Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Hubert van Doorne, Nexmosphere

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Sensors and triggered content have been part of digital signage for probably 20 years, but they weren't widely used for a lot of that time because putting a solution together involved a lot of planning and custom electronics.

A Dutch company called Nexmosphere has changed all that, offering a wide range of different sensors that trigger content to digital signage screens by sensing the presence of people or reacting to an action, like someone lifting a product up from shelf to get a better look.

Nexmosphere has developed its own set of low-cost custom sensors and controllers that make it fast and easy for digital signage solutions companies, including pure-play CMS software shops, to add triggered content capabilities. Nexmosphere focuses on the hardware and makes an API available to partners.

I chatted with CEO Hubert van Doorne about the company's roots and how his customers are now using sensors to drive engagement in retail.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. Can you give listeners a rundown on what Nexmosphere is all about? 

Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yes. I’d love to do that. Nexomsphere is all about sensors for digital signage and to make any digital signage system interactive and by interactive, we do not mean only by pressing a button or touching something on a screen, but it's much more of letting the digital signage installation respond to actually the person in front of it. So it can be a presence sensor. It can be something that you touch or lift the product and that way make an interactive system at Nexmosphere, build a platform of a lot of different sensors that can be hooked up easily to the system and in that way for the system integrator and really help in building this sort of system.

It's something that's been done for decades by a lot of companies who made their own sensors so in that case, it’s not real rocket science, but the beauty of the product is that you can take any of these sensors, bring them together and you don't need any development time to have a proof of concept running and I think that's the real strong point of what we offer. 

Yeah, I've been in this sector for a very long time, and I can remember, when I was working with one company, we had a guy who I think worked out of a motor home somewhere in Arizona or California or something like that, and he would design boards that could be used for very early iterations of sensor-based detection, presence sensor, that sort of thing, but it was a lot of work and there was nothing off the shelf that you could buy to do all that.

I suspect that there's a whole bunch of companies that said, “Oh, thank God, I can just order this and it's already sorted out.” 

Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. It's actually also how the company started in 2015. We were a part of a display company making POS materials for in-store and we developed our own sensor set for Sonos and for Philips to go into the European stores, but what we saw is that the number of stores was heavily declining and the complexity of every system was really growing. So we needed something modular that was not just for one group of displays. We needed something for five thousand, you could make the same part of electronics, but now we need it for 200 stores, something still affordable to build, and that's how the idea started off of making a more standard solution that you can plug and play.

And, first, when we came to the market, everybody was like, “No, we will build something ourselves, that's much easier.” But then, over time you saw these numbers of installations decline. concept stores would only be maybe five stores or ten stores and then slowly evolve over time and that was getting difficult to make something really solid, and robust in small numbers. So that's where we really saw that the companies coming to us. Like indeed, what you say, thank you, you're developing this because it's only a very small part of the total installation cost and compared to a screen or a media player, we are only a fraction of the cost, but it's adding a lot of functionality. So in the end, if it's not working, it's a problem. but it's also not something where you can really save a lot of money because it's only a small part of the budget. 

When you say it's a small part of the budget, are we talking tens of dollars or tens of euros or hundreds of euros on a typical installation? 

Hubert van Doorne: It depends, but if you go for a presence sensor by screen, you have it over, $40-$50 a sensor. So that's only a few percent of the total installation, and of course, we go also to museum experiences where we have 20-40 sensors in one set, and then maybe you go to a few thousand euros, but in the end, it's never a very expensive set of gear, because, in the end, it's just small electronic bits that you can very well pick the right size that you need for your project. So there's very little that you do not use in the end. 

What's the range of types of sensors that you do? 

Hubert van Doorne: In terms of applications, we have a couple of real main areas and the first one is absolutely by far present sensing and its presence and motion. So if someone is in front of a display, if he's approaching or moving across or where he is exactly standing that sort of application, but it's very much based on seeing where a person is and depending on where he or she stands, trigger the content or just for statistics, counting how many people are there.

And, the second, large area is what we call lift and learn. So if you pick up a product you can actually display information about this product over video, because we know which product’s being lifted. Typically we have about seven different technologies that can lift and learn. So we have a lot of different sensors for different products, but in the end, it is all for the same application of building a lift and learning.

Another bigger area is LED lighting which you use as guidance. So a third area that we do is, guidance where you really can guide people, for example, in a museum, where to look if you light up an exhibit, but it can also be in a cosmetic store. If you have different products and you make your selection on, for example, a tablet light up the products that match this selection. So LED lighting, it's not so much a sensor, it's more an actuator, but that's what we do a lot as well, and the fourth, biggest pillar is what we call UI elements and that's anything to do with, for example, normal push buttons, but it can also be air buttons so that you just hold your hand somewhere on a position very close to the screen and it already triggers so you don't have to really touch, air gesture that you can do with your hand in the air. That's all elements where you really want the user to do an interaction with the screen that is not on a touch screen and those elements, that's another important group of sensors. And then we have a lot of small, little special sensors. They're fun, but it's not the big chunk.

Did you find as you were growing the company that you started adding these things because people were asking about it or you just saw that people are struggling with understanding where to look next and so on… so let's use LEDs to light guide them? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both. Of course, we had already very early clients who helped us also. By asking the right things like, “Hey, this is something we could really use. So can you build something for us?” But also looking at ourselves, we have a very strong team, with a lot of ideas where they really look at what is needed now in the market and how we can find a technology that can really be well suited to do this and I think that's also a little bit where we differentiate ourselves from others. 

You do have great industry sensors. They are very expensive. They are very good but, for larger rollouts, and larger deployments, they are far too expensive to make a big rollout or too complex. Yeah, you have the cheap stuff, but in the end, it's also not something that can really scale because you cannot really adjust them exactly how you have to use them in mainly a retail environment, but also we see them now in more and other environments where if you use too many standard sensors then you cannot customize to how it should behave in that area and you can also get a lot of misreads and I think that's the strong point of our sensors that we really build something that you just connect and it works in that retail environment. 

A good example I always give is a presence sensor. We had a competition using exactly the same chipset from ST Microelectronics, but the fact that somebody walked in front of it and there was a minimum timing of a few milliseconds. A person should be there for half a second because otherwise a person cannot appear in half of a fraction of a second and be gone again but if you have a very fast sensor and you think, oh yeah, that was a person you also have to look at the application. It's not in a shopping center that somebody comes in and then a half second is gone again. So that must be a misread somewhere from the sensor, and that's how you very cleverly can filter how sensors should work, and I think that that's why we really make them for the, we call retail environment. That's our main application area, and if you want to use it in other areas there, it will work as well, but retail is just a very harsh environment where it should always work.

Are these devices that you're somewhat buying off the shelf, so to speak, or are you pretty much going down to the wood and designing these from scratch and sourcing the different components and maybe designing your own PCB and so on? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, it's a good question. All PCB design is completely done by ourselves, but the actual sensor is often a technology that we use. It's a standard chipset available from one of the big manufacturers like Sharp or anyone who makes real sensors for the industry where we take just the sensor chip part, put it on our own PCB, and really make it a solution that fits the digital signage market.  

So do you have contract manufacturing that makes this stuff over in Shenzhen or somewhere or are you doing that in the Netherlands? 

Hubert van Doorne: Some of our PCB manufacturing or most of our PCB manufacturing itself is done in China but we also have some clients who prefer the European stamp. So for some of the products, the PCBs are also made in Europe, and then end assembly and end-of-line testing are all done in the Netherlands. So that is where we really make the product and put all the software on and package it as a final product. 

If you look at the qualification, most of the products are really made in the Netherlands. It's not that we have a contract manufacturer somewhere in China who builds our complete box. We want to have that control at the end still in the Netherlands. 

Yeah. So you're definitely not just rebadging something that's made for the China market and client your own? 

Hubert van Doorne: No, absolutely not. For this, it would also be a little bit too complex. I have to say, of course, some accessories like cables or that sort of thing is of course, the standard stuff we sell, we do not make anything nonspecial ourselves, but all the sensor part controllers, everything that's, that's true, including if you look to the products, all the casings, everything is our own design.

You mentioned presence detection. Can you work with computer vision platforms and drive analytics, or is it very kind of basics, sensing the saying, “In an hour, these many people appear to be in front of the display?” 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, we do a little bit different than computer vision. I think honestly the computer vision guys are making great products. The only problem often is that you cannot put a camera or it's something that needs to be calibrated to the space. Typically our sensors are something that you can just drop in the space and it will start working and also on a different price point, but if you look, what we can provide is that we can see if there's someone in front of the sensor and we can measure the distance on a, like a centimeter-accurate. So we know it's a half inch where someone exactly stands and if she, for example, now moving towards display or moving away we get all this trigger data delivered to the digital signage player.

And with third parties, partners of ours, for example, you can have beautiful dashboards that can give you insights like, “This was the opportunity to see” and “So many people engaged with the product.” There you can see a complete dashboard exactly at that time of the day. It was busier because, in this area, more people were standing at that sort of statistics we could easily provide them. 

Yeah, for many years I have wondered about computer vision, the applicability for a lot of digital signage applications, this idea that you're going to serve content based on the demographic profile of who's in front of the screen.

It just didn't hit me as something that would ever be done very much, and I'm curious if your customers and partners generally find that, you know what, just having a sense of how many people the opportunity to see and so on is more than enough. We don't need to get that granular. We don't need to micro-target individual viewers.

Hubert van Doorne: I would say if you talk to the advertising companies, it's sort of the holy grail and they're all looking for the solution, and it's not that it's not coming, but it's also the question of how would you target your audience and I think that's something that’s being asked a lot, but if you see what is the technology needed for it, and if I see how far digital signage is now off still often, not even, if you see just in the store, like looping content, yeah, you could already be much more responsive than just looping content.

And that's also not being done. So before we leap into light years ahead of what we could do, and yes, technically we can do, but if, for example, already the advertisers have problems delivering the right content at the right time, this becomes something very, time-sensitive to really have it in an auction platform and very quickly delivered. So for sure, it's something where, slowly the whole advertising market will go, but I personally do not have the feeling that it will very quickly come into large deployments. 

Yeah. People are still freaked out about the idea of a camera being on them, even though there are cameras all over a store watching for security reasons.

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah. But it's also about how would you like to use it. I think showing content at the relevant position. There was once a client and this was many years ago, but it was about in-store materials and he was a manufacturer of cat food. So he says, “If somebody is in front of the shelf with all the cat food, that's the perfect moment to advertise because I know my customer is a cat owner, or at least someone who wants to feed the cat, and if he's male, female, and their age” and I think that's a very relevant thing. 

If you look into a store layout or for all the media advertising in the store if you know where the shoppers are already in the store, you can also tell a lot about what would be relevant content to show and that it's not only based on age demographics or demographics like male, female. I think that's something typically the advertisers do to slice the market and spice up the market. But I think there are different ways to do that in a very elegant way as well. 

Are you competing with touch or is it just another approach?

Hubert van Doorne: I think we work well together with touch even. I think we are hyper-focused on the sensor market, and that's the same, as what I say about computer vision. I think they make lovely products and also people who do mobile phone tracking, and it's a huge market of all kinds of inputs and sensors you can do and a lot of manufacturers have great touch screens, and I think what we do is just add another layer of possibilities of sensing something that can work well together. 

There's a bit of an orchestration to some of these experiences, right? if you have presence sensing, you can be 10 feet away and you might get one message if you're closer. If you move closer to a screen, it can trigger a different message and maybe guide them using the LED light bars and things like that. It seems to me I've seen demos of this when I've walked through your stand at shows like ISE. 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, that's definitely the presence sensor can just be to make something different than a looping video. I always say for the presence sensor, it’s the same as reading a book. I would like to start on page one, and if you want to tell a story to your customer, why are you starting somewhere in the middle? Because it's a looping video. You will never be synchronized. If somebody approaches the screen, it'll always be in the wrong spot.

And I think with a presence sensor, you can have a nice triggering content that really attracts the people to come close to the screen, and when they’re close and when they are in range, I would say you can start firing your message and have your story being told. A nice thing about the sensor is that you can actually time how long is the person standing in front. and is he watching the whole advert or is he halfway moving away? And that comes to another thing that you can very nicely do is, of course, the A/B testing. If you have different content, you can say, hey, with this content, just where the end is a little bit longer and a little bit more flashy, people stay six seconds longer, so this is better content to show.

So in that way, you can really optimize your content and your message by measuring how long people are looking and how can we improve. 

Now, if I'm a CMS software company, or a retail solutions company of some description, if I want to do that, am I having to write the software to create that experience, or is that somewhat templated or available within your end of the solution? 

Hubert van Doorne: That's a very good question. Technically we are a hardware provider. So the only thing we do is deliver the hardware that's capable of delivering triggers to the media player, and that can be over USB or over network or RS22 and we deliver that trigger message, and then you need a CMS that can actually really sense what to do with the trigger and there's absolutely no software from our side. It's just then the software of the CMS where you can, really in that UI setup like, for example, in a BrightSign, you have Bright Author, and then you can select from a list like, If sensor three is triggered, then I want to start video number five and when this is done, I want to have that started. So that's something that can be done via the CMS. 

I noticed on your website that you have three kinds of distinctions or tiers or whatever or partners. You've got full partners. You've got fully compatible and then partially compatible. What's the distinction between them? 

Hubert van Doorne: It's a very good one. We are still missing the official explanation on the website. So we'll add that over time, but no, maybe good to start with our partners that are really strong partners in the industry where we often exhibit together, we do trade shows together and we do projects together where we really team up and make something work for the integrator as a complete set. So that's our real industry partners. 

There are also a lot of CMSs that deliver a nice software solution, but in the end, we are not very closely working with them together, but the application works well and that's where we say it's a compatible CMS. So that means that all functionality will work, but we don't know that many details about the CMS. So if you want to know how our solution will work with that CMS, best to contact the CMS and they can tell you more about how the integration works because we cannot keep track of 50 different CMSs, how they all work, and how they all work in detail.

Lately, we added the partially compatible and that's the reason that we have a few that do a lovely integration on two or three of our sensors, and it's a very nice UI where you can set everything, but it's not working with every sensor. It's just, for example, our few popular sensors where it does work with, and they say yeah, but we can easily make a widget for this client and then it can work with any sensor, yeah, but it's not something that you can just connect and it just will work. So we say, with these companies, it does work, but for some specific centers. So please watch out and contact the company if you want to use it for this specific specific sensor, and ask them if it's working. So that's why we made these three different tiers.

These sensors are generally very small, and in a lot of cases, you would never even know they're there, right? 

Hubert van Doorne: Exactly. 

Is that by design, a necessity even? Or is it just that's the state of miniaturization where you can do that? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, I would say the fact that you can make it very small is because it's retail, nobody wants to see tech. So the more you can hide it, the better it is, and yeah, I think we make quite a big effort to make the sensors as small as possible because they are much easier to integrate. So yeah, I think there are some options where you can have more bulky systems, but we always try to make them as small as possible.

I've spent quite a bit of time lately talking to different display manufacturers and R&D companies about emerging displays, and one of the things I talk about is with stuff like micro LED, there will be a time when you'll be able to include a sensor right within the display. So just because the pixels are so small, you could put a sensor device in there as well. So you're not just looking at a screen, you're also looking at something that can do some degree of sensing. 

Have you started to look at that at all, or is that just out there somewhere? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, we do see that, I think I can take a parallel to a couple of years ago. We were quite growing big in the room booking systems that we did little LED strips that you could add to the system and then you saw the first screens popping up where they had the little LED strips integrated, and we are not selling any LED strips anymore for booking. That's just where the industry goes. But I don't see that as a bad thing, because I think, for example, if Samsung decides to add a presence sensor in every one of their screens, then that's the next step where we say okay, then maybe our sales of single presence sensors will go down, but there are other sensors again, where you would like to measure again. 

So I think it's sort of the same as you see media players integrating into screens. If people are using it a lot, it makes sense to make it in one unit. I'm happy to see that everything gets less complex and is being integrated into one unit, and I think it's more our job to, for all those things that cannot go into super high volume, that there is space in every screen, then maybe you need a present sense or just looking at a different angle then right in front of the screen. That will be something that's never added to the screen. because it's a typical application. 

There are two components, right? There's the sensors and then there's controllers. How does that break down and do you need both? Obviously you need the sensors. 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, and you do need the controllers. What we did with our hardware structure is that we have a lot of sensors and they all come back to the same little connector. It's what we call Xtalk and it's like a mini USB, and that's actually every sensor can be hooked into any controller, and then the different controllers we have is just to oversee the whole system setup and to have one, yeah, let's say a sort of USB hub where you have one communication channel to the media player and our controller is then, really doing the power supply for all sensors, seeing what's connected and being the host the communicator to the media player. 

And we have different controls because for example, for something like LED lighting, you can get a controller with an LED driver already embedded on board, so it makes it much easier to control LED strips and the same for example for audio switching and we have a lot of different controllers that have different functionalities built in just to make it more easy and have it integrated in one system. 

How do you know if everything's behaving as it's supposed to? 

Hubert van Doorne: It's a good question. The nice thing is that our system, our controller is completely monitoring all sensors and the system integrator can also always see if all sensors are online even exact serial numbers and everything that's connected. 

It looks like very simple tech, but in the end, you can, within a dashboard, for example, completely monitor your system health and see even if somebody is plugging something in a different port. You can already see that the system's setup has changed. So that's how we can monitor and see if something is not working or needs attention over time. That's something that's really needed if you do large-scale rollouts, and I think, yeah, everything we build is just made for maintaining it or giving it a possibility to roll out in big volume.

Is that your device management dashboard, this is purely an API that you can integrate into a system integrator or whatever. 

Hubert van Doorne: It's just the API where we deliver that, and we have then our partners that can deliver you a complete dashboard already that you don't have to build something yourself, but if you have the as a system integrator, I want to build my own dashboard, you're free to use our API and you don't need any license. Then it's just free. You buy our hardware and there's no license cost. 

Is there an emerging kind of tech that you're now looking at that you think you can add to the stack or could be a big deal like lift and learn and presence sensing has been around for a very long time. People who've been in this industry and doing retail solutions understand it, but is there new stuff coming? 

Hubert van Doorne: Not so much on the sensor part. For example, last year, we added weight sensors also for lift and learning so it's a completely different technology. Radar technologies are improving. So yes, we always continuously monitor what's available and there will be new additions, but I think that will not be complete wow in the industry now there is the Holy Grail that this is possible. It will be just additions over time. 

What we do see is that there is a very strong appetite for green signage products and what we will do is next year we will launch a new product in that area so that we can also deliver to more verticals than only the retail and experiences as we become more and more interested in other verticals. 

I was curious about digital signage. If you work in the industry, you think it's quite a big industry, but in relative terms, it's quite small and narrow. Is there enough of a business for you just within digital signage, or is it important to branch out? 

Hubert van Doorne: No, I think it's definitely big enough for digital signage now because there's almost hardly any competition. I always say our biggest competitor is no sensor. So in a project somewhere that the sensor is being skipped, but, it is fast growing and I think digital signage itself is growing, but I think also you see much more areas where it becomes, yeah, it's a discussion, is it digital signage or, it's a screen somewhere in an area, if you call it digital signage or not, we see more and more screens coming up and more and more data becoming available in the digital world. 

So I think, yes, the number of screens will be quite growing in the next few years and I think, there's a very big market we can service. 

Yeah, I've written a number of times and talked to, or when I've done talks with companies, about what I call boring signage and the idea of using sensors that maybe you would think about for parking garages and available stalls and so on, and using that in airports for very busy restrooms and things like that to have displays out front that kind of give you the state of availability of that. 

It sounds dumb, but I think it's incredibly valuable and again, it's just applying sensors in a creative way. 

Hubert van Doorne: Oh, yeah, and we see regularly that our sensors are being used in completely different order verticals. So your toilet example is one where they used our sensors, and even to see if the bin is full in the restroom. So it's not that we are not able to provide those markets. It's only that we communicate and we read the development for the retail space. 

But yeah, you will see more and more areas opening up where it becomes interesting and, that's something we definitely can branch out of, over, over time as well. For the moment, we are really focused on the retail space because I think there's a lot to win still, but yeah, the sensor technology will go not to retail or experience centers only. 

Retail gives you scale too that you don't necessarily get with washroom solutions. 

Hubert van Doorne: No, and I think very important is that, in the retail space, data is hugely important for AI to see. How can I do my shopper assortment? How can I see how people are behaving in the store? And actually by providing the sensors that can really measure. 

We have, for example, now a retailer in the UK that's only using the sensors to see how people are moving in front of the shelf. There's not even digital signage anymore, and I think, that gives the importance of knowing what people are doing, that they want to deploy a system in more than a hundred stores to measure to just see how they can improve and make better operation.

You're in Eindhoven? 

Hubert van Doorne: Yeah, that's right. 

How big is the company at this point? 

Hubert van Doorne: At this point, we are only a very small group. We are around 25 staff and now slowly growing our sales team as we see the market really starting to develop before it was a lot of interest and smaller projects and sometimes a bigger rollout of 500 stores or something, but now you really see, since last year volume coming in and that's really nice that we can now scale and now we are really from the sometime away from the startup and now a scale-up. So that's also where it will happen with the staff in the same way. 

You mentioned being involved with another company back in 2015? Are you completely a private company or do you have ties to a larger firm? 

Hubert van Doorne: No, it's a completely privately owned company. At that time, we were part of a display company, but that one stopped in business and this was completely carved out as an individual company and it's completely independently operating.

If people want to find out more, they get you on nexomsphere.com?

Hubert van Doorne: Yes, that's the perfect place to start, and if there's any question, please reach out to one of our team members or the emails. We are like not all companies always, but we are responsive to our emails, and we like to help people with any question they have because that's the first step in exploring what sensors can do.

You're at ISE, right? 

Hubert van Doorne: Of course, and that will be really exciting with some new products. You should not miss as an integrator, even if you're not interested in the retail space. So I would definitely see common visitors. 

All right. Thank you for spending some time with me. 

Hubert van Doorne: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Have a great day.

Lisa Schneider & Travis McMahand, Videotel

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There are not a lot of companies that have been involved in what we now call digital signage for 44 years, but Videotel has been selling technology that puts marketing information on screens since 1980.

The company started with VCRs (younger readers may have to Google that) and then started designing, manufacturing and selling DVD players that, unlike consumer devices, would happily play out a set of repeating video files for weeks, months and years. Back in the days before fast internet connections, cloud computing and small form factor PCs, that's how a lot of what we now know as digital signage was done.

About 14 years ago, the San Diego-area company added dedicated, solid state digital signage media players - and that product line has steadily grown to include networked and interactive versions. The company also now has interactive accessories for stuff like lift and learn, and directional speakers that help drive experiences in everything from retail to museums.

I had a good conversation with Lisa Schneider, who runs sales and marketing, and Travis McMahand, Videotel's CTO. We get into the company's roots, the evolution to solid state media players, and how Videotel successfully competes with $400 and higher players, when at least part of the buyer market seems driven mostly by finding devices that are less than $100.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what Videotel is all about? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having both Travis and me today. We appreciate it. My name is Lisa Schneider and I am the executive vice president for sales and marketing for our company, Videotel Digital.

We were founded in 1980. Gosh, it's been almost 44 years now, back when we were manufacturing top-loading VCRs, that went into industrial-grade DVD players, and now in the last 14 years, we are manufacturing digital signage media players. We have interactive solutions that include various sensors like motion sensors, proximity sensors, and weight sensors. We've got mechanical LED push buttons and touchless IR buttons and RFID tags, and things like that that create interactive displays. We also provide directional audio speakers. We have various form factors for all types of projects, and then we also have Travis on the line with us. I'll let Travis introduce himself. 

Travis McMahand: Oh, hi, I'm Travis McMahand I am the CTO of Videotel Digital. 

Where's the company based? Is it in San Diego? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, we are in, it's San Diego. It's actually Chula Vista, borderline San Diego. So in California. 

San Diego area. 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, San Diego area. Beautiful San Diego. 

So I've been aware of your company forever and going all the way back to the days when you were doing industrial grade, commercially oriented DVD players. In the early days of digital science before things were networked, that's what people were using and if you used a regular DVD player or even a VCR or something like that, the thing was really not set up to play over and over again if you were using just like a consumer-grade device.

So the whole idea was you were, you guys developed commercial-grade versions that were rated to last, for days, weeks, months, years. Is that accurate? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, that is accurate, and it was, that was our flagship product back in the day. That was because we made a truly industrial-grade player and it would auto power on, auto seamlessly loop and repeat without any manual interaction, even without a remote. So it was a looping player. 

We actually still have three different types of industrial-grade DVD players that we still offer. They're actually really popular in healthcare facilities because they are specifically UL-approved for medical DVD players still, and they are still out there and, we are still producing them. 

The attraction for that at the time was that just the absence of really networked media players unless you were quite sophisticated and were using big box PCs and everything else, I assume that market with the exception of what you’re saying about Hospitals is largely gone away?

Lisa Schneider: It hasn't been, for example, like sometimes with waiting rooms, people are still using DVDs for movies, for entertainment purposes, not just in healthcare. Sometimes there are still people who are self-burned content for museums. It's just simple for them to just throw the disc in and then they walk away and it just continuously loops. So they're still out there. 

It's not completely gone away and we are one of the only ones left though that is still really providing the industrial grade DVD players.

You said about 14 years ago, you got into digital signage media players that were not based on DVDs, it was based on hard drives or solid-state storage.

Lisa Schneider: Yes, we started with solid state media players that were just simply looping off of an SD card or USB, no network connection, none of the fancy stuff, and that was really kind of the migration from the DVD, because people didn't want to use DVDs anymore. They just wanted to upload their content, do the same thing, load them, and go.

So we probably still have a few versions of just solid-state players. That's how we entered the market. But one of the really cool things we did was we made one of them interactive, which, that's where we come into the interactive solutions, which we can talk about too. 

The primary products that you have now are network-connected, right?

Lisa Schneider: We have both. We still have solid-state digital signage players, for those simple needs, and then we do have networked players as well. 

I'm thinking there's an awful lot of cases like retail marketing for brands for product launches and things like that, where, yes, you could use a network digital signage player, but it's loading up a set of files at the start and that's really all it's ever going to use, right? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's a lot of the use cases, where they just want to upload the content and let it go but there are obviously use cases where the content is ever-changing and they can push out content on our remote players, network players, via quick push.

Do you have device management? Will you know what's going on with these devices, as they're out in a big box or whatever? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, one of our new player, we actually just did a press release on it for our VP92 4K network player. It will allow customers to use our free embedded software on the player that will allow them to push out the content remotely and that they can see what is being played in the various locations, wherever the box is deployed to, and then if it's just a single unit or hundreds of units if it's up in the thousands, then we recommend our cloud-based CMS software where they can manage, do all the management within the software itself.

So you have your own software, but I'm assuming you're not selling yourself as a software company? 

Lisa Schneider: No, we are not selling ourselves as a software company. We have hardware and then we have various software options. But it is embedded in the players to make it extremely simple to use.

And it's tuned specifically for your devices. 

Lisa Schneider: Correct. Yes. 

Can a third-party CMS company, a CMS software company use your boxes? 

Lisa Schneider: Travis that might be a good question for you to answer. 

Travis McMahand: That's a possibility. We design our players to be simple and reliable. We don't make it so difficult to set up a program, so in doing that, we've hidden or disabled, certain features within the operating system. But we can still work with companies if they have a specific application or service that they want to use. We can definitely work with companies to try to make that happen. 

Okay, so I guess a scenario would be something like a retailer or even a brand that has networks in stores and is using a CMS for the big displays for retail marketing and they say, we would like to use your stuff for the interactive or whatever, can we use the same platform to manage both of them?

Travis McMahand: Yeah, that's a possibility. It goes on a case-by-case basis. 

It's not something you're actively marketing, but technically you could do it if it makes sense for both sides, right? 

Lisa Schneider: Absolutely, Dave. That's what I'd like to interject. We're open to those conversations with anybody who is interested, especially if it is a larger project is something I would entertain. 

The hardware sector has been a tough one for a lot of the companies that have media players, with maybe the notable exception of BrightSign, which has a very big footprint everywhere, but the PC guys in particular, struggled to, in recent years, get relevance, and a lot of that seems to be driven by a race to the bottom to see how low we can go in terms of cost for a media player, and we now have Amazon with a custom build or kind of a stripped-out build of its Fire Sticks that are $99. 

Has it been a challenge to compete with that stuff or, do you operate differently or have a different market?

Lisa Schneider: That's a great question, and yes, I did see that new Amazon $99 Fire Stick. But we're very unique in a sense where, sure you can purchase a $99 player, but is it really industrial grade? Is it going to seamlessly auto-loop? Is it reliable? Can you connect interactive devices to it? Can you grow within it? 

So it is a challenge in some aspects of it. But it seems that the ones that go, the customers that choose that route, end up circling back and they want more. It wasn't enough. The price was good, but then they realized, if we invest a little bit more, we're getting all of these things that we can grow into.

And your media playout boxes, they look like they're industrial grade, ruggedized. They've got what looks like heat sinks or things like that built into it. Are these designs done in Chula Vista and then you have contracts manufacturer over in Asia? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, spot on.

We design our own players in-house, and then we have them made, and we have a stringent process and a bunch of design engineers that are just constantly trying to break things, and they do a really good job of it, and we are very careful as to what we put out in the market and that is what also makes us unique. 

And that allows you to sell at a higher price point because you have people looking at it and going, okay, I get why I'm paying more for this. 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, absolutely. We're not just relabeling some cheapo boxes. This is something that is designed in-house and these are the features, and we are able to get a little bit more because we are using premium parts during the manufacturing process and other other reasons as well, not just for the hardware.

Travis, is it your own operating system or are you running on some kind of flavor of Linux? 

Travis McMahand: The base operating system is Android. We use Android and just build off of that, build our apps within it, and set up all of the settings exactly the way we want. 

 Has that been that from the start or did you evolve into Android?

Travis McMahand: Oh, we evolved into Android. We originally started when we first were doing players that were playing content just from USB and SD cards. It was really simple at that point and we were doing our own operating system. embedded operating system within the player at that point. 

But then when we wanted to start adding more features and opening up the platform to more types of files, we found that using an Android-based operating system was much easier and more reliable to get going. 

When I look at your customer list, it's impressive. You've got a whole bunch of interesting customers, a lot of them appear to be attractions, museums, that sort of thing, some brands, and so on.

How would you describe, Lisa, your core customer base? 

Lisa Schneider: I would say our core customer base is going to be in the retail space, museums, trade shows and events, and probably hotels, if I had to go down the list, but, we have just about everybody from food and beverage to restaurants, people use our players for menu boards, a lot of kiosks. We do healthcare, dentist offices, med spas, we're into transit on buses and bus stations. Just like the list goes on, but I would say those would probably be our top. 

Because you have these ruggedized boxes, is it advantageous that you are in the San Diego area as opposed to on the other side of the Pacific in terms of, there are companies that also sell small form factor, ruggedized media, and play-out boxes that are in Taiwan or China. But the challenge you sometimes have is the time zones and language. 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we make it known that we are in the States, obviously we wanted to serve the US, but also we can maintain and manage the international business as well. But yeah, it's just was like just evolved in that way. 

You sell direct or do you have channels and distribution? 

Lisa Schneider: Great question. We do both. We sell directly more to the small business owners, and then most of our business is through integrators and the reseller channel.

Why did they come your way? We covered it, but I'm still curious about the pitch when you get asked, why you? 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, why Videotel? We've been around for 44 years, and we have experience. One of the big things is we really do listen to our customers. The word gets out, we offer free customer support and free technical support. You get a live person on the phone. Our customers are constantly, it's funny how they say, gosh, thank you for calling me back. It’s “does so and so not call you back?” So they love us for those reasons and that we do offer industrial-grade equipment. It lasts and thank goodness the rumor is out there that we make solid products. 

I'm also curious about how you get the manufacturing done. Do you have somebody located in China or wherever it is? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, we do.

We have a team of people that are in China that we've actually had relationships for, gosh, I think 15 years now and so it's a very solid relationship. It makes it so much easier to communicate, and then they're the interface to all of the manufacturing that goes on. So there's our front lines there and it makes it a lot easier for us.

Are your deployments, I guess they're not your deployments, but the projects that are done, do they tend to be small quantities and a lot of different customers or do you have accounts where they may have hundreds or even thousands of your units because they're all over the place? 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah I would say probably 70% of our business is the small to mid-sized business and then the other 30% is where you're going to find the more enterprise larger on the upward of a thousand projects. 

As a biz dev person when you have a whole cavalcade of smaller customers that gets to be a challenge to manage, right?

Lisa Schneider: It can be, but this is what makes life a lot easier for us as a team here is that our products are so easy to use that they are plug-and-play. They can figure it out. We have a whole learning program, a bunch of videos on our website, examples, and things. We have a chat, so it flows nicely. It really does. 

It hasn't been too much of a burden because I think we just make things that are simple. That's what we pride ourselves on. 

So I go directly to you, I'm a museum, and I need three of these things for looping videos. I order them, and you ship them to me, what do I need to do to get them running? 

Lisa Schneider: You need to simply connect it to your HDMI to any of the screens that you're using, and then you upload the content on the USB SD and then you insert it and it will play or if you're using the network capabilities, same thing, you plug it in, you get your network connection and then depending on if you're using the free embedded software, It's a matter of just opening up the software on the player and choosing the source that you want to use. If it's, let's say USB SD, if you want to use SFTP or LAN, you can point your content to a URL, but it's basic clicking of a button and uploading your file, it's just that simple.

So if you want to get fancy, you can, and use file transfers and everything else, but, if IT is not your role, but you just need to get something running, you don't need to bring somebody in to help you. 

Lisa Schneider: That is exactly right. In fact, I always tell people, I say, you do not need a computer science or an IT degree to run our stuff. So you get it, take it out of the box, plug and play, and you're really ready to go. 

If it's networked, wre you getting questions about security these days? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, I think we have. Not too many, but Travis would be better suited to answer that. He handles that side of that. 

Travis McMahand: Yeah, for security, we really try to lock down the player to make it so that it really doesn't have any incoming ports to it. So you can't log directly into the player over a network. The only settings that you can do on the player itself are done with either the infrared remote control that comes with the player, or you can connect a keyboard and mouse to our network players to access the menu that way.

But for the sources, say you're using a shared LAN folder or an SFTP site, you're putting your content on one of those sources, and then you're just pointing the player to that source and telling it, okay, go check for new content or check for changed content every hour or every day or whatever. So the player itself goes out and checks for the content. There's no inbound traffic to the player that the player doesn't initiate, 

Gotcha, and I gather from the IT and IS crowd lately that whereas several years ago they were pretty jumpy about using Android, they're now pretty comfy with it. 

Travis McMahand: Yeah, I haven't heard too many complaints about it being an Android player. Once we explained the security that we have built into the player, we really haven't had any pushback on that. 

Let's talk about interactive. Why did you go down that path? Was it customer demand? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes. You know what? It actually was. It started with a museum actually in San Diego and they came to us and they said, this is what we're looking for. We want to trigger content and this is how we want to do it, and we thought, okay, we'll give it a shot, and then it just bloomed from there. 

Once we came up with a way of connecting and how we're gonna create the interaction, then we started evolving from there with all the different types of interactive sources.

You also have interactive devices that are paired with your playout boxes. Was that a kind of a learned decision that you're best to develop your own as opposed to trying to integrate other stuff that may be used for other purposes and could maybe be hacked to work with this?

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, I think that the reason we just did it in the house was because we wanted to control it, and also really because everything was just out was so complex. We're like, okay, we need to just bring this down 10 notches. Let's just, we need to make the super simple for our customers. So then that's why we just developed it in-house. 

Yeah, in my dark past, I worked with a company that did digital signage solutions and had its own media players, and I remember there was an ask for interactive, and we had to source big ass buttons from a company that made buttons for slot machines, and then we had a guy who worked out of a, I think a motorhome somewhere in California and designed controller boards. So we had a custom controller board for this thing and everything else and it worked, but good God, that was a process as opposed to just saying, “Yeah, I want this play-out box and, I need two of these, and two of those interactive things.” 

Lisa Schneider: Oh, that's pretty much how it went down with us too. And our team really loves the challenge. We love doing custom work. I know Travis is working on a bunch of stuff right now with different projects. We have one that is using our interactive IP push, is what we call it, for the automotive parts department actually, and I can't say who just yet, but, it's a customer that just reported back that with our solution that we created, this was the first time in the history of their company they had the highest productivity. 

Again, it comes from the customers. That's what I mean. When I say we listen to our customers, they help you grow, 

When I look at the different accessories that you have, there's motion sensors, there's triggers and buttons and things like that. What typically are your customers using? 

Lisa Schneider: I would say the most popular would be the LED push buttons and/or the IR touchless buttons for museums, also in the trade show booths, I would say our sense solution, is our motion sensor that kind of detects human distance from a display. So you can lure somebody into something and then it would trigger the content once they're in within a certain range. I would say that was probably our two most popular solutions. 

We also have a sensor that's a wave to-play where you just wave your hand over an area and it will trigger content. That's another popular one too.

I've always wondered about some of those things because if there's any sort of a learning curve, like you, you've got to get somebody to wave to change a file or whatever that is, how hard is it for them to figure that out? Even though it sounds simple. 

Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we do. We make suggestions for, God, the stuff that some of these integrators come up with is so cool, but they do make it really simple, using decal stickers or there it's on plywood or it says, wave your hand here, or it's within the content itself. So they come up to the screen. It's pretty pretty self-explanatory. 

We're not one of those where it's going to tell you your age, your hair color and eye color and anything to that degree. This is more simple. We don't find too many people standing there lost looking at it, thank goodness. 

Are many using the capabilities to lift and learn? 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's one of our newer solutions that we just came out with, really cool, lifting a product off of a display and then it triggering. Retailers are really taking to that right now as well as the museums, where you have to physically hold something, lift it. 

Yeah. It's interesting because that's something that's an idea, a concept, and a capability that has been around for 10-15 years. So when I've seen companies saying, look, we can do lift and learn. I'm thinking, okay, you didn't exactly discover fire. It's been around, but it really didn't have much marketplace adoption until now, it seems, recently. 

Lisa Schneider: It is, but the lift and learns that was out there before were again, so complex and we take it down a notch and it's just a matter of making a harness, they plug it in the back of the player, plug it in the TV and you name your files a certain way and they're good to go.

So yeah, we're not reinventing anything, but. We have made it so simple to use that you don't need that, to a degree to figure it out. 

When you talk to prospects and they ask about your company and everything, is there a reference customer, or a project that you tend to trot out and say, here's a great example of what we do?

Lisa Schneider: Yes, there are so many. We're lucky enough to have a whole plethora on our website of case studies that have participated in that. So if I say yes, if it's a museum, I say, okay, I have a link to a laundry list of museums, and here's what we did for them. They shared their photos and how they did it. So yes, we absolutely can do that. 

All right, this has been great. It's terrific to finally have a chat with you guys and find out more about your company. Thanks for spending some time with me 

Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. It's always so good to chat with you. 

Travis McMahand: Yeah. Thank you

Ariel Haroush, Outform & Future Stores

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

One of the particularly interesting things about Outform is how a company that's been doing digital in retail for 20-plus years is not all that well known in digital signage circles.

Not that it's hurt the Miami-based company, which has offices and manufacturing facilities all over the world, and has delivered countless tech-centered shopper engagement solutions for some of the world's biggest brands.

I'd been operating mostly with the impression that Outform designed nice-looking digital fixtures for retail, but there is a lot more to the company than that. They do the whole nine yards of retail from idea through execution.

I had a great chat that could have gone on for a few hours with Outform founder Ariel Haroush. We started with the company's roots and how Haroush kind of fell into scalable digital solutions for retail. We get into how the company works and the state of things like retail media.

Then we spend quite a bit of time talking about Haroush's ambitious new venture, called Future Stores. It takes the notion of pop-up stores, and gives it the scale and digital experience demanded by big global brands. The first location opens in central London on October 30th.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Ariel, thanks for joining me. For those who don't know, can you give a rundown of what Outform does and their background? 

Ariel Haroush: Outform is a retail marketing company in essence. We've been referred to as an innovation agency because we are very much on the cutting edge of retail, experiential, and innovation in retail. The company does everything from design all the way to execution, which is quite unique because we have the ability to ideate and strategize like a typical agency that you would expect. But we are transitioning seamlessly into the execution room. So everything we ideate, we engineer, we prototype and we manufacture.

So while the business has a very, I would say appeal of an agency, we are, in essence, a manufacturer at scale, and we have manufacturing facilities all over the world in three main regions in Europe, in Asia, and in the States alone, we have two manufacturing facilities, both in Chicago and in San Francisco.

Did you start as a manufacturer and evolve into an agency or vice versa, or none of the above? 

Ariel Haroush: My journey as the founder of Outform was quite unique. My passion for the industry actually started when I watched the movie Back to the Future. I'm sure you remember Marty flying all the way to the future with the DeLorean and then you see this billboard transform into a shark, and I was just mesmerized by it, and there's something in it that made me say, “oh my God, this is what I want to do.” 

So when I started my career, I was always very much leaning to the visual aspect of things. I had an office in Times Square and I was looking at all the signage there and I went, geez, why no one is doing it on a commercial level, and that was the seed of founding Outform. So I started really with no manufacturing background, but with a lot of passion towards how spectacular signage should be, and I was able to convince one customer to give me an opportunity. Back in the days it was Siemens and I had done this huge mobile phone replicas in, one of the biggest trade shows called CeBIT and that was an experience, and one thing led to another, the second customer was Samsung, and I was moving from one customer to another, creating those experiences. 

As things evolved, one of the biggest opportunities that I've got was a customer, in the United States, in Chicago that said, “Hey, are you doing all this massive, spectacular signage. Would you mind doing something smaller in scale?” I said what do you mean by that? He said, we don't need giant signage. We need something that we can fit into a retail store, and I said, okay, what do you have in mind? He said, I need 20 mobile phone replicas in a size of, not bigger than a meter or three feet. And I said, gee, that sounds like a lot of units, and back in the days I used to do those things in the Philippines, and he called me about two weeks later and he said oh, by the way, it's not 10 units, it's 500, and I was like, what? So the factory owner in the Philippines said, “Hey Ariel, we cannot do 500.” I said, so what do I need to do? He said, you need to fly to China and look for someone to do injection tools for molds. 

So I took my backpack and I went into China and the guy called me again and said, it's not 500. It's actually 2000, and I'm like, what's going on? I discovered retail in essence and the scale that you have within retail. That time was actually the launch of the Razor phone. I don't know if you remember that Motorola phone. It was a massive success. I've done, in a period of about, I think it was 12 months, I did 70,000 units that went to every single store globally, because there was just a smart way of how we design it, in a way like it's cutting the ceiling or the wall or the floor. So you just apply it, and it seems like the phone is so sharp that it's cutting whatever surface you place it on. So everyone wanted to have it, and then, I realized retail is where the scale is, and the manufacturing aspect of it is what gives the business model way more substance.

So with that in mind, I started to invest in factories, and one thing led to another, and I started to get into a place that, we're now buying factories, and we started to scale the business from there, and here I am today with more than a thousand people at Outform in various regions, doing what I enjoy the most, which is shaping the future of retail.

Wow. Maybe there's not a when moment, but, I'm curious how you evolved into doing the agency ideation through the execution side of it as you did these things, you realized, the best people to actually manage this and deploy it and so on are my own people as opposed to trying to sub this out?

Ariel Haroush: Part of the journey of working with customers, I worked with a very big tech company in Cupertino and you can guess who, and they were so secretive about everything, and we could not outsource anything in terms of the thinking side of things, and I just needed to bring people in house and I always had a tendency to creative, and I was very involved in that side and one person and then another person, and then you find yourself with a creative team and you start to conceptualize and bring in ideas, and because a lot of the stuff that we do had a highly fused tech integration, we started to create our own kind of R&D team to deal with those things.

Many times I face situations where clients come to me and say, " Oh, my agency created this and they could not deliver on that, and we are super disappointed how we can ensure that it's not going to happen with you guys”, and that's always been a differentiator because everything we design we actually do. So we just start building up on those experiences, and one of the things as I built the company that I never really liked when customers or people refer to us as the vendor because the vendor is something very, in essence, commoditized type of a description, right? But I really enjoyed it when I was a partner or an agency, and I invested heavily in that because I felt this is where we create value, and every time I had a conversation with clients, which was on the C-level. It was more about how we can win in retail. It wasn't about how we're going to make it exactly, and what's the engineering and how many screws and the thickness of the material and all that good stuff, it was more about how we can influence the shopper?

That's always been the passion. So investing heavily into that, and that was a differentiator for Outfrom, because, in essence, if you think about the industry in a nutshell, and you ask yourself why advertising agencies became so big as they grew, like the Ogilvy, the Y&R, the Saatchi & Saatchi, they had a really unique business model. They competed heavily on the pitch, right? And they put everything in front of it. Design, planners, strategy, and once they win the pitch, in essence, the reward was the media buying. So if you compete on a Coke pitch, you know that they're going to spend 300 million on advertising, which you buy media on and you're getting a commission on that. So that was the scalable business model. 

For Outform, it's been the manufacturing side of it. That's the scalable part, but you have to put all the upfront investments to have a seat at the table, and to me, that was a model to replicate. When I look at our industry, it was very fragmented to mostly moms and pops type of operation, and they always looked at it in terms of, “I'm a manufacturer. Tell me what you need to do, and I'll make it for you.” 

But that's not really the conversation customers want to have. They want to know how they can best win in retail, and they come into those experts to help them craft the proposition, and when you think about our industry, as it's getting more and more technology fused, you have to rely on people that understand the different disciplines in terms of manufacturing. So it's not just cutting wood or bending metal or using plastic. It's a combination of all of the above, including tech, including data, including how you can learn and optimize your offering as you move forward. So there's just so much built into that, and Outform was very eager to play in that area.

Yeah, I've certainly through the years seen no end of companies who manufacture things. They've invented something and they're very proud of their features and specs surrounding that thing, but they go in selling that thing as opposed to, as you were describing, talking about the objective and selling a solution and providing a solution and you can see how the industry has evolved that way and how more and more, particularly large clients who are saying, I don't want to cherry pick all the components that I need for this thing. I want a partner who's going to help me hold my hand through this whole thing and execute it and, be cohesive as opposed to, ending up with a lot of finger pointing when there's a problem. 

Ariel Haroush: Exactly, and if you think about it, every customer has different types of challenges. When you look at the likes of Google, and they need to educate the customers about what Google Home is all about. That's one type of challenge, and when you look at Estee Lauder trying to maximize the shelf efficiencies, that's a different type of challenge.

You also many times find yourself depending on where you actually have been deployed, the mindset of the shopper from a Home Depot to a Best Buy is completely different. When you're in Home Depot, you want to know how easy it is and how much time it'll take to install. When you're in Best Buy, you want to know the technical specs and the mindset really shifts between the retailers that you're in. So the emphasis on how you maximize the conversion is different. There's just so many opportunities. Of engaging and I'm not even going and discussing the Gen Z behavior and shift in behavior that's really challenging a lot of retailers and a lot of brands, because if you think about it, the type of consumers that we have, the call it the shoppers of tomorrow, they're so different in mindset.

I always like to give the examples that I have five kids by the way, my oldest one is 16 and we're driving in Miami and he said, “Hey, dad, can you change the song?” And I'm looking at him and say, it's the radio. You can change it, and he's giving me this weird look. He said, what do you mean by changing the song? I said, you can't do this on radio. He said I don't get it. So what if you don't like the song? I said, you wait, and he said, if you don't like the next one, I said, you wait. I said, dad, it makes no sense, and he's right because he's using Spotify. It makes no sense. 

You got to get him a rotary dial telephone.

Ariel Haroush: Amen. Amen. So we are talking about a different type of shoppers and those shoppers, if you look at the attention span generally of Gen Z compared to millennials, compared to baby boomers. I just see my kids, I would say that their attention span is on the length of a TikTok story.

They're instantly getting bored, and man, it's a science. How do you get them not to flip this TikTok story or the Instagram story? And you're trying to make sense of it and to understand what actually captured their attention, and if you're in a retail environment, that's not different than your TikTok story moments, right? You have so many offerings, and you need to make sure that the shopper is actually giving attention so you can tell your story so you can potentially convert. This is what we're dealing with, and we have to be super efficient in the way we are crafting the proposition to our clients.

So who are your typical customers or Outform’s typical customers? I'm guessing it's much more brands than retailers themselves. 

Ariel Haroush: It's a combination of both actually. We're working with many brands. We've been super active for the past 20 years dealing with the brands because in essence, they need to deploy whatever they do and not only one retailer, but multiple retailers, and we need to do it on a global basis. So the challenge around it, it's quite enormous, and we've been excelling in that landscape, but we also have a lot of retailers coming to us. 

We realize that we as well need to change, and if we're not going to change, we're going to end up like the Sears and the other retailers that went under, so what do we need to do? And you can start seeing a shift in the way retailers are operating. They used to be super passive, by the way. They’d say, “We shouldn't worry. The brand will figure that out.” But the brand also realized that they can get sales online. So the retailers now need to start asking, “Am I just a showroom type of a facility? No, I need to add more value.” 

So how do you do that and what's the proposition for the shoppers? So everyone is challenged around what's the future of retail. 

Yeah, that's interesting because I've heard endlessly for years and had some experience myself that retailers are interested in the digital stuff and experiential and everything else, but they want the brands to put it in and they want the brands to pay for it.

As Chris Riegel for Stratacash says, “They're like T Rex's, very large, but very short arms.” 

Ariel Haroush: You're right, but there is a shift here because if you look at Best Buy as an example, they're realizing that a big component of the revenue is coming right now from what you refer to as retail media, which is an online terminology. If you want to get good placement on the Best Buy website, you're paying for it, and there is a big revenue contribution to their bottom line coming from that. So everyone understands that retail media is on a meteoric rise. 

Now, the retailers are looking at it, so if I can generate this amount of income from my website, wait a minute, I have all this fleet of stores that can generate revenue for me and that's an opportunity that I don't necessarily want to give away to the brands. So we started to see a tremendous amount of conversations happening around how we can utilize our stores as a component of the retail media. So you're going to see a shift in terms of how retail is starting to look into it and say, there is an opportunity and untapped opportunity that we want to materialize on.

Are a lot of retailers over excited about retail media because they see the big numbers, but that they maybe don't understand that 99% of that dollar figure is going to mobile and online and not a hell of a lot of it goes into in store display. 

Ariel Haroush: The online numbers are staggering, right? I think by 2027, it's going to be as big as social media. So it's just huge. Now people ask: will the retail media in real life will be the next big thing? Now it's really a matter of eyeballs and a matter of conversion. Because all you're really getting when you are putting it online, you're getting X amount of eyeballs that are able to be converted and the percentage of conversion is actually a lead to sales and that's why it's such a hype right now. 

But if you get X amount of millions of people passing through your store and brands are competing in your stores on conversion, they are willing to be the one spending money on getting those eyeballs. You basically just got yourself a new revenue stream. Now one should ask whether the traditional retailer just being transactional is the future, because in essence, we are living in a place. It used to be called Omnichannel, right? Omnichannel, for the listeners here, I’ll use the analogyof a highway. Think about the highway with different lanes and every lane represents the different side of the Omnichannel. But we all drive today and we are crossing lanes all the time. So in essence, Omnichannel is no longer the right way of phrasing it, I call it more of a unified commerce because you can walk in the store, but you are with your phone, so you are constantly connected and you can compare prices on your phone in the store, and you can make a decision to click the button on your phone And it's gonna wait for you on your doorstep. 

So what is an Omnichannel anymore? It's more unified commerce and in a world of unified commerce It doesn't matter where the purchase actually happens. So yes, you have your stores because you need to have a presence. It's almost like a business card of your brand. But in essence, the metrics of how much I'm selling in the store should not be the most applicable way of doing your KPIs if you get a halo effect that happening outside of the store, it doesn't matter. It's a unified conference. 

So where are you at with the company now with Outform? Because you started this new entity that I want to talk about called Future Stores. 

When we chatted, oh God, back in the spring or something like that, you had mentioned that this thing was coming and that you were continuing to be the CEO of Outform, but maybe perhaps winding that down.

Ariel Haroush: No, Outform is my true love. It's a company I founded. I enjoy every moment of it because every day is a new day. But when I see what's the future of retail and when I'm asking myself, and this is something I've always been extremely passionate about, one of the things that I've seen time and time again, that many times we work with the brands and we're doing something, it doesn't really get the big bang that we all hope for, and I ask myself why.

If you want to do, for example, a pop up, and let's say you want to do a pop up because you want to tell the story, and you have a product to launch. By the time you're designing the pop up, you need to design it, you need to engineer it, you need to prototype it, you need to spend three to four months and then you need to find a location that you can actually host, but the landlords are not waiting for you. So securing a location six months in advance is super difficult. So many times we do all this effort and we end up compromising and we find ourselves in a shopping mall, and there's so much work, sweat and tears built into that, that when you're actually launching it, you don't get the big bang that you expect.

And to me, that was always a missed opportunity, and every investment was one off, and if you do something which is very analog driven and things change, context change, the market change, competitive landscape change, you're not unable to react. So to me, I felt there must be a better solution, and when I look at the high street, it doesn't matter where you go, whether you're in 5th Avenue, Oxford streets, Champs-Élysées, Ginza in Tokyo, in essence, you're seeing the same old brands time and time again, and you've seen Zara in one location, you've seen them probably in every location, so nothing really drives you to step inside, which is a real shame.

I ask, given everything we spoke about that TikTok story mentality, I said, what if the high street can be as dynamic as our social feed and I had this vision of creating a space that can be almost like the sphere in Vegas for retail, that is fully immersive and brands can come in without the worrying of engineering and prototyping and manufacturing and finding the spot, they actually know the size and they get the best location ever because it's one of those high street flagship locations and everything is digitized and everything is immersive and they get the big bang for their investment. I said, wow, that's actually something if you're going back to the Marty moment, flying to the future, that's the moment for me where the billboard becomes a shark, where you notice something and you can not miss it.

That's really the thesis behind Future Stores. Those futures stores are set on prime locations. We're talking about the best of the best. Oxford Street, 5th Avenue, where brands can do global activations in multi-cities at the same time without all the hustle and bustle of creating specific, tailor-made, manufacturing, analog driven for a specific site and when content can change from the weekend to the workdays, from the morning to the evening, when it's fully immersive, and we are launching it on October 30th. so this is about 30 days from today. Our first client will be a massive CE brand, and oh my God, people will see it in the media for sure, I'm telling you it's mind boggling. Just the storytelling, the possibilities. someone that's seen it said I feel like it's the iPhone for retail because there's just so many options, 

So if I'm a massive CE brand, and I book future stores, what am I getting and what are the parameters? Do I have to book for a month? Can I book it for a day? Is it staffed for me or do I have to bring in staff? How does all that work? 

Ariel Haroush: You can book it in slots of a week to two weeks to four weeks. We don't want the brand to come in and take it for six months because that's going against kind of the thesis of a high street is constantly being dynamic and we don't think the shoppers would care if it's not changing all the time. 

You get everything basically. It's a full retail operation that you don't have to invest in the time in, because all the walls and the ceiling and everything, all the tech components are already built up. All you need to do is explain your content and we can help you with that as well, and you have the back of the house. So what do you basically need is basically your decision. If you need security at the door because people are going to queue outside, we can provide your security guard at the fee. But the rest is everything is okay. It's ready for usage. 

So the huge project plan with the endless Gantt charts and everything else you would have to do, if you were leasing the space on your own and staffing it and designing it in the whole nine yards, that's covered off. 

A CE brand can just say, I want this for two weeks. Is it available in this time window? There's obviously  some planning they still have to do, but 90% of it is gone. 

Ariel Haroush: Exactly. You're really getting a turnkey solution and the beauty about it is that you can say, “Hey, I know I'm going to launch a product in late March and I need to be in an extra X amount of cities. Can I book it now?” Knowing that it's going to wait for you and knowing that you have the possibility to use your own content for it is just, I think it's the future. Now, this is my thesis, of course, but time will tell. 

I wrote about this the other day and I said it's about two blocks away from Outernet London and very reminiscent of that, but there's some very big differences as well that's mostly about public art and so on, but it's the same kind of experience, right? 

Where you walk in, you've got LED on the walls, you've got LED on the ceiling, and everywhere else. 

Ariel Haroush: Yeah, and Outernet, good friends of mine, they did phenomenally well. Frankly speaking, it's becoming the number one destination in London and well deserved by the way, because it's people just coming in and getting inspired and I love that.

I love the people getting inspired just by walking in the street, and they do amazing content, but yes, it's a different proposition because they are more of a public arts media component. We are all about future retail, while they provide a sense of awareness, we are providing the awareness piece, but also the consideration and the conversion. So there is an ROI component to it that is very clearly measured. We spoke about retail media, in essence, it is retail media in the real world because we're enabling you as a brand to get all the eyeballs, but you convert the eyeballs to people getting into the store experiencing the product with also the option to buy 

What is technically in there? Is it fine pitch LED on the walls and ceiling? 

Ariel Haroush: That's correct I mean we have the highest resolution of LEDs anywhere installed in London. So if you compare it to Outernet, the density of our pixel rate is much, much more advanced. That's a given because we started way later than they did, so they had to commit to a technology that is probably three years old. We have amazing brightness. You're not going to be able to see the pixels, it's just as much of a high resolution, millions of pixels around the stores, which is super impressive to see. 

I think on October 30th, when we launch, people will really grasp the magnitude of it. 

Who is behind this?

Ariel Haroush: Myself and two other partners that I have, but I'm the driving force behind the concept. 

So you have an extremely vested interest in making this work. 

Ariel Haroush: Yeah, absolutely, and it's weird to say it because I am a businessman and obviously the financial world is a metric, but my reasoning for doing that was not for financial gain. I'm really passionate about where I can take this industry forward, and there's just so many possibilities. I'm 50 years old this year, so I took three weeks in India and I was trying to look for my Zen and one of the random meetings that I had in India, I met this very nice lady from the Richmond group and she was doing a one year tour. She wanted to retire and she said, you know what, I'm just going to go on my own, we had dinner and she asked me, “Ariel, tell me about your business” and I decided to speak about Future Stores versus Outform, which is a much more mature business, and she said, “okay, I get it, it sounds exciting, but what's your gain? Do you really want to just make money?”

And it really poked me in an interesting way, and I said, why do you ask that in the sense that the way you asked it. She said, no, I'm just trying to understand. I said there is a motive that I'm trying to do that I'm not describing to many people, but, given how you frame it, I want to describe it to you and she said,well,  go ahead.

I said, one of the things that I'm really passionate about is, I'm not going to use a big statement, but democratizing the high streets, if you think about it, it's something that I'm really passionate about and you ask why. Because frankly speaking, if you think about the high street is kept to the typical candidates that you can already list down without me even need to say it. It's those big brands that you see everywhere and they occupy all the time the high street and it's not like we're not going to engage with them, on the contrary we will, but I want to be in a position that I hold at least 25% of the time of future stores into new brands, innovative brands, brands that are not necessarily going to get the time of the day to be on the high street, but they are the up and coming brands. So we are talking right now with a couple of brands that I'm super excited about that people are going to learn about. 

There are celebrity launches. There are other people that really have amazing stories to tell in the high street, and they just don't get the visibility to be on the high street. So that's another motivation that I have outside of just the financial aspiration that this concept has, and this concept, should it be successful? It will scale to a variety of different locations across the globe.

London, obviously it's an advanced build or probably ready to go, but other cities you mentioned like Champs-Élysées, Tokyo, are these ones in the pipeline or are these ideas of what could happen? 

Ariel Haroush: Tokyo is what could happen. But obviously, if you think about where would be the most relevant cities to start with, it's not a secret that New York, London and Paris are going to be the top three at least from my lens. Asia is a bit far away at this stage. We still need to prove the business model. But yes, we have active engagement in the other cities that I mentioned, and we are just vetting the final sites as we speak. 

This is the sort of thing that is very clever and everything else without question, but it's also something that a commercial property developer could look at and go, “Yeah, I'm going to build that too and I'll give it a different name and I'll tweak it just enough to make it mine.” 

How do you deal with that? 

Ariel Haroush: I'll say good luck with that. The level of complexity in storytelling and working in collaboration, I would never even dream to do that if it wasn't for my experience in Outform. 

I have so much experience in Outform, doing it for 20 years. I understand what it takes and how to tell stories in retail. Landlords want to be landlords, and many of them are already approaching. I said, why don't we partner? And that makes sense in order to scale it faster. But yeah, you need a certain level of expertise to know what you're doing. This is not just a typical media play. It's much more than that. 

This is not just slapping up, some fine pitch LED and renting a high profile space. 

Ariel Haroush: No, there is so much more built into that, because you need to think about it in a retail operation mindset, you need to think about it in a media mindset, you need to think about it from a storytelling perspective, and you really need to maximize what we call the funnel.

Because if you think about the marketing funnel, it's built in such a way that you spend money on awareness and that's usually going out of home media or TV or whatever, then you spend money on consideration, which is experiential, pop ups, you name it, and then you have the conversion piece, which mostly kept to retail stores. And last but not least, the royalty component. That's the marketing funnel. We are, in essence, trying to flatten the funnel so you get your awareness, consideration and conversion all in one location, but there is also a huge component that I don't think people understand the value of it, but they will, which is the amplification.

If you look at Outernet as an example, for every campaign that they're running, they have tens of millions of views of people who have never even been to Outernet, and if you look at every single thing that the Sphere did in Vegas, they have hundreds of millions of shares of something. People have never even been to Vegas, but they know about the Sphere. This has an additional impact Future Stores will be able to deliver. 

If you ask me, Ariel, people tried before. Why would that be any difference? Scale and also inmindset, because when I moved to the States, someone said to me, go big or go home. And I asked, what do you mean by that? And he said, if you're not putting everything in, then it's just not good. That's what we're trying to do. You cannot compromise the location. You cannot say, let me bring this huge brand for a store that looks like a mobile store. They just are not going to do it.

So if you want to get people to take you seriously, you have to go all in and that's what we've done here. So we're talking about a huge investment that we're putting into the high street. Probably if you think about London outside of the Outernet, it's probably the biggest investment ever done in a retail store, and that's what we're going after, we're going after something that is quite impactful and if it's going to deliver the amount of eyeballs that we think it would, then people will notice it, and if people will notice it, then brands will start to see the value in it. 

I'm looking forward to seeing it at some point. I'm kicking myself now. I traveled through London to get to ISE in Barcelona, but I just did an overnight booking.

Ariel Haroush: Oh my God. I'll be very happy to host you there. I'm going there every now and then. It's still in a kind of a installation mode, but all the screens are up, we're now doing the testing. It's a site. The ceilings are super high, so you get the full immersion and without telling who is the first client, all I can say is that, once you see the first execution, it's mind boggling. It's really above and beyond what I ever imagined it to be. So I'm super pumped and excited about where this is going to go. 

October 30th, right? 

Ariel Haroush: Yep. 

All right. Thank you, Ariel. I think you're onto something. 

Ariel Haroush: I hope so. Thank you for taking the time.

Anna Bager, OAAA

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers.

That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios

The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI.

I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO.

We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists? 

Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry. 

So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up. 

It’s a member organization? 

Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members. 

So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner?

Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats. 

Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app.

Anna Bager: They are members too.

Okay, so where would you cut it off? 

Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to take a pick, I probably would have called it location-based media because that's really what we are, right? Wherever there is signage or any type of ad that's there because of the location, and the context that is there it seems to be a good place to reach consumers or business people because they're there at that time and they might be receptive to a message.

So anyone who's in that could be retail media networks. It could be retail organizations, could be place-based. It could be a point of care, like doctor's offices, but we typically don't have those companies as members, but they could be. Also, one thing that I think is common for most of our members is that we're one too many advertisers. We're not targeting individuals so it can be seen by many. So anyone who's doing that could be a member of the OAAA. 

You mentioned retail media networks. I was going to ask about that later, let's get into it. You mentioned it. I'm curious because of the rise of that and how you're starting to see more and more activity around the in-store piece of it and not just the online and mobile parts. Are they different budgets? 

Anna Bager: I think so. I think it depends. It's certainly a growth opportunity for the industry. Retail in general is taking place in a store, a lot of it online, but you have to get people there or you have to get them interested. You also may want to amplify a message before they're in the store, you want to serve them an offer and that's where we can come in. 

The retail media networks themselves, buy a lot of media also on behalf of their advertisers. So it could be a Coca-Cola, right? They buy media for them. I think that out-of-home is a natural part of media that you should buy to create the most bang for the buck for a company, it's not just in the stores, it's everything around and creates an audience extension, et cetera. So there might be other budgets. It's definitely a different type of buyer, but I think we're uniquely positioned and I think we play an important role in the world of retail media, reaching consumers on the go or even at home. 

I think what these networks have can be very useful, especially now that out-of-home has become more digital and you can increasingly use data and target in a very different way and also change out messages really fast. These guys have first-party data, from loyalty programs or consumers basically leaning in and allowing them to use their data and the ability to then use that data on the knowledge of where consumers might be or on the go, or, the interest they might have and use contextual and location-based advertising makes it just so much better. I think it's a great match. The ability to use the data to do that. 

So what's the state of being out-of-home at this point? In your keynote, which I think was for your annual conference, you talked about double-digit growth. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I mean out-of-home has had an interesting journey since the pandemic. Before that, we were growing very steadily every year, then obviously we had a dip in the pandemic and then we had an amazing year in 2022, where I think out-of-home were faster than any other ad media. And since then, it's been steadily going up. This year is particularly interesting. There's a lot going on. We have an election that's coming up that's driving a lot of ad dollars and also not just ad dollars into out-of-home, but also into other media where other brands then look for a positioning somewhere else. So there's just a lot of movement in the market right now.

It’s an economy that hopefully will start growing again. So it's been a good year. We keep growing and I think next year is going to be hopefully even better than this year. 

And does digital now represent the overall kind of installed base and also a percentage of overall revenue?

Anna Bager: Digital is interesting. So I think it's probably around 30 percent of all the installed base, but it's close to half of the revenue and most of the growth is coming from digital, so definitely an area that the industry is investing in and I want to keep moving forward. 

Is it harder and harder to sell static?

Anna Bager: No, I don't think so. I think it's just really easy to sell digital. I think you can still sell static. Static has a lot of benefits too. You have a message up for a very long time, right? It's very sturdy and you know that it works and then again, you put a billboard up, for example, it's going to be there for 30 or more days. So It's the same message that just is engraved in the sense of a little bit of a mini landmark, right? So static works really well too and for certain types of advertisers. It's absolutely key. But obviously digital has the ability to switch out content fast, use data, and do some interesting creative executions too because it's a huge growth area for us.

We talked about retail media before the ability, you can do that with static too, and you can get static up fast today, but the ability to include out-of-home in more of an omnichannel media mix, it's far greater over digital because it's just there. You can just kind of plug it in.

Is efficiency the big attraction? The fact that you can book something very rapidly. 

Anna Bager: For digital? It all depends on the goals of the advertiser. Obviously, to be able to get a message up really fast is important. Also, to be able to switch out a message really fast, if you need to, is important. The ability to again, be able to use data. If it's raining or if it's sunshine or if there's a specific event going on that day or in that place or in that moment, you can use that knowledge to put up better ads, but it's also sometimes, the creative opportunities you have with digital can allow you to do really cool things. Anything spectacular and amorphic, brands love that, right? That's mostly digital. So there are just so many different things you can do. It all depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve. 

You mentioned anamorphic, the idea of 3D visual illusions, is that kind of the bright shiny object, and there's a bright shiny object every 2-3 years that comes along and the old object gets abandoned?

Anna Bager: I don't think so. Out-of-home is so many different things. Some call it iconic, some call it spectacular. Within that category, definitely it's the anamorphic or things like the Sphere. I think that's just a different part of being out-of-home, which I think will always be very interesting to brands who want to make a big mark.

Clearly, you can get a lot of earned media through great executions because It's very socially shareable and you can give it global legs, it's done really well. So I think that's one type of out-of-home. I don't think it's a shiny object, even though it is a shiny object. I think it's just something that brands are very interested in right now, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there are other types of digital boards or signage, and not just roadside stuff, that works really well for brands in certain ways. I think the power of our industry is that we can reach pretty much everyone at any point in time, anywhere, right? And it doesn't really matter if that's static digital or anamorphic. It's just the reach that we have that then, through social media and other channels creates a sort of an interactive space too. That's not just a physical space. The power of the medium is the reach and it doesn't really matter what type of signage it is, I think. 

It's interesting with the anamorphic stuff, I've seen it in person, and I've seen tons of videos around it. Most of it's not very good. It's something spinning or pushing out of a screen and who cares, and it begs the larger question, when I drive around in a big city and I see a lot of digital out-of-home billboards, I think most of the creative isn't very good. There's too much on there, and I just find it weird for an established medium that so many creatives just don't get it.

Anna Bager: Out-of-home is probably the most prestigious thing you can do as a creative if you want to go for those really big campaigns, but it's also really hard and that's why it's so prestigious. Less is more. Simplicity works really well. Don’t overdo it. Think it through. But it's an art form.

I think there's a lot of bad creative but there's also some really amazing creative. The interesting thing is you remember both. So from my perspective, and it doesn't necessarily take away from your opinion of the brand if you don't think the ad is great. You still remember and you see it and you register and you might go and buy the product.

But obviously, I think, I wish everyone did better, because there's so much you can do with out-of-home because you own the whole campus, it's all yours to do something with, there's nothing but a location surrounding it, you can do really cool things, but, yeah, there's good and there's bad, but like I said, you still remember it, and I think that's the real key point, but I think with out-of-home market, just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should, and I think, I agree with you, but it's very subjective, what you like, obviously. But with that type of signage, still a lot of experimentation, I think, on let's do something really cool, and then does it really make sense or does it have a connection to the product? Maybe not, but yeah. 

Yeah. I suppose it's like any advertising. There's really great national advertising and big-budget campaigns, but there's a whole bunch of more local and even hyperlocal ads and they're not produced by big agencies with top-tier creatives.

I was in a rental car recently driving through Toronto on the 401, so 401 is slow, so you got lots of time to look at billboards, and I still couldn't absorb everything on some of these because there was just so much stuff trying to be jammed in there. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. You have to think about that. You have to think that the audience is going to have very little time to look at it, right? Unless there's a traffic jam. Therefore you have to make it so that they can see, they can register, they can get it. They also maybe can remember that one little thing that you want them to Google, it shouldn't be too much on them. I agree.

But I have to say that, and I just came back this morning from my, event that we did in Las Vegas where we had a lot of our members present, different interesting creative executions, and there were a lot of great local out-of-home. You don't have to be, like, one of the biggest creative agencies on Madison Avenue to create good content. There are a lot of locals out-of-home that play to them, it is very local, just knowing the audience. 

I'll give you one really cool example. There's a law firm called Morgan & Morgan and they are pretty much everywhere, they're big out-of-home buyers, you would consider that local advertising, even though they're in many parts of the country. I think this was last year, they took some of their billboards and put graffiti all over, the Morgan & Morgan information called Morgan & Morgan and what ended up happening was that they got so many calls. Where people said, Oh my God, your billboard has been vandalized. Are you aware? And people really paid attention to it to the point where they had to take them down because people couldn't get through. Because there are so many calls. If you're very smart about it and you're speaking to an audience that is there and feels a certain connection to it because it's local, you can do really cool things and I think there's great advertising on both sides and bad. 

Is the profile of media owners evolving? I asked because I used to think of media owners as just being the media companies, Mars and Patterson up in Canada and so on. But I have been hearing that property owners and commercial property owners are blocking and tackling big LED displays on the corners of their new builds or renovated builds, and then engaging a media company to sell their stuff. So they own the display as opposed to the media company leasing that space. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I don't know if that's more now than before I can speak to that. That's definitely a phenomenon, right? And you see not just in the U S that all over the world. If you own property and you're smart about it, if there's an ability to put up a sign there, of course, you should do it if it doesn't make the building uglier or cause problems in any other way, and I think we see more and more of that and then they usually use media companies to sell it for them because out-of-home is not that easy.

Yeah, I've been in this for 25 years, and I still remind people that advertising isn't as easy as you think it is. 

Anna Bager: No, it's supposed to look easy, but very hard. That's for sure, and there's a lot that goes into I think especially with out-of-home I am fairly new to the industry. I've been here five years. I come from the regular traditional digital media side, and it's fascinating, like the know-how location and real estate and just like how to best leverage the space that you have, that this industry has, that is not the same in other places, even though the concept is the same, it's just very different. 

In the keynote you did earlier this year, one of the things you said is we need a clean, simple supply chain without too many intermediaries. What did you mean by that? 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I think that's very important. Basically as the industry becomes more digital, and not just the industry, as advertising as a whole is more and more transacted in an automated or programmatic fashion and you can do static in that as well. It's important that once you start doing it that way, you lose a little bit of control of what's going on, and there are a lot of middlemen that can insert themselves along the way, and there can be a little lack of transparency as to who's actually making money or who's taking cut where.

And that's something that digital media on the traditional side, as programmatic started growing and automation struggled quite a bit, and it wasn't just under the transparency and understanding of kind of how, what the supply chain looked like from a commercial point of view, it's also from a brand safety and fraud perspective, you want it to be very clean, very simple, and very straightforward what goes on in the supply chain.

So the media owner knows what's happening between them and the brand actually posting the ad, and the other way around, it just makes things a lot better, and I think we have an opportunity as an industry because we're building this now to avoid a lot of the mistakes that I think did happen, when digital media came up and if you look at digital media today in programmatic, there's like 30-45% fraud or impressions that never get served. Now, our industry doesn't really have that problem. Our ads always get served pretty much, but, so maybe we don't need to have verification in the same way, but there's still, a lot of things that happen there that where there's a waste, and we don't really know where that money goes, but I think we can avoid, on our end. So that's what I meant, and I think these next couple of years are going to be critical. We're going to need a lot of people to learn a lot of know-how we're going to need to learn. There are a lot of interesting companies that can help, but there are also a lot of players that are just going to try and make a buck because they can and don't necessarily add any value to the overall transaction.

When I look at the ad tech landscape, I get cross-eyed very quickly because there are so many companies selling their capabilities and they all describe what they do a little bit differently. It must be daunting to somebody taking a look at this. 

Anna Bager: That's exactly it. There's a very, who you may know, smart banker, but he's also an industry figure, Terence Kawaja from Luma. He's created something called a Lumascape, which kind of illustrates, and yes, you can get lost in that pretty quickly. We want to keep it as simple as possible. There's like an ad tech company for everything. There's been a lot of money to invest in those types of companies, but in the end, you really have to provide value and improvement to the transaction, otherwise, you shouldn't be in there. 

You also said in the keynote that more than 50% of media owners are now using AI. What hit me with that is why it is so low? 

Anna Bager: That actually was a survey that we did, I think at the end of last year. So I'm sure it's higher now and I think it's growing exponentially. At the time I thought, huh, interesting. I think everyone uses AI these days and I think you have to, if for nothing else, because everyone uses it. So you're going to be way behind if you don't, and I think in our industry, same things as everyone else, great creative solutions, great ways of just getting content out faster, making sure that you take into consideration all the different data and things that you might need to know to do a better job. So I think AI is critical. There's a lot of bad with AI, but there's also a lot of good.

I think the industry this year, since we did the survey, is probably a lot higher now. We should probably do it again. But we haven't done that yet, but it might be more, it might be closer to a 100%. 

Yeah, it strikes me as it's not the highly visible stuff, the creating ads from scratch and so on. It's much more about automation and the things that can be done to increase efficiency and accuracy. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. In the end, that's where it really can help. That and content creation. Of course, you just have to be very careful with AI because you really need to know where the data is coming from and how it's being used and be able to argue that if somebody were to challenge you, right? There's a lot of privacy, and regulatory murkiness around the whole thing. So you gotta be responsible and try to know what you're doing when you're using it. But obviously, it's an incredible tool. 

You mentioned earlier, that this is an election year, which no one can't help but know that these days. I'm curious in terms of budget and financials and forecasts and everything else, does a presidential election year have to be weighted in terms of every four years, there's a bit of an anomaly in terms of spend and then we go back to normal? 

Anna Bager: Obviously big elections, definitely there's so much more money on the market, but out-of-home as a platform is great, every two years there's an election, there's a lot of local elections all the time, there's a lot of advocacy groups and others that are out there with political messaging and our platform lends itself really well to that.

Out-of-home is not just an advertising platform, it's also a platform for public service messaging. A lot of that, right? And we're there, we can reach any consumer. Consumers who might not trust the media, who might not speak the language, whatever it might be, you can put a message up and reach them through signage. Political advertising, depending on how you defend it, I think it's a growth area for out-of-home and something that's not on or off, but obviously this election is also how it's happened, right? There's a lot going on at the very end. I think for everyone, it's a huge opportunity and then we'll have to deal with the aftermath of whatever that might be. 

Oh boy, hopefully not too much of an aftermath. 

I've been over in Europe a couple of times at conferences in the past year and speaking on panels and one of the things that would come up over and over again was sustainability which is a huge issue in Europe for digital out-of-home companies and all digital signage operators and I was asked, "What's happening in Canada and the US?” And I said, it's nowhere near the issue. I'm curious what the OAAA's take is. 

Anna Bager: Oh, we have a sustainability task force. We are very closely monitoring what's happening in Europe. We have a lot of members or not a lot, but we have a few members that have operations there too.

I think it's not as much of a focus here as it is in Europe, but I think it will be, and if you look at big global brands and agencies, they are going to ask for a better insight into how sustainable something was. So you need to pay attention to it. I think what's interesting with out-of-home is though, we might see him as a non-sustainable medium because you drive cars or you ride on airplanes or, But given that we are a one to many media, one ad can reach so many people, and it sits up there for a reasonably long time and it pretty much always reaches an audience, and it doesn't consume as much electricity or power as a lot of other media, in particular, digital does, the production of the ads can be very efficient.

There's something called the Green GRP. We are probably the ones who are best positioned there. We are far more sustainable in other media formats. So what we're focused on is how we better tell that story without greenwashing, and how we can help our members grow with the increasing demands that will come both from the government and from the brands and the agencies around these issues.

So I think it's important. I also think it's important, right? Like whether you believe in it or not, there's definitely something going on with the environment. So it's good to be protective of it, and I think our industry is very responsible. A lot of our members, even if they're in the US have sustainability officers and are constantly looking at how we can improve and make our industry better from that perspective. 

So no, it's a very important thing for us, and we are really looking into both who we can partner with and also what's going on in other markets, to see if we can learn. 

Is the adoption of the change going to be driven somewhat by starting to understand the impact on power bills and realizing, Oh yes, we can do work to address climate change, but we can also reduce our operating costs? 

Anna Bager: Sometimes, probably yes. There can be efficiencies and that's always good, but I think it really depends. I don't think everything reduces the operating costs, but some might, and then that's a form of sustainability too. Yeah, I think you should take all things into consideration. 

I think it's definitely something everyone should be aware of and take a close look at how they're running their operations, and see if they can make changes. 

I met recently with a company that does specialty displays, primarily focused on the digital out-of-home market and one of the things they're tinkering with is large format e-paper displays. So very energy-friendly. I know e-paper quite well, I've been looking at it for years and years. It's getting quite good but there are compromises in terms of color reproduction and everything else, and I asked, what do the brands think of this? Are they fine with it? 

And I was surprised to hear that, yeah, they get it. They understand we don't have maybe the exact color reproduction that we want, but it does other things for us. 

Anna Bager: That's a great example. You don't let perfection get in the way of good, or whatever it is that you say.

Look, we all have a common interest here, and I think if there's something that you can use that's more efficient or more sustainable, maybe less costly, I think that's a good way to convince the brand to do so. That's good news, I think. 

It's also smart to go and ask them for us before developing something, saying here, “Look what we did”, and then they go, “Yeah, I don't like that.”

Anna Bager: That's a a very good point, for sure. 

Happens all the time, but people keep doing it. 

Anna Bager: That is true. 

Alright, thank you for your time, this was great. 

Anna Bager: Thank you, this was really nice and good to speak to you.

Joe Giebel, Poppulo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive.

I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications.

I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side.

David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage.

Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams.

For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo.

Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave. 

Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right?

Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology? 

And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive.

You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right? 

Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time. 

So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left. 

It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it. 

We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good. 

My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool.

So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate. 

Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office. 

So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer?

Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home?

I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things.

So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it. 

When you say customer-facing, how do you define that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment.

What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar. 

How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outstanding way to show use cases and product information, and really shape an experience when you have your customers in your space. Tell me if that was a good answer for what you were hoping to define.

You did fine. Since more and more in the marketplace, larger customers, whether you want to call them enterprise or choose a name, are looking to slim down the number of vendors that they have, and they would like one vendor to do multiple things. Have you found that with some of your established clients that maybe you started with the workplace communications piece that they've then asked about doing large video walls, things like that, and on the flip side, maybe, whether it's an airline or an automaker, I'm thinking of some of your clients, more established clients. Have they said, yeah, we'd now like to also do workplace communications. Do you do that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. First of all, if we make our clients successful, naturally, those teams that manage whatever solution they're implementing are getting questions from their peers on, how do I do that? You know, can you help me, and, who's your partner making this possible?

So we see expansion across the products they own and new use cases. As you mentioned, maybe they're doing employee comms on screens and then it becomes large video walls and experiential things, maybe it's facilities related to meeting room signs, wayfinding, et cetera. 

To the other element of your question, they're also saying if that partner is making us successful, where else can we use them? They do want to consolidate solutions to one vendor that they have success with. That's the biggest question that comes up with my clients. If I invest in you, how are you going to guarantee this solution is successful? And my team sees an ROI and it's not another tool that goes unused. So without a doubt, there's a desire, I believe, by Finance and IT to consolidate technology and vendors, as much as possible, especially if there's a track record of driving a return on the investment and making teams successful.

I'm guessing the conversations are very different than they were, 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, in terms of. I would say in the past, in the history of this digital signage was sold and people were interested in, from the idea of the kind of the sizzle of the screens, the visual elements of it and these days, instead of talking to marketing people, you're talking to IT people and they care about security and they care about data integration, things like that, is that accurate? 

Joe Giebel: That is 100 percent accurate and I think you highlight in 2005, when we started the screen had such a sizzle, most homes didn't have flat-screen TVs. We were talking about plasmas back then. The iPhone didn't exist. So the concept of a touch screen and a large flat screen display, made life a real fun for digital signage. 

Now the screens are more common. security and value, are kind of the table stakes to get into the game and where you really start to differentiate, you you understand the use case and how that is going to benefit a company, whether you're increasing productivity, reducing risk, and is that apparent? And do they understand how you're going to deliver that? And then on the security side, you almost don't get to pass go if you don't have a security posture that can scale globally, and, provide a safe feeling.

I don't even think they have worries, right? You just don't do business with a vendor that's going to create worry, they've either got the security you need or you move on. 

Yeah, and I mean, at least historically, I'm not sure where you're at right now, but historically you had a very large casino group and you had a very large Airline and those are two companies that have to be like, everybody has to be concerned about security, but they really care about security. 

Joe Giebel: They do. It's paramount, obviously it presents a ton of risk. If you don't have that secure environment that matches their standard and those two examples, especially within the gaming world, those are tremendous partners of ours that kind of walked us through: Here's where you need to be, and we're so fortunate to have worked with them, and been able to develop that security posture with them in real world scenarios. 

If you haven't set up gaming integrations and received gaming licenses. That is an in depth process that most of your leadership gets to go through and they get into personal stuff, they do a great job of remaining secure 

So if you're going to work with those kinds of whale clients, you got to be prepared for a lot of hand holding and a long process? 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. They're going to look at everything. I mean, they will find if you've got an NFL pick thing going on internally and you somehow put that interface onto a website, they're going to find that and they're going to ask you questions on why you're running a gambling ring. It goes that in-depth.

They will see your resumes, they're going to do background checks on most of your team. So, there is a process to it. it takes some time and they leave no stone unturned. 

It's been a few years now. Was the process of blending two companies, and I believe it's actually three companies that were kind of blended together, was that a bit of a journey?

Joe Giebel: It is absolutely. Our company for the early history, we bootstrapped it. We had a visionary CEO that founded the company with one partner and we were a tight-knit family that didn't have outside investors. Taking on outside investment was a journey, and an experience, and then as we acquire, these are new experiences for our teams and so it is a bit of a journey. 

There's the whole business operations side of things and how do you get multiple systems to speak to each other? How do we blend processes and then you've got the cultural elements of bringing organizations together, and you have to balance all of that? The people need to remain happy, the systems have to work. So it was a process and if I look at my resume and time with these organizations, what an education it's been for the last 19 years. 

Are there kinds of tribes, so to speak? I'm curious if the operation in Cork, Ireland, which was where Poppulo, came from. Is that the workplace side and are the people in Denver more focused on digital signage? 

Joe Giebel: You know, that's part of the journey and the early stages of the journey you definitely have. I'll stick with your term tribes and people that have knowledge and quite honestly, comfortability with a certain way of doing business.

Along that journey, you start to see that tribal element go away, and you start to see the company mesh and become one organization that grows, and so early on, Denver had to be the hub for digital signage. It’s a, I don't want to say complex, but if you're used to selling a pure SaaS solution, and then you start to add in hardware and the different elements of digital signage, it's more than you're used to and without a doubt, I hadn't talked about email and corporate communications in that sense prior to the acquisition. So it took me time to understand it.

 I would say now, our entire company is so excited about a multi-channel tool, that everybody's leaned into it at this point and we work cross functionally quite well. It extends the workday quite a bit. 

I'm sure there was also a bit of a journey kind of massaging and figuring out the right message, because going to target customers and saying, we do this and we do this, and we also do this must've potentially left them a little cross eyed.

Joe Giebel: Without a doubt. I think we've learned along the way, when to talk about. the channel for a client and when to focus on a specific offering, and that's a delicate dance as well to feel that out. Because not every customer understands our vision quickly, and they certainly don't share the excitement that we have over new stuff because it's not at the forefront of what they do every day. So you can absolutely create a ton of confusion, and we probably did that, in the early process of coming together as Poppulo. 

It probably feels like you're trying to sell them more stuff. 

Joe Giebel: You know, as a sales guy, I'm probably insensitive to that, but, yeah, absolutely. You kind of get that sense when someone's sniffing out a salesperson coming into the room, and I bet we did pass that as well. 

At the end of the day, we are trying to sell more stuff, but if we can't illustrate what the value is and why it makes sense to buy more solutions from us, we haven't done our job and we're probably not going to win that. So at the end of the day, we really do want to try to enhance the offerings and drive value to our client base. 

You also have an office now in Bangalore, India. Is that a Dev team or a remote Dev team? 

Joe Giebel: You know, we've got a number of functions, including development in Bangalore and that's an exciting market. I just saw endless content about how important digital signage is in India, and so we were excited to open that office up. I think it's been open for several months. We held our grand opening last week, but we've got a great team there, including a lot of technical folks and so we're very excited about that expansion. 

But it's sales as well? It's not just purely, what would be perceived at least as being lower-cost, software development than what you would pay in North America. 

Joe Giebel: Correct. It's not purely an offshoring effort. We see some strategic elements there. We've always provided technical experts to support our clients 24/7. That certainly helps the effort. We used to do that from Denver and have people working through the night. We now have folks in support as well in Bangalore. 

The work culture in India, I think opens up a ton of possibilities for any digital signage vendor. That's looking at how do I enhance the workplace and employee experience within an office. I think that's going to be a tremendous market. 

Yeah. I mean, it's a vast market. I suspect the challenge is based on the emails and pitches I get from people that the expectations on cost for SaaS licensing, software, and so on are somewhat lower than they are in North America.

Joe Giebel: It's interesting, and some of the organizations there, that's a tough game if you don't have scale in what we're talking about, oftentimes though, if an organization is looking at this correctly, they're looking to roll out at scale and obviously we can build in better commercials that way, to better understand that, but without a doubt, as we look at a number of our clients are truly global, you do feel that pressure, as you go region to region, and that's an interesting thing you've got to handle, and try to solve for. 

Do you have a client who you're allowed to talk about, because often the larger ones, it's difficult to get any permissions, that kind of really reflects the full meal deal of what you can do in terms of workplace, venue-based, customer-facing digital signage, maybe staff facing digital signage, like the whole shoot and match? 

Joe Giebel: You know, I think Delta Airlines is a great client that takes advantage of most of our solutions, and then especially within digital signage, they've got so many use cases that they deploy both employee-facing, above wing for the passengers and below wing for the employees.

So I think that's a good client that, we're fortunate does a lot of speaking about the solutions and is someone we can discuss. 

Yeah, you've had them for a long time, right? Like, at least a decade. 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. Long-term client. They started out with employee comms, and they've won a number of awards in the industry for some of the innovations that they do. I believe last year we started rolling out passenger-facing applications broadly for flight information displays. 

Yeah. I did a podcast with Ryan Taylor going back about three years or something, and I've been seriously impressed by what Delta is doing.

Because they totally get it, you can use screens really help inform the passenger journey and from the moment you walk into the check-in area all the way post-security. What was really intriguing was what they were doing, as you said, below the wing with, ramp information screens that are talking to the guys who are heaving bags into the planes and everything.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, that's right. It's heartwarming when you see them roll out, one Ryan, leads a team that focuses on a number of things. Digital signage is a large part of it and they all understand what use cases and applications we can leverage digital screens for to help our customers and our employees.

But when you see images of a 30-year pilot pulling up to a gate, and the ramp information display is saying, thanks for your work and dedication to Delta, and you know, that pilot's retiring it. That's a cool use of the technology, and it feels good that they think that's helping them build their culture and recognize people. It's awesome to see that in use, and in context like that. 

The industry obviously has evolved quite a bit over 20 years. I'm curious about what you're seeing these days that you're seeing more and more customer demand for, I suspect it's things like data integration. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. I think data integration is the key and trying to understand, how do we make these things real? 

The industry is asking for, it's odd when I hear it, I want consumer grade. Because I think 15 years ago you wanted everything to be the commercial grade which seemed to mean Strength quality, you know now they're thinking about the experience and consumer-grade is the goal. Consumer grade meaning I want it to react and be as simple As you know, maybe a social media app, and what I experienced on my personal devices need to be intuitive and need to be smooth.

There can't be a need for training on how to interact with this thing. So, part of that is data integration. Is the data automated? Is it near real-time, and accurate? And are we putting the right data in front of people that they want? And you've got to have flexibility on that integration side because oftentimes, we'll see things get deployed and we see behaviors driven and it's like, wow, we didn't predict our clients and us and our project teams will say, we didn't predict those results. Let's tweak this and this to get back towards what we were driving and that flexibility and data integration, I think is the cornerstone of being able to deliver that experience.

You have a platform you call Harmony. Is that the piece that kind of stitches together the different components versus, yeah, I just want the digital signage thing or I just want the email marketing thing? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. So as you start to think about all these channels coming together, we call that platform harmony and it is a multi-channel, omnichannel approach to putting content really, I want to say communications, but, let's say getting content in front of the right people at the right time, and it gives you that ability to broadcast across every channel, or maybe you're using our analytics to say, “Look, we know these disconnected workers are not looking at the email, so we don't need to address them with email, that's creating too much noise.” So that concept or that name of Harmony, is the concept of all these channels coming together in harmony within an organization. 

Without giving away business details, I'm curious, what percentage of customers are using Harmony versus those who still just want the traditional workplace comm stuff and those who just want digital signage for their retail environment or whatever it may be?

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we've got a massive client base. So I would say about 10 percent of them are taking advantage of multi-channel, and on what I would just define as the Harmony platform, and I would say we've probably had serious conversations with about 80 percent and are working with them on plans for which channels might make sense.

Oftentimes you've sold one solution to a team in the past, and that team's not going to necessarily handle that full digital strategy. So then it becomes a process of meeting the other stakeholders, showing them the value, and then planning how we roll this out. Because these are so highly visible, both digital signs, email, what we call feeds, putting messaging into collaboration tools, it's so visible that you have to be thoughtful on how you roll that out, how you plan it. So it takes a little bit of time. 

I'd say 10 percent are the early adopters and taking advantage right now and it's certainly something we evangelize across the client base. 

I suspect the leadership team likes that situation because there's a lot of growth potential there. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we absolutely love it.

The question then becomes, and what we've been working through quite honestly, for the last two years. How hard do you push on a platform play? And then how hard do you focus on nurturing the existing solutions and making sure that the teams that originally bought them aren't getting flooded with, “Hey, here's a shiny new toy.” And they're getting the adequate focus from us on how we make you most successful, within what you own and what are your expansion plans for that singular solution. 

So there is a balance and, honestly, it might come across as a little disrespectful, if you don't pick up on what the client needs in the moment and we don't mean it that way. But you got to have your ears open, and stay customer centric, as you kind of navigate those waters. 

All right. This is great. Good to catch up. if people want to know more, they'll find you just at poppulo.com? 

Joe Giebel: Poppulo.com is the best place to reach us and you'll start to see all those solutions, both from an individual, description and promotion, as well as here's how all these channels play together.

All right, Joe. Thanks again! 

Joe Giebel: Dave, great catching up. Thank you.

Chris Cavalieri, Obsidian Screens

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Projection has always been something of a fringe player in digital signage because of a series of technical barriers to adoption, most notably the limited operating life of the lamps, and the product and labor costs of switch them out. Laser projection has addressed that issue, but the other one that's harder to conquer is dealing with ambient light. Unless the projector is the size of a fridge, super-bright and seriously expensive, the environment's lights need to be off or dimmed and any windows covered.

A startup called Obsidian Screens, based on the fringes of greater Toronto, has developed a projection screen that can show visuals that aren't washed out even with the lights on and the blinds open - and as the brand name suggests, the screens are black instead of white or silver. It's a super-thin laminated material light enough to marry with foam - like a poster with a 1/4-inch foam backing to make it rigid and ready to hang.

Co-founder Chris Cavalieri and his business partner use Ambient Light Rejecting technology - something that's been around for years - but have their own "nanofilter" technology that does a better job, he says, of preserving projector brightness and visibility. And just as is the case with LED video walls, the more black on the display surface, the better the contrast.

The company has been around for seven years, but remains quite small ... as they have struggled to find the right partners to specify, sells and deploy their tech. They've run into at least a couple of challenges - with end-users who were disappointed by conventional projection set-ups, and pro AV integrators who for logical reasons want to sell systems that cost a lot more and need ongoing paid support and services.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thanks for joining me. You're based outside of the Greater Toronto Area and you've been working for a few years now on a company called, well, a product called Obsidian. Can you run through all of that for me? 

Chris Cavalieri: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate taking the time to talk about it and boy, do I have lots to say.

You have half an hour. Go!

Chris Cavalieri: All right. Perfect. No pressure. So Obsidian, I should probably talk a little bit about projection. So what we've been trying to do and we've been doing for a while, is trying to find a way to take all the benefits. So if anyone's in digital signage, I assume there's a few listening to this what incredible things can be done with projection. So things like projection mapping holographic displays, very unique, creative stuff, and it's absolutely fantastic, and when we started out, we looked at things and said, like, why isn't this used more? 

You know, we go to retail stores, we're going to shopping centers and there are LEDs, we've got LCD video walls now and only a few set cases, maybe a performance or display are using projection to its full potential and it begs the question is why, and that why is how we found it, our idea of Obsidian, which is to create a solution to get those benefits projection and make it a lot more accessible and practical in place of, or as an option compared to say our elite typical LED signage and LCD video walls. 

So, I mean, projection, it's very renovation friendly, it's very scalable, and depending on what projector you use, it can be quite a low cost, the benefits are endless, and compared to LEDs, which are quite glaring, most of the time, I'm biased, obviously, no shame in that, but most people don't want to stare at an LED board as a backing, screen for like a speaker stage, for example, casino games. We've talked to fellows in Vegas before. It causes fatigue for people who are near them for too long. And that's, that comes down to the human eye and there's a whole science behind it, the wavelength of lights and all that. I won't go into it. It works. It's bright. It gets people's attention, but it just doesn't give the same aesthetic as a good projection setup would. 

So coming back to it, why don't we use projection? And quite frankly, it's because it mostly just sucks because it fails. You need to have a dark room, dim room, or very well-controlled lighting, and by having controlled lighting and those restrictions, designers or retail commercial designers can't do solutions they want to do where this challenge is like a window nearby and sunlight there are challenges that they can't overcome and maintain a good looking display and that's where LEDs kind of help punch through that. 

So the question is what if we had a solution where projection can punch through that can give you those same benefits and versatility, but you can have nearby lights? You don't have to overly control your space. I mean, of course, you can't do shopping in a grocery store with your lights off or a shopping mall. You know, it's not practical. You might be able to do a half-hour show or presentation, but it doesn't make sense, and that's at least my conclusion personally, my experience is why we don't see more of these really cool-looking projection map displays than we do now. It doesn't work in most cases. When it does, it's great, but most of the time it doesn't. 

So Obsidian is basically to solve that problem. we've got our own proprietary technology and IP around it, and we've designed a system that harmonizes the projector and the screen, and we include the lighting as well for nearby lighting to essentially use the nanofiller technology to work together and what I mean in a very blunt sense from that is that these systems will work independent of the environment around it. So if people have heard of light rejecting screens, ALR screens essentially you have a gray screen or a silver screen. It'll absorb about 50%-60% percent of your light in the room and that gives you contrast, which is great because it helps you have a more adaptable, flexible display. 

What our system does is the same thing, but that absorption, instead of normally it'll absorb your projector. So your white becomes gray, silver, whatever it is. In our case, your projector can shine on the screen and your lights can shine near or on the screen and have no loss, so it will reflect off of it. It keeps its colors, it keeps its white balance, and then the ambient light that is basically using this filter will absorb completely, not just the 60%. Whereas everything else gets knocked down by 50%-60%, and it creates this really neat illusion and really efficient display where fundamentally it's the same as any projection system, but you can see all your colors just popping. You maintain your contrast and your white balance and it's almost like you've doubled the lumens in your projector, and we love this because this opened up an option for again, adding an accessible and affordable solution somewhere between a TV set, and an LED video wall, where again, you can have something that's highly visible. It's got wide viewing angles. It keeps its color resilient, but you can also be adaptive. So again seasonal renovations for a retail environment stores, places where you don't really want to control lighting or it's too much work to deal with it. Plus you can install the thing in under a day. I mean, we've hung screens in under an hour compared to perhaps weeks on a video wall. So maintenance costs and benefits are endless. 

So that was our goal with Obsidian again. What is holding it back from creating unique creative solutions? And how do we overcome that in this nanofilter system? And I think most people are afraid of it because it wasn't easy to develop and there are restrictions to it. Again, it's got to work as a cohesive system, that scared people and got a lot of resistance, but boy, does it work. 

You're an engineer. I'm absolutely not. For simpletons like me, the simpleton explanation would be that instead of this being a white or silver screen, it's a black screen, correct?

Chris Cavalieri: It is a black screen. So if you turn your projectors off and look at it, it'll look kind of a charcoal gray, maybe a little bit of a greenish tint to it, and you know, that's kind of like a decorative wall panel, and that's what it looks like. That's what it is, and that's because the light is bouncing off, it's still being absorbed. Their eyes don't have the nano filters in them. If you wear polarized sunglasses, you might, it might be interesting but that's essentially what's going on there. So it is indeed a dark-colored screen. 

When you describe it as a system, you're talking about the kit of parts, but your part is the screen. The challenge with projection and the reason. It wasn't it hasn't really grown very much in digital science or anywhere else used to be with the projector and the lamp life and how you'd have to replace it all the time and it was unreliable and also that it wasn't very bright. Lasers have changed that. other technologies have improved. So that side is somewhat conquered. However, if you want a very bright projector, you're getting something the size of an Austin Mini. But, the screen thing is still by and large a white screen, right?

Or film that you apply to a window glass that will make an image appear, but it's not very sharp or bright, I mean. 

Chris Cavalieri: Exactly. I mean, that's the only solution people had to date is to get a bigger projector, and what's really unique about using our nano filter technology is you don't need a brighter projector to achieve the same result as you would. So there's almost a savings. I mean, I don't want to just say upfront savings, there is maintenance still involved, laser projectors have been a huge benefit to the industry on that front. They still need to be replaced eventually. But by using these filters and creating this super high-efficiency system effectively, it's not just the screen, it's the pairing of the projector and the screen. You can add the lights optionally as well. That allows you to use about half the lumens you would require in just a punch-through projector to achieve the same visible results that same effective brightness called legibility, of the display, and you're getting a little bit higher contrast because the screen is naturally darker than a white canvas or a white painted wall.

Is it front projection or rear? 

Chris Cavalieri: Front projection right now. We do have a prototype of the rear projection. It does work. We were working with the Art Gallery of Ontario at one point on a display which was kind of fun, so we almost accidentally made it just out of curiosity. There is a rear projection system for it. It's got, it's. own little challenges and restrictions, mostly just size, I say it's the only thing remaining. So while we don't offer it as an off-the-shelf product at the moment, customized solutions, that is something we can whip up together and it does work quite well.

So is this almost like an architectural material that you could use instead of wallpaper or something if you wanted a projection surface in a retail environment or whatever?

Chris Cavalieri: Absolutely. In fact, at one point, we had a version where we put an adhesive on the back instead of, we normally use PVC foam just to keep it rigid for hanging on the wall and we called it digital wallpaper and I know TV sets have tried to replace that and transparent LEDs, but absolutely this the screen itself is only about a millimeter thick. It is flexible so you can wrap it on columns, you can create decorative panels, and again, it does have a nice finish to it. You can route the edges, it's cuttable, machinable, you name it, and from an architectural standpoint, yeah, it's perfect. I mean, decorative panels, unique shapes. You can do multiple shapes in an array. You can make it continuous, join them together, and project whatever you want, and even when it's off, it'll have that kind of charcoal gray, very soft, it's a glare-free canvas finish to it like a print, and it definitely works.

Could you print on it? 

Chris Cavalieri: Yes. We haven't done it, but because it's built as a laminate, there was a layer on the front layer that we'd be able to print on the back of before it's assembled. So yeah, we could print a still image into it or a texture, maybe like a woodgrain pattern to it onto that one layer, stick it together, and embed a static image to it, which you could then nest to the digital content. That'd be really cool. 

Is the front surface, the laminate part of it, is that like a fabric, or is that like an acrylic coating or something? 

Chris Cavalieri: It's a polycarbonate substrate. So it's a kind of a semi-rigid plastic, a very thin layer, but there's a few layers. So it's kind of a blend of vinyl polycarbonate. We've got a few in there, but that top one would be a polycarbonate. So quite durable, quite resistant. 

So you wouldn't have to rope it off or anything, people could be near it without being terrified that something's going to get damaged. 

Chris Cavalieri: No, it's quite resilient. I mean, you can scratch it if you really try, but to break it or crack it is extremely difficult.

What do you see as the primary use cases for it? 

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, I've been dreaming of retail, commercial, public display, but honestly, I'm one person. I'm an engineer. I just want to get these in the hands of absolutely phenomenal designers, architects out there, and interior designers, to let them just run wild because it's so adaptable. In fact, you can shape it, you can wrap it, tile it, and do 3D shapes. Usually, when we go to trade shows we'll do like we have a pop can, it's like a cylinder and we put like a Pepsi animation on it and you can do arrays of different shapes together, and like the limits of creativity are endless.

It's just like any good projection map and application. Get those into the right hands and it's a dream. So, I mean, I pictured grocery stores for advertising, to justify costs. So a lot of the time they have printed posters or a big mural at the back top of their store over their freezers and just put panels up. You have tons of ceiling space, running power, and signal to it, it’s dead easy compared to like an led array for that size of display, and now you have a source of revenue, advertising, promotion of the week, whatever it is, and you have that control. So I mean, a store designer can really go to town because of that ease of use, ease of access, and the flexibility of a projection system, which now works by using our filters.

What kind of challenges do you have around projection angles and things like that? 

I gather we're talking, ahead of this a little bit, and I was asking about ultra-short throw projection and so on and there are some limitations around that, like you want to be a little bit further back in terms of the throw on the angle.

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, so right now, a short throw to a standard throw, and of course, long throws are all good for it. We have done some tests with ultra-short throws, unfortunately, the optics in the ultra-short throw right now do conflict with the optics in the laminate. So we can't use it with that at the moment. Although, secret R&D projects #1, #10 or #20. We are working on a potential solution to that, which should be independent of the projector that may work, but I won't say it will till I prove it. So let's assume it doesn't for now, for an ultra short throw, but again, standard throw and even short throw, long throw setups are all fine. That's what we recommend, and that's nice too, because that gives you, again, control over angles. We do play with the optics a little bit on the screen and it's part of our secret as well, we do narrow a bit of the vertical cone and bend light horizontally. So you have a more uniform viewing experience for things like foot traffic from left to right. So there is a restriction, but it's quite wide. 

Most ALR screens, you might be able to see the thing at plus minus 30 degrees, sometimes usually less, where it comes down to a half-brightness angle. So we get very dark at an angle. Whereas ours actually, you can see funny enough, it's beyond 180 degrees, it gets brighter. That's steep, and it was really weird, totally not intended, but, so that's part of a little bit of the magic of our specific laminate that we've built is it has that really unique uniformity, kind of like paper, close to paper at all viewing angles left right around it.

So there's a workaround. The challenge I've seen sometimes with projection systems is that they're great except when somebody needs to get up close to it or walk by and then there's a shadow and so on. So you can let's say in a corridor, a wide hallway, or something like that, you could mount this on like a track system or something like that and project down and people could walk by without, unless they're right in front of it, they're not going to, come into the shadow there?

Chris Cavalieri: Yep. I mean, because we have that steep angle controlled on it, it can also affect bringing the projector into it. So we can have the thing off to the side. You can have it overhead. You can kind of project from steeper. So again, not quite an ultra-short throw, but that's because of the actual lensing in it. But a standard projector at a steeper angle will work quite well with that. So you have a lot of versatility and adaptability for that. Again, just making sure it's over people's heads, and by the time they block it, technically the advertisement, has done its job. So it's not too much of a concern on that front, but you can get away with quite a bit, and a lot of retail stores and public displays have lots of ceiling space to play with too. So it's very flexible there. 

Do you have to monkey with the content in terms of how it's rendered or have particular software running on the media player or whatever to make all this happen, or it's a screen and point the projector at the screen? 

Chris Cavalieri: That's why I love it because, I mean, ironically all the research we've done again, me and my colleague, both engineers, we love to keep it simple. So we've got a few projects on the go as well. Same idea, but all the software you need is the same that's already out there. It's projection mapping. Like that, nothing has changed. Nothing you learn there. If you know how to do projection mapping, or you have a team of guys who know how to do it, nothing's different. That's just content. All we do is you're putting the right projector with the right screen, and then you can see it. Simple as that. 

So I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about an installation in London in a coffee shop, and it was a black wall with a kind of chalkboard, and they were putting the menu on that instead, well, on flat panel displays and it looked pretty cool, but the coffee shop was having to dim the lights and do everything else because there are windows and doors out to the street and so on. 

If they're using your technology, do the lights have to be cranked down, drapes pulled, and all that, or it could behave as though, it is just being a regular shop?

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, that's a perfect example, and that's exactly what we want to do, and in fact, we tried to approach McDonald's, Tim Hortons, and all that, and of course, they tell me to get lost because who's Obsidian, but that's just, it is, you don't need to turn your lights on. 

Part of the founding purpose was, that Adrian, my colleague, kept tripping on everything in his classroom because he always had to turn the lights on and off and is prone to that he's always back and forth showing his slides and it's a safety risk. Even old age homes, we had approached at one point as well for they have movie theaters, they share and it's just not practical to do that, and like I said in the beginning, that's why projection isn't, and I wouldn't recommend using it in a lot of cases because if you're working as a barista and your lights are off, you can't see what you're doing. It's bad for your eye strain. If you're trying to focus look at what you're pouring, you're going to have accidents, you're going to slip, probably can't clean as effectively. And there's so many reasons you'd really need to have lights on for safety, if nothing else, and our screen will let you do that. 

Again, we've had beams of sunlight across it, still keeping the thing readable. keep your lights on. I mean, there are things you can do to play with it. It depends on the projector you use, you'd use a brighter or dimmer one. You can control the lighting as well, and we do recommend it when you can, but you don't have to be quite as aggressive when you do it. So you can keep those lights on. 

Part of the rise of the LED technology within workplaces has been the idea that in presentation theaters, big meeting rooms where more typically there's been a projector, but then the drapes are closed or a control room where the lights are very low so that you can see what's being projected on the screen.

The idea was that a DV-LED would change all that. You could open the windows up and crank the lights and everything, and you'd be able to see what's on the screen with no problem. But the challenge is cost. 

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, there's cost and there's also, I mean, with LED, do you want to see it? It's not very pleasant to look at for a long period of time.

I mean, the concept is right. All these technologies have a purpose, and I'm not discrediting the value of LEDs like outdoor displays, and billboards, I mean, they punch through light. They're very good at getting through it. They're extremely visible. They'll get your attention. But they're just not pleasant to read, if that makes sense so in terms of a boardroom yeah, it could work, and I've seen stages done with full LEDs instead of a projection screen, and it's just unpleasant. Even if you're recording it, there are aliasing effects and a lot of unpredictable things you don't really expect.

So it's one of those things that's good on paper, but in practical use is not great, and then the cost is the other end of it. So there's the cost to maintain it, install it, you have to calibrate it all those things because LEDs wear out, not no LED is the same when they come out of production, there's binning to them, all sorts of things to keep in mind.

That was our other motivator with projection. These are my famous words. You don't have to blow your budget to blow minds, right? If you do something right with the right technology that's good enough, right? You got to know what your application is, know who your audience is, who's using it, and really understand and appreciate that and Obsidian was our way to say, look, you have another option. Because light ambient light is an issue. Architects absolutely love giant windows nowadays. A funny story about a university in Ontario that got millions of dollars to renovate their classrooms, I won't name them, and big giant skylight windows without drapes, funny enough, that would let the sunrise right in that window and really make the presenter glow at the front of the classroom and which also happened to have a projection screen, which was with white and not Obsidian, and let's just say it didn't end very well, and even the another Yoko university has used projection. They've put drapes on and with those giant lights, but they're not full block-out drapes. You know, they usually let a little bit of light in. Even with the drapes closed midday cloudy day, you still couldn't read the screen. So it is a major problem and aesthetically, the rooms look beautiful. 

I mean, the architect is doing their job on that front. They're gorgeous buildings, beautifully renovated very nice aesthetics to them, but it's not functional. You need technology to overcome those challenges and to date, your only choice is to guess it is LED you either put up with it just squint or not reading it or you stick something expensive heavy bulky, and kind of blinding and you know now you can read it but you've also sort of made people uncomfortable in this space too. So you need another solution, and that's what we're hoping to do.

It's an interesting predicament for companies such as yours in that you're offering what's presented as a better option and probably far less cost. But for the companies that sell into environments like higher education, corporate, public utilities, all that sort of thing, it's not necessarily in their business interest to sell them a cost-effective, low-maintenance solution.

There's a lot more money to be made on the margin of one hell of a lot of LED and then calibration and support services and everything around it, as opposed to just selling them a display and saying, thanks, very much, call us at three years when you need a new projector. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, absolutely, and this has been driving me absolutely insane, to be honest. This projection system has existed for almost seven years now, and I still, we're still a startup. It says a lot. I mean, yes, we're engineers. We're probably terrible at sales and marketing and we are, but c’mon…

You're not the first.

Chris Cavalieri: It’s just we've approached distributors, we've gone through universities, we've thrown sales in front of them practically, and the reality is in the end, you got to go where the money's at. They want something that's predictable. The use case is the same. The installation is the same, and the training for their technicians and the customer is the same. Everything's the same because once you've got your company up and running they're not wrong. It's expensive, change is expensive and it's risky, and nowadays no one wants to take that risk. They don't want to do anything different. You know, it might be better for the customer, but. I like my margins. You know, I need my income. I got to put food on the table. I got to pay my team. 

Now, we're going to do this job because that's what we know how to do, and that's where we make money, and we understand that, and that's fine, but there's got to be someone who cares about the end user to find unique creative solutions find solutions to problems that You know, push the industry a little bit further and this has been an ongoing battle for years for us, and it drives me nuts. 

So you're absolutely right that it's a paradigm for them if they're not used to working with it. If they do, it's a white screen and they know when and where it works, and that's the end of it. There's zero reception for anything else and I hope that changes. 

I suspect there's a bit of a taint as well in that, a lot of larger environments will have used projection in the past and have the experience of going, “Well, God, I can't even see the screen properly, or anything else, so projections are off.” 

So when that gets revisited, unless you have the opportunity to have a really high-quality conversation with them, they're thinking, well, shit, I'm not doing projection again. That was a mess. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. “Oh, we have used projection before. It didn't look that good.” The customer wasn't happy. You know, we can't have that, and I mean, that's valid too. 

So is a better specifier or audience for your technology, quite possibly the architects and people who think about physical spaces and experience?

Chris Cavalieri: I think it has to be, I think those are the only people that really get the experiential side of what you can do with projection, they have the vision they can see they have a basically working towards a solution, right? They have a client who wants something unique they're left to their creative devices to develop this solution or overcome a challenge and they need all the tools in their toolbox and the actual installers, the AV text distributors, but they're not the right people to do it. They're going to do business as usual. It's gotta be the people making the design decisions who can see something greater or want to do something, and previously, let's say they couldn't, that's where proceeding could fit in.

So getting it in front of them, and that's something we're trying to do as much as we can network. That's also been challenging because these people are hard to find. I think I waited four months for a meeting at one point and met an interior design firm, and in the end, they didn't know or want to hang a TV set, so it wasn't a commercial designer, more of an interior designer, the right people are out there, and those are the people that, again, the architects, designers, those are the solution providers that really need to get their hands on this. 

It sounds like along with the physical cost of the substrate or screen or whatever you want to call it, there are really minimal additional costs in terms of a mounting system you don't need to go to the sorts of mounting systems that would be used for DBLED or LCD anything else. There's not all that metalwork, right? It's just this piece of foam that hangs on a wall, like a poster that you get foam mounted.

Chris Cavalieri: That's exactly it. That's what we tell everyone. If you hang it, you just hang it like a poster or a mirror or a print, and it's all adaptable too. Again, we do a lot of customization. So we can put the French cleat on, and hang it on your wall. What we love about that PVC foam is it's you can superglue hard points onto it from this very inexpensive and very lightweight, let's say like a 24-inch by 54-inch panel, so 4.5 feet by 2 feet, is I think about 8 kilograms, basically per panel and put a cleat onto it. We've screwed into it. We've put hooks to hang off of for summer trade shows, for portal displays. You can screw into it, you can cut it, shape it, layer it, can thicken it, or thin it, it's very versatile for the installer and whatever the application is. 

So to really get our goal, the whole vision of the city is to remove barriers, remove restrictions, and that's a mounting system we've enjoyed because it really harmonized with what we're trying to achieve lightweight. It's just no metalwork. It doesn't take weeks. It takes under an hour. You just hang it on your wall. You can butt them together. Done. Very simple. 

So you're a startup. So I assume there's not a cast of thousands working at the company? 

Chris Cavalieri: Nope. We've got two and a dog, we're very small.

I mean we've got a few people out there who are kind of advocates for us as well. So we've networked that way. We've got a really great PR guy as well who is helping us out network to the States, and Canada. He's absolutely fantastic. So we've officially the team is two, but we've got a number of people helping us. We've had some advisors we've worked with locally as well, from the university and then the forge and Hamilton as well, for example. So we've got lots of support, so we're a small team, but we're quite effective at what we do, and we've got contract manufacturers. 

We have a whole network in China if we really had to go down the road for volume production. So we see a path to mass production very quickly if and when we get to that point, but we're still two people at the moment.

Your biggest challenge is just the simple thing of awareness and finding people who get what you've got. 

Chris Cavalieri: That's it. I mean, it's spreading the message, and I mean, anyone who's done a startup knows how hard it is. Anyone who's been an engineer or even not an engineer knows how hard it is to push a product on someone. It's sort of forbidden, forbidden knowledge to do that, and we've tried and iterated our design many times. 

For example, we've made a home theater projection screen you can buy at Walmart right now. We have an adaptation of this technology for home use because during COVID everyone was at home. No one's putting signs in. I mean, we're very adaptable, flexible, and I mean, that's the benefit of being a very small, but creative, dynamic team is you can do these things we have the technology, we have to know how to do it and frankly, we love design and we love creative challenges. So that's something we do and we'll continue to do. 

Are there any sort of caps on resolution or anything like that? Like, I don't really understand screen technology. If somebody has a 4k output, that's what's on there, that doesn't really matter. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. So the resolution is all just coming from the projector itself. So it depends on the projector you choose. I'd say the only limitation, people listing stuff as like a 4k projection screen is just. Throwing jargon at you to make it sound cool. It's, plastic. It'll be stretch vinyl or painted vinyl. The only thing that might affect your resolution in general is if the screen has a high texture in it. So sometimes there are some optical screens for an ultra-short throw, for example depending on the size of those you might see speckling or something at a certain resolution.

That's the only thing I can think of you could justify putting a resolution to a screen, but we don't have that.. 

So if people wanna know more, where do they find you online? 

Chris Cavalieri: So I mean, you can dig me up on LinkedIn, but obsidianscreens.com would be a good starting place. Shoot me an email, and then my name's Chris Cavalieri, should be on the screens look me up on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. We got Facebook, we got YouTube, you name it. So save screen technologies wherever you can find them. 

All right, well thank you for your time. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dave. It's great to talk with you, and I hope we'll get to see you soon. Well, 

We'll see what I can do. 

Chris Cavalieri: I'll show it off. I hope all my words live up to it in person.

Chanan Averbuch, Blue Square X

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

LED video wall technology is now so pervasive, and there are soooo many vendors, that it is increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate and compete.

That's compounded by a lot of manufacturers selling on specs like pixel pitch, and the form factor of their products. Very few, however, spend much if any time talking about the why and what of video wall projects - as in why is this project being considered, what's it for, and also what's going to be on the screen when it gets plugged in.

So I was intrigued when I was in touch with Chanan Averbuch, a South Florida LED industry vet. I learned he'd left his longtime executive sales gig with an LED display vendor to join a spinout that makes premium LED displays, but leads with creative.

The company is called Blue Square X - with the X being short for experience. While most manufacturers just make the stuff, and ship it to integrators, Blue Square plans to bridge a couple of gaps - acting as consultants and producing creative for digital experiences ... with integrator partners doing the final install.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Chanan, thank you for joining me. We've traded messages on LinkedIn and everything else and as we were saying before I turned on the recording, we probably had a brush by, “Hey, how are you doing?” I think at some trade show, but we haven't chatted at length. Can you tell me what your company Blue Square X does, because I'm unfamiliar. 

Chanan Averbuch: Sure. Blue Square, I guess you could more or less call it the parent company has been in business for over 10 years. But Blue Sqaure X is a relatively new venture, leveraging more of my background and my partner's background in the space, and inside Blue Sqaure X, I'm focused on the innovation side more so than anything else.

So Blue Square X is displays that are 90 inches and larger on the LCD side, and on the LED side, everything from, 110 inches all the way to unlimited sizes. We have projects we're doing that are a hundred-foot-long LED walls and 40 feet high, concave, convex, curved, all that stuff. 

But Blue Square X at the end of the day is not another led company. We're focused on the experience first, which means content first, software second, and LED third. 

Yeah, which is quite different because, through the years I've had no end of companies, relate stories about how they sold big LED displays, had them installed and then the customer would look at them and say, “This is great, what should we put on the screen?” like an afterthought. 

Chanan Averbuch: I've gotten that over the years, time and time again, somebody will have the brain fart of, “Wow, it would be really cool if we did a sports bar instead of a bunch of TVs, let's do LED.” Okay, and then two weeks before the grand opening, “Wait, what are we doing on this thing from 8 am to 4 pm when we're not watching sports games when there's no live sports?” So we did digital art in those spaces. 

So you're, the terminology I use is, a solutions provider in that you're not a pure play integrator because an integrator doesn't tend to think about content or experience so much. There's the odd one that does, but for the most part, we put together the projects we deploy, maybe we manage them, but we don't really think that much about what's on the screen.

Chanan Averbuch: Spot on. I think one of the key issues that I've experienced over almost the last two decades in the AV industry is that most of the channel has thought about how to move a box and has never really thought about what the client is trying to feel from an emotional perspective in a space. 

What are they trying to create when someone walks into a space, when they leave a space, how do they want them to feel?

I think in the era now where you're trying to get employees to come back to work, right? It doesn't matter if you're in the US, on the Democratic side or the Republican side, it doesn't make a real difference. If you want employees to come back to work, you have to give them a compelling reason for what it feels like when you come to the office beyond the barista, the coffee bar, and the cereal crap, you gotta have more of an experience too, oh my gosh, I love going to the office. It makes me feel a certain way, and that's where experience matters. 

Do you find that many end users have their heads around what they want to do?

Because I know from my consulting experience that I will ask customers what they want to do and why, and quite often they'll lean back in their chairs and think, I haven't really thought about that. 

Chanan Averbuch: To be brutally honest with you, what was always my struggle for the last 13 years is trying to get people to understand what to try to make a space feel like, and I've been blessed in the early days now in Blue Square X, when we, in a very stealth mode, went to market, our first projects were actually luxury retail and it's not luxury retail where you would historically imagine where they have a big TV or big LED wall. It's now digital art being built. In an immersive space within luxury retail, there are several stores that we're going to be coming to live with soon with some beautiful case studies, very similar to what we're seeing in the real estate market. 

We have a bunch of case studies about to come to market now as well for a luxury real estate sales center. So when someone launches a $100M or $2B project, they want to sell units fast. So having a projector in a sales center doesn't quite do it, but having an immersive theater and immersive LED wall with custom content where it looks like the waves are coming at you and things of that nature in a real way, not the 3D naked eye stuff. I'm talking about the real anamorphic content where it feels like you're buying into a lifestyle. When you're able to translate that, condo sales come along with it. 

Quite often, I've also found that those customers who understand that kind of thinking, then have their heads snapped back when they start to understand the cost of doing that.

Is there a lot of work in getting them over the line or do they just understand that this is a $100M development, yes, we're going to spend $250,000 on content or whatever the number is. 

Chanan Averbuch: So it's funny that you say that because I think when I was personally going through my own journey and starting in this space, it was hard for me to explain that value, right? The good thing is, that we've already done in a very short period of time, some of these unique experiences where we're able to talk about the cost of capital, and the return on their capital, because in the world of real estate, for example, it's all about return on your investment. And they have interest payments in addition to principal payments that they owe to the bank. So the faster they sell units. The less they owe the bank. 

So because we're focused more on the luxury and premium side, and they, I guess you could say the true experiential environments, the price is not necessarily as much of an issue. As the expression goes, price is only an issue in the absence of value, but because we're not trying to sell an LED screen. We're talking about the experience, we're talking about the content first, the software, how to get it there, and the LEDs, how you display it. It's a different conversation that we're having. We're talking usually to the marketing folks. We're talking to the innovation people. We're talking to the people who say, how am I going to get my ROI?

And it's very easy to map that out, and that applies in luxury retail. That applies in real estate, and even because we're focused on the channel still looking with larger AV integrators, we're working with the AV integrators to help translate that value into how it's going to pan out and what it's going to do for their consumer or their buyers, whoever it is in their environments.

So when you say you're working with the AV integrators, you wouldn't describe yourself as an integrator that's competing with them for business but as more of a partner? 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. So, thank God I've been very blessed with working with the AV channel to do control rooms, do experiential environments. That still has not changed for me. The only real difference in what we're doing in Blue Square X is that we are being engaged directly with the sports teams, we're being engaged directly with the architect or the interior designer, and then they'll say, who can execute this with us in addition to the Blue Square X pro services team, right?

We don't run data cables. We don't run power. We don't put pressure on systems. That's not our business. We're not pretending to be an AV integrator. We're still going to be partnering with the AVI SPLs or the AVI Systems or the Diverifieds of the world, et cetera. 

Okay. So you would quite possibly maybe own the customer, so to speak, but you're not doing the whole solution stack, you're gonna sub a partner with, I don't know, pull a name out, AVI, SPL, or whoever it may be. 

Chanan Averbuch: Yeah, and I think there's a huge value added to that too, because not just because they have 5 employees, it's because, oftentimes when I would historically get a call in, my previous job, it was, “something's not working”. Well, screens are usually pretty dumb, right? If the playback is not working, that may be a different story, or it's often like a hiccup in the crash drone or whatever the control system may be, and having that first line of defense as an integrator who's down the block, perhaps. It's a lot more valuable for me than to ship my team to Brazil, ship my team to Korea, or ship my team to Qatar.

You mentioned your previous work and experience and so on. I was aware of you when you were working for an LED company. What is your background in this industry? 

Chanan Averbuch: So I really started 13+ years ago with Primeview, and there I started as a Regional Sales Manager, then Business Development Manager, then VP, then SVP, then EVP.

I was initially just trying to provide for my family. I guess it was like, it was a trunk slammer or whoever it may be. I tried to do business with you when I first started. I just had to put numbers on, and then as things evolved in 2017 and coming to 2018, I was able to pioneer the all-in-one space back in 2018 out of a sheer lack of resources, to be honest with you, on an engineering side. It was funny how that evolved. But the all-in-one category is something that, I'm very pleased to say, had some of my first, with Microsoft, with Citigroup, and some really substantial clients, and then as that all-in-one category evolved and from indoor to outdoor to 32:9, that's when all of a sudden I started realizing, wait when we get out of the 16:9, what happens to the content? How does that work? And that sort of just blew my mind, this whole content space, and I started developing that further, and that thesis when working closely with digital artists, and I have some amazing projects that are about to go live now within Blue Square X, where a lot of times we're getting pulled into projects where we're not even involved in the LED.

We're not even evolving the playback. We're just doing the content, and if I could quote one of my great friends in the industry, Britton Gates from Newcomb and Boyd, he always asked me previously, and we're going to be doing this now: if there are so many people out there that could use help, Even if you're not doing the lead, are you willing to do that? And the short answer is yes. I want to help people create experiences, even if They're not buying our LED today. 

Yeah, you could make the argument that the content side of the business is more interesting and easier on a company just because you're not having to worry about shipping and everything else associated with the hard technology.

Chanan Averbuch: Oh, a hundred percent. I think the same line of logic would imply that if it's an inferior quality LED, and it's just like another OEM, it could also make my content look bad. So I can take from personal example, I was traveling this past week for a very high-end install that our team was doing, and in part of the travels, I remember going through the journey of talking about what the content is, and once we figured out that it had to be not SDR, but HDR, our team had to get on a frantic and run 32 cables instead of 16, right? So talking through the content strategy early on also impacts infrastructure, not just hardware, really.

I anticipate that almost everything that you're going to see from 2024 and beyond is going to be HDR on the experiential side. Everything, because the blacks and the grays, it's day and night. 

And what does that mean for existing deployments out there? 

Is HDR backward-compatible, so to speak, or do you either have an HDR display or you don't?

Chanan Averbuch: Good question. I think when you think back two years ago when people started really talking about HDR on the commercial side, not consumer, but on the commercial side, I think you had people talking about HDR, talking about what they call HDR-ready. This means some of the components can potentially work with HDR, but to go and truly retrofit or change the hardware to now be able to be HDR is not as simple as one may think, even though the marketing materials on that spec may have said previously HDR-ready, it's not truly HDR.

So I think in reality, retrofitting certain sites to be HDR is going to be difficult. I think they're gonna have to understand that SDR is what they bought and it's either they upgrade all their hardware to go and be able to truly be compatible with HDR or they're gonna have to just settle and stick to SDR today, as sad as that may be.

What would that mean? It's not like SDR is going to look bad. It's just HDR is going to look really good. 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. I think even if you look at consumer playback devices as simple as an Apple TV, right? Even Apple TV today is HDR-ready, and it really can play back HDR, but like we're doing now a significant amount of work in the home theater business, it’s not a business that I was actually pursuing, and I'm now seeing these massive home theater projects with commercial integrators. Yes, they're residential integrators, but they're sometimes bigger than commercial projects, these home theaters. 

I had to go down the rabbit hole of what a Kaleidoscope is and what real HDR playback is and cinema-quality playback. So really only once you're in this space and focused on delivering the high-end quality do you understand all these little peripheral devices for playback and content are so significant in the ecosystem. But unless you're in it, you don't know it. 

One of the things that I concluded walking around ISE at the front of the year, and then Ifocomm again, was that the LED display market has matured to a point where just about everything looks really good. Yes, some companies come over from China with, purposefully, low-cost, material that looks crappy, even when it's optimized on our trade show floor. But in general, the stuff all looks really good. It's all sub one mil now and everything else. Have we hit the peak of this? Where does it go? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So I think to your point, I think when you talk about what's market has called mini-LED or COB or some of these more standard technologies today, the COB at a 0.7 look really freaking good. But even within those LEDs, the differentiator between HDR and really great quality scan rates that what I would say is considered broadcast quality or production quality or luxury retail quality, there's a differentiator in the market at that point, because one is good enough, and the other one is truly providing a higher level of experience, and what that means is the quality of the components. 

So on a simple level, you have Nova Star, A6, A8, A10, et cetera, right? You have all the different Nova Star receiving cards, for example. The different receiving cards produce different quality results and have a higher level of spec. That's definitely the case for the mass market. I think there are ways to build materials to change things, and then there are also certain instances where having a higher brightness panel or LED bulb is great. Sometimes it's not good. You have to know the real application because it generates different heat. But in that instance, we've gotten certain projects now in the last few months where having a higher nit bulb helped. We have instances where they wanted a lower nit bulb because they wanted to not have to redo their infrastructure and energy and power, right? So they were repurposing LCD and they wanted to stay with LEDs and if they had gone with a higher bulb, they would have had the max power draws where you require more power. 

But on the evolution of LED itself, COG, chip on glass, that's something that's going to be coming out soon. There are some other new things within the LED world we're about to be launching a product that's almost like an x-ray where you're able to print patterns on an LED and shine through it, but at a high resolution, not low resolution like you see on the market today. So there are definitely innovative ways of producing technology where just imagine a Calcutta marble, finish backdrop, and we print that Calcutta marble on a physical LED, and you're able to still protrude through it with a high brightness bulb LED.

So there's a lot of these technologies that are about to come to market that we're working on, but it's from an innovative standpoint, not everyone else is doing it. How do we just be cheaper? It's what's the experience that we're trying to create, and then how do we solve that in a way that has never been done before.

So when you talk about chip on glass, are you talking about micro LEDs? 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. 

That is a horribly abused and misused term. 

Chanan Averbuch: Yep. I try to shy away from the specifics of talking about COB GOB or SMD. I honestly try to focus on what's your environment, what are you trying to do? I'm fixing other people's problems now, just not on the content, but where someone sold SMD in a public space that should have been COB and in other environments where it should have been GOB to pretty protective solution. Like I just saw a curved LED that was so chewed up, I told the end user, you may consider replacing it completely. And he goes, with what? I said with a glue-on-board version, because otherwise you have to protect this thing, because it'll look like crap. 

Through the years, I have seen some SMD stuff in public spaces and I thought, what in God's name were you thinking? Did you somehow magically believe that nobody was going to scrape this thing? 

Chanan Averbuch: But in truth, it's not just about specifying the wrong technology. A lot of things that we're doing now at Blue Square X is because we realize other people didn't do it, and it's not just about the content or the software side. It's also about the trim kit the cladding and the framing. For example, one of my friends I was talking to at Leon Speakers, where we talked about the idea of hashtag framing every TV. 

The idea of framing every TV is not just so that it looks aesthetically pleasing in a residential environment or in your conference room. It's also to protect it to a large extent. So when I think about framing, there was a project recently, it was comical that we recently lost ironically. And I thought it was great that we lost it. My partner was like, what do you mean we've lost it? I said I'm so happy we lost it. He goes, why? I said because the other guy is putting a product that's going to get destroyed in this environment because there are no protective elements in the backside, and it's IP-65 front-rated. IP-54 in the back and they're putting this in the harshest environment, humanly possible. I'm happy that my name's not on that.

So framing every TV, trim kit, cladding, mounting, and protecting the LED is equally as important as the technology that you're going to use. But people don't think about those things. I want to get the project. I want the box. That's not smart business 

I wonder if the market is now at a point where it's like buying a high-end vehicle in that the salesperson can go on and on about what's under the hood and the typical buyer just doesn't care and in the same way, they don't care really whether it's COB or what controller is used or any of that stuff. 

They just want to know how good is it going to look, does it suits my needs and what's the budget. 

Chanan Averbuch: So I think you're definitely getting more to the commoditized point of the marketplace, which is where I think you're going to see several players disappear. It's already starting to happen. Hence the reason why I've always focused more on what it's supposed to create and what it's supposed to feel like, how much you're supposed to be immersed, which is why it's content first, software second, LED third in our world, and then trim kit, cladding, framing to follow for that same reason.

It really comes down to how do you not just differentiate yourself, but how do you actually demonstrate that difference. Having the right content obviously helps, having the right software helps, having the right LED helps, but one of the things that we're going to be investing heavily in on a national level to start within the US with Miami, then New York, then Chicago, Austin, then LA is physical experience centers throughout the US and that will be going global as well in the near future. 

What I'd like to do is when a client from a sports team a luxury retailer or a real estate developer, whatever it may be, wants to see the product, Yes, I could do a Zoom. I can do a Microsoft team, whatever it may be, but I will, on my dime, fly you into one of my experience centers on my dime and I am a hundred percent confident that the tech stack between the content, the software, and the lead will be noticeably different when you come to the experience centers, noticeably, it'll be a finished product, a true turnkey, a real solution. 

Now, the devil's advocate side of that, if I'm a buyer, this is a highly controlled environment where you're able to think about everything ahead of my visit and optimize the whole nine yards versus operating in the real world where power can be shaky. There's public, there's ambient lighting, and everything else that can play into it. How do you counterbalance people like me who walk in and say, yeah, but… 

Chanan Averbuch: Great example, I just spent $20,000 to do a massive outdoor demo for one of our clients, and we did the demo at one o'clock in the afternoon at the harshest moment, exactly where the sun was hitting strongest.

And you explained that? 

Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah, and he intentionally chose the spot, that was the harshest spot, where it's direct sunlight. I'm like, gentlemen, how do you think this looks? And they told me how it looked and they were pleased, obviously, I said, this is the worst it's ever going to look. He goes, what? He didn't understand what I meant. I'm like, you chose the most sun exposure, like the worst. If you think this looks good, it only gets better from here, and I explained to them why, and they're like, got it. But I spent $20,000 on that demo to do it the right way.

So I agree with your thesis and what you're saying about that in a controlled environment, but with that said, in our experience centers in our showrooms, we have a complete AV system, multiple sources, multiple HDR sources, and multiple cable TV boxes. I could show four cable TV boxes. So if a Sports Park comes in here, like Dave and Busters, I could demonstrate that. If it's a home theater, I could show it with surround sound, Dolby quality, as well as HDR with the collide escape. I could show. Exactly in an indoor environment. Yes, but outdoors? Absolutely. There are environments where you have to put it outdoors and do the real stress test. No question. 

So if you're going to market as an LED manufacturer and your marketing focus is on: here are all of our technical specs for all of our different pixel pitches and this and that, and basically blind the person at the other end, the buyer with all of this flurry of buzzwords and jargon, does that work anymore? It strikes me that the LED market is now somewhat commoditized. 

Chanan Averbuch: So frankly, you're a hundred percent correct. I'm not focused on the tech specs of the LED whatever. 

Does the customer care about it? 

Chanan Averbuch: I think there are some exceptions in the market. There's an artist that I'm working with who really understands the technical spectrum. They understand color parameters. They understand DCI like some of them understand this stuff, but that's like the 1%. But the 1%loves us because we're able to produce, and deliver those exact results. 

But to your point, the conversations we're having are very different in the sense that for example, we just closed a deal with a major sports team. They originally wanted a 3:3 LCD. I said to them, I'll work with you on pricing to get you to the LED world. Because I know for a fact, the LCD is the wrong approach for your application. You're going to be doing spreadsheets, and you have a bezel in between, and now bear in mind, that Blue Square, the parent company, has a ton of LCD business that we do with Samsung, right? On Blue Square X, we want to make sure that if the requirement is there to do an LED, then it should be there, and the reason why we're able to successfully take a 3:3 or 4:4 and turn it into a lead project is that we're asking the right questions. We're educating, not just the marketing person, not just the facilities director, not just the branding team, but everyone along the way is saying: Where's your seat? Where's the closest viewer? What's your content strategy? We're not asking about the LED. We're talking about what the actual application is.

Because you're right, in a commoditized environment, what's the difference between the first 30 Google searches they come up with an LED? It's hard to differentiate. But those other 30 companies are not asking those questions. They don't want to. They just want to move boxes. 

Yeah, they just want to know how much wall space there is.

Chanan Averbuch: That's it. But they're not asking about content playback. They're not asking if have you partnered with Novari, or do you have experience with with Samsung's MagicInfo. They're not asking the right questions because that requires education and training, that requires industry experience. 

Now with Blue Square X, do you have preferred manufacturing partners or are you getting your own led custom manufactured by white label or how does that end of it work? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So we are day one, day two, and day a hundred, and from here on out, focus on the premium side. So nothing that's off the shelf in the market is of interest to us. Nothing that exists today on the LED production line is of interest whatsoever. 

We are designing specs for the higher end of the spectrum. That's where we want to be. So our LED partners are not people I've worked with in my previous role or others, it’s, I would say, the higher-end side of specs and therefore we are designing to our needs from day one. So it's definitely custom spec to something that's not available to the mass market. 

So does that mean you're doing the technical design over in the United States and then getting it a contract manufactured by a high-end production line, probably in China or Taiwan?

Chanan Averbuch: And Mexico as well. Yeah. 

Oh really, in Mexico? 

Chanan Averbuch: For TAE purposes. It is a market for governments as well. 

Interesting, and on the Mexico side, is it final assembly or are they manufacturing the LED? 

Chanan Averbuch: So there is some manufacturing done here, and assembly. So there are certain components, obviously, that don't make financial sense to do complete production here. It really depends on what the next president of the United States looks like because I think that'll determine some of the taxation side of things and how tariffs come into play. So we're just ultimately preparing for the doomsday scenario and the ideal scenario simultaneously.

How do you deal with the cost end of it? It sounds like you're going after premium clients, is cost not as big an issue if you can, as you said much earlier on, really go after the ROI model and what the real benefits are? 

Chanan Averbuch: While I definitely believe in my heart of hearts, price is only an issue in the absence of value, at the end of the day, the clients that we're talking to understand that there's a way to hit something that should be a $100 and pay $60, and there's a way that if you get the $60 solution, it's not going to look or perform like a $100 product either. We communicate the values of both extremes.

Like we'll go and say to the customer, if you want to get this $100 solution, I don't feel comfortable giving you the $60 solution. But if you only have the $60 solutions, this is what it looks like, and what we'll try to do is we'll offer the financing option as an OPEX model so that they don't have to get to that, I don't want to say it, but the crappier option, the lesser quality. We'll gladly take the OPEX model and work with them so that way it fits within their budget because I wouldn't want a lesser experience for myself. Why would I want that for my clients? 

Is that an increasing demand these days? Can you help with the financing on this? 

Chanan Averbuch: So, I think it's coming up more. Is it actually translating to the numbers or percentages that I thought? No, they're not, but it's evolving and growing in the markets. I'll give you an example. If someone is in the car wash industry, okay, and they're used to doing static signage, and now they're trying digital to jump from zero digital CapEx expense to spending half a million dollars. It's hard to get approvals for, but now if you break that down to $5,000 a month or $8,000 a month over three years, whatever it may be, all of a sudden it looks a lot more palatable. 

So I think it depends where the organization, where the institution, and where the non-profit is in their experience with digital and how their internal approval process works.

Now there's a harsh environment, car washes. 

Chanan Averbuch: Oh, it's so much fun. So much fun. We went to the car wash show in Nashville and I'll tell you the most amazing thing that I discovered. There's people like you alluded to that get it and they realize it, and there's people that don't. The ones that get it realize I can't buy crap, right? I can't buy inferior quality. The ones that don't get it, get burnt usually. So I wish them only the best. 

Tell me about the company. Where is it based? 

Chanan Averbuch: Blue Square X is based in South Florida. Home of no state income tax here in Miami, and the market is actually a bit on fire here on a regional level where others say the real estate markets are slowing down, Central Florida, Northern Florida, and South Florida has not slowed down just even a bit. Velocity here is amazing. This is our home base for us but we're about to finalize a few other locations here in the US as we speak. 

What's the size of the company, both, Parent and, just the X side?

Chanan Averbuch: Under 20 employees currently at this moment, but we're hiring and growing rapidly. 

For Blue Square X? 

Chanan Averbuch: Yep.

And for Blue Square itself? 

Chanan Averbuch: So it's hard to say right now because some of the resources are shared at the moment. But that's obviously been a change from the install professional services and the creative side, again, we're very focused on the creative side more so than anything else. 

But one of the partners also is very strong in the rental and staging business and has a whole plethora of warehousing and service support models throughout the US so we have that extra tier of support from one of the partners.

All right, and where can they find the company online? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. If someone wants to reach out to me directly, you could definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. As for the latest to the company, it's bluesqx.com and you'll be seeing some of the press releases coming up about it I really look forward to engaging with customers.

I know people get scared a little bit when we talk about premium, they assume it's price. It's all about the experience, and if you work your way backward through the experience, then everything else that seemingly doesn't matter matters now. 

And the clientele you're going after would tend to understand that more than maybe a certain car wash operator.

Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah. But as you alluded to, the ROI is there if you're trying to evoke an emotion or an experience, that's what we care about. We want people to walk away from a retail experience, from a school, from a broadcast studio, from a control room, from a real estate and say, holy cow, how did you see that? It has to be Instagrammable. It has to be something that creates that wow moment. We want to create those wow moments. 

All right. Thank you for having the time or taking the time to chat with me. 

Chanan Averbuch: Absolutely. God bless, and thanks again for your time as well.

Anthony Nerantzis, Stream

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Feeding the content beast is an endless challenge for most companies who have invested in digital signage technology for their venues, particularly when the messaging mission is not data and pricing, but material that informs, educates and generally occupies the time of viewers.

There are a few companies out there with suites of free streaming content channels, curated and sorted by interest areas. But free means ad-supported. So the action channel a bar owner might have up on screens has digital OOH ads, just like linear TV.

A start-up called Stream is coming at this from a different angle, producing custom content that looks like cable TV news channels and is sorted by interest areas, like channels for medical and dental offices. The big differences are no ads and low-cost monthly subscription fees. The service puts people on screens, but AI is also used to what Stream calls augment the videos.

Started just a year ago and just coming out of side hustle/stealth mode, the founders are going after what they say is a gap in the market for this type and style of content. But in meeting with prospective customers, they've also uncovered hidden demand for private label TV channels for larger clients.

I chatted recently with co-founder Anthony Nerantzis.

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TRANSCRIPT

Anthony, thank you for joining me. I knew nothing about your company, Stream, until the other day I got an email, I looked at it and I thought, this is interesting, who are these guys? And I asked a couple of questions and concluded that perhaps we should have a chat. Can you give me a rundown of what you do?

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on your program. A big fan. My name is Anthony Nerantzis, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Stream. Stream is in a unique space and we think of a new space in the digital signage industry. 

What we're doing is producing really premium, but low-cost and customized content solutions for CMSs, network operators, and so on to put what is a premium content product and deliver premium content product to their end users. Our whole content model is based around on unique streaming channels. So we have both plug and play, but also these white-label custom channels that we produce for brands and organizations that want to get their messages out in a contextual way to drive engagement with their customers and their viewers and we're really excited about it. 

So if I'm looking at one of your content channels, what does it look like? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah. So what we did is the founders of Stream come from media and comms backgrounds. So what we’re the best at is telling stories, visual storytelling, narrative storytelling, audience engagement, and what we identified is that a broadcast news look and feel with a host, with that graphic representation of messages, people are drawn to that. People want to engage with that sort of content. It's a premium, high-level content, think ESPN or CNN. So all of our content is based around that broadcast news style, look and feel. 

What we do is for different, contextual environments, different venues, we create content that's relevant to those venues. Think of a broadcast news channel for a doctor's office. Think of a broadcast news channel for the C-Store. It's really contextually relevant content for those different environments, and it's delivered in that nice look and feel of a news broadcast. 

So it's audio-driven?

Anthony Nerantzis: We do offer audio solutions, but what we've found for the digital out-of-home environment, typically, there is no audio, and that's for a few reasons. First, our file sizes, just as far as the handshake and the transfer, with our partners, a smaller file size, easier to transfer, easier to upload. But second of all, a lot of the end users that we've worked with, especially on the white-label channel side, don't want noise pollution in their environments. They're just looking for that visual component. So that's where our focus is. 

We obviously do audio, but our bread and butter is, that visual aspect, brilliant visuals, that draw people in.

So if it looks like broadcast news, is there a reporter or a host or whatever you want to call it, on-air talent, talking, but you subtitle it or is it more visuals with supporting, titles or captions? 

Anthony Nerantzis: It's a great combo of both. So we do have our lineup of Stream hosts that we utilize for our production and our development and then they do appear on the screens, and yes, with a subtitle delivery of those messages, but we have graphics of messages, headlines, subheads.

You wouldn't turn our broadcast stations on your TV after a long day and sit down on the couch, but if you were to do that, it does appear as if it were a CNN, ESPN, or Fox News sort of broadcast look and feel. 

That sounds expensive. I mean with on-air talent and everything else and the news resources that you need for that, having some experience in that in my old newspaper days and everything else, and there's a little bit of rxperience with broadcasting. On-air talent and everything else costs real money. How do you get around that?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. So, as I said, we come from the media and the comms space. So we do have that production value, that know-how of the space. What we've done is we've integrated some neat, really revolutionary, AI augmentation, to our displays and the content. So not only does that accelerate. our production process but it also helps us keep our costs, you know in check And allows us to provide what is really low-cost content to our end customers. 

Obviously right now we're priced to scale. it's not cheap but we're excited, you know comparatively to a lot of the other options content out there. We're able to come in comparably, if not in a lot of cases lower, but still delivering a premium product. 

Are these AI avatars, are they generated hosts as opposed to real on-air talent? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So not generated. So we call it augmented because they are our host, they're on payroll and we work with them for a number of different creative, creative situations and use cases. But yeah, so one of the ways that we're really able to within our tech stack drive our costs down is  through the rendering process. Again, augmenting our hosts rather than it's not what we're doing is not fake or avatar generated in that capacity, but we are using our, real life host talent and then using them as AI generated through and to deliver them across our streaming channels. 

It sounds like there's two ways to go at this, the standard sorts of channels that you already have, and there are custom channels. If it's a standard channel that's going into a doctor's office, what am I subscribing to? What roughly am I going to pay? I'm sure there's and it depends on there, but, also just what's the refresh cycle? Is this something that's refreshed daily, weekly, monthly? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So I think a doctor's office is a really great example of where we show up in a way that current content options aren't quite there.

What we're doing, I would say on the plug and play side, we have several channels. We have Med One, which is a catch all healthcare sort of channel of healthcare infotainment, and then we also have a dentistry channel, and then we also have a dermatology channel and we're looking at other avenues for other use cases within the medical field.

But what these are doing is they're showing really interesting infotainment content that's relevant to those spaces. We like to say contextually relevant. They're sharing news from around the industry, news from across the health landscape across the US. It's all G-rated. We use the four year old test. If you're a mom in a waiting room, what would you be comfortable with your four year old seeing? So it's not gory.

It's just health tips and interesting stuff. That's going on studies hey a new study came out that lifting weights after 60 is good for bone density, things like that, and then our custom channels, if you are a bigger network and you own a network of, several hundred screens across, dentists office, we can really get really custom on that white label space with corporate branding, corporate messaging, and really for those brands, taking the exact messages that they want to deliver to their customers in that really unique five to ten minute waiting room experience, and getting them off their phones and having them focus on the screens, with relevant content.

As far as pricing goes, that's where we're really excited and probably most proud. So for our venue channels, that's our kind of our second tier. Those really environment specific channels such as healthcare, those can MSRP run anywhere from $10 at the high-end and $5 at the low end. So compared to what it would cost for a CNN Health with through a cable subscription, it's really nice, it's obviously a fraction of that. But it's also a step above rotating PowerPoint slides, with messages that say, “Go get your flu shot”, which after the third or fourth flip, people are tuning out. 

From a cost perspective, it's extremely competitive. And then the white label channels, that's also really exciting for us because we're able to deliver those brand specific channels at a really affordable cost. 

I suspect that's definitely a “it depends” thing on how much they want and everything else. But if you had a typical, private label channel, would that be like a hundred bucks a month a thousand bucks a month?

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question So it depends on the end point and you got me with “it depends.” It does depend but for now, i'll give you an example. We have a network with a hundred end points and that they ask for a white label channel and you know with regular updates, it's not daily updates, but with regular updates, we're able to deliver that at 50 bucks an end point so considering the value that you're getting, the brand itself is getting their very own broadcast news channel. 

When our CMS partners put us in front of these folks, and they say, hey, this is something new, this is something exciting and you can have your own broadcast news channel. The end users are thrilled. Going from rotating powerpoint slides to something like this is such a value add as far as customer engagement. We've really found an enthusiasm for that sort of new age content. 

Are there personalization options out of those private label ones?

In other words, can the dental office in Cincinnati versus the one in Cleveland inject their own kind of messaging like, “Please welcome our new hygienist, Sarah” or whatever?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and it's actually funny you say that because the network that I just mentioned previously, they have a network of doctor's offices across the state of North Carolina, and each one of those offices has their own little, news, notes, updates, awards that they want to highlight that maybe might not be appropriate to share across. Someone in Winston, Salem might not care about what's going on in Carova, so we can make it really specific based on the location, obviously at scale, but yeah, we can get really granular as far as how tailored we can make it to each specific location.

This is different from the streaming channels that companies that I see out there like Atmosphere and Loop and that. Those exist for the purposes of having content supported by advertising. You're not doing advertising at all, are you? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a really great point, and no, you're right. We are not doing advertising.

We are all about content forward, grabbing that audience's attention and giving them the content rather than diluting it with ads. I think that we're different, from that fast TV space in a few ways, very low cost subscription model, not ads. We're not necessarily a walled garden. We work with CMSs and we work with operators and distributors as a puzzle piece to what they're doing and really being allies to them so they can go in to their partners and their end users and say, we have this really cool puzzle pieces that we can fit within our system. So we're trying to be allies in that way. We don't have a player we're not a walled garden and then I would just say third of all we are at the end of the day, we're producing that premium content. We're not licensing it from other folks so we can control that messaging. 

We can control what's showing up on the screens, make sure it's G-rated, make sure what these brands want in their locations and environments and venues is really tailored to them, not a lowest common denominator loop-based sort of system. 

So you've got a content team that's paying attention to the news wires and just the general run of news out there as well as press releases and everything else, industry reports and so on to pull together your stuff?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and that's really our strength. Our team, the founders specifically, we come from some of the biggest media and comms companies in the world. So we understand that space. That's where we think our biggest value is, yes, tracking the news, but also identifying these brands and organizations.

What are the best messages to connect with your core audiences? How do we drive this forward? Especially infotainment, but also in a retail media space where it's about conversions, driving action. That's our specialty and that's where we've been really able to flex our value with our current client book.

You mentioned, you work with CMS companies as opposed to them. How does your stuff plug in?

Anthony Nerantzis: CMSs are our best friends. If there's a North star for us, it's really being partners with the CMS is because they're so powerful in the sense that they have the distribution, they have these relationships and they know what their customers want.

So when we talk about integration, we are coming to them in two ways. First, a simple integration of our plug and play apps within their app store. So when a customer has their interface template up, they can plop us in, and then our content is really seamless. The handshake is very seamless between us, and then our content can show up on their screens.

Is it streamed straight from your servers or the host that you use for streaming or are the CMS getting a file and it's stored locally on the player? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. How it typically works is that HTML5 is our best friend. We provide the content feeds through that, they plug into the CMSs, and then the CMS from there distributes that URL through their app store.

So when someone selects us out of their app store, it plugs in basically they're given access to the license through the URL. We can get as simple as we've had clients come to us. End users specifically if we're working right with the end user and they're like, we just want an mp4 file, so we'll just drop an mp4 file in there in their Dropbox and they plug it into their CMS template and they're off and running. We pride ourselves on universal connectivity. We'll meet you where the customer is 

So if you have an end user who says I don't want a CMS. I don't want that additional monthly cost or whatever. Can I work just directly with you? Can they do that? 

Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, our most important ally in the space are these CMSs. So we respect that relationship. So if we're working with a CMS and there would never be a situation where the client would be like, see you later, CMS, we're just going to plug in the stream. We value our long term relationships more than any sort of, short term gain of an individual network.

And then beyond that, and this came up the other day, we're working with the CMS and their client has a few dozen screens and there might be a few hundred other screens on the horizon in the next few months. We make very clear, we were brought onto the project by the CMS. We're not going to expand past the boundaries of where their players are plugged in. We respect those relationships and I think that's really the key to our success. 

Yeah, and I think the end user community, if you want to call it that, is also more knowledgeable than they were for a good long time, where they understand that having a proper content management system with device management, monitoring, all those other things, the ability to scale and all that are really important versus just, finding some server player that can call a URL.

Anthony Nerantzis: A hundred percent and I think that's what we're recognizing, and we really can only go as far as our CMS partners, media players. We're not going to give individual URL feeds to a thousand screens. We rely on them for that distribution. 

Maybe my mind blanked or something, but did you talk about the typical frequency of content changes? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. So for our flagships, our news and sports, obviously that's quick hitting news and that needs to be updated throughout the day, which it is. 

For our venue channels, those are mostly environments, for example, a doctor's office, you might really only be in a doctor's office once every six months, and you'd think that we'd say, we just need to update those channels every six months. What we really go for is, perception is everything. So if that venue owner isn't seeing it updated that often, they're going to think they're not connecting those dots. We're there to connect those dots for them. We're there to consistently fresh content. So when they're walking into their place of business, they're not like, wow, this is the same thing that was playing two weeks ago. So for our venue channels, we do updates at least two or three times a week to keep that content fresh, relevant. 

Our biggest fear is stale content. That's what we want to get rid of. That's what we want to move past and we want to show up well for our CMS partners that their end users are happy with the content that's being displayed. Obviously with white label, it really depends on what the client wants, but again for us it's all about going above and beyond and being proactive in that sense to provide fresh content so that's kind of part of our bread and butter. 

When you were developing the business plan for this, were you thinking white label was a big part of the business or is that something that you landed on as you started talking to customers or potential customers?

Anthony Nerantzis: White label was not part of the plan at all whatsoever. That was born out of really, I would say a listening ot users. So pre launch, we were meeting with a lot of folks, and they were thrilled about and saying, hey, these plug and play options are great, compared to our rotating PowerPoint slides. Let's get this going. 

But what we noticed was there was incredible demand, really desperation for tailored content. Obviously now everything's going to be tailored, customizable, and contextual. Not only in the infotainment space, but in the retail media space. So we're ideating, Hey, what if we make these custom channels? What if we can go to a brand and say, Hey, whether you're just trying to entertain your customers, let's entertain them with news and updates about the company? And then if you're trying to sell a customer on something, why don't we drive action through content and messages, that will achieve those goals.

What we did was, we obviously went through a pretty big development phase on what we did is we put these samples in these productions in front of folks and the reaction that we got was incredible, and it really showed us that this tailored content and this white label content is really where things are moving away from the lowest common denominator and really going towards contextually relevant brand centric content.

I assume that was a pretty happy discovery because you're able to, in rough terms, 10x the monthly subscription fee from an endpoint. 

Anthony Nerantzis: We were very fortunate to be in a position where we were already tracking towards it. So yes, it was a “whoa” sort of moment, which was cool.

I don't think we could have imagined the reaction that we've received from it, and transparently, we really used InfoComm as our major kind of launch point to get our name out there, and we were expecting to show up, shake hands, get to know people, meet people. 

We brought, obviously, a little tablet. We were showing people what we were doing, and the reaction, specifically for these white labels… We were on our flight home, from Vegas, with huge smiles on our faces, I don't think we could have imagined how much these white labels, channel offerings, how much interest that would have generated.

So you were at Infocomm and I walked right by, apparently. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I guess so. I'll have to catch you at the next one. I think it's in Orlando next year, right?

Yeah. It's starting to ring a bell now that when I walk around, I take photos of stands thinking, I don't know anything about them, I don't have time to stop right now, but I'll look this up later. 

If I go through my photos, I bet you there's one in there like that and my apologies for not stopping, but, I get swarmed that week. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I'm going to let you off the hook. We did not have a booth. We were just walking around. Maybe a booth next year. Maybe you can take a picture of a booth next year. But we were just on the ground getting to know folks, trying to make the most of it. 

And you're able to do that just by having chats with people? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, we're really fortunate. Obviously, the founders are from outside the digital signage space and someone who's been a huge mentor to us is Bob Ratcliffe. I don't know if you're familiar, but he runs, really, what we found to be an incredibly consultancy and, he's really been our mentor and also guided us around the show floor, and introduced us to who we needed to know. So we're fortunate for Bob and he's obviously a great partner with us. 

Yeah, subject matter, knowledge and contacts and all that are invaluable. So how long ago did this start?

Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, we usde Infocomm to put our name out there. Transparently though, I would say since June of 2023 is when the idea was first born. 

Oh, so this is like real new? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yes. I think I mentioned earlier, but we thought we had an idea, we thought we had something, but what we did was we did a lot of listening. We met with partners even before we really put our name out there publicly.

I can't tell you how many Zoom meetings, in person conversations that we had with people in the space, CMS operators. What are you looking for from a content perspective? What are you missing? What's your current situation? The production and development process, obviously, of our software stack, took a long time, to optimize it and get it up and running to what we wanted it to be, to show up in a way that we were proud of.

So I'd say, yeah, about a year and a little before our one year anniversary, we came out to the world and timed up perfectly with Infocomm. 

So what's the state of the company at the moment? Is it like a full time company or is it a side hustle for you guys? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So we are just breaking out of our side hustle, which is amazing. The last month and a half have been an absolute whirlwind. We are in a full growth stage right now. We're incredibly proud of that. So We're going full on and we're fortunate that we were able to get so much excitement right from the jump that we're able to make this decision.

So we're definitely in the growth phase. I think the next three, six, twelve months are going to be extremely exciting. We have a lot of really cool stuff coming down the pipeline, not only with product development, but with partnerships. So we're excited about where we're at.

Actually, just last week, we were accepted into NVIDIA's Inception program for early stage startups. So that gives us a whole suite of tools that are going to propel us, even further forward with our capabilities. So we're really excited about that. 

Yeah, that's how I got wind of this and I, admittedly, didn't know a darn thing about NVIDIA's inception program. What does that do for you? Is it funding or is it just support or connections?

Anthony Nerantzis: I think a lot about the last one. So it really integrates us directly within their partner network of VCs of developer support. So I would say just from apartner in a network standpoint, that's going to be the biggest value add. The second really huge boon for us is going to be access to some advanced features within their software suite. Obviously we're always looking for ways to level up and optimize our production processes.

And with Nvidia, with their help, and being part of this network, we're going to have access to a lot of the really cool things that they're doing behind the scenes. So we're really excited about that and hopefully over the next month or two here, we're going to be able to roll out some things that are a direct result of that, being within that network, so a huge opportunity for us for sure. 

So that gives you access to a whole bunch of computing power, particularly on the graphics side, which I'm sure it is intriguing.

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. That's the name of the game right now. We need it and just to have a partner like that is pretty awesome.

If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So we're a few places. I think our channel of choice is for sure LinkedIn. go ahead and follow us on LinkedIn. We're Stream, and then our website is streammedia.news.

So we kicked .com to the side because we want to really show that we're news, we're content forward. We're not streammedia.ads. We're focused on that content with the news. With the news portion. So I encourage everyone to check us out. 

I suspect streammedia.com was also gone many years ago.

Anthony Nerantzis: Dave, you're exposing me. 

As was the stream.com, probably gone in 2003 or something. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I would imagine, yes. 

Or 1993, I don't know. Alright, Anthony, that was great. Thank you. Happy to learn more about your company and best wishes with all this, and I guess I'll see you in Orlando next year.

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, Can't wait. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you to all your listeners and we really had a lot of fun.

 

Nita Odedra, Blue Rhine Industries

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Dubai, Qatar and more recently Saudi Arabia have developed a reputation in digital signage for bankrolling projects that seem mainly focused on sizzle and scale. But there's a lot more going on in the region than work that's just about Wow Factor.

It's a busy, high opportunity part of the world for companies delivering big visual display projects, but also one that presents a lot of challenges in how things work - everything from regulations and timelines to cultural differences.

I've got to know a Dubai-based company called Blue Rhine Industries through its strategy director, Nita Odedra, who I first met at an ISE conference. I'd already been impressed by how the integrator actually produces useful marketing - tight, explanatory videos that do the job of explaining what was done and why. It seems sensible, but is remarkably rare in this sector. I see a LOT of it, so I know.

Nita and I had a great chat about the company's roots as a traditional sign company, and how and why it expanded into digital. We spend a lot of time talking about what's happening in the region, what customers want, and how business is done.

If your own company is thinking the Gulf region presents a lot of opportunity for expansion, that is indeed true. But like a lot of things, it looks easier that it appears. Local knowledge and experience are invaluable.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Blue Rhine Industries, can you give me a rundown of what the company does? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So we're a digital signage system integrator headquartered in Dubai, in the UAE, and we are working across the entire GCC on various projects. That includes additional screens, software, and interactive solutions, across a range of industries. That's us in a nutshell. 

What are the roots of the company? 

Nita Odedra: So we formed in 2006 by a gentleman called John V. Joseph, who still runs the company now, and he started the company as a static signage fabricator.

So very humble beginnings where we were fabricators for static signs and shop signs. So it could be a Starbucks sign or a Cartier sign. Then inside the retail stores, it would be the category signage, light boxes, and menu boards in F&B, and that's how we started the business. 

And you went to digital, was it because there was an opportunity or it was one of those things where you looked at it and realized, okay, we have to go this way?

Nita Odedra: Yeah, it was the latter. It was that we identified that there was a shift happening, in retail, in F&B. So where we felt this the most was the quick-serve restaurants where they were changing their traditional lightbox menu boards to LCD screens, and that was a big business for us, lightboxes, menu boards, keeping those menu boards updated.

So at that point, we realized that there was a shift happening and we were going to start losing the lightbox kind of offering that we had we formed a relationship and exclusivity with Phillips Professional Panels, Professional Displays at the time, and we were their exclusive distributor here in the UAE for a number of years and that's where the digital signage business began. 

And what does that represent for Blue Rhine now? Is it like a big part of their business or like a sideline? 

Nita Odedra: More than half the business now is digital signage or some type of static signage, which incorporates digital signage into it. So we have fully dedicated teams. It's like the business is almost split into two and digital signage is where we're seeing the most growth. 

I suspect the two are complimentary still in that if you come across a job that involves something more than hanging a screen on a wall, there are a lot of solutions providers that don't really have the expertise on the engineering side, don't have the man lifts or any of these things to do the more aggressive or complicated work.

Nita Odedra: Absolutely. So that's really our differentiator in the market here is that because the company grew from being a fabricator. So we have four factories. We have facilities for large steel structures, both indoor and outdoor large totems. So we're doing canopies for gas stations as part of our static business, which allows us to be able to do those large unipoles for the out-of-home media agencies, for example, down the highway. 

So the ability to manage that whole project from technical drawings on steel structures and, the housing and all that type of stuff, all the way through to fabricating in our facility, installing it in-house, having the digital signage arm of the business, the software, the content, we're able to provide that full end to end solution and that means that when we're doing these installations, especially indoor environments, where we're doing the secondary structure, every millimeter counts when it comes to that perfection of LED screens, for example, and having that beautiful screen housing structure, that's all done by us.

Lord knows we've seen around the world, large format display projects that have been done by companies who probably don't know what they are doing because things fall over or fall on people and everything else. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've seen that recently, but, we've got in-house engineers. We've got those project managers in-house. We've got guys doing BIM in-house as well. 

So we have that technical capability all the way from the drawings. Then we've got the fabrication facility with skilled workers. We have multiple HSC kinds of offices that are going on-site. Most recently we did quite a complex project, from beginning to end, which was the Dubai Mall Aquarium, which was a long installation. That was six months. Because it's a fully operational mall, we had a very short window at night time to go in to put all the access equipment up and work. we had to take out the existing screen, which was an OLED LG display, and then replace that with the infrared screen that we put in and that took six months and we're very proud of that installation because we had zero HSC violations over six months and our team just did a fantastic job there. 

Is that an anomaly or is that kind of the work you do? 

Nita Odedra: That's very much the kind of work we do. So it is these large screens, it is custom fabrication. It will be complex sites. So we're doing one at the moment, which is a very large outdoor screen on the corner of a building, which is also still in construction. So this is very typical, especially when we're looking at those large format screens. 

Those are jobs that don't come along that often, even in your region. A lot of companies would rely more on the, use a term I use quite a bit, meat and potatoes kind of work where it's conventional flat panel LCDs for menu displays.

Nita Odedra: So here the market is a little bit different because we've got so many projects, new developments, they're trying to do things differently. We’ve got cylinder LCDs, we've got pillars being clad, etc. But yeah, you're right there. Our bread and butter and the fast-moving business that keeps the lights on is the retail business. That is the LED screens, the LCD video walls, and interactive displays in retail environments. 

When we get those orders in, they turn around pretty quickly, within a couple of months, the payments are pretty good on those because you're delivering in a shorter time frame, and on the larger projects, that's where, sometimes we can get our money stuck, projects get delayed. An example would be Abu Dhabi Airport, Terminal A, where that project was delayed over a couple of years and we had that stock ready, and then COVID came, the project got delayed, and that became from what should have been two years became five years.

You just have to sit on that stuff. 

Nita Odedra: You're sitting on it or you install it and then the airport's still not open. You've got a screen up there that's not ready for any content yet. But it's just the way it is, especially in this region, projects sometimes do get delayed and we just have to be prepared for that when we're resourcing the company and now we're at over 750 people, almost 800 across the region. So it's managing those resources and making sure that the installation or the fabrication that we're aligned internally on manages everything. 

So from a distance, I look at the GCC region and I see these mega projects being announced and I always wonder how many of them are actually going to be built and how long does it take? 

Nita Odedra: So these are ambitious projects, right? So we're looking at projects in NEOM, like The Line, we've got several projects in and around Medina, and they are very ambitious when you look at them on paper. They are happening, but some of them are being scaled back. So you may have heard Neom The Line that was scaled back from, hundreds of kilometers down to just a couple of kilometers. 

But it's still one of the largest building projects in the world, even at that scale-down size, right?

Nita Odedra: Absolutely, and we are seeing that these projects are now coming to life. So things that were announced, what, five years ago, probably like 2018 when they set the 2030 vision for Saudi Arabia specifically. A lot of those projects are now happening, the hotels are opening, the resorts are opening, so we look at places like the Red Sea Development, which has luxury resorts. It's going to be a tourist destination. They're already accepting guests there now. They've got Qadir, which is picking up pace. We've got King Salman Park, which will be the largest urban park in the world. When you're in the city, work is happening and it's happening at a very fast pace.

Who is largely funding these? Are you in a better position to see them actually happen if they're coming through a big fund like PIF in Saudi Arabia? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So a lot of the work that we're doing and the projects, they are being funded by the government, by the public investment funds.

So those are the ones that are picking up speed, but of course, other private companies are coming up with their developments and they're turning the round very fast. There are out-of-home media agencies that are doing phenomenally well. They're companies like Al Arabiya who are sweeping up these new developments for their network.

Is it very competitive in your region? I'm familiar with three or four companies who do what you guys do, different routes, and everything else. But I suspect because of the money that's going into the region, there's all kinds of other companies in the region and in Europe and even in North America are looking at it and thinking we need to be there.

Nita Odedra: There is competition. There are system integrators, smaller ones that we're having to compete with quite aggressively in the retail space, but where we're different is we've been in this game a lot longer. So perhaps we've lost some clients in retail for a year or two, they've experimented with perhaps other system integrators. Some have been successful, some when it comes to those retail projects, a little bit more complex where, the fabrication element comes back in again, experienced project management that comes back in again, HSC, when these elements are not supported by a competitor, they end up coming back to us and we're able to maintain that retail business.

But absolutely in retail, we have a lot of competition. But there is a lot of work here. There are lots of malls still opening, whether that's the UAE or in Saudi, where there's a huge number of malls opening up, there is business there. 

Does it feel at all like a bubble? 

Nita Odedra: It feels like a bubble when I look at politics internationally and how we don't have that here and we're a little bit in a little happy bubble here.

So yeah, it does feel like it sometimes. And it's easy to forget that this region is an anomaly. We are a region where there are a lot of ambitious projects with speed happening. There is work. There's a very positive attitude towards these projects that are being developed. There's a very positive attitude towards the hosting of sporting events in the region. People are excited about it. They welcome it. It's something new, right? 

So it can feel like a bit of a bubble sometimes when we have so much regional excitement that, perhaps globally, it's not the same landscape. 

Yeah, you mentioned shopping malls going up, and I've been to Dubai, it's been a number of years, but I thought even at that time, okay, there's enough shopping malls here now. But they just keep coming. 

Nita Odedra: I'm shocked as well. So every time there's a new mall, I was like, surely they're not gonna be busy, and then you go, and they're packed. This is low season right now. So the school holidays started last week and we don't get much tourism in the summer, but the mall was absolutely packed.

It's very much a small culture here. We don't have historical high streets or historical villages. Everything is new. Everything's flashy and people want to go to the mall. That's the only place that they can go to for F&B, for entertainment, picking up their groceries, and doing their usual high street shop.

There's a practical reason behind that too, just that it's, so crazy hot there that malls are air-conditioned. So the dwell time, I gather, is not measured in minutes and hours. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, it is not unusual to be in the mall for six to seven hours. You'd perhaps do two meals there, watch a movie, go shopping, and then leave after doing your grocery shop. So it's high dwell times. 

It's incredibly hot here. So I even have friends who go to the mall In the summer, just to get their step count in. So they'll go, grab a coffee, do their step count, pop in, run some errands, whether it's dry cleaning, or whatever it is that they've got to do, but they'll do that step count inside the mall, as opposed to a park, or the town pavements.

Does that make it a better media environment? 

Nita Odedra: Absolutely, So for the out-of-home media agencies, they've got a good captive audience there. It's all indoor. So I think it works really well for the media networks and or the out of their media agencies. 

We've chatted a few times in the past. I'm always curious about the impact of the wow factor on Projects over there and how important it is 

Nita Odedra: culturally, I think we've got a bit of history here with Dubai because it's been established a little bit longer in terms of these, ambitious developments, but they want to be the biggest and the best, whether it's building the tallest building in the world, the Burj Al Arab, the largest mall in the world, maybe the busiest mall, the busiest airport terminals.

They do have this pride in trying to put developments out there that are new, and ambitious. Something that is the largest, and what that means is sometimes it comes with a bit of flash and you've got all bells, all whistles installations for screens. Dubai Mall is an example where I think that's the largest indoor screen in Dubai Mall and you'll have other ones coming up in the next couple of years trying to beat that I'm sure.

Now, as somebody whose role involves strategy. I suspect it's a bit of a delicate dance for you in that you're hearing about these ambitions of being the biggest, the best, and so on and you have to sit there and think, monetarily, that could be great for us, but strategy-wise, I'm not sure that's the right move.

Nita Odedra: Exactly. So we have to be really careful about which projects we take, how many projects we take, and when we take on new partners and new product lines. When we dive first, we're adding more software with, we're providing content now. So we've got to be really careful about what our strengths are and stay true to who we are.

We get asked all the time to do things that are, outside of our scope, but we really have to say no, scale it back, and just stick to our objectives, our strategy as a business, the direction we want to go in, and that's very much customer experiences, passenger experiences. So we're one of the verticals that we're, growing at quite a fast pace is transport.

So airports. There are a number of domestic airport openings in Saudi, we've got new airports opening in Dubai and, across the region. So that's an area that we strategically know that we can take on large projects, we're capable and we're going to see good business. 

Airports, I talk about a lot as being, if you want to see the state-of-the-art and digital signage, look at a refurbished or newly built airport because it just covers the waterfront in terms of digital out-of-home, conventional signage, wayfinding, everything. 

Nita Odedra: An airport is a perfect example of where you could probably take somebody for a site visit and show them every single type of installation for a digital screen possible and software and integration. Airports are the perfect vertical for us to really penetrate and all our complete offerings can be in an airport because we're taking our experience within malls for travel retail. We're taking our experience from mixed-use developments, and all our experience from all the other verticals can now be applied within transport and airports specifically.

Yeah, I'm curious if you work with the large engineering and architecture companies, like, all the way up to Populous who I think is involved in the Qiddiya project. 

Nita Odedra: So we work very often from concept all the way through to delivery, and that would mean the contractors, the architects, the cost consultants, the design consultants, these are all stakeholders that are involved quite early on in the conversations and remain in those conversations almost through to delivery. 

What about on the services side? Obviously you're doing the front end, you're, deploying, you're, designing, fabricating everything else. Are you doing ongoing aftercare? And you mentioned content before? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So services are part of the complete solution, right? So we've got to offer the AMC afterward, and that can be anything from servicing the screens to maintaining them in this region. You've got LEDs outdoors and they need to be maintained, and cleaned of dust. That's very much part of the AMC. There’s remote content management where we're providing content management solutions for retailers and that's for outside of the region as well. So retail operators who are not just in the GCC, but all the way through to Malaysia, Europe, travel retailers who are in Norway.

So managing their content from Dubai, and then, more recently providing the content creation piece as well. So that's where we will have partners. We've got our preferred content partners who are delivering fantastic work globally, and we're transparent with our clients as well that, this is our partner, but we're offering the complete solution under our canopy. 

You're managing screens in Norway from Dubai? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we're managing the content for screens in Norway, all the way through to Malaysia, and Indonesia, I think even in London, so it's becoming global now. So even though we're delivering work within the Middle East region and our direct offices and fabrication facilities, warehouses are all in the GCC, so those are the Gulf countries, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE. We are also in Egypt. We're delivering into North Africa and the wider Middle East area. 

Do you have a preferred list or go to a set of partners on the display hardware and software side, or do you take it project by project? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, that's a great question, actually. So as I spoke about earlier we started this journey with Philips Professional Displays that was for a short period of time when we were starting out. We then realized that distribution wasn't for us. We want to be a system integrator. We were shooting ourselves in the foot there. So that was handed over to another business within our group of companies. So our owner has a trading division. So that was handed over to them and they are now the distributor.

And we fully threw ourselves into being a system integrator where we were able to develop relationships with a number of different vendors and partners, and we remain agnostic. So it's dependent on the project. What is right for that project? And yes, there'll be periods of time where sometimes we're getting great pricing from Samsung and we'll deliver a number of Samsung LCD screens, and then LG. The next day that changes and that's very much price driven if I'm honest Based on the availability of the screens then when it comes to the LED screens, that's far more complex and that is a problem based on the project and the requirements, and that can be very different from project to project.

We have a fantastic Head of Digital, Neeraj Vyas, who's been with us since the beginning, been with us for over 11 years now, and he is in China almost every month going and doing that quality control, really getting into the details of the screen, and he's the one very often who will spec out which, the hardware we're going to use for those big projects.

Do you find that the customers or the specifiers, if they're an engineering firm or an architecture firm, do they know what they need and what they want to use? Or are they saying, yeah, we want to use COB here, or it needs to be this pitch or whatever, or are they relying on you? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So that does happen. They are informed and there are lots of great resources available for them to have a vague idea of what they want. But just yesterday I was on a call with our head of tech and a design firm where they loosely knew what they wanted and what they needed. But when we were drilling down into the requirements and the structure of these screens where they're going, and is it facing daylight? Is it not? We then realized that there was a support that they needed and some guidance on the specification of the screen. 

So there was one specific screen that they mentioned, and we said, actually we have used that screen in an outdoor environment. We probably wouldn't recommend it for X, Y, or Z reasons. They understood the reasons. Because we're also the fabricator and we've got all this experience in indoor outdoor environments in this regio, we know the ventilation we know how to design those structures with ventilation, what type of provisions have to be made so we're able to get in quite early with these guys and educate them guide them on considerations that they may not have made 

The heat in your region obviously tough on humans, and I know that any display technology company has to worry about getting that heat out of the enclosure or whatever, but do you really have to think about it there?

Nita Odedra: Yes. We really do have to think about it. There are the manufacturers there who are saying, of course, that it will withstand heat to 50-60 degrees, even beyond some of them, but having done this for over 12 years. 

But having installation throughout, the peak summer period for testing. We do have to make provisions for ventilation, for AC, for cooling. These are all provisions that we do have to make for outdoor screens, especially the LCD screens, mainly the outdoor LCD screens here, but for LED screens, of course, we still have to account for ventilation.

Yeah. With them, you have to worry about blowing off all the dust and everything, and the sand that gets in. 

Nita Odedra: Exactly. maintaining those, making sure that the sand, making sure the structure as well isn't capturing all that kind of dust floating around. So yeah, even simple things like, when you've got touch screens inside malls and stuff and the IR frame back in the days, there's dust captures in there or sensors. These are all things that we have to consider quite early. 

I first got an idea of your company on LinkedIn by seeing a video that I believe was for the Dubai Mall, the project you were talking about before and what struck me is, Oh my God, there's an integrator who actually gets marketing. 

Nita Odedra: Funnily, the John who I spoke about earlier, my boss, his background is marketing. So I think his degree was in marketing. So he's very passionate about our marketing. He's very hands-on and I'm getting WhatsApp messages in the night saying, let's try this. Let's do something different, and he's the gentleman probably on the video that you saw, and we're a bunch of passionate people. We've all been in the company for a while. He's been there since the beginning. over 17 years, I've been there for almost eight, or nine years now.

So we were passionate about the business. We've grown with the business. We've seen the business grow and we're so excited about these projects that we're delivering. We're excited about what's happening in the region, not just for us, but we love to talk about other things that are happening in the region as well. So yeah, I think, we're doing the marketing justice and he's great on camera as well. 

Yeah, I mentioned that just because I so often see reports about projects and I'm lucky if they even provide decent photos. So to come across videos that explain this is what we did, this is what we use, this is where it is, this is how it works without overwhelming you with Euro disco music or whatever, just the facts, it was almost stunning. Oh my God, somebody got it. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So he really came up with a decision very early on, probably about six years ago, seven years ago, actually, that everything needs to be video content. He wasn't even happy with just images. He was like people are digesting content in videos and this was like the days, early days of, videos being on Instagram or LinkedIn. So we started churning out a lot more videos, to begin with, which were just the videos of the projects, and then that evolved to us giving kind of explainers, educating the audience and just making them short and snappy.

We're making more data-driven decisions on the type of marketing we're doing, where are we getting the most engagement? What are people enjoying? What are they engaging with and sharing? And it seems to be that the ones where we're explaining in a very short space of time, like you said, within 30 seconds, get straight to the point. “This is a pixel pitch, 1.2, the size of it. What have we delivered? How did we do it?” And just get straight to it. That's what people want to know. They want to see the screen. They want to know how you did it and what did you do? Keep it simple. 

Yeah, we were collectively on a panel a couple of months ago now in Munich at the Digital Signage Summit, and it was about doing business in your region and what I asked the group was how easy or hard it is because it is different, right? 

You can't just drop your company into this region and expect to start getting the business rolling in. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've got 17 years of experience, but still monthly, there are new regulations. There are new challenges, whether that's employing locals. So in Saudi, we've got Saudinization where a set quota has to be local employees. Resourcing regionally as well can be a challenge, just licensing and all that paperwork for us still is a challenge. So I know how daunting it is for system integrators, and vendors trying to enter into this region and there are certain cultural sensitivities that we've got to keep in mind, there are a lot of different cultures working together as well. 

So the culture here is very different from European culture and American culture, even more so. There's that consideration to have as well when you're entering into the market. But I would say to anybody that wants to enter into this market, partner up with somebody, to begin with, find the opportunities, find some local partners, get started, have your hand held a bit before you make any decisions, and jump straight into the deep end. 

Now, for a company that's from Europe or from North America or elsewhere, looking at going into that region and saying, okay, I agree, let's partner. They're probably going to be intimidated that this partner may result in us losing the larger business because now we have a partner instead of doing this solo. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, I do personally believe that there's enough in the piece of the pie for everybody, especially in this region. But, we look at long-term partnerships. So we're quite selective with who we work with and how we work with them, and we do believe in honest, transparent partnerships. We will make sure that we've got contracts in place to protect them more than we even. So if they have, because we are looking long term, if they've brought a client, they've got a client who is from the US or Europe and they're looking to support them here regionally and they need a partner. We'll ring fence that client. We'll put contracts in place, it's a ring fence for them. It's only them. We won't touch them directly and just make sure everything's covered legally for them and honor that as well, so making sure that even from the top down, you've got that commitment. So we always make sure on all of our partnerships that from right at the top of management, I'm getting them in conversations with those partners and getting that commitment on what we will be delivering on, and also not creating any exclusivity either too early.

Sometimes getting exclusive with a partner straight away and it's not good for them. It's not good for us, to allow them the flexibility to go out to other system integrators. They don't have to work exclusively with us. 

And just finally, on the cultural side, I would say the common perception is it's very different over there and challenging to work in and everything else, but in talking with you and speaking with other people who work in the region, they've said, yeah, it's different, but it's perhaps not what you think.

It's not as challenging and things have relaxed, particularly in areas like Saudi quite a bit. 

Nita Odedra: I've seen a shift here. So I've been in the Middle East now for almost 10 years, and I'm originally from the UK. I'm just outside of London. I worked in London and across Europe and America in terms of my territories. So I'm familiar with the European market, familiar with the North American market, and the way of working. 

There is a different culture and pace here, but the projects are happening at such a speed that things do materialize. They do happen quite quickly. So it's not that much of a culture shock. You've just got to be prepared, the professionalism, should we say, is different. It's there, but it's just different.

All right. Leave me hanging on that one. 

Nita Odedra: Timelines, deadlines, all that kind of stuff. Those get pushed back a lot in this region, adhering to timelines. So most of our projects that get delayed, get delayed by the client side, approvals for drawings, client. 

One of the biggest challenges we have is site conditions. They'll push for us to have, I don't know, let's just say 300 outdoor interactive kiosks ready. They'll pay a premium just to have them turned around faster because they're not willing to wait nine months. They want them delivered in four months, and then there's no data or power, and we're sitting on 300-plus outdoor kiosks and charging them for the storage, and that is not uncommon. 

Interesting. Great to catch up with you. We see each other here and there at trade shows, but we're obviously many hours apart. So it's not a routine thing. 

Nita Odedra: Thank you for taking the time out, it's been a great conversation and I look forward to seeing you hopefully at ISE.

Absolutely. 

Nita Odedra: Thank you.

Neb Savicic, Plainly

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Motion graphics designers tend to enjoy the creative side of their jobs, but there can be aspects of their work, like editing and rendering slight variations of the same spot, that are best described as soul-sucking.

Neb Savicic has lived that as a motion graphics designer, and with a couple of friends in Serbia, concluded there had to be a better way. So they put their heads together and, after testing interest, started Plainly - which automates video creation and produces finished spots at scale. Like 1,000s of videos in a matter of minutes.

This is not a library of pre-made templates that end-users can then tweak. It's a SaaS tool used mainly by creatives in agencies and studios to take what's developed in a professional toolset - Adobe's AfterEffects - and plug it into Plainly's cloud platform.

The net result is that a creative team that is charged with producing, let's say, 500 videos for a QSR chain can do that with one template and a spreadsheet file that has all the differences itemized per location. What might take weeks to accurately produce, instead takes one click and a few minutes to get rendered, ready-to-use videos.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Neb, thank you for joining me. It’s nice to chat with you. We met in Munich a couple of months ago. I didn't know a lot about Plainly. I wrote a piece when you did some sort of a partnership with SignageLive, but for those who don't know who you are, can you tell me about the company, what it does, and how and why it was started?

Neb Savicic: First of all, thank you so much for having me. So Plainly is a product that helps creative teams automate and scale up video output while keeping the quality of their videos high. What that means, in a nutshell, is we have a platform that allows users to automatically render variations of their After Effects videos just by providing data that's going to be in those variations.

So the benefit of automation is you can produce videos at scale. You can produce a lot of videos quickly without all the monkey work to do each of them, right? 

Neb Savicic: Yes, so the key benefit, and that's the problem we're solving, is that in many use cases, creatives have to spend their time changing text, changing images, and creating variations of the same templatized video they created a month ago for different markets, screens, and products.

My background is actually in video. I was a motion designer before planning, and I always hated those kinds of projects, and that's where the inception story came from, and, I was like, there has to be some better way. So we created a platform where you can create one template, and one After Effects project, and then our platform will automatically create all of the different variations you need. At the same time, you can focus on different, more creative, and more important tasks.

So I understand that for a lot of social media things, even for things like utility company bills, if they want to do a video summary, customer by customer, how would this be used in the context of digital signage or digital out of home? 

Neb Savicic: When I first came into this industry, and I was looking at the content that the companies were putting out, and I said this on another podcast, the one thing that always bugged me is that these companies invest so much money into their systems into their digital signage systems and the content doesn't look that good. You invest so much money to have this great system running in the background, and the thing that's actually displayed and the thing that your customers see is the thing that's getting the least amount of effort. 

So using a tool like ours, you can actually make sure that you have relevant content, personalized content, and updated content all the time on all of the screens. So you can imagine… This is the easiest example, but like a QSR where they have the same content on every screen in every restaurant across all the locations, and that's just because they have a limitation of human resources, they just don't have enough employees to create different content. So they're satisfied with the same stuff. 

With a tool like Plainly and the power we give you, you can actually create individualized content for each screen. So, let's say it's raining in London. You can make different content when it's raining compared to Manchester, where it's sunny, and you're going to sell different stuff, it’s that ability to automatically create different individualized relevant personalized content on a large scale that's what we give to the digital sign, to our users from the digital signage industry. 

Do you have companies that are actively using this?

I know I mentioned that a partnership was announced with SignageLive. SignageLive is always good about working with emerging companies doing interesting things, so it's not surprising they're one of the first to do that. But how are these company’s customers using it? 

Neb Savicic: We work with many agencies, some of the biggest agencies, especially in the advertising and creative industries. These agencies are using it for digital signage for their clients and the way they're using it is exactly how I described it. 

They were spending so much time creating different variations of the same content and they realized they needed to offload this to machines and open up some of that time for our creative team to actually do something more, they paid these people a lot of money because they're great and spend time moving the pixels around, their users, agencies, and in-house creative teams all use Plainly in the same fashion, where you can just drop in a big CSV, a big Google sheet with all of the different video variations and in a click of a button you can get a hundred or a thousand different video variations. 

To be clear, this is not a template system like a lot of digital signage CMS companies have. I think they are sometimes called composer systems where you just open it up and you use templates that exist there, and you can adjust what's on them. 

This is developing templates within Adobe After Effects, usually, templates designed by motion graphics designers who know their way around AE. Then, that's where you plug in, right?

Neb Savicic: Yes, exactly. One of our key selling points is that we are a native After Effects solution. So our users have to be After Effects users. That's why I'm saying they're in-house creative teams and agencies. So what this means is that we are not offering you boilerplate templates that are the same for everybody.

You can actually create your own custom-branded bespoke templates that look awesome and then use our platform to increase the output of those templatized videos. 

So, what would the workflow be for? Let's use that example you had about QSR chains and wanting to have different menus based on weather conditions, geography, and that sort of thing.

How does that work in the real world? 

Neb Savicic: Okay, so there are two ways you can achieve this. First of all, you can do what's called a batch renderer, which is very nicely demonstrated in a video we did for the SignageLive integration. Basically, what you do is upload your After Effects template into Plainly.

You say, okay, we want to change the product's price, the product's name, and the product's image with every video. You create a big Google Sheet that's gonna have all of the different variations. You drop in that Google Sheet or a CSV into Plainly, click Render, and Plainly renders all of the different variations. That's the simple, no-code-needed way. 

The second way, which is a bit more advanced, is using our API. With our API, you can actually create any kind of workflow, and this is where we can also talk about programmatic. You can programmatically create video variations on demand. So let's say you have a system that detects it's rainy in New York, let's create a new content piece, that just pings our API and says create a new video, and we send you back the video so there are a couple of ways you can achieve the workflow, depending on the technical abilities.

What's the timing and everything of that? If you hit “Batch render” or whatever the button is, you click it, does that take 10 seconds, 10 hours, or 10 days? 

Neb Savicic: You can see this on our YouTube channel. We actually made a video in which we rendered 1000 videos in 17 minutes so it's quite a fast system. Obviously, it depends on how complex the video template is, but it's quite fast, and it's quite capable of producing like we have customers doing tens of thousands of videos, like fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, so the core of our product is the scalable infrastructure that can output any number of videos.

Are you using big, cloud-based compute systems, like AWS or whatever to do that, or is this your own iron? 

Neb Savicic: No, of course, we use Google for the rendering. 

So that gives you all the scalability you need. 

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. It's scalable on demand, and we don't have to worry about them shutting down.

No, they're not anytime soon, at least. So what is the output file? 

Neb Savicic: It's a video, first of all, that's the big thing for digital signage. 

It's not an HTML5, it's a video. 

Neb Savicic: No. It's an actual video, MP4 or MOV. So that also has some benefits in terms of being able to play it on older screens and any kind of screen so that also has some benefits. 

So any media player, unless it's a complete piece of junk, supports playing out the video, whereas it might not play out HTML5. 

Neb Savicic: That's one of the benefits, yeah. 

Are there settings? If I say, “I want 720p, 1080p, 4K,” and “Here's the format: it's portrait or it's landscape,” can you munch on those things? 

Neb Savicic: Of course. So all of those things are actually handled in After Effects. So the customer decides what's the duration going to be, what's the dimension of the video going to be, what's the design, but then also some of the agencies we work with, they actually do stuff for broadcast. In those cases, they require very specific output parameters. Because of that, we have a feature where you can define these specific outputs, such as, if you want to change the bitrate, the FPS, or any of those more technical parameters. That's also possible after the video is rendered.

If you do, use your example, a thousand videos in 17 minutes. For each of those videos, where do they go, and how do you distinguish which one is which? Can you give them names based on metadata so know this is Spanish, Escondido in California, postal code, and that sort of stuff?

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. There are a couple of ways you can achieve this. One is naming the files. You can use the data parameters from the video. If you have a product name, and then you want also to add Spanish, you can name them. But in the case of the API usage, you can include the metadata in that API call, which will be how you distinguish those videos.

But specifically for digital signage, and this is one of the things we did with SignageLive, so let's say in the spreadsheet you also have a column that says, where is this piece of content going to go? In SignageLive, it's called tags. You can actually use those tags and automatically distribute the videos to the screens with SignageLive because of their integration and the way we did it. But generally speaking, you can achieve that level of automation where you're dropping a CSV or filling out a Google sheet, the videos are read automatically, and they are distributed automatically to all of the screens where they need to be.

I assume there are guardrails and checks and balances on this stuff. Automation is awesome, but it can work both ways. If somebody makes a mistake or something goes hairy and the rendered videos are incorrect in some way. How do you make sure that doesn't happen?

Neb Savicic: So that's up to the user. We don't alter the data in any way. So what we get is what we put into the video, and then it's up to the user to introduce some checks and balances and security measures to make sure that the content looks right. 

So if there's an approval gateway of some kind that you want to look at each piece of video and go, okay, yeah, that looks right. That's up to the customer. That's not something inherent in your system? 

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course, and we do it also for security reasons. Of course, we don't want to be liable for approving something and then making a mistake. So we leave that up to the user and ensure they have the flexibility to do it in the way they want. 

I think I saw in one of the demo videos that you do have or offer users the ability, at least at the creative stage, to do a draft render, look at it, and then go in and change some of the things, right?

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. If you see a video that may be in, the data was incorrect. You can easily re-render that video, or, as you mentioned, use a draft version to make sure that it actually looks good before it's published. 

You're starting to work with AI, as everybody says they're working with AI, but how are you using it?

Neb Savicic: So we are introducing AI into our tool to help our users do the tasks they always do with the assets outside of Plainly. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a product image. Those product images, in a lot of cases, have backgrounds, and in the video, you want to have an image without a background. So we are introducing features that will help you - we call it pre-processing - remove the background or denoise your audio, and do those things that really help make the lives of our users a bit easier. So they don't have to do things outside of Plainly. They can do everything in one place. 

It's very much what I hear from people talking about the coding side and using AI to remove or take away a lot of the grunt work. 

Neb Savicic: Exactly, and I think that's the right use case for AI. It's just that there are tons of tasks that people just don't want to do, and it's the same as with Plainly like nobody wants to change the text layer or the product name 10 times like you should use machines for that, and I think you should also use AI for those kinds of tasks where. It's so obvious that it's useful in that regard. 

So what about the idea of putting in a chat GPT prompt that says, “Make me a video for hamburgers that are $2.99. Sundays only”? 

Neb Savicic: That's a good idea, but it's not what we're trying to build, unfortunately. What's really interesting about Plainly, is that given that we are an API-first solution, we are very modular. We have clients that are actually doing a bunch of AI stuff before the assets go into Plainly.

For example, we have one customer, at this point, multiple customers who are using AI avatars. So Plainly doesn't really add AI avatars. Still, since we have an API, they can quite easily bring our solutions together and have a solution that's creating an AI avatar. Then that video goes into plain to be included in the final video. If you want a ChatGPT prompt, you can just introduce ChatGPT before Plainly stringing them in a workflow and making any kind of workflow you want. 

I have some history with content automation and using After Effects templates, going back 10 years. The struggle I had was where it was a partnership. The big challenge I had was people didn't get it. They didn't understand the idea of templates and automation and making their lives easier. 

I'm guessing that it's much easier with this because you're not going to end users. You're not going to resellers or solutions providers. You're talking directly to the agencies by and large. 

Neb Savicic: Yeah, it's quite an obvious thing for them because it might seem tricky from the outside because, you could say oh, you are making Motion Designers obsolete. You're taking somebody's job that somebody changed names of the product there all day. But being a motion designer before Plainly, I don't look at it from that angle, I look from the angle of, you can have that Motion Designer to do a lot more work, different work, different creative work and use his or her time a lot more efficiently. 

Why do that menial work in that manner that’s soul-sucking, when you can create different templates and different projects and that's what the agencies see. They see an opportunity for new revenue. Basically, they can take in more clients because they now have this tool that's going to help them output ten times more content than with the same amount of staff. 

Yeah. I was curious about that. I suspect there's a huge problem, it depends on its qualifier, but I'm curious how much time and money this can save.

Neb Savicic: Depends... I'm kidding. 

I did some calculations, I was looking at some templates that are with our customers, and I was like, realistically, how much does it take to create ten videos from this template? And even if you have a fully templated project, you have all of the data ready to go, it can take anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes per video, depending on how complex it is. If you need to create ten videos, a hundred videos, thousand videos, you can see how that easily adds up where we clean with just literally one click. You add the CSV and can do thousands of these in 17 minutes. So the time savings are massive, but not easily counted. You cannot easily calculate it.

At least some of it is owed to, it's the old phrase around garbage in, garbage out. If you don't tag everything properly in the After Effects file, automation is not as easy, right?

Neb Savicic: Yes, of course. But it's not like you have to do some special work to prepare a template for Plainly. 

You just have to name your layers and things. 

Neb Savicic: Of course, every good Motion Designer or Video Editor will name their layers properly because otherwise, they won't find a way around their project if they return to it a month or six months later. 

Believe me, I've fallen into that trap. It's very hard. So you just have to be organized. You have to name this name stuff properly, and everything is going to work like with some other solutions on the markets they all say they're After Effects supported, but the reality is that yes, they support After Effects, but it's not natively.

First of all, you must alter your creative process a lot, meaning you have to work with a plugin or some special effect to import After Effects into their platform. With Plainly, you're just working with After Effects. You put After Effects into Plainly, and it's going to work. So we don't alter your creative process in any way. We just empower you to create more videos. The other thing is that if you're not an After Effects native, that means that with a lot of solutions, you're actually turning After Effects into some intermediary format, which means that you cannot use all the effects or there is some quality loss that happens in that transition. So that's what our users love about Plainly. 

I would imagine this opens up the opportunity for a “boutique level” agency or creative shop to take on very large jobs at a scale that, in the past, they would go, “We would love to have this work, but it would kill us.”

If they have this tool now, they can compete with the larger agencies, right? 

Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yes, and that's what I meant when I said it opens up new revenue opportunities because you can now take on more work, be a huge company, you can be outputting hundreds and hundreds of videos, even though it's… 

coming out of your spare bedroom.

Neb Savicic: Yeah, out of the basement. 

How does pricing work? 

Neb Savicic: Oh, so it's a SaaS, which means you pay either monthly or annually for a subscription and that all depends on the number of minutes you export. It starts as low as $59 per month, but it can go higher if you need more minutes. 

So classic pricing tiers are based on the amount of work you do and the amount of output. 

Neb Savicic: Which makes sense. 

You charge on finished rendered videos, not on the draft, in terms of time? 

Neb Savicic: Yeah. We just look at the output, not what you're doing to plan on, just the output. 

You started this a couple of years ago, or three, four years ago?

Neb Savicic:  2019. 

Okay. So five years ago, there were already some companies in the market doing maybe not the same work, but similar kinds of things. I did a podcast a few years back with Dataclay and I'm aware of SundaySky and some other ones out there. 

How do you compare to them, and when people say, okay, why would I use you versus brand X, what do you tell them? 

Neb Savicic: So there are a couple of things. First, if you compare Plainly to some other solutions, obviously being cloud-based, there is a difference to some of the other tools, like you don't have to worry about your rendering infrastructure because that's us. If something doesn't work, that's our fault. That's the core of our product. We ensure you can render as many videos as you want, as many videos as long as you have money. That's one thing, and then, of course, there are things like being After Effects native, where you can literally add any kind of template.

We have had clients with amazing 3D-based templates that wouldn't be possible in other solutions, and then they were API-based. So a lot of our customers are actually building internal tools. They're actually integrating Plainly into their apps or internal tools for creative teams. So those three things are what separates us from the market. 

So for the big agencies with internal software developers, who would use the API, this is great. But for the smaller agencies or the purely creative agencies, they can go at it using the no-code side of it and not have to worry about APIs and things.

Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yeah, that's it. 

Where are you guys at as a company? I saw that you got some seed funding from, what, the Serbian incubator fund or something? 

Neb Savicic: That was the first thing. That was in 2020, and then we got accepted into a very prestigious US accelerator called Tiny Seed. We were the first company from the Balkans to get in there. So they obviously saw something in us, but we were growing as a team, growing the customer base. We are so lucky to be working with some of the largest agencies and names that you would recognize from both Europe and the US, and we're just trying to make them happy and create a product that makes their lives better. 

I realized you're serving a whole bunch of different vertical markets and use cases, digital signage, just being one of them is, that a substantial noticeable or a friend of mine uses the term consequential part of your business or kind of an interesting sort of side aspect to what you do.

Neb Savicic: I'm not sure how big digital signage is with our agency customers. I would imagine that a good portion of the content they do is for digital signage, but as for us working directly with digital signage companies, we're just getting into that industry. With the SignageLive integration, we might announce more integrations soon. That's a new industry for us. We see that there are a lot of benefits for the users in the digital signage industry we're just trying to get into. 

We chatted at the digital signage summit in Munich. So, obviously, you were there to network and meet some people, and I had some beers. Would you also be at ISE? 

Neb Savicic: Yes, of course, and then Munich next year and possibly Intelcom. 

I assume this product will always evolve. Over the next year, are there new wrinkles you'll be rolling out that you can tell me about without alerting your competitors? 

Neb Savicic: Honestly, the good thing is that I'm so happy to have a technical team that's really fast, and the product improvement cycle is insane. We are putting out new features on a bi-monthly basis. So I don't know. One year from here, who knows what will be added? Definitely, the AI features are greater than everybody.

So all the normal stuff: faster, better, easier. 

Neb Savicic: Exactly. The stuff that doesn't change. 

Yes. All right, Neb. That was great. Very interesting. Thank you. 

Neb Savicic: Yeah. Thank you too, Dave.

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh, Ryarc

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh.

It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects.

I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or  mobile data networks.

That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like satellite content distribution, but different. When I found out Ryarc was the company that was doing proof of concept trials in the U.S., I reached out to Fergal - now based in Seattle - and we had this chat.

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TRANSCRIPT

Fergal, thank you for joining me. I've been aware of your company for a long time, but we've never actually spoken. For those people who don't know what you do, what the company does. Could you give me the elevator pitch? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Thanks for inviting me on. RYARC was founded as a digital signage application, with the starting point of their need for a digital signage platform that combined enterprise capabilities with knowledge worker-level skills by the operator. So this was in an era when digital signage was moving from what was a highly specialized and fairly rare thing, to something where at least from our perspective, the requirement was going to be that digital signage was just going to be another tool in the armory of an enterprise and, as such, it would require rather than a specialized team to operate at a knowledge worker level. 

This goes back 20 years, right? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it does. We divert a little bit into kind of my backstory. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s in Dublin and I had a fantastic time there.

It was Microsoft where the Nvidia of the day, Windows 95 was coming out. So it was a fantastic place to work, and I couldn't have asked for a better start in my career, but I had an itch to try and start something of my own, and I happened upon digital signage. I could see the way trajectories were going in terms of connectivity. If you combine connectivity, availability, and cost & display, availability, and cost, two lines on a graph are going down and to the right and human labor is going up, and to the right. So those three factors combined to make it apparent to me that digital signage was going to be a thing.

If it was going to be a thing, it needed software to go with it. So I quit Microsoft, and I did my Asian Odyssey backpack and thing, and I was actually writing the code for version one. I got so bored sitting on the beach in Thailand that I took to actually writing code. I'm serious.

That is dysfunctional. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I guess. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I'm not a beach guy, which is, another strange story for someone who ended up in Sydney for as long as he did, but, yeah, so it was with that desire to have a go with that. 

Coming out of Microsoft, I felt I had a decent handle on usability and what's needed for a knowledge worker-level software product, by which I mean a product that it became. It seemed obvious to me that digital signage was going to become a bigger thing and as a result, it needed to be a kind of a productivity-type app rather than some highly specialized thing that you'd need a broadcast engineer. I think the early software that was available did come out of broadcast if I'm not mistaken. I think that was Scala's backstory. 

So, I managed to get my hands on one of those. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but I was like, oh, okay, I can see how this works, but you're not going to be able to give this to Joe in marketing and ask him to start operating it. So that was the kind of genesis of why I chose that particular route and why I started writing code to get there. But it took a few years, from building the thing in my apartment to actually launching the company. 

When did the business start, like when you were out there selling licenses and everything? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I think the first license we sold was in 2006 but I had gone full-time about two years before that. 

So you're pretty happy to start selling. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, I was. But it's funny. I was working for a company that was bought by Match.com in Sydney, and that was an interesting place to work at the age I was at the time.

But then, I met some folks there who are independently wealthy folks and the particular gentleman I approached is named Neil Gamble, a very well-known Grandi in the Australian business scene, South African guy, lovely man. But, a serious business guy who is running one of the largest software companies in Australia, such as they were back then. But he was chairman of the company I was working for, which was acquired by Match, and I pitched him my idea. I turned up in the boardroom office of this large software company at seven o'clock in the morning in Sydney. So I think it was 2003 or maybe 2004, it doesn't matter, but I pitched him the idea, and he said, “Fergal, that's brilliant, but fuck off and come back when you’ve got some customers.” 

So, I duly fucked off and I think he ruminated on the idea for a while and came back to me a couple of months later. I was still working as a contractor at the time so I was fine. He said, “You know what? I've met some other people who are doing certain things in the retail space, and what you said clicked even more. So I'm going to take a swing on this”, and so he put in just enough money to basically pay for me and some other young guy to take the code from what was something I could, demonstrate to something that we could actually sell and the first customer was Zimmer if you've ever heard of Zimmer Frame? 

No. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The Zimmer frame is kind of like that. It's a mobility tool for people with generally older people. It's like a walking frame. 

Unfortunately, maybe I'll learn about that soon enough, but not yet. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Not yet. May it be many more years, but we put the website up and boom, that was the first one, and then, out-of-home started to take off in Australia and had a pretty decent clip, compared to other markets, and Neil was very well connected in the Sydney business scene. 

He started to open doors into places like I could get meetings now with people, and my experience of that, and again, maybe it's reflected in our website and our kind of general low-key profile, generally, I found it, if I could get in front of a customer and showed them the product, we tended to do well. It was the getting the customers part, which was the trickier part for us, but Neil was instrumental in that, and that's how we started. 

Back then it was trickier for everybody. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it was. Coming from an engineering background, I found it quite interesting, the whole scene at the time. What you had was advertising guys who were in the billboards business and suddenly there was, foist upon them this need to transform into an IT company, and that created a particular set of issues at the time, I think, where you had companies that whose experience and interaction with IT was about, “fix the printer” and “why is my email not working?” So they weren't tech companies in their DNA, they were marketing companies, and I tend to think of those years as like the cowboy years, by which I mean, there were an awful lot of platforms out there.

What I tended to see, although not uniformly, was a thing I noticed is that oftentimes, the decision makers because they didn't have a mature IT section within their company, it wasn't a traditional thing for them. It wasn't integral to their business in the way it is now, you often had people making software decisions who didn't really have the experience and wherewithal to assess software and what that led to properly, and I think this is partly what led to the massive proliferation of solutions out there was that the thing with digital signage is that it's fairly straightforward to get a piece of software that will reliably get a flash file or a JPEG or a video from A to B.

And when the software assessments were being done by people who didn't really have experience in enterprise software or edge management or remote device management, stuff like that, it was very easy for the smoke and mirrors guys to do well quickly, because no one was asking the boring questions about the plumbing. So that was something that took some adjustment for me with my background. 

I think it's maybe part of what led to the proliferation of often these things. I don't want to denigrate or be down on the industry or anything, but there were a lot of solutions out there that were really something that someone had put together in response to a request from someone and then they came up with a logo, and said, we're a digital signage company, and often these solutions, if you ever got to peek behind, to look under the hood, as they say in North America, you'd be shocked at what was there, and I had several experiences in those early times of being Gesamt or someone with a fantastic sales pitch, which is something that no one would ever accuse us of. 

I was thinking these guys don't know what they're doing anyway. Anyway, I think that's calmed down a good bit because you have to be sustainable and, eventually, if your stuff keeps falling over, that's going to, with the best sales pitch in the world, that's not going to last forever. 

Yeah. I think there were a lot of companies, for a whole bunch of years, who signed on with a service provider, some sort of software company, and then three years later moved on to another one after they learned what they really needed and learned about things like device management and scalability and all that stuff. But first go around, they were attracted by the pretty pictures and the WYSIWYG UX and all that stuff, and as a consultant, I saw it first hand where I would say this thing is boring and ugly, like a Subaru, sorry, Subaru owners, but they're not the sexiest cars, but they just work, versus a Range Rover that looks sexy as hell, but it's going to be a nightmare. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, that was it. And I guess it was inevitable. If you looked at the factors feeding into that, you had an industry that was being dragged, kicking, and streaming into the world of it and you had a lot of people who saw an opportunity and needed to go quickly, but I couldn't believe some of the stuff that I saw pass muster, and I was because sometimes I get a peek under the hood and it was literally, The wizard of Oz, they're furiously pulling levers to keep the thing up.

But we learned, I think, that the company that was the first major out-of-home company we thought was iCorp. 

Australian company. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: That's right, and they were also based in Sydney, and so we, very quickly, felt their pain when things would go wrong and that was an excellent kind of learning curve for us. But what helped embed in the company was this engineering mantra that we had, which was, if it can be avoided, never have the software operate In a manner where if a truck roll can be avoided, it's not avoided. 

There's this focus for us on remote manageability so it's different. I know some people in the early days tried to use browsers for digital signage, but that failed for reasons that we don't need to get into, but when there's a huge difference between an application and this even goes all the way up to major, big sticker stuff like Microsoft, an application which leaks memory or does something like that and, yeah, it's annoying when you have to kill the browser and restart it, after a few hours, which used to be the case a while ago, but that kind of level of tolerance for unattended execution, you could see it didn't exist. 

It's different if the program falls over and you ring Mark in IT, and he says, yeah, just reboot the machine. But if you've got three-quarters of a million-dollar screen in an airport, that's a really expensive proposition and the failure is immediately public and embarrassing. That helps embed for us that learning experience we had with out-of-home, of the importance of just reliability at the edge and going on from reliability to manageability. So we spent a lot of time finding bugs in Microsoft Core DLLs, that's just through the usage scenarios we had, they just weren't common enough even for Microsoft to have identified some of these issues with things that will leak a little bit every time they're used. It's a software term. If the software isn't carefully crafted every time it runs through a certain given set of routines, it can capture a bit of memory and then fail to release it, which isn't a problem if you're closing your laptop at the end of the day but if you're wanting to run 24/7 in twenty feet up in airside and an airport, it's a different proposition. So anyway, that was all a learning curve, but it helps embed for us this fanatical focus on stability and manageability. 

You talked about the people in the meetings in the early days, the visual merchandisers and people from the marketing department, business communicators, those kinds of people, but that's changed, right? The people across the table now, quite often, are IT people. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, they are, and I think that's just an inevitable consequence of the pain of failure to not do that. It was like Mad Man so the whole focus was on the flashiness of the advertising and the creativity and all that, whether it's on a billboard or TV or whatever. But now they were in a new world where boring stuff like Enterprise IT management was crucial, a factor in their ability to succeed.

It was cruel as well because of any failures they had. If you're even running a service and your website goes down, maybe some people would notice, maybe someone won't, but if you've got a big screen downtown, and then your customer is there showing his friends or their customers, say, look, check out our ad down in some public place when it goes wrong, it's really bad because it's so visible, so those two things are combined. So I guess they had to learn quickly and yes, I think it's certainly, it's no longer the situation where you've got someone from Marketing making IT decisions. 

So describing your product mix or suite now, what would it be, and is there a particular market that you focus on?

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. I remember before I started the company I read how to write a business plan, and one of the things was identifying your customer, and I thought, wow, there are so many, anybody who wants to display a message somewhere publicly…

Anybody with money. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. That was the prerequisite. Going back to what I was referring to with the learning curve in the early days, it became apparent to me that there's only so much gilding of the lily you can do in terms of the content management side. I sometimes bristle when we get described as a CMS, because really most of the value of what we do is it's fuller than that.

Content management is its raison d'etre, but it needs to do an awful lot of other stuff, and I always believed that for us, that was a strength of ours in our kind of relentless focus on manageability and Edge device management. I saw it just again, through the growing pains of helping an out-of-home company get through the early days of it. That's really where we needed to focus on managing the device and just being absolutely bomb-proof when it came to reliability. 

What that has led to, I would say organically is: so are we a digital signage company? We are, but we're other things too. So what this hundred of man years of effort, of the device management side and the remote manageability side of things, we have customers now, who don't use us for digital signage at all. They're using us as a remote management platform for devices, and that has led us, over more recent years, probably since the time I moved from Sydney to the West Coast here into IoT, into Edge AI, into sensor management, and device management. 

So I guess what I'm trying to say is what started as an organic reaction to needing remote manageability and not saying to your customer, yeah, you have to fork out an extra 15 bucks a month brand point for some other tool that's going to help you manage the device. That led to that side of the application becoming so developed that it could stand on its own even for folks who didn't need digital signage. So we're on lots and lots of things, where we're not controlling the screen, but rather they're using us as the plumbing, right?

For example, for AI and stuff like that. It can identify a Coke can versus a Pepsi can or whatever it might be. But how do you deploy that model to 16,000 different endpoints and how do you collect information at the edge about how you do AB testing? How do you manage the versioning of AI models at the edge? All that kind of stuff. So there's lots of sleep-inducing, boring, but absolutely critical stuff where the product focuses. And yeah, that's on device management, and we're also used to deploying other kiosk-style applications. So the person interacting with the device could be a piece of software running there. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's RYARC that is forming the plumbing that enables all that to work and go together. 

Back at Infocomm, a few weeks ago, I hosted a little discussion panel where we talked with three people, both attendees, and executives, about what they saw and everything else, and I asked one of the guys who is actually from an LED company. What he saw that he thought was interesting, I thought he would talk about some other LED product or whatever, but he started going on about this idea that you could use datacasting to distribute content, and he bumped into a company that was doing that, and described it, and I thought, that's interesting but I'm not sure who he's talking about. So I asked him after the fact, who was that company? Eventually came around that it was RYARK. I thought, oh, interesting!!!

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Those guys are still around? 

There was that too because I don't bump into your name very often, but can you explain what he was talking about this whole idea of ATSC and using datacasting to move content around? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, sure. The ATSC thing, so the whole TV industry is they've gotten together and they're pushing the ability of the traditional broadcast channels to be able to carry data. The ability to push data across has been around for quite a while. 

Yeah, it happened when when TVs went from analog to digital, right?

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Right, but the ATSC 3. 0 upgrade, which was the thing that was being marketed and pushed, just greatly expanded the ability and the bandwidth available to push data across. Again, I think this is likely to be limited in some respects globally because of the ubiquity and cheapness of being able to push data across cellular, right? So in other areas, cellular is the cheapest chip, right? If you go to places like Korea or India or Singapore or countries that have recently developed, they tend to get saturated with cellular very quickly.

The situation in the United States is that cellular data is significantly expensive compared to the rest of the world. Canada, it's the same story, right? What pertains in North America is a situation where it is so expensive that alternatives are becoming more attractive. Anyway, that's not really a signal to what ATSC three is all about, but essentially, working with some of the hardware and software providers in the broadcast industry. We've been able to plug into the broadcasting software and hardware side of things such that in addition to using our software, you can use our cloud service or install our software on your own infrastructure if you want to do that.

But in this case, in addition to publishing it to the cloud, which is what happens when you create campaigns and do that kind of thing, we can also add another pipe to the mix, and that pipe is the broadcasting station. So when someone clicks the publish button, it's seamless from the user's perspective. But if it's set up in such a way, in addition to pushing stuff to the cloud and having it dribble down over cellular that way, we can also have these files broadcast. So that's a kind of one-to-many, very effective way of getting data across that doesn't require large bandwidth bills.

We've worked with some companies with large numbers of devices. It was another example of us learning by doing, where their cellular data bills were a huge factor. So, we worked pretty intensely to make the handshake and everything else in our software super parsimonious. I think with 20 megs a month, I think what the chatter that our software has in maintaining connectivity with the server. So we worked relentlessly and got that down. 

But anyway, that's all to show how much of a factor the data cost is, and that's that was the impetus that led to wanting to see if we can offer customers a much cheaper way of getting data across and it works seamlessly. We had a working example at that show at Infocomm. I wasn't there, but I think it was an EV station or something like that, which would allow them to do all the heavy lifting so that they've got video and stuff like that. You can push that over the air.

So what's at the far end of it? Is there a receiver or special hardware? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, TV tuner. 

It's like a cable box. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: What we've been working on over the past year is ensuring that our software can run on these tuners. So you've got the prospect now of not having to buy an ARM or an X86 chip and put it in a computer running Windows in the back at the back of the TV, but we can squeeze our stuff now onto many of these tuner devices. So you have a small but capable box, that started life as a tuner, but we can have our software running on there. That's a big step in terms of cost-per-unit reduction. 

For customers, the main difficulty, I think, with the ATSC 3.0 thing is that it's very easy to go to a Verizon or whomever and be able to estimate what your data cost is going to be. If I need to push across three gigs a month to 11,000 devices. I can work out how much that's gonna cost me. The data cost element in the broadcast space isn't quite as commoditized yet. So there's still some ambiguity there and, perhaps, lack of clarity, and I think the cellular companies are awake to this too. It has the potential to eat into or take up a lot of the enterprise pushing off large amounts of data, and there are many industries that can use that, but digital signage is certainly one of them.

This is reminiscent of the late 2000s or mid-to-late 2000s with satellite and multicasting through satellite. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, yes, I remember that. 

Is this the same idea, or is this different? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The similarity I suppose would be in its one-way communications and you need a back channel to be able to do the other stuff.

So you still do with this? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: You can deploy with just broadcast, so we could get the software running so that there's zero coming back. The obvious thing with that is that you don't know if a meteor struck the sign, right? But it is similar to satellites in that it's one-way.

One of the things that we do actually—I don't know if we know—is we do a lot of in-store music. So we use the CMS side of our product suite to organize what is essentially a radio station template and the thing about audio is you can get away with having six ads running for a week on a sign, right?

But if you play three Alton John and five others in a retail environment, the staff in the shop, they'll climb ladders to rip the speakers out of the roof because it'll drive them crazy and that's understandable. So ironically, MP3s are fairly small, but you need thousands and thousands of them.

So we often found, for the in-store audio deployments we were doing, we had to work with that. We did Woolworths in Australia, which was the largest retailer, I'm not sure if they are anymore, but they're one of the big two there, and we did all their in-store music for years and that was all via satellite, which was really painful actually. But this seems to be working. It's a lot easier and it's a lot better as you would expect, it's nearly 20 years down the line from that. 

So is it the same feed, so to speak, the same set of files that you're sending to everybody, or can it be addressable by location, setting different things?

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, we've done some work on that. I can't get too deep into the way our product works because most people won't be familiar with it, but essentially, in our software, we've got this concept called a channel and a channel is an abstract entity that represents an endpoint somewhere or multiple endpoints. We have an engine that will categorize those things. 

Let's say you want a national rollout. Now like a lot of other things in the United States, the broadcast market is really quite fragmented. It's not like the UK or Europe, where you've got a single national broadcast or a few commercials and you can go live everywhere. You've got a real kind of mix right across the country. 

So obviously you don't want to be pushing, essentially what I'm getting into here is that we know where the data needs to get up. So there's a layer in the software that will go, okay, you need to go to station X, you need to go to station Y and I guess broadcast, but once it just gets pushed out, right? And it's the same kind of files, and again, from the user's perspective, when they're using our software, if it's being set up and configured in the back, in the backend to utilize ATSC 3.0 broadcasts that all happen seamlessly under the hood. So they're just clicking a publish button, and in the case of where they use an ATSC 3.0, instead of it just going to the cloud, it's also going to the broadcast station where we work with the some of the ATSC 3.0 technology companies, goes into their queue and then gets broadcast out and then it goes down to the tuner and then we're sitting on the tuner too, so we can watch the files come in and do whatever assembly and decryption that we need to do, at the edge and playback.

So is this something that could be done or are you supporting active networks that are now using this? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: They are all at the POC stage. I alluded earlier to it being early days as well from the people wanting to utilize this, I think the industry is still working out how to package this and sell it.

If they're successful at that and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be, it'll be great for North American enterprise because there's finally a competitor out there to cellular. I don't know what the word is, a triopoly? But yeah, the situation, that a reason why data is so expensive in North America.

We could talk for a very long time. We'll probably have to do this again at some point, but that was super interesting and great to finally meet you. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, I'm happy to talk, and I'm happy to do it again if you think there's more interesting stuff we can chat about. I am probably at risk there doing a lot of reminiscing, but, I feel entitled to that now. I've been in the industry for a while. 

Exactly. All right. Thank you. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy, Appspace

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

One of the things I noticed bombing around the two exhibit halls at InfoComm in June was how most of the digital signage software companies were located in one hall, and some of them not looking all that busy, while there were at least a couple of others in the other hall, and they were packed with people.

One of those companies was Appspace, and it was clear to me why the company was there with a very prominent stand. They were with their people, so to speak.

While Appspace may have started years ago as another digital signage CMS software option, it now refers to itself as a unified workplace experience platform. That's why it was nested in with a bunch of other tech companies that provide the kinds of technologies - like collaboration tools - that drive contemporary workplaces.

The company started out small, but now has 450 staff, offices all over the planet, and about 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers.

I had a chat with Chief Innovation Officer Thomas Philippart de Foy back in 2022, and I wanted to do a catch-up with him because I was intrigued by what the company is up to. I also wanted to know more about how Appspace products have steadily been stitched into the fabric of how a lot of companies communicate, and tied in with many or most of the core tools now used around modern workplaces.

I also wanted to better understand the company's recent announcement of developing native support for its software within Microsoft's Teams. Lots of CMS software companies have tie-ins these days  with video conferencing tools, but Thomas explains in our chat how this is different.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thomas, nice to chat again. We've done a podcast in the past, but for people who maybe don't know much about Appspace and didn't listen to the last one, the fools, could you give me a rundown of what Appspace is all about? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Hi Dave. Thanks for having me on this podcast again. Appspace has changed a lot over the last 15 or 20 years.

It was a digital signage vendor company many years ago. We are now considering ourselves as more of a unified workplace experience platform, delivering a lot of services to large enterprise customers, whether it's digital signage, which is one of the communication channels that we have, or an app, an intranet, or a whole workplace management suite of products.

So the company has changed. We have around 450 people globally with offices around the world and really focused on the enterprise market, although we do a lot in the education space as well. Around 200 of the Fortune 500 companies use Appspace today. 

Where is the company based? Is it in Dallas? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Well, originally, the company was based in Dallas. Today, a lot of the leadership team is based in Tampa, Florida. So, I would say there is probably a split of headquarters between Dallas and Tampa. Both offices are very important for us in the US. 

In the early days, you can correct me, but I think a lot of the development was done in Malaysia, right?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes. We still have a very large product engineering organization in Malaysia. Our Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Stan Stephens is still based over there. So that hasn't changed, but obviously, we acquired a company in the US, The Marlin company, a few years back. So we have additional resources elsewhere in the US and then we acquired Beezy, which is an Intranet company out of Barcelona in Spain. So we now have a big dev team out of Barcelona and some dev people out of Porto in Portugal as well.

I was at Infocomm recently and found my way over to the Central Hall. Most of the digital signage stuff was in the West Hall, but, if you could take a bus over to the Central Hall because of all the construction, I walked through there and saw the Appspace booth and saw it was very large and very, very busy. And you guys were just in the midst of an announcement.

So I thought, well, okay, this would be a good time to kind of catch up on the company and what it's up to that announcement was around Teams integration, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I thought you were already integrated with Teams and it sounds like a lot of companies have done that, but what you're doing was distinct. 

Could you explain to me and the listeners what's different about the integration you've done with Teams and with the other platforms? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Sure. I remember having that conversation with you years back about digital signage on devices in meeting rooms and the benefits it would have for large organizations. Obviously, the pandemic increased the value of content on screens in meeting rooms, whether it's for safety purposes or education on how to use the technology in the room.

We've natively integrated with several platforms, first with Cisco, integrating directly into their Control Hub platform. This allows you to enable signage from their backend. We also integrated Poly with Logitech. Today, we're especially excited because we're natively integrated into Microsoft Teams Rooms, the leading video conferencing platform in the industry, and being integrated directly into Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) makes it extremely easy for large organizations to scale signage services to all those devices from MTR directly. 

This means that when you enter a room, you're greeted with content on the screen. That content could be a welcome message, instructions on how to use the meeting space, or how to keep it clean after your meeting.  It could be corporate messaging, but it can also include Microsoft Teams Rooms instructions, helping users navigate the technology in the room. 

We're very excited about the reception we received at Infocomm from customers. I was actually locked into a little meeting room under NDA; it was focused solely on Microsoft, and customers could come in to discover not only what we're doing with MTR but also our integration with Microsoft Teams through our embedded app and our SharePoint integration, essentially everything we're doing with Microsoft.

And what's the difference between when other software companies say they're integrated with Teams and when you say there's a native integration? What's the difference there? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: The first and the most important one is that we're the only vendor that’s certified with Microsoft Teams Rooms. So if you have an issue with your MTR endpoint and you're running a noncertified digital signage solution on it, Microsoft is likely to say, “Hey, you're not using the product as it was designed. Therefore, it's not supported.” Because many large companies are using MTR, you would expect those companies to want to standardize on something certified by Microsoft. So certainly there is that aspect. 

The other one is how you deploy it. A lot of companies have so-called digital signage levering a web URL. We're running our app on an MTR endpoint, and it's deployed through MTR. So from a deployment standpoint, from a monitoring,  it is a true digital signage endpoint, like any of the other apps-based digital signage endpoint. That gives you many additional capabilities around the narrowcasting of content, broadcasting in case of emergency, and so forth. So I think those two are really critical. 

There are other benefits to managing Appspace from MTR. But I would say just first, make sure you're using a Microsoft Certified solution so that you're fully supported and then the second is being able to deploy this at scale and have an MTR endpoint behave as a true digital signage endpoint and not just a web URL inside Microsoft, which is what some companies do with Zoom. That is not true digital signage as you know. 

So because it's just a web URL, it's just showing a web page like any other web page versus what you're saying is because it's natively integrated, it's a true endpoint and you, you have the ability to know what's going on with it and manage it as well? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. You're able to monitor exactly what content is displaying. You're able to cache content and not stream everything. I mean, it's our full Appspace app that's running on the device.

Okay. So with that, is it a kind of a push situation where your customer-facing salespeople and your business partners are saying to companies: You have this collaboration display in a bunch of your rooms, and it's sitting dark a lot of the time, you could do things with it? 

Or are the end-user customers saying, “Hey, we have this collaboration display that's sitting dark a lot of the time, can we do something with it?”

Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it's a combination of the requests. What we're seeing is there's a lot of digital real estate deployed in companies that is not used all the time, whether because there's no video conferencing happening or there's no call, no meeting happening in the meeting space, but those meeting space are still visible from outside, either because there's a window that opens up to the meeting space or because it's one of those new types of Huddle meeting spaces, which are open. 

So there's a request from internal comms and facilities to use as much digital real estate as possible they have to communicate to employees around the workplace and comms and safety. and there's less and less appetite for companies to print. So they're looking for every digital real estate they can leverage. So I think there's certainly that, and we're getting asked constantly by big companies saying, “Hey, we're rolling out AppSpace. We want to target the meeting group.” That's very, very important to us. 

But we're also starting to see the teams that are using the technology for their day-to-day operations saying, "Hey, can I actually put my content on those screens as well? It's my meeting room in my neighborhood, where I have my team. I want to be able to use that screen when someone enters the room to talk about our team's performance and really narrowcast to their team.” So that's why they want full control of the device and not just a web URL streaming generic.

Now, do they have to go into the Appspace application to produce that content or to load it in, or is it somewhat headless in that they can produce something in whatever toolset they use and it's, and because of the hooks that are set up, it'll show up there? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Both are possible. One of our most popular integrations is with SharePoint. If the comms team is producing content on SharePoint, we have a connector that allows us to fetch that content and repurpose it for digital signs so that it automatically populates. 

I mean, that's been a very old story, right? We heard about the need for repurposing existing content from third-party tools. SharePoint is super popular in the Microsoft ecosystem. but it's not only that. But so you could imagine having a playlist of content playing on an MTR endpoint that's just fetching. Microsoft Content from SharePoint that is potentially related to a team or related even to the IT team that operates the MTR endpoint.

So now, what you're seeing on the digital sign is the how-to instructions that were actually created in SharePoint. 

There seems to be a real distinction between companies that have decided to make their workplace their core vertical market and, let's say, other digital signage companies, whether they offer software solutions that include workplaces as one of their capabilities. 

Looking through the Appspace website, it strikes me that this is all you do, and you realized or have learned through the years that you can't just offer a digital signage solution. You've got to be making a space reservation, booking, assignment, and all kinds of other things like that. So what is the range of services? 

And, also, is that what you found that guys have said, look, if we're going to work with you, this has to be just more than something that's going to put messages on screens?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I mean, if I go back, I think we were one of the very first digital signage companies to say our focus is going to be the workplace and not retail and transportation and others and we were very early there. So we focused on building our product to address the needs of the corporate market and corporate communications. 

When we acquired Marlin, we were acquiring a company that was focused on frontline workers, and communication on digital signs. So again, staying very much in our focus area of workplace communication versus retail or other channels. When the pandemic hit, we had a lot of customers who reached out to us and said, our workers are now back home, we need to continue to deliver the message that they were used to seeing on digital signs, but we need to deliver it on their personal devices. That's really when we focused and started focusing on personal devices, released our employee app, and did an intranet acquisition and suddenly, all of this started to make sense for customers. One single platform to deliver across multiple communication channels, but all natively integrated, not something where you're trying to put solutions together. 

So we do email publishing, publish to Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and Slack, publish on digital signs, publish into an employee app, publish on an intranet, and all of those are native features of the app-based platform. They're not point products that we're plugging one into the other. That means that from a core comm standpoint or facilities when you're creating content, you know you have the ability to amplify your message to all those communication channels and that all of that is going to be automated. 

Now, while we were doing this and focusing on the comms aspect, there was a real need for a new weight for users to plan their journey into the office. You were no longer going and sitting at a desk and just booking a meeting room through Outlook. You needed to book a building pass to access the building. You need to reserve a hot desk or a hotel desk to be able to book other resources like a smart lock or a parking place, all those resources that are needed for you to have a productive user journey. And so we delivered the features In the apps that we had, so it was easy to do it on the signage front for scheduling panels because it's the same app that runs on the digital sign that actually runs on the scheduling panel. The same thing for the wayfinding kiosks, the interactive kiosks that we were doing years ago now also support wayfinding services, and then because we launched a mobile app for employee communication, all we had to do was enable those workplace services in that same employee app, so employees have only one app, one app to receive the latest company news, to be connected to the workplace, but also to manage their journey into the office. 

Today, it's a whole suite. That's why we call ourselves a unified workplace experience platform. We have one app that team members use on their personal devices, phones, desktops, and tablets. Then, we have one app that runs in the physical workplace, on digital signs, on an MTR endpoint, on a scheduling panel, on a wayfinding kiosk, and on a desk bar. And then, at the core, you have Appspace. 

How do companies get their employees to use that? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's probably the biggest challenge for any organization in launching a new app is user adoption for different reasons. You may have frontline workers who don't have a company email. So we had to support one-time password and digital signage plays a key role there in getting users to activate their one-time password. 

Use digital signage, say there's a new app available for you. Scan the QR code. It asks you to enter your employee's unique identifier, your personal email address or phone number. You get a one-time password, and you're then able to log into the app and have access. So that's number one. You need to make sure that everyone is a first citizen of the modern workplace—your front-line worker, or desk worker, whether you have an email address or not.

The second thing is a lot of people use their personal devices and if you're like me, I'm not in favor of using my personal device to use a company-needed app. So I want options. One of the options is to have a fully responsive web app, a PWA. So, if you access Appspace on your Safari or Chrome browser, it behaves exactly like a native app. The first time you log in, you can actually pin it on your home screen. Next time you go in, there is no address bar, you have the full app experience, but it's a web app. You didn't download it from an app store. Makes it easier. 

And then finally, For IT, the biggest challenge is certifying an iOS or an Android app on mobile devices. That takes a lot of time, sometimes 6 months, 12 months, even, to get the certification. So what we did is we embedded our app in Microsoft Teams, and because it is now the number one app used on desktops and mobile devices in the corporate space, you just, as an IT organization, need to enable the Appspace app in the admin console of Microsoft Teams, and one morning the user wakes up and they have on the sidebar next to do a call, your meetings, you now have the Appspace app and all the capabilities embedded in Microsoft Teams. 

That from a user adoption point is game-changing, because now you don't need to certify an app, you don't need your users to download a new app, you don't need your users to remember a web URL, the app is just there living in Microsoft Teams.

So you don't have people going, okay, what is this weird thing? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. 

I'm curious, you mentioned the pandemic and COVID and there was endless writing about how this is going to change workplaces, everything's different. Will people ever go back to the office and so on? 

I work from home and haven't worked in an office for a very, very long time, so I don't see it, but I'm curious, did it genuinely change, or did it just kind of sort of change?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it really changed. I think employees will go back into the office, and most companies want that for cultural reasons, productivity reasons, and so forth, but the way we will go back into the office will never be the same. The physical workplace has changed. There are fewer desks than there were before, more meeting spaces of all sorts, huddle spaces, meeting rooms, conference rooms, a lot more, and so the way a user is going to operate in the physical workplace is never going to be the same as it was before. I think that's huge. 

Also, we're still learning, and companies are still learning, changing, and adjusting. And so the core, the heartbeat of the workplace, in our case, Appspace needs to be super flexible to be able to implement new rules and new workflows to enable the user to plan their journey into the office and also to drive the behavior of a user. We have a huge services organization that implemented hot desking and hotelling, and when they opened their office, all the consultants and partners rushed into the office, and they had a huge capacity issue. People didn't book their workspace, so they expected they were going to find one, and there was no workplace available, so they got super frustrated.

So, the company implemented managed power outlets at the desk, and power is only enabled if you reserve your desk and check in on arrival. The following day, people who came into the office without reserving a workspace and trying to hijack a desk didn't have power, and that never happened twice. When you run out of power, you always figure out how to reserve your power for the next time you go around.

So I think those behaviors are changing, and technology is there to help the behaviors change, supporting the behaviors. And I think that's huge. So it's not telling an employee you have to reserve is telling the employee that if you reserve, you get all those incremental benefits, 

Are you also able to support a lot of the devices that I saw in walking around Infocomm, and some of them I was already aware of like very small displays or even just little LED light things that communicate that this space is available, or maybe a display that says the space is available between these times and it's booked these other times or whatever? 

I find those things very interesting in terms of office hoteling and so on. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, the number of new devices released in the last two years has been crazy.

Both you and I come from the signage world, and adding a new device and running content on the new devices is native to a digital signage provider. That's what we've always done. So whether you display calendaring data or turn on an LED or not, it's not different from any type of content in general.

I think that's where companies who did reservation software are struggling because they don't understand the physical workplace device side of the experience. But coming from the digital signage space in our case, we understand that. So, a scheduling panel back in the day, it was Crestron. Now it's Logitech and iADA and there are so many of those, the Cisco Navigator, and there are so many devices. 

And because we're completely OS and hardware-agnostic, you run our app on it, and you deliver the scheduling experience and then the desk plugs are the same, whether you take the Crestron desk plug, the iADA desk plug, or the nPlug, they're all small desk plugs that allow you to run an app on it and display the experience on those devices. So for us, it's very native. What's interesting is what incremental device content we are putting on it and that's the other devices we don't see, all those IoT devices in the ceiling that track air quality, room temperature, humidity level, and occupancy. And being able to display that data back on the scheduling panel or on a wayfinding kiosk or a digital sign in the lobby when you enter the building, knowing where's the traffic, what's the occupancy rate, what's the current air quality. I think that's bringing another level of value. And as we always used to say in the digital signage world, content is king.

I assume you do analytics of some kind and how are they used? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: So analytics has always been a big part of administrative users of the Appspace platform to monitor the success of the communication campaign, being able to track which content plays at which time of the day and then when you combine it with tools such as audience measurements, cameras that try eyeball dwell time, then analytics becomes much richer because it's now a communication channel that you can really monitor and track the engagement level, but analytics on the workplace management is as important. 

How many users came to the office? What's the average use of a workspace or type of workspace? Whether a meeting room is underutilized or overutilized with regard to the number of attendees? All of that data is extremely important. So we've built a lot of analytics and reporting capabilities in the Appspace Admin platform, so you can actually pull your reports, export all the data and view it live into Tableau or Power BI, correlate it with IoT sensor data, so you can now start to see Not only scheduled based data but also live data.

So I know this room was booked for six, but my live data tells me only four people are in the meeting room. I'm, therefore, underutilizing the workspace, or I'm running this communication campaign in the lobby, and I currently have 40 people standing in the lobby. That's useful data that you can have.

Now, when you add AI to it, AI starts to give us insights and recommendations. It will tell the facilities team whether or not you're about to run out of a certain type of resource. We're seeing a trend of desks with two monitors in the docking station, and we expect that within the next 30 days, you're going to run out of capacity, which will allow facilities to adjust their workplace and anticipate. And the same thing is true with the workplace. We've just released this week. The ability to create content on the signage and to auto-generate a QR code on the digital sign that will link to the origin of the content, whether it was SharePoint, your Appspace intranet, or the employee app.

So when you view the content, you scan the QR code, you're redirected. That analytic is captured and now you have true engagement on whether or not the communication campaign is successful. 

Do you find that all these insights, are inherently actionable, but are your end user customers doing things with it? Or are they just kind of seeing and going, “Okay, this is what's going on?” 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, on the facility side, it's huge because that environment is changing constantly, and they're looking at the best ways to optimize their workplace. So analytics is one of the most important things they want to get out of the Appspace platform. 

From comms, now that we've re we really have true multi-communication channels, iit is becoming increasingly important for them to monitor their communication campaign. “Hey, I posted a story in the employee app. It was broadcasted on the digital sign in the Microsoft Teams channel in an email newsletter. I can track where users are getting access to that story. Is it directly from the app through an app notification? Is it because they saw it on the digital sign and scanned the QR code? Is it because they saw it in their email inbox and clicked on it?” 

Most importantly, we allow reactions and comments and shares, and that provides additional analytics and so now that also provides additional value in understanding how people are reacting. But what's exciting with AI is that based on how content is trending, you can actually change the playlist on your digital sign to display content that is trending up or trending down to make sure you're getting the right message out to the user and you're promoting the right message and I think everyone is becoming more hungry for more of that.

A lot of what I see on the Appspace site and what we've talked about seems oriented to. white collar spaces to offices. Are you doing much in the so-called back of the house, production facilities, warehouses, factories, that sort of thing? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: A lot. I always start all my presentations to customers saying that we treat everyone as a first citizen of the modern workplace, and that's not just marketing. It's true. We want to make sure everyone benefits from the services that the organization's putting in place. 

Signage for frontline workers is huge in warehouses. It's massive. When we acquired the Marlin company, it was because their number one focus was people in warehouses and manufacturing plants, making sure they were provided with the right safety information, education, material, and so forth. So I think we will continue to focus there. We're just now expanding the user to go beyond just the digital signage in the warehouse to their phone in their pocket. And if you're an employee or frontline worker in the store, you're not in all the time in the back office, you're often in the front office or in the front of the store, helping your customers to still be able to get that information, those important notifications on your phone are important and I think we do a lot there.

Again, unlike most of the signage vendors, we don't focus as much on the screen in the store, talking to the consumers. We're focusing more on the screen in the back office or the screen in the pocket of the user, but we, of course, do digital signage for retail as well.

What would happen if a retail chain came to Appspace and said, “Hey, we'd love to work with you guys on digital signage for inside our stores, not for employee comps, but to sell sweaters and shoes and so on.” Would you just say, I'm sorry, we don't do that? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, actually, the two largest retailers in Europe use Appspace in the store and in the back office.

The project started in the back store and eventually, customers saw, well, why can't I use that in the front store as well? We even integrated, I can't remember the name, with a little company out of the Netherlands who built an integration with Appspace to allow the sale of airtime in the store. We didn't build this natively in Appspace because that's not our focus. But by partnering with companies who have that expertise, we're able to deliver that. 

The largest sports brand in the world uses Appspace in all its stores around the world. So we never say no to customers. But what we're very clear about is that we're not building a product just for retail. We're building a product for the workplace and if the features meet your needs, you're more than welcome to use it in the stores. I think we have a lot more than we expected using it. 

Interesting. Last question. I get a sense from this discussion and previous chats that if you're a company lurking, looking at workspace as a vertical market, you really need to understand that it's a unique ecosystem and all of the different technology companies that feed into it.

You can't just say, “Hey, we can put stuff on your dormant screens and you can talk to your employees through our software.” You really need to stitch yourself in with all of the collaboration companies and all the other technologies that feed into it. Is that a pretty accurate statement?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I think so. So I think companies are looking to consolidate, that's one thing. They're looking at replacing point products with a platform that delivers all those use cases through features and not point products for use cases like visitor management, room booking, and all.

So one login into one app, whether it's a physical workplace app or an employee app on your phone, you have one app, and you do everything from one place. That's for sure. It also needs to be truly integrated with the physical workplace because companies are looking to build up their ROI with the technology they're investing in. So, since the pandemic, everyone has rolled out more video conferencing rooms than before, but they need to justify ROI. ROI is by use of technology for its main purpose. But on top of that, when it's not in use, you can use it to better communicate and engage your audience and provide a better employee experience. There's incremental ROI to the technology. And so we can't be successful without integrating with all the players that exist in the physical workplace, whether they are access control systems to enter the building, how do I know if I have access into the building? When you scan your badge, your badge queries Appspace and confirms that you have a valid reservation and that you're granted access. It starts there, and it goes throughout the journey. 

The menu boards of your restaurants, the menu needs to be on your personal device before you even get in the office. You could potentially book your lunch using the app. But when you arrive at the restaurant, the menu board reflects the same information As they have always been, but now you are aware you have that link between, “Hey, I saw that there was this on the menu and I can now see it on the digital sign.” And you have that continuity in the experience. 

All right, Thomas. Thank you very much. I once again, learned stuff, which is what this is all about. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, thanks a lot for having me. It's exciting. I remember the first time we met. I think we had a table at ISE, and now we have a bigger booth I'm glad it caught your attention, but we're super happy, and I'm looking forward to continuing to talk with you over the next few years.

All right. Thanks again, and safe travels. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Thanks. Take care!

Gideon D’Arcangelo, Arup

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup.

I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people.

Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation.

I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design.

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TRANSCRIPT

Gideon, thank you for joining me. I think the first thing to do is tell me about your company. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Dave, it’s great to talk with you. Gideon D'Arcangelo, I joined Arup five years ago. I just reached my five-year anniversary of joining. Arup is a global design and engineering firm, 20,000 people strong, with over 90 offices. So, we work at a global scale. We're really joined up globally, and we do all aspects of design. We are a very multidisciplinary firm. We started out as structural engineers. We are a firm that has major projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Center Pompidou. 

Arup is a cooperative. It became a cooperative in the 1970s, and so we have members that work globally, and we pride ourselves on our interdisciplinary design and practice something called Total Design, which is the more integrated, the more different disciplines working together, the better the outcomes in the built environment. Our main focus is on sustainable development, and in fact, the United Nations' sustainable development goals are our mission statement for the company and we feel that we can really move the needle since we touched so many projects in the built environment globally, every year, we can really move the needle in that direction. 

Interesting. So, I'm curious about the sustainable development part of it. Is that a pivot that the company has made seeing where things are going, or is that kind of always been in the DNA or has been for some time? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I'm really happy to say that sustainable development has always been in the DNA. Arup's been a leader in this place and has been leading in these concepts of sustainable development for 30+ years, if not longer. There are certain professionals here, Joe De Silva, for example, in the UK, who have been leading in sustainable design and development thinking for over 30 years, and really, we are happy to see that the sustainable advice practice that we have as the world is caught up to really understanding that this is a priority and a necessity. So not a pivot at all. In fact, something that we're just really happy to see is that everyone is focusing on it and prioritizing it as much as the firm is.

I was recently at a conference in Europe about digital signage. One of the major discussion points was what they coined as green signage and the whole idea of sustainability. I led a number of panels, one focused on the North American market, and I told the audience and confirmed it with the North American panelists.

While green signage is a big deal, and there's a lot of discussion around sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world, it's barely on the radar in the US and Canada, perhaps to a lesser degree, with a notable exception, maybe very large corporations, but most businesses really aren't talking about it yet.

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I think that's right that America tends to be and in Canada, North America tends to be a bit behind on this, and you get the leadership from Europe, from the UK, other parts of the world, I think, because resources are more constrained over there, frankly, and they're getting to understand the limitations of resources.

They're better than we do here yet, but everyone has come to terms with that quickly. So we tend to learn a lot from what's happening in Europe and bring it to the Americas because we know it's what's coming next. 

Yeah. Some of the European guys were saying just about any RFP or tender that you get that's right up top, they want to know about your sustainability point of view and practices as well. One of the American guys said that in the last three years, we've never seen it in a tender; it's not even stipulated. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, it'll get there. It'll get there. It reminds me just of a project that I did at ESI back in 2015 for PNC Bank. PNC Bank, you may know, has just been a leader in the sustainable development of their real estate fleet for years, and there was a wonderful man named Gary Salson at the time, who was the director of real estate and commissioned the PNC Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, which at the time was the greenest sky riser and among the top 5 greenest sky rises on earth really pushed the envelope in terms of green design of a building.

I was at ESI at the time, and we were commissioned to create a digital display component, the sculpture component is part of the lobby experience. That was intended to give the building a voice and have it talk about how it was using resources or how it was saving resources really ahead of its time, fantastic project, and for that, we had to design our own canvas, our own display, because we couldn't put a big energy hog in the building to tell the story of the building. It was an interesting design challenge. 

So you were at ESI for a whole bunch of years, right? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I was at ESI for 24 years, so yeah, a long time. That's where I grew up in my career. 

Fantastic experience. What was your role there by the time you moved on? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I was in the organization's leadership by the time I moved on. I also led our business development and marketing. In the end, there, I became a multidisciplinary creative director on some of our projects, for example, leading the design lead on this PNC Beacon Project.

I joined the firm as a UX designer. We called it an interactive media designer in the mid-90s when I joined the firm. 

Almost pre-digital. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, it was right at the cusp of all that stuff, and ESI was always leading edge in that regard, and we had a team of people that did interactive design when there were very few people in New York City at least the very few firms doing that at the time.

So that's how I grew up doing UX/UI designs for Museum interfaces. I was always into working in the built environment, creating some interesting museums and corporate programs. But over time, being there as long as I could, I was able to move into the position of design lead, where I could speak to the different disciplines required to deliver these experiences.

So we have physical designers, technology designers, hardware folks, software designers in both front and backend software design, visual design, graphic design, both static and motion, and content people as well as writers who are in practice. Directing that whole team together, is how you get these comprehensive experiences, and so that was what I was doing at ESI by the end of my career. 

And it's the kind of company that while it's substantially in that particular space, in comparison to a rep or those kinds of companies quite small and you would have been contracted into projects like PNC and so on, as opposed to leading them versus I assume now with the rep that you guys are largely leading these projects. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: That's right. It's a different dynamic. When I moved to Arup, it was really about making a jump in scale and so from working in a 50-person boutique pioneering innovative firm in New York for a couple of decades, going to a global firm that's operating at a whole different level of scale, really excited me, and I thought this was a really interesting place to experience design because it was being recognized in the marketplace in different ways.

Various architecture firms were building up their experience in design practices. Arup was really interesting to me because it's primarily an engineering firm and so brings the deep technical acumen that no architecture firm could really bring to the table. So, I was attracted to a firm like Arup that could push into the next generation of experience design at much larger scales than we've ever seen it before. 

So would you be competing for jobs with the populaces of the world in Gensler, or are they a different element of it? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Again, it all just depends on the context. We work with the populace. We work with Gensler all the time in various capacities on very big projects. There are ways to carve out scope for an Arup alongside our partners like populace and Gensler.

In some cases, we might find ourselves going up against each other for a certain piece of scope. All you know is that just happens in the course of business, depending on the client's situation and the way the scope has been described. 

I'm guessing massive projects, but, at the end of the day, it's still a fairly small community, like the folks that at Populous and Gensler are some of the other companies? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, for sure. It's a tightly-knit world. We have a lot of respect for each other and we cross paths a lot at various, professional crossroads and conferences, that sort of thing. 

So how was it to go from a company where you knew what everybody else was doing, and you're of the same mindset to ending up in meetings with civil engineers and people who were experts in water treatment facilities and so on? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, great question. I think that it was, first of all, exhilarating and inspiring, and invigorating. All of those things were really great. They were a catalyst for my thinking and what I wanted to do with my practice. I feel that the real part of being a good experience designer is being a good integrator of disciplines and being able to speak the language of multiple disciplines really fluently and so even at ESI, five different disciplines, it was not unusual, but a special mix of different expertise that were brought together. You had hardware people, you had people that knew about onsite construction and physical constructability, but you had people working on UX and UI design, and you had to be able to speak all those different languages, and dropped into Arup, suddenly 50 other languages to learn quickly, and, to really get, but there were many people that were interested in working with these integrated projects. So we have a fantastic lighting design here. We have acousticians of the highest order. We have fantastic AV designers but also even on the engineering side, we'll bring in folks that are working on urban planning.

It was really interesting for me to find which folks resonated with what we were talking about. Actually, we did a project in Providence, Rhode Island, where Arup, led the master plan for what was called the unified vision for Downtown Providence. It was one of the early projects that I did here, supporting one of my colleagues in the Boston office, where we took an experienced design approach to planning how to renovate and reinvigorate Downtown, and for that, we were working on a larger scale than I'd ever worked before. It was a whole Downtown district. We're putting experience design interventions into this plan, but we're also looking at the engineering of the site and how to make it ready for public use in a variety of ways.

So we worked both on the front end and on the back end, and all the infrastructure was as much a part of our design as the front-end experience pieces. That's what I was looking to do when I came here, and in fact, we did that, and it was a really interesting part of the design. It was so fascinating. We realized after a while that, after our Flood Modelers from the water team took a look at this and saw that the site was really going to be compromised in 50 years. We started to come up with a different design, building bridges, rather than digging tunnels, and a variety of things were done to actually shape the architecture of the site to anticipate the next 100 years and so I was like, that's the kind of thing we can do at Arup with this really highly integrated set of disciplines all under one roof. 

Yeah, and that integration, I assume, is absolutely essential that you cannot operate in silos. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly, and I think that's been my skill, Dave, over the years: I'm a horizontally oriented person, and I'm a good interlocutor or translator. I can quickly pick up a language enough to understand what's critical in that one group and, make sure that constraint maybe is understood by another group that can't quite see it, and that's how I think you get to highly integrated design and make sure basically keep people talking to each other and keep working with each other, because every organization fights with silos because it's just the nature of larger organizations.

It can be deadly if that happens, though, right? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly. It's mission-critical, So Arup is, I think, smart in the fact that we have people that cut across as well, like myself, and I'm not the only one who cut across as well as we have deep expertise in our disciplines. 

You can go into an engineering meeting and not be bored to tears or completely confused by what's going on.

Gideon D’Arcangelo: No, It's fascinating. It was just wonderful, always intellectually stimulating, and a really, really amazing group of talent here. 

I have to say Arup came on my radar because of a post I wrote several weeks ago about JFK and one of the new terminals. I saw that your company was involved in that. Even though you're huge, I'm old and stupid, and I was completely unaware that you guys existed. That was intriguing to me. What were you doing there? And is that a typical project? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: That is a project that I am leading so I can really give you a good view into that, and I think it's an expression of all the things we have just been talking about the integration of multiple parts of a project that might in the past have been thought about as disparate or separate, and since the middle of 2022, Arup has been leading what the client calls the Art Branding and Digital Experience program of JFK New Terminal One and it came about because the Terminal has aspirations to be in the top terminals in the world when it opens in 2026, and it's known that these elements: a proper art program, a proper branding and storytelling program, and digital experience installations are all part of creating a true 21st-century Airport Terminal, and also, this is part of the larger context of the overall upgrade that's happening to all 3 of New York's airports, LaGuardia, JFK and Newark, and some of those new terminals are already online. You may have seen what happened at LaGuardia Terminal B was fantastic, right? I'm a lifelong New Yorker, so I'm benefiting from this. 

Arup was deeply involved with Delta LaGuardia Terminal C. In fact, I did some work on that and Newark Terminal A just came online, so a lot of great stuff is happening from here. It's a good time for that, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is leading that effort to really upgrade. And so as part of that, there's a real demand for this art branding and digital experience piece and the idea was that while the architect was making the base building, and Gensler is the base building architect, a fantastic team from Gensler is leading that, the client was looking for one team to give a very integrated passenger experience for you of what that layer was that storytelling and a sense of placemaking was going to be on the architecture and that was going to be delivered through art branding as they called it and digital experience, and so we took on that role at the time, and so we've been leading the vision for that layer and for that storytelling and placemaking piece.

Since we started in 2022, we've gone through the strategy and design phases, and as you can imagine, 2026 isn't that far away. We're starting to move from design into production, and it was really key for that to make a strong narrative of what it meant to be coming into the New York airport and what's great about new Terminal One, Dave is, it's the only international terminal at JFK. People who are going to foreign lands are coming from foreign countries. So it's that kind of population coming through, and we had to create an experience really could only happen in New York. It couldn't be that this airport felt like something that was in Orlando or some other place it had to be for people coming from, coming, or New Yorkers departing or coming that it had to be something that could only happen in New York, and it's good that I'm a native New Yorker and I've lived here my whole life. I have a good sense of that. I like to think and we were really helping craft that narrative.

We then put together a team to work with us, and so we brought onto our team, Eddie Opara from Pentagram is leading the branding effort. We brought on a wonderful art curator team called CultureCore, who we've worked with in the past, at Arup that is leading the art curation, and then Arup is leading the digital experience design aspect of that, creating a whole set of digital canvases that are integrated into the architecture and a real media architecture style way throughout the terminal experience, both on departures and arrivals, and then a company that you know about we brought on, just last year after about a year into the process we brought Gentilhomme out of Montreal to develop the digital content for those digital canvases. We have a really amazing team that we're working with. 

Another cool part of this project is that the client asked us to collaborate with the advertising partner for the terminal, Clear Channel to have this art branding and digital experience program complement what they were doing and work hand in glove, like one experience.

I'm happy that our client had the vision to do that, and the teams worked really well together to make something that was really passenger-centric and focused on what passengers needed every step of the way so that they worked together. It's they don't, there's no cacophony or competing for eyeballs and imagery. Instead, they work together because we work together and crafted the program. 

How practically would that work in terms of, when you say they're working together, the digital at a home and the experiential art pieces? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, there are many examples of that.

Simply, we would work through each space and say, where are some of the high-value places where Clear Channel will do what they were doing and take that area, and then right next to that, we might put something that brings you into a New York sense of place, creating a moment, and so we went area by area and again, working together, it was going to really compose it together, I would say, and saying, hey, this area is good for that, and that area is good for that, and so one program came out of that. So that's what I mean. 

Okay. So it means you're not running into conflicts around things like sight lines and you can design this in a way that makes sense as opposed to designing a terminal and designing where the experiential digital pieces go and then Chird Channel comes in and say, okay, what's left? Where can I put stuff? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly, because you know, everyone's important in this program and we did it. What’s cool about it, I think, was we took a human-centric or passenger-centric approach to make those decisions and just thought, how can we make a great experience for passengers, and meet all the needs of the advertising program, meet all the needs of the experience design program, and keep it all organized that way.

I'm just always curious how companies such as yours invest a lot of time and have a lot of deep conversations with their customers. How do you define experience? Because when I think of an airport, my idea of experience is perhaps different from some others.

I'm intrigued by the big experiential art things and LED video walls and so on, because that's what I do. But for me, a great experience is wayfinding and status boards to tell me, “Am I late?” “Am I early?” “Where do I go?” All those sorts of things. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Those are also critical foundational parts of a quality experience. So that's a great question. I just gave a talk last week to an aviation group, and that's one of the things I said is wayfinding is the foundation of passenger experience design. 

It’s boring, but it's incredibly important. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: It's critical, and for a geek like myself, it's not even boring and it's just so key, and it's not easy, and it's always being innovated, and in fact, there's a lot of innovation happening with digital in wayfinding now that we’re quite involved in, actually, not so much on New Terminal 1 project, but other airport terminals and other places. 

The functional experience design has to be right, and that’s critical things. I'll just use an aviation example in a terminal. It's crystal clear where you need to go. It's crystal clear how much time it's going to take you and how much time you may have. You might want features on a mobile device that help you understand how you can get on tethered from your gate and roam and shop and eat and do a variety of things before you get on your plane. Those are key, and then there's the more ambient placemaking, sense of place environmental work also. 

In this case, what we're doing with the New Terminal 1 is really that second category: creating that sense of place, telling that story, doing something that's all only in New York and doing that through a variety of means. It is that a whole other program is, in fact, happening for New Terminal 1 and one of the things I didn't mention. We also looked really hard at the wayfinding program to make sure that everything we were doing built off of that, too. There's a whole other because you have to pay attention to that functional side.

We do work, though, in other environments where our team will get into the functional side as well as the ambient environmental side, because they really need to work together as one. 

I guess it changes with every project, but I'm curious, most typically, where does your team start and stop? Or where does Arup start and stop on a typical project? Or is there no such thing as typical? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: There's no such thing as typical, but of course, that's a broad answer because every project is really interesting and unique. No, but we start early. We're a whole life cycle company and we work with our clients that way because we are strategists. Still, we're also builders wearing hard hats on site, making sure that everything got installed according to the strategy and the design, and the big movement right now, in my opinion, Dave, what's happening in the built environment world is the shift from design and construction into operations is getting increasingly smoothed over and thought through in a different way.

So, a building was finished, and then people moved in, and there were various tasks like adding other things. “Add” is a term from air operational readiness that air airports used to shift from construction into operations because it has to work on day one; you can't take a few days to get it right. It has to work the moment it opens, you open the door. So there's a whole process, and Arup has that team. We can bring that to our clients as well, because our understanding of the design and construction process and the commissioning process at the very end, as it shifts into operations, gives us expertise in a way to make that as smooth as possible.

But beyond that, there is a whole movement of using the tools, the digital tools that you create and design and construction as models that then can be brought through into operations and putting sensors into the building and putting a variety of things into the design of the building, so as you move out of design and construction, you have a digital model of the building that you can help use to operate and maintain and work with facilities management and other teams that are helping that building to operate more efficiently once it's opened. So, the long answer to your question is that we really will start when there's a blank sheet of paper with our clients and help strategize what needs even to happen all the way through. Of course design is our main bread and butter. Of course, we stay on during construction to oversee construction to ensure it's delivered as designed and then increasingly into operations in that whole life cycle.

I'm guessing that when your career started, digital was something that was perhaps added on, thought about later in the game, and I'm wondering now, is the visual digital components of big projects are now fundamental to the overall thinking? 

Like it's not something that's added on later. They're talking about it right from inception. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Definitely. It's a good insight, and I've seen that over the course of my now 30-year career to see the shift in that where initially we would have to work hard to convince the clients, even to consider some of these things, and then over time, about 10 years in, you started to see them showing up in a variety of ways and then increasingly they just become, as you say, just part of the program and assumed part of the program. But there's still such a long way to go on that front. And I've always thought that this idea of digital and physical being separate is a design problem of our age. 

In a hundred years' time, people will just see that we got through that design problem and just digital permeates everything you do because it's, why wouldn't it? It's a smart way to go, and it's an innovation and human ingenuity and history. So right now there's a lot of work for bringing the digital mindset into every aspect of life, and particularly into the built environment. The built environment has been slow to pick up on this. So construction is really now in this kind of really exciting phase, the virtual design and construction where these digital tools are coming in and taking off, but there's a long way to go. I like to think of Arup as a leader in digital-physical integration, that's a task of our day, digital-physical integration.

It's not like digital something off on the side, but then you do it at the end or do it in a box. Instead, you think of it from the very beginning and build it into every aspect of how you design, deliver, and operate the project. 

Yeah. I think it's exciting that we're getting very close to a level that LED displays, both physical ones and ones that are embedded in glass, and things like that can now be thought about as building materials that you can use as a wall. Is it necessarily going to be mahogany or travertine tile or whatever. It can be like LEDs that can be changeable when as much as they need to be changeable. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Absolutely. I worked with Michael Schneider when he was at ESI, with me. We often talked about that as we talked about media architecture as that was an emerging term in the field. One of the things I really am grateful for working with ESI was the idea that media wasn't something that you attach to an environment in creating an interactive environment, you actually were working with this audio-visual material as you say, that becomes part of the architecture, and what's interesting about that though is then the client for that gets confusing because if you're putting in travertine or mahogany, you're talking to one side of the client, the design and construction folks. As soon as you put a dynamic piece of media in, who are you talking to? You're talking to that same client who's responsible for building that space. But suddenly you're also talking to the director of communications and the director of marketing and the storytelling people of the company.

And that was something that I've always seen about this field. You needed to be able to talk to storytellers. That would be your CMOs, your directors of communications, your chief communication officers, as much as you could talk to the the head of real estate, that's building something.

Where it worked well, you got leadership from both sides on the client that really understood what you were doing. As you put this material into the building, there's still the question of what it's doing. What story is it telling? Who's maintaining it over time? What's the content strategy? And that's what made it really exciting because it's different from putting a static tile on the wall.

As soon as you put a media, an LED tile on the wall, it has a whole different governance aspect to it that is very modern, and I think now it is becoming standard. People expect that in their buildings. 

All right. That was terrific. I know a lot more about Arup than I certainly did half an hour ago, and I suspect it'll be the same for a lot of listeners.

Gideon D’Arcangelo: That's great. Thank you, Dave. 

I appreciate your time. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Likewise. Great to talk with you.

Industry Wake-up Call: Audio From Digital Signage Summit Europe 2024, With Florian and Stefan From Invidis

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on.

The third of three that I did was an unscripted chat with conference hosts Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker, of invidis, that was billed as a Wake-Up Call for the Digital Signage Industry, and the three of us raised a series of issues that don't get enough attention and work.

My big ones are, as always, having to deal with all the day to day BS put out by marketers, and related to that, the terrible job many to most of the marketers and business communicators do in this sector. Florian and Stefan get into other important topics.

It all sounds serious, but we tried to make it a fun, worthwhile 30 minutes.

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No transcript, sorry!

Varying Vertical Markets In Digital Signage: DSSE 2024 Panel

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on.

The second of three that I did was focused on how to adapt to varying vertical markets, and that involved talking to companies focused on retail, food services and sports - Peter Critchley from Trison UK,  hospitality with Tim Hoddy of Uniguest, and Jan Reiners of Broadsign, which is all about digital OOH.

This was the description for the 30-minute session:

From DooH to Retail to Conferencing: in the digital signage business, it is all about the verticals. Different industries have very different requirements and pain points. So you need to adapt your strategies and products accordingly. But how can you identify these pain points? And how should you organize your portfolio to serve different verticals? Our panels of digital signage experts from different verticals will answer these questions.

Speakers

• Jan Reiners, Broadsign, Sales Executive
• Tim Hoddy, Uniguest, VP Sales, Europe
• Peter Critchley, Trison UK, CEO

Have a listen …

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No transcript, sorry!

IT Security, with Craig Francis (Google) And Peter Critchley (Trison UK)

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on.

The first was focused on IT security, which I will admit is NOT an area I’m overly conversant in. But I had a couple of good people who could come at it from different angles – Peter Critchley from Trison UK and Craig Francis of Google, who is arguably the main champion in the European market for the ties between digital signage and the Chrome OS and Flex ecosystems.

This was the description for the 30-minute session:

IT security has long been desperately neglected in a silo-architectural dominated digital signage industry. But today’s CMS platforms are API-first, data-driven and fully connected. Secure and certified platforms are a minimum requirement for large enterprise customers, government and increasingly also SMB clients. What are today’s IT security threats in general and what’s the impact on digital signage? DSS Europe has invited IT security experts from Google and Intel to give first-hand insights into today’s and tomorrow’s risks and threats.

Speakers

• Craig Francis, Google ChromeOS EMEA, Digital Signage Partner Manager and product expert
• Peter Critchley, Trison UK, CEO

Have a listen …

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

No transcript, sorry!

Robert Johnson, PAM

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There's been a steady stream of announcements in the past couple of years about new sports and entertainment venues going up in the US and elsewhere, and one of the notable attributes about these developments is that they are not just stadiums and arenas - they're big commercial developments anchored by that kind of building but surrounded by retail, residential and infrastructure.

They're sprawling, at times, and with that, not necessarily easy to navigate and use.

An Australian software company called PAM has a tag line about transforming complex spaces into loved places, and it does that mainly through what people in digital signage would call wayfinding. But there's more going on with PAM than just maps. The company blends that base capability with a digital signage CMS, mobile, analytics, and integrations with business systems, including Ticketmaster. It also intertwines all these components so that they're reactive, with data from one component informing another.

The company already has some big name, high profile clients and venues to reference, including SoFi Stadium in LA and the F1 circuit for Las Vegas.

Robert Johnson is VP Sales for North America for the company, and he has a deep background in both wayfinding and digital signage. He got into the sector years ago, in the early days of Four Winds Interactive, and I've known him for ages now. So it was great to learn about PAM, but also just great to catch up.

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TRANSCRIPT

Robert, great to catch up with you. I haven't seen you in years. 

Robert Johnson: Likewise, Dave, it has been a while, and we go way back and it's great to reconnect with you. 

I knew you from your time at Four Winds Interactive, where we were involved in a couple of pretty big deals. I was on the consulting side, and you were on the sales side when you were doing sales for that company. Could you give a background on your journey in digital signage? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, happy to, and you nailed it right there. You and I had a really exciting, fun opportunity to work on a couple of very large enterprise projects with some big names, great folks, and great clients and yeah, you and I cut our teeth together. That's where our relationship really spawned, but yeah, I was really fortunate, I got to start working with Four Winds Interactive when they were very quite small. I think when I started, there were somewhere between 25, and no more than 45 employees there.

Were they still in the house or had they moved out by then? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, I was in the original mansion, the Parkside Mansion, right off of City Park in Denver, Colorado, and that was a trip. They had weddings on the weekends and we sold software during the weekdays in there until we had to break down our desks. But that was a startup life right there. 

Looking back is interesting because that was 16 years ago when I took that job with them and looking back, there's a piece of me that says that you can make a Netflix story about the rise of the software company because the economy was crap, it was 2007-2009, and the housing market crashed. I remember my parents asking me like, how do you have a job? How was the company doing? 

What on earth is digital signage? 

Robert Johnson: Why are people spending money on digital signage? And I remember telling my parents, I was young, I was in my 20s and I was like, mom, dad, this is amazing. People are buying this left and right. It was the kind of product that if you could just demo it and talk about it, you were selling it. 

I was fortunate that I got to move up in the ranks and work on a lot of large enterprise deals, selling very complex digital signage solutions with incredible integrations to Delta Airlines and JetBlue Airlines, Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Staples, just massive digital signage implementations and yeah, we had lots of integrators and hardware involved and it was a ride, man. It was awesome. 

So as it happens, people move on and you went to a new company but could you tell me what they were doing? 

Robert Johnson: The connection is this: In the world of digital signage, I joke and say, I sold TVs for a decade, but on the TVs, on the screens, you're selling communications platforms, employee communications platforms, retail solutions, touchscreens, and wayfinding.

Wayfinding has been a part of my life for a long time. We sold many wayfinding solutions, helping guests navigate stores, retail, malls, airports, and other places. I then moved to a company called Concept3D, which when I started, only had one product: a mapping product, but no signage, and for me, that was a breath of fresh air.

I was able to eliminate all the hardware complexities because hardware fails, PCs and displays fail, turn on, turn off, and get vandalized, and for me, this was amazing. I could sell wayfinding without having to implement any hardware, and they have a phenomenal platform, but then their main focus was or is higher education and I was brought on to try to sell into enterprise solutions, and we had a few good deals in there, but then COVID hit and we launched another product for virtual tours and we did a bunch of other things in there. So they actually have five products now, all heavily focused on higher education, but the wayfinding piece always stuck around.

We sold maps to anybody who wanted to visualize their space and anybody who wanted to enhance their space. If you're on a college campus and campuses are huge, they're square miles large, and so you need to navigate those environments. 

Easy to get lost in them. 

Robert Johnson: It's easy to get lost, and a lot of faculty, students, guests, and parents are frustrated trying to make that experience better, and so that was the plug. 

So you were with that company and then I think you went on a hiatus or something, and now you're with a company called PAM.

Robert Johnson: PAM, yeah, and this is not the cooking spray company. It's not spam. It's not Pam. Funny enough, and this is like an accident, but PAM is actually the word, map, spelled backwards. 

Oh, okay. I was trying to figure out what an acronym was.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, but that was not intentional. We actually had a customer bring it to our attention. Did you know that PAM is MAP backward? Anyway, it's Project Asset Management. That's actually what it stands for. 

But PAM is really unique because it combines the last 16 years of my life into this amazing software platform that has been in development for the last seven years, and so we're still in the ramp-up phase, the startup phase. We're not quite a startup. We're in a kind of launch phase right now in terms of our trajectory with adding clients and growth, but they do a couple of things. We have a digital signage component where we power hundreds and hundreds of screens for large entertainment districts, sporting facilities, stadiums, and arenas and we specialize in interactive wayfinding. 

We don't go to market as really either one of those. We go to market as a smart navigation platform helping cities, visitors, bureaus, and entertainment districts have a more frictionless, guest experience, and as in your world, Dave, the frictionless experience can be anything from how do you get parking? How do you find something? How do you get information on screens or your mobile device? We touch a lot of different communication mediums. It's a perfect fit for me. I've been there for two months now, and it's just been super exciting. 

Were you looking around, or did they come to you? 

Robert Johnson: A little bit of both out there when you've been in the space for a while, as we chatted before, you get approached by people, and certain things become a fit and, every day on my, on LinkedIn and stuff, I'd probably get hit up by a recruiter every day for something, or you get someone reaching out to you.

So yeah, this just came across my plate. We chatted and chatted for a while. It wasn't one of those light switch things where you just turn on and jump ship. When you're our age, my age, your age, everything's pretty calculated at that point. 

We're not our age. 'cause I'm way older than you. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, you're older than me. 

I could be your father. 

Robert Johnson: Fair enough. 

I could even be your grandfather. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, wife, kids, all that stuff, and play, and I'm never just like making a brash decision to just jump because the technology is cool but yeah, it was a calculated decision, but once I got to dig into the software and see what these guys are about. Hindsight's 2020 and I'm just super, super glad I made the change. 

This is an Australian company? 

Robert Johnson: They are headquartered in Sydney but have an office in LA. Right now, I'm heading up the North American sales efforts, and they are very, very, hyper-focused on sports and entertainment districts. So yeah, we are taking a smart city, smart district approach. 

It doesn't really happen as much in Canada because it's much, much smaller, but from what I can tell, any new sports venue that goes up is not just an arena, it's a district with residential, retail, dining, hotels, the whole nine yards.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. Like I joke and tell teens, yeah, you might be on a football team or a baseball or basketball or hockey team, that's fine. But you're actually in the business of pro entertainment. You just happen to have a hockey team associated with you or a basketball team associated with you and if you're football, you only have 8-10 home games a year. If you're basketball, you've got 40 and hockey 40, but there's another 200 to 300 days a year that you need to be putting on events. 

So if you Google, there are 200 stadiums currently being built, planned to be built, and contracted to be built in the next 24 to 36 months and if you just follow a few of the blogs online every week, every month, there's a new stadium that's being announced or a new district that's being announced to be built, and all of these are now very integrated in the city. They're very much funded by voters and the city council and the visitors bureaus. It's a fully integrated approach these days. 

I would imagine they pretty much have to say this is a commercial property development, and not just a stadium for that very reason, with the exception, maybe, Texas, where there are high school football stadiums that will see 20,000. 

Most cities don't want to spend 200 million or whatever the number is on something that's only going to get a handful of days of use. they really need to justify that. This is going to create a whole bunch of other jobs. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah. Nowadays, when a stadium is being built, they look at the entire infrastructure. Do we need to bring internet lines? Where's transit? Where's the parking? Where's the bus situation? If that stuff isn't considered, then the project just won't happen. It's a fully integrated approach, and there are Oakview Group, Legends, and Populous, and there are these massive architects and developers out there who are building these for them, they're managing these event centers and stadiums for the teams and the cities, and it's a huge business. 

That's actually the way that PAM approaches the market. We go one to one and we sell our software and platform to the teams and the arenas. But we also are working the angle very heavily with the architects, and so we're talking to these projects right when they're breaking ground years ahead of time. 

Yeah, I assume that what's important to them is that they may understand they're going to have digital signage, directories, and some degree of wayfinding, but they don't want a gallery of different technology providers to do it for them. They would likely greatly prefer that there's one service provider that can do the screens but can also do the wayfinding, the phone app for navigation, and everything else, right? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, a hundred percent. We work with Gable and we work with Daktronics. We work with ABI SPL, the tech providers so that when ABI SPL is recommending a solution, that way they have one wayfinding provider that's for mobile, that's for web, that's for the digital signage, and when they would need to make an update and communicate… I use this example on some of my calls, I don't know if a year or two ago, Dave, you were up in this area, the Buffalo Bills at the end of one of the games had a massive brawl and there was a fight, and that's like an incident, right? So immediately safety, security, and people like that are trying to get involved, and if you need to communicate to 50,000 people leaving the event that there was an incident taking place, you don't want to update your text message provider, your mobile provider, your web provider, or get on the phone with your web management team security.

You want to be able to go into one place and update. All your digital signage, all your communications, your mobile, everything with a click of a button, and that's the kind of stuff that we have the capability of doing. Just as an example, there are so many other things. Another cool thing that our software does when you think about planning and working with these different technology solutions is we have this really amazing data analytics platform where if there's an event happening on a Saturday, we can then show you this heat map that actually shows you all the dead zones. So if there's a dead zone on the South side of the entry and there's no internet right there, we'll actually be able to show you on the heat map that shows, as somebody was walking, there's a dead zone here and you may want to actually put additional, WiFi connections or routers or enhance the call-up Verizon or AT&T, your provider because there's a dead zone right there. So, our platform has the ability to do all these different things, which makes it really unique, and again, one of the reasons I'm grateful to be here. 

Does the fact that you're working with stuff that's going to be on mobile phones as well, give you some sense of analytics as well, in terms of how people move around those kinds of spaces?

Robert Johnson: Yeah, that's one of our value propositions, which is the ability to provide data crowd management so that you can make a better decision. So think about this: I live in Golden, and I'm actually going to do one of the playoff games on Monday with my wife. We're going to go to the Denver Nuggets game. If I open up the Denver Nuggets app and I get a no before you go message, and it's, hey Robert, you have prepaid parking at this lot over here, and I pull up my app and I use the PMA app to get there.

The PAM app will then show that Robert Johnson because I'm logged into the, I got my profile set up with the Nuggets. It'll say that, Robert left his house in Golden via car, or Robert got on the train, went to Union Station, and got there. The team can then take that information back and say, look, you had 18,000 people at a sold-out game, and 4,000 of them took transit, they took a train to the game. You can take that back to your sponsors and your advertisers and Lexus and Toyota and those guys and say, look, you need to be advertising between the hours of five and six o'clock to all the people coming to the game and letting them know about the merchandise, food, beverage, coupons, parking, all of these things.

So yeah, our platform can give that data to the team so they can make literal, actual business decisions that drive revenue and sponsorship revenue and value to their sponsors. It's really cool. I have been in the wayfinding space for 16 years, and none of the companies I've seen have the ability to do that.

Yeah, I've always liked wayfinding, but the challenge I've always had with the stuff that you find on touch displays in shopping malls and so on is that you look up what you want, and it'll show you how to get there, but then you walk 10 paces and you can't remember where to turn or anything else. The next step is to put it on a phone, which gives you a little bit more, but it still seems a little disjointed from the rest of what goes on in a big space. 

Robert Johnson: You'll like this, Dave, and I think you can probably validate it, as we're the only mapping platform that integrates with Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster Ignite.

So again, using that mobile example, if I'm leaving the Nuggets game and I just had an amazing time and there's another game because there will be another playoff game. If I'm like, honey, let's do it, let's buy the tickets for Wednesday night's game. Right there. I can do that transaction, and if it starts on the map and I say, yeah, I want to buy tickets right here and get my parking, we can follow that journey, go back to the Nuggets at the end of the game, and say, look, you had 4,000 people buy tickets, and their journey started on the map. 

There goes 600 bucks. 

Robert Johnson: Exactly, there goes 600 bucks.

But, like that's the thing that I, as a sales guy and sales professional, have always wanted to go back to my clients with and say, look, the map is generating revenue. We can see that people scan these hotdog coupons. We can see where people came from. You can go back to your sponsors.

All of this and more, Dave, just makes PAM; it's the belief inside me that knows that PAM is going somewhere pretty spectacular in this space. 

Yeah, I'm sure that, some of the entertainment districts and so on that look at this, and say, the experiential side is very nice that this helps people get around, but if you can take another couple of hops and say, and it'll generate incremental revenue for you or boost the average attendee profile in terms of what they buy and so on, then that gets them a lot more interested.

Robert Johnson: It goes from a map turning into a really nice thing to have to, hey, this is something we really need and it provides value and impact. 

So you mentioned that the company is ramping up, but I'm looking at the website and I don't want to rattle off names in case they're not accurate, but you're deployed in some fairly significant familiar areas, right?

Robert Johnson: Yeah, I'd say the company has really been fortunate in the last 24 months. The Australian Open was massive. It covers a huge ground in Melbourne, where the city is almost shut down for that event. Hundreds of thousands of people come in. We've been contracted with SoFi Stadium since the stadium's inception and went live.

That's the big one in LA for people who might not know that. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, they've got the Rams and the Chargers playing out of that stadium. Plus, it's a venue that hosts FIFA and the Super Bowl. I didn't realize this until a couple of months ago. The Super Bowl was just there, and the Super Bowl was the highest revenue-generating Super Bowl in the history of the Super Bowls because of the capacity and the venue drove so much revenue; the Super Bowl is going to be back there, not this season, but the following season.

It is not normal to have back-to-back Super Bowls within two or three years of one another at the same facility. And yeah, we're powering the navigation experience for that as well. Our relationship with Formula One is super strong. We just knocked it out of the park with Las Vegas, and yeah, before this call this morning, I just had a call across the world with another Formula One venue because of our relationship with Vegas. So yeah, it's been a gift. I appreciate that you kept on giving. 

Yeah. Let's talk about Vegas because that's an interesting one in that it's a facility that's built for three to four days as opposed to a fixed venue that, if you like, you might go repeatedly. If you're a season ticket holder, you know your way around. But with this, everything was somewhat temporary, with the exception of the PADEX. How did it manifest itself?

What would be the PAM experience if I went to that I wouldn't because I just wouldn't want to deal with all the crowds, 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. There are a couple of them out there. Miami is similar to Vegas because it's a semi-temporary structure.

There are now some permanent structures at both venues, but there are a few of them out there, in the world, but yeah, Vegas, in particular, was really unique, and they had a lot of challenges that they were very proactive in trying to solve this. You had to walk through Caesars Palace. You had to walk through the Bellagio. You had to walk through some of these hotels to navigate to your seat, to your area, maybe the party, or the venue that you needed to get to. 

I didn't have the ability to attend the event, but I know, for example, the Formula One Las Vegas hat sold out. It's an interesting fact that they didn't make enough. They didn't realize that, but that was the one piece of apparel that everybody wanted to buy. 

Probably because it was the one thing they could afford. 

Robert Johnson: It's the one thing that they could afford, but everyone wanted to walk away and wear their Formula One hat, and as a takeaway for the event, they're like, okay, we need to put more hats around, we need to allow people to buy this apparel easier, we need to help people get to those locations easier. 

I think you'll find this interesting too, Dave. I talked a little bit about the data, the heat maps, and the journey maps that we provided a second ago. That was a huge win for Formula One and the casinos. We were able to go back and show them. I'm going to make the numbers up because I don't have them in front of me, but let's say throughout the weekend, 50,000 people needed to navigate through the Bellagio or the Caesars Hotel to get from point A to point B, and we showed it, we could visually show them people were going and why they were going there and what the places they searched for. But because it was the race's first time, we didn't do any interiors for the Bellagio or Caesars. We just had the exterior of the building. 

So now we've contracted with those properties to do the interiors so people can more easily navigate those facilities and get to where they need to go because they were like, we spent way too long trying to get through this hotel. We didn't know how to get through. 

Yeah, and Las Vegas is a textbook example of where navigation is incredibly valuable. I've been to Las Vegas 40+ times, and if I go into something like Caesars, I'm going to get lost. There are no straight lines. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, there's no straight lines at all.

Our integration with Ticketmaster also played big into that one as well, again, if you're Dave and you bought a pass for you're going to be sitting at Turn 12, you're going to have parking around Turn 12. Your entrance is only going to be at Turn 12, and so when you want to scan your QR code or you want to get directions, our integration is going to say, we know Dave, bought parking here. We know he's staying at this hotel. We're going to get him to his property. Again, that integration with Ticketmaster was a really big value-added feature for the curated content experience. 

So, how does the digital signage component work? Typically with a wayfinding application. It's a file that's going to sit in a digital signage schedule and that's how the two kind of sync up with each other. but I'm thinking it's probably a little different here. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is a little bit different. As you would expect, we have a content management system that allows us to manage the content on the map and the digital signage as well and so if you have a non-interactive sign, we can control the content on there. We can control the content if you have an LED parking sign. But there's a connection between the two, an integration between the two, where if parking lot G gets filled up, we can say it's full, and we're going to go ahead and let the digital sign or the LED board say it's full.

We're also going to provide that update on the map as well or the interactive kiosk so that all of that content is married up into one kind of seamless user interface. 

So it's all integrated as opposed to, I'm going to do something with the mobile app and the wayfinding component of this, then I'm going to back right out of that and then launch the digital signage piece and do other things.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, exactly. The name of that platform with the digital signage is called 360 Live. That's what we call it. It's like a full 360 experience, but that's the idea. You don't have to go into two or three different systems. We don't have multiple content management systems. We've got one that has its parking application. We've got one that just handles navigation. We've got one that handles the digital signage, but when you make an update on one, it updates across all of them.

You mentioned Daktronics and Gable. I'm assuming you guys avoid the hardware side of it.

Robert Johnson: Yes, thank goodness. We do. I would have nightmares if I had to get back into the hardware game. So yeah, we work with those guys to partner with them on the hardware piece. 

So is it something that you license via SaaS, or is it an on-prem thing? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is SaaS. We're a software as a service company.

We have managed services as well, but yeah, like a lot of companies nowadays, we have an ongoing recurring annual software fee that includes software support, maintenance updates, all the features we roll out. We've got initial set up fees for us to build out the beautiful artwork set things up and get it integrated. but once it's up and running, our clients can manage it on their own. 

Formula One's done a great job of that. SoFi has done a great job of that. But a lot of these teams have really small marketing teams, and they rely pretty heavily on their vendors and so we do a lot of hands-on management of their applications for them. 

We've known each other for a long time. One thing that I've noticed on LinkedIn in the last, I don't know, two or three years is a lot of posts by you about something called the Robert Johnson project, and it seems like you've been on something of a personal journey and the undertone of, it seems to be that you realized I was working my ass off and maybe not paying enough attention to my family. 

Robert Johnson: You nailed it, Dave. You really did, and that probably just comes from years of experience that you have ahead of me. I've always been big in professional development and training and things like that and I started working very closely with a coach and coach, Townsend Wardlaw. I don't, Townsend Wardlaw. A good friend of mine, who I have known for 20 years, came back into my life, and yeah, I spent a lot of time working with him, I used to think that the number one thing in my life was work and success and money and getting up the food chain and I did a lot of that and I, and there was a kind of a cost to it, and the cost was a lot of travel. What you and I did together on occasion, a lot of it was late nights and dinners and president's club and all that stuff was awesome. 

I had two kids while I did all that, and man, it's tough because without having done all that, I wouldn't be the person I am, and I wouldn't have a lot of the success maybe that I've had, but I pumped the brakes as I got close to 40. I joke, Dave, and I say I could write a book called 38-39-40, and when I was about 38, this all kind of came to a head, and I realized, the number one thing in my life is my kids, my wife, then sales and me. If I can work on all those things and put my family ahead of everything else, everything else will follow, and I'll still be able to have a really successful life. Yeah, I posted a lot about that on LinkedIn, and I still do occasionally because it's a big part of what I'm doing.

Now when I think about LinkedIn, I've got three kinds of things or passions, and one is my life. One is sales. I love posting about just sales, and then one is PAM and those are like the three buckets of things I enjoy talking about and posting about, and I don't have to try to do it. It just comes out naturally.

So a lot of people have that journey and realize, you know what, I need to pay more attention to my family and not be so obsessed with work, but they don't call it a project, and they don't put it up on LinkedIn. That's not a criticism in any way. I'm just saying I'm curious why you did that. 

Robert Johnson: Wow. Why did I do it? Everyone's different, but for me, when you say something, you hear it, and you put it out there, it just becomes real. It becomes really tangible and real, and it becomes something that you live by, you wake up, and you know it is there, and you can come back to it every time something bad happens, you have a bad day, or if something didn't go the way you wanted it to.

When you go back to what your purpose is… I have a purpose and my purpose, it goes, actually goes in this order. I misstated earlier, but it's my wife, it's my kids, it's me and it's sales. Those four things are my purpose on LinkedIn. I've got another mission statement, and it's to connect with, motivate, and inspire as many people as possible. I come back to those things. If anybody asks, what are you doing on LinkedIn? And I said, look, I just. I just want to connect with people. Why do you want to connect with people? I want to see, if maybe I can motivate somebody. Maybe I can help somebody. Maybe I can inspire somebody.

It hasn't been quite two years, Dave. I started my journey. It was like September, almost 18 months ago, and man, I helped a friend. I said, now she's a friend, a woman at the time who really wanted to get into Formula One, and I made a couple of introductions, and literally about four months after I made some introductions to her, she was on a plane to the UK and gave a live in-person talk about UX and UI design to Silverstone. And that's inspirational and motivational to me and it all started with a connection, and LinkedIn serves a lot of purposes. That stuff just makes it exciting and fun, and I'm going to keep doing it as long as it's still exciting and fun. 

As you know, running a podcast and stuff can sometimes feel like work, and when it becomes work, and it becomes really hard, and it's not fun anymore, I'm sure that you would probably just turn it off and walk away if it became really painful and crappy. 

All right, Robert. You talked about connecting, and it was great reconnecting with you. We need to stay in touch more.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, Dave, really appreciate the reconnect here. This has been great, man. I'm just so happy for you with your business and everything you got going on and, yeah, thanks again for having me on. 

Jay Leedy, Videri

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Jay Leedy probably had a bunch of options open to him when he decided he'd done his job with Sony's pro display team, and it might have surprised some of his industry friends when he signed on with a much smaller company, New York-based Videri, as its Senior VP for Strategic Alliances.

It didn't surprise me, because Videri has been on a bit of a tear in the last few months, hiring well-connected and respected senior people away from other companies active in digital signage. That came out of a $20 million fundraising round announced late last year.

I did a podcast about a year ago with Videri CEO Wes Nicol, so I didn't want to spend too much time talking again about Videri's product and services. We get into that and what attracted Leedy, but what I was really interested in hearing about was his point of view on the CMS software market. His prior role with Sony was building up the digital signage software ecosystem, which involved talking to and looking at scores of different companies. He eventually onboarded some 90 in his three-plus years there, about 70 of them CMS software firms.

So Leedy has a pretty unique perspective on what's out there, and how companies differentiate themselves in what remains a very crowded CMS software market.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Jay Leedy, thank you for joining me. You've had some big changes in the last few weeks. 

Jay Leedy: Thank you. I have. Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to hear your voice. 

Yeah, you don't want to see me. 

Jay Leedy: It's been a couple of months since I saw you last at ISE, but yeah, some changes that were on the horizon at ISE kind of came to fruition over the last several months, and I'm happy to say I'm in my fourth week, almost complete with my fourth week here at Videri.

Wow, you're almost past probation. Are you going to make it? 

Jay Leedy: They haven't kicked me out yet. My wife told me that the paycheck showed up in our bank account yesterday. Yay! 

Things are rocking. I knew you when you were with Convergent and Diversified then you went over to Sony. Am I missing anything there?

Jay Leedy: I think that's the extent of my career in this space. I got introduced to integrations prior to moving to Convergent through a company that had point-of-purchase display manufacturing as their core and had a division that focused on, what we called Intelligent Loss Prevention. We were basically importing a lot of technology solutions to solve theft prevention in retail and that's how I got exposed to systems integration, and when I saw digital signage as a part of that, I naturally gravitated toward that. I saw there was going to be a big growth arc and fortunately, I've been right so far. 

We can get into what you were doing with Sony because I'm intrigued by the role you had and the unique perspective that was offered, but I'm curious because when you started thinking, okay, I've done my job here with Sony and what's my next thing?

What compelled you to go to Videri, I suspect you had a number of options. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, it's a good question. The little background that I just gave you is in part why Videri was really appealing to me. You're right. I had really broad exposure to the market across a number of technologies, not just digital signage, and was considering options outside of digital signage, to be perfectly honest, but the reason that Videri was compelling for me was a couple of reasons. 

One is the, very strong push they were making into the market with some clear funding and a product offering that was differentiated in displays that were very thin and lightweight looking and appealed to the sensibilities of retailers and designers and the folks that I really like engaging with on the creative side of our business, combined with software that really makes it easy to make these things pop and, deliver what we call orchestration of content across multiple canvases of displays to unify those. 

But there were some other things that went into that as well. I met Rob Avery, who had recently joined the company from Scala, at your event at ISE. I'd already met Wes Nicol, the CEO, about a year prior, and then Steven Jenkins, who I'd worked with at Diversified, had recently joined as the CRO along with Nathan Jones, who I'd also worked with as a Managing Director for North America. So there are already some pieces in place, and when I met Rob and we chatted briefly about his point of view on where we are versus where he wanted to take the software on the roadmap, that really clicked with me. Then we announced Jeff Griffin coming in as a retail technology guru and a guy who was at the genesis of what we called Walmart TV. So it wasn't even digital signage when he was involved with that deployment. So he's had a long history of selling into that market, and really the last piece to fall into place for me was, we secured, Tom Ross from NowSignage and I think he must eat energy bars constantly. He has the most energy and passion for the channel of any guy that I've met in this industry, and I've met a lot. All of those things coming together was really a big part of making that decision for me.

Yeah, it's interesting. I've told the story a few times of couple of years ago at DSC in Vegas, some company called Videri had reached out to me and said, could you come to our suite at ARIA and have a look at our pots and pans? And I said, I'm super busy, and so on, and they bugged me and on the last day in the afternoon, I was dead tired, but I said, okay, fine, because I was staying next door and I didn't know a damn thing about them and met them, walked this endless hallway to get to their suite and they showed me these flat panel displays. 

I thought, oh, dear God, I've walked all this way to see some skinny displays, but then they started to explain what they're up to, the business model and how they were working with a very large Austrian energy drink brand that they're not allowed to officially talk about, and I thought, now I get it, and over those, intervening two years, the company has really grown in terms of marketplace visibility and everything else and they have a somewhat unique, not entirely unique, but somewhat unique product. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, I agree. In fact, I was registered to go to that same event but couldn't get there because I was super busy that week. I also didn't have a relationship with them yet. So I didn't yet feel obligated, but I didn't see their product until Digital Signage Week, or maybe it was NRF, one of the two where they had a hospitality event at their offices in New York and I made my way there and I was as compelled as you were because of what they were doing but also where they were saying they were going.

And you're right. The visibility for Videri has been exponential. I think as contemporaries in our sphere of the industry have gotten more visibility to their hardware and a better understanding of whether software can cause the entire industry to really lean in and that's been the case. I think when I announced that I was leaving Sony combined with two days later announcing that I was joining Videri, I never had as much web traffic on my LinkedIn as those two days. I think it was something on the order of 15,000 impressions between the two posts and that tells me that there's a lot of people who were really intrigued about what this new company is and as I've gotten deeper into the organization and started to really look around at the core architecture of our software, which is an Android-based SoC. So all of our displays run Android 12, which offers a lot of opportunity for third-party solutions to run alongside ours, or in some cases, in place of our software with our firmware being the glue that binds the delivery of that software, and I think there's a lot of opportunities in that regard as well, right? 

My goal will really be to build out an ecosystem and a partner strategy very similar to what I was doing at Sony and fortunately, I have a lot of existing relationships that I was already working with that can parlay right into that, that are all dialed into that Android approach, but I think Android, in particular, was compelling for me because it has become a de facto standard in many respects and in a lot of cases with retailers, because of the security components to it, and our particular flavor of Android is locked down, which is really appealing. all the stars really aligned there. 

It's interesting because Android, if you asked people out five years ago, they would probably say no, not going anywhere near that.

Jay Leedy: I know when I was Diversified, it was an absolute non-starter, but the market's changed, and fortunately the strength of Android and the security protocols have changed, and I think it's you and I've talked about a little bit, right? The impression and kind of point of view on Android Deployed in enterprise environments has changed as well.

I think largely because of the broad use of MDMs or device management solutions and familiarity with those tools, with IT admins having a level of comfort with those. At the end of the day, displays for digital signage are IOT devices that have to be managed and locked down in a similar fashion. So something that's familiar just resonates with those decision makers. 

You mentioned a couple of minutes ago third party suppliers or providers. 

Are you saying, and you can correct me if I'm getting this wrong, that if I'm another CMS software company, I could, in theory, drive Videri displays?

Jay Leedy: Absolutely, and we've already tested a handful of them. I think we've got about five so far. We've also tested some lift-and-learn solutions that are quasi-CMS but would also be able to run in concert with our CMS. 

That'd be like Glass Media stuff?

Jay Leedy: It's more like Sign Metrics. We're on ARC over at Pick‘n’Watch. He's got a really interesting solution that's all Bluetooth and UDP-based. We're also looking at wireless solutions for audience measurement, the likes of Blue Zoo or Movia Media. 

Some of the CMS platforms that we've tested, run the gamut of the kind of those that are known more heavily in the space, like Spp Space and Corbett, and then others that are maybe lesser known like Play Signage or one of the newer ones that, as you mentioned earlier, the idea of a hobby business that's not yet full bore or fully funded or has a sales and marketing team behind it, what have you… There's a company called AbleSign that's got some pretty capable products.

Largely a lot of these are available as progressive web app options where the device management capabilities of their full-featured apps are stripped out and therefore don't present a conflict with some of the remote capabilities that are the device management capabilities that we bring to bear. But, in the longer term, we'll also test scenarios where maybe a full-featured solution could be used or what we see more as a trend; why I was looking maybe outside of digital signage, in other technology providers, is that, especially in North America, and I think that this will cascade to other markets is that enterprise clients, in particular, have a point of view on device management.

So, it was really important when I was at Sony to be compatible with whatever infrastructure decisions had been made upstream so that we could just say yes to projects and be specified regardless of what the requirements were. To some extent, that's a consideration with Videri's approach as well.

It's interesting, with this idea that you can work with other CMS software companies. I'm trying to envision that phone call or that meeting on their end, wouldn't they be saying that you have a software that competes with our software? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, but I think we also have a really attractive line of hardware, right?

The kind of customer that will gravitate towards our hardware may, in some cases, already have an investment and an existing state of software that they don't want to deviate from. So it may make sense for us to offer our hardware with some recurring fees for the support and device management components while also being able to enable content management on a familiar platform that is more broadly used across their estate. Those are scenarios that we're gaming out. 

What drew my attention in the tippet area is how the square displays in particular were something that could replace old beverage brands’ neon or plastic backlit signs in bars and restaurants. It was something that was dynamic, the quick ROI that would come out of that, but I've seen Videri in particular marketing, multi-screen video cone matrix. I think there's another word you guys use. 

Jay Leedy: We call it an orchestration, but yeah, it'd be a mosaic or a configuration of multi-canvas screens that, in some cases, we're seeing incorporated with other visual merchandising elements or other artwork elements in hospitality applications, for example.

You might like static, traditional artwork and imagery interspersed with dynamic elements that are part of Videri. The entire wall can very easily be mapped, and content pushed and split across the displays so that it makes sense visually without a lot of hardware to deliver that, and I think that's really a unique element of our software. 

Yeah, and I like the ability to mix and match squares and rectangles display canvases and I know Samsung had a square product years ago, and it came and went because they like to sell hundreds of thousands, not thousands of units, but it came back with this and because manufacturers in Asia are now able to natively manufacture square things instead of cutting a rectangle and turning it into a square, redoing the electronics and costing a lot of money. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, the run rate on our square product versus the other ones is probably not as high, to be fair, but those unique shapes and, I think, more specifically, smaller form factors, the lighter weight, the bezels are only probably about three quarters of an inch thick. The fact that they're low-voltage offers a lot of flexibility. We've got a shop fitter or a point-of-purchase display manufacturer in Germany that's developed a unique bracket that allows these displays to be moved around in their modular system. The entire system is powered with low voltage. 

It's a company called Visplay, and they've done some really interesting stuff. These powered, essentially track systems or grids have ports, and the brackets are designed to automatically pick up power as soon as they do. Once they hit the Wi-Fi, they just start playing content again. So it gives the retailer or the shop fitter a lot of modularity, and they don't have to get a technician on-site to make these changes. It's something that they can do with store staff and that's really appealing as well. 

That's interesting. I've been doing a lot of reading and paying a lot of attention to the whole retail media networks landscape of late because it's obviously got a lot of traction, even though much of the spending now is not in the store but billboards and online, but it's going that way and I've said and heard from people that it's not going to be a second wave of stores, putting big ass LCD displays on every available surface like it maybe was in the 2010s when athletic wear retailers, in particular, were doing that. 

It's going to have to be smaller displays and interesting displays that fit into the design and are designed from the start or ones that don't get in the way of merchandising.

Jay Leedy: Yeah, exactly. I think we've seen that in various gestations over the last several years, especially in consumer packaged goods, brands will incorporate digital elements as part of a turnkey fixture package. It's one of the things I was working on with Diversified prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately, the pandemic killed the momentum on a project that was really promising for us.

But it was in partnership with Westrock, and the idea was that, as Diversified, we would be the integrator and managed service provider to support design, build, and ultimately manage and service these things once deployed. Westrock designed the fixture and also what they called kit packing. So they brought in inventory from their partner at the time, GlaxoSmithKline. They fully merchandised a display fitted with graphics and then added our digital elements with an LTE modem cradle point. As soon as the store personnel received it, which they wielded into place, they didn't have to have a technician. Essentially, they had a turnkey solution that, as soon as it was plugged in, called home and had a range of content that would be played based on a number of parameters. There was an integrated camera. 

So, I think there's a really appealing turnkey solution that doesn't have to rely on the retailer's data infrastructure, which is usually fairly constrained. This gives the brands a lot more freedom for placement but a lot more control over execution as well as the ability to, as you rightly said, put digital in places where you wouldn't expect it, and that's a hallmark of our approach, right? These smaller screens are unique form factors that are less obtrusive and don't detract from the merchandising but actually can complement it, and you're right, I think retail media networks will manifest in that way so that it's not an afterthought. It's not a screen that's hanging from the ceilings left in front of the end cap, but it's actually integrated into the end cap or into the merchandising fixture or what have you. So it really does the job of carrying the brand message, and I think there's a lot of appeal there, especially in lifestyle brands. Especially for a product where, through our orchestration, we could draw attention to an entire category or shop within a store rather than just having individual merchandising fixtures, each with its own message.

The adoption barrier that I've encountered when I've talked to brands about this, what you were just describing is they like it, but they only need it for six weeks or four weeks or some defined campaign term, and even though they may be a big CPG brand with all kinds of products they're so siloed that you couldn't just say, “This shampoo digital fixture could be a body lotion fixture for round two, and you could share it across different ones.”

They’d say, “Yeah, but that would never happen.” 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, that was actually the concept of the one that we were working on with Westrock and GlaxoSmithKline. So the idea was that it'd be a seasonal product that was focused on at the time, Flonase and Claritin, and then once the season for allergies was over, they would pivot to another product that was better suited to the next season. That was exactly the concept.

I think you're right. There is a seasonality to these activities, but the beauty of digital is that you can effectively reskin these things and repurpose them. So long as you have an intelligent design and the rest of the fixture to accommodate a range of products, and basically send in another kit of graphics and merchandise to correspond with that in partnership with a kit packer like Westrock.

You can clarify your role with Sony, which you were there for two or three years, I think. But what I found intriguing now that you're not there is that your gig was basically developing partnerships for Sony to use its smart displays. When you started, there were, I think, one or two, maybe, and by the time you left, I think you were past 80 different partners. 

So you had this unique perspective of talking to a whole bunch of CMS software companies about what they had and analyzing whether there was a fit, and I'm just curious, having seen all these different ones and now somewhat detached from them, what your impression?

Are they all the same, which is, I think what most people would think? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, I was there for three and a half years, and you're right. When I came on, there was exactly one product that had gone through any kind of formal due diligence or QA, and so my program was really about building out that ecosystem with some formalities and processes, and I was fortunate enough to talk to and onboard roughly 90 different technologies that were, I'd say maybe 70% of those were digital signage and the rest were spread between unified communications or AV over IP as a software-defined solution. We also had a range of telemetry and UCC solutions as well.

I think I had exposure to roughly 140 companies or so. On the CMS front, I know Invidus recently did a report that you commented on in your blog as well, and you're not wrong, for the most part, a lot of CMS platforms, at their core, do the same thing. The difference is how they do it. For me, the flexibility in their architecture, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of progressive web apps that decouple some of the real differentiation early in the market, that was an all-in-one solution with device management, has kind of evolved to the point where customers want flexibility and deciding and decoupling that device management from CMS but there's also, I think, the extent to which these companies have invested in APIs and manage those APIs and other data connectors and understand interoperability sets them apart. 

I think for me, with Videri and our clear focus on retail and creative agencies and optimizing and enabling workflows that would be API dependent, as well as a cloud-based SaaS that has the flexibility to be able to grow and evolve, in that direction, that was what was appealing for me. It's not to say that Videri was the only one with all those marks ticked in their offering, but as we talked about earlier, had some other organizational considerations that really were the determining factor for me coming over here.

Without naming names or anything, did you see companies that were clearly more advanced versus ones that were maybe building on something that they've had for many years, and they're just incrementally bolting new capability onto an existing software stack? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's true for any company in the tech space that, at some point, you have to acknowledge that your technical debt load is too much and completely re-architect the solution. We've seen that happen with a number of companies in our space. There are a number of others that continue to struggle with that technical debt and architecture that just doesn't lend itself to meeting the expectations of the market. 

Were you recommending the key things that, whether you're a solutions partner or an end user, they should look for if they want to be future-proofed and really modern? 

Jay Leedy: First and foremost, these days, it's an API-first strategy. We need to ensure that There's a robust enough set of APIs to enable baseline telemetry and interoperability with a number of other API-first solutions. I think about, in particular, what's happening with digital transformation in large consultancies like Accenture, EY, and Deloitte. A lot of those hinge on moving from on-premise to cloud-based solutions for a range of business applications. 

If anybody listening to this podcast is using Office 365, for example, there are a number of third-party solutions that plug into those, obviously with a fee involved. However, to enable that, you have to have the right architecture, and digital signage isn't that different. 

We talk a little bit in this industry about headless and the idea of headless means, I think, escapes some people. I think the idea of no or low code development also, I think, escapes some people, but both of those are similar in that they enable. A much lower cost of entry to get a lot more functionality because the architecture is built in such a way that it can just essentially plug in like a Lego, and you can create building blocks that are predefined, versus having to have a linear development approach that can be really cost intensive.

Yeah, I was on a call yesterday, and it was interesting. They were talking very much about that. From my perspective, if you have a solution that has a distinct login and you have to do everything digital signage through that login, with no real hooks into anything else, that's a big challenge, particularly for larger organizations that want to use one tool set. 

It's going to push out to whatever the endpoint is and whatever that endpoint is communicating.

Jay Leedy: Yeah, and also just thinking about all the different ways content can be generated now. There's been a lot of buzz around generative AI, but the rules for content and distribution largely have been in most of these CMS platforms for a long time. But a means of automating those rules and creating if this, then that scenario or ingesting data that can then drive outcomes and content. that's not necessarily core to a lot of those platforms, or leveraging API calls directly from digital asset management tools and leveraging all of the metadata tagging logic that is built into those, and pulling those directly into the content strategy also necessarily isn't native to a lot of CMS platforms.

So I think those are all kinds of key things to consider when making a selection or at least knowing, if it's possible downstream, should your company mature to the point where they want to leverage those types of tools. 

If people want to catch up with you and talk about what you're doing with Videri, I know they can find you online, obviously, but you'll be at Infocomm? 

Jay Leedy: I will be at Infocomm and the Digital Signage Federation mixer in Tampa in about two weeks. Either way, I'd love to see you and continue the conversation. 

All right, Jay. It's great to catch up. 

Jay Leedy: Great to see you as well, Dave.

Ross Noonan & Larry Zoll, LED Studio

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I have invested a lot of time in the last six or seven years trying to educate myself on LED display technology and terminology, but sometimes it feels like I have mountain to climb and I am still at base camp looking for my oxygen bottle stash.

Manufacturers and their marketers keep coming up with new terms and acronyms, and they often play pretty fast and loose with their descriptions and assertions. Exhibit A are all the companies who are marketing microLED products that aren't microLED, and Exhibit B is the crowd of Chinese manufacturers saying they have Naked Eye 3D LED displays, when all of those visual illusions seen on displays lately are the result of clever creative and have nothing to do with the display technology.

So I have a lot of time for a UK company called LED Studio, which has made the conscious decision to educate its customers and broader market, instead of blinding that market with piles of specs and marketing  terms that few people understand. The company has resources on its website that explain the technology and clear some of the technical fog, and people who know their stuff, speak openly, and aren't in perpetual Always be Closing sales mode.

I had a great chat about LED technology terms, what's going on in the industry, and what really matters. My guests are Larry Zoll, who runs US operations, and Ross Noonan, the UK-based Technical Sales & Marketing Manager and the guy leading the education effort. The accents will give away who is who.

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TRANSCRIPT

Larry and Ross, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a quick introduction of who you are and what LED Studio does? 

Larry Zoll: I'm Larry Zoll, the president of the LED Studio's operations. 

Ross Noonan: I'm Ross Noonan, the technical sales and marketing manager for the LED Studio.

Larry Zoll: We are a UK-based LED display manufacturer with a growing presence worldwide. 

So just for clarity, Ross is over in the UK, and Larry is in the United States right now, so they can't look at each other and go, now you talk or whatever. 

So, I've known you guys for a while. I've been to your little demo center in London, and I know LED Studio is based in the West of London. I had a good chat with Ross at ISE, and one of the things that really struck home for me was that there was a company that was actually trying to educate the market on more than just their product.

You know, Ross, in particular, was trying to clear the fog through blogging and videos and everything else, explaining to people what this is all about because it's a very confusing little space, is it not? 

Larry Zoll: It's a very confusing space. I mean, Dave, you and I have known each other for a long time. I've always been very focused on technology and the education of technology and making sure that people understand what's really out there because it's so confusing. 

You know, a big part of our initiatives is making sure that we're able to educate the market and simplify what's out there because for a long time, this has been an alphabet soup of different options and different availability, and really more often than not tends to be more confusing than it needs to be. One of our goals specifically is to help demystify that and help people understand what they need and, almost more importantly, what they don't need to implement successfully an exciting project. 

Is it confusing because I'm stupid or… Well, don't answer that!

Or is it just that marketers are trying to outdo each other, so they come up with acronyms and push aspects of their products that maybe don't matter all that much but make them sound special? 

Larry Zoll: I'll let the marketer answer that question. Then, I'll give you my perspective. 

Ross Noonan: I think you’re definitely not stupid. I think we've got people who have been in LED for a long time, and they even have to get into the nitty-gritty as to why they're offering a product for a particular application.

You know, it is not like any other kind of technology. It doesn't just come out of a box. I know that some brands are going down the all-in-one route, and that's fantastic. It opens up big screens to off-the-shelf items. Still, it's a very small part of the market, and as soon as you move away from that, there are so many different ways to do something with an LED display. There are so many different applications that basically mean that the specs are ripped up and started again. I think I mentioned this on a blog previously. You know, a consultant came to me and said, why can't you just give me a data sheet? And the reason sometimes is that, well, because you've asked for a particular thing, we've got to go away and kind of rip that data sheet up and start from scratch.

Does it need different receiver cards? Does it need to have a different pixel technology? What is the function that you need? Where do you want to see and how do you want to see it? And then we'll go away and create that and that can be confusing, and it's why you're starting to see the emergence of companies like the LED Studio who are taking the time to try and make sure the customer understands why they're buying something and why they need it or why they don't need it and maybe that's a good point for Larry to jump in a little bit more on the sort of the project management side of things, and delivery. 

Larry Zoll: One of the things that keeps me very excited about this industry is that it is very high tech and it does move very fast, and that can create some confusion in what the different technologies are capable of and what they're not capable of and why you should choose one thing over another, especially on the indoor, although the outdoor has started to make some big leaps in technology as well.

And I think that allaying that confusion and clarifying that understanding is really the responsibility of the manufacturers, or else it just becomes a mishmash of stuff, and it makes people feel like they're stupid, even though they've been in the industry for as long as anybody else, but it's a lot to stay on top of. 

When you're dealing with customers or reseller partners, that sort of thing, are they appreciative of the effort that you're making to kind of explain things as opposed to just kind of blinding them with terms? 

Ross Noonan: Absolutely. I mean, we sat down as a business, Larry from a strategic point of view, Rob as the owner, and myself as marketing, and we said right at the start of this two-year journey that we've been on to get the business.

In people's minds, we wanted to be thought leaders and try and educate people on the response to that has been nothing but positive. You know, people are starting to come to say now I understand why I need to specify this particular product. Well, now I know the difference between what a COB pixel means for energy consumption versus an SMD because before, I would look for a diagram, and there would be 100 different versions of what an SMD and a COB pixel look like, and now something that I can digest and understand, and that's been really exciting for us, to see people coming back and feeding back positive information, all the way from consultants to end clients.

Yeah, when I started really actively following this space, SMD was the primary way that these displays were being built and marketed, and then COB came along, I started hearing terminology like four in one and split chip and it just goes on and on. 

Is there a dominant, primary technology that is now being made, marketed and demanded by buyers? 

Larry Zoll: I think it really depends on the application like you said, but SMD, I'd still say, is the dominant general technology. But there are now a number of variations on SMD that can change the way that you implement it, whether it's GOB that gives you that protective coating, or maybe it increases contrast. You know, it could be a flip chip that reduces power consumption and increases brightness. You know, there are a number of different common cathodes, right? There are so many different ways that you can vary that one technology. Just saying SMD is the dominant technology is a little misleading, but it's a little understated, I guess. 

But I think very quickly, we're also starting to see that for the narrower pitches and for micro LED displays, which we define and hope sort of the industry lands on a definition of anything under a pitch of one millimeter, you're starting to see more and more COB and COB is becoming more prevalent because there's more manufacturing starting to happen with it. It's been a challenge for some suppliers to date because of the difficulty in starting up the manufacturing lines and keeping them going. But that's becoming less of an issue. So that's starting to ramp up. 

So what's the core distinction between an SMD surface mounted and chip on board or COB? 

Ross Noonan: The main thing is that with surface mount diodes, it says exactly how it is. You've got a pixel in a package, which is then mounted onto the PCB. There are a number of components that make up that package. 

I guess the biggest difference between the two is that with COB, you're effectively mounting the diodes directly onto the substrate. So you're removing that little building block that mounts onto the PCB. The biggest benefit of that is obviously a reduction in componentry. That means a reduction in resistance, which then has a knock-on effect on heat output so the screen is generally more energy efficient. 

When you add a common cathode and flip chip to the COB array, you're starting to remove things like copper bonding wires and all of the other little bits and pieces that add to resistance. I think we worked out that on, a 1080p SMD display, there were millions and millions of bonding wires. 

Larry Zoll: I think we said 20 million in an HD display, and they will add resistance. Whether they're copper or gold or whatever, they add a lot of components and physical electric resistance.

One of the things that I sort of lean on when I'm talking to customers about this is that when you're powering up a display, the electricity has to go one of two places. It's either heat or light and obviously, you want as much of that to convert to light as possible because that's how you make the display more efficient. So the hotter the display is, the less efficient your display is at creating light. So, really, what it comes down to is that by eliminating a lot of those components, COB becomes a much more efficient technology in creating light, which is good for everybody.  

I assume it also removes points of failure and does it remove cost as well?

Larry Zoll: To be honest with you, that depends on who you're working with. I mean, a few minutes ago, I mentioned that there is a large cost associated with starting up and shutting down the manufacturing lines for COB. It takes a substantial amount of time and effort, and if it's not something that you have dedicated space for in the manufacturing process, then it's going to impact the price. Suppose you have dedicated manufacturing resources to COB, where you're not switching lines and switching manufacturing processes frequently. In that case, it does have the potential to save you money on COB, even over SMDs. 

Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess one thing that we did as a business sort of a year ago was sit down and look at that fine pitch trend, which Larry mentioned. The long-term trend suggests that COB is going to be the dominant. Potential technology in fine pitch was that we needed to start offering COB at a price that was attractive to people who were potentially considering SMD versus COB. You know, in the past they were vastly different in price so we needed to ramp up our production line to be able to bring that price more in line with one another and make that decision easy.

When you start to add things like COB comes with a protective resin as standard as part of the pixel encapsulation process whereas with SMD, that's an additional cost through GOB resin, all of a sudden the ROI starts to really stack up for the client. They're really starting to see the benefits of that. Not only am I getting a more energy-efficient display, and in a lot of cases, maybe a better one in terms of image quality, but also my pixels are better protected against outside forces, accidental damage, lumps and bumps and things like that. So that's a huge benefit that COB has as part of its standard offering that clients are really starting to see the benefit from.

How protective is the GOB or the coating inherent with COB? 

I asked because TSI Touch, a company in Pennsylvania that has started marketing an acrylic shield that you would put in front of a display. They showed somebody throwing a basketball at this shield, and I've always thought the GOB and the coding are terrific in that they're going to offer some degree of protection, but they have their limits. Correct? 

Larry Zoll: Of course, it has its limits. I love the guys at TSI Touch. I've done a lot of work with them over the years. I don't know if putting a shield in front of the display, if you have a GOB is necessary. I mean, we have one customer we work with that has a lot of family activities around them where kids can easily reach the displays and we've got with this one client, we've got over 15,000 modules deployed, and over the past two years, they're all GOB and over the past two years, we've seen 20 of those 15,000 returned for service, which is like a 0.02 service rate, something like that. 

So, I think in reasonable settings, you know, I wouldn't go and hit it with a baseball bat but it is certainly well enough protected for most general settings. 

Yeah, I tend to agree, but I do wonder if in public concourses in places like arenas and so on, a GOB display may be fine for people coming and going from a Taylor Swift concert. But maybe not for a Norwegian death metal concert. Different demographics? 

Larry Zoll: It's a fair assumption. That's a great question, though. I think everybody would really benefit if we could put together some metrics on what that protection really looks like.

One of the things that struck me walking around ISE was looking at all these gorgeous displays that were all COB or other technologies like that, in various stands, some very high profile, some you had to find kind of if you walk more towards the back of some of the exhibit halls and I started concluding, maybe right or wrong, that I don't know that the industry really needs to get to micro LED or displays that are called micro LED, because the fine pitch, sub one millimeter, more “conventional” and all displays look absolutely fantastic. So are you benefiting that much more from the additional cost of going to micro LED? 

Ross Noonan: That's a very good question because, obviously, as humans, we're always in the pursuit of improvement. You know, technology was about driving the next best thing. You know, it was 1080p, then it was 4K, then it was 8K. There comes a point where this is, of course, my opinion, I think many people who have been in this industry and done what I've done would share that there's going to come a point where having a smaller pixel pitch really doesn't make that much difference. 

I mean, how often are you going to go and stand less than a meter from a screen, especially if it's a big one? That's just not really what's intended for there. There are obviously some cases where maybe an immersive and interactive where you want people interacting with large format displays that perhaps a sub 1mm pixel pitch might make sense, but generally speaking, Larry and I spoke about this before the call. There are some 2.5mm is a fantastic pixel pitch for a lot of applications. 1.5mm is also fantastic. That's why many of those big screens at the show were kind of 1.25 or 1.5mm. 

When you start to get lower than that, it becomes extremely subjective as to whether it is worth that extra $200-400 that adds for not an awful lot of benefit? I'm sure Larry's got more to add, but yeah, I think you're right. I think that chasing that pitch may be similar to what Larry mentioned earlier, which is cameras, and I'm sure he's going to use that analogy in a minute, which makes complete sense. 

Larry Zoll: I think one thing that a lot of people don't realize is that when you move from a 1.2mm pitch product to a 0.9mm pitch product, you're doubling the number of pixels in that display. I don't care who you are; that is going to add a substantial amount to the cost of that display, and whether you're getting the benefit of that double the number of pixels is really a subjective question.

Yes, there are going to be applications where you're going to want something super tight, right? If you are trying to replace interactive LCD, right? In that case, you're going to want something that is tight because you're going to be within that arm's length, right? 

But if you're talking about a conference room, a lobby, or something similar, there are plenty of arguments to keep things a little bit wider, with no discernible detriment to the project whatsoever and Ross mentioned the cameras; I feel like we're at a point in this industry where digital cameras were 5-7 years ago where everybody was racing towards a number of megapixels, and at some point the industry, consumers in the industry realized that 20 or 40 megapixels in an everyday situation wasn't really going to make a difference and most of the major camera manufacturers could hit a reasonable number of megapixels. So that industry moved towards, well, what were the other differentiating factors? You know, is it sensor size? Is it HDR? Is it whatever? And that's where you're starting to see, especially in professional cameras, since the industry sort of forking is on those differentiators, and I think we're moving in a very similar space in the LED market. 

You know, most of the manufacturers out there now can hit a reasonable pixel pitch and do a good job doing it. So what differentiates Manufacturer A from manufacturer B is how you're doing it. Is it the components? Is it the epoxy that you're using for the GOB? Is it the lifetime performance of the display? Those are the start to think. Those are the things you need to start to look at in order to really differentiate the quality of what's out there.

With micro LED, one of the arguments I've heard from a company that's actually in that business is yes, right now it's still early days, but over time, because of the way micro LED is envisioned to be manufactured, when the yields get up there that they reduce the number of manufacturing flaws, you can hugely reduce the manufacturing cost per square foot of LED by using mass transfer and effectively, I guess, kind of printing these displays. 

Larry Zoll: Yeah, and that's one of the things I was referencing earlier about the cost associated with starting up and shutting down a COB manufacturing line.

That's where a lot of those error rates and everything else come from. So yes, I agree. If you can keep those manufacturing lines constant, then it does have substantial impacts on that part of the process and gives you the ability to lower your prices because your failure rates are so much lower, and I think you're right, the mass transfer is the next big. The next big, I don't know, golden egg, and we're seeing that now with a few small manufacturers who are coming out with, they're called MIP displays, micro LED in the package, and MIP displays take advantage of that mass transfer process, and just, very briefly, very high level. 

You know, traditional SMD COB displays, and even DIP displays are done using pick-in-place, where you have a machine that literally picks a component off of a real place on the PCB, and it gets soldered in place very fast. I've seen those machines. Yeah, it's still one piece at a time.

The big draw for MIP displays at the moment is that they can take advantage of this mass transfer process, where you're basically taking a piece of film that has X many diodes. It gets placed onto the substrate that way, and there are advantages to it. Still, I think eventually, with the micro LED displays, we're working towards that process there too, but that's going to take some time, and that's where I think a lot of the industry will eventually move. 

Setting aside really specialized applications like medical imaging, what pixel pitch is pretty much enough? I mean, I walked around ISC and saw AOTO marketing a sub-five millimeter pixel pitch, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but who on earth needs that? 

Ross Noonan: Yes, that's a very good question. You mentioned the screen on Langstand, and I think that was one of the main focal points because it was a fantastic screen with fantastic content. From memory, it was a 1.25mm. I don't think it was lower than one mil.

I think it was 0.9mm. 

Ross Noonan: Oh, was it 0.9mm? 

Yeah, I think so. 

Ross Noonan: I think there's an element that's something to be said there that the awe and wonder that screen caused is whether we are going to get much more amazement from a screen that then is twice the resolution. I just don't know how the costs and benefits stack up. The human eye can only perceive so much detail. 

We haven't even gotten into talking about the content creation costs and keeping that screen refreshed. You know, that's a high ongoing cost that many clients are not necessarily educated about, especially when we're dealing with clients who are now looking at 8k resolution screens, and they've got the budget for it; you have to have that conversation with them. We'll also have you get the budget and that content refreshed and then keep that content playing. It's not a cheap thing to do, and you're chasing a resolution that perhaps you just don't need. It's always a good conversation to have with clients. It's what you want versus what you need.

They're two different things, and sometimes we compromise with them, and sometimes we actually help educate them and help them pick the right thing. I mean, there's a reason why 1.5mm seems to be the fastest-growing pixel pitch of choice at the moment anyway, and I think that 1.2mm to 1.8mm is where we're going to see the most increase and longevity of pixel pitch sales. That's just based on the 7 to 8 years that I've been doing LED and seeing it ramping up and remaining or keep doing so. 

Larry Zoll: I think that comes down, Dave, to the education that you were talking about previously, too. I recently went to a meeting where a customer was saying they’re putting this huge project together, and they're saying, “We absolutely have to do this with 0.6mm displays. There's no way we can't.” We took them and showed them a 1.2mm COB, and they were absolutely blown away. 

Part of it is the education piece of it, right? I think a lot of people say they need to have the newest and the highest, the best, because it's the newest and the highest, the best without really knowing what the potential is for what may already exist and doing that education and exposing the market to what is possible and showing them what the range is, really can help people make very well informed decisions without having to as tight as possible. 

Another interesting thing I was struck by ISC was with one manufacturer, a fairly substantial one, walking around their stand and looking at the displays and realizing they're not even showing the pixel pitch, like, usually particularly the Chinese manufacturers, they'll say it's this and that, and it's 1.4 or whatever it is. But they didn't even have those little signs that called that out, and that struck me as, okay, we're kind of getting beyond this pixel pitch rate race, at least for some of the people.

Ross Noonan: Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective. From a marketing perspective, it's a great idea. Let the screen and the content do the talking, and then people will come and say to you, “Wow, that screen is fantastic. Give me some details,” and you say it's at 1.8 mil. 

It's going to, as Larry said, that's a great way of showing people that sometimes resolution isn't always the main thing. It's all about optimization and really good content. 

Larry Zoll: The install quality is a big part of that too, but I think you're right. I think you can potentially lean on that, and my guess is that if you had people coming up to your booth asking about the pitch of the display, it's typically not going to be as tight of a pitch as they think it is.

What really genuinely matters, if I'm someone who's relatively new to this as an integrator or an end user, they can be all caught up on the terminology that goes, I need a micro LED display, or as you've said, they need a 0.6mm, that's the only thing that's going to work, that sort of thing.

What actually does matter? 

Ross Noonan: What do you want to see, and where do you want to see it from? Yeah, it sounds simple, but that really is how you want to see it or how you want to interact with it? It's probably the next set of questions. I'll let Larry delve into it more, but that is how we always start a conversation.

What is it you want to see? Where do you want to see it from? And then let's explore the options that are going to deliver that, in the best way possible. 

Larry Zoll: My background was in design before I joined LED Studio and the manufacturing side. I was a designer. I spent a long time in the consulting world.

I still firmly believe that technology can't drive the design. You have to let the story drive the tech, and that's how we approach every project. I also think that, as Ross said earlier, there are more and more companies out there doing all-in-ones, and we do them too.

There are great applications for all-in-one displays, but just as frequently, if not more frequently, this industry is still as much art as it is science, and what that translates into from a project requirement standpoint really depends on the ultimate goals for the project.

I've said to people when they've asked me that kind of question, I'm nowhere near as deep as you guys are on the LED side, but I've said what can really matter is quality of support and responsiveness of support and having more than just salespeople in the same country as you, but, in this discussion, you've mentioned a lot of things about what components are used, how it's made, how the heat gets out, all these sorts of things that are much more technical and in the weeds, but maybe are things that people are looking for if they're really trying to make good, informed decisions, they have to get beyond how pretty it looks on the trade show floor and find out how it works and how it's going to last. 

Larry Zoll: No, that's absolutely right. I mean, we haven't even delved into the support part of it, but that's a huge component of it too.

I mean, there's so much out there and many different ways to buy products. I think people frequently underestimate the need for a good partner in these projects. They're living, breathing things; whether it's content refreshes or content management systems, they're ultimately all computers, right? Computers will do what computers will do. So you have to have a good partner who can support you throughout its life. 

At a very basic level, everybody who's involved in technology knows this: Yes, you can buy stuff really inexpensively from China, but whether it's computers or media players or other devices, you genuinely are for the lower cost of getting what you paid for.

Larry Zoll: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess the support side of things is important too, for the fact that, as Larry touched upon, we know these project products are potentially quite complex. I mean, obviously, we've simplified a lot of them in terms of how they are installed, but sometimes you can't move away from the fact that you might need structural engineering; it's not just something that you slap at the end of the project. It's got to be project managed with architects and electricians and all these different trades. It all has to come together, perhaps to a grand opening of a large event, and so what we are finding is some of the bigger manufacturers, they don't want that headache of having the responsibility to do that level of support, which you could claim is quite granular, having to really get involved in the weeds and making sure that you're thinking of every potential outcome and then delivering that on-site and that leaves the door wide open to the smaller manufacturers like us who have built up a group of individuals who've been sort of working at the front end of LED displays. It means we can go in and offer a service that is perhaps a bit more personal, and of course, there are always problems with these projects. That's what technology is all about solving problems. 

But we like to think that we're quite proactive at solving those plans and innovative in how we solve problems with our technologies to make things easier, and that's something that we pride ourselves on.

All right. I said before we even started that this was going to fly by and it certainly did. I think we'll have to do this again because I don't think we really covered the waterfront. We just started our little walking discussion here. But I appreciate your time. 

Larry Zoll: Thanks so much, Dave.

Ross Noonan: Thank you.

Frank Hoen, Netpresenter

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When the pandemic hit and a lot of people started working from home, many digital signage CMS software companies started developing and releasing solutions that pushed the digital signage messaging more normally posted on screens around workplaces to the laptop and computer monitor screens in the formal or ad hoc workspaces created around houses and apartments.

It was a new but necessary feature for most companies, but something the Dutch company Netpresenter has been doing for almost 30 years. The software company started out with that problem in mind, borrowing on the concept of screensavers to create what it calls desktop digital signage. Over time, it added more conventional digital signage capabilities for workplaces - a solution that founder Frank Hoen says is not an add-on, but as robust as the many, many, many other CMS options out there.

Along with offering a lot of integrations with business systems like SharePoint, the Netpresenter platform is very deep when it comes to triggered alerts for things like emergencies. That was developed in the wake of 9/11, when Netpresenter's US office in the World Trade Center complex was lost in the terror attack.

Netpresenter has more than 5 million active users globally, from SMB to huge multi-nationals and government agencies that see screens on desktops and walls as the most effective way to reach and update its workers. While most of that footprint is desktop digital signage, Hoen says at least five percent of Netpresenter's software licenses are being used for conventional digital signage in workplaces.

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TRANSCRIPT

Frank, thank you for joining me. I have been aware of Netpresenter for the longest time, but we've never actually chatted, and it's interesting that you're one of the oldest companies out there but not terribly well known.

Frank Hoen: We're all over the United States. We have hospitals like George Washington Memorial Hospital and big hospital chains across the US, for example, oil refineries in the Middle East, and military installations. There is just a lot of oil, a lot of industries, and a lot of offices across the globe that use our software, and it's been a while, so we have a couple of very interesting customers. 

One of the very earliest ones was the US Space Command, I believe, in 1995. Can you imagine that? Those were the days of PointCast, and everybody was saying it was the next big thing. 

I remember PointCast. 

Frank Hoen: Which was a dragon of a piece of software. It was terrible. 

Sucked all the bandwidth! 

Frank Hoen: Yeah, and it is interesting because, actually, the beginnings of Netpresenter could be traced back to the fact that we were selling one of the big brands of signage out there. I can tell you it was a Scala, Commodore Amiga, which was expensive as hell. They tried to bridge TV to the PC, and well, you know, they weren't that successful. Windows was not very multimedia-oriented then, and it didn't go that well, in the beginning, at least. 

We saw that, and we didn't want to build a signage solution or compete with them, but what we did see is that for the first time, all these computers out there with screens, which were managed, which were there, were available, and they were interconnected, and so you start to experiment. You put some images and videos on the server, and then the server comes down because of all the bandwidth. So we introduced some smart caching, and voila, Netpresenter was born. 

It was kind of an interesting beginning, but big companies like Nokia, Sony, and the early pioneers picked up on it, and one of our early customers was actually a US Space Command. And so I literally started going to the trade show. I came across a Marine who was in this battle group who used Netpresenter, and I never heard of the people. I didn't know they were using it. They might have copied it from one Navy server to other ships, but what can you do? It's a nice story now. 

So you have interesting roots in that since COVID became a thing, the pandemic bubbled up, and a lot of people were working from home. A lot of “conventional” or “mainstream” digital signage companies branched into making effective screensavers, pushing information to desktops for work-from-home people.

You, on the flip side, started as a corporate screensaver company that then evolved and expanded into doing digital signage as well, correct? 

Frank Hoen: Well, yes, and if I may add, and taking it a bit back from COVID, we had an office in Twin Towers, and when obviously that happened, and all the people who I knew had died, we were like, could we have actually maybe contributed in a positive way and then trying to prevent when something similar happens to be able to save more people? And that was the beginning of what we call our Emergency Alert Capability of Netpresenter. 

So, sir, you had an office in the World Trade Center?

Frank Hoen: Yes.

Wow. 

Frank Hoen: So, that was one of those pivotal moments. Obviously, COVID was as well, and I'll get back to that. But, imagine this, there, and suddenly boom, and it was, yeah, obviously terrible. But it was for us. We were like, let's introduce emergency alerts in our platform so that our customers can actually use this for emergency evacuations, fire, aiding and fire alerts, giving specific information, active shooter, tornado warnings, and the software has been with us since then, basically, and to this day, many us hospitals actually use our software for that specifically as well, for example. 

Still, we have whole countries that are actually running the Netpresenter software, including the screens, all these tools, apps, and push notifications. This is a full omnichannel emergency alert system capable of serving whole countries. They're running software. So if people are buying, and that's my point, if people are buying Netpresenter, they're buying something that literally whole countries depend on to address millions and millions immediately. So, we have seen quite a few copycats over the years, and I always felt, and so our developers, they had a very high shareware component in there. It was kind of like hack on the hack. Obviously, then those, what we have very often seen is people start off with that because they have rock bottom prices, obviously, because they can't compete on features. Still, eventually, those customers end up at us. 

If you need to run on corporate devices, mobile devices, PCs, and all these things and networks. The last thing you want is for that piece of software to be installed, which kills your bandwidth and causes all kinds of problems. There are big organizations, especially in hospitals and other places, that they choose for quality, and that means. You know, we're not the cheapest solution out there, most expensive either, but we've had many customers for 20-plus years. What IT company can say that? 

Not a lot. So, when you're asked to describe your company, do you say you're a digital signage software company or something else?

Frank Hoen: We're into corporate communications. Basically, this is a corporate communication platform. We do say that we have signage for the big screens, desktop digital signage for all existing PCs, app solutions, alerts, notifications, tickers, and all kinds of tools, basically any device in the organization.

I always use the parallel of a hospital. There are big screens hanging there. We provide those; we run on those. There's all the PCs, we run on those. We run on the tablets. We run on mobile devices. There's the alert notification as well. The whole thing integrates with things already available. In organizations such as SharePoint integrations, that's not many organizations that offer that.

So basically, organizations invest a lot in their intranets in their SharePoints and similar intranets, but predominantly SharePoint if organizations have Windows, but very few people are seeing the content. So that's problematic. There's a saying it's difficult to be famous if nobody recognizes you, and it's essentially here we are, they have invested a lot of money in that. So obviously, things like signage solutions, big screens, and being able to distill headlines literally, need-to-know, must-know information from intranets, that's a killer app that really is bringing the most elegant way and big heritage of push that's bringing content, throughout organizations, fully automated, and that's just beautiful because number one: organizations, they are popularizing the internet, but number two: they're the headlines of what organizations should know, everybody sees them, and that's just very cool.

Your website says you have about 5 million active users. I assume a pretty high percentage of that is desktop digital signage, as you describe it. What percentage would you attribute to the larger screens sprinkled around an office building? 

Frank Hoen: Well, it's actually relatively high—I would say somewhere between 5% and 10%—and it's significant.

So you got a pretty big footprint out there. 

Frank Hoen: Yeah, and the interesting thing is that we have customers who pay per annum or per month. The rule is, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. So if customers are happy and you keep adding relevant new features, they stay. 

Well, if you've had customers for 20 years, that's a pretty good endorsement.

Frank Hoen: Yeah, and that actually brings in the fact that IT revolutions come and go, and listening very carefully to your customers and then working from there, for example, integrating AI, obviously is omnipresent. That is crucial if you want to survive as an organization, whether you're in the signage or not.

So I'm working for an organization that's using Netpresenter. I'm, let's say, working remotely. How does your product manifest itself on screens? 

Frank Hoen: We use a couple of concepts. Basically, we don't want to be intrusive, so we do have pop-ups. However, I don't like the concept of pop-ups and things like that unless it's in your best interest that you should be immediately notified about something. So we have that, but that's not a mainstream tool. 

The mainstream tool is the desktop app, and we have an app that is for mobile devices that's basically an elegant reader where you can command, and things like that, kind of a smart social internet dish, and that can actually is typically often connected with a SharePoint. So it gets automated feeds, but the key component is actually, the home is the desktop signage, desktop digital signage. That is the good old screensaver. Obviously, screens don't burn in anymore, but the elegance of these new flat screens is basically that the difference between sleep mode and active mode isn't that big. 

Imagine walking through an organization, and every screen, every of those PCs displays the latest information and the latest headlines from your intranet automatically. You get so many impressions of the message. Then we actually measured that you can actually increase intranet, free fault, but more importantly, the retention to two and a half. So literally, a well-used intranet introduced Netpresenter, and a lot more people recall the key messages, and that's just beautiful. It elegantly brings without interrupting people in the core processes. We obviously want to give management from organizations a fighting chance of reaching their staff. 

So if I'm banging away on emails and there's some sort of message that Corporate needs to get out to its staff, what's going to happen on my screen? 

Frank Hoen: We have different levels of notifications. So you have a low, medium, and high level of notifications, and we can literally take over your whole screen if necessary. Think active shooters and things like that We call it an emergency alert, similar to the public emergency broadcast.

You get lower levels than that. You have partial screens; you have pop-up notifications. We can do things on your mobile device as well. If you're constantly hammering on your PC, the screens won't disappear. So there are all kinds of forms, and basically, remember old McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” 

If you have a big toolbox, you don't only have the hammer, if you know what I mean. So you have a lot more tools available at home, but the key tool is still the screensaver. 

I'm going to assume having done this for so many years that you have a pretty good sense of the balance that you have to strike. You mentioned the word intrusive before. You can cross that line, I suspect, pretty easily and just start annoying your staff as opposed to educating them and making them aware. 

Frank Hoen: You know, obviously, we both agree that people don't consider a signage screen intrusive. It's just there. It's the same with a screensaver; it’s there when you're not actively hammering away at emails.

You know, you grab a cup of coffee, take a rest break, and turn to the computer, you will see it several times a day, but it never is intrusive because, you know, it's there with your lock screen as well and we have solutions for that as well. So, basically, when you're returning to your computer or not using it for a couple of minutes, we're there on whatever screen that is out there.

And are those configurable at the user end, or is that something that's set centrally? 

Frank Hoen: The user has some capabilities, but most of them, obviously, you want to ensure that you have some control over internal communications. For example, the screens that won't appear when you're doing a presentation or having a team meeting wouldn't make much sense so you do have control over that, but the organization can determine which tools they use or which mixture of tools they're going to use. 

I assume there's a percentage of people who don't want to be bothered and would be looking for ways to disable the application. How do you fight that? 

Frank Hoen: That is easily done, of course, through configuring your PC. If it's an office PC, it's easy to do, but you know, I should state that it's ridiculous the amount of time people at work spend on their social media. It's getting crazy, and it's literally two hours or more at work.

And it's just not being able as an organization actually to have access, even simple access, to your staff. That's what we're talking about. So we're giving them back a little fighting chance. We're never going to be able to compete one-on-one against social media and all their algorithms and elegant persuasion mechanisms but with Netpresenter, you have a fighting chance of getting your need-to-know information, your must-know information well, between the years of employees, basically. 

How do they know it's that much time on social media? Is that IT department just looking at browser activity? 

Frank Hoen: Oh, no, these are studies.

That's easily googled. There are several big studies out there, and it's what I see here is from Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2023. It basically says that employees are disengaging. They want more recognition for their work, more communication from the leaders, more communication from the leaders, clear goals, stronger guidance, and engagement or culture.

How do you do that when working at home? So, how do you actually get culture across while working predominantly at home? Many employees experience stress often because of social media. They already overworked well before entering the office, so basically, there are a lot of studies out there. If you want to have the chance to keep connecting with your employees, your communication platform needs to be adapted to that so that you don't add to the information overload but basically bring some peace and quiet. 

But if you cannot reach your staff while working at home, you will lose out. There will be no connection at all at your organization. 

How much of this is integrated into other business systems? You mentioned SharePoint before, but you know, companies use Slack and so on. 

Frank Hoen: Yeah. We also have Teams connections, for example, and several other connections. Basically, if you have the data, we'll be able to intelligently deliver it to the screens. 

We're even able to analyze how much of that was read and understood through AI, through smart AI solutions. So imagine letting AI summarize the key headlines your staff or your management wants employees to know. AI literally analyzes it, compacts it, makes an abstract out of it, puts it out to the screens, and then actually keeps an eye on it, does small polls, two—or three-question polls, and checks whether they have understood it. 

So basically, we're seeing now the move from isolated tools or very smart apps into integrated systems, which are basically working like the director of a big news broadcaster. When information comes in, they determine: is it breaking news? Is it news for the app? Is it news on TV? Is it news just for a website? Is it no news? So you have our AI analyzing information, then deciding whether it will be how important it is, putting it out there on the right spot and on the right medium, but also, and that's really new, it can actually detect among these thousands of employees, we actually typically see that on big signage screens or on the screen savers. It can actually detect if they understood it, if they know the basics of, for example, cybersecurity awareness or compliance, and that's really cool. Basically we're bringing signage into massive learning systems without being intrusive, and to elegantly pull, if they know it, not everyone, just a couple and just enough, so, you know, okay, now we need to snooze this campaign that now we need to snooze this campaign or now we need to upscale the campaign and show it more on screens more frequently or maybe even on other channels as well. 

So that's awareness. Can you do training? 

Frank Hoen: Well, you know, it's not full-blown training in that you're sitting and having your course on C programming. No, it doesn't do that. 

This is meant for relatively small pieces of information, not whole ISO manuals or full compliance manuals. Still, the essence of the things the organization has identified is that nobody knows but they should. So, you need to know that those crucial pieces of information are crucial; you can put that in there. It can actually detect if the employees have read it, if they understood it, and it then can report back to management and say, “Hey, you know, did you know that your organization was 85% aware of the basic rules of cybersecurity awareness? It has gone down to 65%. As an AI, upon your instruction, I've decided to show more messages and cybersecurity awareness, and I'm happy to report that after two weeks, 95% of everybody knows cybersecurity awareness.” 

So yeah, it's basically bringing signage into the big world where because of all these PCs out there, added real estate screen, real estate is literally football fields more than the screens you have typically hanging out there if you're only using big screens. 

Right, and the screens themselves are physically bigger. As I'm chatting with you, I forgot the size of this curved screen thing I have here, but I could have a screensaver on one side and have a big desktop going anyway. 

Frank Hoen: Exactly, and basically, you can imagine how big of a screen it is while you are hammering away on emails, but while you're still working in the office or environment, you literally can see the screens to the corners of your eyes or colleagues, or when you walk through the canteen, it's basically, it's everywhere.

Your messages are omnipresent because you literally use every screen in your organization. 

So if I'm using this solution, is it a license that I buy, do I subscribe, or is it a bit of both? 

Frank Hoen: We have on-premise customers that's our current form, and that's preferred by, for example, defense and some of the large organizations, but we also have a new cloud platform, and that's license-based, so we have all variations of licensing. 

I assume the cloud side is pretty much essential for the work-from-home crowd.

Frank Hoen: Yeah. Although, actually, if they just installed it on their servers, then obviously the organization and the people have access to VPNs, and then it would be available as well. So it's that flexibility, which is really nice because some current customers don't need advanced AI integrations and things like that. However, they still want to be able to convey messages on their PC and rhe desktop digital signage, the alerts, that's all in there, and if they want the more advanced integrations with SharePoint, AI, and learning through signage screens, then they need to move to the Netpresenter Cloud.

Workplace has become a very hot vertical in digital signage. What was your reaction during the COVID era when all kinds of digital signage CMS software companies added some variation on corporate screensavers, desktops, and digital signage to their product suite? 

Frank Hoen: We saw plenty of them, and most of them were just one of them. “We have those kinds of features-ish” types of companies.

There have been no further developments. Some have been limited to an announcement or very basic functionality. It's very easy to hack a browser module, display something on it, and wrap it in there. Still, it's much more difficult to have a full-blown, reliable system that integrates with all back offices and middleware applications.

So, basically, it brings back vibes from the shareware days of some competitors. Unless you're committed to developing, keeping it secure, adding new features, making sure it's not an island, it's not something I would advise big organizations to invest in because, basically, it's just a side note for those organizations, 

Yeah. When you're talking, I was thinking it's the difference between a company saying, yeah, we can do that versus another company like you're saying, this is what we do. 

Frank Hoen: Exactly. It's the same with signage. Everybody can connect a big screen to PowerPoint. That's not signage. That’s like the Nike network and USB sticks. That's not signage. Well, I don't consider that signage, and it still is a thing. If organizations would simply calculate the total cost of ownership of the applications, which includes support, which includes messy things with drivers or special PC configurations and things like that, you don't have that when that with Netpresenter, you know, it has for 25 years, it had to run on anything out there, anything, and while being elegant in terms of PC resources and a network resource. With that much experience, no other competitor comes even close there. 

Sometimes, when a solution is focused on one thing, the other stuff it does isn't as robust as a pure-play digital signage CMS. How would you answer that?

Frank Hoen: We have an extremely robust CMS. Technically, it doesn't matter whether our signage is running on the desktop or big screen. It's even more difficult to run on a computer with dozens of applications open, and then we need to run reliably. Being able to run on those computer environments is so extreme, which means that Netpresenter software needs to be incredibly robust. So, I would argue that in terms of CMS, nobody can teach us lessons there. 

Again, whole countries use our software—the original Netpresenter software—and you would use it in your organization. They literally run it too; for example, we had a system a couple of years ago in the Netherlands that was addressing 50,000 public screens and millions of apps, and if you're able to do emergency public broadcast on such a massive scale and reliably run every day on millions of desktop computers abused by users every day, basically, that says something. 

Tell me about the company. How big are you? 

Frank Hoen: Truth be told, we're a relatively small organization. There was a very deliberate strategy never to go to the stock exchange or attract investor’s money, it was never necessary. We kept growing and have been profitable for 25 years in a row. We're very comfortable financially, very secure, and very robust. 

But yeah, I have a lot of friends. They did try to go to the stock exchange in the US, and some made it, but most didn't. So there are many organizations we see in our area that are just going bust trying to collect the big check on the stock exchange or investors becoming impatient and are downscaling. It's terrible, and it's killing the industry, and again, what kind of organization would you prefer?

Are you entirely self-funded, then? 

Frank Hoen: Oh yeah. 

So it's your company?

Frank Hoen: It's my company. 

And how do you sell? Do you go through channel or direct? 

Frank Hoen: Both, and there's a big opportunity for any of your listeners in the SharePoint or corporate world to connect with us for free. There's a big opportunity because how are you going to distinguish yourself from all these other internet integrators? 

So there's that. So we work through these integrators and there's direct sales as well for, if organizations are of such a scale that it becomes more comfortable to do so.

So, last question, what might we see over the next year or so from Netpresenter? 

Frank Hoen: Every new technology brings new capabilities, including the omnipresent AI and smart learning through signage, and that is our big focus right now. We want to be able to literally prove to management that through signage on your desktop and on the big screens, you can guarantee that your employees have seen and understood it. That's going to be our year. 

Yeah. I mean, that's made a big difference to the digital out of home community, the analytics and proof of view, and so on. So it makes sense that if you're going to make that investment in the enterprise, in the workplace, it'd be great if you actually knew it was working.

Frank Hoen: It's not just about counting views. That's not it. Imagine a piece of information comes on and is conveyed on signage, and a small part of the organization receives polls to answer a pop-up, for example, very small, as little as possible, and they're actually being asked if they understood the question. So it's not about counting views. It's much more than that. 

Gotcha. All right, Frank, thank you so much for your time. 

Frank Hoen: Thank you, Dave. It's been very nice.