Jimmy Hunt: We've been very active. Again, it's been a challenge across the industry. I think people are starting to get more and more in tune and okay with getting back on the road, rightfully so. It was a devastating, challenging time for everyone and every single industry for two years, and it still is. So we've been super-active. I would say future focus, we will be at DSE. We'll be at InfoComm, and then we are in the very near term, there’s a media event out in LA called Localogy, and I'll be speaking on that. I'll be speaking on a panel about content and digital signage and how to bridge the gap between the two, and it's interesting, that is typically a media publisher conference, but we've actually invited a lot of our friends over at Sony and Brightsign.
My selfish goal is to help blend these two industries saying, these are some of the largest media companies in the world, and I selfishly want them to be in tune with digital signage, and here are some of the brightest and sharpest individuals in the AV/IT digital signage space, let's actually step out and blend the two. So I'm very excited about that. We'll have a presence at several more, but I'd say InfoComm, DSE and Localogy are the three that we're going to really double down on and we hope to see everyone there.
Absolutely. All right, Jimmy, thank you so much for taking some time with me.
Jimmy Hunt: Dave, thank you so much. This has been great. Being a fan of it for so long and now hopping onboard has been great.
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Jonny Greco, Seattle Kraken
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
Wednesday Mar 30, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The spectacle of pro sports used to be almost entirely about what happened on the playing surface, but these days it's also about the venue and the technology and creative used to create memorable and shareable experiences.
If you are paying $75 a ticket, and $12 per beer, there should perhaps be more entertainment than someone belting out national anthems.
The Seattle Kraken are a new team in the National Hockey League, based out of one of the most tech-adept cities in the world, in a brand new arena that has digital screens everywhere. There are 224 LED displays at Climate Pledge Arena, populated with content specifically geared to the game day experience of hockey fans.
I had a terrific chat with Jonny Greco, the very exciteable Senior VP of Entertainment and Experience for the Kraken. We spoke about what fans see before and during games, the thinking behind the creative, and the technology used at the venue.
We also get into his mindset and insights drawn from years and years of delivering experiences - including the over-the-top world of WWE pro wrestling and the mother of all pre-match experiences - the knights and swords opener to Las Vegas Golden Knights hockey games.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jonny. Thank you for joining me. I wanted to read out a description so listeners can get their heads around everything that's going on with your gig. There are 224 LED displays at Climate Pledge Arena, which has more than 28,000 square feet of digital signs. There are 173 displays outside the main seating bowl. So you have one hell of a lot of screens to operate.
Jonny Greco: That's a good intro. You've got all these amazing world-class tools. You get them during a pandemic while the arena is being built. You're about to start a brand new franchise, and now what, where do we go?
So super excited. Unbelievable honor to be here. I truly think we're just scratching the surface with all of this incredible technology and you'll hear me a lot as a theme as we chat here, and I'm so thankful to be on your podcast, but “story over sexy”. We can have the most expensive toys and all these phenomenal, shiny lights but if you don’t create a compelling story and a narrative that pulls people in doesn't really matter. So I'm always threading that line of technology and the art, where they fuse together to find that really happy galvanization of spirit.
Yeah. I think creative direction is so important. I get press releases every day about the next giant LED display at a sports venue and in a lot of cases, it's a 100 meters/yards along and this big and everything else, they don't talk at all about what's on there and it's just this big ass display and so what?
Jonny Greco: They put up color bars and say, “It's cool. Look at it!”
So with all those displays, does your gig extend out into the concourses, or are you just talking about the game experience once you get into the seating bowl?
Jonny Greco: That's a thoughtful question because I think traditionally as we know, game presentation, whether you're juniors, minor league, collegiate, major league sports, game presentations is kind of on the football field, the music, the mascot maybe the cheerleaders, maybe your promotional team the intermission performances or concerts, but everything that lives in the bowl. And I think holistically game presentation has turned into less of a presentation and more of an experience over the last few years especially, and we're looking at this holistic approach: you can't just be in the bowl to hear the song, or oh, they just scored.
You need to know about this on the entire campus that might be your home base. You should know something happened in my opinion, in the parking lot, as you're walking in, you should know about it whether you're on Twitter as you're looking at it as you're going up the escalator, if you're in line to get a burger. The screen displays should have your goal animation going if you score a goal and you create this kind of connected experience as we roll and again, as you teed it up 28,000 square feet of lead on a 74 acre campus, there are a lot of screens to cover. So you have to do it thoughtfully, then you have to balance the wayfinding and the marketing, and then just the straight energy game presentation, for that moment, while promoting other events that are coming. So there's a lot to juggle and like I said, we're just dipping our toes in the water. So we learn a lot every day and sometimes we get it really right. Sometimes we miss and sometimes we're like, oh yeah, we forgot about that. So we're excited about the evolution game in/game out, event in/event out here in Seattle.
So I have not been to a Kraken game. It's a bit of a drive for me, given where I live. What's the game day experience? As you described, if you're out in the parking lot, or you get off the Monorail. So where do you start seeing the stuff that you're controlling and influencing?
Jonny Greco: Yeah, I think we have a really connected organization as far as the storytelling of our brand, right? Like early that day, the team had a morning skate. There's going to be content on all of our social channels that's going to tell a little bit of the story of that night. We've got our own app where it's going to talk to you about traffic. It's going to give you your ORCA card so you're able to take that Monorail that you speak about to be able to get in, to help mitigate the traffic.
So the game day experience is, you could argue, it starts before the game day, but the day of the morning when you're getting messages, you're hearing about what's going on. You're finding out what, what's the strategy going into the game as we play, and it also just ramps up as you get near the puck, things that you had just mentioned that Monorail experience, which you know is a mile or two away, we have an audio file with our broadcasters welcoming fans onto the Monorail, right? We've got this armory sort of indoor space that we activate with our promo team, our icebreakers and our C squad. And, we've got video screens there and we're doing trivia. We're welcoming people in the most hospitable way we can to just thank them for being a part of this. It's not just, once you sit in your seat and you have your beer at the game that you're connected to the Seattle Kraken Climate Pledge Arena, it is way more extensive than that and that's something we're continuously working on because yes, the screens all over that campus are helping you find your way or teach you about what's coming. But we also just want to completely engage with our audience all the time, so they get excited. They know what's going on there. They're being educated about the process, particularly as this building opens, but we can continuously inform our fans to illuminate their experience when we can.
Now is part of that because going to a sports event now is expensive? For the ticket, for the concessions, for everything. In my days when I would go to a Calgary Flames game, when I lived out west, the game day experience was getting through the gate, grabbing a beer, sitting down, and then the entertainment was somebody singing “O Canada”, and then the game was on and that's it.
Modern pro sports is like a total spectacle, right?
Jonny Greco: I think it's changed a lot. And don’t do a disservice to O’ Canada. It's a heck of an Anthem. I love it. But I do think humanity looks at experiences differently than we ever have before. It's always evolving. You can go back 20 years and what the experience was about, it was exactly what you explained and that even upwards of 10-15 years ago, it was that, and now people want more bang for their buck, whatever they're paying for tickets or beers or snacks and concessions, time is our most valuable, precious resource and we're understanding that more than ever over the last couple of years.
So when we have this time, how we spend it is so important to us. So we need to make sure that we're being thoughtful in creating that experience that connects people with the brand, with the team, with the game. But in my opinion it also protects you from maybe a game where the Flames at the Saddledome don't play very well at night and they lose 5-0, but they still had a great experience and they're telling their friends about it. And even though they have, we've done our jobs in creating that fun. Let's just call it. I go to a game cause I want to have fun for a few hours and I still had fun even though some of the things we couldn't control didn't go our way. I think that's just what fans in general are coming to experience regardless of the costs.
It's that way, if you're going to Disney world, if you're going to a Jazz club or you go to the beach like you want to make sure that you have as much of an engaging experience as you can. It's definitely part of the consciousness of us as humans nowadays, for sure.
You came to this gig, having done a whole bunch of what looked like pretty interesting gigs that are mainly in sports. The three that hit me were live event production for pro wrestling and video direction for curling at the Olympics in Vancouver, a little different for pro wrestling, and then the big one was working for the Las Vegas Golden Knights.
Is the spectacle that is the openers of the Vegas Knights games with the, with all that hoo ha going on, ts that you, did you do that?
Jonny Greco: Yeah. Some people would definitely call it hoo ha. I think, yes, I was a part of and we had a hell of a time. Hell of a great leadership who saw vision and put entertainment at the forefront of the experience and then just knowing you were in Vegas, like you were going to do it a little bit different, right? You were just allowed, you had a different kind of permission to get a little wild that fit the region. On brand, in a style that fits the team, and then, you start winning games. There's a lot more permission you have to fail and try different things because people just are in a better mood. People like to win. That's been around for a long time.
So yeah, I think that list, you just mentioned it. It is a funny list when you go Curling to WWE wrestling, shout out to Halifax. I've been there. We did a show there. I loved it. Absolutely beautiful. But, and then, Vegas and Seattle, the truth is though, the more different opportunities I get blessed to be on and be a part of the more projects and teammates I get to like to collaborate with and contribute to the more I realize just how similar there is to all of it, right? Curling again, what we were talking about, it's an experience you're enjoying, you may love the sport. You may never have seen it before, but you want it to be at the Olympics, but you're going to love the music. You're going to love the natural inherent drama of sport. You may not be a WWE fan, but you probably know who Hulk Hogan is. There's elements where we're all connected in these experiences, and the truth is we all love good. Stories have been around for thousands and thousands of years, and it may be the story within a song, maybe a story in the written form of a book. It may be a micro story of the kiss cam within 30 other promotions at a game in St. Louis that you see, but they're stories inherently every day that we see, and if you can share them in a certain way and you can make your good guys bad guys compelling then all of a sudden people are pulled into it and they care about the story, then they care about, again, whether it's a pro wrestler, a pro curler or a pro hockey player they're all characters in the ensemble, of the show, the entertainment of the film, of the movie, of the story that we want to be a part of.
Did the work that you were involved in with the Las Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL team there, was that what got you up to Seattle? Did the Seattle people go, “Yeah, we want that”?
Jonny Greco: I think, like all of us. we’re on these journeys and paths and, I was doing some research on you as I was prepping for this podcast and, it said you had a boss back in the day. The Internet's just a fad. It's not going to last, but you are somebody who was like, no, I see where this is headed and sometimes you gotta just have the guts to do something that isn't necessarily what people expect or see, and one of my favorite quotes of all time is from Henry Ford with cars, and he went on to obviously do pretty well for himself, but he was asked at one point, your clients, your people buying this and the thing was, he says, if I would have asked people what they wanted versus just doing my own thing, “if I would have asked people what they wanted, they would've said they wanted a faster horse” and I love that because it's a little bit about sometimes we need to show people or expose people to things that they don't know they want, they don't know they're going to love this, and if we talk about it, we may talk ourselves out of it. Cause it sounds crazy because it's never been done cause it won't work and all those reasons, yes, that may be the case, but if we can suspend their own disbelief a little bit and just go for it sometimes and be willing to fail because you're going to, I think you get really unique opportunities. So Vegas, an amazing opportunity built off of relationships from previous jobs, the team president there is a great friend and just an awesome human being. I used to work with him back in the Cleveland Cavaliers days when we were working with LeBron James a million years ago, and you stay connected to these people. It was a recipe of pretty interesting elements when we got to Vegas, it worked out well and I've been given some pretty neat opportunities since then, but I do think the opportunities come from more of the relationships then, and your last gig matters. It really does, but I do think it's the body of work as you continue on, and I had actually gone from Vegas to Madison Square Garden to go work for the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers, which was unbelievable to be at Mecca, but I'd only done it for nine months before the Seattle opportunity came and there was a pandemic that happened as well. So there were a lot of variables, whereas what's the right move right now, creatively for my family and everything else.
So it was only a cup of coffee in New York, but I've had a few really neat opportunities and I've been able to meet and connect with some really interesting people through Vegas, and even before that with WWE and some of the other opportunities as well.
Yeah, and I must have been pretty cool to effectively have a blank slate that like Madison Square Gardens is a pretty old arena, I don't know how old it is, 40 years or something, and there's only so much you can do in terms of LED displays and new technology there versus Seattle is tech central and they went to town with it.
Jonny Greco: Yeah, they did, and that's a really good point. You've got these beautiful venues and arenas all over the world and you don't really want to mess with them like Wrigley field, you probably should only go so far with how much led you put there. Fenway, same idea. Like it would almost be a disservice to the history of the game in that space.
I think in Seattle, it was really unique, and at the time, what I had read was it was the most LED in any arena, on the planet, and that probably changes every five minutes. But I know a few months ago that was the case. But they had the opportunity cause it was a brand new arena, in this beautiful city that is this transcendent science technology, medical, you think of Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, all of these companies, Starbucks, these companies that are out here that have these pioneers of creativity and technology, it was very fitting out here. But I think you learn a little, in the hockey term, original programming that is innovative, super unique, but then also honors the original six, right? Honor the tradition knows whose great grandpas were here playing the game and what they loved and trying to fuse it together, and I think depending on the city you're in, if you're in Boston, it's going to be a lot different than if you're in Arizona, like how you ratio those two elements.
But again, whether you have one screen or you have 344 screens, make sure you're putting up content. That's interesting. Otherwise people are going to walk right past and they're not going to notice it anyway.
Yeah. That's one of the things that struck me about what you're up to or what the, what your team's up to is, I've been in a number of new build or renovated arenas in the last few years when we were still doing things like getting on airplanes, and in those cases, they're putting in big LED video walls and everything else, but it was all about commerce.
It was about running different sponsor messages. If it was an NBA game versus an NHL game, it was about efficiency and so on, and what I'm seeing with what's being done at Climate Pledge is it's about the experience and it's about setting the tone. So you've got like this giant aquarium and things like that, can you describe what people can see?
Jonny Greco: Sure. Yeah, and I think it's interesting, Dave, when you talk about just the philosophy of other venues. Like you go to the arena formerly known as Staples Center in Los Angeles, they need the digital signage to help with some of their changeovers, right? Like I've been there when they had an LA Kings game that afternoon, and then an LA Clippers game that night, like they needed to switch from black and white design to red and blue within a few hours,completely transforming the arena, and nothing can make that process quicker than like the digital signage abilities.
So like you said, not even a few years ago. It was signage. It was sponsorship, and it was like, put the logo here and buy a hot dog or whatever else. But now they're trying to connect it to just, again, more of like where you're being sold, but it sure doesn't feel like being sold. I feel like I'm watching something really cool and threading it into the show, and it was a big part of our own storytelling as you entered the Climate Pledge Arena with this grandiose atrium space that we have, where we were like, one of our taglines for the Kraken is, ”Welcome to the deep” right?
It's the deep fear, fear of the deep, we’re in the deep, right? That's where the Kraken lives, this mythical beast. And, the arena itself is subterranean, it's underground. To do this insane over billion dollar arena build, they literally lifted the historic roof from 1962, took everything else out of it and rebuilt this insanely beautiful arena underneath, and then put the roof back on. To do that, you had to go underneath as well. So as we looked at the layout of the arena, and as we looked at these video screens, part of this really cool grandiose entrance, as you come in, you get to go down these massive escalators with these huge video LED screens, video screens through Daktronics and we said we could put a Pepsi logo on there, but that's not again, that's just a big logo. That's not innovative. There's not a story. It doesn't necessarily make me thirsty. But instead we have the support from our leadership to let's create an atmosphere and what we thought of it's like, all right, you're going down underground. We're going to the deep, we're seeing the Kraken which is an underwater creature. We're in Seattle. Let's dig deep, and as you go down the escalator, let's go underwater. Let's see an Orca that's indigenous to space. Let's see the type of rock formations that you would see at the base of the Puget sound. Let's build out a space to give people again, that kind of experience, and it almost feels like you're like the Atlanta aquarium or something as you go, and you're like, oh, there's a seal. There's a sea lion going by so it was neat that we had that sort of support, and then instead of just a founding partner logo, splattered all over the place, we have a school of fish swimming by as it goes past the Amazon logo, or the Alaska airlines logo. So it's a thoughtful way of fusing the two together where it's like, of course we have incredible partners that we want to honor and showcase, but we also have their support to create this experience that just felt a lot more elegant than even in previous worlds I've been a part of it, it's just not slapping it on there. It's much more of a collaboration and integration of brand fusion together to help it feel just more like an experience than me just looking at a sign.
Yeah, I'm guessing you've fought this verbal battle a few times with the specialty leasing people and other folks who say yeah, this immersive entertainment stuff is awesome, but I need this Pepsi logo on here or this other logo?
Jonny Greco: Yeah, I think we all have. I think it's one of our biggest opportunities as people in the sports entertainment production world to lock arms with your corporate partnership side of things, because it does bring in a lot of revenue and it does bring in great brand awareness. It does bring in great relationships long-term that help a business work, but you don't want it to just be all or nothing. You don't want it to always be black and white. There's this really neat fusion of gray that you can find that kind of everyone can be aligned on, and it goes back to the point we were making before about, let's show you how this works. It's not always the most quantifiable, but there is a feeling when something just lands well and it's not a perfect science, and again we make plenty of mistakes on our journeys and our professional careers for sure but it is fun when you're in a supportive place that nurtures creativity, nurtures storytelling and lets you try some things sometimes.
We know we did some things pretty well here, but we also know we've got a lot of places to grow and develop and keep evolving because everyone's chasing, everyone's trying to do a great job together. So let's lift each other up and inspire one another.
Does the job touch some of the purely commercial aspects of digital signage? I know in some arenas, if somebody scores a goal, and I think you talked a little bit about this before, the concession displays that are showing a beer is $500 or whatever they cost now, it'll go to a replay of the goal and then go back to the beer menu or whatever. Are you doing that?
Jonny Greco: Yeah we're not doing it as well as we'd like yet, but we had some recent meetings about this to do a really thorough walk arounds in the arena itself because when you start and open up a brand new arena this quickly in a pandemic, a lot of is it let's just get it going. Let's get it working, and literally as we're doing this conversation, we just got some decimators to help us with some of our delays on our LED screens on the back wall of our press bridge. Because our fans in that area, this super unique area, they don't have a complete line of sight to our video screens are twins as we call them. So they have these LED screens with our program out, which is awesome, except it's, I don't know what the time is, Two to three second delay on some things, and we all know if you're a little bit late to the joke or the punchline or the goal, it's a little bit less of a connected experience.
So there's constant little technical elevation we're trying to find a more comprehensive experience for people. But I do think we have ways to go. As far as we score a goal that lights up everywhere, that underwater space currently, when we score a goal, that's not being lit up with our goal animation and cutting cameras and stuff, but we know that's where we want to go to just create that moment where even if you're not in the bowl for a second, you feel what just happened? Cause there's not many cooler moments in sports entertainment than that horn going off crowd going nuts, and if you can be a part of it, somehow we want to include everyone. But you know what, when you walk out of the bathroom oh, what just happened? No one wants to be the last one to the dance floor. So we want to help everyone feel like they're the first.
Is there some sort of a show control system that's running all this? What are you using?
Jonny Greco: Yeah, so we work with Daktronics and I'll say this right away. 15 people way smarter than me on the technology side that I work with, that could go a lot further into this, but it is show control for all of our ribbons and Daktronics video screens. And then we're using Triple Play for all of our IP TV needs, and that's run through our incredible group from the Climate Pledge Arena side, because they're doing more than just the Kraken games. They have events all the time, a hundred percent.
So if you're using Daktronics, for that, as you add more stuff, you just go back to them?
Jonny Greco: I think, with technology, you're always looking for, I don't want to say the best, but who helps us tell our story? Who helps us create that experience? Daktronics have been incredible partners and they have a whole lot of their product all over the place and they understand that this is this crown jewel space for their own product as well. So it's just been a really good relationship as far as, Hey, this isn't working or would we be able to develop this? And they're on it. They want this to succeed because they're great partners and we want to keep pushing the envelope, but obviously trying to always see what's out there. Daktronics does a ton of things, but obviously we're working with Ross in our switches and acuity expressions. We got Dreamcatcher for our replay systems. Like you're going to try to grab a whole bunch of different tools and you just want the best tools to create the best kind of narrative that you can and it's rarely going to be just one thing, right?
There's not a one-stop shop for many things. That's where we are right now, but always looking to evolve what you have, right?
How many people are working on this?
Jonny Greco: Ee call it Entertainment experience and production on the Seattle Kraken side, and for that group, which is creating a lot of the social content, we are creating elements like ice projection and half a million dollar shot promotions and, commercial spots and B-roll and everything else. There's 15 of us in that group. So that's on the Kraken inside. So that's your show callers, your scripters we're working closely with corporate partnerships, you're working with your promo teams, and so that group of 15 is split into two. As far as the game presentation side, that entertainment experience, but then also just that content and production side as well, which ranges from creating because we are a brand new team, videos for human resources or maybe working and this is really common in pro sports, working on like a free agent video project that’s super secretive or whatever they like.
So you're creating the very forward facing stuff, but you're also doing a lot behind the scenes, and when you have no library to pull from last year, oh, remember Dave, last year when this happened, we didn't have that. So that's another role that we talked to a lot of people about, and they were, if you can get it, get that archivist role, get that digital asset management person role in your space. So that's something we're working diligently on. We have a person who's phenomenal and we're testing the waters, working on this and then we'll look to be implementing this, over the summer. But just to build that archive, because, season one happens, but really quickly, you're celebrating your 10th anniversary and remember game six, when that thing happened, you want to have that you want to have those things properly logged and an archived for us and or for the next people who come into this incredible role.
Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. I guess you've got to do like the player video pieces where, they're smiling and then they do the arm, the cross arms, and don't mess with me look and all that stuff, you gotta have all that, right?
Jonny Greco: Gladiator shots. Yeah, absolutely, and some of that stuff becomes evergreen, so you can shoot it once and use it for a few years, and some of the stuff, as guys get traded or retire, goes away but they may someday have their Jersey retired here. They may just come back, right? You want to use some of those elements. I learned a lot of that at Madison Square garden. It was interesting how they had archived up until this point, and even there they would admit it themselves. We could do a better job with our digital asset management. We're one year in or half a year in, right like between all those seasons, you're like a hundred years in. So that's a lot of games you've literally filmed. I remember working at the Cleveland Cavaliers, it was the same idea. We had all of this craziness going on with Betamax and 16 millimeter film, and we had to transfer all of that content as DVDs were coming around and then, it's like these video files, is that going to last? So when you have to go back and grandfather in content, that's a much heavier lift, so we're trying to mitigate that as much as we can.
Yeah, it's interesting. Technically, it used to be a lot harder to pull off what you're doing now, but the flip side of that is there's a lot more that you have to produce than in the old days.
Jonny Greco: Absolutely. You're putting out so much content and you're trying to individualize something on Instagram versus Twitter versus LinkedIn versus in arena versus the app, and that's something like strategy-wise, I think, everyone's working on, how are we unique and original but also how are we creating content that can be used in multiple ways, because you don't need to create, oh we have “Mark Giordano, legendary hockey player, tomorrow night's going to be us honoring his 1000th game, the silver sticks ceremony,” it's really cool.
Do you need a different sort of acknowledgement or graphic on every single one of those channels or do you keep it very brand centric with a look and then you figure out whatever the content design look needs to be to fit that scale, and then you go from there. So it's a pretty subjective space, but you're always trying. With the narrative and story in mind first, you're trying to work smarter, not harder cause we all work hard, we know that, but there's a lot of content to create, and once you start, you don't want to pull back. You want to only add to it.
So we started out of the gate with a lot. We know we have a lot more stories to tell. We know we can engage Seattle and Kraken fans in such a different way and further it, and like you said, scratching the surface. We've started, but now we've got to keep rising.
Is the pregame show the big job, the one that sucks up most of the time?
Jonny Greco: Yeah, I think depending on the organization, it can be a little bit different here. It was a big part of the show. We ran into a couple of bumps along the way, just again, with the arena opening, supply chain issues, not being able to load some of our beautiful set pieces for the opening night. And it was honestly one of the more frustrating moments for a lot of us because we weren't able to physically. But we got there and come the new year, we were in place and it's emotional and it does take a lot of our focus and attention, but as cool as the moment is, it can get cooler and we're excited to evolve it and grow it, and now that we have all the pieces in place, take that next iteration up another level.
Yeah, that was going to be my last question. Now that you've got yourself grounded there and sorted out all the technology and the folks and know what everybody's good at and the drill, what's coming?
Jonny Greco: Yeah, there's a whole bunch of exciting things that I'm not going to tell you about right now, my friend, but starting a new franchise, just because I've been super lucky or super crazy, probably both to have done this now a couple of times, I think you got to look at being a part of a new organization much more than just like a few games or a season. I think to really get your footing and your steps, right? For every part of the business it's two to three years easy. It's not a one-year thing. So there's a lot that we dreamed up a year ago that just wasn't able to come to fruition this year for a million great reasons but as you get into actually activating right pre op mode versus operating mode, very different for us, right? The red light goes on, lights, camera, action. You see how people handle it, you see how the equipment functions, you see what you dreamed up while we were in Zoom calls saying, Hey, what would be cool is a camera that does this and does this well now we're using those said cameras and we're like, oh, what else would be cool. So you want to lock arms. You want to step on each other's shoulders and jump higher on some of these things, and some of the things that you envision just didn't really land the way you had expected for a few different reasons.
And in my case, I know sometimes I just dilute myself a little bit because I get so excited about so many things and I don't keep it concentrated on just a few big ones, and I also like to test and learn. So I like to throw a lot against the wall, and it's like ooh, that was great. Oh, that was terrible. Ooh, that's workable. Oh, that was terrible. I would rather cast that super wide net and work off of that, then be like all my eggs in one basket, and whether it works or not, I'm like I don't want one basket, I want 14 baskets, and that's a philosophical difference, probably organization to organization, sport to sport that, just personally, that's the way I like to function. It's not right or wrong, but it's definitely the way I look forward to evolving in this season too, because there's a lot of stuff that we have ready to go that intentionally we're holding back, like it's ready to go, but we're going to wait. We're going to wait, and plan to do that over the summer, to do that in season two, which generally I don't have that level of patience. I get so excited. I'm like, let's do it. Let's get everybody excited.
But I do think the chess game, the slow play, sometimes it's really thoughtful and strategic and it just, it helps with the pacing of the whole experience. If you do think of that brand launch, not just the day the logo comes out, not just your opening night, not just your first season, it's something we're building upon it and creating an equity with it's a nuanced art, I think over the next couple of years that we're going to be working on.
This was a lot of fun. I appreciate you taking the time with me.
Jonny Greco: Oh, Dave, thank you so much for asking. Anytime you want to chat about this kind of stuff. I would love to be a guest. It's an honor to be on the 16:9 podcast and really happy to share some energy with you.
That's great. Thank you.
Thursday Nov 04, 2021
InfoComm 2021 Roundtable: Tortured Terminology, With Three Daves, A Kim And A Chris
Thursday Nov 04, 2021
Thursday Nov 04, 2021
A virtual roundtable panel run last week during the InfoComm trade show pulled three Daves, a Kim and a Chris together to talk about the use and abuse of technology terms in digital signage and pro AV.
Run as a version of the Digital Signage Federation's periodic Coffee and Controversy series, the panel included Kim Sarubbi of IoTecha, STRATACACHE CEO Chris Riegel, David Title of New York-based Bravo Media, and Portl founder David Nussbaum, who has a very cool transparent LCD product he calls a hologram mainly because he needs something short and digestible for what is a complicated offer.
We had a great, very frank discussion - there's no other way with these folks - about a variety of topics, from all those things on Linkedin that aren't holograms or aren't even real, to the challenges of marketing complicated technology.
This was a Zoom call, and the full video is available via AVIXA as part of a post-InfoComm conference package, but here's the audio version.
I have not done all the polish at the front and back, just so I could get this out as a bonus podcast.
Sixteen:Nine podcasts have, forever, been gratefully sponsored by Screenfeed, the digital signage content store. Sixteen:Nine is an online publication and companion podcast produced up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a product of Spectrio, a leading provider of customer engagement solutions ranging from digital signage, interactive kiosks, wifi marketing
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
David Labuskes, AVIXA
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
Wednesday Sep 22, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There is a whole pile of back seat driving happening lately in the pro AV and digital signage communities about how to run a trade show in the COVID-19 era, and much of the focus has squarely been on Dave Labuskes, the CEO of AVIXA, which runs InfoComm and co-owns the even larger trade show ISE.
The show is happening in about a month in Orlando, and with other big trade shows saying never mind for 2021, there are endless questions and suggestions about the prospects of the show even happening.
It will, says Labuskes, unless there are measures like government-mandated closures. Given that the show is in Florida, that's probably not going to happen.
Labuskes has done some frank interviews lately that went into deep detail about InfoComm and COVID, and the business. I spoke with Labuskes late last week and did not see the value in rehashing and revisiting a lot of what he said, so in our chat we talk a little about how things will come off and why. But we spend a lot more time on bigger picture stuff about how trade shows fit, and whether a niche industry like digital signage can find a well-defined home and community at big, omni AV shows like Infocomm and ISE.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mr Labuskes, thank you for joining me. I wanted to get into a number of things, but I also didn't want to just rehash some recent conversations you had in an hour long interview last week with Tim Albright from AVnation that went into a lot of frank discussion about where InfoComm is at and everything associated with that, but I can’t cCompletely ignore that, and I just wanted to ask, where are things now , has anything changed in the last week since I watched that interview?
Dave Labuskes: Mr. Haynes, it's good to be here. There have been a couple of other events that have announced cancellations, but there's been nothing that's changed in AVIXA's policy with regards to InfoComm. We still see a runway to a fantastic event with fantastic people conducting fantastic business.
It's been described as being the last trade show standing this fall, but that's not really true. There's all kinds of events going on here, there, and everywhere.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah. There's a lot that's described that isn't necessarily really true, David. But yeah there's events and trade shows happening every day, all around the world, and I'm actually a little confused. For an industry that is really based on overcoming challenges and doing the impossible and making things happen that nobody believed could actually happen, there is that sort of a sentiment that trade shows can't take place right now and that just simply is not true. They're taking place every day.
So I have mixed opinions personally. I was supposed to be doing a mixer down at InfoComm and decided not to do that, and that wasn't really so much about I don't think InfoComm should even happen or anything else, it was just as simply a fact of, I didn't quite see how a cocktail party, where everybody was wearing a mask and being asked to stand six feet apart would work terribly well and the optics were weird.
It's one of those things where I could see a trade show happening, but I didn't see that happening well, and we don't need to get into all of that. I'm curious more about whether or not you're enjoying all the armchair opinions from people who say what you should be doing, but have never actually run a tradeshow?
Dave Labuskes: Before I had this job, I was a partner at a large architectural engineering firm, and one of the gentlemen that was on the search committee that was interviewing me for this job, James Ford, owner of Ford AV and I'll never forget where he was sitting in the boardroom, he leaned forward and said, “Dave, you've got a really good gig, like why would you want this job?” And I'm like that's a great question, and I try to answer it, and he's like, “But Dave, here's the thing: You're running one of the largest consulting practices in the world and if you have a management meeting and you decide to go liveleft, then everybody's going to leave that meeting and they're going to go left, and the jobs that you're interviewing for you and your team are going to decide to go left, and then 50,000 people are going to tell you, you should go right!”
I actually celebrate varied opinions. I do think a lot of people express an expertise that is perhaps inflated in their own perception. Trade shows, they're a complicated industry. I've been doing this now for eight years and I have people on my team that have forgotten twice what I'll ever know. The interplay between the various different constraints, the challenges that people throw out there as though they're simple challenges. Yeah, they're a little frustrating, but I signed up for it. Nobody made me do this job. I was forewarned, so maybe I'm the one that has an exaggerated impression of my expertise.
Is part of the problem just simply that it's Florida and Florida is this eternally weird place at the best of times, but it's got a particular problem and people all the way up to the governor of the state who don't seem to recognize that, “Hey, maybe there's a bit of a problem happening here.”?
Dave Labuskes: Yeah. I think I'll be a little more politically correct than that, and it was nice for you to try it, but it isn't my first rodeo here.
(Laughter) I wasn't trying to bait you. I just think that's a big part of it and the people, the armchair opinion makers who say why don't you just move it or why didn't you just do it in another city? There's a little bit of baggage associated with doing that but just simply speaking, it's a part of the country that has a particular exacerbated problem, but doesn't seem to want to recognize that it has an exacerbated problem.
Dave Labuskes: It all comes from the jurisdictions and it all comes down to point of reference, right? You can also just say, is it the problem that the event is in the United States, right? Because if you look at the United States and compare the United States to other countries, we're not necessarily getting a straight-A report card.
What I have said, and I know we don't want to have the same conversation I've had already with others, is that I don't think the brush that should be used in making that decision is Florida. I think the brush that we should use in painting that picture is Orange County. There's parts of California that may or may not be behaving in the same fashion you or I would do.
So I think you have to look at where are you going to fly into, where you're going to be, where are you going to have dinner, where are you going to sleep? Those types of things, and when you get to that stage orange county this morning had 79.4% of their population over the age 18 having had one shot of the vaccine. They've got a mask order that was issued by the mayor strongly recommending that masks be worn inside any public space. They've got plummeting hospitalization rates, death rates, positivity rates at 12.4%, I believe.
So, I think, unfortunately the world and this country and all of the states have this polarization thing going on, and yeah, would it be more comfortable for people to attend an event somewhere else that are looking from afar and don't take time to do all that research? Probably. The headline, the abbreviated picture, is challenging, but I do think that there are people that are going to make a decision that attending a trade show weighed against other factors just isn't for them this year, and I think they'd make that decision regardless of where it is.
Yeah. I guess that's the other thing that you didn't know you were signing up for was having an extensive ability to talk in genealogical terms.
Dave Labuskes: This is a true story, David. Last year, I came home from the office, and at dinner I said to my wife and son I spent an hour today reading a scientific study about the efficacy of washing your hands with cold water versus hot water, and that is not something I ever anticipated taking place in my career, I will admit that. (Laughter)
By the way, it is just as good. You just don't tend to wash them as long because it's less comfortable, but...
I'm just impressed I was able to say epidemiology.
Dave Labuskes: Happy with that. These are words that were not part of our vocabulary two years ago, right?
Just drafting off of some of that: CEDIA which AVIXA has a relationship with because you co-own ISC had their event last week or the week before in Indianapolis and I won't go into how that went business-wise or anything else, but I'm curious if you had AVIXA folks there and did they see how things were done? I know they had signage and kind of cues on whether you are comfortable with people coming close and all that sort of stuff. Did those things work?
Were there things that you learned from that you can take away and apply to InfoComm?
Dave Labuskes: First part of the question: No, we didn't have anybody from AVIXA at that event that I'm aware of. Not that I know of, but I'm sure there were people there that were AVIXA members. We do have a close relationship with CEDIA. Obviously we have a partnership over a very large joint venture that owns and operates ISC and ISR and DSS. The show itself is owned by Emerald Expositions, and we have our conversational talking relationship with Emerald as well. In fact I have a call next week with Emerald to talk through lessons learned.
I was in Louisville, Kentucky a couple of weeks ago at a SISO conference, which is the Society of Independent Show Operators. So it's Emerald, Informa, and mostly the for-profit trade show organizers and AVIXA was invited to attend. The industry of trade show organizers and meeting planners and event planners, we've joined arms and we recognize that this is a problem for all of us that we have to share best practices with, we have to share learnings with, we have to talk about what works and doesn't work.
It's kinda like the AV industry and as I'm learning more about it, the digital signage industry where people compete, but they also have a comradery where a rising tide lifts all ships kind of a thing, and so I think all trade show operators are working through this, associations as well are famously collaborating with regards to sharing information and learning and helping each other. So that's a good part of the pandemic.
I would imagine one of the things that all these organizations collectively learned, if they didn't already know it, is that the whole virtual trade show thing just really doesn't work. Does it?
Dave Labuskes: It certainly didn't work in v1.0 of 2020. I think v1.5, and we're starting to get closer to 2.0, I think there's hope for it. The best visual I saw over the last 18 months is talking about books versus movies, and you don't convert a book to a movie by putting it on a podium and filming somebody turning the pages. And I think that probably is a closely apt description of what we all did with our first version of the virtual events. But I think you can tell a story, very effectively in print or in film, leveraging and celebrating the differences of the media.
Where I am at now and where AVIXA is driving towards, and you'll see more developments about this in the next couple months is more about how AVIXA delivers on its mission, leveraging physical events and digital platforms, and how do they interface and interact with each other? How do they mutually benefit each other? What's good in one, that's not good in the other?
Not a lot of good, special effects when you're reading a book, but a lot of great imagination when you're reading a book. Not a lot of ability to be character development through introspection in a movie, but it's really easy to do that when you're reading.
I think if you look at education, you look at delivery of information from provider to consumer, that can be done pretty effectively digitally. I think about human interaction and the break time during class is almost impossible to create digitally. That doesn't mean it is impossible. So I see a lot of assumptions that we made in order to achieve X, we needed to convene people face-to-face being challenged. But I also think that all of the pundits that got online in March and April of last year and said, this is the end of face-to-face, and we're going to be digital for the rest of our lives, have seen that they were probably not right with that either.
I think the one thing that I took away, or what I have enjoyed about these virtual events is the ability to attend round tables panels presentations on demand. So I don't need to be somewhere or sit at a certain place, set aside things then at 10:00 AM, I'm going to watch this.
Just the simple fact that I got stuff going on. I can't do this today or right now, that I could click on it and see. Yeah, somebody from Brand X explaining this to me on my terms, and if I'm bored, I just click out, I don't have to stand up and walk out of the room and embarrass the presenter or anything like that. That part I like.
Dave Labuskes: I do too, and that's the irony of it is. If one of the things that all of us like is the absence of time and geography constraints, right? So it doesn't matter if that panel discussions take place in London or Nova Scotia or Orlando, you can still receive the outcome of that panel.
Why are we saying that they should be organized and delivered between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM Eastern time on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week? That's where I get to this. I think it's more about a digital presence and digital community, a place where people interact when it's appropriate for them to interact, where they can organize their interaction times.
I'm old enough to have been in chat rooms on Prodigy and AOL and you remember you would organize with people like I'm going to be on at eight o'clock tonight for an hour, because you can only afford an hour. Because we were charged by the minute, and then I think that's what we have to recognize. So in that regard, I'm really excited about the fact that I'm not a trade show organizer, instead I’m an association that is committed to an industry and an industry community, and what I can do is build that community both digitally and physically.
What do you think of the suggestion that the days of the big macro show are cloudy and that regionalized events make more sense, so an InfoComm Southwest, an ISE UK, that sort of thing? And granted that was tried a little bit in the past year, but that was out of necessity as opposed to design.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, I'm intrigued by it. But I think the loudest proponents of it are the attendees, not the exhibitors and the attendees don't pay. Doing ten small shows only costs a little less than doing one big show or less than doing then ten times doing one big show. The cost of doing a show has a fixed amount. Even in the smallest show, you're going to pay an X and then get to the big show, you may only be paying 2X where if you're doing a regional show, like 10 times, you are close to 10X, and your ROI on each of those events is smaller because your audience is small.
Now that's using all the old rules. So if we go back to the last question, if I can segment an audience for an exhibitor and say, I'm going to bring people that have spending authority over half a million dollars that have a project next three months, it's going to require a high-end audio system. That's going to change that algebra, and so I don't think you throw it out the window, but economics has a factor in these things and it's easy to say I would rather go to a small event in Nashville, but the problem is I have to find somebody to pay for it, and even if you say I'm happier to go to a small event in Nashville, I bet you don't want to spend $195 for a ticket to go to that event?
I get the hunger for it. I get the desire for it, but I don't see a business model around it right now. We've never been successful at small events being profitable. There have been good strategies like, before ISE launched. We did small roadshow events from country to country, it was before my time, but I hear stories from the old timers about the amazing sort of experience of going from hotel room or hotel conference to hotel conference across from Warsaw to Budapest to Rome type thing. And we've done them in advance of launching our Bangkok show. We did it in advance of launching our Mumbai show, but those become feeders to a larger event that has a more sustainable business model. We did a lot of what we used to call round tables, for example, we did the AVIXA round table in Baltimore where you'd have 15, 20, maybe 30 people come to them, and so you were spending a lot of money on an event that served 15, 20 or 30 people, and we just felt like there were better ways of spending the industry's money than that.
The demise of Digital Signage Expo certainly raised the eyebrows at AVIXA and got you guys thinking, although you've always had digital signage as a component, you've had pavilions for many years, but there was an opportunity and a sense that something needed to fill that void. Granted, it's been refilled to some degree since then, but the show hasn't happened yet so we'll see how that comes off.
How do you build up the digital signage affinity for InfoComm? Cause I've gone for many years, but I go to have a look at the gear. I'm not a gear head, but I write about it and everything else, but I don't really see it as an end-user show where a big retailer, those kinds of people are going to come to that they maybe they send their gearheads, but more likely it's the integrators that sell into big retail and so on are there are there, so how do you make all that kind of come together over the next couple of years?
Dave Labuskes: Boy, there's so much in that question, David. We should talk more often, I enjoy this.
Yes, it is an unfortunate demise and it didn't get folks in the AVIXA thinking. Yes, we've been looking at the digital signage industry for a long time. I do think it's a community within the larger industry that needs to be celebrated, and that's that other point with regards to small regional shows versus big shows. I think we see lots more shows within shows taking place, and I think that's probably the right solution, and I'm biased. I think AVIXA has the right place to build a home within a home for the digital signage community.
First of all: there was this interesting dynamic between the association and the show operator, right? From an association perspective AVIXA has been having conversations with DSF, with DS-LATAM, with digital signage of Asia, and the various different entities in Europe. When you move from our association to association, one of the ways I think I actually described it to Rich Ventura, he and I were talking probably years ago and it's like you and I, David, are best friends, but our dads owns the competing gas stations on the corner, and so we can go to school and everything and be friends there but when we came home there's limits.
That was kinda how I felt like it was and I felt like there's a window there to not have that dynamic. Now, some of that's changed and I respect Questex. I respect Paul and don't know him well, but I know him and I've had conversations with him and he's a smart guy and I believe he's committed to delivering a successful event. I think it's being honest, looking at what does an organization want, what is the community best one? And making honest agreements and commitments to each other, and then keeping them. There are advantages to working together, and I think the end goal is that “home within a home” and “a community within a community.”
I think the challenge and opportunity for digital signage and InfoComm is the scale of the InfoComm show and the specificity and the heart and relationship with the digital signage community, and I think if we work together, we can build that home within a home. I think it can be more than a guest room. It can be an in-law apartment. It can be a place where it's identified and that's, yeah, I'm disappointed that you're not going to be there, and I know the mixture is just one manifestation of that home within a home, and we look forward to being able to do it in the future.
Absolutely. One of the logistical problems or mechanical problems, so to speak, with a big show like an InfoComm is: yes, you've created these pavilions through the years of digital signage pavilion and some of the vendors have been in that, designated zone, so to speak, but the biggest players are the display manufacturers, and they've always had their spots, their Primo spots, and they're serving a whole bunch of audiences at InfoComm, not just the digital signage people. So how do you figure out a way to create a show within a show when you've got Sony in the front row, Samsung's got a giant booth in the middle of the hall and so on. You're never going to be able to herd them all into one hall, so to speak?
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, so what do you do then? I think what you have to do and we're down to the details of tactics, right? But I think you start to curate attendees' journeys. You use content as the honey to attract and people will come where content is and content can be delivered where people are, and that's the challenge of starting a trade show, but we've done that. We know how to form a trade show and it takes time and it takes continual feeding until it becomes a self-feeding cycle, and then you have to create a journey that is guided a bit so the attendees that are coming from retail or the attendees that are coming from the advertising agencies can get to where they will be able to extract value and some of that will require tour guides, not maps and serendipity, because it's too big to just let somebody lose, but we have that problem now with end users in general at the show, you described as gearheads, but about 40% of the attendees at a typical InfoComm are end user buyers. It's part of what makes that show so valuable to exhibitors.
A lot of them are brought there by channel members. The consultants are bringing their customers, the integrators are bringing their customers. But a lot of them are brought there by us too, with promoting them and developing conference content that would be of interest to them, creating a nucleus of community. It's all very explicit, but it doesn't happen by chance. There are hosted buyers that are brought in to shows around the world. There are groups that are sponsored. There are other associations that are partnered with. Richard runs our Asian subsidiary. He's a genius at identifying influential associations within the geographies and partnering with them to offer programs. Organizations like the Indian Architects Association are partnered with our InfoComm Mumbai event, and they are holding content conferences for architects in conjunction with our event. All of our channels want architects at it. Those types of strategies are part of the town and the team that works on these.
Last question, looking ahead a few months to ISE and it's hard to do the crystal ball thing, but I gather things are calmer in Spain. I don't hear very many people at all saying, hell no, we're not going to Barcelona or anything else, maybe that'll bubble up, who knows? But is ISC in Barcelona going to be normal-ish?
Dave Labuskes: Yes, I think so. Again, like you said, the crystal balls are not crystal clear and now, after the last series of conversations, I think I'm going to put the crystal ball into the same place where I put “pivot” and “agile” and “unprecedented” but yeah, the biggest indicator that you would have about and event like ISC at this stage five months out is sold show floor space, right?
I don't think we've even opened registration for attendees yet, and show floor sales are, I think they're probably about 8% off of 2020. I guess there's no such thing as quoting me because we're recording this, but it's within that ballpark of the size of the last event at the Rye, which is, really the last event to compare it to. So if it's 90% of that size, 80% of that size, I think that's, that absolutely fits into your technical definition of normal.
And there were lots of people who said, because you're going to Barcelona, as awesome a place as it is, it may mean you see a slight drop because people who might go to ISC in Amsterdam, because they can drive there, maybe would not go all the way to Barcelona?
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, but there's other people that are going to drive to Barcelona that wouldn't have driven to Amsterdam. And yeah not a hundred percent a repeat audience, but…
Well, I’m not driving to Barcelona.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, me neither. (Laughter)
That's those armchair spectators that you talked about earlier, right? We did the homework to make a determination about that, and we love the Rye. We would love to have stayed at the Rye, but the Rye isn’t big enough to hold the show as it was moving forward in the future and it was starting to have a negative impact on attendee experience and you start to have those different factors impact a show and reach the value of the show.
I'll just be happy if I can find my way around.
Dave Labuskes: Yeah, it's a beautiful city. I'll tell you what it's like. It's the opposite of the Rye. It was one of the things I joked with Mike about. Finally I figured out how to get through the Eye without getting lost, and now we've decided to move the show.
Yeah, me too.
All right. I appreciate you taking some time with me. I suspect you're a busy fellow these days.
Dave Labuskes: Never too busy for you, sir. Congratulations on your recent deal. I'm really happy for you.
Thank you!
Wednesday Jun 23, 2021
Paul Miller, Questex
Wednesday Jun 23, 2021
Wednesday Jun 23, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When news broke back in March that the live events and publishing firm Questex had bought the assets of Digital Signage Expo, there was, understandably, a lot of interest and speculation about whether that might mean the defunct trade show and conference would be revived.
It will be, likely around the same timeframe as the past, and back in Las Vegas. It is also likely it will have the same name - though it might just be called DSE.
What's also clear is that it will not be a simple re-boot of the old show - which makes perfect sense, since the Digital Signage Expo that ran for 15+ years would politely be described as spinning its wheels - with attendance flatlined and exhibitor counts shrinking.
I contacted Questex when news first broke of the DSE assets being acquired at auction, and have had a few conversations since then with the company, including its CEO Paul Miller.
I wasn't sure how much he could tell me, but we had a terrific, very open chat about what went down, and his company's thinking around a new and different DSE in 2022.
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TRANSCRIPT
David: Paul. Thank you for joining me. Who is Questex?
Paul Miller: Hi, Dave, thanks for having me first and foremost. Questex is a media and information services business that produces events alongside its media sites. We have been in existence as a company for about 15 years, just over. We are a company that focuses on really five or six markets, that is the life sciences and healthcare markets, the technology markets, and then we also focus on the areas of travel hospitality & wellness, and all of that is wrapped up around a focus on the experience economy. That's who we are and we do events, we do media websites, we do all kinds of connecting of buyers and sellers in those areas.
David: So of those properties that you have in the context of the Pro AV world, what would people who are listening to this most likely know, LDI or the Nightclub & Bar Show?
Paul Miller: Yeah. They would probably know our Nightclub & Bar Show in Las Vegas, mainly because that would have been in history. Some cases would collaborate with DSE and in some cases would just sit alongside so they would know that.
They probably would know the Lighting Dimension Show, the LDI show that you mentioned. Yeah, that's also one that is quite well known in this space. I would say outside of that, there are events that I think are relevant in the hotel area, in the spa area, in the gym area where we’re connecting owners of hotels & operators of hotels and gyms and spas with various people that want to sell into those spaces. So of course digital signage is a huge area for all of those end users. So they may not know those, but certainly, I think they're areas that we think are very relevant.
David: We'll get into acquiring assets of DSE, but I was curious when that happened, so I looked up Questex to see who they are and how they work and I get a sense that your typical approach is you have publishing wing as a foundational thing that kind of sets the content for that particular vertical market, and then you grow and market the live event off of that. Is that a fair assessment?
Paul Miller: Yeah, I think that's a good assessment, Dave.
We believe that we should be engaged with communities 365 days through the year because people don't always wait for an event before they make their decision. So we want to help them through that buying process through content that attracts them to our websites. As they interact with that content, we like to use that data to produce what we would consider a very relevant show. So when you come to the show, it's content that's been popular throughout the year, probably speakers that have been writing content that you can come and meet live. So we see a full connection between how people in the B2B world look for content, and how they go through that buying process, and the event is part of that.
In many cases, it's an exciting part of it, because people come to actually buy. In some cases, they come to network. In some cases, they come to get educated, and in some cases, all three. So, that idea that we would just do an event, and then see you next year is not really in our DNA. We're more, “Hey, we want to serve you throughout the year, and we'd love to see you live at the event if relevant.”
David: And I also get a sense that that the events look different depending on the vertical. So you don't necessarily do a full trade show with exhibits for a certain vertical because it really doesn't fit, whereas, for other verticals, it may.
Paul Miller: That actually is a really astute comment. I think sometimes in our world, not the digital signage world. This is our world at Questex. We sometimes talk about events a little bit like somebody saying, “I'm going on vacation to Africa,” and your first question is what country you're going to because you’re going to have a different experience depending on where you're going.
In the events world too, there are various flavors. In some events, it truly is sort of a cash and carry. You bring in your goods, you set up your store and people come in and they buy your goods, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. By the way, I do not think that applies to digital signage, certainly on the whole, but that there is a flavor of event that we do that sort of emulates that, that is very much you come in to buy stuff and the exhibitors are there to sell stuff and success is how much did I sell, frankly?
And then there are the educational type events which sort of surround large conferences. I think you'd be familiar with these: great speakers, good education, and some really good networking off-piece at the hotel bar afterward, et cetera, and then you can get into some really specific events which are matchmaking buyers with sellers. This particular buyer is looking for this solution and we're going to put you in a room with this seller. They tend to be more intimate, very VIP, in some cases, we will host those buyers. So we tend to be, and I think your comment is right on. We tend to look for what fits what element of the market at the right time.
I think where it gets exciting, Dave, and this probably leads us into sort of our thoughts around the Digital Signage Expo is that in many cases you can do all three. You can have a great conference, you can have a great show, trade show floor, and you can do great matchmaking, and it doesn't work all the time. We have a feeling that it is relevant to DSE from what we've been hearing from the market, but you're absolutely right on the money. We don't really have a one size fits all approach as a company, and I think given the communities we serve, that would be very difficult for us to shoehorn in certain templates if you will.
David: Right. So back in, I think you said it was April, but you acquired the assets of Exponation. What did you actually acquire?
Paul Miller: We acquired the assets of Digital Signage Expo which would have included the trademarks, the websites, the database, the customer database. I think that was about it. A few other URLs, websites that sort of surrounded the industry a little bit. But everything that Exponation had that was DSE-related is what we acquired.
David: And how did that happen? Was there like a Broker who came to you and said, “Hey, we have this”, or do you have people who just pay attention to this sort of thing?
Paul Miller: No, it was strange, to be honest. The last year has been strange in many ways. Firstly, we’re very aware at Questex of DSC. We had, as mentioned at the start, we had seen the show, we had visited the show. I wandered over to the show while at our Nightclub & Bar event.
David: Just to sober up? (Laughter)
Paul Miller: Yeah, actually, just to see what it's like at a B2B show that isn't serving alcohol, which is a different field, and actually we had been impressed for many years with the show. We certainly didn't really know the understories and what was really going on, but from a very shallow view, I would say, the show looked very professional. There were great companies, and there was good buzz, and we always said to each other that, that looks like a great event, and that was about it, just for the record.
Then I forget the actual timing, but sometime in the fall of last year, we obviously saw the story that Exponation had filed for Chapter 7, and that sort of alerted us about that a lot of us that are in the events business, the pandemic has been devastating. It wasn't that it was a surprise, but to be honest as having that sort of very narrow and shallow knowledge of the show, we were like, wow that's a shame that, that was a good looking event and we're probably going to see more of this was our initial reaction. Then what happened, Dave is that we got a notice from, I think it was the bankruptcy court. I can't remember who it was, but anyway, we got a notice that the assets were going to be auctioned to help raise funds, for those people that the debt was owed to if you will.
So we said, okay we like these assets and we've got some things that we could bring to the event, or this was before we knew, by the way, that might be relevant. So we entered into an auction process and it was the first time in my career that I've ever been through such a process and it truly was a person on the phone, basically banging the gavel and saying, “Yep, sold to the people at the back,” and that ended up being us. We obviously then did a lot of homework before we went into the auction. We got our hands around a little bit. What was the size of the show? What was the target audience for the show? What do we think we could bring to the show? And it checked a lot of boxes for us. Yeah, we went into the auction seriously and we won that auction, and then, of course, you find what actually have we acquired? And that was a fascinating sort of few weeks of research.
David: I've spoken with you in the past, I've spoken with someone else from your company and a consultant, Brent Gleason, who you've engaged to help out with this.
I'm curious, as you've done your kind of due diligence and exploration of the industry, what have you been hearing about the industry, your impressions on that, but also, we can go from there to what are you going to do?
Paul Miller: Sure. So firstly I have to say, and I think you know this that there wasn't a lot of ho-hum type of commentary in the research when we went to the industry. People were very passionate about space, very passionate about this product. Not all of it positive. I think there've been some negative experiences for certain people, but what we did find, Dave, was that this is an industry that is going through terrific growth and that growth looks to be sustainable, certainly, through the next half a decade if not beyond in our opinion, so great sort of 7.5% CAGR growth rates, touches a lot of verticals, and I know that people listening and yourself would know this, but this was our learning, touching verticals as diverse as healthcare, through to retail, through to hotels, houses of worship, hotels. So that was really interesting for us.
We also found and heard that the industry actually wanted a place to gather. They do see this as an industry that has its unique personality. It's not all about one thing or another thing, and there are definitely some trends that are coming in, the digital out of home space for instance, that in my opinion, is akin to what happened between print and the internet, back in the late nineties, a lot of data starts to be kicked off and a lot of backend technology starts to get into play. With digital signage becoming the forefront of that, it's where people first interact. So we got very excited very quickly. Some of the comments frankly, were hard to swallow or people saying, “Hey, the event was not what it used to be.” “It was starting to lose a little bit of its luster.”
Obviously when the show was canceled last year. Some people were really quite upset about the lack of refunds and what went on there, and I fully understand that. We had to cancel a lot of events last year as well. It was a very tough scenario for everybody, but the industry we felt as we got into it had an opinion, and it was a strong opinion and people wanted to talk. We had incoming people calling us saying, “I want to talk to you about what you've bought here and let you know what you've got.”
And actually Brad was one of those, by the way, Brad said, look, I have a lot of history with the show, and I'd love to help reinvent it along the lines that I feel, and I think what the industry feels it should have been going in any way. So look, we have the ability to “start again” in many ways. I don't think the Exponation had that ability. They had a product, they had to try to grow that product. We've acquired a set of assets, but we have a real strong ability to listen to the community and try to create a new experience for the community that they're telling us they want. And that's unique. So, we purposely were have been extremely patient. We just said, let's listen, and the more we listen, the more we're finding that the industry wants an event, it wants a place to gather, but it doesn't really want your grandmother's DSC.
I think the event has reached its limit, if you will, in terms of value and people wanted to do something else going forward, without losing some of the great things about the event, seems like it was a fantastic place for the industry to network and meet once a year. We don't want to lose that. That's a super reason for having an event. So, it's been a real experience. I mean, this is a very good acquisition from my experience, acquired through auction had gone into Chapter 7 through the pandemic and it has a set of stakeholders that really want to have a say. I mean, nobody said, sorry, I don't want to talk about it, or, I don't really have a comment. Everybody had something to say and I think that's great. That shows some passion. It shows some engagement. It’s just that not all of the comments were positive, I have to be honest.
David: Oh, for sure. When we chatted in the past, I said, I don't think there's enough to do at a trade show with a whole bunch of exhibit stands and everything, the way it was done in the past. There's a diminishing number of companies that want to spend those kinds of dollars, and I just didn't see it. Is that what you’re hearing more broadly?
Paul Miller: Not really, no. I get your point, and we actually gave people the ability to tell us what they really want. Now, I will say that the number one thing that's coming back is that we want to meet people that are going to buy our product. So we want to meet, we don't really want to just get together and talk to each other. But it's a very expensive meeting to just talk to other people in the industry. So there's been a lot of questions to us like, do you reach people in the hotel industry? Do you reach people in the restaurant space? Do you reach people in other areas where digital signage is needed and can be engaged with?
And when we've explained, as I did up top, that these are the markets we're in, people have gone, if you can get those folks to attend an event, we absolutely will bring a booth and we absolutely will exhibit, but you gotta bring buyers. You're not going to get away with putting up an exhibit and meeting without competitors across the aisle, that’s not enough.
David: Right. I know with Exponation, they worked their butts off trying to get brands to show up, to a level that they were putting them on advisory boards and things like that, just to make them feel like they should be there.
Paul Miller: Yeah. Look, I've been in the events space for sort of 25 years. It is not easy, particularly when, and this is where it comes back to the strategy of Questex, I think compared with Exponation, we're a huge believer in content.
I think I've said this to you before content is still king or queen, but the kingdom is data. Once you have people and you've attracted them, around content, it's really about understanding what their needs are, what they're looking for, engaging with them, and I think if you're a pure-play event company, what you do is you put on an event once a year, you're sort of reliant on a lot of partners to produce that content for you, and not in your environment. So you don't get the data as much, and I think that makes it very difficult in complete deference to what Exponation was trying to do.
I think they were trying to do the right thing, but when you don't have that daily engagement with the community, it's quite hard to hit it out of the park on every single thing. You're going to find your content probably gets a bit tired, sometimes the loudest voice gets to be the speaker, as opposed to the one that everybody wants to hear. There are certain things that data takes out of the room. It takes that emotion out of the room and it says like this audience is engaging with this type of content, that's what they want to see live. That I think gives you a little bit more data-driven decision-making around what the industry wants, as opposed to my gut feel or what somebody just told me at the bar last week at the show.
David: So, based on everything you've been hearing, everything your team has been doing, do you have the bones of an idea of what we’re going to see?
Paul Miller: Yeah we do. I think that's a good description. I'm not sure we're fully fleshed out, but I can certainly tell you a few things that we're going to do.
Number one, we are going to relaunch the show. Just to be clear from the top, we are going to relaunch the show. We do think that the show has to be repositioned somewhat to be a broader show to bring in those customers, as I mentioned, We're looking at experiences around a broad-based agenda of life and business and mid the re-emergence of society and the global economy. So this is more about where does digital signage fit in the “roaring 20S”? So we are looking to bring back the event. We're looking at next Spring and we are looking at Las Vegas. I can't go much further than that at this point in time, because we are obviously trying to secure venues and we're trying to secure dates, and that by the way, is easier said than done in a post-pandemic environment and everybody wants dates.
But we do have our Nightclub & Bar rebranded as our Bar & Restaurant event in Las Vegas next spring. There's the possibility of bringing that together again if you will. We will have an exhibit floor but also adding things like show floor experiences, very inclusive. You know, “let's demonstrate some applications, do some showcases, have some themed presentation stages.” So a lot of buzz on the show floor, but at the same time, a really engaging conference program, lots of curated presentations, tracks based on innovative applications, why do this, what are the outcomes, what you should be looking for?
And last but not least we are hoping to have multiple layers of networking at the event. That's one thing that this community told us is, “Please don't lose the networking!”
As I think, you know more than I know, great parties, great places for the industry to come together and celebrate, learn to buy, to sell. So yeah, we were even looking at guides around Las Vegas itself, tours of installations so people can learn, form real-life applications, not just what somebody might tell you what could happen. Let's curate some tours, and we do that by the way, for our Bar & Restaurant event, we take people behind the scenes at a Nightclub behind the scenes of a Vegas restaurant, so they can see everything from point of sale applications through to what's going on in the kitchen, and how does the food come out? We think that the audience, the community is telling us it wants more, hands-on more, show me what works, more education, more demos and bring it all together as an event that is an experience beyond just, ”I walk the show floor and I meet a couple of friends at the bar.”
David: Yeah. I've certainly heard many times and when I did a little survey asking about, where should a trade show go? The comment that's stuck in my head was, I know when I go to something like DSE, I'm landing, and that's what I'm doing that week, or for the next two, three days, that's my subject matter versus an ISE or an InfoComm, which are great shows, but they're Omni shows covering a whole bunch of different vertical industries and technologies and everything else and you don't have this aggregate of people who are just there for digital signage. Now you could go to a party and talk to 20 people, and they're all doing things that have nothing to do with digital signage, but they're in AV.
Paul Miller: Yeah, by the way, I think both are relevant. A lot of respect for ISE and InfoComm and the AVIXA Association in general, I think they do great stuff by the way.
And I think there is relevance in attending a show that is broader than just the sort of industry that you're in. I think that's where you do see adjacencies and ideas that might be applicable. But what was loud and clear from this community was we wanted our own place. There's enough going on in the digital signage space for us to need to focus on our industry, our solutions, our ecosystem for us to want our own place, and that, by the way, was one of the key learnings over the last 8 to 10 weeks of listening to people.
There wasn't one person who said, I don't think the industry needs its own place. There are a few people who said can I afford the time to go to all of these events? And I think that's a relevant comment and that's all about saying, well, we have to win your respect to get your time, and we have to have a program that you walk away after two or three days or a week, and you go, “Wow, I'm going to recommend this to my friends because these guys really put something on that it creates a fear of missing out if I'm not there, and I think more importantly than all of that actually creates business interactions. People actually do write orders and they do write RFPs at the event.” That's what we're here for at the end of the day.
So yeah, I think the need for an event that's focused on this particular community is clear: that's actually a box that was checked very clearly. it wasn't a 50-50 decision.
David: There will be people who listen to this and think that's great that you're doing a show, but spring in Las Vegas or just spring in general in the trade show industry is very crowded. There's a lot going on and you're putting this in between ISC and InfoComm, which are AV shows, there's NAB, all these other ones that happening around then there, I've heard many people say it would be lovely if an event like this was in the fall instead.
Paul Miller: Yeah. Unfortunately, the fall is also busy. It's got its own interesting issues and particularly around the pandemic where shows have been moved around, and they're off cycles. The feedback that we got, Dave, was again, you're right, “It's crowded. Please don't put it over the top of another show because we don't want to be forced into a decision. Do we go to this or this?”
The feedback we got was, “We liked where it was before,” which was, around that April timeframe, spring timeframe. So we've taken that into account and we didn't have any huge set of people saying, “Hey, move it to November or get it out of the way.” The other option we had by the way was to think about, do we put it alongside our lighting show, which is in the fall, October, November.
The more we get into it, the more it becomes clear to us that actually, the lighting show is not as relevant as an audience, they tend to be lighting designers, people that are doing the rigging of lighting, et cetera. A better audience would be people that are buying stuff for their restaurant for us. So yeah, we're never going to get a date that's going to satisfy everybody, unfortunately. Our feeling is we have the best chance to bring the right set of buyers to this event in the spring of next year.
David: And if you do it somewhat in tandem with an existing show like your Bar & Restaurant show, I imagine there's some efficiency around Ops people, like, you don't have to bring double the staff. You may bring more than you would for one show, but not of double compliment.
Paul Miller: Yeah, the efficiencies come with, obviously the show place itself. So if we do go to the Las Vegas convention center, obviously you get efficiency. If you do two in one, if you will.
From our team perspective, maybe Dave, in terms of we could send seven people rather than two sets of five, for instance, which is where I think you're going. But I'm not sure, I think what we're looking at for this event is and also by the way, for the Bar & Restaurant event, as you can imagine, the experiences there are pretty high end. You've got people launching new dreams. You've got people launching new bar and restaurant concepts. So I think that it would be the same as at a reinvigorated DSE. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not looking for cost efficiencies, let me put it that way. That wouldn't be the reason for doing it.
David: When do you think you'll have a launch or an announcement saying we're going to do this?
Paul Miller: We're in the midst of recruiting an advisory board. We're getting some great traction there, by the way. I can give you a few names if that helps. I would say we are a matter of weeks away from a full announcement and maybe not many weeks.
David: Yeah, and I guess you really have to be because planning cycles are long, right? People are already budgeting for 2022.
Paul Miller: We gotta get moving, yeah.
It's not just the budgeting aspect of this. It's the sales team that has to be implemented. You've got to have your content team in place. Your advisory board needs to meet so we can start to get around the sort of flavor of the show. So no, we gotta get our skates on, no doubt about it.
David: So who are some of your advisors that you can say?
Paul Miller: Some that I can say, and by the way, there are a number of others that we think are going to be really exciting for the community to hear about, but we've got Rich Ventura, B2B Business line manager at Sony, I think previously the chairman of the DSF. We've got Rick Robinson, Chief Strategy Officer for Billups, leading voice in the out-of-home industry, and by the way, a play on the advisory board, just for the record is these four quadrants, there's the industry veterans, those people that really know this space, the new voices, and the new faces. We said we're going to reinvigorate, let's get some new voices. So Jackie Walker, digital signage subject matter expert at Publicis Sapient is one of those.
We've got a number of others. Laura Davis Taylor retail & reality, we've got some people here that I think are going to bring some really great new voices and faces alongside the veterans, also strategic partners that we're looking at, and of course, people like yourself in the media. We'd like to have a balance of all of the above and if we're going to deliver on our promise of a reinvigorated show, I think the definition of insanity is doing something the same way and then expecting a different outcome, so we've got to make some changes here and reinvigorate the advisory board, get new names and voices and faces involved, but don't throw away the baby with the bathwater either, make sure you've still got the people that know what they're talking about.
David: The last question I suppose is will it be called Digital Signage Expo or it'd be something else, or is that TBD?
Paul Miller: Yeah, that's a great question. We have, interestingly, sometimes for how things happen without doing more sort of fundamental research, but internally we're using the DSE acronym quite a lot. I don't know is it Digital Signage Expo? Is it Digital Signage Experience? Is it DSE? At the moment where we're sticking with brand equity. Words and all that come with digital signage expo, but it's interesting internally, and we do refer a lot to it as DSE, and sometimes that just turned into the experience as opposed to the expo. So a little bit more about the industry, a little bit less about the product itself.
I would say a personal front, from what I've heard from customers, Digital Signage Expo is fine. People are calling it DSE anyway, and I don't know if I want to go through a massive rebranding exercise at the same time we're doing a relaunch of the event.
David: Yeah. It's more of the communications and the people you bring on board and everything else.
Paul Miller: I think so, yeah. At the end of the day, I think it is: have we delivered a product that people go to and say you know what, these guys are on the path to creating a must-go-to event, we did some business, it was great to meet the community again, and I learned a lot. If we can check those boxes, I think we can then start to think about, okay, what now? And at the moment, we're just fully focused on producing something that people walk away from Vegas going, “These guys nailed it, they listened and we've got an event that's a must go for our industry, and they want to listen to some more on how we can make improvements from stage one.”
So I think at the end of the day, that's what really matters. Yes, people have a lot of opinions. Yes, there's a lot of baggage. Yes, there's a lot of words that we're using right now that I hope resonate with the industry. But at the end of the day, it's did we deliver?
David: All right, Paul, thank you. I appreciate your time.
Paul Miller: Dave, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
Michael Schneider, Gensler (from InfoComm Connected 2020)
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I was kinda sorta off last week and did not record a new interview, but I have this audio track from a recent online event that's well worth sharing.
The pandemic shifted InfoComm 2020 from Las Vegas to online last month, and one of many educational sessions held at InfoComm Connected was about experiential design.
I was the host, and my guest was Michael Schneider of the giant global design firm Gensler. I've known Michael for a few years, first at ESI Design and now at the New York City offices of Gensler, where he runs the Media Architecture team.
The session was called Designing Contact-Free Building Experiences, and was a chat about how the global health care crisis is forcing a re-think of using and navigating public and commercial building spaces.
Where much of the experience in big buildings lately has been about Wow Factor, health safety and utility are now in the mix.
The session was a video call, with a chat recorded ahead of time and then live Q&A. About 20 minutes in, you will hear the tech jump in with a few questions.
I'll have a fresh podcast, with transcription, next week.
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Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
2019 DSF Coffee And Controversy
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
A couple of weeks back I was in New York for the annual Digital Signage Federation Coffee and Controversy event, which I moderated.
I was able to grab audio last year and post as a podcast, and this year we managed the same. The audio is OK, at best, but you should be able to hear just fine.
Your big challenge will be discerning who is saying what, because the session was me and five great panelists, all with terrific insights and experience.
The topic was privacy and proof, as it relates to tech being used for retail and advertising insights. The speakers were:
- Dylan Gilbert, Policy Fellow at DC-based PublicKnowledge
- Laura Davis-Taylor, the Co-Founder of Atlanta's HighStreet Collective & LivingRetailLab
- Kym Frank, President of New York-based Geopath
- Amy Avery, Chief Intelligence Officer at New York agency Droga5
- Jeremy Bergstein, CEO of New York agency The Science Project
By all accounts it was a great session that could have gone another hour or more. The DSF is working on video clips, as well, which will be available to its membership.
Please note it is double the length of a "normal" 16:9 podcast.
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Wednesday Sep 25, 2019
Paul Peng, AUO
Wednesday Sep 25, 2019
Wednesday Sep 25, 2019
I was in Taiwan recently for a trade show called Touch Taiwan, and managed to grab 20 minutes with Paul Peng, the Chairman and CEO of display manufacturing giant AU Optronics.
AUO is based in Taiwan, with its main office about an hour south of Taipei in the manufacturing city of Hsinchu. The company has about 42,000 employees globally, including a digital signage business unit that came with the acquisition of the CMS software company ComQi.
AUO makes LCD displays primarily, with a production line that can do glass sizes from Gen 3.5 to 8.5. The bigger the size, the bigger the display.
At one of the two biggest stands at Touch Taiwan, AUO was showing the wide range of display options, from stretch LCDs for retail and transport applications to super-premium 8K displays.
We grabbed some chairs at the back of the AUO stand for the chat, and while Peng does most of the talking, ComQi CEO Ifti Ifhar also gets in on the discussion. The audio quality is a little iffy, just because of where we were ...
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Wednesday Jan 23, 2019
NRF 2019 Round-Up: Interviews on ESLs, HTML5, Interactive Lightboxes And Avatars
Wednesday Jan 23, 2019
Wednesday Jan 23, 2019
This is a special edition of the podcast which I am pretty much whacking together myself, in the wake of running around the NRF show last week in New York.
I had my handy little Tascam recorder with me, so I grabbed some quick interviews with several companies I bumped into, with the idea of stitching them together in a round-up. These are not the biggest companies. Not necessarily the hottest stuff on the show floor. But they caught my eye, or in the case of the first interview, reflect my thinking that I wanted to know more.
Normally I get interviews properly smoothed out by my sound engineer guy, but with four interviews and intro and so on, it was a big ask on short notice. So here I am, fiddling around with Audacity audio software. So this will be a bit rougher than normal, but the content is solid.
One of the things I noticed on the NRF show floor was how there were way more electronic shelf labels than I have seen in the past, which is why I stopped to chat with Rob Crane, the head of global sales for the ESL company Altierre.
I bumped into Tomer Mann, from 22 Miles, outside the Intel booth. He was doing stand-up demos of his company's long-running wayfinding platform. That's well established, but I was interested in what the company was doing in retail, using HTML.
Inside that Intel booth, I chatted with a Spanish company, called Kendu, that comes out of retail graphics and has introduced a hybrid print and signage solution that uses LED animations behind a lightbox frame of print graphics, and also uses gesture for interactivity.
Finally, I was wandering around the Innovation Lab - which is a lot of new companies, but also companies who can't afford a full booth. I noticed people hanging around a floor display, and reacting to the screen. A company that's partially Toronto, partially Berlin, has an avatar chatbot thing that uses AI to drive interactivity. TwentyBN's avatar seems a little gimmicky, but done well it would be useful in spaces where there's a set of predictable questions.
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Wednesday Nov 07, 2018
2018 DSF Coffee and Controversy, in NYC
Wednesday Nov 07, 2018
Wednesday Nov 07, 2018
I was in New York last week for the Digital Signage Federation's annual Coffee and Controversy breakfast event - a panel discussion that each year brings together some of the most influential leaders in the digital signage industry.
I'm on the DSF board and my fellow board members drafted me to run the panel - with Chris Riegel of STRATACACHE, Jeff Hastings of Brightsign and Beth Warren of Creative Realities.
There's only so much controversy you can whip up around digital signage, but I tried ... and if anyone in this industry was going to stir up some shit, it was Chris. He didn't disappoint, nor did Jeff or Beth.
The women who ran the AV for the event very kindly generated an audio recording for me. This is about twice the length of a normal 16:9 podcast, but if you didn't have the chance, time or budget to get to New York last week, you can have a listen to what was said.
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