Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

George Clopp, Korbyt

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

What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant?

That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform.

Using computer vision and machine learning, the idea is that if the platform can get a sense of what's making people stop and watch in a defined environment, then content can be optimized based on that interest.

The system finds and schedules content to push to screens based on engagement metrics.

How it all technically works is a bit over my shiny head, but I had a good chat with Korbyt CTO George Clopp about what's going on and its implications. We also get into what the future looks like for AI in digital signage.

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TRANSCRIPT

Geroge, thank you for joining me. We've chatted in the past. For those who don't know Korbyt, can you give me a rundown of what the company's all about? 

George Clopp: Hi, Dave. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. Yeah, Korbyt is at its root an employee engagement company. So we've got roots in digital signage, but our typical use case is using digital signage at corporate campuses and to communicate to employees, to increase employee engagement as well as to communicate real-time mission-critical stats as well. 

Is that pretty much the core vertical that you guys chase, workplace? 

George Clopp: It is. We are heavily into the workplace, meeting rooms as well. We do a lot with retail banks, a little bit into the retail space, but it's primarily corporate campuses.

For those who don't know the company, it actually goes back a long way to Symon Communications days, right? You guys were doing workplace communications long before the digital signage industry discovered that. 

George Clopp: Yeah, exactly right, Dave. It precedes me. I've been here for seven years now. I can't even believe it, but that's how much I enjoy this space and the industry. I enjoy the company so much, but we had Target Vision, Symon Communications, and we've just evolved. I joined at the tail end of 2016 to develop the Korbyt platform, and obviously, we have to meet the needs of the digital signage industry, but we've had a really heavy focus on employee engagement as well.

Is it interesting to see all these other companies who have more general offers, find their way into the workplace because they see that as an opportune vertical? 

George Clopp: Yeah, I view it as exciting. I think it's definitely a macroeconomic trend with the pandemic, post-pandemic, the modern workplace, everything is reimagining and reinventing and re-everything these days.

I think it's good. It's a legitimate macro problem that everyone's looking to provide solutions to. So, I'm really excited. I love the industry myself. 

In some respects, you guys have been doing back-of-house, a lot longer than most companies would have. I mean, you're not just working in the offices, you're working in production areas and so on. 

George Clopp: That's correct. Heavy in manufacturing and heavy in the contact centers, anytime where you're doing mission-critical real-time data, you're connecting to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or yard management system, and you want to change or orchestrate the display and the surroundings based on data changing, we've got a deep background in that. 

Yeah, for contact centers, if I recall, years ago pre-arrival with the company, you were doing low-resolution LED readouts that were just telling people in the contact center about the average wait time on calls and things like that. 

George Clopp: Exactly, and that's matured over the years and now we're doing that on the desktop and on the mobile device as well. We still have some supply chains and some yard management systems in a warehouse, where we'll do the little blinky boards over the dock doors themselves.

We range from the dock doors all the way to your mobile device now. 

The PR that came out about a new piece of functionality, your marketing talks about a million endpoints, 250 cloud migrations, and 100+ native integrations. 

A million endpoints, that's like a lot.

George Clopp: It is. Yeah, scalability and being able to expand out to touch desktops, normal, typical digital science screens, and mobile endpoints. It's been a real focus on us for the last four or five years. So we're really proud to announce that, and then the back end, like you were talking about those native data integrations, I think that's really what sets us aside from a lot of our competition is making those really hardcore authentications and then that real-time pipe between us and the source systems. 

I know a lot of other software in our space that we run into, they talk about integrations. A lot of times it's really just a file, they're taking data from a source system. They're putting it into a CSV format or any kind of other format and then they're pulling that in. So that's really where we shine with that real-time data integration. 

Is that important in terms of a distinction when solutions providers and users are looking at data integration and they see that a CMS says, yeah we do data integration, we can integrate with your platform? It sounds like you're saying there are different tiers of that, and there's real integration and there's just like a baseline. 

George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. That's the right way to pick up on that day, for sure. When you need to orchestrate and change things in a 911 center or in a manufacturing-type environment and definitely in a contact center, speed is really the key there. So having something on a five-minute loop that's pulling a file, it's just not fast enough. So you need that real-time data, you need that high availability so that something was to break that you've got a backup in place and you can make sure that contact center, that supply chain, that 911 center is rolling smoothly.

They're not just getting their data, but they're changing the experience of the data. That's another thing that we do, we pull in stats, but we also augment those stats and do value-added calculations on the stats, and then we trigger on those values to change the screen, or change the mobile device or change the desktop. So if you've got too many calls in the queue or you're running behind on this loading dock here, we'll change the entire experience for you based on that value-added stat that we do. 

I also assume that when companies talk about integrations, for very logical reasons, they're going to go to the most used platforms out there, whether it's Teams or God knows what. But if you have a hundred plus native integrations you're probably talking about some pretty exotic things that nobody's ever heard of, and if a company went in and said, we can integrate with their systems and they say, what those systems are, their eyebrows are going up, because they're thinking, I have never heard of that.

George Clopp: Absolutely, Dave. There are some low-level protocols where we just integrate at a TCP level with a very proprietary protocol, but I would say the bulk of it is more modern, JSON-based RESTful interfaces, for sure and we like to distinguish between data integrations, business application integrations, and SSO integrations, in three categories there.

So, like a Power BI or a Tableau or something like that would be more of a business application integration, and when we're talking data integration, we're talking more low level, running SQL against a data store, running web services, running SOAP-based web services, and to that extent. And again, that's why we call it out in our marketing because we do think that's a core differentiator for us. 

So just to go back to something, when you talk about a million endpoints, you're including desktops.. 

George Clopp: That's correct. Desktops and mobile devices, basically all of the endpoints that we talk to.

Good. Back at the start of summer, you guys introduced something called, Machine Learning Broadcast. What is that?

George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. We were involved with machine learning, and AI before it was really cool, so this was actually something we developed in 2018. We've been honing the model, and then we re-released it this year. But machine learning is a subset of AI, and we all know AI is a super big buzzword these days and when you peel that onion, there's levels of accuracy involved there, and there's a lot of hype around the world.

But the reason why we called the feature machine learning broadcast is really to focus on the ML aspects of it, and it's a great business problem to solve because, at the end of the day, what we're really creating is a recommendation engine. And I think everybody's familiar with the Amazon recommendation engine, Instagram, and other social media platforms that are just, they're recommending content for you.

That's essentially what we're doing here. We're using KNN Analysis, which is supervised machine learning to look at content that has some engagement with it, and that engagement could be measured by computer vision on a digital signage screen, it could be measured by interactivity with it on a desktop or interactivity with that content on the mobile device and then behind the scenes, all we're doing is we're finding out second, third, fourth-degree order content, that's related to the content that was engaging and then it's a feedback loop. We go ahead and automatically schedule that content and see how that content is engaged with so it's a self-learning feedback loop there and the whole purpose of it is to find content that's engaging and show more of that content to your employees.

Could you give me a real-world kind of example of how that might work?

George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Let's say a company's opening up a brand new office in Buenos Aires and for whatever reason, people really gravitate to that content. They look at it on the signage screen, on the fifth-floor break room, they're engaging with it on their desktop, they're looking at it on the mobile device. We learn from that engagement and say, okay, let's go ahead and find similar related content there. Let's find content related to office openings in Buenos Aires, and then let's go ahead and go further out and look at second, third-order tags. So that would be content related to South America as well. And then we automatically play that content, inject it back into the playlist, and our customers have complete control over whether it's automatic and which players actually get this content and which devices get it and then, we learn based on that content. So it's a feedback loop, and you might find in that case that your employees are really more interested in the geographic region than they are in the new office opening.

So it's relentlessly relevant. 

George Clopp: Exactly right, Dave, and solving a real-world business problem because one of the challenges our customers have is, it's really arduous to constantly schedule new relevant content. 

The first couple of times you do it, you create a scheduled playlist. Yeah, it's okay, but it takes a long time and then, with Attention Deficit Disorder in today's modern world, people grow immune, and they tune out that same content over and over again. So, you need that fresh content injected to keep the employee's attention. 

I'm guessing that somebody's going to be listening to this and thinking, that's cool, but where on earth do I get, or how do I develop all this content so that I do have this somewhat bottomless hyper-relevant content available?

George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. Right now, in its current stance with our ML broadcast, you need to have that content in your media library. We're not automatically going out to like copyright-free areas and pulling in content. But with our release coming out next year, it's called our AI employee engagement. With that, we'll automatically be creating and sourcing content for you on your behalf. 

Yeah, I saw a demo of something like that over in Germany a little while back with another company who, I'm sure you'll be happy if I don't name them, that was all about using what was available through an intranet and an extranet, and other resources to auto-generate content for screens.

George Clopp: Yeah, it's opening up the whole world of generative AI. We're actually looking at both. Whether there are generative images, generative video, or generative text. Obviously, in our space, images and videos mean a lot, and there are different systems out there. There's DALI 2, there's stable diffusion. They've all got their strengths and their weaknesses. But we're combining that with templated-based content as well. 

So automatically generating content that's relevant based off of a text prompt is super useful. But in some cases, it might not be the right content that's generated. So we also will have a mixture of templated content as well. 

Yeah, I think templates are a big part of that. I've farted around with things like Mid Journey and so on, and you could see how it could go sideways on you really quickly if you left too much up to the machine. 

George Clopp: Exactly. It gets into that whole thing of prompt engineering.

You got to be really good with your prompts, and they've all got issues like generating hands and things of that nature right now. But we want to be on the leading edge of this, use it where it makes sense. An area where we think it really makes a lot of sense, a preview into our AI Employee Engagement, is on mission values and goals. We feel like that's an area where our customers just don't communicate enough to their employees, like, there's cake in the break room, let's recognize employees. 

That's all part of it, but really just reinforcing, Hey, your goal in the finance department this week is to close your books three days earlier. And so, mix that text in with some great video or some great images that are created in the background using this generative AI.

Yeah, I saw something on LinkedIn last night, and I commented on it because I thought it is great that there's a company that's using KPIs and messaging right on the production floor, and the person who posted about it said, this is not very sexy, but it goes to what's needed on the floor for those workers. But the problem was, it looked like hell. 

It was just black and white, and they were slapping up a whole bunch of Excel charts, like a stock of them and you'd need binoculars to even see them. So it's important to think about the presentation. 

George Clopp: Yeah, totally agree, Dave. I say this at all my speaking events: content is king, content is queen, and that still rules the day.

When we're intermixing real-time data with content, it has to be visually appealing. You can't have 20 different stats on the screen; all of those rules of graphic design, I still think, hold true here. 

Do you see a day when things like scheduling and trafficking of content are largely automated and handed off to machine learning or some variant of AI? 

George Clopp: That's exactly what we're trying to build, Dave, with a release next year. With the ability, of course, to intervene, the ability for the communicator to come in and approve the content or really go ahead and bias the content and say, okay, I've got these 30 categories of content I see that I really want to bias, what the content areas could be. 

“Hey, I'm a new enroll. I'm a new first-time line manager. I'm a new director. I'm a new VP, and there's content associated with that new enroll.” They might want to bias that and increase the weight on it, decrease the weight on it, or take it out altogether. So there's still going to be that human touch involved in the ability to approve content, but the AI itself will take care of making sure that content is fresh and relevant.

And the big problem we're solving there is just that, again, attention deficit disorder people have, if they see the same thing on the screen, week after week, they tend to tune out. So how can we think of innovative ways to display KPIs, display goals, display things that are really important to the company and give it a great background, give it a great video so that it gets employees' attention again?

We're going to talk about machine learning. You reference AI-driven camera optics. Is that basically a computer vision?

George Clopp:  It is. Absolutely is, yes.

Did you guys write your own, or are you using something like Intel's OpenVINO? 

George Clopp: Yeah, the two big ones out there, we've used OpenCV, that is, Open Computer Vision, and TensorFlow, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but there are higher order problems we're trying to solve here, and not reinvent computer vision so we're using some libraries for that. 

Is that just part of the mix of doing this sort of thing? Are there other technologies you can use to get a sense of dynamics in a venue?

George Clopp: Yeah, I think so. Infrared detectors, pressure sensors that kind of tell you who's in that immediate vicinity. You're basically correlating that to human beings in the vicinity, how many human beings are there, and what was playing on the screen at that time. Yeah, so there are less technological ways to do this and still get some good results. 

AI is being talked about a lot as you've gone through about its potential to automate presentations. Are there other aspects to a digital signage company, the way your company operates, that you can use AI to help with marketing, help with customer contact, that sort of thing?

George Clopp: Yeah, without a doubt. I'm sure you're reading everything. It's revolutionizing all traditional roles, right? Not just engineers writing code. You got a chat with a ChatGPT engineer. With Microsoft's Copilot, it's going to revolutionize the way we all use Excel and Word and PowerPoint and things of that nature.

It's definitely revolutionizing marketing. Building product brochures for you automatically, things of that nature, and then, that naturally progresses into, is AI going to take all of our jobs, which I don't think so, going to help us all become more productive. The employees that really change and adopt the AI, I think they're going to be even more valuable than they are today.

It's just the employees that just say, I'm not going to do this, and they refuse to allow their cheese to be moved, those are the ones that I think you have to watch out for. 

There’s an increasing number of companies. I just wrote about one today that has gone down the path of headless CMS. The idea that you can leave the final presentation later, the interactive element, whatever it is to software developers at a large company or who works with a large company as a services company and the digital signage CMS is just the infrastructure, the foundational platform that does device management, scheduling, trafficking, all that sort of stuff.

Are you seeing that demand in the marketplace? 

George Clopp: We're seeing the opposite. What you're saying absolutely makes sense, especially with my background and the way we've architected our product with microservices. What we're seeing, especially with our large enterprise customers is, they want a little more white glove service.

Taking on the arduous task of piecing everything together, even with a microservices framework, is putting a lot of ownership on them. But that is not to say that there's not a need out there. We just really haven't found it. We've actually gone the opposite direction on our side, which has really served us well because we've gone from zero revenue in the cloud to 2 million. We brought on a new CEO, and we quickly ramped up to 20 million. I think it's working for us so far. 

Yeah, you're a very different company than maybe prior to you joining RMG Networks, that was a weird little side trip into digital out of home. 

George Clopp: It was. We see the artifacts and all that, but I think it's a great group of people here now. There's not a leftover where people have bad attitudes or anything like that. So really proud of where the company's been, the talent we've acquired. We've acquired people from all over the industry. Really love working with the current team and cross-functionally, not just engineering and support, which is what I run, but in sales and marketing as well. 

Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned you've gone in the opposite direction of headless. I've heard that as well, particularly when you get into, like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 kinds of enterprise-grade customers. They want to outsource digital signage, by and large, in the same way that they've outsourced a lot of IT services.

George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely. That's the same trend we're seeing, Dave too. It's a little bit of both, right? Everybody wants their cake and eats it too, right? Like they want you to have the ability to do it, but then when it comes time to actually execute on it, we typically find, Hey, we can help them get faster to market if we help augment their team.

How important is security?

George Clopp: Oh! It’s Huge. We all know that the disaster scenario in digital signage, someone compromises your network and they put up some content images or videos that are not appropriate. Even more so with us being more omni-channel with desktop, mobile devices. We've got a data privacy officer, we're SOC 2 compliant. We do a lot of work in Europe so GDPR comes up a lot as well, data privacy. So I think it’s super important. 

When I think you look at the different offerings out there and the first tier, we look and sound the same. So I think what you got to do with new prospects or new customers, they just got to peel that onion more. What does that really mean? What does it mean that you encrypt your data? Do you do it at rest? Do you do it in transit? Those kinds of things, and I think that's where you can tell the difference between different offerings. 

And are the people in the first and second meetings with prospective customers different than they were 7 years ago when you started? I'm hearing the IT people who used to come to meetings and sit there with their arms crossed, thinking, dear God, how long is this going to go on? They're now tending to lead these meetings. 

George Clopp: Yeah, I've seen it in multiple ways. Definitely, IT is still the big persona of the buyer here. But I'm also seeing less and less about speeds and feeds and players and hardware and transmission equipment and scalers and more about the final purpose of what we're trying to do.

I'm just starting to see that shift. Seven years ago, I talked to people, and it's the AV integration guy. I don't really care what's on the screen. I just care that it's not dark. I don't want a screen that's down. That's their most important thing, and now I'm seeing that shift a little bit more towards they do care about the content, and they're bringing in more of the HR and the communications group involved and making sure that the platform can grow. I can create content on the platform or I can integrate with Adobe or SharePoint or something along those lines. But I still see it, especially AV/IT as a huge influence in the buying process. 

Yeah, certainly going back seven, eight years when I was doing some one-to-one consulting with enterprise level customers, that sort of thing, I would go into a first meeting, and I would say, okay, why do you want to do this? And it was always intriguing to see how often people would lean back in their chairs and say, I hadn't really thought about that. They wanted this thing, but as you say, they didn't really know what they were going to do with this thing.

George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. And there's a little bit of power in that too. There's power to putting the latest and greatest screen technology in your office and giving you that modern technology look and feel but then just carry it one more step in the maturity direction and start focusing on the content too.

Yeah, you can demonstrate innovation by having a big ass screen in your lobby, but if there's nothing useful on there, you're not really demonstrating a lot of innovation. 

George Clopp: Exactly, and I think there's still room for that super wonderful creative experience that's human-curated that graphic designers make, and they spend a lot of time getting just perfect in those high profile areas, like the lobby of a company, and then there's also opportunity for, new content generation automatically for me so that I don't have to necessarily sit here and handle this thing. So I think we're going to live in a world where both will be applicable.

So you mentioned you, you're working on new iterations of AI-driven content. Is that the big kind of roadmap item for your company over the next year? 

George Clopp: Yes, it really is. Yeah. We've got a huge, large-player ecosystem, all the data integrations, and omni-channel platforms. So where our new development team is focused on is automating the content creation, automating that entire feed, if you will, so that it really takes that arduous process away from our communicator.

How many folks do you have in the company now?

George Clopp: We're a little under 70 people right now. So still a small company and I love it cause everybody has to wear multiple hats, do multiple roles. You have to bring a lot of energy to the company, and I just love that. I've just grown so fond of it over the last seven years. 

And is most of the team in the Dallas Fort Worth area, or are you all over the place?

George Clopp: Since COVID, we're mainly in Dallas, but since COVID, a lot of us have moved out a little bit. So I'm actually in Colorado. Some of my engineering leads are in the West Coast, some are in Pennsylvania. So we're really practicing what we preach, the hybrid workforce.

All right, George, thank you for spending some time with me. It was good to catch up.

George Clopp: Yeah, it's fantastic, Dave. Thank you so much for taking time out.

Andrew Gould, Ditto (Squirrels)

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

A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen.

I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring.

Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer.

Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions.

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TRANSCRIPT

Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product? 

Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting. 

So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this?

Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here’s what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that. 

So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.” 

That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario?

Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud. 

The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a moment.

So, in essence, whether it's a teacher or a student or in a working environment, whether it's the person leading the meeting or somebody who's a participant, they could pull up their phone, their tablet, whatever it may be, and if they have the Ditto app, they can push their screen to the main screen in that room?

Andrew Gould: Exactly, and our big focus with the collaboration part of Ditto is that device agnostic approach. So we want any kind of device that's coming into a space to be able to share, not just if you have an Apple device, it'll work to this Apple TV, or if you have a Google device that'll work to this Chromecast.

We really push hard to make sure that each device that comes in, whether it's from a browser or from a native app on a platform, can connect and quickly share. 

And that's important in a number of ways. A, it doesn't slow down the meeting, but it removes a lot of IT support and AV/IT support within an organization, whether it's a school or a business. Because I've been in those meetings where somebody says here, I'll just share my screen, and then 15 minutes later, it's still being sorted out.

Andrew Gould: Yes, and we've all gone into those rooms that have the laminated sheet of instructions of, “If you're using this device, it's these seven steps, and if you're using this device, you have to be on this network. Then you have to do these three steps, et cetera, et cetera.” All of that goes away with Ditto which means far fewer support calls for the IT staff, and just a more pleasant experience is that we have people come into our offices, accountants, lawyers, just general non-technical people, and they're blown away at how easy and fast it is to get their content up on the screen, which is all anybody wants.

We don’t care about how fast or how crisp it is or how cool it looks once it's up there if it takes you 10 minutes to get it connected. So quick, fast, easy is always our guiding light as we mature the product and move it along. 

On the digital signage side of this, the way it's marketed from what I can see is, it's a tandem product, as opposed to, we are a collaboration product that, oh, by the way, we can also do this. You seem to be saying, “It's a full-fledged product on its own. If you wanted, you could just use it for digital signage.” Is that a fair statement? 

Andrew Gould: Oh yeah, for sure. We have customers that turn off the mirroring capabilities and they just use it for digital signage. Menus in the fast dining have TVs over the counter where people order. We have customers that are just using it for that, that don't even care about what the original purpose of Ditto was, which was the screen mirroring stuff, and then we have customers that only use it for screen mirroring and we haven't got them up and running on digital signage ye. They haven't realized what the value add is. 

But there are more customers doing both. They are mirroring, and then when it’s not mirroring, they are showing important information to the users. Whether it's connection information, things going on at the organization, stocks, or just the kind of stuff to keep it feeling more fresh, utilizing those screens. But yeah, it's definitely a product that can just be utilized as a standalone digital signage solution.

I'm guessing that you and particularly your customer-facing folks fight a perception problem in that there are other products out in the marketplace that were started as one thing and added digital signage on, and generally speaking, the perception I have and the feedback I've somewhat heard is that, “Yeah, it can do digital signage too, but we're not talking about robust digital signage. We're talking like we can run a set of files on a screen in an order and that's about where it begins and ends.” 

Andrew Gould: We are not an industry-leading digital signage solution when it comes to features. There are incumbents that are far more feature-heavy than we are, but what we've tried to focus on are the things that the customers truly need to have a good digital signage experience. So it's being able to create signage lists, as we call them, which are basically playlists of media, ease of use of setting all of that up in the configuration portal, so that it doesn't feel like an add-on or a thing etucked into a corner. A lot of time and energy is spent on the part that actually the end user never sees, which is configuration managing of all the media files and also providing templates for people who don't want to or don't have the resources to create their own digital signage assets. Providing some really easy turnkey solutions as well to say, hey, if you just need to get some basic information shown and you don't want to have to pay a designer or something like that to create something, here are some really cool templates that we've put together for you and they're just WYSIWYG, change this line, change the subject, change the body, upload an image, add a video, and you're ready to go with really nice looking digital signage. 

So I wouldn't say we are innovating digital signage by any means, but we're trying to create a package that doesn't feel like we just bolted something onto the side of it. That really feels like a first-class digital signage solution.

In a lot of cases, while there are certainly feature-rich software options out there, I suspect a hell of a lot of end users don't ever use more than 15% of what's available to them with those platforms. 

Andrew Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We poll our users frequently about, “Hey, what do you like about the product? What don't you like about the product?” That's the most important part. We wanna make that better, and we ask, “Hey, here's a whole list of different things. How much would you use this?” 

The feedback nears that there is 10-15% of features we don’t have that people say they might use, and most of the people say that they probably would never use synchronized digital signage across eight different screens or things that kind of fall into the more high-end solutions for digital signage. They just want ease of use, things that look nice and reliable. Those are what they care about the most.

Yeah. So if somebody comes to you and says, “We're putting a huge LED video wall in the lobby. Can you drive that?” You might say, I suppose we could maybe do that, but that's not what we're here for. 

Andrew Gould: We've certainly had those requests and we've said, “Hey, here's how you would do that if you are ready to do it. But, to be honest, there are better solutions for that problem.” 

Digital signage is not a one-size-fits-all problem. There is very high-end hardware that drives large billboards and there's our end where we're just trying to drive it on a 70’’ screen in a room. So we don't have to solve everyone’s problems. We're fine saying, that sounds really cool. We wished Ditto was designed to do things like that. You might be better served with something that's from the ground up built to power stuff like that. 

You can stay in your lane, and it's a pretty decent-sized lane. 

Andrew Gould: Correct. Yeah, it's a huge market. So there's plenty of room for lots of people to all be swimming, doing different things, and not really stepping on each other.

One of the problems I find with some entry-level, and I'm not saying yours is, but just in broad strokes, entry-level platforms don't have much in the way if they have anything at all in terms of device management, and I gather that your device management is done through third-party device management modules, like the Jamf and so on.

Andrew Gould: Yeah. So early on, we explored building Ditto with MDM capabilities. But what we experienced in talking with our customers is that most of them already had a solution to do those sorts of things. So we would have to convince them to switch to our device management platform and 90% of what MDM does has nothing to do with what we would need to do with it. So we'd be building out this whole lump on the side of Ditto just to be able to replicate the service they were already using so they would switch to ours. 

So we ultimately looked at that and said, this isn't the right fit for us, rather than trying to fight upstream and convince all of these customers that already have solutions to switch to ours. Let’s just partner with all of these solutions and make it work really well. So we've partnered with the various Apple TV MDM vendors to make it really turnkey to mass deploy Ditto to hundreds of Apple TVs with literally just pushing a couple of buttons. So that's been our approach to it and that seems to be what the customer's like with us. 

Yeah, if they're already using it, why would they go to something that's just dedicated to your application? 

Andrew Gould: No matter what I do, I will always be inferior to a Jamf. They're a huge publicly traded company focused solely on MDM. I'm never gonna make an MDM as good as theirs, so why try? 

What is your footprint, and what would you say are your core vertical markets? 

Andrew Gould: The core vertical markets definitely K-12 and higher education in the United States. We have a footprint all around the world. We're in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America. We have a lot of business users as well, whether that's in office space or co-working spaces have been a big business for us lately, as people are working from home but wanna get out of the house occasionally and go somewhere else. Those office spaces are looking for easy mirroring as people come in and out.

But we’re really focused on the K-12 and higher education market because this solution just fits so nicely into that environment. It works great in business. It works great in fast casual dining and all these other places that people use Ditto. But what's cool about Ditto is that it is so universal as a tool. It can plug in all kinds of places. We have churches that use it to show the lyrics to songs as people are singing along. There are all kinds of really interesting applications that we set out to get into flexible and adaptable tools and put into a lot of interesting environments. 

When it comes to education, how is it being used in classrooms? 

Andrew Gould: So you've typically got it running on the screen at the front of the room, whether that's an interactive whiteboard or just a TV mounted on the wall or projector, whatever. It's usually connected to that, and then primarily, the teacher is using it to push her screen from a laptop device up to the screen, and then we can support up to four devices sharing at the same time. So then students will connect and we have an add-on application for Windows and iOS where the teacher can manage who's allowed to be sharing. She can approve or deny connections to hide somebody if she wants to emphasize on her screen and not the other students who are connected to that.

Then typically, when nothing is being shared, there's digital signage that's usually managed at the school level, but we do have some schools that allow the teachers to set up their own digital signage per classroom. So you're seeing that digital signage there and then it's spilling out into the hallways. They're putting TVs into hallways of even K-12 schools, higher ed common areas. They're running mainly just digital signage in those areas versus the hybrids that they're running in the classrooms. 

Are school districts mostly using Apple TVs? 

Andrew Gould: It’s about two-thirds Apple TVs and one-third Windows devices, that’s how our users break down. So it's not quite 50-50. I think it's trending more towards that 50-50 blend. Early on, it was very Apple TV heavy, and we're seeing a bit more of a skewback towards Windows devices. 

I'm not sure exactly what's behind that trend, maybe it's the drive down of cheaper and cheaper Windows devices that can actually run 4k video and kind of stuff, the nooks, and the likes But yeah. So right now, the blend is really two-thirds Apple TVs. 

What about collaboration displays that have systems on chips embedded in them, can you work with those? 

Andrew Gould: So we've looked at the Android TVs and Samsung's OS and those sorts of things.

The feedback that we've got from customers is that they are not really interested in that capability. The limitation of that is usually given the horsepower on those devices; we can usually only show one or two screens at a time. It ends up making Ditto, a hobbled product for it, and most of the time when people come to us, they've already got Apple TVs purchased or they've got a Windows device, they're already looking to use, and they're coming from the, “I picked my device, now I'm looking for the solution” approach, and the Smart TVs don't come up in the conversations that much.

We're not opposed to it. If that's the way the market wants to go, we can surely adapt to that. All our technology is really flexible, so it's quick for us to repurpose a new platform, but just not what the customers are asking these days. 

Yeah, and it's not like an Apple TV is expensive. 

Andrew Gould: It's $150, and it'll run for probably 10 years before you have to worry about replacing it. They're really rock solid. 

When you're selling into K12 in particular, are you selling district-wide or do you have to sell down to the school level? 

Andrew Gould: It's typically district-wide. It's usually the IT coordinator or applicable semi-related role there that's looking to roll out an agnostic solution, and that's another place where we really shine is that schools are not one-to-one all the same type of device. You're typically seeing iPads in the lower grades, and then you're seeing Windows surfaces or Chromebooks as you get more into typing and writing papers and those sorts of things. So they want one solution that's going to work across the board for all of those things, and that's what Ditto's bread and butter is.

So that starts the conversation off right away: one solution, you're supporting one product across, whether you have three schools or a hundred schools in the district, it's all the same solution, and then we can start the conversations if you realize digital signage, you've got all these screens in the cafeteria or the hallways, how are you putting information up there? And a lot of times it's, oh, there's a USB drive, and we go around and collect them, and we update them once a month. Somebody's job is to update the USB with the media and plug it back into all the TVs, and there is a much better way to do that.

With a lot of schools using Chrome devices, is that problematic at all, or does it work with your system just fine?

Andrew Gould: No, it works great with Chrome. So Chrome  OS used to have applications; they called them Chrome Apps. So we originally had a Chrome app that did all of this. That was in the store.

And then Google wound down Chrome apps just because they weren't really being utilized all that much on the platform. So we went to a pure browser experience. So you just go to our goditto.com website, and you enter the room code that's being shown on the teacher screen, and then we just use the web RTC built-in technology to capture the screen and send it over to Ditto receiver and show it so you can actually share without installing anything on a device, and that works on all platforms that support the browser capture technology. 

There are other options out there for certainly higher ed. You've got companies like Rise Vision that's particularly strong in K to 12 in churches and things like that, and some others How do I describe them, CMS software companies that are focused on that market, and then you've got the companies like Zoom that have video collaboration that have added on some digital signage capabilities and the Air Teams, where people who do similar screen mirroring. How do you match up against them and how do you sell against them?

Andrew Gould: Yeah, so the Air Team and Immersive, they're selling proprietary hardware with a subscription service on top of it. So if you're looking for, “Hey, just give me a turnkey solution, give me everything. I'm not really worried about the price, I just want it to work.” Those are great solutions. But what we see in schools is they care very much about the cost and the pricing, and some of them have already made investments into hardware with Apple TVs or Windows devices, and they're saying, look, this is just extra cost that I don't need to do the same thing.

So how we position against those is just, “Hey, you can use whatever hardware you want. We're happy to run on either of those platforms and if you've already got them, cool, just buy our subscription, and you're ready to go. You don't have to worry about buying a five, six or eight hundred dollar hardware device, deploying it, or managing it differently than how you manage other things.” So that's how we match up against those. 

The more CMS type things that are focused on, digital signage in those very specific things. Again, those are the incumbents, those are the people that have been doing this; some of them have been there for decades doing this type of stuff. So we're not here to try and outcompete those companies. We just see that there are certain niches that maybe those companies don't fill as well, and we're content to come along and fill those in and keep improving our product, and one day, maybe we'll compete with them. Maybe we'll have a platform that we've decided, hey, we should just make it do everything for everybody and look at going after competitors like those. 

But like I said, the market is big enough that they can have that niche. We can have this niche, and it's a very healthy business for us, and we're happy to keep doing that. There are a couple of things that we know how to do really well versus, maybe, trying to get too big too fast, trying to do everything all at once. 

Was having the digital signage component added to it pretty important because you've got companies like Google that have Chromecast that costs 35 bucks or something like that, that can do some degree of screen sharing, and it would be people who are really cost conscious, they could just go down that path?

Andrew Gould: Yeah, for sure. We don't really see many Chromecast in school-type approaches. For whatever reason, they still don't have basic security like onscreen code or passwords. They've only recently rolled out the ability to remotely manage those types of things. Adding digital signage wasn't really about competing with any particular thing. 

The customers that we have and the ones that we're trying to get all value this functionality, and we saw it as a natural fit. It wasn't like we had to completely reinvent the product and take it in some radical new direction. It just seemed like a natural complement to what we were already doing and we talked with some customers. We're running two different solutions on an Apple TV, and they were trying to use Ditto for screen mirroring, and they were trying to use a different Apple TV application for digital signage, and they were trying to do crazy MDM scheduling, based on the class schedule, lock this app for Ditto, so it's open, and then when it's time in between class, walk the digital assignment solution, and we said, there people really want it that bad, maybe we can just be all of that in one and not force our customers to have to run two things like that. So that was the natural genesis of it versus we need to protect our position or something like that. It just made it evolutionary to move in a new direction.

So, how seamless and intuitive is it? 

Let’s say, it is running in digital signage mode, the screen is, and the teacher decides, I want to push something to the screen from my laptop or my phone or whatever, and launches that session, does its thing. To then go back to digital signage, what's involved?

Andrew Gould: You just start sharing your screen and stop sharing your screen.

So it's directed from the device that wants to share their screen. So, when you open the app, you enter the room code. We make them fun, easy to enter, like red apples, big pineapple things that are easy, not like random numbers and digits that are hard for kids to type in.

And they push ‘Start sharing’ and boom, their screen's up there, digital signage fades out, screen sharing fades in. It's an instantaneous switchover, and then as soon as the last person stops sharing their screen, if you've got multiple people connected, it goes right back to the digital signage slide it was on when the person first connected. So it's very easy. There's no mode, nothing you have to tinker with on the screen itself. 

So the management, whether it's the school, the district, or the individual teacher, they’re using a browser to plan out their digital signage side of what the screen's doing?

Andrew Gould: Yeah. It's all a cloud-based portal. So you can be in the same building, or you can be in a different state. We have businesses that are deployed with Ditto in offices around the world, and there are a couple of people that sit in California and they manage all the digital signage worldwide. So it's super easy right from the portal.

And what's the commercial side of it? What are you paying? Is it a SaaS? 

Andrew Gould: Yeah, it's a SaaS model. It's a yearly subscription. We offer a monthly if people are using this in bursts, but obviously, you save money by purchasing for an annual versus monthly. And it's per screen that's running Ditto. 

So the other thing that we allow is, if you have multiple screens in a classroom, obviously, you can show digital signage on those, but we actually allow one device to push their content to multiple screens. So we're seeing, especially in some classrooms, you've maybe got a screen in the front or to the side or behind as they set up classes less like when I was in school where it was just rows, everybody facing the front now that these little pods of kids are sitting at tables and not everybody's facing the same direction, so they've actually got multiple screens in the rooms. So we just charge per screen that runs the software, and that's it.

What's the fee? 

Andrew Gould: So, it's $12.50 per month annually. So it's $125 per month if you're at 10 or more receivers in a school.

Is that just for the screen mirroring, or is that for the functionality, including the digital signage?

Andrew Gould: Yeah. That's for everything. That's one price for everything. We don't charge more for that. We view it as, “Hey, we took this thing that we charge this price for. It made it even better by giving you all the stuff, and it's the same price.” 

And that includes the emergency alerts as well. So that ties into a protocol called CAP, which is how the National Weather Service and School Alert Systems all can send alerts. So we have a CAP server capability, where we can receive alerts from other servers, whether it's the National Weather Service, an alert system that, unfortunately, a lot of schools are having to deploy now, where it can push one button and text the parents and send a push notification and send all the alerts out to Ditto and Ditto immediately takes over and shows that alert. You get all of that for that one price. 

Yeah, it sounds very much like this isn't a constrained compromise limited solution for the K to 12 market, it's gonna do pretty much what an average classroom and what an average school is going to need. 

Andrew Gould: Yeah, we really tried to put everything in there because, again, we don't want people having to be like, “Well, Ditto almost does everything. It'd be great if it just did this one other thing, and then we wouldn't need this other solution.” The hope is that we can provide that one solution that everybody needs. 

Tell me more about the company. It's been around since 2008. Is it privately held, or are you listed? 

Andrew Gould: We're privately held. I'm one of the co-founders of the company, started it back in 2008 with my business partner.

When we first started out, we weren't doing collaboration. We were doing iOS app development. We had one of the first 50 apps in the iOS app store. We could actually get to the bottom of the list.

It was a TV guide app where you could put in the code and see what was on TV. It sounds like an archaic technology today but it was pretty cool back in the day, and then we got into the collaboration space in about 2012 when we released our first collaboration app, and then we've been focused on collaboration ever since. 

Where's the company based? 

Andrew Gould: North Canton, Ohio, about an hour south of Cleveland but we have a diversified team present in a lot of states all around the country, but all the within the United States. 

Is the majority of your business in the US? 

Andrew Gould: Yes. That's where mainly our outbound sales are focused on. But, like I said, we have a really big following actually in Australia. A lot of ditto customers there, and we are working on expanding into Europe this year and into next year to really go after that. There's a lot more regulation and requirements, and apps have to work certain ways and those sorts of things that we want to make sure that we're compliant and respectful to those things and come into that market appropriately, but it's a big focus for us because we think the same needs exist there as they do everywhere else.

Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of US and Canadian companies think they can just make the jump over, and then they get asked about things like GDPR and they're looking at the other person, “What?” 

Andrew Gould: Yeah, or even just common things like in France, everything has to be localized into the French language.

If you have one string in your application that's in English, they typically won't purchase. They value that. So we want to be respectful to those things, and they're not hard things for us to comply with. It just requires us to pay somebody who knows French to translate a list of strings, and then we can sell into those markets as well.

Are you selling direct, or do you have channel partners? 

Andrew Gould: Mainly direct. We have some channel partners that we started with right before the pandemic, and so we've seen a lot of that market move around, and so some of the channel partners that we originally partnered were more business-focused and the world has changed for business where people just aren't going to the office as much anymore, and those channel partners just didn't make sense. 

So we're actually working through a sort of reset of that channel partner program to be more education-focused with the channel partners. But we have some really great channel partners in the US that we work with, whether they're distributors or they're resellers, whether they're just purchasing on behalf of the school and passing that through, or taking our solution and bundling it up with, “Hey, here's the screen you need and here's the speakers and the WiFi and everything,” and including us as a full technology rollout. We like to work with both of those. 

If people want to know more, where do they find you online?

Andrew Gould: Our website is goditto.com. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial there. You can set up as many screens as you want, and play with digital signage as much as you want for 30 days, and then, as I said, it starts at $150 per receiver for a single license, and then we have volume pricing above 10 and it scale scales down from there. 

Great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Andrew Gould: Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.

Jason Ault, Coffman Media

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

Jason Ault was working in the traditional sign business back in the late 2000s when a customer contract came along that required a digital sign. He had an IT background, so he stuck up his hand and took it on.

He caught the bug, so to speak, and has been in digital signage ever since - putting together an initial team that launched in 2010 as Coffman Media. The Columbus, Ohio-based solutions provider has found a niche in the middle of buying market - not the little guys who can't offer much scale, and not the Fortune 500s that are going to opt for a national integrator, major software firm or even a giant consulting firm.

Coffman is particularly active providing a solution, plan and services in workplaces and in regional and mid-sized QSRs, notably coffee chains.

Jason and I chat on this podcast about its services, how the marketplace and needs have evolved, the gulf that still exists between conventional and digital sign companies, and the steady need for educating end-users.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Jason, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a bit about Coffman Media and your role there? 

Jason Ault: Absolutely. Coffman Media is a digital signage integration firm that we started almost 14 years ago and I am the co-founder and chief operating officer.

You guys are in the Columbus, Ohio area and then down in Jacksonville as well? 

Jason Ault: That's correct. We just opened the Jacksonville office just over a year ago. But servicing customers all across the US, Canada, and Mexico. 

How did you get into it? 

Jason Ault: Back in 2008, I was with a traditional sign company, and we were doing a big mall redevelopment project, and some of that scope called for digital signage and back then, my background was computer information, so we decided to say yes to that part of the scope as well. Took it on, partnered with CoolSign way back then before Haivision acquired it and really caught a bug for the industry, started formulating a team that we wanted to put together, and launched the shingle of Coffman Media in February of 2013.

It’s interesting, that the traditional printing industry seems like this is something that they have to go towards and evolve into, and while we've seen some of it, it still seems like an industry that's not really made the jump or evolved into it.

Jason Ault: I absolutely agree, and we see the same thing as well. Just knowing that industry, from my previous life and also working with a lot of traditional sign companies, it is a struggle for them to get into because it does require some computer skills and some networking skills. Obviously, they may have some content chops and metal fabrication chops, but they still need that networking and computer element. 

Is that something that you guys help out on? 

Jason Ault: Absolutely, everything from traditional sign companies to managed service providers, because they don’t know the signage side, even they don’t know the IT side, architects, really anyone trying to get into digital signage side, we can help them in pre-sales support, demos from CMS partners that we have, training up their clients, passing it off, supporting their clients, really however far they want us to go into the weeds with them, we can help them out. 

So you start all the way at the ideation stage with some customers and can take them all the way through managed services?

Jason Ault: Absolutely. It depends on where they want to jump off and take over. We can come in under their banner; we can come in as partners with our logo. This depends on how they want to present us as a partner to the end customer.

It's interesting because the digital signage market, particularly the software companies tends to present their products as being very easy to use, and very intuitive. They spend a lot of time explaining use cases and everything else but still seems to be a big leap for traditional companies who don’t think about this stuff sometimes. Why is that?

Jason Ault: At the surface level, we are right in some aspects, it is easy to use but as digital signage use is evolving, content is getting dynamic. People want to integrate into data that's living out on the web somewhere or integrating into a point of sale or a plethora of other things that you can plug into. That's where things get lost and they need someone to come in and help tie all those things together.

I refer to companies such as yours as solutions providers as opposed to integrators, which sounds like an arms and legs hang and bang situation. Is that a term that fits?

Jason Ault: Yeah, at the end of the day, we are a solution provider. We live on both sides of the world, but at the end of the day, we're always starting with the end in mind, working backward, and figuring out what solution fits that customer's needs. We're not just one CMS partner shop. We're not just one hardware shop. It really is what fits customers' needs the best.

And so you don't have your own software, you don't have proprietary hardware or anything else, so you're able to just look at a job and figure out, okay, based on what Mr. Customer's tell us, here's what we'd recommend. 

Jason Ault: Exactly. We've got three core CMS partners that we've formulated over the years with Signage Live being our longest tenure at 13 years running, and then hardware runs the gambit to whatever that platform supports, and then we pick from that bucket. 

So, why would you have three software partners?

Jason Ault: This depends on the customer. Sometimes a need is going to lean towards their benefit more. So if we need a native POS integration, we can look to engage Spectrio. If we need a lot of data binding, we can look at Wallboard, but our largest partner is really Signage Live because they approach it from an API-first headless perspective so we can do a lot of unique things with them and we developed really great projects over the years, so that's the standpoint but again the need is justifying the partner that we bring to the table for that total solution. 

That's interesting. I obviously have a relationship with Spectrio and know their product very well because of the ownership position. But the Signage Live component when Jason Cremins, the CEO of Signage Live, told me three years ago now, that he was going down the path of headless CMS, it was early days for that, and I had to ask him to tell me what that is and he did, and I thought I could see the marketplace moving towards this thing just because of the flexibility that it presents. Is that what you found? 

Jason Ault: It is, and then it correlates to what came out and the Invictus reports last year or this year, I can't remember which one it was, where it's talking about the new wave of architecture that's gonna have to come down the pike for CMSs partners and that's really where I think Signage Live was a little bit ahead of the curve and had already gone down that path of headless API first and how they were going to market three years ago.

Yeah, I think Stefan from Invictus describes it as the old style is very monolithic, and the new style is composable, where you can come at it from different angles and inject content and make things happen. Plus, you can use your own tools. 

Jason Ault: Exactly. 

Have you found over 14 years that customer needs have evolved?

Jason Ault: A hundred percent. I'd say 30% of our business this year will be Gen 2, and Gen 3 digital signage partner relationships for us. And it's not because they were unhappy necessarily with their partner, but the infrastructure or solution that they had in place for however many years, it'd be no longer able to suit their needs.

Everything from being able to ingest outside content in unique ways, supporting new hardware that has security measures being able to pass all these, security requirements now. So everything is secure from the customer's standpoint. Those kinds of things are changing quite rapidly.

 Yeah, and you're sitting up above this.

I'm very curious because you have your software partner, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time looking at everything that's out there. I'm curious, if you find that a lot of software companies are stuck in their lane and don't have the mechanism to expand and make what they have more open.

Jason Ault: Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. Whether it comes down to how it's built or just where they're in the market and they can't really move past it. They do have their niche and that's just where they stay. That's where I think we have three great tools in our tool belt that can handle pretty much anything thrown at us, from a unique perspective one of mail digital signage to something that's experiential.

I talk to companies a lot about the importance of identifying the marketplace understanding, what you do, and what you're particularly good at versus general offers. 

As a solutions provider, have you started to focus on particular vertical markets, or is it somewhat generalized? 

Jason Ault: We're starting to focus really in the last 12 months, and that's really between corporate communication and quick service restaurants. We had some really great wins in each of those sectors and found our identity in those, but that's still not to say that we won't serve other opportunities that come to our direction either through partners or just by knocking on the door.

Those are two incredibly competitive markets to go after. How do you set yourself apart?

Jason Ault: It’s a great question. In a way, it’s hyper-competitive. So, we are not necessarily fishing for the whales or maybe not even the tunas, but in that mid-market space, someone with 100 locations, or maybe they're just coming up to that three-digit all the way to approaching the four-digit mark, we really found a nice little lane where we can help them out from setting up what a total solution should look like, rolling it out and being that consultative arm for them, vverything from clearance bars through headsets to digital signage, really every piece and stack that could be around that whole ecosystem, and we're bringing it together as one package. That's where we're setting ourselves apart from and then serving that kind of middle market. 

Yeah, I suspect when you talk about the whale accounts in QSR and even in Fortune 500 companies for workplace communication, the large ones are not as price-sensitive. They're somewhat conditioned to working with big consulting companies and just large service providers versus, as you described, the regional ice cream chain or whatever where those kinds of companies come in to see them. They're looking at them like, you want two extra zeros from us, and that isn't going to happen.

Jason Ault: Exactly. A lot of the time, those mid-market franchise orders are struggling with the balance of how do I either roll this into the total package for new stores or they want us to deal with the franchisees directly, and a lot of times, that can be very cumbersome for an organization, but we take that on, and yes, it comes with our own licks, shut doors and we don’t get paid, or we are served bankruptcy papers but we’ve been able to make some wins at it. 

We are hyper-focused within the QSRs side, and we found a home with coffee chains, I don’t know how they fell in, but it just started to snowball.

I think it's one of those cases where they don't quite understand what they're asking for and why they need it, but if they can see an example of another chain that they compete with or are familiar with, they can see, okay, this is what they did so yeah, we want that too. 

Jason Ault: It's kind of a way of Keeping up with the Joneses’ aspect, and that's where we're able to show them, here's the package that we do, obviously skewed for their particular organization, but helping them along the way, getting them familiar with understanding what they're asking for and then making sure that the value is perceived from the dollar they are spending.

The pandemic and the lockdown compelled QSR, in particular, to start looking more at this because maybe they had to do drive-through, which they didn't do in the past, and they had to do self-service kiosks because staffing became an issue. 

Jason Ault: It did, and it didn't. We actually had a couple of partners that reverted away from digital because they were now just doing takeout as more on the piece of the side where they were having dine-in. They just realized that it's not going to change. They're doing a lot more just from the mobile pickup delivery, that kind of aspect. But then, on the other flip side of more traditional quick-service, absolutely, really force them into thinking how we can work better in the current market?

And then that's just propelling it forward three years later.

I still see pretty substantial QSR chains out there that have issues with what's on the display and that they're not integrated fully or properly with their restaurant management system. So they're doing things like putting stickers over the top of items that aren't available or wrestling with them, do I stroke something out on the screen, or do I make it disappear? 

Are those things pretty elemental?

Jason Ault: It is, and it is a struggle, and seems to me, the larger the organization is, the less process there is in order to ensure that screens are operated in the correct fashion. We see it all the time, whether it's a drive through which I'm personally going through or one we're trying to win the business up. You can set things in motion, and one of them starts with integration and giving some autonomy for people to fix the screen. That way, your corporation does not necessarily have to be the big brother that’s managing everything. 

There are roadblocks to put in place to stop those things from happening. Physical tape is a little bit harder unless we shock somebody when they touch it, but there are ways to put those stops in place.

When you're dealing with the small regional to mid-size chains, is it more challenging technically because maybe they're not standardized on restaurant management systems, point of sale systems, that sort of thing?

Jason Ault: It's a little challenging. One thing that we try to do is bring in partners if that is the case. Talking with point-of-sale companies, they don't necessarily go that route, but at least we can bring in some people to help in that scenario. We do like to at least have them unified on point of sale, so we're doing only some kinds of integrations, but it is a struggle for sure. 

Even a chain of a hundred stores we're currently working with, they've got two or three points of sales because some people are still on legacy contracts and things like that, and we just have to work with those as they pop up.

Do you have to spend a lot of time educating franchise owners that this is why you want to do this, because they really don't wanna drop $15,000 on a drive-through display?

Jason Ault: Hundred percent. Pretty much every partner who a customer, whom we are aligned with, at their annual conventions talking, teaching, and explaining the value, because we just had one that was doing dual lane drive-through, and that obviously doubled the cost.  They went static rather than digital. They just didn't see the extra value of spending the 50 grand to do all of that. So, it still needs to improve the current partners that we have today. 

I'm curious about the workplace side where you're seeing traction. Like how is it being used?

Jason Ault: That's a great question. We do a lot of manufacturing right on the plant floor. Keeping those folks up to speed on what's going on, and then we're also doing a lot of just traditional workplace communication, between multi-sites and multi-silos within the organization just to generalize workplace communication. Still, manufacturing has had a pretty big uptick. Everything from screens down at the machine level to doing some video walls on the plant floor that everyone can see with some workplace KPIs and things like that to get some real-time information to the floor folks. 

Yeah, that's always struck me as more useful in many respects than white-collar environments like offices because there are typically ways to communicate to people all the way down to the level of a manager walking out and talking to somebody, but when you're in a desk-less environment, and you've got a whole bunch of workers who maybe don't even have English as a first language, how do you reach these people? How do you tell people what's going on? How do you motivate them? All those things. 

So it's encouraging to see that now, really starting to get some traction.

Jason Ault: Yeah, absolutely, and we're also seeing a couple of the real estate players that are in the commercial side, taking a look at putting in digital signage as part of these packages to make it an entire scene for someone coming into renting the warehouse for the manufacturing business.

So, it is just part of their infrastructure? 

Jason Ault: Exactly. So it’s, “Hey, this is why you should choose me over the competitor's space. We have this great infrastructure”, and then when that tenant leaves, they can wipe it all clean and have it ready for the next person.

Do you have to future-proof those sorts of things? Because if there are tenants and they sign a five-year lease, and somebody else comes in, are the screens still in the right place, or maybe a five-year window is enough, and you don't worry about that? 

Jason Ault: I don't know if we can have the right data for that. We've only been doing it for about two and a half years in that space. We're keeping it at a five-year warranty window for those particular devices going in once a year, doing some maintenance, doing some checks on those particular locations. But time will tell as the next two-and-a-half-year cycle comes up on what we have our hands on.

I'm curious about very elemental digital signage in office environments.

I've got another press release today from a CMS company that's integrated with a video streaming platform. This one's with Zoom, but I've seen at least three companies integrating with Microsoft Teams. The idea is that you can use the video conferencing collaboration displays in meeting rooms as digital signage screensavers. But it strikes me as interesting, but awfully elemental, and what does that really accomplish? 

Do you fight with that at all? 

Jason Ault: We don't necessarily fight with that.

We have some CMS partners that can do that with the Mersive solstice pods, with the Barco click shares, and turn it into some digital signage when that is not in use for the huddle rooms or the conference rooms. But it's not been a huge adoption, at least from our book of clients.

Yeah, it just hits me, and some of it, I suspect, is probably pretty good, particularly those that started with a full-throated digital signage, CMS. But some of the particular ones that the companies like, maybe Mersive, I have yet to see their stuff, but I assume it's pretty basic. I wonder if it's if the end user customers look at it and go, that's all we need.

Jason Ault: In those situations, even when we're doing the ones with Barco click share and putting signage live on those devices, when it's not in use for its screen sharing capability, they have the full-fledged option to treat it as a traditional screen.

But, sometimes, these are in huddle rooms with a door that may not be open. I wouldn't put, “Hey, there's a fire alarm going on”, because someone may not be in there. So, in our opinion, an odd industry because those rooms were not in use. Are they ever seen? It really depends on the client. We have a client, Washington Prime Group, here in Columbus, Ohio, that has glass conference rooms and huddle rooms, and it makes sense for them because everyone can see as you walk through, and it’s above the privacy shelf.

Yeah, I was curious about an announcement by Mersive. They were going into a whole bunch of WeWork co-working locations, and I thought what they were doing was interesting because it's probably quite elemental, but their whole business rationale is they've got sensors that recognize that somebody's coming into the room, and when that happens, the screen goes on and says, hey, you need to book this, or have you booked this?

If not, it needs to be booked; get the hell out. It didn’t say that part, but it's all about addressing operating concerns just in the same way that meeting room displayed when those started coming out about 6-7 years ago, addressed a pain point as well. 

Jason Ault: Absolutely. I think tying it into a sensor could definitely alleviate that concern.

It also gives you analytics on how much it actually is being used. 

Jason Ault: Exactly.

Let's talk a little bit about AI. It's on everybody's minds these days. Have you looked at that as something that can help support your customers and support your business, or is it something you're just kind of watching?

Jason Ault: We're playing with it and watching it. It has not made it to assisting our customers at this point, that something is coming down to the pipe with Signage Live and some of their offerings, where we can do some AI-generated things. But probably the first thing that's going to help our customers is an AI driven chat bot for our support team, to take the load off of them and then see if we can drill down some response and some resolve times.

So somebody comes in and if they can get a question answered just by going through the chatbot prompts and delivering a solution or at least some information to them without having to wait for 5-10 minutes for one of your support people, that helps? 

Jason Ault: Exactly. So that's probably the first thing that we're playing with and, of course, just like everyone, we're playing with it from a marketing and writing perspective. But just still watching it on how we can best utilize it by putting it into production for customer sake. 

Yeah, my son is heavily into AI to the point where he is doing consulting for some people on what tools to use and everything else, and I've got him doing some work for me, and I've looked at things, and the image generation is interesting, but it's still very weird and surreal in certain respects, and on the writing side, it's great for people who can't write to save their lives, but for people like me, I've been in journalism for 40 years, it's like this stuff is so elemental and it can crank something out in 30 seconds, but it's not very good.

Jason Ault: It's definitely still a jumping-off point, but it's gotta have someone of skillset to reread that and fix those mistakes or add in professional tone or the writing tone of the organization. 

We've talked about headless and AI, obviously. Are there hardware sides of technology that you're watching and thinking it is going to be a big deal going forward?

Jason Ault: We've pretty much set in our lane from a hardware perspective. Of course, we watch Direct view of the market that's evolving there. But, we're really just watching the products of our current partners, the big three screen manufacturers, and seeing the products that they are rolling out, coming off the line with, that we can put into the marketplace, but shiny balls and things like that, not really. 

I try to keep my blinders on so no one gets confused or takes us too far down a rabbit hole. So we try to just keep main hardware partners, and main software partners and run the race. 

To me, the thing that's going to be interesting is when micro LED gets to a level and maybe complementary technologies or very similar technologies that you start to see, non-traditional display services, whether that's architectural glass or even countertops, that you can start to see content arrive on and be crisp and visible and everything else.

Jason Ault: Yeah, I definitely think that can go a long way with micro LED and the cost being affordable at scale for sure. We are getting more architectural requests, flying things on the ceilings, and whatnot. So we’re watching in that regard just to see how we can help those architect partners that we talked about earlier on in our chats, fulfill some of their needs, that they design it.

When you bump into new customers or potential customers and they ask you, alright what's a good reference account? What's something I could go check out? What do you tell them that you’ve done?

Jason Ault: Yeah. We take a look at obviously, who they are, and if they're talking about quick service, we’re pointing them in the line of Biggby Coffee or an up-and-coming chain, Crimson Cup Coffee. If we're talking about retail and malls, we’ll take a look at malls for Washington Prime Group, and their 120 malls across the country.

When it comes to Directview LED, we've got a couple of convention centers in Columbus and Texas, and then some adjoining hotels that have some direct view installations. If they're looking at cameras, we can tell them to jump into a number of hundred different areas across the country to take a look at. So we're not short on pointing people in the right direction, that's for sure. 

Okay, if people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online? 

Jason Ault: They can find us online at coffmanmedia.com or on LinkedIn with our Coffman Media company page.

And where's the Coffman coming from?

Jason Ault: So, we weren't really creative 13 years ago. So there was a founding family in Dublin, Ohio, the Coffman family, and we decided to make it a regional name play. 

Fair enough. Is the Coffman family still involved? 

Jason Ault: No, they were never involved. We just decided to name it after them; they probably don't even know it. Everyone asks, is there a Mr. Coffman who started it? No, there's not. Sorry, it's a boring story. 

I know, but you can blame it on him. “Coffman did that, but he's gone.” 

Jason Ault: Good point!

Alright, Jason, thank you.

Jason Ault: Alright, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.

David Title, Bravo Media

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

We've seen a noticeable rise in the last couple of years of visual illusions and other trickery on big digital OOH screens and other surfaces presented as real screens, when they're not.

There's enough of it that observers have started giving it names, like virtual out of home, Fake DOOH or the one I like - Faux DOOH. Arguably,  the most notable ones involve Dubai landmarks - a giant, empty picture frame in that city turned into an Adidas billboard celebrating Lionel Messi's World Cup win. Or a giant Barbie taking a step in a plaza, with the Burj skyscraper looming in the immediate background.

They're fun and noteworthy, but if people got in their cars to go have a look in person, they'd be disappointed, because they're totally computer-based compositions overlaid on surfaces that don't have screens. And it absolutely happens.

David Title of the New York creative technology shop Bravo Media goes back and forth with me a lot about this stuff, on social media.  While we both have a problem with CGI creative presented as real when it isn't, we have differing opinions on its validity and value.

In this podcast, we get into what's going on, how it is done, the good and the bad, and interesting things like the legal implications of running a Faux DOOH ad overlaid on a real screen that the media owner otherwise sells. It's a fun half-hour.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

David, thank you for joining me. We've chatted once before, but that was in your office in New York. Can you give me a rundown of what Bravo Media does, first of all? 

David Title: Sure. Bravo is a creative production studio with a very sort of direct focus on real-world, real-time experience, and for us, that sort of splits almost down the middle between working on events across trade shows, conferences, activations, launches and then working on projects within the built environment around corporate environments and retail display and hospitality and immersive attraction and combining the world of visual content animation 2D and 3D modeling video along with interactive development and design.

Would you liken yourself more to an agency or like a solutions provider because, I know, a lot of the stuff you do involves some hardware as well, like you've gotta figure that part out?

David Title: Yeah, we straddle a lot of those traditional titles. We work with agencies quite often to help them execute projects that they have developed with their clients.

We also work directly with clients across a lot of areas, especially in the B2B space, on projects in which we're helping from ideation right through delivery. And on the hardware side, we really partner across the board with folks in the AV and hardware space. From LED providers, integrators, manufacturers, and all those folks have to come together.

The thing that's so challenging and exciting about the idea of experiential marketing is that it does require a swath of people with different specialties, and any place that's saying they were doing it alone is either lying or doing it badly. 

I know it's always difficult to talk about projects that you've worked on because a lot of your customers don't allow you to say anything. But are there ones that you can provide references that people might be familiar with? 

David Title: Sure. I think a couple of things that have been fun for us that are out in the public eye; I know NFL season is starting up again shortly, and we got to work on a pretty exciting project as they were building out the new NFL Broadcast Studios, network Studios next to SoFi Stadium.

And we helped create this pretty phenomenal piece of the studio called the Duke, which is half of a giant extruded glass and metal football, but each pane of glass is actually reactive. So it can go from opaque to transparent in a microsecond and then fully projection mapped. So, we're able to go from this clear display that people walking behind it can see through to the show floor and turn it into a full-fledged display for on-air graphics. That was a really fun piece to collaborate with some really excellent folks across the space, and it's fun to see it on TV and see the differences in how it's been used over the last couple of years.

You also did that QSR in Times Square. Are you allowed to talk about that one?

David Title: The Revlon Spot?

I'm thinking of donuts.

David Title: Oh, yeah. We did the Krispy Kreme experience for Times Square, sort of flagship for Krispy Kreme.

Okay. So you can talk about that.

David Title: We can talk about that a little bit. We created the Donut Theater Experience, and part of the fun of that shop is that, as you're waiting in line for your donuts, you're standing watching their fully automated sort of donut production line do its magic tricks. We enhanced that with a whole bunch of projections, including projecting on their glaze waterfall and making tracked projections onto donuts, which required creating a piece of software called 'Is that a donut,' which is fun to use in other projects and the whole integrated system of little shows that happen throughout the day, showcase that space. 

Interesting. I'm finally getting back to New York in a couple of months. Go down there and see as much as I try to avoid Times Square, but it's been a while, so I should go. 

David Title: I gotta say, in terms of digital out-of-home, there's definitely been a sort of explosion of really gigantic displays now in Times Square.

We've got that big TSX board now with the stage doors that SNA put in that I walk past almost every morning on my way to work. I cut very quickly through Times Square to get to the other side.

Zigzag around the tourists, although it's probably not the first thing in the morning as much.

David Title: It's amazing how early they get out there. Sleep in.

Alright, so we're mentioning Times Square. The reason that we wanted to have a chat was to talk about the emergence and somewhat the explosion of, first of all, anamorphic video or visual illusions on these big LED boards. But, more to the point, these visual illusions that don't actually exist are being developed by brands using CGI artists and everything else and being presented as the real deal in some cases or being assumed as the real deal.

And I have a problem with those instances which are frequent when stuff gets put up on LinkedIn or Twitter or other social media channels saying, 'Look at this amazing thing in Dubai or wherever, or one of the most recent ones was this giant, I don't know how tall it was. Purported to be like an 80-foot-tall Barbie near the Burj Khalifa. And people are going, oh my God, I have to see that, and I was going on LinkedIn saying it's not actually real. It's just a CGI thing, guys, and I think that's problematic. We've gone back and forth with this, and you said it's actually pretty interesting and opportune.

So, what's your perspective on it? 

David Title: I think it's interesting you bring up the anamorphic, quote-unquote, 3D displays that have been happening on a lot of billboards around the world. And in some ways, that kind of started this whole discussion because one thing that we both saw in a lot of people on LinkedIn and other places like Instagram and Twitter, that there was a mix of actual footage taken on the street of these displays from that perfect viewing angle. And they looked really cool and really amazing, and then, there were a number of comps that are CGI artists creating content that is superimposed onto video of those same billboards. Sometimes, they do really well, and sometimes, with less viability, as they leave the frame of the billboard and things like that.

In some cases, it is being used by manufacturers and resellers claiming to have 3D billboards or 3D LEDs, which is very misrepresentative and super problematic. I think across the industry, for everybody, it creates false expectations and limits your ability to show off what actually is cool and impossible.

And I think it just creates a negative connotation across the board, and at the same time, of course, like at Bravo, because we create a lot of original experiences. We create a lot of comps for our clients all the time as a way to help explain and understand how something's gonna look.

We use it as part of our design process, part of our creative process, and the next iteration of that, and honestly, the first one of these that I remember being in that space between a fake that many people thought was real. The Soho Zara storefront, which was, again, a really well-crafted fantasy comp, which, if for no other reason than once it was completed, the space seemed to have no doors, which is problematic for retail. I think if you have a really killer window display and nobody can get in it, it's a little self-defeating.

There were plenty of other reasons why it was impossible. The artist that created it, I don't think, created it with any intent to make people think it was real. That same artist has done plenty of other pieces similar to this and has a history of these sorts of works.

But Zara did post it on their own Instagram without saying it wasn't real, and I know people that went down there to see the store. People that I thought were smarter than that, to be honest. But I get it. You get wrapped up, you get excited, and I think the beauty of these sorts of comps and fantasy installations is that they are super inspirational, and they are exciting, and they're really fun.

And then you got to this next level. I think over the last six or seven months, the biggest ones that I think people saw and some people bought into, and some didn't, but all were put out there without a direct statement that they weren't real. There was a big Argentina billboard after the World Cup. There was the French bag company that I won't pronounce properly, that started with a 'J' that made handbag cars that drove around Paris which looked great. Maybelline did a mascara thing on subways and buses that looked like they had giant eyelashes, and then I think the one that really went super viral was that Barbie piece that you were talking about.

And the coach had a fun piece for their new coach Topia popup, which also a number of people thought was real, and clearly, they've never tried to get anything past a permitting board in New York City because that wasn't going to happen.

One of the people on LinkedIn said, "You should go down and check it out", and I challenged him, I said, where are they gonna check out? That's a comp, it's an AR thing. 

David Title: Yeah, and it's super fun. I think what's exciting about it from our perspective is that, first of all, I don't think there's any value or any point in anyone involved in these projects directly and saying, "Hey, This is real when it's not."

Is there a responsibility to do something somewhere out there that loudly says, this isn't real? I don't know. They don't say that on The Fast and the Furious. But I don't know, cars in outer space. Oh, I guess that's Tesla's outer space. But anyway. But you know what it allows for one is it allows even small brands, challenger brands, and not-for-profits to create the experience of their dreams and realize it at a fraction of the cost of executing it in the real world. And with out-of-home in general, obviously, you're first buying for those views on the street.

But the bonus for out-of-home is if your content is so good that it gets picked up and shared on the internet and across social media and picked up by the news. When that happens, it's a massive boost, and so if you look at these current virtual digital out-of-home campaigns, you're not getting those street views, but you're getting an exponentially higher number of impressions through social media. So, I think in that way, it's such an exciting way to explore what's possible and also to play around with reality. And, if you watch those handbags driving around Paris, and it feels real, and it looks real, then that's a great experience for you to have watching it.

And the fact that it was synthesized doesn't make it any less fun or engaging than Fast and the Furious. 

Does it matter if it's not technically possible or incredibly expensive to do? If you did wanna make it possible? I'm thinking of some of the anamorphic illusions, where the physics doesn't work; the visual is escaping well beyond the borders of the display. To me, that's more problematic. 

David Title: To some degree. Again, I think most of those that I've seen start with somebody claiming it to be a real thing and that they have some special product that does it, and that I have a real problem with. 

The other question and this is probably more controversial, but on video, in theory, Brand Z could virtually take over every billboard in Times Square and pay nothing to the owners of those displays as far as I know. I don't know if those laws have been written.

Yeah, I think you're right. Ocean Outdoor is a big UK digital at-home media company. Big media owner has the big ass display right in Piccadilly Square or the circus, pardon me, and they put out something recently saying, yeah, we do have a problem with this because you have companies who are appropriating our media space and presenting it as something that they booked and ran on it when they didn't. 

David Title: And that's an interesting question. Because, in theory, what they're selling is digital out-of-home, and what I've done is made a video of the surroundings. And then, can I do a video where I put lipstick in a funny hat on the Statue of Liberty?

Or can I make it look like the Lincoln Memorial has been dressed up for the circus? 

Oh, Lord. 

David Title: There's always been a history of advertising stunts. Some of which have been more moral or ethical. Burger King did an AR takeover where it turned their competitors' logos and things on fire.

So you'd point your phone in the McDonald's outlet, and it would be flame-broiled or whatever. I can't remember exactly how it operated, but they impacted their competitors. And again, I'm like, I opted into that. Is that Avaya? Probably some interesting court cases are coming, I would guess.

Or some, at least starting with some cease and desist letters, maybe. 

Yeah, you live in a very litigious country, and I wonder about those graphic artists, particularly if they're commissioned by a, let's say, a fashion chain or whatever to do something.

And they create a piece on a building that doesn't even have a display on them. Some commercial property company has, and they see that and are gonna stick their lawyers on them and say, guys, you're using my building as an out-of-home media display. 

David Title: I would counter that when a movie shoots in a city, every building in that shot is part of the scenery that I'm using in my movie. They're not getting paid.

Let's see what happens. You just gave some lawyer an idea.

David Title: I know. I hate that. That was not the point of this conversation, Dave.

The point of this conversation was to inspire people to get excited about virtual digital out-of-home and see the possibility. But what I think is fun about it and, again, moving even beyond and creating virtual billboards or virtual content onto real billboards are some of the larger, more imaginative things you can do.

The coach piece the Maybelline piece, and even, to some degree, the Barbie piece, which honestly was so clearly CGI that I don't really feel like anybody can be upset that they were trying to be fooled. Come on, it's an 80-foot woman with no nothing behind her.

Yeah, I think the Dubai frame one with Leonard Messi was more convincing to a whole bunch of people.

David Title: Yeah, it was; I got phone calls asking how they did it, and...

You said they didn't.

David Title: I said they didn't. They did. That's the fun of it.

And also, the whole thing with all these things are the ones that really are successful because they look great, they're a really fun idea, they inspire a level of enjoyment and engagement. It's good advertising, and I think the few people who feel slightly tricked by it don't really cause a negative brand impact.

Whoever owns the Dubai frame, whether that's a municipal thing or a private entity or whatever it may be, should they be paid for that usage? 

David Title: Yeah, it's a good question, and at what level? And by what metric? and I don't know what the line for that is.

People take videos in Times Square all the time and alter things and change things and post them on their feeds, where is it artistic expression? What am I allowed to do? Because it looks cool and fun 

When you have something like the ZARA Store or the Adidas Lionel Messy thing in Dubai. Those aren't cheap to produce to do them well, as you were saying. Does it tend to be the brands that are commissioning these things? Or do you have CGI artists like Shane Fu, who did the ZARA thing, just doing this for giggles? 

David Title: I think there's a mix.

I think we're certainly currently working with a handful of clients on, essentially, virtual, out-of-home campaign concepts. These are clients that would never have the budgets to do these things for real but do have the budgets to create the virtual version in a satisfying manner.

And it really allows them to express themselves in ways and to create experiences in ways that are new and exciting and get attention. 

Yeah. Does this stuff have a shelf life to it? And I guess what I'm wondering is right now, there's not that many of them increasing numbers certainly, but it's still pretty new. At some point, if you have a whole bunch of brands doing this, does it become an arms race where you somehow there have to be a little bit more outlandish? Otherwise, it's just like wallpaper, like other, more conventional digital signers displays and digital out of home displays.

David Title: I think, not unlike the anamorphic content, I think that it's partly a trend. When it's done really well, and if you're going to go with an anamorphic display, it really helps to have a good reason to be doing it beyond; I want it to look 3D, right?

And the best anamorphic pieces we've seen are really clever in the way that they take advantage of the illusion, and it's really satisfying, and I think that's gonna be the challenge. It's not so outlandish. I think it's gonna be cleverness and integration and in the same way that it would be true for any kind of real-world activation.

I don't think that Maybelline's gonna get the same pop out by putting lipstick on a Volkswagen after doing the mascara on the buses. But I think there's another channel they could explore to find another hit of attention.

Yeah. As some of the 3D displays that I've seen are just videos mainly, a watch, the face kind of escapes the screen a little bit, or somebody walks up and peers out over the edge of the screen down into the crowd or whatever, they're clever, but I really wonder how much impact they have.

David Title: Yeah. Honestly, I think with any of these anamorphic, you, on the one hand, you've gotta be losing a certain number of impressions because it simply doesn't make the impression, a valuable impression from a lot of angles. But it makes a really big impression from the right angle.

Which is a very narrow-angle typically. 

David Title: Although there are so many of these right now in New York, and I do think folks are beginning to understand how to make things that have a slightly better and wider viewing angle by just not pushing the 3D illusion quite as deep.

You can get away with it a little better, but obviously, a big hope for doing these 3D boards is that somebody is filming them and sharing them, or the client is doing that and getting that extra engagement through social media. I think, again, it loses its amazing value for just being seemingly 3D.

And now we're into the second wave of this, where it actually has to be smart, interesting, and relevant, and all the things that good marketing and good advertising have to be successful regardless of the channel that you're using. 

Yeah, I was over in Germany at a conference about a month and a half ago, and one of the presentations was from Ocean Outdoor, the UK Media firm.

They're in some other countries as well, and they were talking about 3D projects like that, and one of 'em was in a shopping mall in Denmark, and then I asked them, Specifically, did you guys shoot this and socialize it out of your own channels to make sure that you had a really good, perfectly positioned camera angle on this?

And you used that to amplify it because I wrote a piece about that one in particular. 'cause some consumers shot it from an off angle, and you could see how crappy it looked. 

David Title: Yeah. I remember when they first started popping up before I saw my first one in New York. I was literally on LinkedIn begging people who live nearby to shoot at any of those from an off-angle.

Just so people would understand. Not again; this is nothing. I think it's cool as hell. I really love that we make anamorphic content. I think it's really cool. I love optical illusions in general. We have a long history at Bravo of projection mapping, which is all about optical illusion.

Because I love triggering the brain without any magical technology. It's just the beauty of how our brains work in perspectives, and it's great. Super cool. But, it really matters for people who are looking to utilize any of these technologies. We're. Obviously, we're almost at the end here, so I'm not gonna mention the H word, 'Holograms.'

Oh, go ahead. 

David Title: Holograms. There aren't any, but It's important that people understand what the abilities and limitations of each of these platforms are so that you can utilize them to their best effect. They're all cool. Pepper's Ghost is cool, and Amorphic is cool. I think virtual digital out-of-home is cool, but it can all be terrible, really easy if it's not used right.

Yeah. Sometimes, the best application is not the one with the most whizz banger about it. It's just right for the environment, and I think of what you were talking about with projection mapping. I love jobs where the projection mapping is very subtle, and it just appears on a wall in an unexpected way, and it's not flashy or anything else.

It's just, oh, where'd that come from? It makes you look.

David Title: I think the whole notion in the video game world, there's this history of Easter eggs. These sorts of things are hidden within the game that are special if you look or if you stumble upon them, and I really think so.

Within the whole world of experiential marketing and out of home, those little moments of discovery can be so powerful and so meaningful, and I totally agree. The relevancy and meaningfulness and relationship to the environment and all those things are really what makes something effective.

It's not necessarily the biggest, loudest, flashiest thing. 

The stuff that was done for Coachtopia with this giant Rube Goldberg machine spitting out handbags off the side of the building. Is that a more viable way to do augmented reality? 'cause I've always wondered what percentage of the population is going to reliably view the outside world through their six-inch smartphone screen.

David Title: Yeah. Again, I think with a lot of the AR stuff in general, one of my favorite clients from back in the day, a woman named Bernadette Castro, used to just always ask me, no matter what we were gonna do for us.

She'd say, I don't know, David, is the juice worth the squeeze? And I love that, and I think about it all the time, and I think with AR, you're asking people to go through this extra step, and the juice has to be worth the squeeze, and again, if it reveals something that's interesting and meaningful and relevant and rewards you in some way for that participation, then I think people will do it.

But I think a lot of AR projects go largely unviewed. Because they're just not worth the lift. 

Yeah, and it's a little bit of eye candy that people look at and go. That was fun. But they'll give it 10 seconds, and that's it. 

David Title: Yeah. It's getting more viable.

Web AR is getting better, meaning that you're not downloading an app; you're not going through all that rigmarole. The other thing is you're still relying on available bandwidth wherever you're standing, and at least in the US, that can often not be enough.

And that's a larger issue with all the AR stuff and all of the digital extensions to outta home, is the cooler that experience wants to be, the more bandwidth it's going to require, and that's not always available. 

Last question. I'm curious if all this stuff that's been emerging is leading to new business because people come to you saying, we'd like to do this, and you have to tell 'em what they did at the Zara store isn't really possible because you need a door to get into the store. But does it open up new conversations and new opportunities? 

David Title: Oh, absolutely, and honestly, we spend so much of our time just educating, and for us, it's been really important from the beginning.

I don't sell any particular hardware, and I don't have stock in any particular platform. So, for us, being able to understand and communicate the opportunities with projection mapping versus LED versus LCD or the conversation I had yesterday with a client about the giant refrigerators.

I call them shower stalls.

David Title: Yeah. I just always think everyone looks; everyone has to be very cold. But I don't sell those directly. I think there's a place for all these things, but what we really love is to have that opportunity to share all of these cool opportunities that are out there and to really help our clients select the solution that's really gonna move the dials for them, that they need to move.

Yeah, figure out the problem as opposed to, how can I use this thing? 

David Title: Right. Because nobody cares what the thing is when they're having the experience. All they care about is the experience, and if you can do that experience with a $10 piece of something and it's powerful and meaningful, then you should do that, not do the $10,000 one, if it's not as good a fit. 

Yeah, a $200 Pico projector and not the $200,000 video wall. 

David Title: Again, there's a time and a place for all of these things, and it really is about understanding what you're trying to do first, like you said, and then finding the solutions that are out there.

All right, David, thank you. That was a lot of fun. 

David Title: Yeah. I really appreciate it. That was great.

Tobias Lang, Lang AG

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

Germany's Lang AG is a family-owned and run business that has developed through the years into one of the larger and more influential players in the pro AV market - operating as both a supplier for rentals and staging market, as well as a distributor for systems integrators.

The company is run by Tobias Lang, who based on a couple of chats, clearly has both passion and deep knowledge of the sector, business demands and both the state and opportunity of emerging display technologies.

We had a 30 minute-plus conversation that flew by, getting into a bunch of things - including the potential for a projection systems, which these days don't get anywhere near the attention of LED displays.

We also spend a lot of time talking about LED, and how he thinks that technology isn't necessarily supplanting LCD. From his perspective, he thinks LCD and LED technologies are actually merging. Have a listen and he'll explain.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Tobias, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your company is all about, what it does, and its background? 

Tobias Lang: Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Lang AG is a video-only company, which is doing only B2B, which means we cover both verticals, which are rental and staging and system integration.

We supply mostly the European rental and staging market with big projectors, LED screens, cameras, converters, whatever you need in video, and as a distributor, we supply both rental companies and system integrators with the staff of the manufacturers we work with such as Epson, Panasonic, several LED manufacturers to supply the modern technology to them in a good way to consult them, which is fitting to each other.

What amount of your business would you describe as being involved in digital signage? 

Tobias Lang: First of all, if you look at the turnover of Lang AG, we do have companies in Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and Germany, which is the biggest. Germany did more than 80 million last year, and 60% of this is done by sales. If you look at digital signage, which is part of sales, this is a significant number, maybe 15 to 20% of our business. 

The business itself is in the orbit of Cologne, that area?

Tobias Lang: Yeah, we are spotted in the western part of Germany. We have everything in Germany in one warehouse, as we have in Zurich, Switzerland, Barcelona, Spain, and London, UK because it's very important for our customers to have the opportunity of a one-stop video strategy. 

How long has the company been around? 

Tobias Lang: We are now 45 years old. My father, when my brother was born, said, “Hey, I have three kids now. I should start something serious.” He founded a company in 1978 without any other ideas because he loved stuff like projection at this time. With the evolution of technology, we ended up being where we are today. 

Were you groomed to run the company one day or were you doing other things and decided to go into the family business? 

Tobias Lang: I worked for the company as a child which is typical for a family business, then I tried to step away a bit. I studied mathematics. I founded a software company. I did some interesting things. 

This stuff is still existing and I still have my chairs, but at one point, I decided that it was a great opportunity to join the family business Lang AG and to be honest, this was maybe one of the best decisions in my life. I love what I'm doing. 

That always helps, doesn't it? 

Tobias Lang: It does, yeah. 

Is there a particular market where you're seeing a lot of activity right now and is it evolving? 

Tobias Lang: Over the last two years, this immersive art experience vertical projection was said to be dead or going down five years ago, ten years ago, and what we were able to see over the last months is that projection is growing, and we enjoy this because we love projection and this is based on all these immersive experience setups which are done worldwide mostly based on art, but we believe other verticals can follow. 

So these are effectively entertainment venues? 

Tobias Lang: So far, yes. But we believe that corporations will use similar setups for brand experience and stuff like that.

I've been to at least a couple of those venues, they work because they're darkened, they're purpose-built and you can control the lighting and everything else. 

When you get into a corporate environment, that becomes more challenging but is the technology catching up in terms of laser light brightness, the projection engines getting smaller and detached, the projection head being away from the rest of the equipment, and so on?

Tobias Lang: This is a challenge for sure, but if you look at most installations, most of the projectors are around 10,000 lumens, and you could use brighter projectors, and there are opportunities from the technology side to set up even brighter projectors than we have today. The brightest projector at the moment for the event market or the integration market is 50,000 lumen. You could easily go above. 

It's a question about the demand, how much it will rise. But, I believe we will see this too because if you look at the Pavillion of Dubai Expo, 2/3 of these pavilions used projection over LED because of the flexibility of the technology. LED is a strong technology and a strong growing technology, but there will always be room for projection because of its flexibility. For example, the setup time of a projector, don't underestimate that. 

Yeah. It used to be for projection mapping and edge blending and everything else. That was like a lot of work and a lot of mathematics and everything else, and now you can do it in software quite quickly from what I understand.

Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's fantastic. That's true. 

Yeah, makes a huge difference. The thing I like about projection is the way it can just arrive and be unexpected versus if it's fixed hard physical displays, you know that there's something there in most cases with the exception of places like the Comcast Tower, but the projection, you can have a wall that all of a sudden is a digital canvas.

Tobias Lang: Yeah, and our understanding of the word, “screen” will change.

Mapping is a good example, we use buildings as screens. Decades ago, we had a television at home and this was the screen for us, and yeah, we see changes happening and we see different dimensions of screens and in this flexible world, we will use projectors more. But in our world, we'll be LED, and we'll be covered with some kind of display, but where we don't have a display, we could add a projection screen to add some value. 

Is the partner reseller market and as well as the end user market getting more sophisticated, do they understand this technology more or is part of the role of your company doing education and holding their hand?

Tobias Lang: I think it is both. This is always about technology that has different layers. First, you have to train the experts. You have to give an understanding of the possibilities, and then you need to set up a discussion about opportunities for creative people, and then demands rise, and there's some latency in this process as you could feel from the immersive art experience and the change to other verticals, and I believe that they're by nature and you can't change it. 

From what I saw on your website, you have a lot of technical people on board. People who can pull apart devices and get down to the board level with them and everything else. Is that a bit unusual? 

Tobias Lang: I wouldn't say this is unusual. What may be is unusual that we have technical staff who can decide every single day what they want to do, because of some service and stuff like this, it's necessary sometimes, but we drive an R&D team, which is absolutely free to make a choice of what they believe is important for us tomorrow.

The market expects us to give feedback on future technology and therefore we have to look deep with our partners into product planning and technology, and this is what we love, and I think that's within our organization, a great job opportunity if you join one of those teams.

So when you say you're doing R&D, you're not coming up with your own products, I assume, or am I getting that wrong?

Tobias Lang: No, we are not a manufacturer, but we have to set up solutions sometimes. So what we try to do is, we add value to a product. For example, in the US market, most people know us as the cage company, as we did all the projector frames. They almost thought for a while, this is our business. 

What we did, in reality, is that we looked for a solution for our projectors to use them in rental, and we added a mechanical solution on top. For other products, we add batteries as a solution to run wireless. Now, we added some drone business because we believe if you're strong in mappings and you supply media servers and high-brightness projectors to the markets, you should cover the pixels in the sky in the future too.

It also means you're future-proof. 

Tobias Lang: Future-proof is a hard word. Let's say we are interested in the future, and how it will go. 

Yeah, I guess you can never be totally sure because it moves so fast. 

Tobias Lang: That's true.

I would assume that when you're doing all this value-added engineering work, it's in part that in order to service a customer and address a project, you can't wait on the marketplace for the suppliers to just develop something and put it on their roadmap to serve your needs.

Sometimes, you must do it yourself to make it all happen. 

Tobias Lang: You have to bring together the information of the need of the market on the one hand and the possibility of, what's on the technical side thinkable on the other hand. So we have to bridge between our customers and the manufacturers, and it depends on the demand or the project. 

To be honest, in the first project, you understand the need, but the solution is not available yet. But you learn from it to bring it back to the discussion of product planning, and future roadmap, and then you can return with the right solution for the future because if there is a need in AV for a solution, this will hit you a second, a third time and so on.

Are you in front of end-user customers at all, or your team, or is that something that you stay at arm's length?

Tobias Lang: We try, and I believe we are mostly invisible. Most of the end customers in the European market have no clue that we exist. If our customers rent material from us, it's just a gray case without any brand of Lang AG. 

I assume that your business partners prefer it that way, they want to own the customer? 

Tobias Lang: Yeah. We always say we are behind, we let the show to our customers and I think those who like this come back to us and we understand this as one of our values. 

When we were talking ahead of turning the recording on, you were talking about one of the things that your firm does is you work hard to try to forecast what will be possible and what matters and what the need is of the marketplace. That has to be challenging just because of the way technology shifts, and also, there are so many different factors as to what the marketplace wants including, the war in Ukraine and supply chains and everything else that has happened in the last couple of years. 

Tobias Lang: Yeah, around 10 or 15 years ago, it was much easier to drive a mid-size family business.

But today, with the experience of a pandemic, of such a war influencing the supply chains, you have to make sure that you have an understanding of the global world and the effects which are happening for your industry. So we try to be in shape around this. For the actual situations, we handle this quite well. It is easier if you always love to ask yourself what's new, and what's next, because, then you are flexible and agile enough to change fast. 

Some of the trends that I've been hearing a lot of discussion about are moving manufacturing out of China into other countries, having storage warehouses, different methodologies for shipping, and everything else.

Has that been critical with the weather the last two, or three years?

Tobias Lang: I wouldn't say critical, but it is part of the game. This is mostly a discussion around LEDs, and in the end, you have to understand that even if you produce an LED panel in Europe, there will still be parts that will be supplied from Asia.

So it's only bringing the challenge to different classes regarding customs rules. It is a bit about politics because it depends on what the European Union will change in the rules of customs, I think there is a similar story in the US. 

When I was at the Munich Digital Signage Summit Europe, one of the areas that was discussed quite a bit was green signage and sustainability. Is that factoring into how you do business?

Tobias Lang: Yeah, a lot, and this is rising fast, and I believe there's no stopping it. So it will continue to rise. 

In every single supply chain, you will have to report what you do regarding sustainability. You will have to explain yourself in the future much more intensively, much more often how you face this challenge. As a company, it's very important that you have to accept these circumstances and then you should work on it.

Energy management and conservation and cutting energy costs were something that was around prior to the Ukraine War and everything that kind of bubbled out that, but has that really heightened in the last year and a half? 

Tobias Lang: Yes, there is a different pace of this change. I'll give you an example.

Last September, there was a new rule by the European Union that all signage displays had to be turned off in Germany between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, and most LED screens were never built to be turned off, so they just used a black image to be turned off. But in reality, they were still running. 

So this was a challenge, no one was prepared for and I think it's sustainable and good that we now have the discussion of how to manufacture an LED screen, which is easy, honestly speaking, that you can turn off every day. 

 Yeah, I didn't even know that until I was at the Munich thing, because you just assume it's a display, there's an on-and-off. Why is it difficult for them to be turned off and then turned back on gracefully? 

Tobias Lang: Honestly, in most installations, those screens were done modular, which is no surprise because it's cheaper in transport, and then you set up the screen, and you do some kind of dressing, and not all screens understand the dressing once you turn the screen on. 

The result is if you turn the screens off, you can turn it on again. You need to have an LED Technician too, because the dressing is no longer working. These are just simple things, but this is a different way of thinking because, in the past, people were consulted to let the screen runs. 

And are there workarounds? Is this all being addressed? 

Tobias Lang: Yes, there are some workarounds out there. There's a lot ongoing and I believe this story will be done in 12 to 18 months completely.

It is a learning curve, and it also shows the strengths of our industry that we can adapt fast. We can do a lot regarding sustainability because we can save energy quickly if we focus on the right questions. In an absolute way of thinking, we are maybe not the greenest industry, but in relation from year to year, we improved so much that we can be proud as an industry of what we are doing.

Is it a hardware fix that puts an intermediary device, or is it a software fix, or is it like the new generation of Nova Star controllers and so on that will get around that?

Tobias Lang: So, in the first step, it is a hardware fix, what is done now, and in the second step, it will be mostly a software fix.

One of the things that I read in another article that was attributed to you was, and we were talking ahead of this discussion, you were saying how LED and LCD will merge, and I was thinking it kind of is because LCDs are using LEDs as their backlighting and so on, but you're talking about something different here, right?

Tobias Lang: First of all, I have to mention that it is tremendous what is happening in 2023 in the LED market. When I went to ISE, I was surprised at how many manufacturers talked about micro LEDs…

And some of it actually was true micro LED.

Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's true. But before this year's ISE, it looked like all the manufacturers of high-resolution LEDs were going to chip-on-board technology, and then the semiconductors offered a micro LED package, so a package again with where you could do pick and place like with SMDs to produce an LED panel, and a lot of companies looked into this and announced that where they will have a product in future based on this technology. And I wondered, okay. Is this even before COB has started to come to the top the end of COB because there is a superior technology? 

This is still an open question. I can't answer it by today. But it shows how interesting it is, and the comment about LED and LCD merging is based on the fact that now nearly every former LCD manufacturer, like the Chinese BOE, is joining the LED race because everyone is accepting that there will be a lot of replacement from the LED or former LCD installations and based on this challenge, a lot of LCD manufacturers ask their health how to use the stuff they did in the past, and they found out that if they use the transistor film, they have an LCD, they could supply active matrix solutions based on LED as the video source. So driving every single pixel by a transistor to get a value as a product that is superior to what we know. 

So I believe we will see screens that are more flexible, and more transparent than we used to, and this is incredibly interesting because it will change our understanding of the word display and screen to have just one dimension in a 4:3 or 16:9 screen. We have to start to think completely differently, and the funny thing is that the concept of active matrix and passive matrix, I don't know, maybe 30 years old or whatever, was there as long as I am in the industry, but it was always too expensive to drive every single pixel and there were no advantages, but now it seems like an active matrix became reachable in a price range, and there are supplies added values because you get such light and flexible products and for example, the hype of the transparent LED from Muxwave we saw at the last shows was one of the rising stars, gives us a first look in the first understanding of what could be the future, what could be possible and I’m pretty sure we will see many more products based on this technology. 

Not everyone, to be honest, agrees that this is the way to go. There are some manufacturers which believe passive matrix is still the way to go, but there are also a lot of manufacturers which believe in active matrix. It is very interesting to follow this discussion and to see every single move of the different manufacturers, and this is for example, for me, a strong argument why it is wrong as a market player just to visit one show a year. That's the reason why you have to show ISE and InfoComm, Display Week because the different levels of information you get at the different shows by the different timing is helping me so much to face these questions.

I'm trying to wrap my head around this. When you're talking about TFT, does that limit the dimensions and shape of the displays to how LCD is made right now in terms of having mother glass, and the largest display you're going to get is 105 inches, or does that not really in play here?

Tobias Lang: Yeah, I'm not an expert, to be honest, on LCD factories. What is the limitation of the size? Is it the glass? Is this the Tft? Is it a combination? But for sure, this will have an influence on active matrix products. 

For example, at Muxwave, it's about the drivers, the number of pixels, you can reach, it’s not about the transistors. So this question will be answered by yes/maybe if you have really high-resolution products, and maybe by no, if you have lower-resolution products.

Because you do a lot of work in the rental market, equipment is going to be put up and torn down repeatedly. You have to think a lot about durability, right?

Tobias Lang: Yes, that's true, and redundancy. This is one of the main challenges. If we face AV over IP, which will come into our market for sure, and we believe based on XMTP and IPMX but it is a change, and people in the event, want to be sure that everything is working out because if you look at a modern event what kind of amount of setup timing those professional players have left, it's quite tight, and they need to be sure that everything is working and therefore, we have to understand that our role is to make their work as easy as possible. 

Having chip-on-board and things with hardened or more durable surfaces and having lightweight, grid-based systems, even down to something like the Muxwave product, which is super thin and would go up and down pretty easily, that stuff, I assume, is pretty attractive? 

Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's one of the arguments we believe you will see those solutions in rental and staging too because there are advantages in rental and staging regarding transport cost, which is also a question which is regarding sustainability, and then it is an advantage quite often, in setup timing. 

There will be a mix, and this is somehow in our life so incredible that you can always learn from one vertical to the other, so sometimes technology, which is done for integration, will be helpful in event and staging and vice versa.

Last question. I'm curious if there's a project that you've seen in the last year or so, digital signage or pro AV in some way where you thought, okay, that's really good, that's where this is all going. 

Tobias Lang: As you can imagine, I was involved in several projects, and I don't want to mention any particular out of this, but I can tell you I'm really looking forward to coming to Vegas to see the fair by myself in real life because I did some running when they were setting it up while different shows in the morning and I always pass by, and when I saw the first images on social media, I was excited and this is for sure a big thing, and like I think everyone in the industry, I would love to see it in real life. 

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that in December when I go to Digital Signage Experience. I've been watching it for a while now and actually trying to do a podcast with them, and maybe one day they'll say, yes.

Tobias Lang: I will for sure listen to this podcast. 

Yes. It's the company that's the LED suppliers, the same one that put the LEDs on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Montreal Company. Alright. Tobias, thank you very much for spending time with me. 

Tobias Lang: Much appreciated, Dave. Thank you for having the interest, and I enjoyed every single second.

Bernd Albl, Umdasch - The Store Makers

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

The Austrian firm Umdasch refers to itself as The Store Makers - designing, building and kitting out retail stores at scale both in Europe and globally.

About seven or eight years ago, the company looked at the shifting state of retail and realized that staying relevant meant adding digital to its toolset - a decision that's played out nicely for the business unit, which is part of a much bigger holding company that is a global leader in construction - from office towers to single family homes.

I first met Bernd Albl earlier this year at ISE, knowing almost nothing about Umdasch and not a whole lot more about what the company refers to as shop-fitting. But after this podcast chat, I now know a whole lot more about the company and more broadly about the expectations, challenges and demands of properly designing and equipping retail in 2023.

We get into a lot of things, including defining experience in retail. We also have an interesting discussion about sustainability in retail - particularly a shift from doing store refreshes every five to seven years, to 10 years and longer. That's driven mainly by demands to stop tossing out perfectly good wood, plastic and metal finishings to make way for new designs. One of the beauties of applying digital is its ability to refresh a store's look and feel by changing files, not hard materials.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Bernd, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Umdasch does and what it means by store makers? 

Bernd Albl: Okay, Dave. First of all, thanks for having me. Umdasch actually is a family-owned company within the History of Wealth brand for about 150 years. We are a shopfitting company, basically focused on the European market, and we are building stores in different areas, from fruit areas to grocery stores, the fashion industry, banks, automotive industry, all places.

We say we are businesses done, and we are around 2000 employees in our organization, and since around seven years, we established the business of digital retail because we saw that the business is completely shifting from the traditional millwork and handcraftmanship towards digital business and this is what Umdasch stands for, and our headquarters is in Austria, in Amstetten.

For people who don't know Austria like me, where would you locate it? Is it by Vienna or somewhere else? 

Bernd Albl: Probably most of you might know of Munich, Salzburg, or Vienna, and Amstetten is in the middle between Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna, around one and a half hours away from Vienna towards Germany, in that direction. 

Umdasch is quite a big company. I think I saw the turnover is 1.5 billion Euros.

Bernd Albl: So, this is when you're talking about the whole company. Umdasch is basically three company pillars. The biggest one is called Doka, which is a forworking company, and it is also established in the North American market. 

So, we always say that about every building is higher than 200 meters in the world is by 80% built by Umdasch Technology, and the second one is ours one, it's the Umdasch store makes its shopfitting business, and the youngest group is Ventures, where we invest venture capital for disruptive technologies in the field of construction and in the field of retail technology. And in total, yes, we are doing around 1.5 billion euros turnover. 

So you're pretty substantially backed in terms of your initiative. You're anything but a startup.. 

Bernd Albl: Yes, that's definitely right. 

When you say you are doing the build of stores, is that the build, including the whole actual physical building or when you're talking about store makers or shop fitters, you're talking about the interior?

Bernd Albl: It's a very good question. The value chain in projects in the past, we usually were focused on the interior design, on the production of interior installation of interior shop fitting. But as I mentioned, as we are a big company, we are also building those big buildings with our technology. So our supply chain is moving in the direction of a very early stage of building. When it's in the building phase where Umdasch comes in and that’s where we want to jump in and guide the customer from building to the interior, to the operating of the building as well as the stores.

So we are serving the customer of the whole supply chain and operating chain of buildings, basically not just focused on shop fitting. 

When you mentioned that the digital end of this was started about seven years ago. Was that the result of seeing an opportunity or because the retail industry and the requirements and ask of the retail customers was to incorporate this in there, so you had to add this?

Bernd Albl: Honestly, some years ago, we had very tough times in shop fitting. We had losses at the end of the year, and we have seen that with the rise of standard online shopping, we are faced with a very big shift of how customers are shopping in the future.

And this brought us in real trouble some years ago, and we were faced with the decision, what should we do? Should we run away, or should we jump into this new topic, integrate and develop our core business? And this is what we have done, and about it was eight years ago we sat together and said which technology should we start in terms of retail technology because there are so many technologies in the market, but what should be the first step for Umdasch which customers and retailers believe that we can deliver? And the second aspect was how we can handle the shift of parroting within our employees. Because some of them were afraid as they know that online shopping and digital technologies are our enemies and core business, and now we want to bring them into our core organization.

And therefore, we figured out two technologies at the beginning. The first was digital signage to replace a poster price screen, and the second one was electronic shelf labeling, it’s the price tag on the shelf. With those two technologies, we started the digital initiatives within the Umdasch group in terms of retail and where we started the shift of paradigm and the shift of the whole organization towards getting more and more digital,

That's not an easy shift to make for a more traditionally focused company. Is it? A lot of training, a lot of education. 

Bernd Albl: That's right. On the one hand, we have definitely shown our employees the chance we have. On the other hand, yes, we have to convince them and train them how to integrate screens. It sounds very simple when you say just implement a screen but honestly, mistakes in the implementation of hardware are still done. When you look through stores in the market, air circulation maintenance, possibilities and all those things and we are not focused on one single store project. We are focused on rollouts where we built thousands of stores and there you have to really exactly plan how you implement this. Because if you don't do this very carefully and you have any troubles, for example, with air circulation and you have snack work afterwards and you have to make changes then it costs a lot of money.

So therefore we have to create the knowledge of our technical designers when they are designing the furniture and the stores. And there are many other aspects where we teach them how to implement this and not just in terms of digital signage but also in terms of electronic shelf labeling, and I would say it's booming since Corona, where we have seen many of the big retail chains there, which are investing hundreds of millions of dollars and euros. For example, Walmart, as you might  know, had decided to implement electronic shelf labels in the North American market.

There is a few million hundred dollar project which is currently started. They have to exactly plan how to implement those simple little looking electronic shelf labels on the shelf edge. That it's not falling down, that it's not stolen, doesn't get broken et cetera, and that the appearance of the whole shelf is still working as soon as an electronic shelf labeling is put in front of the product on the shelf edge.

And there could be a real disconnect between building engineers and pure interior design teams with the technology that then has to go in. I've heard of and seen endless cases of why did they do that? And why didn't these folks talk to each other? So if you can keep that all within one business entity doing all that planning then you don't get those disconnects, right? 

Bernd Albl: Definitely, and this was one reason why we have merged different departments within Umdasch together where we have brought together, for example, in Duisburg in Germany, we have built it up a new office where we brought together all the interior designers together with our digital retail designers, where the digital storytelling comes together with the shop fitting design, storytelling i would say, that you definitely see the red line through the customer experience when it's designed. And this was one of the mistakes we also made in the past, that we separated those teams that we said, ’okay let's plan the store, and afterwards we plan the digital applications’.

But, we instantly saw that it's not working, because the harmony and the whole concept wasn't given, therefore it's very necessary that as soon as and in the very early stage of the project, both competencies in the organization are working on the project and start communicating instantly together with the customer to realize shop fitting journeys of the customer which are working. 

I don't know your business, but I assume for a more traditional shop fitting a company as part of a larger team that's doing any number of things, and you become a contractor to a larger project, whereas with this I'm getting the sense that you guys start right at the strategy stage and carry on through the project execution, and I'm wondering, do you also do aftercare, are you doing managed services where you're managing the digital signage component of the the retail network?

Bernd Albl: Definitely this is something you have to provide in terms of digital installation, as many other full service integrators we were serving in a very early stage from the concept until software development and installation. Also, operating means content creation, hosting onsite services et cetera. But, what we have seen in combination with shop fitting, we have seen that those competencies which we already have in terms of digital are asked in the future from shop fitters. That means that the retailer wants to have a single point of contact, the kind of support hotline for shop fitting topics.

If he needs other shelves, or if he needs when something's broken, or if he needs extra components. He doesn't want to contact different points within the organization. He wants to have one single point of contact, and we have also faced the topic of SLAs within shop fitting, so that we have to react within a certain period of time and fix the problem onsite.

Why? Because, the furniture which will be produced in the near future, will get smarter and sensors will be implemented. And as soon as you have technical and electronic components within the traditional shop fitting environment you need those services, maintenance and operating services for customers.

One easy topic is, for example, the cash desk. 

Right. When you're talking about sensors, that's something you could do right now, but is it a case of the sensor technology and the thinking behind all of that needs to just mature a bit more so that it's fully integrated as opposed to something you add on.

Bernd Albl: First of all, yes, some installations we are doing are stupid ones, which are not reacting based on sensors. Yes, we definitely see that trend on the market. The sensors will be unable to allow the retail to get more flexible, to get more target oriented to decrease the loss by improper communication to customers when it comes to digital signage, for example, where there is the combination of sensors when you use it for audience measurement and smart targeting.

And we have seen sensors, weight sensors, light sensors, out of shelf sensors, however in terms of loitering, in terms of queue management where we see that the different kinds of sensors are getting more and more popular. And everything that pays in for the retailer to optimize processes because all of them have stuff topics that they don't find the stuff they need on the shop floor, so we have to help them to optimize the process costs and reduce the effort for the staff they have on the shop floor. And the other thing is to increase the shop experience for the customer, and sensors will definitely be one of the hot topics for the near future, and this is why you are seeing when you look on the signage market or on other retail technology markets that camera sensors, optical sensors and the radar sensors are getting more and more required from integrators and asked by retailers for smart solutions.

And when you're using things like audience measurement technologies, whether it's camera base, radar base, whatever it may be. What are they looking to get out of that? Are they just trying to understand how the store works or are they trying to do almost personalized, one-to-one messaging to shoppers as they come within a quote unquote a strike zone. 

Bernd Albl: As I mentioned, one thing is definitely to optimize the one-to-one communication to the customer that you send the right message to the right customer. Let's say, if he is a male customer in the age between 25 and 35, that we play out the right playlist when he's looking on the screen first of all.

Therefore, optimizing the one-to-one communication to the customer, and the other thing is we are using the sensors for reducing process costs for the retailer. For example, one of the hot topics currently is off the shelf management or expired date management, this is something everybody's working on, how they can support the retailer to reduce those process costs for him.

And those are the most important two areas where sensors are currently asked for and audience measurement, for example, as I mentioned, there is one use case where you can use a sensor. 

Let's talk about some of the trends you're talking about. I was reading through some Umdasch material as well as some interviews, and one of the areas that was mentioned as a trend is individualization. What do you mean by that? 

Bernd Albl: We definitely see that many brands are closing their stores. Many are reducing the number of stores they have in the field, and they want to increase the customer experience when they're entering the store, and one big criteria is how to hold the customer as long as possible in the store and to increase his basket to create a high level of individualization for him. Individualization means that we show the right information to him to give in an atmosphere and ambient design where he feels convenient and also we compare a little bit when you go online shopping or when you go on websites due to cookies and other trackers, it's very easy to flexibly create the web information based on your requirements, and this is something the customer has used and is standard for him and this is in some kind we try to transform those flexibility of experience rooms to the real store. That means that we want to play out the right stores, that we send the right push notification on the mobile application for his checkout devices that we probably play the right sounds due to the audience which is inside the store, that the influence is light based on the outside ambient, and there are so many possibilities on the turntable. You can increase or decrease to create an more and more individualized experience for the shopper.

Right. You mentioned experience several times. How do you define experience in a retail environment? And I'm also curious how the retailers define that when it comes to applying digital. 

Bernd Albl: This is a very good question. Honestly, some of our retailers don't know it exactly by themselves and this is something when we are working on a concept, what we evaluate together and one starting point is definitely the brand itself, the values of the brand. The atmosphere that the brand wants to communicate, that they want to transport and what are the visions and what is the reason for the store? 

What is the offering of the store and what is the message of the store? And as soon as you have answered all those different questions, you can create the storytelling around that. At the end, this creates the experience and from the consulting, our experts are using the right materials, they're choosing the right colors and the right light atmosphere.

We bring in the right technologies, the right touch points as soon as we have defined together with the customer the right use cases. By the way, this is one of the big mistakes many retailers are making over the concepts. First of all, they're thinking how many screens to be installed? Where should we place a screen? But they don't think about the real use behind the benefit of the touchpoint, and this is the way we create digital touchpoints. First of all, we say what benefit we wanna create.

Then, we look at the area of the story which we want to offer and technology is the last point of the whole story. And all this together, is the key of success, and we call it already experienced stores to bring them alive. And I want to add one more thing is we always have to keep in mind when we create those stores that we have to think mid or long term in terms of operation. Most of our customers want to have the most fancy store possible, but we have to think what is in three years, what is in five years with the store.

We also have to keep in mind how we can run the store, how we can operate, how we can keep this level of experience up for the next year, not just for one year. And this is also a very important point when you start designing an experience store for retailers and customers. 

Yeah, they have to think about a five to seven-year creative budget, that's gonna be refreshed steadily, and they have to think about technology that's somewhat future-proofed and isn't gonna look old in five years. 

Bernd Albl: You're talking about five to seven years. Honestly in Europe, I don’t know what’s happening in North America and Canada.

We are faced with the topic that our stores have to last for the next 10 to 12 years, we are asked by the retailers. This is a very hot topic currently due to sustainability and ESG, that we have to develop stores that last much longer. So therefore, we as a shop fitter have to rethink our business model because it's definitely right what you're seeing, but in the past we have designed stores about every five to seven years at that time, and about 20 years in pharmacy stores. But in the near future, I think within the next three years we have to have concepts ready that enable us to realize concepts that are economically beneficial for a shop fitter to create stores that last more than 10 years. One of those things could be operating and digital services you provide and this is one of the big challenges for shop fitters in Europe they have currently faced and I think it's a very positive challenge because it has to be done.

And this has to primarily do with waste material at the end of that five to seven years that you're throwing out all the wooden cabinets, the metal work, the plastic and everything and refreshing the whole look of the store, and therefore you're filling a landfill site with all this old retail design material.

Bernd Albl: Exactly. All those topics you have mentioned are paying into this topic and the big challenges we have is, for example, Nike is one of our big customers in Europe. They're using used materials already, and we definitely see in the design process that the demand for used and refurbished materials is getting high. The quality is not there yet, what is expected by the retailer is that it lasts for a certain period of time. But the trend is definitely going in that direction, and that's the reason why we have implemented at the EuroShop this year, a sustainability database within our organization where we do a lot of research for refurbished materials, how long they last, how you can use them in shop fitting, and therefore we are currently investing a lot of money and time to create the knowledge you need and to fulfill this demand, which is definitely increasing over the next two to three years.

You mentioned Nike. And as one of your main clients, there seems to be two kinds of tracks in retail design lately when it comes to digital, there are stores like Nike's and other particularly athletic apparel kinds of retailers where they, as well as fast fashion, where the stores are just visually noisy. There's all this digital going on, and that’s it's very much digital forward, and then the other track, particularly in luxury retail is, it's very minimalistic where there's digital integrated in there, but it's definitely not in your face. It has a very distinct purpose and kind of blends in with the overall design. Is that what you're seeing?

Bernd Albl: Yes, this is something that we can underline. Unfortunately, we are not doing the digital installations for Nike. But this is definitely a goal that we are heading towards…

To calm them down?

Bernd Albl: I would say digital has a very major part of the storytelling of those stores. When you look at night towns, for example, it's for the whole experience, digital applications also enable the retailer to entertain a big number of customers on the shop floor.

When we come to luxury stores where you have a limited number of customers on the shop floor, at the same time, you're focused more and more on the one-to-one communication from staff to the customer. And, there is also much more to the product, the real product in the center of the storytelling.

And they're much more focused on the materials they're using for shop fitting. And the luxury feeling and being luxury doesn't mean to be digital. That's the reason why we don't see too many digital applications at luxury stores. They are more minimalized there, because the product is in the front and especially the staff is in the front. 

They're in there for the product, not just attracted by the shiny lights. 

Bernd Albl: That's right. 

What does digital represent for the shop fitting side of Umdasch’s business? I think I saw something saying, it used to be maybe 10%, but now it's roughly half.

Bernd Albl: No. I would laugh that it would be half. My boss always says, Bernd, you have to do at least 50% of our total turnover to be digital. Probably in the future. Yes. Definitely. This is something where we see the trend because digital services are also getting into traditional shop fitting applications.

Bernd Albl: Currently, we're doing around 10 to 15% of our total turnover number digitally. 

And are you primarily operating in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, or I assume that some customers take you all over the world with the projects. 

Bernd Albl: This is a strategy we have within the whole organization of Umdasch. With the shopfitting department we are doing business basically in the whole Europe, in the Middle East, in Turkey and in some areas of North Africa. And, we say in those areas where we are actively doing business. 

Last question. If I was traveling through Europe and asked you, okay, I'd love to see one of your stores where you've guided the project and deployed and is a reference case you can talk about. Where would you send me or somebody else to go look? 

Bernd Albl: When you fly over from Canada to Europe, I would say let's make a pit stop in London and go to Harrods. So, we are currently rebuilding Harrods back to its 1920s.

Oh, wow. Interesting. I'll be in London in mid-September, so I'll have to pop by Harrods. Take a Trip to Knightsbridge. 

Bernd Albl: Perfect. But give me a ring. I will come over there and let's go there together.

Alright Bernd. Thank you very much for spending the time with me.

Bernd Albl: Thanks for having me and all the best to Canada.

Tim O’Malley, E Ink

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

Lifers in this industry have been watching the slow but steady evolution and maturity of electronic paper products. and are now seeing them get to a state that they start to make sense for certain display applications, while also looking good enough to satisfy marketers.

Taiwan-based E Ink is by a large margin the best known company developing and marketing this technology. While the big volume is in simple black and white displays for e-readers and electronic shelf labels, E Ink has been steadily improving its capabilities with color.

There are now premium e-paper displays that arguably look as good as what comes off a conventional four-color printing press. And there are also now larger format single and multi-color displays that won't get anywhere near matching a specific Pantone color, but can do the job of adding green to a parking sign, to better indicate availability of spaces.

E-paper products are particularly attractive for some applications these days because they nicely address concerns about sustainability and energy usage. A lot of information signs that get printed and shipped to site can get replaced by e-paper versions that are updated over networks, and use a fraction of the power of more conventional public information displays.

In this episode, I have a great update chat with Tim O'Malley, or Tim O as he says he's most known. He leads commercial activities for E Ink in the US market.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Tim, thanks for joining me. In the context of digital signage, what would you see as the main applications for e-paper displays, E Ink displays?

Tim O'Malley: Yeah, great question. So, the e-paper display has two main characteristics that we leverage into those applications. The first is that it's paper-like and it's reflective. It's not creating light, it's reflecting the light around it, and it's very low power; it does not use any power when the image is not changing.

We really want to look at applications that have been using paper traditionally, and improve that experience, create new functionality, and create more sustainability instead of replacing that paper all the time but enabling it to change. So, a big one for us is in retail applications, whether that's shelf tags on the shelves next to the product or even some of the slightly larger ones that are indicating sales and special promotions about the product. 

Right, so the ESL market.

Tim O'Malley: Yes, the ESL market. In many cases, you'll go into a store, and you'll see they all look like paper. But they're not, they're actually E Ink enabled shelf tags.

And in that sense, there are a lot of installed signs, over 900 million tags installed in the world, and most people don't even know they're seeing it. Similarly, most of the out-of-home signs that are installed on street corners and bus stations are actually paper. All of the attention, of course, goes to the digital ones that you can update and show the latest movie posters, but there's still a lot of paper out there and if we can bring more sustainability but also run on renewable power and the ability to update it remotely, that's an improvement. So, those are the types of applications. 

If you set aside ESLs and digital fact tags, that sort of thing, and then the e-reader market, what would commercial displays represent in the overall business for E Ink. I would imagine it's still pretty small. 

Tim O'Malley: It's relatively smaller, that's correct. Our two big applications are the ones that you identified. That means to me of course, that's our growth opportunity, that's a big area that we can help the world, but also grow the company. As we introduce our new color platforms, we have a color that has high saturation and looks like a 4 pass printing press color, and we have color that's perhaps more muted, but it's faster and easier to use and has wider temperature. 

We're coming out with a range of products that can go into those different configurations and be more appropriate for larger installations of digital signage.

Yeah, I remember, God! It was probably like 13 years ago, going to Computeex in Taiwan and seeing one of the first E Ink color posters. It was like a 32-inch poster or something like that, and I thought that's pretty cool, but it had a color filter, so the colors were quite muted and over the years, those color filters have gotten a lot better, and as you mentioned, you have E Ink products that look like 4 pass color printing. 

Tim O'Malley: Right, the color filter approach does have physics limitations, the lights pass through the color filter, and so you do lose some. We still take that approach, and that's still great for some installations like a lower lift in terms of scalability in order to make a display like that…

 And more cost, I would imagine. 

Tim O'Malley: There's extra process stuff, so it's the same. The material difference for us was taking those colors, those particles of cyan, magenta, yellow or red, green blue, and moving them into the electronic ink material so that we could move away from adding this filter on top, and that’s where if you print on paper, you get the full saturation. If we use the same particles and move them, then we get full saturation. There was a material challenge in 2013, we hadn’t solved it yet. But some of the stuff that we've shown in the last couple of years, and certainly this year in the Society of Information Display Conference, people would sit in front of it and just stare at it for 10 minutes, and then they would say, “How do you do that? It's pretty good.” 

Although I haven't seen it in person, it looks like a very rich, detailed, fully saturated color. 

Tim O'Malley: It does. We need to get you to see one in person. We can probably send something that you could look at and send back.

Oh! Do I have to send it back? Damnit. 

So, what is the status of that thing? Is it still what you're showing at SIT and things like that, or is it a commercially available product now?

Tim O'Malley: So, in April this year, we announced that the product will be commercially available to purchase early next year. So at this point, it's getting partners and downstream ecosystems on board to be able to support that. So that should basically say the technical risk is in a reasonable place, and it's more about scaling and configuration than it is about solving any technical problems. 

So, we started with black and white, as you noticed, so we added red, so it was black, white, red. We added yellow, so then it was black, white, red, and yellow, and now this gets into full color. So it's been a progression for us over the last decade, and that progression has given us the tools and confidence to say the platform has come together in a very reliable way.

Would that be something in fixed sizes, or would it be like custom manufacturing according to whatever the end user needs? 

Tim O'Malley: Yeah. So that gets into the business model and how we approach it. The right way to think about it is that most of what we make is a meter wide and a kilometer long, so we make it by a role process. Then it gets cut down to the appropriate size. However, we're all familiar with the mother glass and the gen fabs that go through on this TFT. So there are efficiencies by different sizes, and that's where you get this 16:9 cut. So, we are typically selling sheets of this that someone else downstream from us can cut to size. But then they're still limited by efficient cuts of glass, or we're making modules ourselves, buying in TFTs where again we look at the efficiency of the cuts of glass. So technically any size is possible, practically most people coalesce around standard sizes.

Okay. So it would be the same kind of sizing range that you might find for a flat-panel LCD display?

Tim O'Malley: Yes!

I guess what I'm angling towards is trying to get an understanding of this premium full-color e-paper display. If it was a 55-inch e-pap er display reflective display versus a 55-inch QLED or OLED display, what would be the cost difference? Would they be comparable, or would you be paying a lot more because the volumes are smaller? 

Tim O'Malley: So we try to characterize the cost into total cost of ownership. 

Yeah, I understand, it's a salesy thing to do, but I get it.

Tim O'Malley:. Yeah. So straight up, It's typically more upfront, but the installation costs are typically much less. So a lot of our installations are running off solar panels. So, there is no digging up of the concrete or running a power line in order to supply it. You put a pole on the ground, you put a solar panel on top, and it works.

So that's where even on the installation side, just the cost of the display itself isn't the only factor, and then if we're using 1% of the energy over the lifetime of the display, or if it's renewable, practically zero because it's not drawing energy then we want to be able to factor that in as well. That's why I try to characterize it as looking at the total cost of ownership because we do want to factor in installation and renewal. 

Fair enough. It just becomes a sticker shock issue if you're just selling completely on MSRP or something. 

Tim O'Malley: And I also said at the outset that we're looking at paper primarily as our way to improve things, and it turns out that paper's kind of cheap. So yeah, the people who are used to paper pricing will get a sticker shock as well, but the value is there. We think it makes a big difference. That's an education project for us.

I was thinking more of this premium fully saturated color, E Ink displays being indoor products, but you're saying they could go for digital out-of-home applications.

Tim O'Malley: Right now, the highest saturation color is primarily indoor. So again, that's part of our progress to continue adding the capability to do outdoor activities. In the outdoor signs, there are both low and high temperatures and a little bit of the rugged UV side of things.

But UV is not that bad, as you can add filters. Low temperature is relatively easy because heating is small and easy to put in. But cooling is a pain and so making sure that we get the high-temperature right, which we're working on and is very close. It will unlock even more locations for us outside. We do have other products, like we've announced Spectra Six, which is the highest saturation and mostly indoor. Kaleido 3 Outdoor, which is the color filter we talked about, is our other product that was announced in April, and that really is giving us the temperature range for the outdoors that does get into match the configuration of the application. 

What's the refresh rate on that?

If it's a transit schedule and it's showing that the next bus is in three minutes when it goes to two minutes, is it pretty snappy, or does the image get a little wobbly for a few milliseconds?

Tim O'Malley: A little wobbly, interesting choice of words. 

To use the kid's term spazzes out for a few milliseconds. I've certainly seen that in demos of e-paper displays. 

Tim O'Malley: Sure. But I'll take a little wobbly over spazzed out. So the Kaleido 3 Outdoors is built on our black and white platform, which switches very fast. We only have to move white or black particles up or down. So, that's typically a second, let's say. Maybe up to five seconds depending on temperature and other factors. So, it's pretty quick. 

The higher saturated sets that we talked about, that's more like 15 seconds to update, and obviously, if you're standing in front of it, 15 seconds is longer enough to notice. So again, we still talk about fitting the configuration to the application. It can be faster, or it can be up to 10 or 15 seconds. 

I'm perhaps weird, but I think it's actually interesting in a way of attracting viewers in certain respects when it's going through this change, because you're looking at it going thinking, what the hell's going on there, and then you see what turns into and it's almost like you want to see that happen again. 

Tim O'Malley: Yeah. So, you've got a lot of experience in the industry, and you know that motion attracts attention. So there certainly is an element to it, you can use that motion, and in some cases we've tried to add that into the retail application where not just showing that static, say, price of the product, but sparkling a little bit or highlighting a little bit in order to draw somebody's attention as they're walking by in order to attract them to that product. So that is something that can be done, and it's an advantage of moving from paper to a display but still keeping five-year life on the coin cell battery instead of having to connect it to power. 

How important was going to color filters for your transit or municipal displays? 

Was that something that the end user said, “We like this, but we need to show a no parking sign or whatever with a red filter on it?”

Tim O'Malley: Yeah, it was important feedback from the market and consumers, whether that's a public transportation subway line where you want to be able to show each of the line colors with red, green, blue, et cetera, appropriately, or the bus lines often have colors associated with them as well, or red means no parking, is a common thing. Red is used to indicate something of special importance. That was definitely based on the feedback. 

That's where we started with the color filter because that was the integration and that was the easier technical challenge and then moved to built-in particles in order to make the color more saturated over time.

Is that where you're at now with the, I think you said, Kaleido 3 or something like that? 

Tim O'Malley: The Kaleido platform is the color filter platform, and then Spectra is our higher saturation, has traditionally mostly been for retail platform, right? And with the reaching of full color, we're looking to expand that into broader markets.

Is there still R&D work going on to introduce video? 

I saw low frame rate E Ink displayed at Touch Taiwan about four or five years ago and thought, that's interesting, but it's got a long way to go before that's commercially viable.

Tim O'Malley: Yeah, so there's a couple of things there.

Recently we showed, again at that same conference in LA, a display running a video. I think it was around 15 frames per second just to showcase that it was possible to have a display running a video and that was using a color filter on the display to do it. 

In general, however, the main advantage of replacing paper with an e-paper display is the low power when the image is not changing. So most of the applications that make sense aren't using video because they want low power savings. Like I mentioned, the shelf tags are five to seven years on a pair of coin cells. You could shorten that to three months if you did video on the coin cells. But why would you? 

So if someone wanted to try and do video, it would lose some of the key benefits of low power. It could technically be done, but that's probably not the best fit for the technology stream that we've been focused on, and the application we are focused on. 

It turns out there's a really good solution in the world for video. As you mentioned, QLED or OLED. So that's a fine choice for that application and for paper replacement, and for things like that, we're developing a differentiated approach.

So you can go down that path with R&D, but it's not a core focus, and you stay in your lane, so to speak?

Tim O'Malley: That's a great rephrasing. Little shorter. That was good. You're hired. 

I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago for a conference, a digital signage conference, and Europe's very different from North America in a whole bunch of ways, but particularly when it comes to the mindset and the requirements around energy conservation and sustainability. 

When I was asked, while I was over there, “What's the mindset in North America?” And I would say they're starting to talk about it, but it's nothing like it is over here. I know your company talks a lot about energy savings and sustainability. Is it more of a discussion in other parts of the world than perhaps in North America? 

Tim O'Malley: Yes, absolutely. I agree with your impression of Europe. There was a regulation passed in Germany, and I think one also in France, limiting the amount of time that a digital display for non-public information, so an advertising display can be operated during the day. So I think it's six hours. 

Primarily that regulation is intended to save energy. My general observation from looking at the retail market where we were working in shelf tags, it started in Europe. They were maybe leading the thoughts on the benefits that you can get with low power displays, particularly on labor savings because the labor situation in Europe is a little bit different than in Asia and North America.

But the trend to use e-paper displays in retail migrated from Europe, then to Asia, and from Asia over to North America. You might have seen earlier this year Walmart announced they were adopting it. I expect the same thing to happen with this type of focus on sustainability and energy usage, and signage. We will see that Europe will lead, and then eventually, as the configurations are more mature and the benefits are clearer, it'll start to migrate around the world. So I do expect that the stuff that you saw at that conference will be a trend. 

Is the mindset around being socially responsible and environmentally responsible, or is it more calculated that this is going to save us money, or is it simply they're doing it because regulations are forcing our hand?

Tim O'Malley: I expect that when it turns into a trend, which I think it will be all of the above. I mentioned that the initial push to put shelf tags in retail was primarily for labor savings, and it was primarily in Europe. But now, if you look at the recent interview that the Walmart CFO did, there's a return on investment by making these changes; we can update prices easier, we can compete online, can do supply management, and it helps us with logistics. Also, we still have the labor savings, and it looks better. 

When the configurations start to mature and come online, it'll still be about sustainability, but there'll be other aspects that are beneficial as well. We can use it for communicating with the public during emergency situations. That will also lend to the trend. Right now, it's a lot about sustainability and energy savings. I think as it gets better, more and more attributes will start to be recognized and feed the trend. 

I'm curious again about mass transport.

I've seen and written about a number of pilots and initial deployments of e-paper displays as real-time transit schedule information signs at bus stops, and so on. I'm curious whether you see those turn into full deployments or, for the most part, they are still early-stage pilots?

Tim O'Malley: Most installations we've been working with today are city by city, shall we say? Each city is typically doing a pilot before moving to a larger installation. So we're in the process of that earlier stage. In some cases, there are signs hanging from handles in subway cars in China. That's an installation. 

Late stage pilot is maybe a reasonable answer, but also it's part of the process of getting it through these stages of government bureaucracy approval, figuring out how they want to make infrastructure investment, and validating that these different applications and new cases make sense. So bus stations, bus signs, and bus shelters are a strong category for us, but it's still early days. 

Yeah. Is there any mass transport system globally that has fully deployed? 

Tim O'Malley: There's not a fully deployed global system that I'm aware of, but there's a number of, especially cities, that are interested in what could be done with the right configurations, and this is where we are getting to a full-color product is also helpful to those installations. Instead of talking about it being limited to black, white, and red, it can do everything. Let's figure out how we adapt that in a way that makes sense. So it turns the conversation from talking about potential limitations to talking about potential solutions. 

Yeah, I think Sydney, Australia, and transport for London and the UK have both done pretty substantial pilots, right? 

Tim O'Malley: Yes. Very impressive. 

There you go. I haven't lost all my marbles yet. 

Tim O'Malley: You have been in the industry for a while. You must follow it. 

Yeah, that's what I get up in the morning and do.

What about the medical market? I think that's an area that's really got a lot of opportunity in big healthcare institutions for information displays, like outside of patient rooms, at the nursing stations, on and on, and I know on your website that's talked about. I'm curious, what stage of adoption is that? I suspect early.

Tim O'Malley: It's the earliest stage, a fine description. We identified that opportunity and started working towards it. It's a little bit ahead in Asia. Right at the time when Covid was starting, it turned out not to be a great strategic moment to really be focusing on healthcare. The worldwide healthcare hospital industry started to focus on something else at that time, and it has taken a little bit of a reset for us to engage in those conversations. 

Nevertheless, whether it's an information board in the patient room where it's displaying key statistics that are relevant to the patient, such as their doctor's name or their schedule for the day. And we've done a pilot with Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston, where there's positive feedback on that type of board in the room. It's nice in the sense that it's not giving off light at night, it's not like keeping you awake as if your TV showing the same information, and it's unobtrusive if you decide you did want to watch TV, it just sits on the side of the room with the information if and when you want it.

Yeah, I suspect, though, it's an incredibly long sales cycle. 

Tim O'Malley: Everyone tells me healthcare is extremely lucrative and extremely hard to break into. We're working on the break into it at the moment. 

Yeah, I don't think there's any deal that you do in a couple of meetings. 

Tim O'Malley: But there's real value there. We think it's a potential solution. We are starting to see the conversations change now that the world is getting back to more normalcy. 

We might be seeing a little bit of adoption on the inventory management front first, where you take the same shelf tags that are being used in retail and bring them into those stock rooms in the hospitals and connect that to the inventory management system. So if something starts to run low, you push a button on the tag, or maybe it's even automated by a scale, you can have a significant savings by managing your inventory better. So we're seeing in the back room, maybe not seen by all the patients, that might be a pretty good application. So, we're still exploring ways to add value there.

Yeah, I chatted with a company called Freshwater Digital in Michigan and their digital signage solutions company, but they also do ESLs, and they were describing how they were seeing some activity around things like e-paper fact tags in research labs for the cages for and trying different medications on lab rats or monkeys or whatever, and I thought that's interesting. 

Tim O'Malley: Exactly. I've also heard and seen some of that. It's leveraging that combination of this cloud communication infrastructure and the fact that you don't need to connect the tag to power. It can sit there, it can be in communication, it can update when it needs to, but it can also go for a year plus on a coin cell. That's enabling us to go into places that might have been more difficult for traditional solutions. 

There's been a lot of noise the last couple of years coming out of CES with, I think it was a BMW that had E Ink, some sort of an E Ink overlay that would make the car changeable. Is that like trade show bling or something that's real and one day might be out there? 

Tim O'Malley: Absolutely real, and one day might be out there, but also a little trade show bling. So working with BMW has been awesome. They're great designers, and taking a technical mindset and engineering and matching it up with some design thinking created what was really a wow concept car. And so, the goal was to create a concept car to show what's possible, and what was shown at CES this year was a car covered in E Ink material that could switch between 32 different colors and show different patterns and different segments and create a lot of wow factor. 

Ideally, over time we'll start to work this into some simpler parts of the car, maybe inside the car. We also have some integration with the front lights and with the headlights and then work towards that full-color car covering; the exciting thing about that is it's moving away from what we think of as digital information into something that's more like personalization. Now, you can change your clothes every day or from one venue to another depending on whether you're at a barbecue or a formal dinner, and you could change your car too in order to reflect either location. Hyper personalization seems to be a trend. That was part of what BMW was leaning into we have a sustainable solution, but also a digital solution for personalization. 

What about building materials? I think it was near San Diego airport, or at the airport, they had a parking garage that was collided in another E Ink material.

Tim O'Malley: Yeah, that was based on an old battleship design from World War II called Dazzle, where it would break up the lines. So you didn't have quite an outline on the horizon, and they wanted to bring that same feeling into the rental car center, because they have the naval base out there. And we did have a whole bunch of signs on the outside of the building that could change and pre-programmed patterns.

You said it did that. Is that no longer active?

Tim O'Malley:  Oh, it's still there. Architecture is not a primary focus, so if we start from that first principle of looking at places where people use paper and then bringing added benefit. Paper isn't widely used on the outside of buildings as a material. You might have some signs or some advertisements, and we did talk about that. 

Architecture, there's a lot of it. It might be interesting over time, but it wouldn't be my first step from where we're today. 

That's also a very long sales cycle. 

Tim O'Malley: It's also a very long sales cycle, yes, and it's not traditionally an easy way to bring a high-tech material in. You really need to make the configuration simple to bring onto the site for people to install and use. 

This flew by. Just one last question. What can we expect to see what kind of announcements can you hint out over the next six to twelve months for E Ink?

Tim O'Malley: We're heavily leaning into applications that are color, and we want to bring full color into all of our product lines. So the thing that I would be looking for is more announcements by customers and partners that have E Ink displays that are upgrading them to those full color solutions and in many cases I think that will help us unlock another round of excitement as consumers become aware of what can be possible, and hopefully, smart cities start to look at that and adopt it as well. 

So full color in more places is those type of announcements that I'm looking for.

Alright. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Bernd Hofstoetter, M-Cube

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

Italy's M-Cube has quietly grown into one of the larger and more pervasive digital signage solutions providers on the planet - with deployments in more than 100 countries globally, across some 60,000 retail stores.

It does mainstream retail and QSR, but the sweet and lucrative spot for Milano-based M-Cube is servicing the needs of luxury brands - something both Italy and France seem to have as specialties.

M-Cube has grown both organically and through acquisitions, including the purchase of a French firm run by Bernd Hofstoetter, who is now M-Cube's Paris-based CEO.

In this podcast, you'll hear about how M-Cube operates in Europe and globally, industry trends (particularly in retail), and how it approaches and works with luxury brands in their bricks and mortar stores.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Bernd, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what M-Cube is all about? I think there are a lot of North American listeners who probably aren't familiar with the company. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yeah, Dave, no problem. M-Cube is a company that has existed for over 20 years. We started 20 years ago out of Italy, with mainly audio solutions for retail, and five years later, over 15 years ago, we moved very fast and very strongly to the digital signage growing market, and we became, over the years, the leading provider in Italy, and then we bought different companies in Europe, and today in 2023, we claim to be one of the top in-store digital solution providers based in Europe, but with a global footprint delivering to over a hundred countries in 60,000 stores to 500 clients our digital solutions like audio, video, content, technology, and more and more as well omnichannel.

Would you describe what you do as a solutions provider or an integrator? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: More the first one. I would say that at the beginning, we were more an integrator and we became much more a full-service solution provider. 

We are moving more on the first part of the value chain, meaning the customer journey, and content development because technology is everywhere around and to fit the right solution, a good mix of the best content and the right technology, and of course, the power of deployment and service is the most important key success factor in this industry for the next 5 to 10 years.

Was it a case where the company saw the opportunity to expand its services, or they were being pushed in that direction anyways by customers? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yeah, that Dave is very often like that, the strategy you do afterward. So that means, of course, there were some global customers who were pushing us to deliver video solutions, so we moved to video. And as we have a lot of global customers, especially in luxury, we are, of course, a company that can deploy in over a hundred countries this kind of digital solutions in retail. 

Yes, it is pushed by the clients when you start, but of course, over the years, then it becomes a company where you add some parts where you are not so strong, so you buy from time to time some expertise from outside to complete your value chain. 

So you're one of those companies that were acquired by M-Cube. You're the CEO of another company in Belgium and France. How did that go? 

I'm curious because it strikes me as Europe is still regional. There are particular companies that are strong in Germany, Italy, France, or Spain, but they're not necessarily pan-European. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, I come from a company acquired by M-Cube, and we had the journey to integrate all the companies we bought to integrate in the last two years. Of course, there are still local champions in the German region or in the UK or in France, et cetera. But the tenders are becoming more and more European or even more and more global. 

I think if it continues like that, the pure local providers, they probably will have a bit more trouble in the next years to grab the business. We see more and more European-wide, or over several countries in Europe tenders.

And that's not easy, is it? Because of all the different languages and everything else. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, but we have now a position in every main important country in Europe. I'm not talking about little countries like Luxembourg but all main countries. Italy, Spain, France, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Belgium. We have a local team where we deliver local, but as well, European or global solutions. 

Your company works a lot with luxury retail. How important is that particular vertical market to you guys? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Of course, we have grown in luxury a lot. I think we understand luxury very well because this sector is extremely demanding, it's extremely global, it's extremely service oriented and there's still a lot to be done in the luxury sector, that’s what we see, so it is important. 

That's the reason as well why we moved more and more to the content side in the last years. I think we are very fit for this sector. 

And it's a very different sector to approach as well. Like me, I get a sense that luxury retail wants to be subtle and has a kind of a minimalist bend to the way they approach digital in their stores. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yeah, totally. They are not approaching it from the technology side. They are approaching it purely from the customer's side, that's what we love. That's what we know to do. It's a specific code, what we say in our business, specific code when it comes to luxury, it's a bit different world to address to, to talk to, to communicate to.

Because a lot of the luxury brands emanate from Italy and France, so have you experienced organic growth because a lot of those companies are there and they see what others are doing and come to you? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Of course, as we were strong or still strong in Italy and we have acquired a company in France we could have a good positioning, but we are now working as well with luxury companies, not only based in Italy or France. So our culture, our compensation, and our interpretation of the luxury challenges in terms of customer journey seems to be very appreciated, not only to the Italian-based or French-based luxury groups.

It would strike me, as an outsider, not spending enough time thinking about it, that the budgets that these kinds of retailers have are quite different from what you would have for let's say a fast fashion apparel retailer.

Is that a fair assessment or wrong? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: In the end, it comes to the return on investment. It is not about what we are thinking about whether it is the fast retailer having a lower budget or a luxury group. It's about return on investment at the end of the day. 

The solution we engineer, we design for our clients, they need to bring the expected return on investment in their stores or boutiques. 

No, I would not really say that a luxury retailer has double the budget of a fast retailer or whatever. It really depends, and at the end, it's the return on investment. 

It's interesting, with one of your main competitors, and I'm sure business friends as well, Trison based out of Spain, they work a lot with Inditex and there's a particular brand, Lefties that has stores that - I haven't been in one yet - but they look pretty wild in terms of the amount of digital in there.

Is that something that you're being asked about or is it, or would it be the opposite of how a luxury retailer would approach things? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: No, Lefties is, of course, an interesting case. I've been to one of the stores in Barcelona, Dave, and it's clear that in stores like that where you would expect a bit of digital, but when you see the level of digital investments in the store, of course, it's really amazing. But it shows one thing, screens everywhere. 

The generation who go shopping today to Lefties, they are grown up with screens, and there's no way back. I can give you a little anecdote on that. We had a client five to six years ago, and they deployed at that time 700 nits Window screens in 200 stores. 

After five years, the lady said, “Hey, Bernd, five to six years ago, we were the first. Now everybody has a Window screen, and much more, and the problem is that they are 2000 or 3000 nits. Ours look old-fashioned. I think we'll stop.” And I said of course you can stop, but you will not be recognized anymore. What is the story? They invested in the new generation, in the new technology with 4,000 nits screens. So there is no way back, and Lefties is one interesting case for that, Dave, that for me, there is no way back. Food retail is very active at that moment with screens. For example, we said years ago that food retail will likely not invest anymore. There's no way back. More and more screens everywhere. 

And what do you mean when you say there's no way back?

Bernd Hofstoetter: There's no way back to less digital. There's no way back. For us, it's clear that perhaps there will be fewer stores, but the investment per store in digital will grow over the years. We are totally sure of that. 

Yeah, I guess you have a digital native shopping crowd now that maybe you didn't have even 10 years ago because I can remember retailers screening out a store, like there were screens everywhere in a store, particularly for sports retailers, and then when they did a refresh, sometimes they would strip out a lot of those screens because they just realized it was so much noise. Have you experienced that at all? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: No. We have very few cases where the retailer has not integrated in the next version of his retail chain, of his concept, more screens. Very very few. I really need to think for a long time to find an example. I remember there was one or two in the last five years, but that's absolutely the exception. That's not the rule. Not at all.

What's been your experience with interactive retail? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: It’s not so easy to do interactive in retail. Then Covid wasn’t fair to the tech, so interactive was somewhat totally stopped, but it’s restarting. We see some projects in some specific markets, but it is not like what we imagined 10 years ago when everybody said everything will be interactive in the store.

Yeah, I've found that a lot of interactive efforts in stores just sit orphaned. They don't get used unless somebody encourages them to use it. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: We think more about the interactive, for example, as omnichannel an solution to help the salesperson in the customer journey, so to upsell something in the store, but for the end customer, it is still not so easy to make use of these technologies. Yes, I totally agree with you, Dave. 

So for a salesperson, it's like assisted selling, this is a tool they can use?

Bernd Hofstoetter: Exactly. That's what we can offer.

When you go into engagements with a new client, let's say it's a luxury retailer that you're not yet working with, what are those first questions you guys are asking? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: The expected return on investment of a digital solution, because it does not make sense to make technology for technology. So the benefit of the technology, of the solution is the key for us. It's absolutely key. 

And do the clients have a sense of that? Because I've sat across the table from customers in my consulting days and asked them why, and in a lot of cases, they couldn't really quantify that. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: More and more. We have more and more technology to understand what could be the return on investment of a digital solution.

We always run proof of concepts or tests or pilots. But you are totally right. When I look back 10 years ago, it was like, oh, we need to have a screen. Today, this is really totally over. We hear questions like, “What is the objective?” “What is the return on investment expected?” “What do we really want to achieve?” And from there, it's the design of the solution and the integration of the technology into the customer journey. These are the most important points at the beginning of the discussions.

Are you marketing your own technology, or do you work with partners? Obviously, you would on the display side, but do you have your own software?

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, Dave, one of our DNA is to have our own platforms, audio and video platforms. Of course, if the customer says, I want to work with this non-proprietary platform, we can do that. But we prefer to run our service on our platforms where we have invested over the last 15 years now. We still have a lot of software development people in the company continuing to develop the platforms, hosting and maintaining, and evolving the platforms. Yes, it's one part of our DNA, our proprietary platforms. 

Are you typically, or most typically managing the networks for your retail clients?

Bernd Hofstoetter: We are more and more integrated into the networks of our clients. Monitoring is becoming very important. Of course, that was not so important years ago. That's now key. Proactive monitoring is very important. Reliability and security are becoming more common in the last two years in big tenders; the security level and tenders are only increasing, not decreasing, only increasing. The request for more security is increasing. That's clear as well. 

Yeah, I saw a comment from your president, Manlio that you were getting into some deals and replacing existing software vendors simply because you could offer the level of IT security they could not.

Bernd Hofstoetter: That's totally true. For example, one and a half years ago, we had a global deal where we replaced the existing provider and the main driver of this client was security level to enhance.

You're operating, as you said, in the north of a hundred countries. How do you manage all that, like do the deployment in places like China and India? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: In China, we have an operation. In Hong Kong, we have an operation. In North America, we do it with a partner. We have a network of installations. We have three hotlines in different time zones. So we cover our customers 24 hours, seven days a week. 

China is a bit of a mystery to a lot of people within digital signage just because it's such a huge market internally. How do you compete there?

Or is it more a case o,f you have European clients who are expanding into China with their luxury retail?

Bernd Hofstoetter: We do both. We help our customers from Europe to serve and support in China, but we have a local business development team as well. Yes, China is, of course, totally different in terms of competition, in terms of market environment, that's clear, but it's a huge market. We have been there for a couple of years now, and we are quite happy. 

When you're going into competitive situations in China, do you even know the names of the companies you're competing with? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: After some years, yes. In the end, we can identify the relevant set of competitors in China. 

Are they mostly domestic companies? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, mostly domestic. 

So you would never bump into in North American or European companies? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: No. 

For the technology, are you seeing trends in terms of what's interesting to your customers? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: We see the combination of the online and offline world, which is not only a trend; it's a real demand from our clients to prolong the online journey into the store. So that's something where we are investing. We have a special team for that, and we upsell our clients with this kind of Omnichannel solution. This is one part. Then, of course, technology is becoming more and more powerful. Because you better integrate it into the customer journey. 

I would say that's the two main drivers for technology coming from our clients. 

So when you're talking about omnichannel it's this whole idea of retail media networks?

Bernd Hofstoetter: No, it is not the retail media. That's another subject we are looking at now. 

But it's about the clienteling, it’s about e-commerce in the store, this kind of application. The retail media, Dave, we discussed in Munich as well, is something that has been in Europe for years, and there is now a new dynamic of the retail media and of course, with our stores deployed, we have quite good positioning here on that.

Would you envision third-party advertising going into places like a luxury retail store? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: No, I don't think so. I think there are sectors where retail media in the store will not be applicable because there are retailers who want to manage the exclusivity of branding in their stores.

I was working before in the advertising industry. I know about this world. I don't see that even in five years in a luxury store there is advertising for automobiles or whatever, don't see that. 

And most of what you do is luxury brands for beauty, for timepieces, bags, all kinds of stuff like that. Do you deal with automotive as well? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, we have a team specialist in automotive. We had one year ago, a huge tender for a global rollout for a global automobile company. In automobiles, we are moving very fast. That's another sector where we still see a lot of business to be done. Telecom, we are strong as well. Food retail, we are reshaping it. Of course, fashion is a bit down in Europe. We had some bankruptcies in fashion chains. So fashion in Europe is not in a super shape. But automotive, yes, it’s a sector where we have acquired a lot of experience in the last three to four years now.

You've mentioned, or we've talked a lot about luxury, but you also have QSR clients, correct? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, we have in Italy QSR, we have in Germany, QSR. We have in Spain a bit of QSR in France as well. 

Those are very different meetings, I suspect. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Very different. QSR, the subject very often comes with franchisors, and there's a lot of franchise business out there for QSR, which is again another world. Not in terms of finances, but in terms of technology, technology is not a subject. The menu boards are not a problem at all. It is; it's not a challenge. It's more the contracting and invoicing part where you have to, where you have to work with many franchises or single sites one by one, which is a bit different.

Is your company and your development team looking at AI and how it can be applied to what you do? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: We look to that, of course. I think everybody is looking at that. We have our ideas how AI could improve efficiency for us. 

I'm curious about North America. You mentioned that you have a business partner over here. Is the plan one day to establish an office here as well? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: We are thinking about it. When you see our geographic footprint being in Europe and Asia, you could say, “Hey, M-Cube, why are you not covering the North American market?” It's something that we have to think about, sure, but we want to do it right. That's very important because America, of course, is a market in itself, and we want to make it right if we make it with a known and operated structure. 

Does it present a barrier at all that you don't have an office there, or can you talk about your partner? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: We do not have the feeling today that we do not get the global deals because we do not have our own office and team in America. So for us, It's not a downside. We see that if we move there, there might be a potential upside. 

It's a nice to have, but not a need to have. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Today, it's not the missing partin our business, but we see that the deals become more and more global and that it would really make sense of course to have a strong team in America.

I'm curious about marketing and getting your name out there. When you work with these incredible luxury brands, they tend to be very quiet and cautious, and I'm guessing that it's not often that they allow you to talk about your projects with them. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: That's totally right, Dave, unfortunately, but that's the price to pay. But to be clear, luxury is a very interesting and challenging world, and to be honest, we do not need to do our marketing for that because when people move from one brand to another, and they worked with us in Brand A and will work now in Brand B, it's the best advertising we can have.

Is there a store that you can talk about, that once people say what's your kind of showroom or the one that you send people to if you can? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: In Milano, we have several stores of several global luxury chains and retailers. When we do a store visit, we mainly do it in Montelliana in Milano, where you see the power of the M-Cube solutions life. 

So once you engage with a prospective client, then you can hopefully get them to Milan and show them around that way. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yeah.

You are based in Paris, correct? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: I'm based in Paris, yes. 

But you're back and forth all the time, I suspect.

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yeah, but I'm based in Paris today. 

It’s nice to have two cities like that to cycle between. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, very nice cities. Paris and Milano. 

Alright, Bernd, thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Thank you, Dave. Take care. 

Digital Signage Yearbook 2023

In this special episode, I chat with Balthasar Mayer and Antonia Hamberger of invidis Consulting, the Munich-based firm that has for many years produced an annual yearbook that takes a deep dive into the digital signage industry.

The new yearbook for 2023 is out, with versions in German and an international one in English that includes quite a bit of copy and input from Sixteen:Nine.

This podcast goes into the story behind the yearbook, its growth beyond first Germany and then Europe, and what readers will find in the 2023 version - which is some 200 pages of editorial (not advertorial) content, including regional market analyses.

The good news - it's a free download.

Shane Vega, Userful

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

Using existing network infrastructure has long been talked up as an efficient way to manage and deliver digital signage solutions in large companies, but the concept has been clouded by concerns - like the cost of additional AV hardware and the impact of all that video on the company network.

But we now live in a world where companies support countless video conferencing sessions with piles of users, with little or no latency. Other technologies have also caught up, and computing just keeps getting more powerful.

Which is why I was interested in chatting with Shane Vega, VP of Marketing for the Silicon Valley software firm Userful, about his company's AV over IP solutions. The company has its roots in Calgary, Alberta and still does a lot of the R&D work there.

Userful first showed up in digital signage circles talking about a different way, using software and endpoints, to drive video walls. But in the last few years it has been much more focused on a broader IP-driven solution that tends to start with control rooms and operations centers, but can also drive things like meeting room displays and digital signage around corporate campuses.

There's been a lot of discussion about AV needs converging with IT interests, but from Vega's perspective, that convergence is already firmly in place.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Shane, thank you for joining me. Where are you today? 

Shane Vega: I am in sunny Tampa, Florida, where although it's not all that sunny today, we've got some rain, but that's per the norm now. 

Now, Userful is in Silicon Valley, but a lot of the developers are in Calgary, right?

Shane Vega: Yeah, that's correct. All of our R&D, engineering team, and the like, they're all up in Calgary, Canada.

So you're missing the Calgary Stampede this week? 

Shane Vega: I am missing the Stampede. 

But you know what, I believe they deserve a bit of some good time because they spend the majority of the time avoiding the minus 30-degree weather. 

Yeah, I spent a number of years in Calgary, and it's an interesting weather city.

Shane Vega: Yeah. You know it's bad when they've developed an entire infrastructure of walkways between buildings to avoid having to go outside. 

Yeah, just like Minneapolis. 

Shane Vega: Exactly. 

All right, so we had a quick chat in the LG booth at Infocomm, and you explained what Userful was up to with its Infinity platform and AV over IP and AV as a Service and so on, and I've seen that. I will wholeheartedly admit I don't totally get it, but how you explained it to me was very interesting, and I thought this would be useful for a lot of people to understand the infrastructure and distribution side of digital signage. 

We spend so much time talking about the content and business strategy and all those sorts of things, but behind-the-scenes stuff is awfully important, and maybe we could start out by just explaining what Userful is and does and where you came from because when Userful first came out, it was presented to me as video wall software, and I had a hell of a time wrapping my brain around what it was all about. But I know you guys have evolved quite a bit. 

Shane Vega: Yeah. I appreciate that, Dave. To answer your question, Userful has grown exponentially in the last 5+ years. John Marshall, our CEO came on board about 7 years or so ago. My timing might be a little bit off, and when he came into the organization, we were a perpetual software company, so we weren't software as a service, we weren't selling subscriptions. We were selling perpetual software…

You'd buy a license and then get that supported? 

Shane Vega: Yeah, you'd buy a license then we support it for the duration of however long you wanted to use it, and the license for the software was pretty siloed, right? It was, “Hey, you can buy this operations center license.” Where, to your point, we were just managing content on a video wall. 

And it was mostly control rooms, right? 

Shane Vega: Mostly control rooms, almost exclusively for a time, and then we evolved into the digital signage world, and it was cloud-based digital signage exclusively. So what most folks are familiar with is hosting up in AWS, giving you some access to dynamic tools for creating templates and the like. 

During Infocom, what we've launched and from the time that I just mentioned until about, maybe two and a half years ago or three years ago, we've pivoted the company from perpetual to subscription-based software as a service, and that's who Userful is. We are a software company, and we've been a software company tailored to the needs of the AV industry. 

Most currently, we've just released our newest platform, and that's really been the biggest evolution, which is moving away from application-specific deployments into more of a platform approach for AV over IP and that is really the biggest breakthrough development that we've had here, because in the older version of our software, we were a monolithic code base. Again, we were just selling either the operation center software or we were selling some digital signage. Everything was monolithic. It was difficult for our engineering team to manage updates, firmware, bug fixes, and the like.

We've now moved to a distributed code base that has given us exceptional flexibility with how we develop our software for the various use cases and applications in the AV industry. So if you think about what you've seen in the conversations you and I have had, essentially, and you hit the nail right on the head, this isn't just about fancy software managing content on a video wall. Can we do that? Of course, we've got feature sets for various different use cases, but there's also the infrastructure piece, and this was my “aha moment” through a different lens at Infocomm. 

AV over IP has matured through the years from IP addressable matrix switchers where everything was still very much centralized into IP addressable nodes, encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers, and all the different AV manufacturers out there have now standardized on this proprietary hardware version of AV over IP, and I started to ask myself the question: what is their value proposition in doing that?

And I overheard quite a few folks during this past Infocomm talk about the value of this distributed architecture: enabling flexibility, scalability, augmenting workflows, the total cost of ownership being lower, and I sat there a little bit baffled because these are all the same things that we talk about at Userful and so it really opened up an area where I feel like we do need to evangelize a little bit more about how Userful do AV over IP differently, and that we don't necessitate all of the hardware infrastructure. We truly are a software platform, but because of the IT protocols that currently exist, that's how we developed our software.

So when you think about Userful, I've actually positioned us a little bit more as an IT solution than an AV solution, even though our entire solution is built around the AV industry and its needs. The reason I say that is because we're literally a server, non-proprietary, and an endpoint, and that endpoint is software, so our uClient application.

In between the two is network infrastructure. There are no end encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers, and the list goes on. Because we are able to transmit content and aggregate content, meaning we can pull in sources of visual information and audio information into a data library or data store that we manage on our server and distribute that information to any destination or any screen and we do that all with IP protocols. 

The same IP protocols, by the way, and this is how I usually get people to have the “aha moment.” If we were having this over a Teams meeting, Dave, or a Zoom meeting, we would be transmitting video two ways. In many cases, multiple participants from multiple regions of the world share two-way audio and video. We would be able to share content from our local computers into that meeting, and nobody would have to go out and buy a proprietary encoder and decoder to make that happen. So using that same infrastructure or those IT protocols that are currently at work, IP protocols like WebRTC for instance, we're able to build a solution that leverages those same advancements for the purposes of AV over IP.

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but that's what we're doing. 

So you wouldn't have been able to do some of that 10-15 years ago because the network infrastructure is a lot of larger corporations hadn't really caught up with that, so you would flood a network if you were using a lot of video and so on, but things have changed. 

Shane Vega: Things have changed substantially, and I would even say it's been not even 10-15 years ago, just 5-10 years ago, and the reason I say that is because there are the laws of engineering and physics like Butter's Law, Kryder’s Law, Moore's Law, which talks about how rapidly the advancements of, let's say, fiber optic networks, which are doubling every nine months, the amount of bandwidth that you can get between the fiber optic cable or the amount of processing speed that you can get out of a CPU and how fast these advancements are happening. 

What we're doing and the way that we're doing it is taxing the CPU of that server. It's also taxing the GPU of that server, the graphics card because those are the two major components that we use for our solution. If you think about just two years ago, Dave, our servers that we were deploying in the field were 8 cores of processors. Right now, I have a server that we've certified that's 192 cores of processors, so we're able to do exceptionally and exceedingly more on a single server, which is why we've actually built our solution to be a data center solution by and large, where you take a big beefy server, you put it in your data center, and you're virtualizing all of the traditional hardware that you would need, and you're managing a wide range of AV endpoints, whether it's digital signage, meeting rooms, operations centers, or what have you. 

Is there a baseline for what you need in terms of the network infrastructure? 

I'm definitely not an IT Architect, but do you need a CAT6E, or can you do this over Wifi, I don't know, and I suspect a lot of people don’t know. 

Shane Vega: Yeah, so it's a good question. So again, because we're optimizing for IT protocols, we're able to do a lot, right? From the screen to the switch, we're just really looking for that one-gigabit uplink, which is standard. Most folks are going to have that. From the server to the source to the server and all that infrastructure pulling into the server, we're looking for the 10 gigabit uplink. 

So there are some requirements for the network, but nothing that is outside the realms of standard network topology. The real intricacies or the real areas where we get into some deeper discussions are when they have multiple networks that we have to traverse. When you start getting into DOD environments where things have to be air-gapped and there's no internet connectivity and when networks start to get a little bit more complex, that's where we have to begin to get a little bit more intentional about how we design it.

Now that said, we haven't yet met a deployment that we couldn't meet the network requirements for, even though some of those were those complex ones.

There were two things that particularly interested me. 

The first was, as you laid out earlier, that you don't need all these encoders and other bits of hardware to layer into a network to make this happen. So you're cutting out conceivably a lot of capital costs and a lot of potential fail points, and I guess the other thing that intrigues me, and you can talk about that next is or after. 

The first question would be the idea that you can use this for multiple aspects. I suspect there are control room data dashboards, and software platforms out there, but one of the things you talked about at Infocomm is that you can cascade this out to do all kinds of different things from operation centers to experience centers off of the same platform. 

Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly, Dave, and to answer the first question, you hit the nail on the head with one of my areas of confusion when I was at Infocomm, and I heard people talking about the low total cost of ownership, and they were tying it to these encoders and decoders. 

We don't require those things. So when I think about the total cost of ownership, I think about the hard work upfront costs that you don't need to have and the additional BTU output from all of that hardware that you would normally need, that's no longer going to be there, which is going to drive your HVAC costs, right? You don't have all the power consumption. So for green initiatives and companies who are looking to do things, and this is a big one moving forward, folks want to be more green, and get green initiatives going like lower carbon emissions, lowering power consumption by not having all that hardware is yet another total cost of ownership benefit for Userful. 

Again, our encoding happens at the one server that we require in that Nvidia graphics card. The decoding is done by a piece of software we developed called the uClient application. Now, where that uClient application resides, we give you tons amount of flexibility. We have integrated it into certain endpoints like Web OS or Tizen or Android. And that gives us the flexibility to be able to load that client application in various different environments and use cases, depending on the display type if it's an LCD, if it's a direct view LED, and how we manage that. 

In some cases, we do have a small appliance that you might need at the edge, and that would be one additional piece of hardware per display, depending on the display type, and that's an Android box that we load our uClient application onto if the display doesn't have the ability to integrate with our software. 

So if it's a smart display that already has a system on a chip on it, conceivably you don't need that Android box? 

Shane Vega: Correct. So now what you're left with, as I said, is just a server with software at the edge, and network infrastructure in between.

So ongoing maintenance costs are substantially lower. Initial hardware costs are lower. Your total cost of ownership around all the things I mentioned earlier is going to be lower. Therefore, your refresh costs are going to be lower. Because with hardware, every three to five years, in some cases five to seven years, you're having to do a hardware refresh. It's always tied to CapEx because it's usually proprietary. They have to budget for CapEx renewals of all this hardware. 

Because of Userful's deployment model, we can take on an OPEX model for those folks who would benefit from that because your hardware refresh can be built into your standard IT refreshes because you own the hardware. In many cases, as many as we can possibly, push for, we don't provide the server, we want the end user to provide the server, and that way, it gets built into your traditional OPEX refresh, and that way, the only recurring cost is the software. 

To your next question about what we spoke about and the benefits of the platform. This is where our software really begins to shine, right? Because our platform is accessible through a web browser, so no proprietary software needs to be downloaded for a user to access it. You access our software through a traditional HTML5 web browser. 

Once you access the software through a web browser, the first thing you're going to notice is we have six applications that any user can take advantage of. In most cases, folks aren't trying to eat the elephant hole, right? They'll have a use case like digital signage, or they'll have a use case like meeting rooms or experiential centers or what have you, and that's one of the reasons why we are licensing the server. We're licensing the CPU cores and the number of graphics cards that you need on that server so that if you have a smaller use case, your out-of-pocket costs are gonna be lower because you need a smaller server. But when you log in for the first time, you're gonna see, “Oh, I got this for digital signage, but I didn't know I could run my meeting room here.” or, “I didn't realize that I can do these artistic video walls,” or “I didn't realize I can incorporate these data dashboards from Power BI or Tableau as a native source and share those to any display that Userful is managing.” 

The value is seen almost immediately, and so what we do is try to help people understand the peripheral or parallel use cases. So I use digital signage quite a bit, and I gave you this analogy regarding airports at Infocomm, Dave, where at least half a dozen times in the last six to eight months, I've had conversations with various airports, and most of them are pulling us in because they have an operation center. Airport operations center, or security operations center, or what have you, and they'll say, “Hey, we want the Userful software to run the content on these displays and video walls in the operation center,” and when we have these discovery calls, I'll typically ask, “Hey, have you guys thought about the advantages of using our platform to help you with the signage?” And I'm usually shot down rather immediately, and most folks know Airports are convoluted in the way that they deploy their technology. They got various different groups. They're typically siloed, but specifically the airport operations centers, I'll just say, “Hey, look, I get that, but let me just throw this use case out there and see if it lands and hits you as showing value.”

You're in an airport operations center. Wouldn't you want to be able to manage the entire network of screens that are currently being used to show baggage, arrivals, departures, signage, and all your wayfinding screens? Would it not be valuable to be able to manage those as part of your airport operations, also, I've noticed in many cases, they'll incorporate security into their AOC. Some of them have independent security operations centers, but in either event, I would tell them. What happens if you have an incident at the airport? Wouldn't you want to be able to take over those screens from the command center that's responsible for monitoring and sending strategic messages to people, depending on what the situation is? If there's a fire, “evacuate.” If god forbids, there's an active shooter, “take shelter in place,” and be able to send strategic messages to various screens all from within your operation center? Well, you can't currently do that because you've got multiple systems driving all of these different AV endpoints. 

If you had a single platform, it doesn't just give you the ability to scale your deployment, it gives you the ability to scale your workflow and become more flexible to augment those workflows where I can send strategic messages to screens, I can manage arrivals and baggage from my AOC, if that's such a thing that I need. In addition, we could help you with your meeting rooms. You can walk into a meeting room, and I can help you cast some content in a meeting room and have an impromptu meeting on a drop of a dime, as just a few use cases of what our platform can do.

Sometimes, when you have these platforms that say they can do, in your case, at least six different things, there can be compromises. In other words, “Yeah, we can do all these things. That's just none of them are particularly deep, or maybe one of them is deep, and the other ones are so so.” 

Do you get that question at all?

Shane Vega: Ironically, no. We don't get that question. But it's a question most people should be asking David, and I'll tell you that when that does come up, and it's only come up a handful of times, I'm always very candid about what we can't do as well as what we can do. And there is truth in the fact that we are software as a service, and so there are certain applications that still have roadmap features, candidly, that we're going to continue to augment and build them out. 

If you could probably imagine the top three or four of our use cases would be: operations centers, digital signage, meeting rooms, and data dashboards. We do those very well. With experiential environments, we manage those artistic video walls very well. Now when you talk about experiential environments, there are some things that some folks might want to get involved with, but we might have to have some deeper conversations, right? 

And that really is around interactivity. Do you want multi-touch video walls, like in a museum for kids or something like that? Where we have some roadmap items to help ensure that multi-touch is what people would expect, where you don't want to have the lag, you don't want to have any of those issues when people are trying to have that fun experience as a child or what have you.

So there are certain features that are still roadmap items, but what I will bookend that with is, before coming over to Userful, I worked with one of the larger AV firms globally, and while I worked there, part of my interaction with customers was, “Man, I wish I could do more of these things with a single solution, I have to farm it out to so many folks.” 

But more than that, I would have feature requests for the stuff that was out there, and it was always in one ear, out the other. I don't care which manufacturer it was. If I went to some of these larger manufacturers and I said, hey, you really would benefit if you did this or this. It just didn't go anywhere, and then I had a similar conversation with the Userful back in about 2018 at a trade show, I said, look, your software is good, but it really needs these four or five things to really be a competitor in the space that you're looking to deploy, which at the time it was operation centers. 

I'd say if it was six months, it was a long time. So within six months, I got a call from the then VP of Sales who said, “Hey, I want to have a meeting with you, Shane. We've incorporated all of your requests into our software,” and that really pivoted my approach to looking at users as, alright, these guys are the future of AV and, little FYI, we actually got that award at Infocomm, the Future of AV award. 

But the reason for that was, look, if we're going to be software as a service, then we have to prioritize feature requests from our customers above our own market research or our own gut check, and so that's part of my role here at Userful as VP of Marketing is that I'm also over Product Marketing, which is over the roadmap, and so I get involved in customer calls quite a bit, and I'll hear some of these features that to your initial question is, “Hey, how do you go deeper with these applications?” I look for that feedback, and then I get to go back to the roadmap and go, “Hey, we need to prioritize this, this, and this feature. Push out the other features to the next release. Let's get these done because it's revenue dependent. We've got customers who would value this. Let’s get it done!”

We take that very seriously here at Userful, and we're at four releases a year, so you'll never have to wait all that long. 

So you referenced Airports. I'm curious, in the context of third-party software development, if there's a software company that works in the Airport realm but isn't doing digital signage or some of the things you do, but they want to visualize information on displays, is there an API or something that they could develop to work with Userful or does it have to be Userful development to add that capability on?  

Shane Vega: We have an entire program around API. So we do have our own API, currently, it's A REST API, so we can receive tons of different messages and calls to trigger certain reactions within our software.

But additionally, that's got its own roadmap in and of itself. So we have our software application roadmap, and then we have our API roadmap where we're going to be developing even deeper integrations and capabilities including, but not limited to, even wanting to create possible easy configuration tools for customers who can use our API to do whatever they want, onsite.

Are control rooms and operations centers the gateway for the initial point of contact, the thing that gets people interested, and then other things cascade out of that?

Shane Vega: That has been our experience. We call that our land. So we're land and expand through our platform. Let's find the use case. Let's land where it makes sense, and then let's show the power of our expansion, and just because of how the company has evolved, operation centers have been kind of the tip of our spear, and it makes sense because operation centers will use two or three of our applications out of the gate, right?

They'll use the operation center software, they'll use meeting rooms for war rooms or situation rooms. They'll also use our trends for dashboards and Power BI integrations, depending on what type of operation center it is, so they usually get value from several of our use cases and applications out of the gate. And if it's a large enough organization and we're typically targeting LDOs (large distributed organizations), they'll have multiple operations centers, which gives us multiple points of connection and interaction and engagement to open up opportunities to talk about the meeting rooms beyond your war room and situation room, or some operation centers are fishbowls, where they want to bring folks in their data center and they just want to use it as a showpiece to show their customers how well they manage their data, and so they might have welcome screens outside, and we'll let them know, “Hey, we can manage those welcome screens for you as well,” and that evolves into a larger digital signage strategy, corporate communications, so on and so forth.

These large organizations, do they have separate AV and IT departments, or are they pretty much hiving into IT now? 

Shane Vega: So more and more, IT is taking over, but what's happening is it used to be that they have AV specialists on staff, and by and large, it was for the meeting rooms, and in some cases, the digital signage where they had AV technicians or AV specialists on-site, and those were the guys were the gatekeepers to decide what technology gets deployed.

Yeah, and get everything working before the meeting starts somehow. 

Shane Vega: Exactly. “Who's got HDMI? Who's got DVI?”

So to that point, people keep talking about the convergence of AV and IT, and I don't know why. That convergence happened years ago. People are now starting to realize that because of that convergence, the IT organization or the IT departments within these larger organizations are going to be the ones holding the budget and are going to be the ones responsible for managing any AV resources on the network.

And so, we have intentionally built our product to cater to those IT stakeholders in the organization. When you say things like, “Hey, you can centrally monitor the entire platform from a web browser,” they really get that right. When you say, “We're an IT solution, we're not an AV solution, which means we're not going to put all this IP addressable hardware on your network,” a lot of the walls come down from their security concerns. You then begin to tell them that, look, you can augment your roles-based access control, and integrate with LDAP. Plus, we give you tools that are IT specific to help you monitor things like, what is the impact on my network? What is my current CPU utilization, or what's my current GPU utilization on the server that we're licensing? We give them all of those tools built into our software. So it's not just AV end-user tools that we're giving. We're also giving those IT tools that help the IT stakeholders manage deployments because we recognize these are going to be larger in scale. They're going to be responsible for a lot. Let's make it easy for them. 

When you talk about AV as a service, it's a term I've heard for a while, but you guys go at it quite a bit differently from what you're saying. 

Shane Vega: Yeah, we do, and Dave, I struggle with that, because we were flirting with the term AV as a service, and we started to use it quite a bit. But I know, coming from the integration world, that AV as a service historically meant we're going to just finance this stuff, right? We're going to get a leasing program, and we're going to build in the hardware, the software, the services, whatever we can into a monthly payment that makes it nice and easy for you guys.

We approach it differently by saying, we are software as a service that's for the AV industry. Therefore, we are AV as a service, meaning, we don't have all that hardware that you have to purchase. You're truly able to deploy all of these AV use cases and manage an entire host of AV applications from within our platform. And we are a software that you pay for based on subscription, typically three-year plans. 

That's what we mean when we say AV as a service. It's exactly that. It's a software as a service, which is which is the actual term, which is software as a service for the AV world. 

This strikes me as something that probably has a learning curve, as every software platform does, but it is almost something you kind of have to ease your way into?

Shane Vega: Believe it or not, not really, and I think that would be more pertinent if somebody was wanting to say, “Hey, I want to use your entire platform right now.” But as I said earlier, most folks are saying, “Hey, I want this operation center,” and they're familiar with Operation Center softwares. They know what they want. They know they want to be able to build custom layouts. They want to manage big, beautiful video walls. They want to be able to interact with sources with soft KVM functionalities so that they're not just visualizing the sources but they can engage with them because they've got tools, right? They got video management tools, and they've got access control, what have you, and so that software that we're providing isn't going to look and feel a whole lot different than a lot of the other softwares they're used to using. 

Now, we do it differently. So the real benefit, rewinding all over to the beginning of this conversation, is, yes, we're giving you all these software applications and features, but it's the infrastructure that really differentiates us. 

Along with removing different hardware components from this kind of a network, you're also removing potentially different software applications that you'd also need because you've got this stack of different things you can do? 

Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly.

To that point, Dave, when I showed this at Infocomm, when I gave my demos there, typically when you deploy an AV solution, let's call it digital signage, that's the background that you're most familiar with. 

In digital signage, let's say, you use it for corporate communications; you'll have screens all over the office. In some cases, they'll want to be able to integrate that digital signage into their meeting rooms as well, and when the screens are in standby mode, they want to be able to have some of those corporate communications as part of the digital signage strategy, managing those meeting rooms. But when you go into the meeting room, they'll typically need some type of infrastructure to support those meetings and local collaboration. Usually, it's a network of AV infrastructure, HDMI cables, or what have you, go into some form of a matrix switch that's going to be some type of tablet controller that can give you the ability to manage what laptop is being viewed on what screen. 

With Userful, because the software does so much, the screens that we manage are not tied to any one specific application, and that's really the beauty of it. So I can walk into a room where they're showing corporate communication. I can sit down, open my laptop, and immediately start a meeting by screencasting whatever's on my laptop onto the screen in that room without connecting a single AV cable. I could then open up my operations center software on that same screen and turn it into an impromptu war room or situation room where I'm pulling in multiple sources and building out customized layouts, and navigating through a crisis. So there are a lot of things that we can do, and it's not dependent on the screen, and, to your point, we've reduced not just the hardware need but the software as well. 

All right, Shane, that was super interesting. I know much more about this space than I did half an hour ago.

Shane Vega: It's been great talking to you, Dave. I appreciate it. 

Loek Wermenbol, First Impression

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

Things are changing - and both buyers and sellers are getting more knowledgeable about how to design and execute digital signage projects. But it's still nice to have a chat with an AV solutions company that resolutely insists on establishing the objectives behind a job before even talking about the technology that might get used. And how much of it.

The Dutch firm First Impression made its first impression with me when it kept getting recognized earlier this year at the global Digital Signage Awards, which were handed out back In February during ISE in Barcelona.

"Who are those guys?" I was asked.

"No idea," I replied.

But now I do know, because I met Loek Wermenbol, the company's Retail Strategy Director, at the recent Digital Signage Summit Europe in Munich. We found a relatively quite little area in the hotel lobby and had a great chat about the origins of First Impression - which is located down near Eindhoven. We talked about a lot of things, notably how it approaches engagements with clients, including the Dutch beauty brand Rituals.

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TRANSCRIPT

Tell me about First Impression. What do you guys do? 

Loek Wermenbol: We are First Impression, what we call on paper an AV integrator, as many companies over here …

But you're qualifying that.

Loek Wermenbol: No, maybe other people qualify us as an AV integrator in the market and we still are. 

They put you in that bucket, but there's more to it. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, there's definitely more to it and I think our proposition that we have is a little different than some of the other integrators in the market. First of all, strategy is a really important part of what we offer and we really try to help the customer to ask the right question, and sometimes that's needed in the process. Yes, they have knowledge, but most of the time, not all of the knowledge is needed to do really good integrations. 

Because in part, they're fixated on a display or something other that's captured their imagination.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. It can be technical or otherwise, if other departments are involved, information can be fragmented throughout the organization, and it might be hard to bring that together to form the right question, and sometimes there's just a lack of knowledge, and that's okay because it's a different field of play for a lot of retailers.

Yes, they have big online marketing teams, etc. But doing in-store communication, it's a little bit of marketing, it's a little bit of formula, it's a little bit of data, and that combines and is needed for a good integration. So if you help your customer determine what that right question is and where we actually can help them solve problems or help them with the threats they have in the market, or enlighten their opportunities. In the end, the ROI on what we do right and what we are going to install in a solution will be much better. So rather than just answer…

And it's gonna scale out as opposed to being one of.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, of course, and we're in the scaling business too, but you have to scale the right solution rather than just a solution, and of course, we also integrate Windows screens and sometimes that is just step one. 

Right, but then they're a customer and can ask you for more.

Loek Wermenbol: Definitely, sometimes the challenge is bigger, sometimes they already have digital in place and need to replace us, or want to make the second step or the third step in the process, and sometimes it's the first step for retailers in the world of digitization on the retail floor.

And then the steps are different, but still, you have to focus on where you want to be in three or four years also as a retailer. I think at First Impression, we help them really well in defining those steps towards that in three to four years, and step one can be an easy step. Let's do a rollout of Windows screens because it is almost in the industry, a no-brainer in integration. 

Still, you have to do that correctly, with the right content, etc. There is a lot to talk about. You can talk for half or an hour about just Window screens, etc. But, that strategy part is you ask what do we do differently, it's just one part. By offering a more holistic service package to our customers. 

So it's a lot more than where do you want to put it, how many do you need, and when do you want it in? 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. Because if you're a supplier of hardware, you're just a supplier.

Yeah, you're not a business partner.

Loek Wermenbol: Exactly. If you are more on the strategic side and you are helping your customers achieve their business goals or to tackle their problems, you are on the strategic side, and you're a totally different person on the table. When it's from a strategic point of view, rather than just a hardware provider and the added value is much bigger, and otherwise, it's just about how fast can you do it, what's your price, etc. 

Yeah, so let's back up a little bit. Did the company start that way or did they realize that this is the customer house and this is how we should evolve, and how long has the company been around?

Loek Wermenbol: No, it definitely didn't start that way at all. The company started 26 years ago already, and it literally started…

In the time of CRTs. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, one of the owners who started the company was a DJ and into music and creating cool parties, literally starting from the basement of his parents as many of those beautiful stories go. And he bought some materials to make the show a little bit more attractive, more materials, and at one point, he had so much of materials that he could rent out some stuff. 

That's where the business began and that's where the First Impression began. So that was really more the rental side of the AV technology, and through the years that of course had evolved and after roughly six to seven years, fixed installation became a part of the organization, and basically everything turned around and it became a bigger part, until where it's now. 

Almost the only thing we do is that we still have a little department that does temporary projects but it's mainly fixed installations as it goes in the market. And we focus heavily on retail. Roughly 80% of what we do is retail, and the other part is Oracle experiences, which can be an experience center, , a business center, a museum, or a building that has an experience factor in it.

And you’re based in the Netherlands?

Loek Wermenbol: Yes.

Is that the primary market, or are you kinda across Europe?

Loek Wermenbol: It started of course out in the Netherlands as our home market but definitely not our only market. We have an office in the south of the Netherlands, our headquarters is in Tilburg. We have an office in Amsterdam but also recently, we opened offices in France, and also in Germany. But we're already operating globally, and doing installations all over the world and on every continent.

Is that because it starts with something more regional and as they say, can you also help us out with the store we're opening up in Shanghai?

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and it really depends on the brand, for example, if you look at Rituals, those are big Dutch brands. 

What do they sell? 

Loek Wermenbol: All kinds of beauty products and everything you need as a woman to feel good.

So, nice high-margin products. 

Loek Wermenbol: Nice high-margin products. 

 They probably don't want to say that, but that's the reality.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. It's a really beautiful brand and it's actually a brand that a lot of trade retailers look at because they are there in the markets on lots of different levels and also in AV technology. 

And pardon the pun, for them, first impressions are, I suspect, really important.

Loek Wermenbol: They are, but actually there is a funny story because we really wanted that client in the beginning, but they were quite resilient against AV integrations because they thought it didn't resemble their brand because it's all about serenity and the body and the products, and if you look at their stores, you may figure out why, but we actually did two things.

One of them was to create a piece of content. It was really simple, but with a little bit of animation in it, in line with the branch values of Rituals, and the other thing we did, we made a breakdown of the comparison between the integration of a Windows screen, comparison with paper, and the number of replacements they did with paper. And that was a really interesting business case, and those two things together with the setup we created in our unique experience center in Tilburg, managed to get them over and finally convinced them to go into digital, with little steps. The first step is a window display, a cash desk display, the first thing most retailers will do. But now we evolved from that and actually, Rituals is the perfect client to work with because their teams now know how to operate in the equation together with us to get the best results and to do innovations that are unique in the market. 

And it's not just you going to them trying to sell them something new, like, “Hey we went to this trade show and we saw these new amazing displays. You should have some!”

Loek Wermenbol: No. Because then you're selling technique, and we never start with hardware. We always start with the right challenge and question. 

For instance, we created a unique piece for them that's all about perfume, and they didn't sell perfume for a long time because it's a hard category, lots of big competitors, high loyalty with brand loyalty with which potential customers look for themselves. There's always one fragrance that they've had for ages, so how do you convince people to switch? 

Yeah, completely foreign to me, but…

Loek Wermenbol: Maybe some listeners will recognize this.

But we created a really nice piece that not only looks beautiful but actually does the job of convincing people maybe to try one of the perfumes of Rituals, and in the end can convince them to replace a bottle that has been there for ages. Of course, if you look at that from an aesthetic point of view, it looks beautiful, but the magic is inside with how we use sensors and data to figure out which perfume fits the market. Actually, we were awarded that two times with the best digital innovation for retail in 2022. 

Yeah, I wasn't aware of your company, but if I remember correctly, at the Digital Signage Awards, your company won two or three awards.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. At the Digital Signage Awards, we won three and a recommendation. So we were getting back and forth to the pool. 

And I was like, who are those guys?

Loek Wermenbol: I know. I think we're a challenger in the market and sometimes it's good to be a challenger. I think one of the big advantages we have is we're still privately owned. So there's no private equity or something.

 How many people? 

Loek Wermenbol: Almost 200. 

Okay, that's a good size company in this industry. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, definitely, and did a turnover of 40 million euros last year. So that's quite a decent company to show it like that, and of course, you were there, last night, we were awarded as the rising star in the industry. I think that says a lot. 

We are noted in the market, not only by our colleagues and the industry itself, but also by retailers, of course, because we do something different and we try to help them with the total process of integrations, in a smart way that it also connects to the total customer journey because that physical space where we do the integrations in the end we’re a specialist in doing communications on the retail floor. We're more like an agency than a hardware integrator. We use the hardware components to make it possible, but in the end, it's part of a bigger thing. 

Yeah, I was going to ask about the creative side of it. Obviously, it didn't start with creative because you were doing DJ rentals and things like that, but did you add on in-house creative capability because external agencies, maybe the agencies of record for these different brands, didn't really get it, didn't understand it and was this a need, or did you just see it as another revenue stream?

Loek Wermenbol: No, definitely not the last one. In the end, you have to do that properly, and they will be additional revenue. 

But there's a skillset and insights that an agency isn't going to have. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. We started roughly 10 or 11 years by hiring the first person that did content creation and mainly because we noted that we do a perfect installation, and then somebody comes along and puts on a piece of content and basically wrecks the solution because the most important part in communicating with the clients and addressing the purpose is that piece of content.

So if somebody's going to create it, who doesn't know how communication in-store devices works, ninety-nine out of a hundred times, it won't be the right piece of content. 

Yeah, and you talked about Rituals and the serenity idea or vibe, so to speak, and if you had third-party agencies who just drop something in, it would be visually jarring potentially.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and we did a lot of communication for them. We created, and we worked together because they have an in-house agency too. Rituals are kind of a different story in that way. So we helped them in the beginning and now they're creating a lot of the content themselves because they know how to do it and they have a really skilled team inside.

So that's how we work too. Sometimes we start off and create content first and show the internal agencies or people how to do it and otherwise in some other cases, we keep on creating the content for them. But it's so important because it is also for agencies that do generic commercials or socials, etc, creating content for this matter is totally different because there are so many factors that you have to think of. 

Dwell times, sight lines on and on.

Loek Wermenbol: Exactly. Position, lights, dwell time, passage time, angles, UXs, et cetera. Even the privacy of people, are we going to use a device when it's tilted or does it need to be flat, etc. It's all going to determine what your content looks like, and it is so important in the end to be successful with that solution and to have an ROI on that solution, and the content is a major part of that. 

There's been a lot of noise in the last, I would say, six months in particular around Retail Media networks, and I was interested, we were at this conference in Munich, and I've heard or spoken with a couple of people, it's all getting a little fuzzy to me after two days, talking about Retail media networks, incorporating third party advertising, programmatic advertising into a store, and that actually rattled me a little bit because it just didn't seem right. 

I understand the idea of endemic advertising for brands that sell in the store, but do I really want to see a T-Mobile ad in a Ritual store? I know they wouldn't do that, you know what I mean.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, Retail Media is almost a buzz word right now, but we actually started operating our first Retail Media network for one of our clients already, I think, two or three years ago. 

And they've been around in some form for 25 years.

Loek Wermenbol: Yes, but in a serious form, it's not that long. And of course, retailers are starting to know that, “Hey I can create a valuable position over here,” and brands like it too, because if you do it correctly and which is important, then it will be an added value for everybody involved. It will be an added value for the advertiser because it's related to a product he can buy in the store…

…which encourages sales ideally. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, it encourage sales, and of course, it is interesting for the operating party of the Retail Media network too. For instance, we do a big supermarket chain called in the Netherlands called,  Jumbo and they have almost a thousand outlets. We operate there in a Retail Media network with them but there's always a keen balance between commercial messages and... 

It's a slippery slope. You don't want to feel like you're on a highway. 

Loek Wermenbol: Definitely, if it's too much, it won't work. That's one way of a Retail Media network. Related to products you can buy right in the store you are in or entering. The other one is we also have a big Retail Media network in Basic-Fit, and Basic-Fit is a large fitness chain in Europe with roughly 1400 outlets in Germany, France, and Spain, and they have a lot of screens inside too. 

Because of that, they have a special proposition, they're on the low end of the market and they want to be able to operate clubs with one person to keep that cost low, and to get a low entry fee. 

Hence the name! 

Loek Wermenbol: But the funny part is that if you enter the club, all the products are really good, and it's a really good training facility, but if you want to do so, you have to do a lot different, and it's a lot of digitization within those store from training that you can do in a digital way and activate yourselves through all kind of other stuff, but also communicating with your clients, giving them maybe messages to motivate them or any health advice, but also just to inform you that maybe the shower is broken in the ladies room, for instance. 

But those screens are roughly around seven to eight in each club and of course, are really interesting for Retail Media too, because the target group that is coming into a sports club is pretty defined. If you know the proposition is on the low end of the markets, then you have real good statistics on demographics, which people are coming in. So that's a perfect match, and a lot of advertisers, of course, are really interested in that target group and now have difficulty in reaching them, especially in the younger generation. So that's also Retail Media.

So is that real money to Basic-Fit or is it a rounding error? 

Loek Wermenbol: Oh, it's definitely real money. I can't talk about figures, but it's real money, and basically, they're operating in two ways in operating Retail Media networks.

The first part is direct sales. There's a team within the Basic-Fit commercial team from Retail Media that is in direct contact with big clients to sell time on the screens. But there will always be leftover inventory, and what we did, I think it's one and a half years ago, we connected software that is able to connect on the backend to the big marketplaces the media companies use to buy their ads.

Like the Vistas and so on?

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and they can directly tap into the system and buy leftover inventory.

And you could put the parameters in so that it's not going to show a competitor on the screen with you?

Loek Wermenbol: Exactly. You can tailor it however you like. But it's a really good way of not getting rid of your inventory but basically sell out your inventory.

Of course, it's another price when you buy it in that way. It's going to be cheaper than direct sales. But in direct sales, you have the best spots and the best time slots, and maybe you want to only advertise in a certain area or maybe in a certain country, etc. So that's really interesting in Retail Media and it's going to evolve. We are going to see more spots within environments that show Retail Media, and you were mentioning, Dave it's strange when you see an ad for a wireless carrier or whatever in a retail store, and I think so too the market is really looking now, where are the edges of what we can and can't do, in approaching and maximizing our revenues from Retail Media, and on the other hand, not breaking down our brand. Because those go hand in hand. 

You spoke a little bit about the return on the investment of display and all the technology in a store. How is that being measured? Because I've seen companies who do audience measurement and retail measurement and so on, talking about conversion ratios and so on, and I'm always a little skeptical about how accurate they can be.

Loek Wermenbol: This is a really good point because this is not the same for every solution. It really depends. 

Of course, we love to measure everything because that gives us insight, gives us data, and will help us improve. But mostly, If you do an installation with a combination of techniques that actually can set up a kind of a funnel, for instance, where you can measure that there are so many people in front of my solution and making use of that solution, and of those people, so many people do step two, maybe go and pick a piece of clothing out of a wall of jeans. And we can measure that because we have counters in the ceiling, we also can measure how many of those people go into the fitting room and actually try on something, and if we know they're going into the fitting room, we can also measure if they come out and if they go to the cash desk, and if we do it like that, then we actually can create a funnel, and see what is happening, and not only see that happening but also tweak and improve. I mentioned the Rituals solution before, and I'm trying to visualize this in a verbal way. It's a beautiful piece of furniture with all the perfumes on it, and rather than having to spray the perfume off a piece of paper and smell it. In front of all those perfumes, there are little glass cones, and you can pick those up, and beneath is a little piece that we impregnated with the fragrance. So if you pick it up, you can smell it. And the important thing to know is if you pick it up, we measure your pickup, so we know how many pickups there are of that piece. 

So you've got some sort of sensor embedded in there? 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, it's actually a light sensor that covers, and if you open it up, the content that is displayed when you pick up that specific color of glass, say I'm picking up perfume A, when I pick it up, on the display it will show the content of perfume A. But it's layered content, so the longer I have this piece in my hands, the other types of content will be displaced, like an information funnel, but it also gives you the information that a certain person is more interested in this piece than somebody that puts it immediately down because maybe they didn't like the fragrance and all that information gives us all that data, gives us information about that specific setup in that specific location because, of course, fragrances can differ in different areas, cities, countries, etc.

And it actually helps the divisional merchandisers to create a setup with the different perfumes on that piece of furniture that is matched perfectly with the audience they are serving at that point. Because we can use the pickup data, the content data, but also the data that is being generated by the cash desk, and if you combine those, then you have real information that will help. It's going to be more difficult if you want to measure the success of a window display because there are a lot of factors in place.  Why somebody will come in or not, or why it's busy in a high street or not, temperature or events… 

Yeah, you’d need some sort of a cookie on that person, otherwise, how do you track them?

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and then, of course, you have the tracking of people in general, and GDPR is a thing, so we have to take that into account in some cases.

Actually, we want to do really good management and measurements, and sometimes we can, but GDPR will limit us, and it's not only the effective GDPR, but it's also the perception of the user itself. It could be allowed by GDPR, but it is not received in a nice way by the customer because he feels monitored and on camera somewhere. So perception is really important to take into account, and if you use it, be open about it, and tell your customer about it.

Is it your software management platform, like in-house, or are you using a third party?

Loek Wermenbol: We actually do both. We have our software platform, and we keep on developing that, especially for certain clients with certain wishes. We tend to push the limits in the market, and often we look for things in software that just aren't available in the market. But on the other hand, there are really good products in the market too. So we connect with certain platforms to make use of that. 

 I was curious because at a conference like this and everywhere I go and everything I get in by email, there are so many software companies who state that retail is their key vertical, and what you've been describing, it strikes me as it would be very difficult for a very brand sensitive and brand forward store, retailer to just go with a software company because they really need and has benefit from all that front end advice and the simple poking at them to say, “okay, why do you wanna do this?” 

Loek Wermenbol: The software is relevant for the client only if he is going to operate it by themselves. 

Basically, which probably doesn't happen that much anymore.

Loek Wermenbol: No, of course, there's a little bit more to it. And that is because the interface and the user-friendliness of that product will be relevant. But if you look at the other way around, in the end, what's most important for the reader is whether will this be a successful integration in total, am I going to improve my customer journey, can I add more experience that is going to generate more sales for me? And it really doesn't matter what kind of software does the job. It really doesn't matter what kind of hardware does the job. That's almost a commodity. It needs to be good, and for the AV integrator, you need to have those four-letter words together. It's so important to keep those channels, have a good service proposition, and make sure those screens are always on 99.9% of the time, they sre energy saving, all that kind of stuff. 

But also in managing the content on the screen. It's important, but it's not the thing that matters most for the client and this industry tends to look more on the technology side and try to say to the clients that we have all of this. Yes, it's important, but if you're starting off with the wrong journey and the wrong question in the beginning, it really doesn't matter that you have really good stuff.

If you’re selling on features and specs, you're dead.

Last question, with retail, generally speaking, they want a business partner or service provider who's going to take them right from ideation all the way through managed services and run the network for them?

Loek Wermenbol: Yes and no. I say no because they don't always know that these kinds of offerings are available in the market, and if you don't know that, then you're not looking for it, and it's getting a little bit better. But we try to really focus on that holistic approach and offering, so that we can basically help our clients on every level. We have specialists on every level. We have 125 different types of roles within our company, if you think about it with roughly 200 people in the company, that’s huge. 

We have specialists for every occasion. So if it's about IT, we have specialists that can talk with the IT of the client. If it's about strategy, we have strategists that can do that. If it's about marketing or content strategy, we have those specialists. They don't need to use every offering in our total portfolio. But we offer it, and at least in the end, if they don't use it in our offering, we can talk with them on a high level about the specific topic then and help them anyway in that topic. I think that is really important as our business, especially retail, is transforming more in helping brands to communicate in the right way with the digital retail floor, and that's why I said it, and it sounds a little bit strange, it's more like an agency which is part of communication and knowing how to do that, and advising clients how to do that is super important. 

But we can only do that, and that's important, maybe last words, if we have everything really good lined up in the backend. We have super good people to make those integrations, super good technicians, and we can tell a beautiful story, but in the end, if we can deliver what we promise to our clients in our first talks, we're out of business. So that has to be perfect.

Jim Nista On Code Painting

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

When a big LED video wall gets populated with fresh creative, the creatives and the people operating a display are likely going to have a conversation about the size of the finished file and how to move it – because there’s a good chance the rendered file is huge, and not something that can attach in an email.

So I was intrigued as hell when a creative guy told me the video wall creative he’d produced for a project could fit on an old-school floppy disk … because it was really just some lines of code.

A lot of people in the digital signage ecosystem will know Jim Nista. He started and ran the LA creative technology shop Insteo, before it was acquired by Almo. Nista worked for his new masters for a while, but eventually went off on his own, and is now spinning up a new boutique agency that’s doing creative for visual projects.

One of the things he’s been actively working on is what he calls Code Painting – a big visual that gradually builds in front of viewers and then self-destructs, replaced by a new visual that again starts to build. You set the file and visual instructions, and then forget it, as it will just run and run but always be a bit - or a lot – different.

It’s all done in programming instructions, and in the case of his current efforts, is focused on the familiar visuals of flowers.

Nista’s work was one of three used for the Sixteen:Nine Mixer at InfoComm last month. Having had a couple of explainers of what was going on, and the approach, I figured a podcast was the best way to help the industry understand what he’s figured out, and what he’s delivering to clients.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey Jim, can you explain what code painting is? 

Jim Nista: Yeah, it's a fun new concept for me. I know that other people are doing some of the same types of things, but really, I have been trying to make a painting through either JavaScript or other coding techniques. I started with a more simple approach, and the goal truly was to create something that you're watching a painting come to life, and my own brief to myself was this needs to look good at every stage of the process. Sometimes a time-lapse at the beginning is. what are we looking at here? And so it's been a fun process for me to figure out a way to make something, not just paint itself through code, but to be interesting to look at through the entire process, however long it takes, but 30 seconds to a minute is what I'm usually trying to come towards. 

But it is truly just code. There are no images, videos, AI, machine learning, or anything else. It's just a scripted process of creating a unique painting while you watch. 

We were sitting in Orlando, chatting about this and you were describing it to me, and I was thinking, boy, this is a little bit over my head, but it sounded like it starts with almost like an armature. You start with some curves, and it just builds from there?

Jim Nista: Yeah. It starts from a very primitive drawing. It is almost like a child's drawing because some of the early pieces, and certainly some of the pieces that I showed down in Orlando, are flowers because those are shapes that are very recognizable to our eyes.

We can spot a flower-type shape almost as well as we can determine a human face style shape. I don't know why, and I don't know the evolutionary reasons behind it, but I realized that this is a pattern that we can determine very easily so behind the scenes, one of the very first things that this code does is to generate out some curves and if you think about the shape of a curve, if you flip that shape, it makes a petal or a leaf shape. So if you make a simple curve and then flip it, you end up with a leaf shape or a petal shape, and if you take that and rotate it around in a certain way and put a dot in the center, our eyes say “flower,” and we're really good at it, right? 

It probably has something to do with our ability to find food and all the other things that we do as humans. But it becomes a shape that is very recognizable to us, and so once I have these very primitive drawn shapes stored in memory, then the real code takes over, which is the work that I spent so much time on over the last year and a half trying to make realistic-looking paint strokes come out of these primitive drawings that are stored in memory, and that's been really the fun part of the project is to invent a way to create something that comes to life that way, but is truly just based on the most primitive, basic line drawings you could possibly imagine. So there's some color encoded in that primitive. There are some rough shapes encoded in that primitive, but really it's just very simple and then works from there to create a painting while you watch. 

We demoed this on a very large canvas down in Orlando, a 26-foot-tall LED video wall, 155 feet wide in terms of a curve and you had little vignettes, a number of these, I shouldn't say little, but they were substantially sized, maybe 15 feet tall or something like that, but you had a number of them and essentially, something would just build on this as you went and eventually show itself as a flower and evolve from there.

How long do these things take to build, and when they're finished building, is that what stays on screen, or does it erases off and you start over?  

Jim Nista: The big idea that I started with for this project and just going back one step is this really came from before the pandemic when I started trying to learn oil painting again. I had done it in college and art classes and things like that, and it was always a fun passion. But I was struggling because when I was learning oil painting, especially during the pandemic-that was my hobby-I kept making paintings that were almost too realistic and I challenged myself. I was like, I know how to code too, so why can't I code a paint stroke that can teach me how to be more loose? And this is where the genesis of this came from, and from there, I let this take on a life of its own, but along the process, I decided I don't want this to look as organic as it could.

The overall idea is that it creates a piece as you're watching it and then destroys it and creates a new one, and then destroys that and creates a new one, and the idea came out of so many video walls, and we've all done them where you end up with a five-minute loop of stock footage, and there's a lot of fatigue that you can imagine from employees who have to visit, watch this screen every single day to, guests and visitors having to see the same content over and over again and just the boring factor of yeah, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this video while now we're gonna spend a thousand dollars on content. There are so many projects that are like that, and so I was thinking, how can I put together something that is eternal content, or at least, doesn't need to be changed as often?

And that was the genesis behind this. Let it create a piece, let it destroy it, let it make a new one, let it destroy that, and just eternally create work that hopefully carries some unique nature to it, and that's part of what this code carries, it will not just change the colors throughout the day and do dramatic colors at sunrise and sunset and things like that, but it also changes its colors and I even call it mood. It changes its mood throughout the year, so for running this on a video wall, it would be never the same image. There would be a lot of similarities from day to day. There would be a lot of similarities if you looked at something in one November versus next November, you'd see a lot of similarities, of course. But that content would constantly evolve and change throughout the day, the month, and the seasons, and with the idea that you just can truly set this and forget about it, walk away and let this run on a video wall indefinitely and truly never see the same thing twice. 

What's the timeline?

I imagine there are all kinds of variables and parameters you can set, but typically, is it the sort of thing that builds over the space of four hours or four minutes? 

Jim Nista: I've been playing around with it and I love the idea of letting these things run even longer. But right now I've found, at least from people watching some of the early samples and some of the places that I've installed it, that shorter time durations are better, so about a minute to create a piece and letting it linger for a little while after it's created and then destroying it, and that really does seem to be the sweet spot. 

Now everything is just code. So if somebody said, I want it to run and build for four hours, I can certainly do that, but I was funny as I've been building this because it's code I can just run it in a web browser, that means I can run it on my phone, and so I've been able to annoy friends but demo this out in front of a lot of people as I've been working on it, and I noticed very early on that the slower pieces tended to have people looking away as opposed to looking at it, so capturing a performance of creating this piece within a minute and refining it and almost getting the rough sketch done sooner rather than later, really that's how it started to feel like it was creating a performance that people would wanna watch, and I think it can capture people's attention while they're transiting through space, which is a lot of these sorts of corporate AV installations take place. Nobody is expected to just stand there and look at it for a really long time. So it's tuned into that. 

But I do know that even running it in my own space, I have a projector here and I can run it on a big wall from time to time just to see it, that sometimes when it is more ambient, letting it build for several minutes is a better approach. But in the public space, I think about always seeing, and when somebody first walks into this space, I don't know what point of the build, of the painting it's gonna be at, it's just continual, and so the goal is to just have it always look good, and that's been a very difficult goal to achieve because you think about something at the very beginning of it drawing, it might be very abstract, and it's hard for people to understand.

When you say, it builds, and then it destroys itself. What does that look like when it's in destruction mode, so to speak? 

Jim Nista: I had to make the brushes move a lot faster during that mode so that it does attract attention like something's being wiped out. But I also found that leaving a lot, not completely erasing the canvas, leaving a lot of the underlying or previous painting adds a lot of character as well, and so it roughly washes over with larger brushes and lighter brushes, but it will leave pieces of the previous painting there, and that's a nice approach. 

Now there's another version of this that was more prevalent in Orlando that we ran there, which is more of a continual mode where rather than creating an image behind the scenes, it's creating a 3D image and using that instead and so now that can constantly rotate or unfold or evolve, and so that's an alternative version. So in that one, the destruction is almost immediately where it is changing from, let's say, creating an orange flower to now evolving into creating a purple flower. That transition is a lot less noticeable than some of the other versions of this that I'm running, which are creating one painting, building that painting, and then destroying it.

So there are a few different ways that I've envisioned this, and one is truly continuous, but evolving where rather than Building and painting and destroying, it's constantly painting, and what it's painting is constantly changing, and so it's a different approach and that process requires a little bit more horsepower. So I've built one of these that I know, from having worked at digital signage, we don't necessarily always have the fastest media players in the world, and so one of these, I've tuned is low cost and even with previous generation media players, we're getting some really fast new media players that have GPUs built into them, so that's really going to be wonderful to take advantage of. But I built this before those were really available to me, and some of the versions of this are really designed for a sort of solid-state media player, like BrightSign players or SpinetiX players, that kind of thing, right?

Where I've been focused on turning this around, they're great HTML engines, they don't have a lot of memory, and they don't have a lot of horsepower, but how can we do generative art on that type of hardware, which is so prevalent around the industry? 

So this doesn't need to be on a big-ass media server.

Jim Nista: There's a version that does, and that's the version that I was running in Orlando because of course we had a lot of horsepower there and a bigger screen too, to take advantage of. But yeah, there's a version of this that's just pure JavaScript and I've tested it all over the place, including on a 15-year-old laptop, and it runs fine there.

So I've written for a number of years now about visualized data, and that's evolved into the terminology of generative visuals and generative AI. But you skip past this really quickly when you're explaining things that this isn't AI. This is its own thing, right? 

Jim Nista: Yeah, I could have used some machine learning techniques for this in terms of creating the underlying primitive image. But rather than doing that, given that I'm dealing with somewhat simple shapes like flowers and landscapes and hills and trees and things like that, code can easily create things like trees and landscapes and those types of things. So it didn't make sense for me to train this in a machine learning model to build those primitives for me, and certainly, machine learning wouldn't help with the process of coming up with the painting itself, but the idea of connecting this to live data or sensors in space is really where this is headed. 

I've had other projects that are more interactive or immersive, especially involving the Microsoft Kinect from the Xbox Days before it evolved into this commercial tool toy. So now some of the new work around this is, reading what's happening in space. So if somebody is standing in front of this and they're wearing red, the flowers will be red, and so those are some of the pieces that are coming out within this because yeah, it's generative. I can pull weather data, I can pull any sort of information and add it to the mix of what I'm currently doing.

Oddly, some of the early versions of this were intended and requested to be offline, completely isolated from the internet, and run forever, and so really the only data that those have is the clock. They just know the time and the date, and that's the only data that they can use. So everything has been pre-programmed in and it's just following its script forever, but there's so much randomness to it has a tendency to never repeat.

So one of the things that were interesting about walking around the exhibit hall at Infocomm recently was seeing how a lot of the big display guys, particularly the LED guys, were using generative art on the displays instead of just like the stock videos and so on, which was what happened for a whole bunch of years.

It is the sort of thing that Refik Anadol pioneered; there may be another artist as well, but that's the one that most people would know. Is that the sort of thing you could conceivably do with this as well, or is it just a different track? 

Jim Nista: No, a lot of the work that he's doing, and I don't mean to trivialize it because when I see some of the work that he's doing, he's pulling in these massive data sets, right? But a lot of the work itself is running through software that I use as well, like TouchDesigner, and a lot of the same type of effects are happening. What he's built, and a lot of people are copying, unfortunately for him, but what he's built is in some respects, a two-part process. He's pulling all of this data together and then from there, using his own code to render it, and that a lot of that is done in software, like TouchDesigner, Unity, Unreal Engine, those types of applications is where a lot of this happens. But yeah, I think that one challenge that we're facing is that an artist like him, his style is identifiable, but as I was walking around the shift floor, I'm seeing essentially what are either ripoffs, direct ripoffs of his work, or artists just copying it or inspired by his work. 

At the end of the day, and again, I don't mean to trivialize what he's doing, but there are effects built into these software applications that sort of mimick his style. He was the first guy to come up with it and use those tricks and techniques and everything else. But a lot of people can just follow along a 30-minute YouTube tutorial and mimic a lot of the work that is coming from him and then some of these other generative artists as well. So there is danger in that, working this way becomes somewhat easy if your style becomes popular to mimic it, and it's sad to see that so many companies are either hiring somebody to copy this artist's style or just outright taking the work directly from other videos that he's published online.

But it's unfortunate. It happens. It's nicer to see though because most of the time what we see at these is somebody running movie trailers or worse, Big Buck Bunny or those blender foundation free videos, and those are very well produced, but they're now 15 years old, and it's like blenders have gotten better in the last 15 years, and so it's nice to see a little bit more creativity around the show floor, but at the end of it, it's not creative because a lot of it's just, “Hey, look at this popular artist. Let's take his work.” And there's a fine line with that. I certainly would love to have some of my demos made available, but, at the same point, if we start seeing it over and over again or people are copying it, it's a nice form of flattery, but it's also dangerous form of flattery as well.

One thing that you mentioned when you were finalizing this stuff for this big video wall was you said that the actual code package scripting or however you wanna describe it, and you'll do a better job than me obviously, was so light that you could have loaded this on a couple of floppy disc, which for the youngsters out there, look it up, and you'll see what a floppy disc is.

Jim Nista: It's the icon that we use when we save things on our regular software. Not that anybody has seen one in a while. 

That canvas we were working on for the Orlando project is 18,000 by 3,000 pixels, so a lot of real estate, and of course, this was rendered out, we've given the nature of the project and everything, but if that had been delivered generatively, it's just shader code. That project was built using a concept called GLSL shaders, and it's code, it's a weird code language. It borrows a lot from many different types of scripting languages, but it's for creating visuals like that through code and the files that created those flowers, the individual code for some of those was 9 kilobytes. Just because it's just a little script running and doing all this creative. But what's funny in there is that along the way, as I was initially building some of these projects, I would go into graphics software like Adobe Illustrator for example. I'd go into that graphic software and I'd hand draw what I thought a paintbrush should look like.

And so now I've got this little chunk, not really code, but a vector graphic of what a paintbrush should look like, and over time, all of those little things that I did, I took them out and said, no, I need to code what a paintbrush looks like. I can't rely on having drawn something in advance and so all of these asset files initially part of this just to save a step or move faster were removed and just replaced with code. So there's just one file that builds these experiences that just has to be launched in and played back. Some of those are HTML and run in a web browser. Some of them are not HTML and would need a GPU to render out properly. But yeah, they're very small files that run. 

Obviously if it's running in a web browser, the digital sign's just going to be playing its HTML content and the file that is uploaded to, for example, BrightSign players can go a few kilobytes. It's a fun different process versus hundreds of gigabytes of files and or these large dataset files that we see from some of these artists where they're saying, “I built this dataset analyzer that goes through a million photos of this city to create this art.” And I'm looking at it going, that's cool, I created some random noise channels to get my data to generate my randomness rather than having to go through millions of photos. 

It's certainly a different approach and makes for fun stories as far as not having to deliver all of these massive files. I've had some surprises along the way. “I don't think you sent me everything.” “Yes, I did.” Just launch it on the BrightSign player and see what it does. 

So operationally, there are implications it seems, in terms of data transmission times, and bandwidth consumption, although that's not as big an issue as it used to be, and local storage, things like that. Are there other kinds of operating implications or advantages of going down this path? 

Jim Nista: Yeah, I think the biggest advantage is just being able to promise a client that the content's not going to get stale, right? 

You can set it and truly forget it.

Jim Nista: Yeah, and that provides a big advantage to it. There are some other challenges to this, and so certainly some of the projects that I've done where we, after a while, realized that that particular circumstance and that particular hardware are not really conducive to running generative, and in those cases, I've rendered eight-hour-long movies, I just let my computer do the generative work and record it, and then upload a big, long movie. So that defeats the purpose and the idea of having to send a nine-kilobyte file, now all of a sudden, it's turned into a big, long movie. But for the most part, no, there's really not too much to consider with this, especially on the simpler version of this code, which certainly is not as dramatic as what we're seeing in museums, in some of the early days of some of the generative artists that are starting to get really well noticed. 

But I'm also thinking in terms of the real-world applications of this, we have a lot of low-cost, low-power media players out there in the world that are well suited towards this and can handle a project like this without overheating or anything else like that. So that was a big driving factor for me that I know a lot of other artists wouldn't really even think to put limitations on themselves like that. They would just think, I don't care about the technology and then suddenly create a project that requires multiple of the latest, greatest expensive GPUs on a Windows device, which is nothing wrong with Windows, as we all know, it's not the biggest friend in digital signage. It's a noisy operating system, and it wants to make its presence known, and what we're looking for most of the time is all of that stuff to be in the background as far as possible. 

Is this something that you came up with or was it technology that existed and some people were using and you've just adopted it and done your own thing with it?

Jim Nista: I think in terms of the work that I'm doing with GLSL shaders, and the more modern GPU process, I'm coming into a workflow that other people have been pioneering, and so I'm just getting more than my feet wet with that, but it really is newer. 

But on the other side, building generative art on, essentially, think about some of the last-generation BrightSign players, we're talking about devices that were designed in 2015-2016. So seven years old and already intended for a solid state and not necessarily have any GPUs. That idea to create generative art on some of these older devices, is new, and I have not seen anybody building content that way. I don't know why you would, right? If you start on a project like this and you don't create limitations for yourself, your are going to want to have the best GPU, you're going to want the best system to run it on. You're going to aim for the highest caliber, and here I am going, no way, I got to aim for these devices that are out of date and not necessarily have the fastest horsepower, but I know I can count on them and I know I can rely on them and I know that they're going to do what part of this project's goal was for me, which is to run indefinitely, right? To be able to create something like this. 

I think another idea that's always popped into my head, and just as an odd way, is if you go to a contemporary art museum or gallery and you see audiovisual art fairly often, it's a big part of it, and I was at one a couple of years ago, I went to one of those big art shows where they have the galleries come and I bought the tickets and I decided I wanted to go see this like the Art Basel but Frieze is the one that I went to, and I noticed a lot of the AV was very poorly running. So they're trying to sell us a million-dollar art project and there's a BrightSign player on the floor with cables, and the AV guys frame-shooting it and know it just isn't right. I know that device. I know what it's capable of. I know it could pull this off. 

So a lot of that was what happens when somebody invests in one of these pieces or wants a work of art in their space. Now they have to keep it running, and they have to have an AV tech constantly going out there and patching it up and fixing it and keeping it going and all the other things and it really started to make sense as you look at it older AV art installations. There are a lot of AV artists from the 80s and 90s who used CRT devices, right? How do these museums keep that stuff running? And so it was also just a practical idea for me, having an understanding of the AV industry to think as an artist doing this work, I have to prepare for that. Who knows if anything I do will ever have longevity or maybe nobody will even look at it. But, it was an idea from the beginning. I want to help solve these things. I've been that guy on the floor fixing the BrightSign player and I don't wanna be, I don't wanna create that problem for somebody else.

So it was an idea just about born out of seeing how a lot of this audiovisual art becomes a technical nightmare, and how can I do something that is, from the beginning, avoiding those technical challenges. I've done projects until the pandemic like I had BrightSign players that had been on and running for 10 years for some projects and, if I can count on a device to just run that way, that makes this creative all the more impactful, at least easier to operate into the future, and just a fun little goal of myself to say, how can I challenge this to do something that attracts people that is interesting to look at, but then also is capable of running on much, much older devices.

So is this a product?

You've had a design agency in the past that you sold to Almo, then you went off on your own, doing your own thing, and you're spinning up an agency again. But is this something that if I could ring you tomorrow and say, yeah, I want five for five different venues, I could buy it, or how does that work?

Jim Nista: Yeah, that's part of the idea for me I wanted to do something as a creative project, but I also wanted to find a commercial space for it too, right? It's no fun just to build something and then walk away from it, and knowing and having a background in the commercial AV space, it it's designed for that, especially the more modern version that is a little bit more active. Both of them are really designed for the commercial AV space, and yeah, I've been working already with some architectural firms. I think that they're the ones that are going to get this right away. But then also there are some AV companies that are really specialists in building video walls in corporate residential spaces, right? And I think the residential spaces are going to be a big upcoming space for this, and also I think this is another factor around this type of work that it lends itself to is most larger cities in North America, have a percentage of a project's budget that has to go to art, and I've noticed more and more a lot of l led walls getting put in to satisfy that piece of the art budget, and so if I can productize this around some of the commercial AV companies that I know are getting those projects, right? They can say, oh, we spent all this money on art, but they're putting in an LED wall. You know exactly what the next step is. They're going to put the stock video on it and call it art, and so if we can have something readily available, somewhat off the shelf, and I say somewhat because I don't know too many clients who are going to just want this exactly as is.

This is custom creative. Everyone's gonna want a little bit of customization to it, and I always have known that in any of the template-type projects that I've done is that there's a piece of this that has to be still within the client's control. They feel that they drove some of the creativity, and they wanted certain colors or whatever, and I've left that as part of this. But yes it really truly is intended for this commercial AV space as a somewhat off-the-shelf product that you can just pick up and install into this as the primary visuals on an LED wall.

Some of the work that's been done by these generative artists, it's amazing and everything else, but there are six-figure projects. I don't want to put you on the spot, but can you give any sense of how this fits? Or people listening to this going, that would be amazing, but I don't have half a million dollars to buy this original creative.

Jim Nista: A lot of that comes with the name, and once you get to be a well-known and a well-identifiable artist suddenly, the prices go up. I'm not there yet, and you know a lot of projects have a tendency to fit into that magic sweet spot of the 10k budget, right? The $10,000 content budget. They're spending $250,000 on the LED and the installation and the content is still in the afterthought realm, and that's really the other idea that I've had around this.

What's very common, but when I'll get a phone call, we have an LED wall that's being built. This is the type of content, only sometimes clients are asking for generative. They come back, and they're looking for some sort of animated visuals, motion graphics, or edited video loops, and it typically comes in as a budget of around $10,000 for getting that content pulled together, and that's what I was aiming for with this is that it would fall into that sweet spot. Somebody’s looking for more or more customization, certainly, that's possible, and that would impact the price, but to just prep this and get it ready to go for your average installation is intended to be easy and also not half a million dollars, right?

At least not yet!

Jim Nista: No, and even then, if you reach that stage as an artist, there's another fun factor that comes along with it is now you have gallery exclusivity and all kinds of other things, and while it's fun, those big tickets are being shared amongst a lot of different greedy hands, and so you see something that sells for half a million dollars, the artist might have gotten 20% of that and as sad as that is, there's a lot of hands that get into those pies. So at least for now, by focusing this around a space that I know better, I don't necessarily know that gallery space so well, but I know the commercial AV space a lot better, and focusing on that, just makes a lot more sense to me. 

I do interact with commercial art brokers, and that's been happening now for about the last six months or so, but, again, that space is different from the commercial art gallery space, which is very interesting. 

I bet. So if people want to know more about this, how can they find you? 

Jim Nista: My website is getting redone. I'm in the process of making it prettier, and I still need to put this work on there, because I have put very little on there, so this is all new for me as I'm getting this up this summer.

But yeah, it's nista.co, and I'll be enhancing that over the next couple of weeks to be showing some more of the work that I'm doing. I have a few projects that are wrapping up all around the same time, so I should get those wrapped up, get some photographers out to those locations, and then get this content on my website. If you look at it today, it could be showing off some of the generative work. 

Okay. Thank you. That was terrific. I now understand it better, although I'm not ready to sit down and try to do it myself. 

Jim Nista: No, it's fine. I appreciate this and the opportunity to talk a lot more. I'm having a blast with it. I can't wait to see what else is out there as I get more involved with this work.

Francesco Ziliani, SpinetiX

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

The Swiss technology firm SpinetiX has evolved its go-to-market approach through the years - positioning itself much more as a software solutions firm than as a manufacturer of very nice media layout boxes ... that also came with software.

The company has end-point devices that have been operating flawlessly for years, but to grow and meet demands, it had to look at what it wanted to be and what it wanted to do.

Now, founder and longtime CEO Francesco Ziliani is talking in terms of SpinetiX being a SAAS software company, and happily showing how carefully selected partners - like Taiwan's iBase - are also now making hardware that works with the platform.

I met with Francesco down in Orlando, where the company had a stand at InfoComm and was also doing off-site meetings and demos with partners. We get into a lot of things, including where he's seeing a lot of market growth. As is the case more broadly, workplace communications is a big growth driver.

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TRANSCRIPT

We started out by my asking him about company priorities right now ...

Francesco Ziliani: Look, this year, the priority is to remind people that we are still hardware because we believe hardware is important, but software as a service is really what I believe is the right strategy, the right vision for us, and to make this model SaaS for an indirect sales channel work, because if you think about most of SaaS, they are a direct business.  Microsoft and Adobe sell direct; we do not. 

We have two levels, distributors and resellers. So to make this model work, you need active partners. So you don't need only an opportunist or someone who once has an opportunity and starts selling SpinetiX. You really need someone who says, I share the same vision. I like the product, and I keep learning it so I can bring more over time, and it's through that AV channel; only some are ready for this step. Many people like box-moving types of business, right? I buy something, I add the margin, I install and resell. So everything I can do to inspire resellers to ask themselves, is SaaS for digital signage, for my customers, and for me, interesting? Am I ready to explore it seriously? That's something there that can help SpinetiX. 

Yeah, the company has, in certain respects, pivoted, not really, but when I think about SpinetiX, I think about these gorgeous little boxes that are ultra-reliable, and you get the software with it, and now you are talking much more as a software company that has its own purpose-built boxes, and as you were telling me before we turned the microphone on, getting partners.

Francesco Ziliani: Yes. Our tagline is: We do everything except scrapes because it's true. We have the hardware. Now, we use partners to manufacture, but we co-design. We have the operating system, the DSOS, and the rendering engine all integrated, and that's also quite unique because, let's take BrightSign, for example, they have their operating system, but they allow others to install the rendering engine, and now you have two people responsible. BrightSign is upgrading the operative system, the CMS might not follow up or vice versa. The CMS needs to do something, and BrightSign is not there yet. 

In our work, that cannot happen. It's like Apple. We control everything. So every update is tested and comes with everything you need. That's why the reliability is so high. So that's also an advantage. Now this is still there. It's available on GP 400. Now we can also install the same DSOS on an SDM module. Sharp NEC is a partner now that we signed, and we are going to have a Sharp NEC display in the booth with the SDM. So that's integrated. 

What’s an SDM? 

Francesco Ziliani: Smart device module. So SDM and IBASE have the same philosophy. So now I'm not forced to manufacture myself. I can ask someone, you are good at manufacturing, you manufacture and install my operating system on it. So we work together. The operating system is very reliable, we cut everything useless for digital signage, so very compact, and then rendering engine with all the APIs, and so we basically make all these players like a zombie for SpinetiX., and as a zombie, they can talk with IO. 

They're zombies because it's a defined, tightly contained operating system. 

Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely. You cannot install any program on it. You cannot change it. Everything is locked. Yeah, and that is for security. You cannot jump on it and say, okay, now I install a program or install something else. This thing comes natively compatible with ARYA CMS. Aria is a highway of data to players. But when we work with banks, the player is within the bank's network. We talk to ARYA through http to know what to display and to get the instructions. But once the instructions are on the player, it locally talks with sensors, databases, and whatever services. So it's fully secure. Even if I cut the internet, the player has the capacity to get data around him autonomously on the local network.

So it's not streaming video; it's really like a CMS as an application. Easy to use, made for the end user, no training needed. That's the value of it, and every time you need to do something more complex, our partners use Elementi, which is our offering tool. They create the widget, customize it, and have a button to upload on the right ARYA account. With the button, ARYA has an additional asset, which can do whatever it has been designed for. So connecting to an SMTP or doing whatever. Now this set in ARYA is like a video, it's like an image, so it's a programmable element, so the end user cannot look inside. It's just there, but he can put it in a layout in a very simple way. So you understand that we make the end user autonomous with a tool that always remains simple, and we give our partners a tool that makes them able to program whatever they want, and now this is a combo. So we integrated this, so when you create a project with Elementi for using widgets, you know that you need to have an ARYA widget.

When you create a more complex project with Elementi, you need streaming—that system type of license in Element. We have the planning system in ARYA, so we simplify this combo with integration, and we can offer the right tool to the right audience. 

So if I'm an end user and I'm interested in this, I'm getting an IBASE box, and it's going to be connected and managed via ARYA. Is Elementi opt-in, or is it fundamental too?

Francesco Ziliani: It's an option. So let's see the path. You buy an IBASE, it comes with our operating system, and it comes with everything you need to connect on ARYA. The first step is ARYA Discovery which is free of charge. You can have one screen, you can have 1000 screens. You create your account, you pair your players, and your screens on your account and you can start publishing images and videos, and that's all free. You don't spend anything on the cloud right now. At a certain point, you get stuck because you need more users or more storage, or more functionalities, that’s when you need to upgrade to ARYA Enterprise. 

ARYA Enterprise is an indirect channel. So you need a SpinetiX partner. You need someone who knows how to set it up, and how to help you discover more. So you contact a partner and the partner comes to you and asks, “What do you want to do?” And if your needs are basic, you just upgrade to ARYA Enterprise by paying an annual fee. The partner will call you at the end of each year saying, “Is everything fine, do you need more?” Then let's say you need more, because you now understand that you are responsible for spending two hours per day updating images and all these images are already in your database, so you would like this to be automatic. So your ARYA Enterprise is now upgraded to ARYA Enterprise Widget and in the widget, you are compatible with Elementi widget projects. So it means that your supplier, your SpinetiX partner is designing for you with Elementi, which is the right tool, programs you, whatever you like, and once he has created that content shows you say, “Hey, is that what you want?” “Yes.” And with one click, it's in your account, and now as an end user, you can use that widget, and decide to show it in the lobby or in a certain location, with a certain background, with a clock or a countdown, whatever you like. But you are autonomous because that thing has been designed for you.

And like this, we value the services of our partner who is fully autonomous with Elementi. They don't need us. But we also protect the end customer, who can still ask them to do the job because they don't need to understand what's behind, and before, when we only had Elementi, it was not like this. We had Elementi, which was a complex product in the hands of an end user. So some end users love it. But most of the end user we're saying it's too complex. 

Yeah, I don't have time to learn this!

Francesco Ziliani: “I don't have the time, and I'm using it perhaps with my intern and the guy is not trained, so he's making mistakes and he is gonna leave.”

So ARYA is simple for that type of user, still we are not limiting the experience. Now what I want to fight is leveraging down. I want to leverage up, so that's why I am calling partners to say, “You cannot just sell ARYA Discovery for free or just our enterprise for an annual fee for basic features, you need to upsell your services, customize it.” Because if you don't do that, then the hundreds of CMS that will beat us one day. So instead, if I'm able to create this local relationship with the supplier, and the end user. Instead of being in a relationship, I supply once and I go away, I'm a partner with you, so I'm with you with the evolution of your needs, then I'm making my customers loyal, and that's the secret of SaaS, because every year you add something and we double every year the number of new things but if we lose the previous one, then it's like having a bucket that is leaking. So you add water but it's not growing. And I want to remove leaks, and to remove leaks, you need to create this loyalty, this relationship 

We're sitting in at InfoComm and historically the integration companies that come to InfoComm are looking for products and they're thinking about margin and how many of these can we move and everything else and, historically at least, it’s been a bit of a struggle to get a lot of these companies to understand, you also should be in service. There's recurring revenue in that. With shrinking margins and everything else, this is something you need to do. 

Is it hard to find those companies that understand that or that a lot of them are waking up to it?

Francesco Ziliani: There are many that are ready to do this, but it's true. AV is not IT yet. They are blending, converging, there are good things in both communities. But I think the opportunity AV has is great because they have the relationship with the end customer already, because they are selling services of support. So it's just a click in their mind, in their mindset, to say, “Hey, now, I'm not selling you a box, I'm selling you a service. I'm with you supporting, training, inspiring you”, and of course I understand that perhaps they tried solutions that were not reliable yet, or not delivering on their promises and it's true that if you are not protected on that side, you are in trouble, because you don't have actions to take. So you want a solution which is reliable, secure, and you want to build your services there, on top of that type of solution. 

But we see people that are, I'm not saying afraid, but they have an attitude of, let's see what's for me, and probably start one project after the other. I'm going to give an example of a company in Switzerland who started four years ago with ARYA with a few units at the beginning, few customers, they start calling existing customers they have, proposing the new model, and now it's a small company, but they already have more than a $100,000 in record revenue and now if you think like this, a hundred thousand means that you can have a part-time employee developing more, and the hardware is very reliable, so the end customer does not have reason to stop. The product is evolving, so you don't have reasons to look for competition and they’re running in parking lots, they’re running in schools, fulfilling different types of needs, and the solution works very well. They’re very happy, and I'm using them as an example to say, “Hey, you can start, even if you're a small company, there are local opportunities to you that might start with just one screen the first year, and then double, and then upgrading to more powerful plans and the solution is open, you can upgrade, you are not forced to stay three years, five years, every year. You can choose. So yeah I think it's a modern app approach to digital signage.

When I think about SpinetiX, historically, I think of these beautiful little boxes and the stories I hear about how they're still in the field 10 years later, 12 years later, and so on. So reliability, durability is a big thing. 

I'm sure that's still the case, but it’s not what you lead with anymore, right?

Francesco Ziliani: We want to do more. But by doing more, we are not forgetting where we are coming from and so the hardware remains reliable, the know-how is in the team. But I think, yeah, we would like to scale up a bit more. 

And is that the driver behind, like you've always manufactured or contract manufactured, or designed your own boxes, but now you're adding hardware partners, more partners. Is that just for scale? 

Francesco Ziliani: Scale is one reason. The second reason is that we live in a complex world where supply chain manufacturing, finding chips are a challenge for everyone. 

We learned many things in the past three years. 

Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, and despite the fact that we had a very good relationship, so we have been able to go through difficult times, I realize we are not in the position to guarantee right availability for whatever type of project. So we need to have Plans B, C, and all the work we have done on the Intel platform opens us to a lot of opportunities, and then if you think about it, we have a product we are launching, which has four outputs. So that's ideal for video walls. Four outputs, perfectly synchronized. You just plug in, you use it as a single screen from ARYA or from Elementi easily. 

So you could blend an 8k LED wall? 

Francesco Ziliani: More. It's four times 4k. So you could have 2x2 8k video walls if you want, or 1x4, or even just 1x2 and we can already do this with the synchronization feature of our players. That you only have one device, so it's more convenient in terms of price. One license, one device. What is the volume behind? I don't know. It may be a hundred units, a thousand units. If I'm manufacturing that device, I put myself in a niche of a niche. And there are people that are good at doing that. That may use the same product for other applications. So why not collaborate with them, helping them learn why we need POE in digital signage, right? Or why we are asking them for a higher capacity battery. So there are specificities in terms of synchronization, security that are of our industry, but I can share that with this supplier, and, at the end, we come with a product which they manufacture for us to fit the needs of our industry, from our perspective, of course. 

Now this, I think, it's the best we can do for our customers, offering them more options and not being limited on the investments that we can do ourselves.

Are you challenged at all to service the - I don't wanna say lower end of the market, but small to medium businesses, the kinds of end users who are maybe using an Amazon Fire Stick or a cheap Android player or something like that - can you even compete with that or is that not who you're after?

Francesco Ziliani: No, today, that's not our target, and we understand that there are customers that have really big constraints in terms of cost or budget. But we are really focused on long-term relationships with our partners. So we want devices and hardware and software that we can master. I don't want to find myself in a situation where I'm asking you one question and I don't know how to answer. Of course our support is best, but we cannot guarantee a result every time, but we want to have tools that we control. 

Now Intel Ecosystem has devices, which in terms of budget are much more accessible than our HMP 400, which is, inducer design made for wide range temperature, supporting POE. So we have been able to offer that flexibility to some of our projects. What I'm satisfied with is often the customer is challenging us on price, then I offer them the alternative, which is budget compatible, but they still buy the HMP at the end, because they realize that CapEx is important, but operating costs are also there, and if you have a product that is designed to live two, three years, it will fail statistically on that period, and customers are smart. They know where their money needs to go. If they have a long-term vision, they will buy more reliable devices. It's better for them. 

Has the end user profile changed much through the years? Are you seeing new vertical markets and new kinds of customers showing up? 

Francesco Ziliani: Yes, corporate and education are booming for us. We also see a lot of requests in manufacturing environments, and plants where basically you have a production line that uses screens to motivate the people working on the lines with videos. 

Shows KPIs, dashboards, etc.

Francesco Ziliani: Not only that, motivational videos are triggered by the KPIs they measure. So you don't have a sterile gauge or red-green level, right? You really have someone that is based on, is it Friday? Is it at the end of your turn, to understand the KPIs and give you the message that is relevant for you where you are. 

I think digital signage is a narrow term for us sometimes. I hope you can visit our new building in Switzerland. We have this corporate building where we rent spaces to different companies, and we have a lot of digital signage there from the parking lot to the roof. We really see the impact that digital signage has in a corporate environment to inspire people, to inform them about services, about what's going on where, before going home at five o'clock, six o'clock, we display the map of the traffic, so you can make a decision, should I take a drink before going with colleagues or is it the right time to leave? We have the timetables of trains, and buses appearing at the right time. Little things that make the user of the building achieve an easier life. That is growing a lot.  We sell a lot to military campuses like Fort Knox in the US and place like that. 

Yeah, I was about to ask about security. If you're doing Fort Knox, and you mentioned before I turned on the microphone that you're also doing NASA, so obviously, you're pretty solid on security. 

Francesco Ziliani: Yes. I think our team really designed products with security in mind, and that's a game changer, and it's challenging. Still, I think it's important because you put a lot of information, you put your credibility on the screens, on your network of screens. If someone is able to bypass your security, then you risk a lot in terms of image or terms of trouble, or continuity of service. It's really the customers we have that consider the investment as business critical, so security is definitely important, and then, GDPR in Europe is important, so everything related to how you protect your personal information and we have corporations that are asking us, what are the logs that we can access to know who has used the data, if the data remains in the cloud or not, where is it a store? Is it in Europe, in Germany, or in the US? So that means a lot of infrastructure work, a lot of tools that are only sometimes seen by the end customer if they're not interested, but a large corporation, know what they need. SSO (single sign-on) as well, these are all tools that facilitate a lot of the deployments and acceptance of our solution. 

You're European-based, have you seen shifts in terms of where the business is?

I've heard from some companies who've said Europe is going along okay, but the real growth is in North America. is that what you're experiencing as well?

Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, North America, I think we are just scratching the surface of opportunity. So today, we are, more or less, half in terms of our business. But I see a huge potential in the US. That's why we have invested in a team of three people. Before, we didn't have anyone. We only had distributors, but now we have three local people, and Europe is doing well. They are indeed asking themselves a lot of questions about the impact of power use for digital signage. But at the same time, they realize that. The benefits are there as well, right? So you need to inform people. You need to keep this communication channel open, and of course, it has a cost, but if you do it right, the benefits are higher. So I think we passed that period where everyone was saying, switch off because we need to save.  

I advocate if you use this tool to do the right communication, then the investments are worth, it because the impact is big, and in the end, you can change bad habits. I'm 16 years into digital signage, and I'm a believer in the benefits of digital signage for many, many sectors.

What you're talking about on the factory floors, I think the same thing could apply in healthcare environments as well, where there are just so many ways that you could be communicating with people, and these are people who either don't because of their job or don't have time because of how busy they are to sit down and read stuff, they're going to see stuff when they're zipping down a hallway or along a corridor, and if there's a screen there that's going to motivate them or inform them or tell them, “There's a gas leak, go that way, get out!” That has incredibly valuable. 

Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely, and it's true that hospitality in the large sense, whether in a hospital or a restaurant, in a hotel chain, or a campus, it's all about delivering relevant information, and our product, our solution, is made to automate. Of course, you need someone to know what to do, but the technology is there. And you can really take into account all the parameters. You can add artificial intelligence. You can imagine a world of possibilities, but it needs to be simple, and I remember we made an audit some time ago, and we were asking our customers what they think about Elementi, our software, and half of the customers said, it's the easiest software that we have been using, and the other half was saying it's the hardest software we have been using, and that is because basically, we were providing one tool to two audiences.

So simplicity is a relative concept. If you understand your audience, you are able to provide the right tool, then you are delivering a simple tool to them, but you cannot make something like programming simple for everyone. It's a lot of investment. 

I think having the capability with the solution to really segment the stakeholders and address their needs, that’s at the end, our innovation is that we are bringing with this integration with ARYA, and that's what I believe is going to be the future for our industry and many other people will contribute with dedicated software for specific verticals like business management, building management, right? You have dedicated software for restaurants, and all this is going to be simple for the right audience, and our job is to collect the data from this software, to make it simple to animate the network of screens so that the information is delivered in a relevant way. 

All right. Thank 

Francesco Ziliani: You're welcome.

Chris Grosso, Intersection

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

The out of home media company Intersection is probably best known as the operator of that network of smart cities display totems - called LinkNYC - on the sidewalks of Manhattan and New York City's boroughs. But the company has a much bigger footprint around the United States - mainly mass transport systems, but also the flashy Hudson Yards mixed-use development in New York, and United Airlines.

I had a good chat with Chris Grosso, who took over as CEO a couple of years ago, but had already been with the company for a few years, having come over from the broadcast and digital world.

We got into several things - like the state of the DOOH industry and the evolving needs and demands of the municipal governments who become business partners for Intersection. Smart cities needs, for example, are shifting.

We also get into Intersection's recently announced addition of AI-driven ad and content targeting, with the idea of making what's on screens not just relevant to the city, but all the way down to neighbourhoods and streets.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Intersection Is all about? 

Chris Grosso: Sure, and thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here, Dave and I very much enjoy reading your publication and the newsletter, and the email all the time. I’m Chris Grosso, the CEO of Intersection. We are a leading out-of-home advertising company in the USA focused on major US cities. We really are differentiated from the other out-of-home companies in three ways. One is typically we put in consumer amenities in center cities, most notably things like the LinkNYC program in New York, so Wifi kiosks across the city of New York. We do customer information and advertising systems for places like Chicago Transit Authority and SEPTA Transit Authority in Philadelphia.

And we do bus shelters in many US cities as well. So very much driven by bringing consumer amenities and partnerships with cities and transit authorities. The second biggest differentiator for us, which is most relevant to this conversation, is our focus on content and programming. We like to put useful content on our digital screens, and we wanna put entertaining content on our digital screens, and that could be anything from what time your train is coming to what the weather might be to art or fun facts. We want to program these screens just as you program any other screen in order to make them entertaining and engaging for consumers.

And the last piece of our business we pride ourselves on is selling data-driven advertising. We like to be very focused on the data that helps our advertisers understand who they're reaching when they advertise with us, as well as what happens after the release. 

So the idea of consumer amenity that I gather that the smart city-ish kiosk that you're putting on the street and other things like that, that’s a more modern version of the amenities, to use your term, that outdoor companies have been doing for a whole bunch of time with bus shelters, right? 

Chris Grosso: For sure, and we're also in the bus shelter business as well. We do some stuff with Bikeshare, and I think it's a long tradition in out-of-home advertising to bring the amenity to allow us to get access to the public right of way to put the advertising in, and this is very valuable for a city transit authority because they're getting something that they don't have to put up the cash for. So it's a real value-creating event both for the communities as well as the advertisers. 

Is it the price of entry now for particularly larger urban geographies like New York and so on, where if you want to play, you're going to have to provide infrastructure as well? Can't you just put in display totems?

Chris Grosso: I think it really depends on the municipality and the deal structure. In some cases, companies have to put up the capital and bring the amenity and bring the service into the community, and that can both be the infrastructure, but increasingly also the software and the services that you can bring. But there are also some cases where, you know, particularly with the Infrastructure Financing Act, that the city or municipality might want to put up the capital for the infrastructure themselves, in which case we'll partner with them to create the revenue stream as well as overlay the data and the software to really get the most out of the infrastructure.

In all cases, I think that it's important is being able to have these digital screens up, having software to put the right content in the right app at the right time a big is an important part of the equation and a big differentiator for us. 

Does that happen much where you have municipalities that are making a capital investment?

Chris Grosso: It depends on the deal, but yes, and there's a couple of different ways you do that sometimes the municipality puts up some of the capital themselves. In other cases, in many of these deals, we recoup the capital through the revenues. So we might if we put up the money and then recoup it out of the payments to the city.

So there are many different ways you can do a deal. 

Chris Grosso: There are many different ways you can do a deal. There are a handful of companies, of which we are really good at this and have built a strong team that knows how to work with cities, work with transport authorities, and create value, both for us and also for the cities.

I think one big differentiator for Intersection is we are a mission-driven company, and we are very focused on making cities better through our products. 

You came out of Broadcast & Online, which is very much a digital entity, and now you're running a company that has to do a lot of infrastructure and has to do these sorts of capital-intensive deals. Was that a big adjustment? 

Chris Grosso: It's a different business. There are a lot of similarities between being in the digital media space and the Intersection space. But certainly, in the last few years, I've learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about trenching and conduit and coin fiber and a lot of construction.

I like to say I was in consulting, and then I was in media and software. So this is the first job I actually had, physical things to deal with, and it's an interesting and exciting part of the job, and it's a real differentiator for us at Intersection. Because we have people who are very good at digital media, but we also have people who are very good at working with cities. And we've got an extraordinary team of folks who really understand how to deploy and operate these things in physical space, and that goes for even the guys who are out, cleaning and posting. We've got a really great team of professionals and field operations who really understand work in physical space, and part of what makes our business both fun also gives us a leg up is we're good at these different disciplines. 

You also, I assume, had to learn a lot about politics and about city bylaws. 

Chris Grosso: We've got people who very much understand that world for sure. 

Which is a bit of a labyrinth.

Chris Grosso: One could say that.

You have to deal with them, so you're being careful. I can understand that. 

Chris Grosso: I think the level of talent in these city governments is really impressive and we benefited at Intersection when we started, we were put together by a historic business Titan, which was an out-of-home advertising company, and then Control Group, which was a digital innovation company, we put together to create Intersection in 2016, right before I started.

But we had the benefit of Dan Doctoroff being our chairman, who helped put the deal together and was an alumnus of the Bloomberg administration. We've benefited from some folks who come out of that world, who really understand that and did a great job in government and then can help us understand how to do stuff with the government in a way that creates value for the population and citizens, and people who live in the cities for sure, but also, creates economic value for our business.

When the whole Smart Cities thing bubbled up with LinkNYC and other initiatives like that, there was a lot of noise around it. This seemed to be the way that digital at home was going, that anything that was going into big municipalities was going to have to be a smart city initiative in some way. Has that really played out? 

Because I don't hear as much and/or read as much noise about all that now, and I know that we can maybe get into this a little bit of the LinkNYC has had its revenue struggles through the years. I don't know where we're at with that now, but it doesn't seem like smart cities have the same kind of energy around them that maybe they did in the mid-2010s.

Chris Grosso: I think the definition of what a smart city is has evolved, and I think the parts of the smart city that are important people might not have thought of as smart cities but are huge trends in the changing nature of cities. You really saw that during the pandemic. 

So what I mean by that is if you look at the evolution of mobility in a city, which wasn't the classic under the rubric of Smart Cities. Still, you think about how people get around cities now versus how they did 10 years ago with Bikeshare with Rideshare, with changes to how the transit authorities function, all of that is a much smarter way to run a city than several years ago and requires data and requires real-time information. So I think a lot of the ethos around the smart cities just got absorbed in how cities are operating, and particularly a lot of that got accelerated during the pandemic.

One of the biggest areas of smart cities is what do you do with parking? And that's outside of our world, but if you think about the pandemic that happened. It really made people reimagine what you do with street-level parking in cities because all cities, particularly New York and others in the United States, suddenly put restaurants on the restaurants due to the need for giving these restaurants the ability to run their business without indoor dining, and that reimagined the whole way people do parking. Is that a classic smart city type of initiative? I don't know, but it totally reimagined how the street works, and I think if you walked down the street on the Upper West Side today versus what you saw in 2019, it's a completely different experience with the bike share and the outdoor dining and other things of that nature. 

So, are there still demands among municipalities to have these smart city kiosks/totems that are multipurpose devices that they're advertising totems? Obviously, there's an interactive thing, maybe there's WiFi built-in and sensors and so on.

Is that still being deployed and asked for? 

Chris Grosso: I think the form factors are changing, and I think the needs are changing in the cities, and I think that there are a lot of fundamentals that cities need. So it may not be a totem, but cities need bus shelters, and now it's not just a bus shelter, it's a mobility hub.

Cities need advanced wayfinding to manage this multimodal transportation system that's coming out of the pandemic. Cities have always needed it, and I think we all underestimate going to smart cities. Still, we realize now that cities need the ability to broadcast content, localized content at street level. Whether it be what time my train is coming, emergency messaging, or just education around when the community board meeting is, that has a ton of value. So I think the original premise of Smart Cities is let's take an iPhone and put it at street level. I don't think that's turned into the right answer, but I do think there are applications and amenities in the right of way that are required that cities want and are ready to ask and get deployed.

And I do think you'll continue to see these kinds of initiatives. It just may not be in the form factor of totems. It may be a bus shelter because, you know what, you can put WiFi in a small shell in a bus shelter, and by the way, the bus shelter provides shade, and that's really important in certain municipalities, shelter from the rain, and that's important. So I think smart cities have evolved into what are the real needs of the people who live in the cities where before it was, “Hey, we've got a cool thing. Let us give you this.” and even if you look at the Link, the core propositions of Link like free WiFi and phone calling for sure are hugely used and hugely important. But what we also recognize is Link as a megaphone to broadcast real-time information to the city of New York is also hugely valuable and something that the community has been able to leverage effectively. Most recently, we played a big role in the we love New York campaign where, you know, if you put content on Link, we can reach, I think, 90%+ of New Yorkers a hundred times a month.

That’S a massive megaphone that can be valuable to advertisers, but it also can be valuable To the city. If there are schools that get shut down for a snowstorm, flip the switch and tell everyone the schools are shut down due to the snowstorm, that's a big value for a city. Is that a classic 2015 Smart Cities thing? I don't know, but it's a huge value. If you are a parent, figuring out whether your kid's going to go to school or not the next day. 

So where is Link at in terms of rollout and viability? 

There've been a number of stories through the years about revenue challenges and pace of rollout, and so on, but I haven't really seen anything for a year or more. So I'm curious where it's at, and as you said, it has its value, and people like it and everything else, but is it still the way forward? Would you continue to deploy this? 

Chris Grosso: Yes, so during the pandemic, working with our partners ZenFi, we actually have a new form factor for a next-generation Link, which we call Link 5G, which has many of the original features of Link, like the free WiFi and the tablet to make phone calls, but it's taller, and it allows for multi-tenant small cells, to support New York City's 5G rollout. We are in the process of working through deploying those now with our partners ZenFi, who run Fiber and telecommunications.

So this would, this is a nice little partnership for you because they'd be able to share the infrastructure cost, I assume. 

Chris Grosso: Exactly, and also they have the expertise in telecommunications. We are in the media content advertising space. We really understand media content and advertising software. But we're not telecom companies. ZenFi is a world-class telecom company. They understand fiber, they understand dealing with carriers and that kind of thing. So it is a good partnership. They've been great partners for us. 

Your company recently announced, and you've been talking about localized content, that you're doing localization of content using AI. It strikes me as, great, this is something that absolutely should be done but it was also very reminiscent of stuff that was done, as much as 20 years ago when they would call it hyper-local. 

But hyper-local was very difficult to achieve and very difficult to plan at that time, and it seemed more like an aspiration than something that was possible to do it in a way without a whole bunch of work. I assume that's changed hugely because of databases, APIs, and also AI. 

Chris Grosso: Yeah, so we've always done localization, and given our screens are often deep in neighborhoods, it's a very effective way of doing stuff.

We've always done it, though, with structured databases, right? Weather: give me the weather in a zip code, right? Transit: give me what's going on at the closest train station when the trains are coming. Top 10 lists of the best songs in this neighborhood, but it's all very much tied around structured data, and rules engine and APIs, and we're very good at that. 

We have a whole suite of dynamic advertising products. We've got a great product, for instance, that you're a retailer, you put the ad up for the retail and then a map at the bottom to tell you how to get to the closest retail location and that's highly localized, but it's all based on structured data—the big difference now what AI is that it allows you to do things with much more unstructured depth and much more visual creativity, which we're very excited about testing and rolling out. So, for instance, if you have an ad for an alcohol brand, how do you put that alcohol brand in context for a neighborhood? Maybe you show what's the relevant drink for this block, and the AI can figure out that this is the block that Edgar Allen Po lived on, so it'll be Edgar Allen Po’s drink. Trying to do that manually would be impossible. But you can do that using these AI engines and then on the visual side as well, which is very exciting. Maybe there's a mascot or character of a brand, and let's actually put that brand in context in the neighborhood and dressed up as someone from the neighborhood. You can do that kind of thing with these AI engines that if you were rying to do this yourself, you may not figure out the creative idea, and could never have the army of people who take to build all that creative. So that's why we're very excited about using these tools to do localization for unstructured data, and yeah, more creative types of ideas than the classic, “Hey, here's the top 10 songs being played in this neighborhood.”

It expands a lot of possibilities. But how do you do the gatekeeping on it? Because, as many people have described, AI can sometimes have these “hallucinations” and come up with a strange list that maybe isn't the top 10 songs in that neighborhood.

Chris Grosso: Yeah, for sure. One way you do it is to control the prompts and make sure you're being smart about how you're doing the prompting.

The second is: We still would envision having a layer of humans looking at all the creative before it goes on the screen to catch stuff that just doesn't make sense. Over time that problem might go away, but you still want some level of quality control, but it's very different to have creative designers take a look at a hundred pictures over the course of an hour and just check everything to make sure it looks good as opposed to trying to create all those mocks literally. It's a huge difference, and so I think, at least to start, we're going to have some level of human quality control in this for sure. But I still think the ability to use these tools to be able to do things you never could do before because you just didn't have the army pf people and it would not be cost-effective to work is really what we’re moving towards.

In the old days, my understanding of digital out-of-home was a media planner would develop the plan, and the media company would execute it based on the insertion orders for that plan. When you're getting into hyper-local AI-driven targeting and original content by the street, who's doing that plan?

Chris Grosso: I think it's often in partnership with the advertiser or the agency, right? There may be cases where the agency has a really good idea of what they want to do. There may be cases where the agency says, help us think this through, and we've always provided creative services to our clients whenever they needed it. So this is not far afield from what we do already. 

When I mentioned some of these dynamic advertising, oftentimes, we build them on behalf of advertisers and our agencies as part of our partnership. So we envision it in the same way. 

David:] I gather that programmatic is on the rise. The usage level is up. The last number I saw was like 15% of digital out-of-home ads are now booked out of programmatic platforms. Is there a bridge between programmatic and this AI-driven hyper-local stuff, or do they have to operate independently because it's just how it works?

Chris Grosso: I think to start, you have to build out these campaigns, and these campaigns will be more high-touch than your classic programmatic campaigns. So I think to start, these really have to be directlt sold because a lot of this is around the creative idea and creative concept, and there needs to be back and forth with clients to really get this right.

As opposed to programmatic, which is really about scale and tonnage and efficiency, and we spend a lot of time on programmatic as well, for sure. We launched a Place Exchange, which is an out-of-home ,SSP and we actually spun that business out because they did a lot of work with us, but they were doing work with all the other publishers, too, so it made sense to be an independent company.

We have very deep integrations with Place Exchange and several other SSPs. So we're very focused on programmatic and do view it as a growth driver. But I do think the creative side has to be much more, and I really think long term the way the business goes - I used to work for Tim Armstrong at AOL who used to call it the concept of the barbell - and I think you're going to see continued growth of programmatic, and then the direct sales really going to be about driving solutions for advertisers that are highly strategic and deep partnerships with advertisers. It could be something like the AI program, or it could be like other things we do, for instance, where we have advertisers sponsor train stations or whole train lines for multi-year deals where we work together to rename a station or a train line.

In New York City, the Bet MGM renamed the line that goes out to the Meadowlands, and we do this in other places as well. So I do think you're going to see the direct sale be much more solution-driven and working very tightly with the advertisers and the agencies to build these really cool things, whether it be AI or long-term sponsorships or big programs and then on, on the flip side, you'll see the programmatic businesses continue to scale as well. 

Has the characteristics of venues and the type of venue partners evolved over the years, like the old Titan was about transit and street furniture, but you have other companies that are very active in airports and other mass transport hubs. 

Is that evolving for you as well, or are you very much about kind of street-level advertising? 

Chris Grosso: We're about cities and the the key thing is street level advertising in cities is really really important for us, and a big area of focus transit remains a big area of focus as well.

And then we've done a little bit in airports and airlines. We've also done work with some of the next-generation multi-use developments like Hudson Yards, where we put in the wayfinding directory system and the advertising system, and that's a great business for us. But our criteria for whether or not we want to partner with someone really comes down to being able to do something value creating in big cities, top 25 cities in the US. That's what we're good at. That's how we're differentiated and sure, the types of partners that we work with will continue to evolve just as the audiences are evolving. 

If you think about the transit business, the transit business includes street furniture. It includes signage outside train stations, it includes buses, and it includes the train stations themselves. I think during the pandemic, what we found is the vast majority of our revenue, and where all the growth was is on the outside of the train station, the outside of the bus stations, everything that's at street level. And that offset the fact that the train stations themselves have fewer people, but there are still tons of people outside the train stations, and that's where we put a lot of our emphasis on the ad side. 

Has the business recovered from the Covid era? 

Chris Grosso: Yes. It looks different given our revenue mix, but we're largely back to pre Covid revenue levels. The bus exterior business and the street furniture business are well above. The train station part of the business is still somewhat below because the ridership is just not there. Then we're continuing to look at new types of inventory, whether it be multiuse destinations, as I said, like Hudson Yards, airlines and new forms of street furniture. For instance, we've got a great ad campaign on the bike share in some cities. 

Do you have to look at municipal opportunities differently now? Because of the way Covid changed things and the urban downtown areas not being as heavily populated with office workers as they were in the past. It's different in New York or something, but let's say in Cincinnati or Minneapolis, or something where not as many people are coming into the urban area.

Chris Grosso: Yeah, we do the exact same methodology when we assess the deals that we look at, which always starts with where the audience is, and we've got folks who are really good at looking at GIS and traffic patterns and people patterns to understand the scale of the audience on all the different assets we might either deploy or take over the ad sales for.

That mechanism, we do exactly the same mechanism that we did in 2018-2019, we do today. What comes out of those models is a little bit different, for sure. But what's great about a lot of our business is we typically cover the entire city, not just the central business district.

And a good example of this would be in New York, the LinkNYC. If you look at the impressions, both ad impressions generated by the LinkNYC network before and after the pandemic on a network level, they're pretty close. However, the Links in Midtown Manhattan, where people are going to work three days a week are lower, however the Links on, say, the Upper West Side or in Brooklyn are actually higher because of things like outdoor dining and people working from home.

So the people are all there. They just moved around different places, and so the methodology we use, which is understanding where the audience is, works fine, we look at everything the same way. But what comes out of those models is different based on how cities evolve. 

I talk a lot to people in Europe, and they have asked me where are things at in terms of what they call Green Signage and are there North American digital signage and digital out-of-home network operators that are concerned and doing something about energy costs. Is it something that comes up with you, or is it something you're trying to address? 

Chris Grosso: We are definitely looking at sustainability to the extent it's part of our assessment for screens on how much power they use, and then we are also looking at how to make these networks more sustainable. Ways you do that. So, for instance, one is, we do static bus shelters, but they still need a backlight, and we will use solar panels on those shelters, which has the benefit of both being greener friendly, but also just cheaper because you don't have to pull power to the shelters. Regarding digital signs like LinkNYC, we've looked for opportunities to source electricity from green sources and that's been something we've done successfully. 

But then also we look at our footprint on how we take care of our infrastructure. So we've started to test, for instance, electric vehicles in one of our markets. All the trucks that we use are electric right now. Running that as a pilot it's gone very well. The guys love the EV trucks to the point where we had a couple of EVs and a couple of gas guys just fighting over who got to use the EVs. So instead of being a half-EV, half-gas pilot, we put everything on EVs in that market because everyone's fighting over to drive the EVs. 

Are you being banged on at all by municipal authorities or by public interest groups saying, you need to do something to reduce energy waste. These displays on the sidewalk are not mission-critical. 

Just like Europe, where they were saying you need to turn these off for certain periods of time, they don't need to be running 24/7 anymore. Is that something you have to worry about, or are you hearing about?

Chris Grosso: I think municipalities want you to be sustainable, but I think we would argue our signs are mission-critical and should be up 24/7. But no, no one's asked us to do anything otherwise, but if you think about the importance of real-time information, if you're looking at when my bus is coming, or the weather and the sign's not on, that's a problem.

We like to think, and we would insist all of our signs are actually pretty mission-critical. Now that being said, there are things you can do around how much power you use and dim the signs at night, and that kind of thing to reduce the energy load and optimize that, and everyone consents to do that. And then again, to the extent we can source power from green sources, we do that as well. 

Last question. What can we expect to see out of Intersection in the next year? You made that announcement recently about generative AI. What's next? 

Chris Grosso: So I think we're very focused on product innovation around serving, meeting our customers on the needs that they want.

So I think you will continue to see more innovation around ad formats. You're also going to start to continue to see more innovation around measurement and attribution and our ability to help people, help advertisers understand who's seeing their ads and what they do after their ads and that's a huge focus for us and a big area of investment. I think you’ll hear a lot about it, and then, we're always looking at new partnerships and new deployments, and we've got some stuff cooking right now that we're hoping to be able to talk about towards the back half of the year as part of our continued expansion.

All right. Chris, thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Chris Grosso: Thank you, David. I appreciate it.

Jeff Hastings, BrightSign

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

If you are going to the big InfoComm pro AV trade show, coming up very soon in Orlando, you'll undoubtedly see a very busy BrightSign stand, and a crowd around CEO Jeff Hastings.

I've spoken with Hastings a couple of times now for this podcast, but it had been a while ... and I wanted to catch up and get his