Episodes
Friday Oct 13, 2023
DSF Cocktails and Controversy, NYC 2023 - AI In Digital Signage
Friday Oct 13, 2023
Friday Oct 13, 2023
The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at Sony's NYC offices can have a listen.
Consider this a bonus podcast, and I have not added an intro or exit ... so it's a bit raw, but just fine for listening.
The topic was AI in digital signage, and you will hear from me, but much more usefully from Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, Jeffrey Weitzman of Navori and Jim Nista, who has a boutique creative agency out in LA.
We covered a lot of ground and tried to zero in, very much, on what AI means to digital signage and how it is already being applied.
Thanks to the folks at Sony for getting me the file!
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Chris Grosso, Intersection
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
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.
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Steve Bernard, Ocean Outdoor
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Wednesday May 24, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A lot of digital out of home media is marketed mainly on the basis of reach - essentially the scale of the aggregated network and the audience reach that's realized. It's more about math than science.
But the UK out of home media company Ocean Outdoor is very much interested in the science of advertising, and over the last decade, Ocean has commissioned a series of studies that measure brain activity and how people respond to the visuals of advertising and other mediums like social media.
While a lot of audience measurement is about counting people and characterizing behaviours, Ocean has commissioned five studies that take participants into a lab, put something like an electrode cap on their heads, and measure how they respond to campaign visuals.
The newest study, called Digital Out Of Home: The Vital Ingredient, looks at how digital out of home optimizes the use of social media. The research found that using socially amplified digital out of home, changes how brands are perceived, and the value of their role in the media landscape.
I got a rundown on the background and the findings of this research from Steve Bernard, the Head of Insight for Ocean.
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TRANSCRIPT
Steve, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't live in the UK and maybe aren't in the media business, can you explain what Ocean Outdoor does, its footprint, and that sort of thing?
Steve Bernard: Of course. So Ocean started its life about 15 years ago, and we exist in the UK out-of-home media industry. So what that means is that we are selling premium digital screens to a range of advertisers across the UK. As I said, the business started back in 2008 with just a handful of sites, but in the period between then and now, we've grown our portfolio sites significantly. We now have well over 600 locations in total, and that's largely digital out-of-home screens. So some of those are static digital screens that show static imagery on them. Some of them are moving images so we have the ability to display moving images to the public, and whilst many of those screens exist on what we call roadside locations, so typically to the side of roadways and also on pedestrian pavements, that kind of thing, sidewalks, we also have several screens within internal environments so shopping malls are one of our big sort of environments that we exist in and what marks Ocean out as different from its competitors is that it's very much focusing on selling to advertisers that premium network of digital out-of-home screens.
And indeed, the environments in which those Oceams screens are located, for example, those shopping malls I referred to a moment ago, are often the most premium environments that exist in the UK. So, for example, we have a contract with Westfield, which is one of the largest shopping mall brands globally, and they have a significant footprint in London. So we have the advertising space on the external side of Westfield's locations: two locations in London, one in Stratford and one in White City, and we also have screens in the Edwards and James Mall, which is a premium shopping mall in Edinburgh in St. James's quarter, and we also have a footprint at Canary Wharf Mall. So Canary Wharf, for those who don't know, is quite a key business environment within London which typically has financial businesses. So by having our advertising screens in a location like that, we know we're reaching a very high-end premium audience.
And very quickly we have just started putting screens in Battersea power station which is again, another new premium shopping environment in the heart of London. So what works us out differently is our premium in inventory, and it's very much about digital out-of-home screens.
We're talking primarily because your company has put out neuroscience research, and I'm guessing at least that one of the re reasons you're investing in that level of research is because you do have premium properties, and you're selling your advertising at a premium so there's probably a higher demand for proof of impact and proof of audience on all those things. Is that accurate?
Steve Bernard: Yes, very much so. We always need to identify different methods to measure the effectiveness of premium digital out-of-home. One of the things about the out-of-home universe, if I may call it that, is that it's fairly varied in terms of the formats, in terms of the size, in terms of whether they're digitized or whether they're static posters.
There's a variation in environments as well, and so we know that not all out-of-home sites are the same in terms of the kind of impact that they deliver, and because we specialize in the premium end of the out-of-home universe, yeah, we need a methodology, which not just marks us out as different from our competitors who use more conventional, if I can call it that, research methods, but also something that is going to truly measure the impact of that premium out-of-home space.
So with neuroscience research, what are you doing? I realize that you're not doing it and that you're commissioning a third-party company, Neuro-Insight to do that work, but what's involved?
Steve Bernard: So ultimately, what we're trying to elicit is how people are thinking and feeling about a stimulus that's presented in front of them and to move that into the out-of-home context, what we're fundamentally trying to show is that by running premium digital out-of-home prior to other media channels for any given brand or any given campaign, that primary effect, that first impact is going to have a profound outcome in terms of how the audience discerns those other media channels. And we call that the priming effect, and during the course of the neuroscience studies that Ocean has run over the last decade or so, it's always been about trying to elicit that priming effect of premium digital out-of-home on other oot-of-home formats, for example, which was the neuroscience one or on other media channels completely like television or mobile campaigns.
That's ultimately what we're trying to show is that by leading with premium digital foam, a brand is able to ensure that how people take away the message on the other channels that they've run is fundamentally different compared to if they weren't running that premium digital out-of-home beforehand.
So what happens? You're not taking people who are participating in the research out on the street or anything like that. This is in a lab or something, and you're putting a brain or a skull cap on of some kind?
Steve Bernard: Correct. These studies are largely done in laboratory settings and controlled settings. And yes, as you've described there, the participants are made to wear these kinds of headsets, which are able to measure the various cognitive functions that are coming to the fore, as I say, when that participant is exposed to a particular stimulus or stimuli, be that digital out-of-home advertising or a brand in digital out-of-home advertising or seeing a brand in another context entirely so a TV advert or other out-of-home campaigns or indeed social media campaigns, which will I'm sure I'll come on to in a moment.
So what did you learn? Did it validate assumptions, or has the research surprised you guys?
Steve Bernard: I think we've always had this view that the effect of premium digital out-of-home and not just, can I say pre premium digital out-of-home, but also iconic out-of-home. One of the sites we also have in the UK is Piccadilly Lights. So that's at London's Piccadilly Circus. It's like a mini version of. Times Square in New York, if you can imagine Times Square in New York, Piccadilly Circus is a sort of a version of that, and we've always had this sort of expectation and this view that those kinds of sites are clearly eliciting different emotional outcomes for brands advertising on those platforms versus other more conventional formats.
As I said earlier, it's a very varied sort of universe. But clearly, the way in which someone consumes a message displayed on Piccadilly Lights, for example, or any of these other premium digital out-of-home sites that I'm referring to is gonna be different from how they consume that message on a bus shelter poster, for example, or a more conventional roadside billboard. So we've always, as I said, had that expectation of difference.
So the research is validating. But I think in respect of the lace neuroscience study that we've just launched in the UK and in some of our other European territories, which Ocean is based, we're able to show actually quite an interesting relationship between digital out-of-home and social media and a relationship, which I think for advertisers has yet to be fully realized, and hopefully, with this study, we are drawing attention to the closer relationship that these two platforms have. Digital out-of-home on one hand, and social media on the other, and as a result, getting advertisers and their agencies to think more about how they plan these two media channels together.
Can you give me an example of how they, how the two mediums intertwine, and how digital out-of-home primes social media channels or social media interests?
Steve Bernard: Absolutely. So to set the context a bit on this, typically within the advertising industry, you can put different media channels. So traditional media channels like television or radio, newspapers, magazines, and out-of-home and newer media channels such as mobile advertising or social media, you can have those on a sort of access, and you can look at that access based on how strong those channels are delivering what's called performance. So highly measurable, highly targeted on one side, and the sort of more intangible effects, so branding effects, brand equity awareness, fame, consideration on the other end of that spectrum.
So you have performance on one side and branding on the other, and you would typically see social media at one end of that spectrum on the performance side, and digital out-of-home and out-of-home are widely on the branding side of that spectrum because the view has always been that they do very different jobs. One is highly measurable or highly targeted, and the other is about reaching huge numbers of people in a public space. So one to many versus one to one.
What we have noticed over the last two years, it's probably been going on for longer, but over the last couple of years, is more and more examples of famous people, if I could put it that way, celebrities, influencers on social media, et cetera, promoting out-of-home content on their social media channels. So you'll typically see examples of famous actors or pop stars or musicians generally Tweeting or Instagramming a picture of themselves on an out-of-home canvas. That could be a banner site, or it could be a digital out-of-home screen. but very much promoting themselves on that platform, and we would contend that they wouldn't necessarily do the same thing if they saw themselves on a magazine page, or even in a television advert because a television advert is overtly a marketing function. Whereas the interesting thing, the unique thing about the digital out-of-home and home more widely is that its public furniture, I guess you could say, it's a public message in a very public space, and so I think that's why there's this relationship between known public figures and communications in the public space and that's the out-of-home space.
So that was happening over the last couple of years, we really wanted to explore that more deeply. On the other end of that is that more and more advertisers themselves are promoting their content, their out-of-home content, I should say their brand from a digital screen, on their social channels and we've seen examples from Amazon and Meta and a range of other advertisers who are who are increasingly looking at these kind of really exciting executions that they can deliver on the digital out-of-home space, and rather than sharing on their social feed, on their Twitter or Instagram a conventional advertising message, they will utilize that out-of-home content within the social media space. So you'll get Amazon Prime Video, when they're advertising a certain program, they will have performed an execution on an iconic site or a premium digital out-of-home site, and then they will tweet or Instagram the out-of-home campaign on their social channel, and that's really interesting because that represents a significant step change for our industry.
It's not necessarily just about reaching all of these people who walk past our sites on the ground every week, every month, et cetera. But the opportunity for that advertising to be seen much more widely by people who have not encountered the advertising on the ground, and that leads to all kinds of interesting questions about what is the true reach of an out-of-home campaign and like I say, that's very unique to our industry, given its greater level of creativity that's at our disposal now, given the greater proliferation of high impact digital out-of-home sites, and given the proliferation of a greater level of technology, which enables us to bring these campaigns to life in new and exciting ways.
There's a lot going on there, and so wrapping all of that together, because of this idea, this concept of sharing the out-of-phone campaign on the social media channel, fundamentally, there is a strong relationship between the two. Again, this is something that we've wanted to explore for some time, and we felt that neuroscience, given that it elicits precisely how people think and feel about something that they're exposed to, versus another sort of research technique, like a survey or a focus group, we felt that neuroscience is the perfect way in which to measure the impact of this type of concept that I'm describing.
There's also this interesting phenomenon that's bubbled up in the past couple of years where you have brands commissioning motion graphic designers to create a digital out-of-home ad, usually some sort of anamorphic illusion of some kind on a building where there isn't actually a billboard, but they design it in such a way that it makes you think that there is a billboard there and those seem to get one hell of a lot of social media shares, even though they're not actually physically booking a digital out-of-home campaign.
Steve Bernard: Yeah, that's absolutely true, and again, it's this idea that as an industry in the out-of-home space, we have a unique opportunity to capture the imagination of the audiences that encounter the various creative executions that we deliver.
And it's no surprise when you look at how welcomed and trusted different media channels are, out-of-home quite often appears at the top of those kinds of lists when they're ranking different media channels, which as TV and radio and online, et cetera. Out-of-home does really well in terms of being more welcomed and more trusted versus other media channels.
And I think that's because we have, as I say, just a really strong opportunity to capture the imagination of people as they're going about their daily business in an unobtrusive way. It's also the idea that out-of-home generally is one of the most venerable media channels in existence. There were people putting up painted billboards and painted communication on buildings a long long time ago, and that venerability is everlasting. People will always want to see things in the public space, and seeing them in the public space gives an inherent notion of trust. In a way, we would argue that isn't necessarily the case with one-to-one communications and certainly not online communication, desktop ads, et cetera. We know that brands who are appearing in the public space are trusted because they're in the public space because it is seen as a public medium.
So yeah, we have a lot of opportunities to capture the imagination in welcome unobtrusive ways, and as I say, there's now an opportunity to take all of the benefits of using out-of-home in the physical space, moving those benefits into the online space.
Were the rationale and the budgetary argument for doing this kind of research different a decade ago than it would be now?
I assume that a decade ago, digital out-of-home media companies had to work a lot harder to sell the medium itself, there was still a degree of skepticism, and a lot of it was just being sold on gross audience impressions and not a hell of a lot else, versus today where there is all this level of sophistication.
Steve Bernard: I think that's an evolving story. Fundamentally, the medium is still traded very heavily on reach, how many people any given campaign reaches, the frequency of encounters, and ultimately the number of impacts or impressions that a campaign is delivered, and that's chiefly how it's valued really.
I think one of the great things about this study and any series of studies that Ocean has done with neuro insight over the last decade is that with each of these studies, we are communicating to the wider industry the value of neuroscience., which has a very unique value. Now the company we work with on these, Neuro-Insight, they're a global neuroscience business. Still, they started their life in Australia, and it's very interesting that in Australia because this is not the case in the UK, in Australia, they incorporate what they call a neuro impact factor into their audience currency. So how they value outflow medium in Australia factors in these types of techniques, so it's not just a case of looking at reach and frequency and impact over there, there is implicitly this role of neuroscience coming to the fore, and the data that you see for different out-of-home formats and environments over there, and this is something that here in the UK, we're yet to do with our own out-of-home audience currency, which is called root.
But the long-term ambition would be for this type of methodology, this kind of study to at some point be incorporated into the out currency because, as I say, the out-of-home currency is very robust in that there, there's an awful lot of heft that goes into its methodology and an awful lot of inputs, data inputs there. A variety of sources. As I said earlier, there is clearly a different role played by sites such as the Piccadilly Lights or premium digital formats generally versus more conventional out-of-home formats, which are traded really on reach. There's a fundamental difference in these different parts of the industry.
An advertiser would be able to buy a thousand bus shelter posters, for example, or 2000 billboards on the side of the roads, up and down in the UK, and the value of that is in the reach, in reaching literally millions of people in any given period of time. Where this kind of study differs and focuses on is the unique sort of relationship that a relatively small number but high-impact sites have with an audience, and these kind of sites, these unique sites enjoy strong reach. Still, really their difference with more conventional standard out-of-home performance is that there are relatively few of them. Therefore the impact, if I can use quotations of how it's making an audience think and feel is very unique compared to more conventional out-of-home formats, which are traded purely on reach.
They're not differentiated from each other at all. So a bus shelter is a bus shelter. The same in London as it is in Manchester or Birmingham or et cetera. This is very much about showing the value of these more unique sites, more premium unique sites.
Do you have to invest the time with media planners and with brands to explain this methodology and. what's coming out of it, or do they inherently understand it?
Steve Bernard: No. It's very much the former. We spend a lot of time explaining how we put these studies together. They're complex studies. There are lots of different elements within neuroscience here in the UK. It's growing. It's a developing research study. One we've pioneered at Ocean Outdoor within the out-of-home context, but we do have to spend a lot of time explaining the methodology, there is always a great deal of interest when we go out to present these agencies or out-of-home buying specialists, et cetera, or when we go to clients directly here in the UK because it's quite a unique method because it doesn't have, at this point, a more widespread adoption, I guess you'd say.
So that means its uniqueness means there is an awful lot of interest to hear what we have to say. But it is always an interesting experience, kind of communicating the different elements of the methodology of neuroscience. I mean with the social media study, the vital ingredient, as we've called it, is us looking at the priming role of digital out-of-home on social media channels. There are an awful lot of moving parts to this. All that always relies on that always requires a lot of expectation. Fundamentally what we're measuring, the outputs are cognitive functions, as I've mentioned earlier. These cognitive functions are a mixture of engagement and approach towards a brand, memory, emotion, attention, et cetera and it's these kinds of outputs that we show uplifts for when we're presenting results. But again, it requires constant explanation because these are not elements you could describe them as, which are talked about a lot in research. A lot of the time, when we're communicating, out-of-home research, it's very much in looking at the effect of a campaign on brand awareness, or brand consideration, that kind of thing, and those kinds of terms are much more widely understood on the part of the advertising industry. But these kinds of outputs, like I say, cognitive functions, attention approach, engagement, et cetera, require a lot more explanation.
Is it a differentiator? In other words, would you have a circumstance where a media company, not Ocean, but a competitor Decaux or whoever is seeing planners, and would they actually say, okay, where's your neuro research, or what does your neuro research say? And they would say, well, we don't have any.
Steve Bernard: So neuroscience study within the out-of-home context in the UK is still relatively rare. It's something, of course, as I've said, that Ocean has pioneered because it's particularly about measuring sites, which fundamentally it's harder for the out-of-home currency to measure. So the value of neuroscience to us at Ocean is that we need unique methods to measure the effectiveness of what we would call unique properties.
Our competitors would be less likely to involve themselves in this type of study purely because our competitors here in the UK have a much wider portfolio in terms of volume, right? So in some cases, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of different out-of-home formats because they're selling scale, reach.
Fundamentally, they're selling size, and they're selling the idea that reaching so many people in any given period of time has an inherent value, which, of course, it does. But as I say, neuroscience is a complex methodology. Still, one which is particularly useful when measuring unique properties and Ocean Outdoor of any outdoor media owner here in the UK has the unique properties, high impact, and famous premium locations, which makes this the perfect sort of methodology to use to measure their effectiveness.
You've done five of these studies over the pace of 10 years, is there a cadence to it? Are you doing one every two years, or are you done now?
Steve Bernard: That was a really interesting question. Each of the neuroscience studies has focused on the priming effects of digital out-of-home on another type of advertising format, from Neuroscience One, which looked at the priming role of premium digital out-of-home on wider outer home campaigns, and Neuroscience Two looked at the television, and we've over the years looked at things like mobile and the effects of priming digital at home on mobile.
I think it's hard to say, but there's been one every, as you say, every two or three years when the time is right. We felt that with this study which began its life last year, we felt that because social media channels were playing much a much more significant role within the advertising industry generally, and not just in the UK obviously but globally, we felt that there was a particular value in looking at the relationship between our own medium and these platforms. Where do we take this next? That's a really interesting question.
This study has already garnered a lot of interest here in the UK amongst agencies and clients. It's also something we have communicated to our other Ocean Outdoor locations. We have offices in Sweden and the Netherlands and across Scandinavia, and there's a lot of interest there. My colleagues and I have been presenting this study at events in Europe. So because of the level of interest that this is generating again, not just here but internationally, I think there will be a lot of ideas that come from this, focusing on areas that we want to explore further. Things that we weren't able to pick up necessarily in the study that we launched last year, but looking at more specific elements within them. So it's hard to say exactly where we'll take this next, but I think there will be a lot of ideas being discussed with us as we take this more widely
For people who have been listening to this and thinking this sounds interesting, I'd love to see the data or see the findings or whatever. Is that accessible, or is that something that you only share with your customers?
Steve Bernard: So it's something that we will always share with our customers first.
It allows us to have quite in-depth discussions with them about their media planning generally. So that's the first aim. We always ensure that the findings are displayed on the Ocean Outdoor website. So if you go on the Ocean Outdoor website now, you will see the findings from the previous four studies and they're readily accessible, and this study, of course, in due course, will be communicated on the website. It's something that we're sharing a lot on our social media channels, as you might imagine on LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera.
We're always happy to talk to people face to face or on an online forum about the study in more detail. In terms of the data itself, we've found some really interesting things in this study, as I said, these are two platforms, digital out-of-home, and social media, which, in the perception of advertising planners, exist on different sides of the advertising spectrum. But we've proved with this study that there is a significant priming effect of digital from digital at home on what advertisers are already doing on social media. For example, we've seen significant effects on dwell time. So that's the time people spend with an advertiser's brand post. That increased by 32% when the campaigns were primed by digital out-of-home.
Where we've seen a really really interesting finding is what happens when the digital out-of-home content itself becomes a social media post. So rather than an advertiser doing a conventional brand post, they can display the out-of-home campaign on their social channels. We saw, again, a 54% increase in dwell time. So again, that's time spent with that social communication cause of the primary effects of that socially amplified content we've seen increases in emotional intensity, and we've seen increases in a specific cognitive function called approach, which is ultimately or essentially people becoming more positive towards a brand when they see the campaign begin on digital out-of-home, then on social media.
So what we're really saying is that digital out-of-home is making campaigns online more approachable, making the brands more approachable. They're pressing the emotional buttons, which emotion is key in turning attention into long-term memory. We're enabling more time to be spent on social media communication. That's a key role of the priming effect and, most fundamentally, at this point. Finally, it is the fact that if you see the campaign, so let's say you've got an advertiser who uses out-of-home and puts that on their social channel, there is a tangible benefit from doing that for that brand versus if that brand was to just do a conventional brand post on Instagram or TikTok without the participant having seen the campaign in the physical location.
A lot of what I've described here is about the priming effect. But if you take away that priming effect if you just look at an audience who hasn't encountered the digital focus screen and you just compare how they felt about seeing it, seeing that phone campaign, on their social feed in sit versus if they just saw that brand, that same brand doing a standup brand post. There is a tangible benefit for that brand in terms of approach, a 21% increase in approach and a 3% increase in memory. That's really exciting because that suggests a much wider audience out there for campaigns that go viral, and that's the raw power we have as a medium, we can make social content more appealing to that audience.
We can do that for a brand. We're not just giving a brand the great benefits of the physical location, but we are also making a social media campaign for that brand more positive. I'm a part of the audience. It's really exciting, and lots of different layers to this study. So like I say, the results will be fully available for people on our website, but we would also welcome the opportunity to discuss it further at any given time.
All right. Thank you very much for spending all this time with me. That was terrific.
Steve Bernard: Thank you very much.
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Brett Crossley, FanConnect
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are a lot of screens at sports and entertainment venues, and when it's possible to buy a 4K TV the size of a bus for a few hundred bucks, team owners and venue operators are having to work harder than ever to compel people to get off their sofas and come to games.
Whether it is college football or pro basketball, there's a big emphasis on maximizing the game-day experience for ticket-buyers, while also optimizing the investment sponsors have made in being at the venue and part of everything going on.
A Charlotte, North Carolina company called FanConnect is very specifically in the business of providing and supporting a platform and services that drive the game-day show, and the information on most or all of the flat screens around a stadium or arena.
FanConnect does in-venue TV programming that enhances live game broadcast feeds with things like real-time stats and sponsor messaging, and it also does IPTV for the suites and loge areas, as well as digital signage around the concourses and at concessions.
That last component is something most or all venues want and need, but the digital signage capabilities also track back to the roots of the company. I had a chat with Brett Crossley, FanConnect's VP of Product.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brett, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what FanConnect does?
Brett Crossley: So what we do is we work with the corporate partnership teams in sports venues, so in college and professional sports and we work with the partnership marketing, the sponsorship team if you think about it that way to put something on the TV screens. I'm talking about our primary product, so our biggest product is FanConnect TV. We make other things, but that's probably the biggest thing we have. It's also our biggest footprint, and what that does is it makes a private TV network for use in the venue that plays on all of the TVs that are in the venue that would've been showing just the live game feed. This feed was being produced for probably the video board in most cases. We turn that into something that fans are gonna want to look at because it's good looking and that fully integrates what the sponsors and what the corporate partners need into that experience.
So that's the main product that we supply, and then I'd say that all the related products are similar, right? They're all designed to operate inside of a large sports venue, inside of a stadium or an arena, and they work with TVs or video technology of some kind inside of that venue.
Do you get any pushback at all from venues saying why wouldn't I just use the broadcast feed that's already coming in that I've already been using on the TVs?
Brett Crossley: No, I don't think we don't face that pushback, and the main reason is if you think about our primary customer is a corporate partnership team. On the college side, that would be somebody that's a Rights holder, like a Leader field, a Playfly, a JMI, typically that's who that is. On the professional side, it's a group that's titled something like Corporate Partnerships for the Chicago White Sox, and prior to us getting there, they either didn't have any way to include their corporate partners in the TVs or what they had just wasn't working for what they wanted to do.
And so yeah, I don't think we faced any pushback there from people saying why not just use the existing feed? I think the other part of it is too tough, in our opinion, when we are done, it looks a lot better and it provides a better fan experience than before we got there. And I know we're on a podcast so you can't see this, but if people go to our website or if they look us up on LinkedIn. we're FanConnect.TV so that's our domain name. But if they look at what we do, it's designed to mirror a lot of what you would see with a professionally produced broadcast. So imagine somebody's in a truck and they're using tools from Ross and Grass Valley, et cetera, and they're building something to make it look broadcast quality, we're doing something similar. We just do it in software and without having people do it in real-time.
I assume one of the drivers here for the corporate sponsor people is they're looking for as many ways as possible to give their corporate sponsors some love and avoid any minefields of a TV broadcast, if, let's say, I don't know, Chrysler is the sponsor at a stadium or a sponsor at the venue, they don't want a Ford ad on TV or a Toyota.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what they're trying to do is they want to create something that works for a partner, and I will say, because we probably lead the world in this and I know that sounds like blowing our own horn here, but as far as companies that are really invested in understanding how corporate partnerships work and the needs of the teams that work with them, I think we probably do more of that than anybody.
I'm not talking about just the pure technology people doing an L bar, creating something that kinda adds to the video. But the other part of what we do is education about the best use of that technology to actually do what it's supposed to do, and so oftentimes prior to us getting there, if they did have something like, think just like an L bar, going back to Cisco Stadium Vision days. If they had something, there wasn't a lot of thought put into it, and in most cases, the experience wasn't great. It really looked like what it was, which is you just shrunk the amount of video space available to show the game and you put an ad wrap around it, and you're showing kinda nothing but a wall of ads, and if you see what our product looks like, if you saw it in the NFL, you're gonna see passing statistics and rushing statistics, and we're gonna interleave in photos from the team's official Twitter feed when those are appropriate, and just pulling in a lot of stats and engaging content and then embedding that with the sponsor assets in a way that looks really natural and not like we just put a wall of ads up there.
I've certainly heard through the years of very large technology companies like Cisco buying their way into these sorts of venues, and in order to do that, you have to use their technology. Are we past that where the venues realize, yeah, that was great, we got that for free, or very little money, but it didn't actually work for us?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say that is still something that is evolving. So if you look at the landscape today, certainly you've got teams that have invested in one IPTV system or another, right? So Cisco was one of the first of those. There are plenty of other technologies that do that, and that's something that we make as full IPTV as well. But if you look at the people that do it, I think that in most cases they certainly would show in their marketing something that looks like an L bar and they're all going to say words on their website like make more money from sponsors. But in terms of actually doing that, it's an exercise left to the reader, and so you see teams that have had some of those newer technologies and have had them for years, and we know because we talk to everybody that we work with and people that we don't, you'll see people that have had it for multiple years that have not gotten that to where it does something close to what we do, not even just a basic version of it.
So the content's hard. I think you probably know that as well as anybody, right? In the digital signage industry, content's also hard. But it's especially hard on the side where we play because you have a lot of things that you have to do well to make it look like what we're trying to make it look like. We want the scoreboard embedded in the same way it would be on the broadcast TV feed. We want the live clock that's coming, it's the same thing that's tied to the scoreboard controller that's in the stadium. We want to be able to show out-of-town scores. We want to highlight when something significant has happened in those out-of-town scores that lead to changes. We want to show sort of detailed stats, like in major league baseball, hit and pitch data, and so tying all of those things together and making it work well is not something that's easy, and so I would say that currently the positioning by. Most of the vendors that make something like IPTV is yeah, you can just use our stuff and go build something to your liking. In reality, we certainly work in a number of places where the vendor that is there would much rather that experience be them than be something created by us.
I'm curious about how deep you have to stitch your way into the operations of the venue and of the sports franchise, whether it's football, baseball, hockey, or whatever the case, you have to work with the scoreboard systems, like the statistical analysis systems, the people are doing things like reading how fast that fastball came in and all that sort of stuff. Is that a lot easier to do now than it was even five years ago?
Brett Crossley: I would say that parts of it are easier, but there are new technologies that come out and then essentially new APIs that you're having to deal with on the regular. It was much harder for us when we first started. So we started doing this way back in like, 2010, and I can share this now because it's just been so long, and it doesn't matter, but we really bluffed our way into it, and at the beginning, it was like, yeah we want to make something work here, can you work with our scoreboard controller? Yeah, sure. What is that? What brand?
And it was difficult, right? I think that when you think about the vendors that are in sports venues, a lot of them do not want to play well with others, right? Think about the people that made the scoreboard controller, and the people that made the stats, and I feel like there's another barrier to entry there, which is that the professional sports side, all have pretty tightly codified APIs that distribute all of their data. But if you haven't already got a team that's your customer, you won't get access to that data, and so it's not if you came up with a product idea, you can just build it, and they will come. You have to have something in the door to be invited to use the data. I think for us, it certainly got easier over time because as we saw one of every type of scoreboard controller, we would just chalk that up and write it down. We're like, oh, okay, they've got Dactronics, they have an OES, or whatever the thing was, and then we would figure out how to work with it. You can imagine some APIs represent abstraction for that so that t no matter which one of the controllers we're working with or which stats API, we can kind of create something more unified and easier to manage.
Sports entertainment venues are turning into experiential venues in many ways. Are you now having to also work with almost like show control systems?
Brett Crossley: So that's interesting. We do, in some cases, work with control systems, but interestingly enough, more of that is done during a live sports game for example, if you think about working with the production crew, they might have a Ross tool that is designed to trigger things on the video board, on the ribbon boards, et cetera and we can make it to work on the TVs that we operate on are one more thing that can be tied into those control systems and so imagine, somebody's just hit the third home run of the game, and so they want to put a special message up, they can send that message, and it'll activate all of the things at once. It's kind of a TV takeover, video board, and ribbon board. So that's where we see that.
On the sort of mixed-use venue side, I think that the requirements in general on the TVs are a little, and when I talk about the TVs, the bulk of the TVs, I'm not breaking it down to the very specific ones that are doing a job that looks much more like digital signage, right? Like concessions, menu boards, and sort of those things. But if you think about it, the bulk of the TVs that would've had the game on in that venue during a concert is probably still showing the concert feed. They might be doing a simple wrap, and the wrap is just giving some day-of-event information instead. So it's a little bit simpler just because nobody has a big vested interest in doing something special for a one-off like a concert.
You mentioned digital signage. You also have that as part of your kind of product suite, right?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, sure. We originally were a digital signage company, so if you went way back when we started doing what we did originally in college sports and then eventually in professional sports as well, FanConnect was a wholly owned subsidiary of 10 Foot Wave, which was a digital signage company and was split off in 2018 as part of the acquisition of 10 Foot Wave by Spectrio and so our roots were in that space, to begin with anyway. It's natural that as we split off and just focus on sports venues we wanted to be able to handle all of the small screens, you can think about them that way that are inside of a stadium, and so that includes the TVs that are showing the game, TVs that do the equivalent digital signage which is just informational, et cetera, as well as the concession, menu board, those types of things, and then the other kind of interesting one is like what we do at Ohio State, which is we make a tablet that's used in the lodge area. And so it's purpose-built, it does, IPTV, so it does videos so you can watch them out of town game or whatever that you're interested in. But it also has a bunch of functionality used by the kind of premium seat holders at Ohio State. So if they need to call an attendant, if they're trying to figure out the pricing of the mixed drinks or whatever, they can look that up what to do and all of that, look at rosters and team data, et cetera, on that purpose-built tablet.
So there's one at every seat?
Brett Crossley: There's one at every table, is the way that it works. So if you think about a lodge area, it’s a hybrid, right? So it's assigned seats in grouped sections as opposed to just you're in these five seats, so you've got a shared table for every three people or something like that.
So there'd be a lot of client entertainment happening?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, there's a lot of entertainment, and then those people paid a lot of money for those seats wherever they are. I mean sports venues are expensive, and so just trying to create a premium offering for those people is something that a lot of teams are working on.
Is there a lot of pressure to do more and more from one company in a sports and entertainment venue?
I talk a lot about the importance of a company being known as the guys who do this kind of work, and I wonder if you were just going into sports and entertainment venues, purely doing the concession digital signage, are you pressured also to be doing IPTV in the suites and elsewhere on the concourses and all that sort of thing? Or are the venues pretty much okay with you doing this piece of it, we'll have these other five companies do these other things?
Brett Crossley: I think that really like every industry that matures, the buyers in this case, the technology side of the stadium, they would rather have a smaller number of vendors to deal with than a larger number, and so as a practical concern, I think you're right, which is the way we think about it, we need to be able to do all of the things you would want to be able to do on anything that looks like a TV inside of a venue. That's part of what we have to be able to offer because, again, you are correct that people would rather have a single vendor, a single interface, et cetera, to deal with.
One place where I think that does break down a little differently is the content side because that’s just so complex on its own, and so we certainly have people that are leveraging us for the experience on the screens and all of that, who already have another vendor in as the IPTV solution who may have somebody different for menu boards, et cetera. And the one thing that they truly can't get anywhere else would be something similar to what we do with the content that's created on TV.
So you might have an IPTV service of some kind, and they're quite good at video networking, but they don't know much about the presentation side of it?
Brett Crossley: To be fair, I'm not going to say that they can't make something that's pretty, I think that you'll see, and I think it's been true of digital signage forever, which people will show you really pretty screens and, use that, whatever's on that screen as a substitute for, here's what you're going to have to do to get that to work. And the example I always give is, you look up at a concession stand or a digital menu board, and you can't really tell what you're looking at, is it just a static image? Is it an image over just an animation background? Or is it truly being rendered dynamically tied back to a point of sale? It's hard to tell.
So I think that at least on the content side, it becomes something where you would rather have something that works than be given a toolkit, especially when it comes time to actually build anything that's as close to as complex as what we do. You could build it, but you'd be spending a long time. It took us a long time to build what we have, right? And so if you just sat somebody down and you gave them a pile of tools, building that is going to take a lot of effort, and you're gonna have to hire people to do it and it's not like you get to build it once, you have to continue maintaining it and working on it, changing it out and adding to it over time. I think it's just difficult.
What's the business arrangement that you would have with a typical venue? Where do you start and stop?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, so our contractual arrangement most of the time is with, like I said, the corporate partnership side, right? If you think about whoever is in charge of making money from corporate partners or sponsors, that's usually who our contractual arrangement is with, and then a side part of that and really it happens in every deal that we're in and every stadium that we're in prior to the deal being signed, they bring in technology and those guys grill us and ask us, how are you gonna work with our system, and how do you do this? And we pull up diagrams because we've seen a lot of that before. And we're like, yeah, this is what we would do to work with you guys.
Once that's all done, we are working closely with the technical team to just make sure that everything is still operational. But then our business arrangements are with the corporate partnership side and we are paid kind of the way you think about it, just like anybody else, right? We get paid for things we build and put on the screen, and we don't have weird arrangements, I don’t know if you remember those guys like Arena Media Network, et cetera. There were multiple companies that would try to do that. We'll give it to you for free and we will keep some percentage of the inventory. In some cases, it was more like, we'll give it to you for free, we'll pay you to take it, and we'll keep part of the inventory.
We don't do anything weird like that. We're more of a direct business relationship with whoever is the equivalent of the rights holder and then they are the ones that are bringing the corporate partners.
Yeah. The whole build it, and they will come to things where we're putting screens in the washrooms and everywhere else, hoping that they could sell media time around it, there's been a legacy of failure there.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, and you still see it, and not to pick on people, right? But the classic one for me was the urinal TV, where you mount these TVs, individual screens up, I like to think that what we do is the opposite of that. What we want to do is to make something that we're a corporate partner, and when they see it on the screen, they are like, wow, that looks great.
We're active on LinkedIn, and my favorite thing is when somebody that works for the sponsor takes a picture of the TV screen, and they are on it, and it's the game-winner. You've just won the big game, and then their stuff's up, and they take that picture, and they throw that out on their LinkedIn. They like what they see there and the company they're keeping. As I said, if you just look at our product, it really does look good. In addition to kinda all the things that make fans want to be on it and the technology side, and I'm not saying that we wouldn't build something to work in urinals if a team wanted us to build that, but we certainly wouldn't go out of our way to do it without somebody really asking for it.
Yeah. If somebody's in trouble, they become the field maintenance guy for that. Do you do the deployment, hardware sourcing, or anything, or are you strictly on the software and automation?
Brett Crossley: We work on the hardware side as much as we need to, or as little as we have to.
We're not in the business of making players. We're not like a Brightsign. We try to remain pretty hardware neutral. We have preferences, of course, I think anybody who's been in this industry does. But if you think about the FanConnect TV product itself, it's a hybrid cloud solution, right? So there is a server installed on the premises. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. The server is responsible for compositing, pulling everything together, and building out what is going to really be a show and that's how that's going to work.
The rest of the hardware for FanConnect TV would be the video distribution system, so we work with whatever is there. In many cases, we were replacing, let's say, you had your stadium, you had Channel 10.2 digital, or if you're using IPTV, it's an IP stream, and you've got kind of a symbol for it. We're often just replacing that. That's the first thing that we are doing at most places. Now there are places where we're doing more sophisticated things, where you can imagine, if you're in the suites at American Airline Center, every channel, no matter which channels you are tuned into, would still be wrapped in kind of an L bar wrap so that's an example of something that's different and does require a device behind every TV. But in most cases, pretty straightforward, we're tied into the existing distribution system, pushing that out, and as I said, we try to remain relatively hardware neutral. Our server is, of course, just one U rack-mounted server that's hardened and does what it's supposed to do. But we can work with various kinds of player technologies regarding digital signage, our IPTV solutions, the things we do in suites, et cetera.
Yeah, I would imagine you're seeing a lot of smart displays in suites now.
Brett Crossley: It's starting to happen. It's expensive to replace everything in a stadium, and you’d think replacing TVs would be something that would be something done more actively than it is. Still, right now, I think what are people wait until there's either a big renovation or they're just going to build another stadium, and so they're waiting on one of those two things to go in and do the big upgrade on the TVs. But yeah, smart TVs, things with a system-on-a-chip capability are certainly starting to move out there, and I’m starting to run into them. And venues would like you to use them if you can, right? They would rather just have a smaller number of things to break and manage. If you can avoid putting a box behind every TV, then that would be better.
Does it make any business difference to you guys in terms of whether you're working with Major League Baseball, which is gonna have 80+ home games a year, versus football that might have six or seven home games?
I just wonder about some of these massive venues that really don't get used very often. Are they more reticent to invest in technology?
Brett Crossley: I don't think that's the case. I think that what you'll find is, if you take an NFL stadium or a big college stadium, right? That would get you closer to your six or seven games. The fact that there are so few games means that the games that you have are extremely important and really in their minds, they want to make sure that nothing is going to go wrong. Whoever's in charge of the technology side, just wants to make sure that it's going to work. That's their number one concern.
The corporate partnership people, again they care the way that I put it, and this is true of really anything in sponsorship, not just us, but if you're a baseball team, if something goes wrong and you don't do the activation for that corporate partner that you were supposed to do, you have a lot of other games to make that up to them and comp them. If something goes wrong at a football game and you mess up what you've committed to a corporate partner, then you're in a different position because that game represented a significant percentage of what you were trying to do for them for the season.
I don't think we've ever faced any pushback because of the number of games. It's more on the technology side. They just want to make sure that it's rock solid, and we've been doing this long enough, we can point to that, and we can go, we've done so many games, we can't get an accurate count of them. We've tried, but it's thousands upon thousands of live games that we've produced at this point and so I think it's really a trust issue probably more than anything else.
Is it a challenge for something like an arena that may have an NHL team, an NBA team, a WNBA team, and they all have different sponsors, and they may change from night to night?
Brett Crossley: So we do support those. If you think about a complex example of that, it would be Capital One Arena in DC, where we were working with the Washington Wizards, The capitals and also Georgetown is in that same venue, and so you've got, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and then concerts, things like that, and the way that we operate the way we operate FanConnect TV is a little different from the rest of the digital signage. So today, we operate that as a managed service for them, and so they tell us what they are trying to do, what they want to do, and then we just help fulfill it and actually make it all work on the screens.
The needs for the different sponsors are really a byproduct of who is running corporate partnership at the venue and for the teams as far as if they need something different. So we do something similar at Acrisure Stadium, right? We work with the Pit Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers, and there are two totally different corporate partnership teams. In some cases, it is the same team, whatever way they want us to work, we will work with that.
Tell me about the company. You're privately held?
Brett Crossley: We are privately held. We're not VC-backed. We have investors, and then many of us that are there are also investors, and we were as close to profitable as we want to be, right? And so if we're not profitable at any particular time, it's because we are intentionally spending more money. It's not because we have not yet achieved some measure of success.
Has all the weirdness of the last three years affected your industry or your business at all? I mean obviously, when nobody was going to games, that was a bit of a challenge, but it’s back.
Brett Crossley: Absolutely. Looking back on it, it was very difficult. I think when Covid hit, a bunch of people we worked with just shrugged to put their hands up and it was not good. One thing that was nice about that was we'd been working on kind of a full ground-up replacement of our core technology, and we went ahead and did that, and now we've seen that through to where we finalized that, right? So it's the third generation of this technology.
And we had the luxury of being able just to take our time, building it from scratch, knowing everything that we'd learned over this time, and so in some ways, I'd say that maybe was a little bit of a blessing, although it didn't seem like it at the time, watching the P&L statements for that time. But yeah, I'd say it was crazy for everybody.
Yeah, I've heard that story a few times. It's interesting when they say we didn't plan on this, but suddenly we have time to tear up the platform and start over, or do v3.
Brett Crossley: That work had already been started, right? And technology moves forward, right? And then we'd been looking at a number of things that we wanted to be able to do better in a kind of fully integrated way, and so the timing was good. We'd already started working on that effort. It's a lot of work, right? Replatforming is a significant amount of work.
What it allowed us to do, though, was to take our time and get everything right. There was no rush to try to get something in because the season was getting ready to start. So I'd say we've found some benefit. The one side note, though is things are bigger than they were pre-Covid in terms of what we do in live sports, in terms of attendance, in terms of the interest that we're getting, in terms of the way people view what they want to do inside of a stadium. I'd say that things are better now than they were pre-Covid.
I live in Canada, and I don't live anywhere near Toronto, but the Blue Jays just had their opener, and they did a huge refresh of a lot of the technology in that building, and one of the drivers said they have to up the game day experience. That's what people expect if they're going to be spending $14 on a beer and $80 on a ticket, that sort of thing.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, that's right, and it's not wrong when people say that sports venues are not competing with other sports venues. They're competing with the big-screen TV that's in your house, right? So putting something in front of the fans that is very impressive is really important, and we fit in well with that. During the off-season, when I say off-season, I'm really thinking of kinda the fall sports off-season, because we are running some games throughout the entire year, but when we had a chance, we went back and did a redesign of sort of the core of FanConnect TV, and we worked with graphic designers that have done work with Fox Sports, FX1, et cetera, to come up with something that was really polished and professional and look broadcast quality, because, that's what people wanna see, right? Especially when we come in, and we're like, we've got something that's better for your TVs, and they're like, okay, prove that, and that's what we ended up with.
I think one thing that's neat about our design is unlike an ESPN or somebody like that who has to essentially be neutral, right? Our broadcast is definitely themed for the home team, right? If you saw this at the University of Georgia, it is nice, and it's red and black, and it is bulldog television, and if you saw the same thing at the Chicago White Sox, it definitely looks like the White Sox, right? It's not trying to be neutral.
All right, Brett, thank you very much for spending the time with me.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it.
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
John Hoyle, Sook
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
If an entrepreneur or an established brand wants to open a temporary pop-up store on a busy retail street, there's a lot of planning, work and cost involved in making that actually happen.
So what if there was a retail space in a high profile location that could be rented for as short a time window as an hour ... that uses LCD video walls and software to establish the look and feel of the shop?
That's the operating premise behind Sook, an interesting UK start-up that has digital-first spaces for rent in attractive locations around the UK, including London's retail-lined Oxford Street.
I visited that Oxford Street location when I was in London recently, and had a good chat with Sook founder and CEO John Hoyle.
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TRANSCRIPT
John Hoyle: So it's really easy to quickly create a clean and bespoke environment and so that means you can literally do whatever you want in these places. It's a space that is as much about non-retail uses as it is about retail. It could be somewhere to have a screening of a movie, it could be somewhere to do yoga, pilates, or meditation or it's a shop in the more traditional form.
The whole rationale behind this is that if you facilitate hourly access to units like this, which would otherwise be empty, you can actually drive three to five times more revenue than a traditional lease because you are making use of the time before, you know, standard rent is over a 10-year period, deeply inefficient because someone sits in a space and expects there to be effectively making all of their money on in the peak hours whenever those are, which is like a Saturday. Using this you can drive your own footfall, drive different peaks across 120 hours of the week and generate more revenue, as well as make it much more efficient for occupiers to come and engage with the space.
It's completely modular. You can take this entire fit-out away and move it elsewhere. It's all free-standing so there's a selection of furniture. You can see the hanging rails and shelving units here which makes it super easy for someone to come and self-serve if they want to. So using QR codes, you can learn exactly what you need to do, full WiFi, utilities, audio, et cetera, anyone can come quickly turn this into a space to use for whatever they want. These modules obviously can be disassembled and moved to another space. So we don't take leases. We are just a device that operates as an asset management tool within specific spaces. If a landlord wants to move us, they can, there's a small cost associated with that, but it's much more economically and environmentally sustainable to have this fit-out that can be reused in multiple other locations.
This one is slightly compromised because we're over two stories and the rear loading is in the basement. It actually works better on one level with a big back of the house. It's a bit like a theater set. All of the physical preparation happens out back so that you can efficiently roll into the space for your activation.
I'll show you downstairs. Everything that’s here, we can take away. There’s storage out back, but this has been everything from a rave for Jaegrmeister who launched a party, to the launch of a High Streets Reports by a big industry insider to a salsa dancing class. So it's all about using the same space for multiple different activations and doing it in a way that allows digital content to drive how you make that place appropriate.
That's why it's interesting to me that they have started to add digital screens to retail kind of after the fact and now we're in the situation where you have people who look like this, that are setting up pop-up retail with digital as the enabling part of it. So you can change the feel of a store, change the message, and everything else with a few keystrokes.
John Hoyle: Absolutely. If you think about where the brands of the future come from, they are gonna predominantly start online because the barriers to entry are much lower. But they need that IRL engagement to have an authentic touchpoint with their customers. But they don't wanna scale as the private equity-backed retailers in the past have by taking 120 leases and then marketing them. They want to dip in and dip out and have an online-type solution that's agile to determine where works best for their product and to make use of the fact that they can drive their own footfall through social media.
So if you think about it, I suppose a good example in the UK might be a, let's say Superdry, a challenger brand that's had to play the game of real estate to get where it is, to become AN established brand. We believe that we can facilitate that happening for the brands of the future without them having to need a real estate department to negotiate leases, to deal with the portfolio of assets. In fact, there will be this agile solution that they can use as they see fit, and what's interesting about that is that suddenly you are changing the role of a shop as a static distribution channel for stuff, and you're making it much more of a point of engagement for customers to actually meet IRL, the people that sit behind their brand and the products, and that can happen everywhere. There's no need now for perhaps the flagship in Central London or the concept store in Coven Garden because the various entries are lowered by this solution, you could take your product to secondary locations around the UK, do it for a weekend drives an enormous reaction because the people in, let's say Northeast England are not used to seeing something like that and then get out without any of the legacy, liabilities or commitments that you would normally get through these.
It's a service in just about every respect, right?
If I'm a fashion designer, which is a very novel concept, if I wanted to open up a pop-up store for the weekend, I wouldn't have to worry about the AV. I wouldn't have to worry about any of that stuff, I just do a deal to have the space for six hours or whatever it is and you guys can take it from there, right?
John Hoyle: You can dice it in whatever way you want. So you could be completely absent and we would run the entire piece for you, including fulfillment, staffing, and even the design of your space, and you can obviously have complete control because using Canva, which is an Australian Photoshop unicorn, you can drag and drop whatever you want onto the walls and you can walk around in 3D before you come here. So you can be in the US and control space in Oxford Street without having to be here. So that opens up enormous opportunities where at a fraction of the cost we can serve you.
But it's more about just that flexibility for occupiers. It's also making physical spaces available for all sorts of uses that are not necessarily traditional retailers. Social media is becoming increasingly important as part of the customer shopping experience. So working with those sorts of brands to engage IRL, onboard customers online, and complement what they're trying to do online is really powerful.
But equally, if you think about amenities. In the UK, retail banking branches are closing down in record numbers because they just don't make any sense with the rise of online banking. There is a real community value to those places for some people. Could we run a banking offer in the lunchtime slot, which is when people wanna go to the banks and not be there the rest of the time? Can you bring digital art into play? Gaming, estate agency, car showrooms? A whole spectrum of retail uses that basically haven't existed in the physical high street for all sorts of reasons previously to be used in a much more agile way in our spaces.
Is there a typical time window, like the amount of time when you are seeing bookings?
John Hoyle: It completely varies. We've had a guy take the space for an hour, turn it into a shrine to his girlfriend and propose to her. Equally, we were a Corona testing center in one of our spaces for I think 14-15 months, which is a sign of the times. We have three-month bookings. We have three-day bookings, and that's the point, different people wanna do different things at different times and that really is the core of what we do. No one needs a shop seven days a week, hardly, practically, no one needs a shop for a decade. Think about the time that you need to do activations. Let us manage the headache of all of that, learn from it from analytics, and then get out and do something different.
The old mantra in real estate about location. I suspect that still applies, right?
John Hoyle: It does, but it's a mindset rather than a reality. My belief is that footfall is a flawed metric, and that's what really underpins that location piece. The way we've done retail traditionally is that you found a location that suits you. Adjacencies are important, but you are really basing it off the demographic in the area, and then footfall, and that's a deeply inefficient model when you think about it. To make a 10-year bet on a place based on a data set that you see at that period in time, sit there for a decade, and only make money on maybe a Saturday or a Sunday. The rest of the time you have a loss-leading asset. You can't be agile and change if something about that location changes, and you're not learning anything about customers elsewhere.
So what we are saying is why not be far more granular, why not figure out which hours of the week your product works in? So Greg's, which is an incredibly successful restaurant brand essentially, it's famous for its sausage rolls, and they sold more Greggs sausage rolls last year than there were Big Macs in the UK, to put some scale on it. So their biggest selling unit is at Birmingham New Street Station and its peak time is from 10:30 on a Friday evening. It's people who've been drinking in pubs, buying sausage rolls, and are out on their way home. The other time they do a lot of business for essentially the building trades very early in the morning. So they are completely different profiles to an apparel brand, for instance. What we're saying is why don't you blend all of those different uses into more concentrated, more efficient spaces?
Is it nimble enough that you could do multiple occupants in a day?
John Hoyle: Yes, absolutely.
Have you done that?
John Hoyle: Yes. When you think about it, most shops don't open till 10:00, and most close at about six. Then you've got four, maybe five hours in the morning, which lend themselves to wellness, for instance, and then in the evening when shops sit dormant, this could be an event space, and that's pretty lucrative. In fact, in its own right. I think we could hang our entire business model on what shops would see after hours in certain locations to use this amazing digital tool, to be a private room for a restaurant or could it be a Deliveroo restaurant for instance, or could it just be a party, but rather than renting a bar and having a minimum bar spend of a few thousand pounds, you can have something bespoke, where there is amazing digital content of the person whose birthday is, for instance. Children's parties, and meetups, there are limitless ways of effectively monetizing space when in normal retail times, it's just closed.
Yeah, I've certainly heard of restaurants that are daytime cafes that have realized, okay, we have a kitchen and everything else, but we shut down at 3:00 PM, why don't we have a breakfast place in the evening? It's a Mexican place or whatever, and they're using the same kitchen, but you're sweating the asset more.
John Hoyle: Absolutely. The same principle applies here, just we've gone to extra lengths to make it more versatile. The food and beverage pieces are probably our most challenging use case because of the infrastructure that's required. You can't just have bare walls and exact screens, so that's our limit.
Although you can cater in these places, you just can't really prepare food through cooking. But yeah, given that there are fast approaching a hundred thousand empty shops in the UK alone, and that problem persists throughout developed markets, why aren't we making use of these assets better and doing it in a way that can be financially sustainable?
If you do it, what's really interesting is that there is a market for people who want to use these spaces at the right price point, and in the UK, if you have an empty shop it becomes a business rate liability, which is like property tax in the US. So an empty unit isn't just an empty unit, it's actually a liability for landlords. So what we're saying is let's bring them back into the community, let's make them accessible. Let's engage with customers in a completely different way, to the risk-free basis that has been the important use of the real estate asset furniture for so long and engages with a whole new spectrum of occupiers that just didn't exist 10 years ago.
If you have a hundred thousand empty shops, is it a risk to you with that many available spaces, the rental property becomes commoditized, the price comes down, and it becomes a challenge for you to be competitive with that?
John Hoyle: Not really, because our model is an arbitrage on whatever the rental levels are. Right now empty shops are a huge opportunity for us, and when you think about it from our customer's point of view, actually rent shop occupation costs are only about 30% of the total costs of having a shop. When you think about the cost of staffing an empty shop. To my point where if your shop is only really profitable on a Saturday, It is really painful having to staff it for the other six days of the week and a landlord will demand that you do. If you're in a shopping center, you have to be open. That is part of the deal, and you think about the inefficiencies around stock, people buy, and there are billions of pounds of stock sitting on shelves around the UK. It's absurd. Why not lend an online demand model with an IRL activation?
Yeah, create a public showroom and get fulfillment on the back end.
John Hoyle: Exactly, so we believe that we are creating the opportunity for massive efficiency across the board. It is hard to get brands to think differently. There is a huge amount of inertia around some of the big established brands who just have always done things a certain way.
It's the, “I want that unit. I want it for 10 years with a five-year break, If we get X amount of football and we price our stuff at Y, that will convert into profit.” There are lots of guys that cannot think beyond that and that's one of the challenges of being changemakers like we are is getting the 10% of early adopters to think differently about and do stuff, right?
So where did this come from, this idea?
John Hoyle: I launched it out of an accelerator called Zinc, which is all about delivering social ventures for profit. My background is in real estate. I'm a landlord, formerly at Grosvenor in Central London. So I was deeply frustrated having been on the other side of the fence about the inefficiencies and the huge numbers of occupiers who are excluded from shops.
The reason there are a hundred thousand empty shops is partly price points, but partly accessibility. All the ancillary costs around lawyers, agents, and these guys are all set up to do deals that have to be at least a year, but generally five and ideally ten. That struck me as such an enormous opportunity for disruption. That we've seen in the office space. We've seen it in the huge residential space. Huge global unicorn businesses have disrupted those sectors, but no one has done that in retail yet, and it's slightly more complex. There are the customers of your customers to think about. There's stock, there's a brand, and that's why a fit-out is necessary to facilitate all of that.
So if I'm an apparel designer who has just come out of some fashion school and I wanted to open my own, the commitment to do so would be many hundreds of thousands of pounds to do that, and through this model, I can open up on Oxford Street where we are for a day and have a popup and it's gonna cost well, what would that cost for a day?
John Hoyle: It depends. So it's demand-based pricing, so it's cheaper on a Monday than it is on a Saturday. If you can drive your own footfall, then you might as well take a low-value retail allowance. But you can on a good day get this space for probably just under a thousand pounds on Oxford Street, which yeah, no commitment, no utilities, no legacy issues. You come, do your thing, and when you work it works, you've got clear evidence of that that it is really useful as part of your entrepreneurial journey in terms of building momentum, it's great for content, et cetera, and the halo effect that we all recognize of our engagement is massive for your future on mindsets.
Are you funding this yourself or have you got financial backers?
John Hoyle: We have done four funding rounds. We are fundraising at the moment as well. This is our seed round where it's running for the next three months.
We're likely to have strategic partnerships with big asset managers who are invested and some retail groups. To date, it's been largely angels in the UK. There's a really vibrant ecosystem of angel investment in the UK because the government gives some great tax breaks called EIS.
I'm curious if when you approach people if they give you when the tilted head looks or they get it quickly?
John Hoyle: I think as with anything that's new, there is a bit of adoption. So we find that for our first booking, we insist that there is someone in our sales or customer service team present to help people because there's an element of anxiety. It's a bit like if you organize a party for your other half or family member and you're a bit nervous about the caterers and are people gonna turn up, et cetera, then the party starts and you relax. We see that a lot from our first-timers, but we're at 40% repeat customers, and so for subsequent uses, when you know where it all lies, you know what to expect, it's much less stressful for people.
It's just like your first day at the office when you don't know whether the photocopier works or what your password is, all of that becomes far less scary. So I think the answer is that onboarding involves more friction than we hope will ultimately be the case, and we are very much pushing the envelope of change. There is a bit of a learning curve, and then you see the penny drop and the opportunity. People's heads essentially explode with opportunities to do things that they could do because everyone's got an idea of how they might use a space like this more.
I'm a digital signage guy, so that's what makes me awfully curious about it. How fundamental were the digital screens to make this work?
John Hoyle: Absolutely fundamental. So there is a business that is failing at the moment that I was a customer of. They are effectively a booking system for empty shops, and they're pioneers in many ways because they've pushed the idea of flexible occupation, but they really are no different from a normal real estate agent, and the problem with just being a booking system is that you don't provide any of the services that are absolutely essential to launching a shop.
They're renting an empty cavity. You gotta figure out the rest?
John Hoyle: Yeah, and if you do that, they'll only rent for a minimum of a week. You turn up. You spend the first day setting up, and the next couple of days, no one comes in because it's Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe you have a launch event on Thursday. A few people pick it up a bit Friday or Saturday, and then it's over. You spent probably 15,000 pounds. You've had to buy all of this deeply unsustainable, both financially and environmentally stuff in order to facilitate the fit-out, and you've got nothing really to retain from a legacy perspective With ours, the digital screens are utterly fundamental because that's your fit-out. That's what gives you the environment. You can take that content, you can reuse it on your socials, and can reuse it in other Sook spaces. You can send your stock around. But we will provide essentially the entire platform to allow your Sook to take place without you, wherever else you want.
Could you do these locations without the screens?
John Hoyle: It would remove a USP of ours, and of course, there is sometimes demand, but what we are trying to do is a hundred percent occupancy, and a big part of that is out-of-home media. So when we're not actively booked, we can be a billboard for your screen, which is a super light touch. It can operate when shops are closed throughout the night and generate revenue.
It is a really powerful, utilitarian way of squeezing revenue out of latent assets, and obviously, an empty shop's just an empty shop, and you can't do any of that.
Do you have a handle on what you're using for the displays? The screens are obvious, but, are you using a particular piece of software or…?
John Hoyle: You have to ask the AV guys. We've been through several iterations and in classic startup style we've tried lots of tools, we keep the ones that work, we discard the ones that don't and we're constantly iterating and I would describe that device upstairs, like a massive iPhone. Obviously, it's way less sophisticated than the iPhone today. But the principle is the same. Physically, it iterates just your Apple device and then the software behind it upgrades, but without you needing to change the device. So that is the process that we're constantly evolving.
When did the first Sook open?
John Hoyle: I opened one in 2019 as the sort of first MVP in Cambridge, and then we won a few prizes straight off the bat because it had such success in Cambridge.
Why Cambridge?
John Hoyle: That's where I live. I wanted to prove that there was demand, which we did, and enough so that Legal in General, the insurance company, and pension fund, gave us our first proper site in a shopping center in Cambridge, which we opened in January, 2020, but of course, we all know what happened a month later. We were pretty quiet op operationally throughout all of 2020 and quite a lot of 2021 for obvious reasons. But we emerged from the pandemic with this site on Oxford street, one on South Molton Street, and one in Edinburgh. So it was clear that we had identified a need from landlords and we've expanded.
Is it important to be on high streets like this, like really well-known ones?
John Hoyle: Yes and no. So at this stage in our business, the startup, people don't know what it is to your point, people wanna understand it and they wanna be in great places, and we have to prove that investing is a success, and then we can generate revenue. So it is really helpful being on Oxford Street as opposed to somewhere unrecognizable.
But our goal is for it to function everywhere and for it to be a platform where Nike can reach a customer in a place that is utterly undesirable from a profile perspective, but where there are still obviously many customers and we believe actually the impact in those places could be bigger, and you asked me earlier about whether the erosion of the retail market could affect us. Well, one of the things that brands will pay us for is the opportunity cost of being able to do this, which is often in less desirable retail locations with a much higher ROI for us than on Oxford Street.
I'll give you a good example. MasterCard used our space in the Metro Center, which is in the northeast of England, it's probably one of the least affluent areas in the UK. We're in big shops, bigger shops and regional shopping centers there, and they're paying us London prices in Newcastle for the opportunity to have those spaces.
My dream is that there can be a Sook on every high street and it can address all of the community goals in the same way that maybe a town hall does, as well as being a state-of-the-art retail space for brands to dip in and out to engage with those customers and create a halo effect.
Because a fashion designer can be in Newcastle and, doesn't have to come here to launch?
John Hoyle: No, it's bigger than that. Why can't they be in New York or Dubai or Beijing? Stock light, you can use physical stock, but so much of it can be digital, purchases get made online, which through using QR codes, it's not necessarily about leaving with physical stuff, but if you are a global brand on a mission to scale, what a brilliant way of dipping your toe in the water.
And because there are so many empty sites, landlords love something that is gonna delight, that's going to be good for placemaking and community and that in some instances is more important than actually a business case for the space. It's a tool for asset managers to drive footfall into assets.
You see lots of distressed real estate where somebody's put in a gift shop or a calendar shop or whatever, and they don't have a lot of money and it just looks sad and it doesn't lift the street. It takes it down.
John Hoyle: Exactly. We wanna be the opposite of that. And I really believe that constant rotation of activity is the way to bring life back. Because you could have the coolest brand in the world in your unit, I always use the fashion apparel one, but maybe there's a better example of that, but if its peak hours are only on a Saturday, the rest of the week is to all intents and purposes in an empty shop. So it isn't adding anything to those high streets.
But running up the costs.
So how many Sooks do you have now?
John Hoyle: We've got 11. We want to double it next year, and part of that is reliant on fundraising.
We're also allowing some other systems to list on our site, and we have our first overseas site agreed upon in South Africa, Johannesburg. Got opportunities in the UAE, the US, Canada, and Europe. As you would not be surprised to hear, I'm just balancing the amazing demand we have for our product with a fundraising environment that's a bit tepid, thanks to all sorts of reasons, not least in the UK because of very recent economic turmoil, which is completely self-inflicted.
Where is the business out overall, given what you just said about the economy and Covid?
John Hoyle: We doubled our sales last year on year. I'm really happy about that.
But that would be in an anomaly year.
John Hoyle: No, I think we will potentially quadruple it this year, and even if we don't add any more sites, we should double it again. The demand from global brands is through the roof. TikTok, Quikr,. Sonos, Universal Music Group, Uber, MasterCard.
So they're finding you, even though you're a startup in most respect?
John Hoyle: They're finding us so that's incredibly encouraging.
My challenge is not having today, although I expect to rectify that in February, the capital really to run at so many of these opportunities. This is a brilliant time for a disruptor to emerge. The sector is on its knees, asset managers are desperate for a solution. We have a solution. It's proven. It can get better, it can get more exciting. The fit-out you saw upstairs can evolve dramatically, and in fact, there's a very exciting space that I'll point you towards up Oxford Street, which we hope to take over quite soon, that you should go and have a look at, which is really the next generation of what Sook could be even more immersive.
Could you have a larger, almost like the department store, level place with multiple shops, like there are lots of department stores that I've shops within shops now.
John Hoyle: Yes. So we've talked to two department stores about providing that service.
My personal view is that the department store model is inherently inefficient because you go to some amazing stores that I love in New York, like SHOWFIELDS which is the new age department store, and just like every other shop it has a peak and then a massive drop when no one's in there, and that just to me, as a utilitarian, who is very focused on the revenues that real estate assets can yield, just seems a bit mad.
So the answer is yes, we could work in a department store, but we'd be in that instance much more beneficial to the department store than to us in terms of driving feet at times when they don't necessarily have customers.
If people wanna find out more about your company, where do they find you?
John Hoyle: www.sook.space. Everything is on our website. We're at Sook Spaces on social media, across all channels. Follow me on LinkedIn. I'm John Hoyle, and yeah, tell the world about Sook because it is coming to a street near you.
All right. Thank you.
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Gerhard Pichler & Zuzana Yalcin, Easescreen
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The roots of Austria's Easescreen are as a AV systems integrator, but when the company looked around in the late 1990s for software to use for jobs that weren't yet being called digital signage, there weren't many options.
So Easescreen wrote its own software, and the company is now, by far, a software company first ... though it still offers hands-on solutions work in its home country Austria.
Now Easescreen is looking beyond central Europe and actively developing partnerships and business in North America.
I had a good chat with CEO Gerhard Pichler, and marketing manager Zuzana Yalcin, about the roots of Easescreen, how it differentiates itself from the many software options out there, and why they now have their sights set on this side of the Atlantic.
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TRANSCRIPT
Gerhard and Zuzana, thank you for joining me. Gerhard, can you give me a background on what Easescreen is all about and how long you've been?
Gerhard Pichler: Sure, Dave. Easescreen started in the late 90s, so actually, my first company, which still exists, is an AV integrator, so we come from quite a strong technical background, and in some of the projects, the customer requested solutions, which we now call digital signage. So we started, more or less, as the second role on the market as a manufacturer of software, as I told you, more than 20 years ago and now this year, we have rolled out more than 10,000 projects in nearly 100 countries. So it developed quite well, I would say.
Would you describe what you now do as being software-first? Or do you still operate as an integrator as well?
Gerhard Pichler: Software-first, but in our home country (Austria), we have two offices there, one in Graz, which is in the south of Austria, and the other in Vienna, the capital. So in this home market, we also do AV integration so we still keep our knowledge regarding network, transmissions, protocols, screens, and so on quite high. My team does this kind of job but definitely, the most important thing within the company is the digital signage of the Easescreen.
I assume having that capability and current knowledge of the hardware market and the installation challenges and all those things is probably quite helpful in giving you insights as to what the end users and the resellers need versus just guessing and talking to people about it?
Gerhard Pichler: That's for sure. Especially one thing is the contact with the other manufacturers. So for our businesses, we have very close contact with two manufacturers: LG, and Samsung, and on the other hand, we know how the integrators, which actually are our customers with who we do indirect business, how their mindset is, what their pains are because we experience the same. So that's quite helpful.
I'm guessing that you got into the software side of this business, back in ‘99 because there weren't a whole bunch of software options out there at that point, right?
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, you're right. There were some dinosaurs, like Scala or Omnivex in Europe but the options for the customers weren’t many compared to now. I would say in the 2000s and on, there were quite a lot of solutions coming up and disappearing again so it maybe was not very helpful for the signage industry because many of these solutions were not really professional, so the customer had a bad experience. They didn't touch signage for long, but I would say 10-15 years ago, it started again when customers trusted in professional solutions, and now the markets as you know as well, it's merging and there are a lot of solutions out there and there's some kind of consolidation going on.
Of all those different deployments that you have, do you have some large ones?
I think I saw that recently you did some sort of a deal where you have, I think, roughly 8,000 displays for a tobacco company in stores in Germany. Is that correct?
Zuzana Yalcin: Yes. That was Japan Tobacco International. They carry brands like Camel, Winston, et cetera. I believe they're the third largest tobacco company in the world.
Yeah, and what are you doing with them? Are there screens at the point of sale?
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, point of sale. So each point of sale has, I think, between one and three screens and behind each screen, there's an Easescreen license. So this is one of the larger projects.
I told you we have 10,000 out there and the project means networks the small network consists of 1-3 screens, and the larger ones like JTI for example, with at least 6,000 or 7,000 screens. The larger networks have more than thousands of screens in one network.
So do you have a reference case or two that when you meet a potential business partner or customer, they say, “give some ideas on the kinds of projects that you've done.”
Do you have one or two go-to's that you tend to mention?
Gerhard Pichler: We go through the channel, which means our strategy is just all the know-how we have about our solution and all the things around digital signage software, we transfer to our resellers. The resellers are 20% AV companies, 60% IT companies, and 20% agencies, I would say from the creative side.
Every one of these companies has to go through a training and certification process. For many projects, we don't really know where our license goes because they can stand on their own feet. That's one of our strategies is to be able to multiply without having hundreds of employees. Usually, the customer asks for signage. In the meantime, digital signage is some kind of expression that the customer already knows, and if the project has some specialties, like integration of databases, or something like that, which is not which cannot be configured out of the box with our solution, then we work together very closely with our resellers and with the end customers, and we help them to integrate all solutions in their not only network but the environment, but most of the projects, we are not involved in it as a manufacturer.
So you stay behind the scenes and you're not even really marketing that you did this, and let your partners shine?
Gerhard Pichler: We call our solution the Austrian Army knife. It’s like the Swiss, but the Austrian Army knife. It's a toolbox for our integrators that is very full of features, and functions that now after 23 years can be used out of the box for various vertical markets.
The most important for us is definitely the corporate market. So most projects are in this field. Companies use our software to inform the employees and the customers, on production lines, for example, real-time data showing to the teams there, digital door sign canteens. So these are the kind of projects we do. The project with the many licenses, I mentioned before, 1000-10,000 are more in retail because these are the projects with a lot of licenses, but besides corporate and retail, we identified ten verticals where our solution is widely known and used, for example, higher education, transportation, healthcare, for example, is very interesting because we are certified in Europe with some kind of protocol so we can show patient names. So they can use our software for calling the next patient on one side, but also for showing their offers that the hospital has or some advice they give, or for wayfinding, things like that. It's quiet interesting..
I often say to companies that are marketing CMS software that I encourage them to find a vertical market or a specialty of some kind that has a lot of opportunity associated with it versus being a general offer because if you're a general offer, you are mainly competing on price because the functionality is maybe different across different companies, but in general terms the same.
But it sounds like you're doing fine with being a general offer because you've got 20-plus years in the business and established resellers.
Zuzana Yalcin: Yeah, so that's where our sales channel comes in because our integrators have specialties, so they are the experts on different vertical markets. They know how to customize our software to the end customers' needs. So it's also an example of where you empower the integrator, you empower the reseller, and then they're able to do amazing things.
Is the software white labeled?
Gerhard Pichler: There are some examples, yes.
So if a business partner, a reseller wants to say this is Brand X’s software, you guys are behind the scenes entirely, but driving it?
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, we are prepared for this so we can easily white-label it for partners. Usually, this discussion comes up with large integrators. They say, okay, I want to hide the name and I want to add my own branding to the solution. But when we talk to them, it often turns to the opposite. They say, okay, it's better that we have a very close relationship with you, and we can start with all the references we bring to the table.
Still, there are some examples where Easescreen is hidden behind the different names.
We met on the floor at a Digital Signage Experience in November and you agreed to do a podcast, and one of the things that intrigued me was that you're an Austrian company, but you are in the United States looking to expand into North America and build up partnerships here. I gather that's been something that's been an ongoing effort for the last couple of years.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's true. So from time to time, we do get some projects in the US. For me, the US is definitely the Mecca of digital signage. There are a lot of really professional companies there, which could be great partners for us. There are so many opportunities. The market is that huge. So for me, it's a challenge to start a business there, and I wished to do this many years before, and we decided I think two years ago to install some guy there to do market research, to find ways how we can sell it, through which channels, and so on. He is a very experienced guy out of the AV business and after we see that there are enough opportunities, there are chances for us with our solution.
The market in the US does not really have a lot of software that is comparable to ours. So then we decided, okay, we go to the next step. The next step was founding a company called Easescreen America LLC in Miami, which we did this year, I think it was in June. Because we have had success in the US for a long time, it's definitely important and necessary to have a company there, and I think 2023 should be our year. The pipeline is quite full now with projects.
So some of our guys were doing the DSE in Vegas, they were on the East coast visiting future partners or partners, which already signed contracts with us, and they brought I think five or six projects to Austria. So I think the start is quite successful up to now.
If you're an AV integrator or an IT systems integrator, whatever it may be, there are a lot of options in North America. There are a lot of companies selling software solutions and it wouldn't be that you'd get a meeting where they’d go, “oh finally, somebody's got software that can do this.” Why are they choosing to partner with you when there are other options out there? What's ticking their boxes?
Gerhard Pichler: One thing that we experienced is that we tell them and they seem to trust us. We only go through integrators. So many examples in the past, the integrators told us that manufacturer, they promised us they promised not to make shortcuts directly to the end customer, but they didn't do it. The integrators, they're waiting for, I think manufacturers who they can trust.
Other thingsinclude things like we have so many options in the setup, we can be installed on-premises, for example, which many other solutions are not able to be because they're only cloud-based. We have a cloud infra as well if the customer wants to use it, they can use a private cloud, and so there are many options for the integrators and multipliers, it seems for them very interesting, and besides that, we have technical feature wise I think so many things on board out of the box which nearly no other solution can bring to the table, and these are some of the reasons why they change because many of them when you talk to them, they would tell us about the bad experiences with other solutions. With us, it's always good if some company is experienced and tells us the pain and we can show him how our solution would do it, then you can win them very fast.
So it's interesting and very good for us if companies give us the chance to talk to them, they have already had experiences with solutions, then these companies are the best us and for them, we can be quite fast.
In terms of partners, do you have a kind of partner, like a profile that you would prefer to work with?
Gerhard Pichler: It seems the larger projects are done by IT companies. So in the US, they're large IT companies, they do the job for digital signage for companies, and so on. So the profile seems more to be IT-focused companies than AV. But we have experienced in the last months, the really interesting projects, they come up more from bigger IT companies.
So one way to the market was through reps, so they introduced us to the integrators there. So we cover now I think nearly 45 states, reps like Simco or BP Marketing, and these guys, who have a large network of AV and IT integrators behind them. For Easescreen, this is the way we can reach the integration network quite fast.
Is it a challenge on the educational side?
One of the things I've heard over the years is if you're going to have a reseller channel, you have to invest a lot of time in ensuring that the people who are talking about your product and solutions, fully understand what it is, and if they're an IT systems integrator, they're thinking about all kinds of things, including network security and bandwidth and so on.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, of course, it's a challenge, but since we have been so long on the market, there are so many slides and training programs exactly prepared for these kinds of topics. We can talk about the language they talk. So you have to talk to IT companies differently of course than to agencies, and in the end, in the US market, we have to learn our marketing lessons because the first step to the customer more than here is by a colorful brochure and things like this, which is quite old fashioned, but it's definitely necessary.
And here, I would say, comes in Zuzana again. So what has been your experience on the marketing side, comparing the North American market to Europe, and what homework we had to do?
Zuzana Yalcin: So definitely from a marketing perspective, it’s way more abot storytelling. Of course, at some point it's about the USP, it's about the features, it's about all the amazing things you can do. But the first story is always: who are you? Where do you come from, and how do you actually serve the people all around the world?
So for me, this has been a big lesson in trying to focus on the human side of software because in the end, our partners are human, the end customer is human. The user is human, so how can I translate that story in a way that makes sense to everybody from a professional integrator all the way to an amateur user? And I say that without any negative connotation, but just so they know what digital signage is, what the screen is, and what it can do for them.
This is something I'm noticing actually in Austria as well, most people see digital signage every single day, multiple times, if not countless times, but they have no idea what it is. They cannot label it, and if you talk to them about digital signage, they think it's maybe digital signatures or something like that, so just raising awareness in general is a pretty exciting thing for me.
Yeah, I was gonna ask about the evolution of all this. Given that you've been involved in it for as long as I have that, what have you seen changing through the years? Obviously, something's never changed. There's still a limited understanding of what it is, but I suspec I find in my own life that I don't have to go on and on at length to explain what it is I do and what I'm involved in. They get it pretty quickly versus it was, a five-minute conversation back in 2005.
Zuzana Yalcin: I think software is definitely becoming more accessible to the end customer in general, and it also changes customer expectations because they expect to be empowered more. They expect to be involved more. But I think, 10-20 years ago, you could be a genius technician with amazing software and rely on people coming in. Now you definitely have to tell the story if you definitely have to go out there and share the message.
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, but you are right, Dave.
Of course, the awareness now is different than 20 years before. In shows like ISC or Infocomm and so on, we've been part of ISE, I think 15-17 times. In the first years, you had to explain even to the people in the industry, what is digital signage and so on, and that changed completely. Now, people quickly understand what it is. I would say that changed.
The trust in signage is there. That means customers who want info screens and systems for showing content, know that if they make the right choice they can buy systems that are stable and reliable. That is different than it was 5-10 years ago. I think what didn't change is that the end customers are not aware of which kinda tasks they have when there is a digital signage solution. When we are involved in projects, we try always tell the customer, I hope it's clear to you that there will be a technical, very perfect system for you, but in the end, you have to think about who do you want to reach? What are the contents? How is the way that content coming to the screen? Who is responsible? So in many projects, this didn't change. The customer is not aware that he has to give resources, that the digital signage system is successful and lives and is active, I would say. So that slightly changes, but it's the same story as many years before I would. But we help them in creating concepts, for example.
How is the company set up? Are you privately held or do you have a private equity backer?
Gerhard Pichler: Oh, private, a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the code is made in-house and we are privately held.
What's your headcount?
Gerhard Pichler: 25.
Has that grown much through the years? Obviously, it started with one, but...
Gerhard Pichler: Yes. I would say by one or two per year, so we are growing but not that fast
There's a lot of companies that are your size like you have larger companies, particularly private equity backed ones, actively looking at as potential acquisitions, I suspect you're getting those emails and phone calls pretty regularly?
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's right. But we didn't decide on one until now.
You're staying on your own path.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, up to now. Our mission is not completed yet.
So if people wanna know more about your company, where can they find you? Obviously, you're going to be at ISE in a couple of months, but online they would find you find you at…
Zuzana Yalcin: www.easescreen.us, and of course we are on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Simply type in an Easescreen and you will find us.
Simply put, I like it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Gerhard Pichler: Thank you very much, Dave.
Zuzana Yalcin: Thank you. The pleasure is all ours.
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Giles Corbett, Cloudshelf
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A UK start-up called Cloudshelf has come up with an accessible, heavily-automated and simple platform that helps small, mainly local retailers offer the same kinds of interactive display tools in their stores as deeper-pocketed and more heavily resourced major retailers.
The company has written code that crawls and analyzes local retail sites on Shopify's vast e-commerce platform and produces interactive experiences that are a lot more than just the online site on a screen in the store - something we've all seen and rolled our eyes at. In this case, it is curated and stylized to look and work like an in-store interactive site produced by a digital agency - probably for a lot of money.
I spoke with founder Giles Corbett about the origins of his company, how the platform works and is sold, and why the nightmare scenario of retail lockdowns and restrictions through the pandemic actually created something of a perfect storm for Cloudshelf.
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TRANSCRIPT
Giles, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what Cloudshelf is all about?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, sure, Dave, with pleasure. First of all, I gotta say it's fantastic to be on the podcast. So Cloudshelf is a really simple idea. We call it in-store eCommerce. Now I bet you and the people listening to this podcast, you've all been into a store at some point, and you've gone in looking for a bike or a pair of jeans or some jewelry and you haven't found what you were looking for and you left the store disappointed. It turns out this issue of walkouts costs physical stores a trillion dollars a year. So it's a big issue, and that's just the immediate loss of sales, without even talking about all of the dissatisfaction, et cetera that it causes later on.
Now, being such a big issue, it turns out that some of the most successful retailers worldwide have built solutions to go and bring digital experiences in-store that can alleviate this issue. But what Cloudshelf does is it takes this idea and just using an AI-driven platform immediately makes it available to even smaller or independent retailers that don't have the unlimited means or the technical knowledge of some of these super retailers and these retailers can very simply set up Cloudshelf in a matter of minutes and get fantastic digital in-store experiences, either interactive experiences or display experiences that help them sell more and close more sales in the store. That's what it's about.
So how this would manifest itself in a store, a physical store, would it be some sort of a touch screen kiosk screen, whether it's on a counter or free-standing, or perhaps mounted on a wall?
Giles Corbett: Dave, all of those. It's always using some form of digital display, and Cloudshelf can operate either on interactive touch screens that you're describing, or it can even be on display-only screens. I'll talk about those maybe a bit later on. But indeed, typically retailers will have a kiosk that could, maybe imagine a fashion store with a small jewelry range and on the jewelry counter, you go and see a beautiful screen that's showing off in a stunning way all of the available jewelry, and you go and see the small range on display and you maybe you can't find exactly what you're looking for and the screen next to it will say, discover the rest of our jewelry range. You touch it, you can find what you're looking for, and even buy it directly off the screen.
Now this is different though and I wrote about this recently, how I walked around the National Retail Federation Show and saw some eCommerce companies at that time. This is going back 3- 5 years, basically pushing their websites and their online presence to an in-store screen, but not changing anything. It was just The eCom site on a computer terminal, basically in the store, and from my perspective, that wasn't enough.
I'm very old and I go back to the starting days of the internet and online news sites were filled with what was called shovelware, basically shoveling content from another medium onto a smaller screen and saying, we're done, and it looked like that. You're saying this is different, right?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, putting your website on a screen in the store is a really bad idea. You wouldn't expect to go and find your website just running as it is on a desktop, or on a mobile phone.
Similarly, as a customer, you do not want to go and see the website running on a screen when you go into a store. If I go into a store and the retailer says, oh, I'm sorry, I can't help you. It's on the website. Please take a look at it. I'm thinking, hang on, why did I even bother walking into the store in the first place? Now the whole point is to go and create digital experiences that complement the magic, the delight of being in a store. You go into a store because you think that the person who's there is actually going to advise you on the best shirt that looks the best on you, or the bike that's the best for the kind of road that you want to go on, or whatever it may be. You want that level of advice, of contact, of engagement, and therefore you want a digital experience that complements that, and that's what Cloudshelf does.
If you just put the website there, it fails miserably. Look, I will give you a really obvious example. Go into a clothes store and you have jeans, you have shirts, you have ties, you have suits, etc. If you've gone in wanting to buy jeans, you've gone up to the jeans area and you've had a look, you expect the screen next to that area to go and show you about jeans, not to go and show you that if you happen to be on the third floor of the store, you could also go and get swimwear or whatever it may be. So it's the idea of having this effectively interactive visual merchandising next to the product, and you want something that enhances that in-store experience, and that's what this is doing, and then there are a whole bunch of other reasons why it's different to the website. For instance, it knows a device it's on so that when you go and buy something, it knows which store it came from. It makes sure that you don't have to enter any personal information onto the device itself. If I was to go on the website and I wanted to buy something in the store, I need to go and type my credit card number into that tablet or that website, that would be crazy. So it does away with all of that, and it does a whole bunch of other things too.
So the premise here is that you can take an already built and managed and populated eCommerce website from a cloud platform and largely automate and push a version of it, a curated version of it, to smaller screens without having to hire an interactive agency and have a 6-12 month project on a possibly a six figure budget to put it all together, right? You can do this pretty inexpensively and easily?
Giles Corbett: That is a perfect summary. So indeed, we start with the existing eCommerce website. Why? Because for most retailers, that has now become the biggest repository they have of visual assets, product descriptions, et cetera. So that's what we use as a starting point, and just imagine if you're a retailer, you've invested a lot in your online website. It's fantastic if you can just reuse that automatically to go and create all of these in-store displays, so you're spot on.
If you happen to be, for instance, a Shopify retailer, you simply add the Cloudshelf app. It analyzes all of the products that you have, and it says, what kind of a display do you want to create? “I wanna create one for trousers or jeans, menswear, whatever…” You want to say what it is, it will then go and propose all of the products to go and put into it, and it will go and create that. You then say which screen you want it to go on, and it displays that on the screen. It updates whenever you update the website. It chooses all of the best-looking images so that you don't need to go and go through and select them all independently. It does the whole thing in under five minutes from beginning to end.
So you would have templates, I would assume that would be the wireframes to do this in different ways?
Giles Corbett: Yeah, absolutely. You could choose a number of parameters around how you want to go and lay it out, but you don't have to. You can just click ‘Create a Cloudshelf’ and it's there within seconds and then you wanna go and tune it, sure, you can tune it.
Do you find if people are doing the kind of click-and-forget thing where it's just gonna create something that they're fine with that? Or do they want to tweak it?
Giles Corbett: They definitely want to go and tweak elements that are key to their visual branding, so brand colors, logos, fonts, and things like that, and most of them will do that.
But then what is amazing is they can just about forget about it because after that, whenever they do an update to their website, it is carried through and it's there and it's intelligently displayed. They go and put on promotional sales and it is carried through to their Cloudshelf automatically. So once they've spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing those initial branding choices, then the whole thing just runs.
And that's because you're working at an API level with the eCommerce platform?
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. So a big part of what Cloudshelf does is an incredibly powerful backend sync engine that just manages the analysis, and synchronization, checking all of the retailers that are live on the platform.
And you've integrated first by the sounds of it, with Shopify, and Shopify gives you a vast audience, correct?
Giles Corbett: Shopify gives us pretty fantastic API access. It gives us a vast audience and it gives us a growing audience. So what we see in all of the countries in which we started operating is that more and more of the retailers who maybe were using another solution are moving over to Shopify, and one of the things they love about Shopify is the ecosystem of apps that enable them to go and find exactly the solution they were looking for to address their issues. So for us, Shopify has been a great place to start and learn.
It seems to me Shopify was noodling this, going back four or five years ago at NRF and some other eCommerce companies as well, why wouldn't they do their own as opposed to partnering with you?
Giles Corbett: You know what? I think you are right that Shopify is going to be looking more and more at this. In their recent declarations, they were really promoting in-store being the next growth vector for them suggesting that this is an area that they will be looking at. And you know what, when they do, I think they'll come up with something that'll no doubt be absolutely fine.
But if you want to have the very best solution, it's gonna be Cloudshelf because we are the team that's just dedicated to this area of work and development.
Yeah I've been involved in digital signage for more than 20 years now, and I've seen all kinds of very large, well-funded, deeply experienced companies get into digital signage, but, only kind of sorta, and it's a skunkworks operation. I'm thinking about past iterations of Cisco and Google and companies like that, and they're just not fully engaged and therefore the products are never all that robust. It's just like, “There, we did it!”
Giles Corbett: Yeah, I think there's a bit of that, and let's go back to what Shopify is doing. They're clearly promoting and investing in their POS and making it better and better. They are going to spend time on this but we are at a slightly different segment where this intersection of digital signage, which is about beautiful displays, and eCommerce, which is all about driving transactions and this space that we've created for in-store eCommerce is all about the union of those two worlds.
Yeah, I would imagine you had to spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience, how it looks to people walking up to it, how they're gonna navigate it, and so on because it's not the same as sitting at a desktop or monkeying around on your tablet to shop.
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. To begin with, it's a public screen, so the kind of information that you'd expect your phone to know or that you'd be willing to type into your phone, you do not want to be entering onto a public screen, so you need to have all of the handoff, the seamless handoff between what happens on the public screen and then what you complete to finalize the transaction on your private phone, and that is a completely novel experience.
When you're working with a big eCommerce platform like Shopify, were you just working basically tapping into their API and developing something, or were there sit-down meetings with Shopify folks saying, “Here's what we wanna do, here's what we need from you” and they were, in turn, asking you how we manage security and all those things?
Giles Corbett: It's a very interesting question, Dave. When we first spent some months actually prototyping all of this solution as a private app, something that was still allowed on Shopify in the early days, we were trying all of this stuff out and iterating like crazy with retailers. And then at one point we went to Shopify and said, listen, this is our idea, this is what we wanna do, this is what we want to launch, and they were scratching their head saying, “Hang on, we don't really understand. Is this POS or is it eCommerce? Where does it sit?”
We said no. This is new. This is different. This is taking somebody's website and making it so that it renders and uses beautifully in their store, and so at first, there was some confusion on their side about where does this fit? And then the more we engaged, the more enthusiastic they became, and they've been fantastically helpful at giving us feedback and advice on a bunch of things.
Do you have the back end sorted out as well? One of the things that I said to some of the companies when I was walking around NRF and they were showing this core idea was, what about device management? How do you know if the screen's active and working properly and so on, and they looked at me like I had three heads, it just had not occurred to them.
Giles Corbett: Dave, in a past life, I was running from West London, a network of 15,000 connected devices in, I think it was 350 cities in China and so yeah, we learned everything we needed to learn about monitoring devices.
You have been through the wars.
Giles Corbett: Big time. Anyway, what I'd say is that if you go and look at the Cloudshelf code base, the bit that we call the engine, the bit that displays on the screens is probably well under 20% of the code base. The backend and all of the management tools are where all of the cleverness is.
Yeah, that's an interesting comment because I've said so many times to people that getting media to play out on a screen is a technical challenge, but it's minor compared to all the work needed to keep the stuff playing on the screen reliably and manage it.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, indeed. Retailers are using Cloudshelf because they want to enhance the in-store experience. You do not enhance the in-store experience by having a blue screen.
Yeah, definitely. So where did this idea come from? I was looking at your LinkedIn background and your previous company was Ksubaka and it seemed to be about interactive in retail as well.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, so my background has always been around stuff that drives or is driven by end-user engagement. So it started off with mobile games, and then from mobile games, we thought about how we can use games to go and drive engagements in stores next to products, and would that be the beginning of a fantastic media platform.
And that's what Ksubaka was all about, and we developed that extensively in China, and then that sort of stayed in China, and we'd started developing extensions from what we are doing Ksubaka in the UK and in France, and we were supporting big retailers such as Tesco, Marks & Spencers, Next, and some others. And then the pandemic hit and Every single one of our retail clients closed down in literally a two or three week period, and that gave us an opportunity to think, reflect, go work on some of the back projects that we hadn't had time to work on, and while that was happening, there were two things that happened that I found absolutely fascinating.
First, we just became more and more aware of all of the small independent retailers around us who had closed their stores putting big signs in the window saying, “Come onto our website…” and they were all, every single one of them moving onto Shopify. So we started looking into Shopify a lot more and discovered that maybe there was something there. But you know what, the second thing that was really interesting is that all the way leading up to the pandemic, there'd been this kind of belief that all retail inexorably moving online. That basically, once a consumer had bought something online, that was it. They weren't going back into a store.
Now in the UK, we are blessed with a lot of very impressive real-time statistics by organizations such as The ONS and they track all of the online and offline sales for the last five years, they've been showing quarter after quarter increase in the share of online, and by the time we hit the pandemic, online in the UK was way above what it was in the US. It was like 24% to 25% of all consumer spending was taking place online. We hit the pandemic and that number goes through the roof, 38%. McKinsey publishes its sort of big report about how basically online has just stepped forward 10 years in two months, and that's it. It's a point of no return, and then the first lockdown ended and it was really puzzling. We saw all of the stores around us fill up, and we started looking at the statistics and the share of online fell back to what it was just before that first lockdown. Now we had lockdown two and lockdown three, and each time the same thing happened: online shot up, but by the end of lockdown, online collapsed back to the level it was at before.
All of these consumers had found out how to go and buy their jeans or their milk or whatever it was online, but yet when the stores reopened, not for all of those purchases, but for many of them, they decided to go back into the store. Now, that told us for the first time that there was absolute proof that something we'd always believed was true, and that in the future, retail was going to be something that would be completely hybrid. It was gonna be, yes, a lot of it online, but also a lot of it in-store, and the stores that would survive were gonna be those that would've invested cleverly, smartly in the digital experience to make sure that the in-store experience was outstanding and that became our customer base, and they were the people that we started targeting. So all of those things happened, and then a third thing happened. The third of my two things.
And that was the emergence of hybrid working. So initially full remote, then hybrid, and the bet that we took there was never gonna go away, that we would all spend more time working from home or elsewhere, but basically not from the city center than we had done before the pandemic, and that meant that there would need to be a shift in the fabric of retail and the structure of high streets around where people lived and that as there were many more places where people lived than their worst city centers, stores, brands, retail units would have to be smaller, and if they were gonna be smaller, then they'd need more digital to be able to offer the same range of services. And therefore our bet is that we are absolutely in line with all of those trends happening simultaneously. People are moving to Shopify, independent retailers, or retailers in general, learning how to go and digitize, and consumers wanting to go and shop more locally, and that's why we think this opportunity of in-store eCommerce is so exciting.
Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of chatter about the idea that larger stores, like big boxes and so on, would increasingly become showrooms where you could go in and have a look at something, but then you can order online or whatever, and I would imagine that it extends itself down to even small businesses who can expand their product range without expanding their footprint.
Giles Corbett: Dave, it is fascinating. I was with the owner of a small independent store yesterday called Cherry Moon, and she's got a beautiful selection of designer clothes, and she has these two tables in the middle of the store that has beautiful jewelry by two designers and she was saying that the issue is that many of these pieces are unique or in very small quantities, and the designers can't afford to put all of their stock there in that one stop, so that means that they then can't exhibit it elsewhere, and all of a sudden, what Cloudshelf was helping her do was give these designers the ability to go and sell their entire range in her store without needing to commit all of the stock. And that idea is one that we've seen time and time again.
I was in a meeting this morning with a retailer we're rolling out with this week, and they have five of their own stores. They have 12,000 SKUs and they have 200 stockers, and their issue has always been being their website is ahead of their stockers, who go and see the website as taking business away from them. And yet with Cloudshelf, it completely turns the whole story around because now they can go and have Cloudshelf presenting all 12,000 SKUs in these small stockers with the stocker knowing that if somebody goes and buys a product via the Cloudshelf, it will be allocated back to their store and they will go and get the same benefit from it as though they'd actually sold the product physically from within the store without having had to hold the stock. Now, that's a pretty amazing proposition, both for the brand and for the retailer.
So you're rolling out with a customer right now. Where are you at? In reading some of the PR, it indicated you went through a series of trials, the company is not that old, and you went through a series of trials in London and Paris and are now deploying. So you're obviously past the testing stage and getting into operational mode.
Giles Corbett: Yeah, so we are 18 months old. We started off with a small group of retailers that we called basically friends for life, pilot retailers, and the deal for them was that they'd get Cloudshelf for free forever, they just needed to go and give us feedback on a weekly basis on how they were using it, how their customers were reacting, what else they wanted to go and see in the product, and we worked with them for a year, basically iterating and improving the product, and then indeed, as you said a few weeks ago, we actually made our app live on Shopify and announced that we were now ready for business and I'm delighted to say that in the short time since then, we've actually had some fantastic successes. So we're going to live in Ireland at the end of this week with two retailers. We're going to live in Scotland also this week. So there's definite movement there.
There's been a lot of interest from many partners in France and we've just kicked off some discussions in Germany, and Dave, I really hope that in the next few months we'll be signing up our first retail networks in the US because this solution really scales and works everywhere.
And Canada where Shopify comes from.
Giles Corbett: And Canada, of course, spot on. Now you know what? To go and help us work out where we needed to target, we built a really nifty tool that we call Store Finder. Basically, I go and put in any address anywhere in the world, and it produces a glorious map of every physical store in that area, and it tells me all of the ones that use Shopify, all the ones that use Salesforce, all the ones that use Magenta, et cetera, to go and power their backend.
So a super useful tool for prospecting. But I can tell you this one thing. Shopify has done incredibly well at promoting itself in its home market because the number of stores in Canada that use Shopify to power their back head is quite phenomenal. So yes, we should definitely be there.
So if I am a digital signage company, and I'm listening to this, and a software provider, and I target retail for, I don't wanna say meat and potatoes, digital signage, but for the other stuff around a store, are you a competitor? Or is there a way to work together? Are their parallel things?
Giles Corbett: Interesting question, Dave. If you happen to be a provider of screens, we are a savior. We are working with a bunch of screen manufacturers and resellers now who basically tell us that when they are selling into retail, oftentimes retailers will come along and say, listen, we want these digital screens, some in store for our merchandising, some in the window, et cetera, and how do we create the content and the digital science company goes, ah, yeah, that's a bit of an issue.
Clearly, with Cloudshelf, we talked a lot about the interactive mode version on the kiosks a few minutes ago. We also have a second version that we called Display Mode. We haven't yet launched Display Mode. We're testing it still with retailers, but it will be launched in the next two, three weeks most likely, and what it does is it does the same kind of clever analysis of your product ranges and imagery, et cetera, as we use on the in interactive mode to go and create fantastic product-oriented visual displays. So you want to go and have something that goes and shows your various product ranges and et cetera in the store window to attract people to come in, Cloudshelf Display Mode will go and do that on the fly.
Now what we find, In the retailers we've been interviewing, is that for a number of them, that's fantastic and that's exactly what they want. But we also find a bunch of them that say you know what, actually we want to go into great videos. We want videos from the brands, et cetera. Now you wanna go and put in some, some simple banners, et cetera, Cloudshelf helps you do that automatically, but you wanna go have a very sophisticated loop with all kinds, other stuff other than relating to the products in the store. Then, you know what? You go and find a digital signage company that can go and helps create the CMS to go manage that loop and Cloudshelf can just come in and be part of that loop. So we're currently working with two CMS providers of digital signage and that's exactly what they plan to be using Cloudshelf for. So they will go and see the retailers. They'll say, listen, you can have the Cloudshelf version or you can have a Cloudshelf version and you can go and slot in, the local news, the Instagram feed, whatever else it is that you want to go and have next to it.
So if the website has something saying, “Baby clothing, 30% off, this week only” as a banner on the website, that could conceivably be curated automatically into a call to action poster for a screen doing that, but your platform's not gonna run a video wall on a big set of LEDs modules or something?
Giles Corbett: So what our platform will do is it will work out and it'll enable you to go and promote the sale. It will also select some of the best products and the products with the best images. It will go and show those. It will allow passing by, maybe you're walking past the store in the evening, and you go and see a bag that looks super nice. It will of course have a QR code on it. You can scan it and it will take you directly to that bag on your phone. If you buy it, it will be recorded as having come from that screen in that store. So all of our backend magic to help people sell more. But now working also on, on display-only signage. That's what Cloudshelf display mode is about. It's about helping retailers sell more. It's not their whole branding experience. That's something that they'll work with other people to create.
So what am I buying? Am I subscribing to this? Am I buying a software license?
Giles Corbett: You're subscribing to it. It's a SaaS model. So it's just like your subscription to Shopify. You go into Shopify, you add the Cloudshelf app, and you get one display for free for life. So you can try it out, there's no limit. You can use it as much as you want, and then as the number of stores expands, or the number of screens per store expands, you then just go and upgrade the license.
This was great and quite interesting. Can you just tell listeners where they can find out more online about your company?
Giles Corbett: Absolutely. Just head over to Cloudshelf.ai and hopefully, you'll be able to find out everything you want about the company. If you don't, call me, I love speaking with people, at any time of day or any time of day or night. I love it.
All right, Giles, thank you very much.
Giles Corbett: Dave, thank you so much for the opportunity!
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
Telmo Silva, ClicData
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
Wednesday Aug 24, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Integrating data has increasingly climbed the priority list for more ambitious and involved digital signage and digital OOH projects. The big driver for that is how near or real-time data makes what's on-screen automated and triggered, which means more timely, targeted and therefore relevant messaging.
Lots of CMS software companies offer some degree of data integration and on-screen presentation, and we're starting to see some third-party companies that work mainly in digital signage - like Screenfeed - also offering data display toolsets.
We're also now seeing well-established data handling companies making themselves known in this sector, particularly to help make some of the more complicated set-ups both happen and then reliably, and securely, work. ClicData is a software firm based up in the northwest of France, but has clients globally that use its Business Intelligence platform to bring data in from more than 250 sources - into a single, harmonized data warehouse.
I spoke with co-founder and CTO Telmo Silva about Clicdata's roots, how its platform works and how it can be applied in digital signage applications.
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TRANSCRIPT
David: Telmo, thank you very much for joining me. Can you tell me what ClicData is all about?
Telmo Silva: I started ClicData in 2008 as a pharmaceutical-focused data analytics company, and later branched out a little bit into making it a wider-used data analysis, data management and data intelligence tool for all sectors, and hence the name, ClicData from ClicPharma before, and yes, this tool is really the culmination of that learning in the pharmaceutical sector that we thought is applicable to really any sector.
David: Okay. So if I'm sitting here listening to the beginning of this podcast, some people might be wondering, those in digital signage and the AV sector, might be wondering, okay, why am I listening to this? How does it plug into that sector?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and it's funny, Dave, because an acquaintance of ours asked me, should we do this podcast? And I said, yes, absolutely, because everything generates data and digital advertising is definitely one of the factors.
You have to know where you're spending your money and what you're requiring and who's looking at things, and one of the first clients we had in the early days was actually a Canadian company out west that had this technology on elevators to take snapshots of peoples and try to recognize their age group and their demographics and as they're playing the videos on the small screen on the elevator, try to figure out what's the retention? Are their eyes moving and moving away from the screen and so forth, and how long do they stay hooked for those short 30-second clips, and things like that? And that was actually my first introduction to digital advertising and a use case for ClicData, a very successful use case, and I was hooked on that.
I was hooked into that so much that where ClicData is based out, which is France, there's a very large history of retail companies here that spent a lot of money on aisle advertising, and they start using those concepts, not only in terms of video and monitoring but also in terms of monitoring the paths of customers through their stores, optimization of aisles and things like that, where to put the digital signs and advertising and so forth, and all that generates a lot of data that you have to make sense of. And this is really well ClicData comes in, right? Those point solutions with digital advertising are part one, but without actually collecting all these from the different stores, and different locations that start making sense of it, it's just data, right? It does not turn into information until you do something with it and that's really where we come in, in trying to bring as much data from the different systems and different points of information really that a company may have, or a client may have and bring that into something that makes sense, that you can aggregate, that you can slice and dice, and then further down the line, then expose that to your customers, and say, okay, this is what you paid for.
David: So you're aggregating and harmonizing and developing insights around the data as opposed to being a collector of data, right? Like you're not doing any of the computer vision or sensor-based work yourself?
Telmo Silva: We do not, but we do have all the necessary connections just with the different systems. Unlike potentially other systems that are very well standardized, each vendor of those displays of those collectors may have their own interfaces, APIs and so forth. They may have their own storage formats and as you use the different systems, your challenge is really to understand, how can I connect to this one now, and how can I extract information that I want out of that. And our connectors are actually quite flexible in that sense where we have fixed connectors for some of those systems, but for others, we have generic connectors that you can kind of configure to tap into that data.
David: Would this be something that might be called middleware?
Telmo Silva: I would say potentially, yes. It depends on your definition of middleware. Ultimately we see business intelligence at least the portion of data analytics and reporting that we offer, as the next step before you feed it back and you go, okay, now I understand the results that I've received here, what improvements are we gonna make? And we start to cycle again, right?
So again as an example, you may start receiving data from certain videos and start saying, okay, this is the demographics and so forth, can I make some adjustments to my campaigns or to my videos or to the sequence of videos that I'm displaying? Again, I'm going back to that video on the elevator concept and optimising that, so it is part of that loop of data collection, data analysis, making decisions based on that data, and then feeding that back into the loop again.
David: When you started the company accessing data from all kinds of different data sources was very complicated and time-consuming, and you had to get all kinds of permissions and all kinds of meetings and phone calls and everything else to work it out.
One of the things that I gather has changed over the last decade or so is that most platforms now have APIs, it's easier to get stuff out of them, and so on. So has your role lessened, or has it increased because they're always changing and there are so many and if you're an independent company, like a digital signage company, a software company, you have to stay on top of that, or you would use a company like ClicData that's spending all their time doing that and making it easy?
Telmo Silva: To answer your first question, it has actually increased, right? Whereas before we would ask a vendor whether that be Facebook or Google and say, our mutual customers have data on your advertising network, right? And again this kind of can expand to any type of data vendor or data collector that we may tap into and before they would basically know it's our data, and the consumers of course start reacting against that, right? Today, If you do not have an API, if all you do is get my data into your system, but not give me anything back in return, then I don't want anything to do with you.
And we've seen backlashes at times with Facebook, Cambridge Analytics and things like that, where those types of sharing are also kinda gone another way rather, but nonetheless, today, if you do not have an API, then you're a second-class citizen on the internet and on the software technology stack. So that is great but an API is still an API. It is a programming interface and it does require some knowledge and it's not a standard. Just because we call it an API does not mean that they'll follow the same standard, it's very well organized, and it’s very well understood. So every API has its nuances, its little quirks and its own way of paging through the amounts of data that it can offer.
And so our role has actually increased due to that, because again, as I was mentioning before our connectors know how to deal with those different variations and those different formats and schemas that the data may be provided with. So in that sense, it's actually increased the need to have a tool, like ClicData, to be able to tap into those APIs and bring it into a format that is easily digestible by any analytics tool, including our own tool.
David: How much is involved, if you wanted to do this yourself and let's say you wanted to Integrate information from four different business system sources or whatever, within your company? Is that something that would take a morning, a month, or a year to do if they weren't using something like ClicData?
Telmo Silva: If they were not using something like ClicData, they obviously need somebody technical, but it would take an extensive amount of time for development, and again, large companies still do that, where they write custom interfaces to bring the data and amalgamate them into one single source of truth. This is where millions of dollars are being spent on data warehousing projects and business intelligence implementations and so forth. So not having a tool like ours definitely would require a good technical team, and again, depending on the sources, potentially database analysts, database experts, SQL developers, API developers, whether they do it in Java or Python or what have you.
And then bringing all that into a data warehouse will definitely take more than just a few days. In my previous life, prior to creating ClicData, that was my bread and butter, and these projects would go on for 3-6 months. With ClicData, if we have the connector that you need or if you can configure your API connector and you have a basic understanding of APIs, you should be able to do that within a day, to connect three or four data sources and start seeing the data flow through into ClicData.
David: So on a project launch basis and certainly on an ongoing operating basis, it sounds like if you're running a spreadsheet model on this and a business argument, it would take a huge amount of cost out of the equation and time, and these are people you don't need to hire?
Telmo Silva: It goes on to just beyond hiring and the people behind it, because, having somebody who can accompany you if you're not an expert or in the technical side, then it may be worth it. But the bottom line is the continuity of it as well. It's okay to build a prototype. It works once but the next day, you don't want to have to do the same thing, right? You don't want to have to copy and paste the data into Excel or out of Excel again and repeat and so forth.
And also, technology is what it is, business evolves as it is, and so you always need these adjustments. It is an investment that you have to make towards being data-centric, being data-focused and to say, I want to build these systems that collect the data on an ongoing basis that I can automate the reporting that can save you time as well in reporting these numbers back to your team or your clients or your management team and all this combines into the ROI that you're looking for, and yes, there is a technical side of it as well that there will be savings, whether it's in consulting or in minimizing, at least the number of times that you involve them, to gain access to your data.
David: If I'm a customer, what am I buying and how am I paying for it? Do you buy an enterprise license or is it software as a service?
Telmo Silva: It is totally software as a service. We do not offer any on-premise installations of software, and this is because we want to be rapid at giving new features, new connectors. Connectors continuously change, and there's new software in the market and we wanna be rapid in making those available. So software as a service is really our model, and what you get when you subscribe to when you get one of these subscriptions, which is monthly or yearly based, is you get basically all the connectors. You get a data warehouse, a database available to you through Microsoft Azure, that's our partner, and you can have your data stored in over eight different regions around the world: US, Ireland, Canada, Germany, France, and a few others, and once you have that data warehouse, that’s your piece of the database there, the data starts flowing through the connectors. Once that is in your data warehouse, then from there you can actually build downstream flows, you can tap into it directly with Excel if you want, or you can use our dashboard tool to start creating dashboards and graphs and charts and tables indicators.
You can share those dashboards with other people. You can publish them to your customers, et cetera, and then you can just automate these things so that it just does that every day or every morning or every hour.
David: Is that the primary output that you would see for digital signage and digital out-of-home home networks, probably more so on the digital signage side, would be data visualizations and dashboards?
Telmo Silva: I think that would potentially be one of the use cases, analyzing the data that's coming through and making decisions based on those as normal reporting and analytics data tools would. The other part of it and some customers of ClicData do this is they just use the collection capabilities of ClicData and the data warehouse to store their data, but then they feed that into other tools of their choice, tools that potentially they wanna do some more advanced machine learning on the data, maybe they want to write their own special code to analyze it, or maybe simply feed another system that requires this data to consume it and so forth.
ClicData is really a multifaceted tool that can be either used just for collection and aggregation of the data or all the way through to data visualization and analytics.
David: Okay, so you would have almost like templates or widgets of some kind that would be able to do develop dynamic charting and things like this based on what you select?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, much like you would do on a pivot table in Excel, to drag and drop some columns, and the chart starts taking shape with columns, rows and so forth. That's exactly our design, it's very user-friendly as much as we can, we do have a lot of options for styling because not everybody likes the same styles and colors, but in essence, it's very much an Excel-like data visualization tool built into ClicData.
David: If I'm a digital signage CMS software provider and I'm working with, let's say a financial services company and they wanted data visualization, if I wanna put that visualized chart into a schedule, so it shows up on the digital signs around the workplace. Is that an HTML file or how do you get that up on a screen?
Telmo Silva: If you want to embed our dashboards into third-party applications, into screens, we have quite a few customers that have screens around the office, we have a railroad train station system that actually publishes our dashboards on every single station and stops with the schedules and things like that, and their performance, so are they late, etc.
So you can definitely embed that, and it's just simply a URL. You put that inside an iFrame, inside your web page, and the iframe immediately refreshes if the data has been refreshed, so you don't have to do anything, you just have to open it up in a browser, maximize the screen and boom, your dashboard is live and will refresh automatically.
David: Aare there any kind of limitations on how real-time it is or is it just how you wanna set it and how it works at the other end, in terms of data generation?
Telmo Silva: Our schedules have the ability to go on a minute basis to your data sources and pull the data in, however you can use our API, because we too have an API, to push data in, and in that case, the push is up to you. If you wanna send it once per second, you can. These will not be full data loads. These have to be small packets, a few rows, a few hundred rows at a time, potentially.
But you can use our API to bring in real-time data, and again, the same concept, whether we pulled it or you pushed it, everything downstream gets refreshed and gets activated for you.
David: I suspect that's a conversation that you and your sales engineers have at times with resellers and end users, “Sure we could do real-time, but for the application you're talking about, do you really need that, or is every minute or every five minutes fine?”
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, and this is why we stopped our schedule at one minute. Again, you have to be really in a high traffic, high volume situation, and to be able to make a decision in real-time, and that's ultimately the key, right? It really is up to you and there's the cost associated with you developing a push notification to other systems as well.
So it really is up to the customers, but yeah, in some sectors there are times that some folks ask for real-time when in fact, their data doesn't change on a daily basis. Case in point, Facebook, they themselves only refresh their own metrics or expose their own metrics on a much larger time scale. So for us to do real-time with certain systems and certain data sources is just refreshing and using bandwidth for nothing.
David: Do you have to make statements and assurances around privacy of the data or that's not really your issue, whoever's collecting that data or you're gathering that data is the one that's gonna have to worry about that, you're just enabling the use of that data?
Telmo Silva: Even though obviously data privacy and respecting the customer's data is our number one thing, we do have a role to play. If we're talking in Europe, GDPR is a huge thing. Every country has their own protection laws and privacy protection, like the California Data Protection Act. Every country and state and province has their own or has started some type of laws and regulations. Us being a European company, but with customers in North America, we have to be very careful. This is why we're almost the only ones that actually are able to start your data warehouse in any country that you wish in those eight regions that we've mentioned, and that's step number one, but we are a data processor for you. We don't know what your data is, but we are processing your data for you. It's our application, and we are responsible to make sure that there's no external access to it, that if there are court orders, we have to make sure we validate and check them with our customers and so forth.
Luckily that has never happened, but we don't know what your data is. So we are not able to be really responsible for it, but that's part of our terms of service. If you put data that you are not entitled to use or process if you put data that is not legal for you to own, that's the responsibility of our customers, but obviously, we would have a role to play in that in this GDPR system where we are responsible to at least point out or give it out if asked legally, obviously.
David: I assume you get a lot of questions around security as well.
Telmo Silva: Oh, absolutely, and again, this is why we partner with Microsoft Azure. Our expertise is really making the software intelligent, and easy to use, that it processes fast, that we can process thousands and thousands of files and sources and dashboards a day, an hour really, and not really on the physical and digital security of these data warehouses and systems. And this is why we rely on Microsoft Azure severely. We have a strong SLA with them to protect our property and our customer's property, their data.
David: I know almost nothing about the technical side of what your company and others like it would do, but I assume that a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of security is on the Azure side and you take advantage of that and you let them worry about that, but, make sure that you're working according to their policies, right?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely, but it also takes our knowledge to encrypt the data and to make sure that their configuration is set up correctly. I think that is the positive and negative of cloud-based systems, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It's so easy these days to just start a server anywhere and start putting data into it. It's much harder to make sure that nobody else has access to it and to make sure that it's protected and so forth. And even within Microsoft, there are some checks and balances there as well. We can’t say, just because it's Microsoft's or Amazon or Google that takes care of your data, we're pawning it off on them, and if something happens, let's go to court.
That's not how it should be handled. There has to be some responsibility on the people using those systems, and how we code the application, and to make sure all the settings are set up correctly. So it is a team effort between the vendors and us, and also our customers to make sure that they're comfortable with the fact that we are ISO certified, SOC certified HIPAA compliant, et cetera. This is time and an investment on our part to make sure that they should not be just for the sake of having a stamp, on your website saying, “We are ISO certified” and that's it. It does take effort from both companies and all parties involved to make sure that the data is secure and private.
David: So Microsoft is a major business partner, but they're also a competitor, through Power BI?
Telmo Silva: That is correct. Power BI, their visualization tool is a competitor to our data visualization module, not necessarily to the whole ClicData platform, and they do an excellent job at it as well.
David: But I assume your company has its share of competitors, right?
Telmo Silva: I believe there's data visualization for every type of business in the world. Power BI, Tableau, ClickView. I don't wanna name more than three, but there are at least three hundred of them, and let's not even go beyond those, let's just talk about Excel, there’s some amazing visualization in Excel and it has been around for years. So there's a lot of great experience, but again, these are tools and they are distinct separate tools, and if you have to load up Excel or Power BI or whatever every day to hit refresh, and then export it out and think about security and access, then that's the downside of these tools. They do a great job for that initial data investigation but are terrible for the ongoing maintenance of it.
So what we say is, whereas we may not be as advanced as some of those tools, potentially. If you're trying to do something very specific that only Power BI can do, maybe we cannot do it. The upside of using our tool is that you don't have to do anything else. The data is there as soon as it's refreshed, the dashboards know that the data is refreshed, it immediately sends emails out to the people that are on the list for receiving this dashboard, and they get it on their mobile app. They get an alert, whatever, right? It's all automated for you.
So if you want to spend less time wasting copying and pasting and using Excel and these tools, then, these are the types of platforms that you need to look for.
David: I assume the other thing is that you stay on top of it because APIs change and data sets change and everything else and if you just had it developed yourself internally or if you outsourced the development, a month later, the schemas and things could change and all of a sudden it doesn't work, right?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely. We see that with the big players obviously, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and others are constantly improving their APIs. Security keeps changing around the world. We're phasing out certain types of security, TLS 1, TLS 2, et cetera, and APIs need the security, they need to be compatible with it. So this is really where most of our customers get their benefits is to say, okay, ClicData is taking care of all that for you, and then make sure that the data keeps coming in, and flowing into your data warehouse.
David: So if I'm a digital signage content management systems software provider, or Perhaps an AV/IT systems integrator who has an ask from clients or wants to incorporate this into their service offers, what's involved?
What are the first questions you have to ask them? Do you support this, do you support that, or are there any really real barriers?
Telmo Silva: We start by looking at their data sources, right? If we can't bring the data, if they're using a very specific format of a very specific system that we cannot gain access to, typically very old ones then we're upfront about it. We say that you're not gonna get this data in, and you're not gonna be able to report it.
David: It's on a mainframe system or something?
Telmo Silva: Mainframe, believe it or not, we can connect to it. It is important for us and believe it or not, there are still a lot of customers, especially in the retail sector that does mainframe, IBM series of servers, those things that we thought don't exist. They exist and they exist in quite a lot of companies. So we still support those. But sometimes it's just very cryptic or the format. I cannot give you an example off the top of my head but we have this, as I mentioned before, a very robust kind of API connecting connector that takes a lot of options, and most of the time we can configure it to fit.
But yeah, if you're a provider of data that pretty much says: I'm not giving you access. I can only give you monthly reports or something like that. Yeah, you can import those reports monthly by hand. Is that something that you really wanna do, et cetera? So we discuss alternate solutions like that.
But yeah, that would be the first step. The second step is what are their objectives? Are they looking for visualization and embedding these dashboards and putting them back to their customer in a self-service mode so they can monitor the success of their campaigns, their ads network, et cetera? Or is this internal use for analytics and so forth? So we discuss those items to make sure that ClicData is the right solution for them, and if all checks out, I think then the next step is just to get a trial account for 15 days and connect a couple of data sources, see what you can build. We have an in-app chat tool that allows them to ask questions as they go along during their trials. Ask your questions, ask how you can do things and get that first initial prototype, and that's a big advantage of being a SaaS product, there's no installation, you lose nothing, right? You don't have to install or return servers. You just get started, start connecting your data and start playing around with your data and start visualizing and prototyping within your team, get success quickly, get motivated quickly as well. That's a big part of it, and from there, you just start your subscription level.
David: What level of skill do you need?
Telmo Silva: To do complex things, you definitely need some SQL sometimes, some function programming, as you do with Excel, we are all different experts in Excel. There are those of us that use Excel just to type in numbers and your basic drag and drop, and that's it. And then there's those that know to do Lookups and they know a few more functions and then there's those that do Macros in Excel, right? There are different skills, and with us, it's the same thing. It really depends on what you need to do and how much your data needs work. So we have our own kind of Excel-like language that they can use, very similar to SQL as well. They can do a lot of things with the data.
We needed to make ClicData very powerful, and very flexible to ensure that we will not be stumped by a specific need or a specific customer request. But at the surface, we also try to make it easy with a strong UI to write those hard-to-write functions behind the scenes through an interface that is a little bit easier to use.
David: So at a minimum, you want somebody who has an interest or a knack for this sort of thing, as opposed to Margaret in Sales and Marketing saying, “Here, you do this!” and she gets the deer and the headlights look?
Telmo Silva: Absolutely. Now you can, if you have, and some customers of ours do this and they split the work of connecting and making the data available versus consuming the data, right?
You have your technical person, the person that knows the data very well to create these kinds of slices and catalogues of data and make them available to the rest of the team, and the team then goes in, either with our dashboard editor or report editor, and does their own dashboards and their own kind of visualizations or with other tools as well. So there are also those splitting of functions that sometimes are important to put in place into a company.
David: ClicData is in Northwest France based in Lille, correct?
Telmo Silva: Yeah, we have three major offices. That is our head office, the engineering office in the north of France. We have one in Toronto, Canada, and we have one in Texas so we're all over the place a little bit.
David: So Europeans are gonna engage through your European offices and Canadians and Americans can find a couple of offices on this side of the pond?
Telmo Silva: That's correct.
David: Where do they find you online?
Telmo Silva: ClicData.com
David: It's important to say there's no “k” in the click. Somebody got to it before you could get the one with the “k”?
Telmo Silva: I believe so, or maybe at that point in time, we wanted to make it very even with four and four, Clic and Data, I'm not sure.
David: Oh, they'll find it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Telmo Silva: Thank you for having me.
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
PJ Thelen, RoveIQ
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
Wednesday Jul 27, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When PJ Thelen talks about the company's software and hardware, he focuses almost entirely on the experiences they enable and deliver, as opposed to the features and specs of the technology.
It's refreshing, because a lot of the conversation and marketing around outdoor displays for directories, wayfinding and advertising has been - at least in recent years - about how they were more than just screens, but smart city devices that did a variety of things, including WiFi connectivity and IoT sensors. Thelen went so far as rebranding the company he now runs from smartLINK to RoveIQ - getting away from the heavily-used smart moniker and emphasizing how Rove speaks to enabling people to navigate a space with intelligent - the IQ bit - guidance.
The company has a CMS, sophisticated mapping, an ad server and analytics capabilities all designed to help people find their way around big places. The early adopters have been commercial properties - like mixed-use lifestyle developments. In many to most cases, those are wayfinding directories with mapping, supported by advertising.
But Thelen sees a lot of possibilities working with large-footprint healthcare, helping people find their way around sprawling medical campuses. There would be physical screens providing guidance, but in his vision, RoveIQ guides people from the time they park in a hospital garage all the way to a specific building, floor and waiting room.
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TRANSCRIPT
Peter, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what RoveIQ is all about?
Peter (PJ) Thelen: RoveIQ really emphasizes smart kiosks and wayfinding software solutions.
We just rebranded our organization from smartLINK to RoveIQ and Dave, a big reason for that was we wanted to make sure our new name is better aligned with the solutions that we bring to market and the value that we provide for both our customers and partners. Now the word Rove, it's the whole idea of wandering, discovering, et cetera but the IQ element is to do it in an intelligent fashion. So you have a very efficient and enjoyable experience.
So if somebody listening to this is trying to visualize what you do, the visual that would immediately spring to mind would be a display totem outside in a public plaza or something like that with directory or mapping, correct?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, without a doubt. So I always use the analogy, Dave, to pretend that you're going to a place for the first time. You're not quite sure where you are or what is around you so you leverage the hardware and our software to understand what is available and then ultimately leveraging either the kiosk experience or the mobile experience allows you to essentially get to where you want to go leveraging a Blue Dot scenario, which obviously is our wayfinding software.
Blue Dot scenario, what do you mean by that, or is that just the name of the software itself?
Peter Thelen: No, that's just the analogy I use Dave, where if you think about where you are and let's just say, hypothetically, you want to go to a restaurant, the dots correlate to the path that you need to take to go from where you are to where you ultimately want to go.
The old name, smartLINK, connoted the whole idea of smart cities and that there were all kinds of companies coming up with smart city kiosks in the last decade or so, and I don't necessarily see a lot of traction for those sorts of things. Is that kind of driving this as well? What if you better focus on the whole idea of guiding people, as opposed to saying this is this station that will do all these other things to help cities become smarter?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, we took a step back. RoveIQ is a software company. It just so happens that it needs a hardware platform to promote the value that we drive on a day in and day out basis.
In our minds, smart was widely used. It didn't necessarily correlate to exactly what we do today and where we're going tomorrow. From a search engine optimization perspective, it was tough just because there's so many smart this and smart that. As RoveIQ continues to grow, we're growing more and more into other verticals beyond just the smart city. So the bottom line is that we wanted a name that more appropriately aligned with who we are and what we're doing on a day in and day out basis, and it just made sense.
It was a great exercise. It was about a six month long exercise with a phenomenal local company here called Brand Fuel, and we're very happy with the results.
There seem to be two kinds of threads of these kinds of outdoor street furniture displays. There are those shopping malls and community business districts, that sort of thing put in to help people find their way around intelligently, and then there are those that are there primarily as advertising. “Oh, by the way, there's also a directory” or “there's also some sort of a lookup thing” but it exists for advertising. Do you go down one path or the other, or do you serve both?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, that's a great question, and we definitely serve both, but there is no doubt that the emphasis of our software is around creating experiences. Experiences that a visitor or a resident is wanting to have, or is not expecting, and ultimately has, which generates this great feeling.
Our software, which we consider a platform. It is a content management solution. It has the ability to be an ad server, which allows you to download and upload ads as well as schedule ads, then it has this third element around data analytics and reporting. So we feel like we have some of the best software out there. But there is no doubt at the end of the day, we're trying to promote more experiences as compared to just ads.
But a big part of the ROI from a customer perspective is that digital out-of-home ad opportunity, and post COVID that's growing significantly, which is creating great opportunities.
And ultimately, regardless of the venue and the scenario, something's gotta pay for the thing, right, so that's why advertising tends to come into play?
Peter Thelen: Yeah. We always say there's hard and soft ROI in terms of your investment in RoveIQ. The soft is the experiences that both the customer, the resident, the visitor, incurs on a per visit basis, and how do you measure that? Secondly, it is the digital out-of-home ads based on whatever DMA that property or the city resides in that correlates to how big of an opportunity that is, and then the third element, which in my mind is still fairly immature, but it's becoming more relevant and more mature each and every day is this whole idea of how do you leverage the data?
Whether it's the touch analytics, whether it's the video analytics and then the ability to potentially incorporate both WiFi and mobile, and then what do you use to do with that data to do something of value with it.
You mentioned experience, how do you define and characterize experience?
The experience can be what you see on the screen, what it looks like and everything else, or the experience can be, “that was easy. I found what I was looking for quickly, and that was a great experience” because now I can go in and experience whatever public plaza or mall or attraction that I'm at?
Peter Thelen: At the end of the day, people want to be informed, they want to be educated, they want to gain access to information in a very quick and inefficient manner, and ultimately, they want to.
We're designing our software where when you approach a kiosk and you start to interact, you can get off of it in less than 40 seconds and feel really happy about the experience and you're on your way, and you feel like you're on your way in an intelligent way. I always use the analogy, Dave, if you come to a property or a city for the first time, you're gonna be inclined to use our software. We at, RoveIQ wanna make sure every time you visit that city or that particular property, regardless if you know where you are and what is around you, because of your previous experience, you want to, once again, interact with our software, it causes you to want to come back, and if you're coming back, that means we're doing our job and adding great value to the customer, the property, etc.
So if you're doing your job, this is where repeat visitors tend to migrate to like Moss to a light. They just know, “I'll start here to help me find what I'm looking for”?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct, and our new brand promise is this whole idea of enriching lives through intelligent software designed to move humans, then we elaborate saying both physically and emotionally, and that emotional element is probably the most important.
So where does your company start and where does it stop in terms of services and technology that you provide?
Peter Thelen: So knowing that we're a software company that ultimately needs a digital display to add value and differentiate, we're providing a fully integrated solution to a customer, which obviously includes the hardware, the related installation, the software, and then the ongoing maintenance. To do all of those things, you need to wrap it in a bow from a project management perspective, and then ultimately you're bringing this data element and this advertising element as part of the overall solution as well so the customer looks at you as a one stop shop.
So we have that ability today. Now, obviously, we leverage partners where that is their core business to add the ultimate value and aspects of the overall solution. But hopefully that's transparent to the customer.
Yeah, I'm guessing that you guys would be happy as clams if you could just be a software company and not have to worry, or really even think about hardware and just provide the specs that it needs to run on this sort of thing, but as you say, people want one stop shopping, they want turnkey.
Peter Thelen: Yep, but that does bring up a good point. Before I got here in May of 2021, we were predominantly dependent on hardware. Of course, in the last 14 months we've made phenomenal strides in promoting mobile-only solutions. So if you think about something as simple as a smart city or a mixed use real estate, yes, you're walking up to a kiosk, but as you exit that kiosk, you can scan or text to phone, to basically take that exact same experience from the kiosk with you on your mobile device, you don't have to download anything, it is considered a web app and off you go.
We're also offering mobile-only solutions which are cool. As we penetrate colleges and universities and healthcare, we're not dependent on that hardware. You can get the benefits of our software, just leveraging your mobile device which has been pretty exciting to see and we look at that as a high growth vertical.
So in theory, let's say on a university campus, you could walk up to a support column in a building and there'd be a QR code on there with a message that says. “Having trouble finding your way? Scan this!” and it'll launch your app and off you go?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
How do you make money off of that then?
Peter Thelen: Well, that's all our software. If you think about it, the theme you're probably hearing from me is, we're a software company, and every time we're providing value around our software, there is a fee for that subscription base , it's monthly and it's based on the opportunity.
So in a conventional setup where you are providing display hardware, you would have a play out license for that display, but with the university campus or something like that, if you're not using physical displays, you would just have some sort of a site license for the campus?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
Okay. That makes sense then. I'm curious about wayfinding. Mapping for big public displays has been around, I'd say at least a decade, maybe 15 years, and like everything it's evolved, and I saw on your website, one of the things you talk about is three-dimensional wayfinding.
Over the years, what has your company found in terms of what resonates with end users? Do they care about certain things like it being three-dimensional or do they just want something that's very intuitive and quick?
Peter Thelen: I've concluded it's all the above. I think users today are smarter than ever. They have a very high expectation in terms of the experience that they're aspiring to have. So they want everything. There's a lot of wayfinding solutions out there. So we always think to ourselves, what makes ours better than the next, and knowing that we emphasize experiences, how do we really promote a better experience as it pertains to that whole wayfinding experience?
So not everybody does 3D, most only do 2D. The whole idea of interactive is a big deal, and we obviously wanna promote that fairly aggressively, but the one thing that we're really emphasizing, Dave, is this idea of hyperlocal. Do we capture all elements of a property? So when an individual starts their journey, leveraging our software, it's a great experience. They very clearly know where they're going, they can visualize the surrounding environment and as they're going, there's no fear and uncertainty or doubt about where they're ultimately going to get to, because there's a high degree of confidence in that.
The hyperlocal is a very important element to our solution. It could be as simple as a bench, it could be a tree, it could be the look and feel of the building. Our UI/UX team does a phenomenal job of configuring the property on a per deal basis to make sure it looks and feels just like that property actually is.
So some of the areas you're in like Port Orlando in Orlando, or Miami Design District and so on, if a shopping or mixed use outdoor district like that approaches you guys and says we want to do this. What is involved? You were talking about the UX design and everything. Do they go on site or how do they put this together?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, it's a lot of different elements, which makes it fun and exciting, but ultimately it starts with a site survey, where we walk the property with the respective owners. We identify those high traffic areas. We understand the goals from the owner in terms of what they really want from this hardware and software. You have to define the advertising opportunity as part of the whole digital out-of-home. Sometimes it's a great opportunity, sometimes it's just an average opportunity and in some instances, based on the location of the property, it might not exist at all. Then the last element is this whole idea of data.
Data is becoming more valuable like I referenced earlier. Each owner wants different types of data sets that's important to them. So as part of the onboarding, we define those data elements. But as we leave that site survey, you're taking all these pieces to the puzzle and assembling them into this picture that correlates to ultimately what they want which is a combination of hardware and software that are strategically placed throughout the property. We've built out the software in terms of the configuration so the experience as you approach the digital display looks and feels just like the property.
I always use the analogy, picture your iPhone. When you open up your iPhone, you have the various apps on the first page. That's no different than what we do for a customer as part of the configuration process, and then we build out the maps. Take into consideration that hyperlocal, 3D concepts
It is the core goal and aspiration simply to ensure that people who visit a venue like Port Orlando or whatever, to just not be lost and frustrated, or is it a little more sophisticated and evolved in the case of trying to influence where they might go?
Peter Thelen: I'm chuckling a little bit because it's both. If you think about the whole idea of moving people physically and emotionally, the physical aspect is the wayfinding, and that is the emphasis of our software, but we're one of the first in industries to roll out augmented reality selfie. I was at the Avalon property outside Atlanta, Georgia last week, and I sat on the property for three hours, Dave and I watched people interact with our software, and 70% of the people were leveraging the selfie and having an absolute blast with it in terms of what filter to use, how many people to incorporate into the selfie picture. I watched them scan or text to phone and I watched them walk away giggling, because they were so happy with the experience.
Okay. So this is walking in front of a totem, there's a camera, it's capturing your image in front of the camera and then you're overlaying it like mouse ears or whatever?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct. I would say think of Snapchat filters, that's the exact experience that we're promoting, leveraging our software.
Is that all just about the experience? Like I did this at this location and it's going to brand it and say I was at Avalon, and I did this fun thing and it's cascading out to that person's followers and therefore it's helping the Avalon brand?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct, and then the other side of that, and I'll just use an example of coupons. Think about the whole dynamic of a property wanting to potentially push more and more of the visitors to select locations or select stores, think about the whole idea of, I'm at Avalon for the first time, where is Lululemon? I used the software to understand where Lululemon is from a wayfinding perspective, Lululemon then offers me hypothetically a 10% coupon for today's spend, I scan that QR code, I work my way to Lululemon, I obviously make my purchase, I go to the POS as part of my payment process and I get 10% off my total order.
Lululemon's ecstatic that our technology drove people to their store, but the visitors were ecstatic because they got 10% off that they weren't expecting, everybody's happy. Those are the ideal scenarios. So the next time that family comes to Avalon, they're gonna be very inclined to leverage our software to understand what other coupons are out there.
That's got traceability too, right?
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct.
Yeah, and is that happening very often, people using it?
Peter Thelen: The answer is yes, and it's happening more and more every day. RoveIQ has only been around since 2016, it was started by two individuals that also had another company. So you could make an argument, it really was a hobby.
I came here in May of last year. We had very talented people, it just needed more direction and more leaders, and we're adding new features every single day to our software to once again, heighten the whole idea of creating more and more experiences.
. Did you know much about this space when you came into it?
Peter Thelen: Yeah, I did a little, I do adapt to be dangerous, but I ran an IT solutions company for 19 years. I spent my last two years at an organization called Kroger, a rather large grocery store where I ran a division called Sunrise Technology, and that was all about leveraging technology that Kroger developed in house and realized that it worked, and the ask from me was to take that technology and sell it to the global retail world.
The emphasis of that technology was digital shelves inside a grocery store. So I took that same experience, in that case, it was a digital shelf. In our RoveIQ world, it's a digital display, but the elements of the solution were very similar: data, advertising and experiences.
I noticed in the press release announcing the name change that you also made a reference to healthcare software that was coming and I thought that's interesting, so what was that all about and is it now live?
Peter Thelen: I've had so much fun with the team and healthcare customers working on this new concept and it's going great. The premise is fairly simple. If you think about the average experience today, where you have to go to a healthcare facility tomorrow, and these healthcare facilities continue to get bigger and bigger, which from a patient perspective, creates a lot of apprehension and anxiety around, where do I park, what entrance do I go in, and how do I ultimately get to the department that I'm needing to go to?
So leveraging our legacy software, we have made tweaks where we are now integrating into their Epic and/or Cerner, where essentially a patient gets a text the day of their visit and that text takes them from their current location to the correct parking garage via car, then transfers to foot from the parking garage to the correct entrance, and then continues from the front entrance to the actual department. All leveraging a mobile device and obviously our software on that mobile device, and needless to say, it's addressing a rather large problem in healthcare that we believe with confidence we can solve and we're pretty excited about it.
Now, where does it stand? We're in pilots as we sit here today, which means we're learning every single day with a set of customers, and needless to say, our goal is to go live with many customers as we enter 2023.
That's an interesting one because an awful lot of big healthcare complexes started off as one building and ended up being eighteen buildings and they're all joined together and it's confusing as hell to find your way around, and I can certainly respect the idea of something that can say: go out this door, go down this hallway, go up three levels, then turn right and left, and eventually you're gonna find your way there because without it, you might have to leave super early because you know you're gonna get lost.
Peter Thelen: Completely agree, and if you think about the idea of hyperlocal and our legacy software with these enhancements, we can promote this unbelievable experience where you always feel like you know where you're going and where you need to go to ultimately reach your destination. And from a customer experience perspective, these healthcare entities that we're working with today, that's one of their big issues.
People need to feel good about where they need to go and how to go about getting there.
Do you address language as well?
Peter Thelen: The answer is yes. Now our current pilots, they have not asked for that, Dave, but the bottom line is, our software has that capability.
Yeah. I asked because years ago I had a meeting with a hospital in Toronto and it was in a very multicultural area of Toronto, and they had a roster of staff and volunteers who just handled all the different languages that came to the reception desk, asking where the Pediatric Clinic was or whatever, and they would have to call people and say, we need somebody who speaks Lithuanian or Tagalog or whatever it may be, and it was this monumental challenge.
I suggested at the time that you might wanna look at some sort of interactive directory that you select your language first, and then it takes you where you need to go that way, and they said that's interesting, but they wanted to just do the wow factor, I can't do stuff in their public areas instead, and they're like, oh, okay, that's not gonna solve any problems, but fill your boots.
Peter Thelen: Yeah, the bottom line is you wanna make sure you have software that can cover the population. The healthcare entities we're working with are defining that population. Needless to say, we're making sure our software can perform, and since it's our own proprietary software, the sky's the limit in terms of the capability and potential.
Yeah, I could certainly see what you're describing is working well on university campuses as well, particularly for night courses and part-time students who aren't familiar with where they're going and really the same thing in airports.
Peter Thelen: The airports for us, Dave, have been a tough market. It's so competitive, there's a fair amount of rather large players. Don't get me wrong, we focus on airports, but that's not necessarily where we have generated the most success today.
Airports are also pretty conditioned to media companies coming in and saying, we'll put this in for free.
Peter Thelen: That's a hundred percent correct. I can play that game all day, every day. I can play, it's just a matter of, can I compete?
Yeah, you're not gonna win too often when the other guy's saying, we'll put it in free for you.
Peter Thelen: You know that's the dynamic we deal with every day on a per deal basis. Based on the perceived digital out-of-home advertising opportunity, that can create a free experience or that unfortunately you have to pay for, it has to generate the corresponding value. So those are the discussions we have.
I'm guessing the majority of the opportunities that you run into and close are in some way bolstered by advertising, and there aren't that many that are purely just an informational display?
Peter Thelen: It's interesting, we've had a phenomenal 2022 and the characteristics of each deal really are so different, especially as it pertains to advertising, and there is no doubt when advertising can generate that ROI on its own, it makes it a very easy decision for a customer. But when that's not the case, then it correlates to what are the other value elements and is that important to our property? And we're seeing that increase more and more, which has been exciting, because obviously that's creating great opportunities for us.
But there's no doubt, advertising is a big play here and at the end of the day, we're trying to do everything within our means to bring the best solution forward around advertising to optimize that ROI from a customer perspective.
You mentioned programmatic in your press release. So are you working with the many programmatic companies out there? I don't even wanna rattle 'em all off, cuz there's so many and I'm so confused by it.
Peter Thelen: Yeah. So our software, because it's this platform and has this ad server capability, it integrates into programmatic partners, and we're constantly looking at the appropriate programmatic partners and then obviously incorporating those into our solution.
So yeah, that's a big opportunity. This whole idea of unused inventory, how can it be sold in an automated fashion? These programmatic partners make it very easy to fill a high volume, usually obviously lower revenue elements, but still important from a customer perspective.
The company itself, is it private or are you publicly traded?
Peter Thelen: No, it's private. It resides here in Northern Kentucky, right outside Cincinnati, Ohio. The emphasis today is within the United States, although we're always looking at growth outside of the US, but it's a fairly small company, but it's doing some really exciting and fun things.
How many folks do you have working there?
Peter Thelen: So we have 12 people today. I'm trying to grow that by an incremental three between now and year end. We have about 25-30 unique customers across five verticals: smart cities, mixed use real estate or lifestyle centers, we call it entertainment, but the emphasis really there is sports arenas, and then college universities, like we talked about earlier and healthcare. We're heavily focused on five verticals.
All right. So if people wanna know more about RoveIQ, where do they find you?
Peter Thelen: Our new website is RoveIQ.com, which in the last three weeks has gotten a lot of attention, which is pretty exciting. But they can also email me, which is pretty simple: pj@RoveIQ.com, and you have my commitment that I'll respond and give it the appropriate attention.
All right this was great. Congratulations on growing the company the way you have.
Peter Thelen:. Dave, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your support. You do great work and thanks for giving RoveIQ an opportunity to talk about what we do on a day in day out basis.
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
Johannes Troger, Ameria
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
Wednesday Jul 13, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Health safety concerns that become top of mind for the whole planet back in March 2020 led to a lot of assumptions that the interactive display business was going to go touchless, with screens managed by mid-air sensors or perhaps by voice.
That only kinda sorta played out, as touchscreen companies did just fine through the pandemic. Staffing shortages and a desire to minimize staff to customer contacts led to widespread adoption of self-service screens used to order food and buy tickets.
But a German company that specializes in touchless technology suggests while consumers will use touchscreens to specifically get and do things in faster and easier ways, situations in which the screens are more about experience and discovery are going touch-free. Ameria argues that when a screen experience is opt-in, consumers are happier if they don't have to touch the screen - for health safety reasons and also because of the age-old worry about the cleanliness of the people who used the screen before them.
Based in Heidelberg but selling globally, Ameria is focused on the software that create, enables and delivers touch-free experiences using optical sensors. I had an interesting chat with Johannes Troger, who runs business development for the company.
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TRANSCRIPT
Johannes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Ameria is all about?
Johannes Troger: Yes, thank you, Dave, for having me, and sure, I can give you a little rundown. So Ameria is originally a software company coming from software project development, and a few years back, we went into the brick and mortar retail space providing interactive solutions. We are all about bringing a great experience to the customer, and started providing a lot of touch free or touchless solutions to customers.
So this is one of the things we are doing, and we are also providing a cloud platform behind that to manage all the solutions, to bring out the contents and to collect the data.
And you're based in Heidelberg, Germany?
Johannes Troger: That is correct. We're based in Heidelberg, Germany. We're founded here a few years back, actually by a couple of students from Heidelberg University who met there and found that there was a big market for software development, and yeah, that's how it got started, and then after a few changes, we arrived at where we are at now.
Are the students still involved or has it kind of evolved from there?
Johannes Troger: So one of them is. He’s our CEO, and the other one left a few years back, but one of the founders is still heading the company and is still our visionary behind everything we do.
Okay, and you're a private company, but you have outside investment?
Johannes Troger: Yes, we are a private company. It's still mainly owned by the founder and his family, but we have some outside investors. So the biggest part actually goes to a crowd investing group. It's a German platform called Companisto and we did a few rounds with them, which was a really great way for us to do it because it allowed a lot of people who also come from the industry to invest, and they didn't have to go in with large amounts but they really became our marketing and PR crowd and then we have a few larger investors also involved, but it's mainly in a family office space.
And what's your role with the company?
Johannes Troger: So I'm really heading the business development and partner development part of the business, so on the one hand, I'm a lot out there. Now again, out there at trade fairs and conventions and so on, talking to potential customers, also working with a lot of our partners and also still have some accounts which I started developing when I started at the company, and where I'm still involved in projects, which is always really good because from once in a while to see what's actually happening out there, that's really good.
We met at Infocomm in Las Vegas two-three weeks ago, and I'm curious: was this kind of a first foray into the US to start to build out that market or have you been active in it for some time?
Johannes Troger: In the past, we had some projects in North America, but they were mainly driven by customers from Europe who we supported in projects with their companies in North America. So really Infocomm was the first foray we did into North America, also talking to potential customers there, to potential partners and getting a feel of the American market.
How would you describe the state of the business? Are you out there with active installations and everything else, or are you just building things up?
Johannes Troger: So we are out there with active installations. They're usually not at a large scale yet, so we're talking about a lot of pilots and a lot of small scale installations. So it's about at this stage of the business, and I think we are on the verge of the first bigger rollouts with the Touch Free technology.
And is that the lead product now, Touchfree?
Johannes Troger: Exactly. That's what we've been focusing on in the last two to three years. We actually had some touchless solutions already before the pandemic, and we used them mainly in retail for promotional campaigns. We used them at trade fairs for companies who wanted to basically get more attention to their booth. But it was a niche product. It worked really well in what it was supposed to do but people didn't really see the need beyond that, and so with the pandemic hitting, a lot of companies realized that there are some companies out there in the market who are already doing solutions like this, and they came to us and based on their needs and requirements, and based on our experience and ideas, we started pushing those solutions, developing new options and re-augmenting our portfolio where it was needed. So that became really the focus.
It's interesting, when the pandemic first hit, the conventional wisdom was that this was the end for physical touch screens, nobody was gonna use one ever again because of the contagions on the screen and the inability to keep them clean and so on, keep them disinfected, so to speak.
What kind of played out is, touch screens actually had a pretty good couple of years through the pandemic because it was determined that separating one to one human contacts was safer using touch screens, even if you did have to wipe them down or do that sort of thing. So self-service became a big deal. So I'm curious because I thought that, okay, a lot of this is now gonna go to touchless and voice, but it didn't, but what did you experience?
Johannes Troger: So what we experienced is that, pretty much as you described that at the start, a lot of companies believed that the day of the touch screen was over and what we experienced over the course of the pandemic is that, there is a kind of big divide between solutions which are, I would say more process based. So you mentioned self order kiosks, for example, in the QSR space, and then on the other hand, there are more experience based solutions which are more geared towards marketing and inspiring customers and so on, and so with those process based use cases, we really see that touch screens are big in business and I think it’s kind of got the, “You still have got to get where you're going” thing behind it, right? So people really want their food, and as you mentioned, it feels safer to do it via the screen than to stand in front of a person at the counter.
So people use it and it's quite funny because even before that everyone could see all the studies about how dirty they were and how people were not washing their hands, and so on. We don't want to get into those kinds of unpleasant things, but it was pretty clear before that, but it didn't stop people before that, but when you see on the other hand use cases where companies try to bring an experience to their customers, inspire them, acquaint them with probably new products they have or with new services they're offering, there, we see that touch screens are not working at all. So if people don't understand what they're getting out of it, they're not gonna start interacting with a touch screen.
So they'll opt in when they're hungry or they need a transit ticket or whatever, but if it's for discovery of new products and promotions or accessorizing an outfit, they are less likely to want to touch something?
Johannes Troger: Exactly!
Okay, interesting. So one of the challenges that I've seen with touchless, and it goes back to the days when people were using Kinect sensors, gesture sensors, and so on, there was a learning curve and there was a problem with accuracy, and I'm wondering where that is at now?
Johannes Troger: Obviously, the technology has developed a lot, and I think the way it has developed this much more on the software side. So really the side from which we are coming, because we are not creating our own hardware sensors, we are really hardware agnostic in that.
So I think there are really some different things that happened. For one, the Kinect really worked based on creating a full body model, what is called the skeleton of the body and then tracked different joints and different points of the body, and that always meant there was some latency in it, and that always meant that you had to keep the interface with really large buttons and so on because it wasn't very precise.
And you're asking people to perform!
Johannes Troger: Exactly, and you usually have a certain distance from the screen and they have to make really big movements. So this was actually really the first solution we offered and we saw that it worked really well in any environment where people were in a kind of playful mood anyway, or where a lot of kids were involved and so on. So this worked really well or where you really wouldn't ask, People not to perform too much in front of the screen, but they still had a good experience, and so what we do now, for one, you're much closer to the screen so you can really work with an interface that you could also use on a touch screen. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's advisable to just display a website, right? Because even with touch, you wouldn’t just use a normal website, you would probably make the buttons larger and so on. But it's precise enough now that after a bit of learning, you can actually even interact with a website without any trouble. So this precision problem, it's really a thing of the past.
What we also do is that we give users basically visual cues, so they get a sort of cursor where we have a dot and a circle around it, and then they know, okay, if they move closer in and the two merge, then that's when they do the click and they get a click sound. So it has become more intuitive, more precise, but at the same time, you can also help people to ease into it, and then regarding that whole latency problem, here we are really working with a combination. So it's not only about modeling the hand, but it's also about taking a lot of other parameters, like distance to the screen and so on and tracking objects in this kind of 3D space that we create and that really allows you to interact very fast.
So I assume the UX design is super important, like the workflow and that you've learned a lot through the years?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, absolutely, I think that's next to the technology and to making it really precise on the software side, that's really the key point and that's also why we realized pretty early that we had to be involved in that process, at least at the start.
So, we really pass on our experience with that to agencies of our customers, we are really involved in the whole design process, and obviously it's about a lot of things, I think some of the things also have to be considered when you talk about touch screens which you use in a public space, obviously the size of buttons and the positioning, so position them in places where it's comfortable for people to reach and things like that, and a lot of those things, once you look at it, they seem pretty obvious but they're not that obvious when you're designing it, and when you're in the middle of the process.
Do you have to tell people up front on the screen, so to speak, that you don't need to touch this, or is it intuitive enough that as you reach to touch it, it’s gonna blink and give you a signal that, yeah you've done your action already?
Johannes Troger: So we've been experimenting with a lot of different ways to make people aware, starting from not making them aware at all and just letting them find out themselves. But what we do a lot of the time is that we give them little hints, little popups and so on when they touch the screen that they don't have to, in a nice way, and that it's basically a nice service to them that they don't have to touch the screen, but what we also do is that they still activate the button, even if they touch, right? So I think that's important because we don't wanna punish anyone for probably not getting it a few times.
At Infocomm, we had an app where the hint said in German, please don't touch or you don't have to touch. But it said it in German, and I was always joking. We do it wherever we are in the world. We do it in German because German is such a nice language for ordering people around. At the beginning we experimented with things like, if you touch the whole screen turned like flashing red and you would get MC Hammer’s Don't Touch This song and stuff like this. But what worked is, and we have tried a few apps where the concept or the idea behind it is that people, not in a straightforward tutorial get made aware of it or get taught to do anything, but that they explore it for themselves and are drawn into this by realizing, oh I'm moving my hand in front of the screen and something is happening.
So for example, we have one case where it's all about recipe inspiration in grocery stores and there you get drawn in by some audio visual cues to look at the screen, and then if you start moving your hand in front of it, and if you're about 20 centimeters or 15 centimeters away from it, there's this wooden cooking spoon on the screen, which starts moving with your hand, and so almost by accident, you realize, oh, I don't have to touch, and I'm still doing something, and we also do this with start buttons, which follow around your hand when you move it in front of the screen. And so this kind of accidental realization that, this is a touch free solution that is working really well, and that's what we can see in our data, and when we talk to users, which we routinely do, they usually say that's probably the most satisfying moment that they feel when they found out for themselves that this is something new.
When you install something, is there an adoption period where you can see at first there's lots of people physically touching the screen, but maybe a month later as you get repeat users, they get it?
Johannes Troger: So it's probably not so much an adoption period over the whole group of users. What we see is that typically a larger proportion of the users get it right away. So what we do is we basically track all the movements that happen in this kind of 3D space in front of the screen, and we use this to also tweak our algorithms and to work on that, and we also track how many of those little messages pop up when people are actually touching the screen, and so at one point when we were checking the numbers, we thought, okay, there's a hell of a lot of those messages, and we realized that they were restricted to very few sessions. So it seems that few people who don't get it, they really don't get it but the majority of people get it pretty much right away.
And this is optical sensing, right? So it's like those old leap motion, little chocolate bar kinds of size things that create this physical space in front of a screen?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, exactly. So we usually work with multiple sensors so that we can attach them on the screen, so in a kind of kiosks solution, they're built into that, but we also provide little boxes, which you can click on the sides of just a normal, old, passive screen that you have, and they basically from both sides, create this field and this multiple, camera approach also allows us to scale up in the number of cameras, which also allows us to, for example, in the retail solutions add a third camera, which is looking out and basically scanning the surroundings so that we can react to people walking past with the content in some audio visual ways.
So is there a little bit of AI and machine learning happening?
Johannes Troger: There is actually quite a lot of that happening, especially in the tweaking of the algorithms in regards to precision and to making it more intuitive, so one of the things on the roadmap is to use that to also be able to react to the way someone is interacting, so that after a couple of clicks we understand is this a power user, is it a regular user or is it a first time user? And then we can react in terms of the guidance that we give, and in that, there's quite a bit of machine learning involved.
You said you're a software company first and foremost, but you do sell hardware. Are you selling, kind of display totems that have this technology embedded in it? Because it's just simpler to have a full package, as opposed to saying, “We can do this part now go find the other part”?
Johannes Troger: Yeah. This is what we do, obviously in the early stages, and it's different for different use cases, right? So, for example, if it's about retail, we have partners who built the kiosk Systems, there's obviously a number of providers out there who custom build the kiosk to do what the customer wants, sometimes there's more involved. So it could be like a printer to be added to print out the recipes or some card reader which would be included. So that's where we work with the experts, but we can basically then deliver it end to end.
I guess what we're planning when we get to larger numbers, this kind of partner ecosystem is obviously gonna grow and what we are also working on is to also have basically this kind of retrofit model we can use the screens you already have and just have an upgrade path.
So it sounds like you do hardware because you have to in the early days, but ideally you're behind the curtain, so to speak, enabling other hardware manufacturers and solution providers to make this happen?
Johannes Troger: That's really the goal, yes.
But you gotta get from here to there first, right?
Johannes Troger: That's always when you bring in something new and when we were talking about the content and about designing the the UI and so on, I think if you bring out something new, you are always required to do much more than what you probably consider the core of your business, and of your innovative capabilities. I mean, if you do passive digital signage or you shoot a TV commercial or something, they're out there. There are thousands of agencies who understand the channel, who understand how it works and who can tell any customer perfectly how it works. But when you come to some new channel, which it really is, then there is no agency out there who has a whole desk full of best practices, and that's what we are seeing a lot of the time.
For example, with one customer, we were working on a solution, which is placed in petrol stations, and before that they had passive screens there and they obviously have what they do online, which is the only stuff they know how to do interactively, and so somewhere in between that, we had to find a way where the brand’s people said, yeah, that's fine, that's along our guidelines because they didn't have guidelines for that channel. So it's really about developing concepts for a whole new channel, and that's the same really with the hardware. So we talk to the hardware producers, to the kiosk producers and manufacturers, and we discuss with them how to best mount the sensors and how to bring it together.
So yeah, that's the fate of anyone who brings in an innovation, but I have to say, it's also the fun of it, right? Because it allows you to not only see this very narrow field in the value chain, but to also learn and understand about many other areas and become a more rounded business person for that.
Is it just the software that creates this field and does motion capture and all that? I believe you've got composer software that allows the end user to fully design the experience that their customers or their users are gonna see?
Johannes Troger: Exactly. We have a cloud software suite also behind that, so part of that is a composer software, which allows you to build the content. So you basically just upload the assets and activate them, and the other part is the, it's called the CX manager, the connected experience manager, and that really takes care of all the content distribution scheduling but also taking in the data that is created because other than a touch screen, we also have a lot of data that tracks what happens before someone starts interacting with that outward looking camera, ao we know how many people walk past, stop to look at the screen and so on, and it's really for monitoring the hardware, and it's really a system we started building a few years back and it's really geared towards being a central hub for all sorts of different interactive customer experience solutions that you have out there. So it also runs augmented reality car configurators which we did for a customer. It also runs beacon systems and mobile apps for customers.
So the idea is really everything that you bring out there for your customer experience or for creating customer experience can be run via that centrally.
Interesting. I noticed on your website that you referenced beacons and I thought there's a technology that had its moment and didn't seem to get much in terms of broad ranged adoption, but you're using them. How are you using them?
Johannes Troger: So, with beacons, it's use case where is really in the automobile industry, and It works in a way that the beacons are placed in the cars, and then if you have the manufacturer app you can step next to the car, and it displays all the facts about the configuration and about the car you're standing in front of
On a smartphone or…?
Johannes Troger: Yeah, on a smartphone.
So the idea behind that is really to provide information and then to allow people to take this information, and for example, then include it into their own configuration that they probably have done online and that they have stored in the app, and so that there really is a kind of exchange between the physical experience of the showroom and the digital experience they probably started at home.
If somebody stops you and says, who's your big client? What's that reference case that you like to talk about? What is that?
Johannes Troger: So, in automotive, the most work we have done is with Porsche, so for a long time they were our largest client and they were the most innovative ones really when it came to how to deliver more experience or more digital experience to their customers. In retail and consumer goods, the longstanding client and the most innovative one, and the one we were able to try and learn the most with this is definitely LEGO, and I think one part of that was really that they obviously understood the kind of playfulness of it right from the start, and what we are seeing is that really the retailers themselves that's something that really only has happened for the last two or three years.
I think, five years ago, a lot of the retailers still felt okay, the whole digital stuff in brick and mortar, that's mostly gadgets and let's just hang up a couple of screens and that's fine, if they even did that, but now for the last two or three years even in grocery, retail and so on, I'm hearing a lot of managers saying, okay, we know that we have to move and we know that we have to do a lot to be ready for the future, and I think the exciting thing at the moment is that other than, if you wanna build an online shop, there are a lot of people out there who can tell you that's how you build an online shop, but when you come to digital in the brick and mortar space, there's no one who can tell you those are the two or three recipes, that's how you build it, and that's it, right?
So probably passive digital signage is about the only thing that people by now know how it works, and you can find someone who does it for you and executes it nicely, and that's fine. But anything beyond that, it's still a lot of trial and error of finding out what is it really, what the customers want? What do they need? How can we attract them to use something?
All right, this was great. If people wanna know more about the company, how do they find that out? Where do they go online?
Johannes Troger: Obviously, the first point is our website, so it's www.ameria.com
Okay, perfect. All right, thanks again for spending the time with me.
Johannes Troger: Thank you, Dave. Thank you for a really interesting half-hour with you.
Wednesday May 18, 2022
Jeremy Jacobs, Enlighten
Wednesday May 18, 2022
Wednesday May 18, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The cannabis retailing industry is interesting in a whole bunch of ways. It is a unique vertical market with an absolutely screaming need for digital signage and interactive technologies.
While longtime recreational users may know their stuff, as US states and Canadian provinces have legalized, there's a whole bunch of new users coming in with needs that have more to do with sleep problems or arthritic joints. They walk into dispensaries and are confronted with products and options that are somewhat or entirely unfamiliar, so screens that promote and explain are very helpful and relevant.
The dispensary business is also interesting because the industry has its own overcrowded ecosystem of payments and management systems that need to somehow be tied together.
The largest player in cannabis digital signage is the Bowling Green, Kentucky firm Enlighten, which is in some 1,200 dispensaries in the United States,
I had a fun conversation with Enlighten founder Jeremy Jacobs, who found his way into digital signage when the clean energy business he was running went south in the late 2000s recession. He pivoted into screens in businesses, and menu displays for restaurants led to an opportunity to branch into cannabis retail. He's a super-smart, interesting guy more signage people should know about.
Enjoy.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what your company does?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Enlighten is the only real omni-channel company within the cannabis vertical particularly, and by omni-channel, we affect the customer journey throughout that entire customer journey. We have a product real quickly called AdSuite that targets people in a digital environment, whether it be mobile, Roku or even desktop computers based upon audience segmentation data we have, to know those are known cannabis consumers. And then we have our SmartHub product, which is an in-store product which is why we're here today, digital signage, kiosk related, and that product helps to upscale the customers that were brought in from the marketing from AdSuite.
And this could be on menu boards, this can be on information displays, this can be on tablets, any number of things, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so SmartHub is really unique. Even if you zoom out of the cannabis vertical and just look broadly at the digital signage industry, SmartHub is an extremely unique product that we created. It manages kiosks, it manages digital signage, all sorts of menus, feature boards, order queue systems, break room TVs, where the audience has shifted from a consumer to the actual employee. It uses extremely advanced logic and filtering with the point of sale data that it's consuming to make these things and even has an e-commerce component to it.
So really the way to think about it is that SmartHub is an extremely robust merchandising platform that manages all of your consumer facing surfaces, whether that surface is a passive screen, an interactive screen, like a kiosk or even the webpage where someone would come to purchase and make an order on your website.
And the cannabis industry is its own unique ecosystem, right? There's POS companies that only do cannabis business, and so on?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, I would say there's no true word than cannabis is its own individual ecosystem. So as a veteran, not been in the industry quite as long as you but since 2008, I've seen a lot of things and cannabis extremely unique. So it does have all of its own tech stack companies for the most part. There are a few companies, Microsoft Dynamics makes a sort of a POS system that's been modified for cannabis. But outside, I'll see a Square every now and then, but for the most part 99.99% of all point of sales systems at a digital signage company would integrate with are extremely cannabis specific and they all compete for what is roughly 8,500 retail clients across just short of 40 states, and so to talk about the uniqueness, even in more depth, not only are the stacks different in cannabis than they would be outside of that, but all the individual laws and rules that apply very literally from state to state. So you even have state variances.
Why would so many companies decide, “I want to be in a space that's changing constantly and not all that big and in the grand scheme of what retail is”?
Jeremy Jacobs: That's a great question. I think what your question was alluding to, there's the TAM, the total addressable market. You look at restaurants and there's literally hundreds of thousands of them, and I would argue there's barely as many POS companies in restaurants as there is inside of cannabis. And I think it's a couple of things. From an emotional standpoint, this is “the green rush” right? Any cannabis advocate that for the last hundred years that it's been illegal has felt violated by the error, has seensocial injustice from that. I believe there's an emotional component why a lot of these companies are there, a lot of these leaders are there. Second, there's a power vacuum that gets field when no one wants to go somewhere. So when you take a look at the cannabis industry, none of these major POS companies that we're referring to, none of them had any interest at all whatsoever in getting involved in cannabis. So the result of that is someone has to, and then the third prong, I think of this little fork here is that there is a green rush. The Anheuser Bushes of the world are about to be made of cannabis. There's very unique transactions, very unique audiences, and there's a lot of money to be made there. There's a lot of value and you can see companies that are in the space that make tech.
If you look on the internet, Weed Maps is probably the largest one, listed on the NASDAQ billion plus dollar company, recently Dutchie has made some announcements for billion plus dollar companies as well. So fortunes are being made even though the total addressable market is small.
Yeah, I've always thought that the cannabis dispensary business was a particularly interesting one for digital signage, because unlike most retail where you walk into an apparel retailer, you know what you're looking for, clothes, I need a shirt or whatever. It's pretty obvious.
But if I walk into a cannabis dispensary, I'm pretty much lost. I don't know what I'm even looking at and all these different strains of flowers and buds and this and that. It is like Mars to me. But, and I suspect a lot of people walk in like that who maybe aren't recreational users, but want it to help them sleep or calm them down or whatever purpose they have for it?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, and so to drill into that observation you've made is really there's two kinds of consumers that very quickly develop in cannabis. There's the customer that you just described, which is a new customer, and there's a lot of those, because again, cannabis was technically illegal for about a hundred years. And so there's a huge amount of new customers that don't know anything, and so there's a massive educational vacuum there, and that's actually, Enlighten really started as we recognize that, and so we created an in-store digital out of home, a television network that runs ads for brands and things of that nature, endemic or non-endemic. We've got clients like Door Dash or Vans shoes or FX networks and their cannabis shows, but the content that's on that network is educationally driven specifically to satisfy that lack of education that you just talked about, and then on the other end of that spectrum, there are these clients that very much know what they want and precisely what they're looking for and those particular clients aren't looking for that same experience. They're looking for, digital menus that can be sorted based upon terpenes are based upon cannabinoid profiles so the highest THC value, they're looking for is express checkout kiosks, so they don't have to have an interaction.
So uniqueness of the cannabis dispensary from a digital signage perspective is you have to create digital environments that satisfy both of those polar opposites.
I gather when you were talking about omni-channel that it's really important or helpful to a company playing in this space to be able to serve multiple needs and to integrate with the other technologies that are part of the ecosystem. If you just did digital signage, it's a walled garden thing where you're going to get much better reception for many users, whereas you can provide multiple components, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: Oh, absolutely. I've been in a lot of industries. The restaurant space was the first one. I was really into digital signage. Sysco Foods started slinging my digital menus for me, and like things 2009 and their 30 different offices and so I got to see a lot of things there. But in the first week in cannabis, eight years ago, the word integrate came up like 40 different times within an hour, and so I've never seen an industry that's so demanding of integrations. Like for example, you walk into a restaurant and any number of restaurants and you look over by the hostess stand and there's the DoorDash tablet, and there's a GrubHub tablet, and there's a Postmates tablet and there's all these tablets. And so the hostess is watching these orders come in and then they're putting them in their POS system.
That would never fly in the cannabis industry, like it's a demanded integration by these people, and so if you're going to create an integration engine, you're going to want to make it have more points of influence than just a TV menu, you're going to need to provide that e-commerce plug and you're going to need to provide those kiosks. You're going to want to link up with their customer data for targeting those customers, on their mobile devices. You're exactly right, if you're going to be relevant in cannabis, your stack better be serious because they're trying to reduce that vendor set to if they could just one, nobody does all of it, but they want to reduce that number to the smallest possible.
Is that in part, because it's a younger buyer audience who understands technology more and didn't grow up in kind of old style restaurants or whatever, where there were all these different systems?
Jeremy Jacobs: Interesting thing you said there,t because it's a younger buyer, so that was very true eight years ago. But at this point, that is not the truth at this juncture. So just a few years ago, I think it was two and a half years ago, the fastest growing segment of users shifted from 20 year olds to middle-aged mothers and it was the fastest growing audience, and then over the last few years, what has really been the fastest growing audience has actually been elderly people. It seems like they're starting to come to grips with, “Hey, I have pains and aches and cannabis is actually the solution”, and so it's a big growing segment.
But I think the answer to the question that you did ask is why is there this desire for a consolidation of a tech stack more than anything.
Yeah, I was thinking more of the operators that tend to be younger. Maybe that's not the case?
Jeremy Jacobs: Same thing at this point, it's not the case now, it's weird. So it was the case before, a hundred percent because who was willing to take that risk to get in the weed business, and so a hundred percent, but now I'm sitting in meetings with digital officers and marketing officers from Abercrombie and Apple, and they came from big organizations and so it's a very changing landscape.
But at the end of the day, I think that some of them are young, so yes, to your answer, very good observation. Second is the ones that aren't young are professionals, and they're used to dealing with that. But thirdly, I think for both of them, the demand of tech stack is necessary because the regulations and the data that they have to send back to the state agencies and authorities and all of those sorts of things and the compliance they have to undergo is worse than any other industry ever. Like they're under so much scrutiny and you could lose your license at the drop of a hat, and so they want less to deal with so they can focus more on staying in business.
Does that touch on your platform and what you do? Do you have to have a Nevada version of it and a Colorado version and I forget where else it's legal, California, obviously. But do you have to pass them out state by state or is it pretty uniform?
Jeremy Jacobs: Great question. So the technology itself is the same across all the states. AdSuite is AdSuite and SmartHub is SmartHub, but there are definitely nuances. So let me give you a couple of interesting examples in the state of Pennsylvania, you're not allowed to put anything up on a screen from a digital signage perspective, unless absolutely it has been medically proven. And so it needs to come from a doctor or some position, a medical authority, and in Alaska, for example, they don't believe anything has ever been proven by a doctor or medical authority and so you can't put anything up that even closely resembles a recommendation. So there's two polar opposites. So from a content perspective, I gotta watch those things.
From an advertising perspective. Some states, even though it's cannabis, won't let you show pictures of weed in the advertisements. Go figure that out. How do you advertise weed without showing weed? You can't show people consuming the product in a lot of states with advertisements. So there's another nuance, and then a third nuance is like in Pennsylvania, what I'm able to put on a digital menu is very specific and I cannot put any imagery into one thing, and I have to, I'm required to put certain testing results, similar to the way in the restaurant industry. Now everybody went digital whenever they were required to put the calorie count for these items, and that's when you saw this massive uprising in digital cause they got to replace all this stuff anyway, might as well go to the screen, and in Pennsylvania, I got to put things like that, testing results.
What's the content that seems to be required across all the different dispensaries, kind of the money messages that need to be there, and the operators want to have up there?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so from a TV menu perspective. We'll start with our that's the most largely adopted digital signage product ever and so the TV menu, what's necessary is the name of the products, the type of the product, the weight of the product, the price, the product, but really importantly, people want to know about cannabinoid profiles, is this high or low in THC? The psychoactive ingredient that gives you the feeling of a high, is it higher, lower in CBD, which is the non-psychoactive ingredient that really focuses a lot on pain, arthritis and inflammation and things of that nature, muscle pain. So consumers sort of demand that, operators want to provide that.
And from an educational perspective, if you're talking about a different digital signage product and just more like digital signage, we're producing educational videos, the demand really is around education of what are these different terpenes, what are these different cannabinoids, these little things inside of the cannabis that creates different effect for each strain, like this one makes me sleepy, this one makes me energetic, this one's great for back pain, and so that's the demand from a regulatory standpoint of pretty much the only uniform thing that I can't really do is show anything that's cartoonish that might want to lure children into the store.
There was a big problem with packaging for edibles for a while there, right?
Jeremy Jacobs: It was, they've got sour patch kids on the box, and the first versions of edibles were very kid friendly because they took kids candies and made them, and now that's pretty much been regulated out. So the same thing, that same sort of concern with the packaging that you pointed out with edibles is also a concern in digital signage and even digital advertising. So if I'm targeting a mobile phone, even though I'm targeting a known cannabis consumer, just stay away from anything that might be alluring to children.
So if I'm a customer of Enlighten, is it a SaaS platform that I am using?.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, so the two products are different. The SmartHub is the in-store signage, kiosk, kind of technology that manages all of that and talks to your POS system. That is definitely a SaaS product. As far as pricing models, there's been a lot of those in digital signage, our kiosk system is one price for your entire store and use as many as you want. Our signage model is the same as anyone else's, per node. SaaS model on our AdSuite product, though that is a SaaS product, if you will, it's a piece of software that gains you access to those audiences on our DOH network and in stores, as well as, digital Roku devices, mobile devices, desktop computers but that's driven just like any other digital advertising model would be external on a cost per impression basis.
What's the footprint for your company at this point?
Jeremy Jacobs: So we've reached a really interesting crossroads, very few companies in cannabis have ever got over that thousand mark. Right now, I would estimate we're in probably roughly 1200 dispensaries, somewhere thereabouts and then have several hundred other clients that are brands and so forth so our footprint reaches to about 1500 or so clients, big number and a TAM of 8,500, if you look at it that way.
And this is an industry that like more and more states seem to be coming on stream, or at least there's a push to bring them on stream. So it's not like it's a finite market right now?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah. So that's part of the growth. When we're assessing growth, there's a couple ways to look at it. One is how we can get more money out of the existing customers and that's to offer premium versions of our products, additional services that might be out there that we could focus on. But also there's just the overall growth of the entire market itself, and there's a couple of phases of that. The first phase is for the state to go medical. So now, they can be a client of ours. But typically, we find the greatest traction in the states once they go recreational because what happens is their revenue growth is astronomical.
People don't appear to want to go to get a medical license nearly as easily as just walking in a dispensary. So whenever they go recreational, they buy a lot of other products from us and really focus on that retail environment and creating a magical experience for those recreational customers. So really there's two phases, medical, and then recreational. But right now you're looking at cannabis in almost 40 states at a medical level roughly 10 or so at a recreational level. I’m averaging there, the number changes. I haven't kept track of it in a minute, but to give you an idea of growth, there's about 10-12 to go to medical and then there's the vast majority or 80 plus percent that are not yet recreational. So a lot of growth in them.
Are you up in Canada as well?
Jeremy Jacobs: We are. So it's a lot of challenges working inside cannabis, anybody's ever nailed internationally. You have to have your own bank accounts, your incorporations, your teams up there. It's hard to import hardware products, and as a company, we do also provide the hardware. So that has its own challenges, but we do operate in Canada. We've got some systems in Puerto Rico, which is a US territory. Jamaica, we send some things too. We have some plans we're brewing up. Spain has a pretty good sized cannabis market and so we're looking internationally there because the challenge is the same. People don't understand cannabis, they need education. That's the same worldwide. It's been illegal globally, for a hundred years.
How did you get into it? You mentioned that your first foray into digital signage was restaurants for Sysco, how did you end up in this?
Jeremy Jacobs: So in 2008, I started a company called IconicTV, and it's had many offshoots with verticals. I've been one of those guys when I see a vertical, I'd make a very precise product. We helped build a C-store DOH network called C-store TV. We had a school product called, school menu guru. We had a lobby product called lobby Fox, it does visitor management and so one of those products we noticed early on was digital TV menus, and so in 2009, I formed a deal with Sysco foods and they have 30 offices across the country that would distribute my digital signage, digital TV menu products to their restaurant tours. And so I hired these vice presidents in each of those areas to partner with those offices as Sysco calls an opco, and so Sysco would have reps and my reps would go do ride alongs, and so they would ride along with these representatives and go in and meet these restaurant tours at work and stuff. One of them, the guy in Denver, Colorado, Ted Tilton's name? So Ted called me one day and this is right before cannabis goes legal in Colorado, which was the first state to legalize recreational cannabis, Washington and Colorado voted on it basically at the same time. But Colorado was the first actually who implemented, and he calls me, he says, Hey man, I got this idea and I said, what is it? He goes, these TV menus we’re selling through Sysco. I said, yeah, he goes, what do you think about making some for marijuana? I said, what are you talking about? And he says I've got these buddies opening this dispensary called DANK, and it'll be the closest dispensary to Denver International airport and I got this feeling as soon as weed was legal in Colorado, a lot of people are going to be coming into DIA and this place is going to be really busy since it's the closest one, and he says, and I was like, what would be the difference? And he said, essentially we put up marijuana buds instead of chicken sandwiches. And I said, I'm in.
I've been a big advocate of cannabis for a long time. At one point, I was even the executive director of Kentucky NORMAL, the division of the national organization for marijuana legalization. It's the Kentucky chapter. I've been a big advocate of it. I've been a self prescribed patient for many years. It was an interesting opportunity to take a couple of things I was very passionate about both cannabis and digital signage and went to do some real work on two things I care about. So we dove in.
Has the profile of the operator changed?
I remember talking to another person who's involved in this space and actually being out in Denver and he was saying that there’s two types of operators. There's a business people who see this as a growth opportunity, and they've already had some experience in retail or in investing or whatever, and then there's growers and growers who are turning into retailers and he said the challenge with the growers as they're growers, they're not business people and they don't really understand retail, and I'm curious if in the early days you saw a lot of them stories of dispensaries that would start up and then drop off because they didn't really know what they were doing?
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, and I'll take that example. Your friend gave you a pretty good insight there, but to expand on that, I don't even think it's just growers though. It's I think just very weed passionate people, like they're very passionate about it. Whether it's consuming it or making concentrates or growing it or whatever. So I would just call them plant passionate people versus business people, and it very much exists, and it doesn't today to the degree that it used to. In the beginning, someone that's a senior executive vice president of Abercrombie is not going to go start a dispensary, like during the first couple of years, we were all wondering if everybody opened these things, were all gonna go to jail. I'm sure everybody in America is going everybody in Denver is going to do it, just wait, and if all my friends at open dispensaries were sitting around, I would have conversations with the night and they're like, I'm just wondering if tonight, the DEA raids my house, and so nobody wanted to be under that scrutiny except plant passionate people.
But as time got on and the federal government sorta started to take a position, even if the position was, “we don't have a position”, that's still a position, and so they're not taking an aggressive stance on it then you began to see real business people start to come into the environment and at this point, you have organizations like Cresco who just bought Columbia Care, and these operators have over a hundred stores and they're doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in retail cannabis sales. These are not the type of marijuana dispensary that I think most people have in their mind. These people have entire floors of IT teams. They have entire floors and marketing teams. They do in-depth customer insight studies, and that influences every tiny nuance of their packaging and their store layouts. These are real operations, but I can still take you to Oregon right now and walk into the shop or Nancy and Megan who are best friends and they have tie-died things up on the wall and they're very whimsical people that are just very passionate and who also have a successful sotry. Now they're not going to sell hundreds of millions of dollars to cannabis, but they're also successfully operating.
Think of it like liquor, for example, Liquor Barn exists and that's a big corporation. But, in the town I live in, everybody wants to go to Chuck's Liquors when Chuck was alive, because Chuck was just the coolest guy ever. So you went to Chuck, so they both have a place.
Yeah, I've certainly seen the same thing. I remember being an Amsterdam for ISE and, you'd stick your head into one of these coffee shops, and it was just a hole in the wall and weird but out by the hotel where I was staying, there was a dispensary that looked like an Apple store, like it was very slick.
Jeremy Jacobs: Interesting you say that. So there's this place called Euflora and Jamie Perino was one of the owners at the time and it's at the 16th street walking district in downtown Denver. This is the big street with the old piano outside and everybody wandering around a very touristy area and so we did the first project for them that I remember getting a call from them and they're like, “Hey, we open in 11 days and we've got this crazy idea where there'll be a touchscreen kiosk and it's sitting next to a jar of marijuana, and this kiosk has all this interactive stuff on it with everything about that strain of marijuana. We needed in our stores in 11 days. Can you guys do it?” And they said, oh yeah, and our budget is X, and I just laughed, and I said X is missing a couple of zeros, especially for 11 days, what are you talking about? And they're like, can you do it or not? And I said I can, but I shouldn't but I'm going to, and so we did, because we wanted to be part of the exposing of this whole thing.
And so we took it on, and so when you would first walk on your floor, you can dig up some old video files from the news channels from eight years ago, it very much looked like an Apple store cause we had Apple iPads on every table next to a jar of marijuana and you can scroll up and down and see what the euphoric effects would be and does it make you sleepy, happy, hungry, horny, what's it going to do? And, in what genetics, where did it come from? And just all this interesting stuff, and people would come into that store fascinated, and so it was very Apple-esque.
How did you end up in digital signage? Cause I was looking at your bio and you've got patents in Magneto, hydrodynamics for energy exploration, drilling and everything. How did you get here?
Jeremy Jacobs: What the hell happened? Early in life I realized I didn't really like formal education. So I think I'm like nine hours from a college degree, but I dropped out and became entrepreneurial. So I became an investment broker and I worked on several different fundraising deals, most of them were driven around biodiesel. That was very active at the time when I dropped out of college, nearly two thousand, biodiesel was a thing, a lot of different technologies. And very quickly I got interested in alternative energy technologies and energy efficiency technologies, and just anything that was energy related, and technology related, and so I had an operation with about 20,000 acres of natural gas wells in Eastern Kentucky that were clean natural gas wells using advanced technologies like hydraulic fracturing.
I started inventing Magneto hydrodynamic technologies that's used by Chevron and Exxon and people that. It goes down in oil wells. It's used to eliminate paraffin and that technology has now been adopted by the DoD to make airlines, to make fighter jets fly farther because the fluid systems flow better and a lot of different things, and then 2008 came, so I own a quarry, that's mine and silica for Silicon to make marker processors, and I got a bunch of natural gas, wells and magnetic technologies, and 2008 comes, 2007 comes, the housing crisis collapses, everything and natural gas went from about $14 in MCF, which was a vast majority of the revenue that we were driving to like a dollar and a half in MCF, which is the unit that you produce and sell for, it stands for thousand cubic feet, and I needed $3 to make that make sense, right? And now it's at a dollar and a half. So I went from really cash flow positive to a hundred percent cash flow negative and just a matter of months.
And on top of that, when you own a bunch of quarries, nobody's buying any materials, and so I look up and literally everything I'm involved in just all of a sudden is collapsing and I don't have the payroll to make payroll for this massive bunch of employees. We had several offices in different parts across the country. And surely it was excruciatingly painful fast. Everything had to close, and so here's, here's the reality. I'm at home depressed out of my mind. I've just had to lay everyone off. I've had to shut in all these gas wells. I've had to lock the gates on all these quarries and nobody wants to talk about anything, everybody's going broke and my wife comes to me and she says, you've got to do something. We have kids we have to feed, we have bills we have to pay. You cannot sit here and be depressed, and I had seen somewhere I think it was in a mall. A friend of mine had built a TV screen, turned sideways, and it had Adobe Flash player on it, and it was playing some animated motion graphics that he controlled on a desktop PC inside this big kiosk and I thought I could do something similar to that, and so I literally grabbed a 32 inch Vizio TV out of my living room. My wife goes, where are you going with my TV? I said, I'll bring it back to you. I'll see you in a week, and she goes, you are leaving with the TV for a week? I said, yeah, and you’ll get a bigger one, I promise, and I grabbed the Toshiba laptop that my field hands that would go around, they had to log what parts they use and how long they were on job sites and stuff, and I grabbed one of these old stinky laptops that smells like crude oil and hung it in a friend of mine's restaurant in Clarkson, Kentucky. It was called K's cafe and it was political season, and so I'm going to tell a story about myself here, Dave, and so I go around and build these very animated PowerPoints and I'm changing the files out via LogMeIn at the time. I didn't even have any software, digital signage software. I didn't even know about the digital signage thing.
And so I'm like, I gotta sell ads on this thing, so I go to this guy that's running for sheriff, and I told a little white lie. I was like, Hey man, the other guy that's running for sheriff, he's buying in on my screens. It's in the most high traffic restaurant, and apparently legally, I've got to offer you the same opportunity at the same price. He goes, why what's he paying? And I told him, he goes, I'll take it, and so then I went to the guy that I just told a white lie and said, this other guy is buying. It was, which was actually true the second time. That's how I got started, I had to feed my kids. I had a 32-inch Vizio TV and a busted up laptop and I sold some people aspiring to be politicians, some ads and some real estate agents, and it just grew from there. I look up and I’m in hundreds of restaurants and fitness centers with the DOH network and six months later, a friend of mine says, Hey, can you use one of those silly ad TVs and make a menu on it because the price of salmon keeps fluctuating so much. I got to put these mailbox letters, and so we made, which was one of the early digital menus. I think we'd both agree, 2009-2009 was not the dawning moment of digital menus. It wasn't the precipice of it. That was very early.
And so we started using those and saw opportunities to replace those little black felt directories with the letters you run out of the M, and so you flip the W upside down, it's all bow legged looking, on the little felt boards. We started making digital directories integrated with Google sheets, so you could change it easily and the rest was history, man. I dove in and needless to say, the kids are fed now. The wife is happy. She got a bigger TV. I think it's 70 inch now. So everyone's cool.
That's a hell of a pivot.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, buddy. Necessity is the mother of invention.
All right. This was terrific. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Jeremy Jacobs: Yeah, man. I was going to start off this morning saying longtime listener, first time caller. I've been watching your website, your blog, your podcast for as long as I can remember. So it's been an honor to finally get to be a part of it, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you for taking the time with me.
Jeremy Jacobs: I thank you, Dave.
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Geoff Bessin, Intuiface
Tuesday May 10, 2022
Tuesday May 10, 2022
NOTE - Podcasts normally come out on Wednesdays, but as a favor to Intuiface - which is at this week's ISE trade show in Spain - I moved it up a day to coincide with the show's opening day ...
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
One of the big trends in the software world is the whole idea of no code development - the premise that both programmers and mere mortals can create applications without getting their typing fingers dirty and brains fried doing traditional computer programming.
The proposition is that no code development platforms can cut out a lot of time and cost associated with pulling applications together, and also deal with the reality that good programmers are in high demand and therefore scarce.
The French software firm Intuiface is in the interesting position of having offered a no code platform long before no code was a discussion point, so the folks there are a great resource for discussing the implications for the digital signage and interactive display market.
I spoke with Geoff Bessin, the CMO and main voice for Intuiface, about the distinctions between no code and low code development platforms, and how they differ from the simple drag and drop, what you see is what you get user interfaces that are common in digital signage content management systems. We also dig into the benefits, the limitations, and more than anything, why you should know and care about no code.
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TRANSCRIPT
Geoff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown first on what Intuiface is all about?
Geoff Bessin: Will do, Dave, thank you for having me. So Intuiface is a no-code platform dedicated to the creation of interactive digital content. That includes digital signage, but really it can anything in the venue. It could be a museum exhibition, could be a sales pitch for a movie sales team, could be anything at a trade show, something in a real estate office, et cetera. So you create it, you deploy it, you can do analytics with it. It’s all good.
And the company is based in France, correct?
Geoff Bessin: We are headquartered in a town called Labège, which is right outside Toulouse in France. Although I'm not, but it's funny, my name is Geoffrey Besson, so both my first and last name look French. So people always assume it's French, but that’s not the case. I'm in Boston.
Can you speak a lick of French?
Geoff Bessin: Oui. Yes.
Good for you! I wanted to talk about no-code software, cause you guys have been no-code before people were even using that term and no-code is one of these trends, just like headless CMS, that seems to be bubbling up and maybe people don't understand a lot about it yet.
Geoff Bessin: Yeah, you could go back to the 80s and find things like HyperCard where you were enabling non-developers to create an application of some sorts. So it goes back a long way, but in terms of a movement, generating notice, gaining investment and having companies spend money on it, it's only been the past few years.
I can tell you that statistics are now saying that the market size, the amount of money being spent on no-code software used to create apps is almost $14 billion. It's a lot of money being pumped into these apps. And in fact, more than 65% of apps are now created using no-code tools. So more than 50%, more than half of apps are being built with no-code software. It is the predominant means of delivering applications these days.
What's the distinction between no-code and low-code, because I've heard both terms.
Geoff Bessin: There's no formal distinction. You can't point at it and go, “Oh, this one’s no-code” like you just went over the line. But the idea is that with low-code, there are back doors. There are means to enhance, to extend, to facilitate integration that might involve a little bit of coding. Even that coding could be simplified based on maybe either a scripting language that is native to the tool or a public scripting language like Ruby.
Whereas no-code is just 100%, you're not going to see code anywhere, and so you are in a way limited to the sandbox provided by the no-code platform, what it is you're able to deliver is limited by what you can piece together with the Lego blocks of that platform. no-code gives you those little back doors to branch yourself out.
So what does it mean for development? Does it distance or mediate the need for application developers completely, and just any old end-user can produce an application without having to engage developers or is it more something that accelerates the development process and just gets some cost and time out of the way?
Geoff Bessin: I think that question brings us to who's doing it, and why are they doing it? As I mentioned, no-code has exploded recently, and it is due to a set of developments that have driven application development to what is now called the “citizen developer.”
Trends such as a shortage of developers, it's not that we're trying to get rid of them. It's that there’s not enough. I saw one statistic that back in 2020, there were 1.2 million unfilled developer jobs in the United States, just the US but 1.2 million developer jobs unfilled in the US and colleges and universities were only cranking out about 400,000 developers. There's a shortage. So it's not that we don't want them, we don't have them. What do you do about that? There was also COVID, which has greatly accelerated investment in these no-code platforms, because everything moved online, and when everything moved online, everything needed to be digitized and companies realized we have to move now but we don't have enough resources, so how the heck are we going to digitize these things?
And then there's also tangential, but influential, the fact that even in our own home, we're not coders, but we are programmers. If I'm working with my Nest thermostat, that's programming. I just got a puppy and they have these apps that you can then program to see how many steps they've taken and how much water they drink, that's programming, and the digital native is used to controlling their environment digitally. There are tools out there that enable them to realize their ideas as an application, and somebody has to build it because there's not enough developers to go around. That's what really kicked the no-code market in the butt.
What we're seeing subsequently is that the developer shortage is being filled by these citizen developers producing applications, maybe for personal use, maybe for internal employee use, maybe for customer us, it depends. Those developers are now being transitioned to work on larger projects, more intricate projects. They have more time arguably to focus on the big tickets stuff that still needs the hardcore development, offloading their responsibility from the simpler things that can now be handled by that citizen developer.
Are there trade offs that you have to accept, to use no-code instead of just doing your own thing?
Geoff Bessin: Certainly. There are obvious advantages, there's speed and there's costs benefits. There's a big productivity boost, but of course there's trade offs. I like this notion of Legos. You have these prebuilt blocks and this is a finite number of block options that you can combine in an infinite number of ways. At the end of the day, you're still limited to those blocks, right? And so if I'm using a no-code platform and I need a block that doesn't exist, I'm stuck.
Now, I suppose if it's a low-code platform, depending on what I need to achieve,okay, maybe I can put something together if I have the skill, maybe I don't, but if I don't have the skill or if the opportunity with the platform doesn't exist, I am limited, and I think that might be the fundamental challenge is what can I do? What can I realize? Cause recognize that a lot of these platforms are built to be generic, to address sort of breadth, not always depth, and so that can be a challenge. You are also, of course, relying on them to be responsible for performance and reliability. You are handing over that duty, that responsibility to the provider, the no-code platform. I hope they're doing a good job. Because it's out of my hands, I can't control that, and so those are the big risks: can I achieve exactly what I want or am I making compromises? Am I achieving the level of performance? My ability to deploy? My ability to collect data analytics? My ability to manage that deployment?
There's 150-200 platforms across the spectrum offering no-code and low-code options. You might be making some compromises on the way, certainly are, but as I shared with you, 65% of apps are now built with no-code platforms. So companies have decided it's worth the risk.
What's the distinction between no-code and what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) user interfaces?
Geoff Bessin: No-code, I think it's more of a connotation, not a denotation. I think you could argue that a lot of no-code platforms are WYSIWYG. Intuiface is a no-code platform, it's a drag and drop tool. It's a WYSIWYG. The connotation of WYSIWYG, it could be for a developer. It could be for anybody of any skill set. So it's more of a generic catchall for applications enabled to create other applications by dragging components and you can see what they look like at design time and development time.
No-code connotes the non-developer, the citizen developer that you don't have coding skills and you're not expected to have those skills. So I think that's it.
You sent me a white paper that kind of goes into this and you're making the argument that while no-code is out there, it's exploding and growing and everything else, there's really no application, I think you called it a ‘no-code blind spot’ in terms of in-venue applications. What do you mean by that?
Geoff Bessin: So let's define in-venue because that is exactly our contention. In-venue is an encapsulation of any digital deployment out of the home. It could be digital signage, could be all those things I mentioned with Intuiface as well, the museum exhibition, the sales presentation, real estate office, et cetera. It is out of the home. It is not my phone though. It is not my PC. I'm not browsing the web at home. I'm out of my home, I'm in a venue and there is some digital content trying to communicate to educate, to promote, to sell to me.
That domain has been, I think with the exception of Intuiface, untouched by the no-code movement. For sure, if you look at the landscape of companies delivering solutions to address the needs of the citizen developer, there is nothing out there addressing these in-venue deployments. It's all about web and mobile apps and some websites, that's it. So if you want to create digital signage, if you want to create that museum exhibition, the sales pitch, there is no option out there now, and which brings us David, I know you're going to want to ask this, which is, will, aren't all digital signage platforms, no-code? Which is great question, Dave, by the way...
You are a psychic!
Geoff Bessin: That's a yes, but, it is absolutely true that you don't write code, but there are certain expectations of a no-code platform that the traditional digital signage CMS cannot fulfill, and it's interesting if I take a step back, really by definition, it has always been the non-developer on the digital signage side, hasn’t it? You buy a platform, there's a CMS, the user of the content management system is the content person. They're not coding anything. They're working with the CMS, they're assigning content to zones and they're day partying. By definition from day one, digital signage was always a non-developer domain, whereas web and mobile apps and these sorts of things were always the developer domain.
The no-code movement was, “Hey, this complicated stuff, we gotta make it simpler. We need the citizen developer involved.” So they brought no-code to the domain that started with developers, which I think is one of the explanations for why it didn't really come over to the in-venue side yet, because it was always non-coder users, but there are certain expectations of the no-code platform, that is not really in scope of the platform delivering in-venue content. A simple example, just to give you one would be the notion of context. To react to the user, react to the environment, in real time in that context, and do something as a result that is inherently this notion of logic. If this, then that. That's coding, right? It's got the whiff of coding and how do you do that? And there's a list of things we can discuss about what makes in-venue unique. But it requires the accommodation of additional concerns that are beyond the scope of what a traditional CMS does and that no other no-code platform does across the no-code spectrum.
I guess what you're saying in certain respects is you can develop a playlist, do all the basic functionality of a digital sign, you can target content and everything else, but the moment you get into a request to do something different, that's interactive, that as you say, maybe responds to triggers and so on, that gets a lot more complicated, and at that point you're putting in, if you're an end user, you're putting in a request to your reseller or to the software company directly saying, can you do this? And they'll say, yes, we can, but it's going to take this amount of time, this amount of money and, we can't get this to you for six months cause it's off of our roadmap or whatever… Is that one of the arguments you'd make?
Geoff Bessin: I would say that for sure. You see, a lot of companies have libraries. Here's our template library, here’s our plugin library, here's our integration library. Oh, you want something we don't have? We can build that for you. Here's the cost. Here's how long it's going to take. That's one example.
I can tell you that from a Intuiface perspective, we don't have any libraries. We haven't really prebuilt anything. Our paradigm is to enable integration with any web service, to create any UI, to integrate with any content management system, to have that ubiquity, which means that we don't have to build anything for our clients. The customer can do that. But it also means that, well, you better have a good idea and you better need to know what you. Because you're starting with a tabula rasa, but yes, that is certainly one good example of how you fulfill these sort of unique needs you might have thought about. I'll give you another example, which is retail point of sale. How would you build that thing? To me, that qualifies as an in-venue application. That's in the venue, right? I can order through a website, but do I want to put a website on a kiosk? It's a different domain. It's a different paradigm. It has different design requirements, different expectations, different issues about security, about being able to run potentially offline. But having to work with peripherals, having hyper-local context dependence, there are all of these concerns that will impact that user experience in the venue that may not be relevant or at all to a web experience. If I want to build that thing, how much flexibility am I going to have? Now there are companies like Grubber, which are pretty much pre-built everything, right? All you do is you push your menu into their back office system, and you're good to go. You just have to hope it does exactly what it is you want because you're constrained within the confines of what they offer for design, with the offer for business process, what they offer in terms of context, awareness, and reaction and if you need to make any kind of changes, you're dependent on them to make those changes, and that has a cost and a time penalty to it.
What kind of skillsets do you realistically need to use a no-code particularly in the context of Intuiface? I'm assuming the proposition is anybody can sit down, but you still have to plan out, you have to have some methodical thinking about what you want to do with what the decision tree is on all that stuff, right?
Geoff Bessin: You do, and that gives me an opportunity to give you just a brief history of Intuiface because we were never a no-code company, that wasn't how we were oriented. The company was actually founded back in 2002. It was founded by a couple of PhDs with expertise in touch technology. And from day one, it was about bringing user experiences to a lot of it was, believe it or not, the defense industry, but also retail, touch-driven user experiences for something, to accomplish something. The company was always about the user experience.
At the end of the day, as great as your touch technology might be, nobody cares if it's not usable. If it doesn't make it easy to achieve some goal, and so Intuiface, when it was born it was all about the user experience, and in fact, most of its early hires were focused on that, on how to make something intuitive and that where the company name comes from, an intuitive interface. To make intuitive user experiences that we're driven by interaction like touch. What happened was we were servicing all of these organizations, again, a lot of defense, Intuiface is headquartered just outside the Toulouse, as i mentioned. So you have the big aerospace and defense industry located in Toulouse like Airbus. So a lot of those clients, but also retail, commerce. Focused on user experience, and it was hard to scale the business because you had this deep technical dependency underneath because it's driven by touch and we’re going back 15 years, so expensive hardware, challenging technology, and at the same time, trying to come up with these really intuitive user interfaces, it was a challenge, and we decided internally, I say we, but I wasn't here yet. Intuiface decided internally that we need to come up with something that can accelerate our ability to deliver good user experiences on top of this touch technology.
The company builds something called Intuikit, it was used internally by user experience experts, designers, and people good at aesthetics, people good at thinking about the customer. They were not developers. Ultimately, we decided this thing called Intuikit is pretty awesome, maybe that's our business, and so we're. It's a short story about how the software platform Intuiface was born. We were always about the user experience. It is our expectation that our users are experts in the users, creating intuitive interfaces, not In having any necessary knowledge about development. So that is our expectation, and that's what we think is appropriate. You need to be creative. You need to understand the user. You need to understand the domain. You don't have to worry about the platform you're building it on. That should not be your problem. You should be all about solving the customer's problem.
I realize you work with a bunch of industries, but a lot of your activity is in digital signage. If I am an end-user and I'm using ACME digital signage software, can I use the Intuiface with it? Does it plug into it or are there restrictions? Do you have to go through door number one or door number two, you can't use both doors?
Geoff Bessin: Probably, you can't do. Typically the content management system used by the DS platform is proprietary. It's a closed system. It doesn't have a published API. So we couldn't read from it. Intuiface conversely has its own runtime as well. We can run side by side. In fact, on Windows, we have the ability to run side by side with other applications, we have had customers who are not ready to transition off their existing DS investment. So they were sort of a cohabitating interactive Intuiface based content at one part of the screen and traditional DS content and others were cohabitating that screen. But normally no, that wouldn't be how one would do it.
Certainly Intuiface is positioned around interactivity. We believe that by definition, once you introduce interactivity and the need to be responsive and context, and to accommodate not just touch, but sensors and voice and computer vision, when you need to account for all of these things, you need to be very good at that if-when, right? And that notion of conditional responses to events which are completely typically outside the realm of the traditional DS platform. That's where we start, and then clients can decide, do I want these Intuiface to co-exist with this DS platform? Or do we need to make some sort of transition.
If I'm an end-user and I start with Intuiface and have a series of interactive screens that are doing some sort of functionality, whatever it may be and then I decide, I want to also have an expanding network of “dumb screens” that are just running traditional digital signage content in some sort of a sequence. Can you do that too?
Geoff Bessin: Sure, the content doesn't know it’s in a dumb playlist, right? The content is fine. Certainly you can do that. The Intuiface was born, solving the interactive problem. And it's interesting, Dave, because in the early days of selling our platform, digital signage was something else. You didn’t touch signage. So our communication to the marketplace was not interactive signage. There wasn't such a thing. There was interactive content for kiosks. That was the world when we first walked in, you were touching something such as a table or a kiosk. There were touch screens, very expensive touch screens. You could be bound on a wall, never a perceptive pixel from a million years ago. Like those CNN screens and that sort of thing. You spend $2,500, you can have a touchscreen, but bylarge, it was kiosks and that sort of thing.
What happened was that they had this largely commoditized, digital signage space, hundreds of companies offering traditional digital signage and customers had iPhones in their pocket and they had iPads at home, and they started thinking about interactivity. They see the voting coverage on CNN and people tapping screens. So can you do that? That's why we started getting questions about traditional digital signage. Can you fulfill that as well? We were like yeah, we can, and over the years we developed additional capability to accommodate it.
The paradigm is still different. We don't have a traditional notion of a playlist for example, but you can create a playlist within Intuiface. We're using our Lego blocks, not just to build interactive content, but non-interactive content as well. You can do both.
So it was something you could do, but it's not your focus?
Geoff Bessin: I would say, we’res interactive first, but the traditional broadcast signage, and I don't mean this in a judgy way, it's not typically that complicated. So if it is a playlist of stuff, images, videos, documents, it's very easily done, but people very rarely come to us, Dave, with traditional first. They're coming to us because they need to solve an interactive need, and oh, by the way, long-term you can transition to traditional content as well.
I agree that, the conventional side of digital signage, the meat potatoes, run this stuff at this time and these locations and all that is commoditized and pretty simple, and I always say that the complicated stuff is behind the scenes, the device management, the API integrations and all that sort of stuff. Are you at a level now where you can provide the building blocks, the Lego blocks to do the interactive piece, but also enable the end user to monitor and remotely manage all that?
Geoff Bessin: We do offer that, and in fact we offer both of what you mentioned, cause you also mentioned the API integration, we can accommodate that as well.
On the device management side, certainly we have an awareness of the devices in the field and you can set up notifications if things are going wrong, that sort of thing, you can see what's running on those devices. On certain platforms, you can remotely update on runtime, that sort of thing. We're not averse to working with a device and platform management options, to collaborate with them in a deployment, but we do offer some of that. And with API integration, we've actually offered for six years. It's been a long time and it's one of those things, Dave, where, as I said, we weren’t born with no-code. We were born worried about user experience and we realized we looked in the mirror and wen, oh, we're actually no-code.
We've been offering a software called API Explorer. You can automatically create an integration, an integration with a web API without writing code And it is a real time integration reading from writing to that web API. It could be a back office system, ERP application, CRM application could be a database wrapped in an API, could be a device on the internet of things, all of these options can be integrated with a running Intuiface experienced by a non-developer, using API Explorer. So we've offered that for some time.
We now have our own CMS but you don't have to use it. Our original value prop is to use whatever you want. We have API Explorer, you can plug into whatever you want. We have now introduced our own because depending on the scenario and the requirements of the project, it just makes better sense to use ours. But we still have customers that would rather use that other thing, or Dave, they’re integrated with the ERP application. They're building a retail point of sale application with Intuiface, and they have integrated with the ERP system, they need to work with the API and you can do that.
Who would you describe as your kind of core end-users, core customers?
Geoff Bessin: I would say 50 to 60% of our customers are agencies and integrators. So we can discuss with the actual user might be, but I would say more than half of our installed base are agencies and integrators with their own clients. And there is a spectrum of reasons why they're using Intuiface. Some of them, they don't have the development skill, but they want to offer interactivity. Others have men and women on the bench with the skill, but they don't have the scale. That's the problem with people is that they can work on one thing at a time.
And what we find is that a lot of the integrators in particular will be taking Intuiface so they can scale. They can take on a larger volume of maybe small and mid-sized projects that they can do with Intuiface, and then put the men and women on the bench onto the bigger high value projects. We find that customers are saving 80% of time and 60% of costs versus customer that don’t use Intuiface. So it's very easy for them, and it's an easy pitch. Conceptually, if you can build an interactive application, doing exactly what you want with a no-code platform is probably cheaper and faster than if I wrote code, so it's an easy idea to wallow and it is what our customers experience. So that's what you'll find. I would say the majority 60%-55% agencies and integrators, the rest are the small and midsize museums, schools, retailers, sales offices, marketing, and sales teams, they want to do it themselves.
And do they want to do it themselves because of cost or control?
Geoff Bessin: Often it's because of cost. They have ambition or they've been bitten, Dave, where they have outsourced it. You don't see this going in, but you meet an agency. You tell them what you want, they agree and deliver something in two months that doesn’t resemble what you wanted, so you ask for revisions, and this cycle continues while you pay for the time. It's not an agile process, and again, I'm not casting aspersions at the agency, they are our customers. But their sales pitch is we use Intuiface so we can deliver what you want faster than the other guys that do exactly what you want, and by the way, if you don't like the work we did, you can take it with you.
If I pay an agency to write custom code and I'll be dissatisfied, I'm starting from zero with another agency. So you have that kind of portability benefit as well. So yes, a lot of the small and midsize, it's budget driven or based on their experience, they have limited budgets. They outsourced it, and they were just satisfied. We do have the occasional large enterprise. They want to have maybe an interactive sales pitch. So the marketing and sales team is driving the creation of the collateral, hiring a developer to make. I could use PowerPoint. Why am I hiring? It's hard to justify this pay developers to code a sales pitch, I can just use PowerPoint. Hold on a second, here's this thing called Intuiface. I can build an interactive sales pitch for my Salesforce. I'm still using the tool. I'm the creative team on the marketing sales team. But I'm creating something that is far more novel and engaging than a PowerPoint.
When the pandemic hit, I speculated and I'm sure many people speculated that this was going to be a difficult time for people who were in the touch and interactive business. What happened instead is that touch actually went up in demand and self service applications became very much a big development initiative. Have you seen that happening in the last couple of years?
Geoff Bessin: We have, and then ultimately it turns out people are more afraid of other people than touch screens. And our business has rebounded quite well. What we were hoping for, and it seems to be the case is that demand didn't drop. It got stuck behind a wall. There was a dam and the demand was building behind the dam, and you couldn't open the dam cause nobody was out of the house and the waters were rising, people are finally out of the house, and you opened up the floodgates. So we're seeing a really nice rebound that is complimented, not just by the building interest anyway, but the kind of renewed interest in facilitating a non-human interaction, which sounds horrible culturally, in their place of business or what have you.
And again, it's not just touch. Yes, I think probably most people would rather take a little Purell. They're fine with that, but still some people are not, and maybe they can use their mobile phone or scan a QR code.
But it's also a labor issue. It's harder to hire people and if you can use self service, then you don't have to worry so much about staffing.
Geoff Bessin: There's that whole other thing too which is the cost of staffing and training and enabling and equipping and there's that as well. So for sure, there is certainly a perceived increase in interest, and interactivity of any kind and Intuiface has always been focused on any kind of interactivity, not just touch, and certainly this ability to use my mobile phone to interact with content is an increasingly interesting example, using gestures to interact, using voice to interact. So I'm not touching but I'm still working with technology directly rather than mediating through somebody else. So all of that is going on.
Last question: you guys have certainly in the last few years had a presence at ISE and at other trade shows, what are you doing in the next few weeks and months? Is Intuiface going to be something that people can walk up and get demos for?
Geoff Bessin: We will be at ISE, so that'll be our first trade show in however many years we'll be there. So you and I are speaking on April 26th and that's why I say in just a couple of weeks, we will be there with a booth, and we certainly hope we'll see others there.
We used to actually have our user conference in parallel with ISE, in-person and the pandemic put the kibosh on that. We've done virtual user conferences every year since then, and we like that because you don't have to travel, and so our user conference will be forever more be virtual. We actually have our user conference in three weeks that people are welcome to join. It's free, it'll be online, but we plan to be at ISE. We plan to be a DSE in the US and I think it's now November, and we'll be participating when your colleagues at Avitas are running DSE in parallel and ISE will be participating in that as well. So we're starting. We're treating this as back to normal. It's interesting, Dave working on my travel plans, flying into Spain. But you can’t just get on a plane, you need to jump through certain things because of COVID. But it looks as of today, they're not even requiring masks onsite. That doesn't seem to be a requirement. Just the honor system that you are vaccinated or recovered and we'll see how that goes, but we're excited to be there. We'll have a big booth and about eight of us, we'll have a lot of people there.
And where can people find Intuiface online?
Geoff Bessin: Dave, thank you for asking, Intuiface.com. They can also just contact us. You are listening to Jeff Besson. You can just email me bessin@intuiface.com.
The product can be tried for free, Dave. No credit card required. People can poke at it and see if what we're saying is true.
All right, thank you.
Geoff Bessin: Dave. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Ryan Taylor, Delta Airlines
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Airports and airlines were early adopters of digital signage technology and the whole idea of data-driven messaging - using screens to tell travellers about arrival and departure times, and the status of flights and boarding at gates.
But digital signage is becoming central to communications not only for passengers, but also for staff.
A huge upgrade of Delta Airlines facilities and passenger experience officially opens today at LAX, with the focal point a 250-foot-long horizontal LED ribbon behind the check-in and bag-loading areas at Delta's relocated and renovated terminal. Similar work is being done by Delta for another busy airport in bad need of sprucing up, LaGuardia in New York.
I had a chance to speak with Ryan Taylor, who is managing the digital signage side of these projects for Delta. We get into the thinking behind them, and how they'll be used, but we also have a broader chat about other ways digital signage is being used in airports by Delta. You have maybe heard of FIDS and GIDS displays, but did you know about RIDS and even SQUIDs?
Listen and learn!
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Ryan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your role is at Delta Airlines and how that's evolved?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Dave. So my role now is exclusively digital signage. So I run a lot of the digital signage that you may or may not see. Some of our stuff is in the airports and increasingly so now, but a lot of our stuff that I do is the back of the house employee communications. We do a lot of dashboarding and other things. So yeah, I am full time digital signage for Delta Airlines right now.
Wow, is there like a department or are you the guy, the one person?
Ryan Taylor: Our team is growing, so it's me and a couple of other people and a whole lot of people that support us tangentially, of course.
But right now there are several other teams that do digital signage. Most of what you see in the gate areas is another team, and then like I said, my responsibilities are some of the airport areas and then mostly back of house. So right now I manage a network of about little less than 1800 screens somewhere in that range.
Oh, wow, and does that include back of house and workplace and so on?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so a lot of the employee communication stuff. So we're in break rooms where employees congregate, lobby areas and then of course there's a lot of dashboarding that we do for various groups to help them navigate the operations and specific things to their work groups. We're very data intensive, so it's not all the nice, pretty pictures. Some of it's just pulling data from various systems and giving people and work groups the information they need to do their jobs effectively.
Where are you hived out of, the IT group?
Ryan Taylor: That's correct. Yeah. So I'm IT and so we manage the infrastructure, the software and build the experiences for customers, whether they're internal or our actual customers.
It's interesting because when you talk about data, you could make the argument that airports were probably the first venues that really adopted the idea of data integration, and they've been doing FIDS displays and GIDS displays for 20+ years.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, and you can imagine that an airline generates a lot of data, right? And data has a how's the shelf life, especially in real-time 24/7 operation, getting that data to people that need it is critical and making sure your flight is not delayed and it's on time and it's going where it needs to go, and everybody that needs to be on it is on it, and so yeah, we do pride ourselves on playing a really active role in putting that data in the hands of people that need it.
I like to think of the dashboards that we do, they're really heads up displays. The ramp people that load the bags and service the plane and everything, we have our RIDS displays out there for them that give them a whole lot of data on that flight, you know, they don't have access to computers. So having a display on the ramp that shows where that flight's going, how many bags left to be loaded on, how many passengers. All that data that helps the operation run is really front and center for them and has a really positive impact on how the airline operates. So something that we're really proud of.
Yeah, that's interesting. Being a consumer passenger, I'm sitting on the plane or I'm sitting in the gate and all that, the only screens I ever see in those areas are big, almost analog LED displays that just say, which gate, or maybe it says, 867 BOS, cause the flight's going to Boston or something. But, as you're describing, there's more displays that we would never see that are mission critical to the folks trying to get the plane out on time.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so you can actually see these RIDS displays if you're in one of our larger hubs. Sometimes they're a little hard to see from the window seat, but they are there and we're pushing a whole lot of information to them. A lot of the data probably doesn't mean much to a passenger, you know, just looking at it but it means a whole lot to the ramp guys and even the pilots rely on it even though they have different systems, it's so visible that they become Kind of integral to the operation, which is great. It's a great place to be when the stuff that you're doing is that valuable.
Is that a new application or have those always been there and I just didn't know about them?
Ryan Taylor: They've been there for a couple of years now. They're about maybe two years old, so pretty new, and I can send you some pictures if you're interested in seeing them, but they're really a cool success story. They do serve a very vital role in the operation.
Yeah, it was going to be my next question: you've had two years of these in action, have you been able to measure the impact and assess the impact of them?
Ryan Taylor: That's a very good question, and it's one that I wish I had more data on.
I believe we know that they are having a positive impact. It's a source of frustration for me, because I would love to get more data on the before and after, on everything we do really. I don't know if everybody's plates are already so full that going through and coming through the data and gathering it is just another task that people don't feel is necessary at this point, but everything from the employee communication side of things, I've always wanted to do before and after survey to see how better informed they are after we put these screens in their break rooms even, do they know more about what the company's direction is and things like that.
We do signage in the Sky Clubs, these are actually iPads that are on the bars that show the drinks that are on offer the premium drinks. We know that they do have an upsell effect in that the bars that have them do sell more premium drinks, we just don't have the hard data to back it up because we can't get anybody to provide it for us. So it's things like that. But yeah, I would love to be able to point to some positive ROI stories because it's always hard digital signage, right? Because sometimes it's not readily apparent. Unfortunately, we don't get that much information.
But anecdotally, and just inherently, you would know that down on the ramps and all that, just simply enabling the workers to know where they're at, what the status is, how much time they have, how many more bags to go or whatever, must be huge for them?
Ryan Taylor: It is. Yeah, we know from talking to them and from the leadership, and just from the investment they've made in it. These went from a, like everything, it starts out as a small POC, and once they see the value, they either hit the gas or they hit the brakes and they hit the gas on those RIDS very quickly. We went from pretty much 0 to 200 of those deployments and in about six months.
So they're maybe not standardizing on them, but they're becoming a fairly normal sort of piece of the landscape?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, in the airline world, we have leeway to put these in some of our larger hubs where we have more of a presence and in some cases, we're not allowed to put them in a common use environment, but we have in pretty much all our largest hubs, which is great to see.
Yeah, I guess in airport terms, there are airports where you have gate licenses to be there, but there are other airports, like obviously Hartsfield in Atlanta and Salt lake City where you have your own terminal and everything else, right?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. If we're the terminal operator, we basically have pretty much free reign to do what we want in terms of the technology and everything else that we put on, and like in a smaller station where we only have a couple of flights or a handful of flights, or we're sharing gates with other airlines, that's obviously not as easy to do.
Digital signage and airports have been around for a long time. Obviously there have been two main activities, there have been the flight information displays and the gate information displays that are traveler focused and are just saying, “This flight's going here at this time at this gate and so on”, and then a fair amount of new digital signage has gone in from media companies, but it seems in the last 2-4 years that airports are really, and airlines are making an investment in kitting out the pre-security areas, doing things at check-in and elsewhere, using digital signage that gives them a lot more flexibility and the ability to do messaging and everything else and I was intrigued, and the reason we connected was the work that's going on at LAX. Could you explain that?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So this is probably the most exciting thing that I've ever been involved with in my work life, so we do the LIDS and everything airport digital signage needs, your flight information displays, so FIDS or LIDS, as you mentioned. So really LIDS have traditionally been just a single screen behind the counter where you show, checking in the main cabin or this is for sky priority, segmentations. When they started redoing the LA airport, we kinda got involved with our corporate real estate partners, ACS, which is the airport customer service team that runs the gate counters and everything and we wanted to do something that was different that allowed for more than just your normal screen behind the counter.
And that's where we started talking with NanoLumens about putting it in a digital back wall that was continuous using direct LED technology, and it grew from there. So as far as we know, this is the largest single back wall in any airport in the United States. I know Orlando has a much longer one, but it's individual LCDs.
Yeah, it's a whole bunch of tile narrow bezel LCDs.
Ryan Taylor: Right, so this is the longest, continuous one that we're aware of. So we're going to claim it. We're going to say, we have it, but yeah, it’s 250 feet long. So beyond just the normal, for main cabinet or oversize baggage, this allows us to put a whole lot more information, and branding. The whole idea was to create this wall that had a calming effect in the airport. An airport can be a very chaotic and sometimes intimidating place, like LAX can be daunting. So this gives us a whole new avenue to promote the brand, but really inform and maybe change the mood a little bit in that check-in process.
So what you'll see is an addition to the LIDS information, we'll have flight information, so there's actually FIDS embedded in there. There's an innovative new meter for the sky club to tell you how busy the club is before you even set foot behind security. So you can play on, “Hey, the club is busy. There are two clubs, so you can choose between them.” So that's a really cool data point on there, but just the imagery and the videos that we'll be playing behind it will kind of have a sense of calm. It all works together on this really huge, beautiful back wall that stretches the entire length of the ticket counter, which is pretty impressive. I'm really happy with the way it turned out, and we're really excited.
The really cool thing about it is there will be a sister to this wall coming online very soon in LaGuardia, and it will be the next one to get it when they open up in early June.
These are two terminals that could badly use any sprucing up they can get, right?
Ryan Taylor: Absolutely, yeah. If you've ever flown out of either one of them, you’d know how much they needed investment and it is a big investment and we're happy to be a part of it.
So with the 250 foot wide LED ribbon, are you running a single piece of content at times across the whole swath of it or is it segmented?
Ryan Taylor: It'll be segmented and most of that, I guess from the user end, it'll look like it's one piece of content. It's actually two PCs running the wall. So there are two PCs that split the wall in half. So one side is driven by one PC, it's actually a 4k resolution. So everything's being reassembled onto the wall and in that linear fashion, but it will look like one piece of content.
The only reason why we don't have one continuous landscape shot would be just because it doesn't exist. We couldn't find anything longer than 4k width to put up there.
So you'd have to come up with custom creative and maybe somewhere down the road, you do that, but to get going this'll do just fine?
Ryan Taylor: Yep, absolutely.
And the LAX job, it was previewed recently, but it's not actually live yet, right?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So LAX is going to open April 20th, that’s when passengers will start being directed to use that space over the old terminal to check in and that one will be renovated for another airline that I believe. But yeah, that will be our new home, terminal three in LA come April 20th.
This is why you're going back and forth a lot between Atlanta and LA?
Ryan Taylor: That is, yeah. We had a media event a while ago. As you can imagine, there's still a lot of last minute details to take care of. So we're just making sure that all the I’s are dotted, T's crossed and ready to go for April 20th.
In terms of the LED wall itself, did you have to do some testing and everything else around what pixel pitch was going to work for viewability? These are not just ads and not just visuals, you've got to have text on there. I would assume you have to be pretty careful to make sure the legibility is there so that people aren't wondering, does that say 130 or 730?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, this was definitely a learning curve for us. This was our first foray into using the LED technology and you mentioned the pixel pitch, which is spot on. I think we're using 2.5 millimeters on this wall, so there is some trade-off right? The resolution is pretty good, especially when you're standing at a distance.
Customers will be about 10 to 12 feet away from this when they're actually at the check-in counter talking to an agent. So you have some distance, but it is still relatively close. We did a lot of testing on the legibility. When we're actually putting data out there, it's really good. Some of the images, depending on how fine they got, tended to not be as clear. So where we could, we defaulted to actually printing and texts from the software instead of putting up an image.
I'm curious if what you're doing will extend into the automated baggage loading areas. I don’t know the technical term for that is, but one of your rival airlines that rhymes with United, in Denver, had a new area open up recently where those conveyors or whatever, where you do your own bag tagging, and then you drop them on a conveyor and they go into something, they were using LED walls there to segment the different stations and say, this one's open, this one's closed or whatever, or this is for a business class, all that sort of thing. Are you doing that or looking at it?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, so, there's an express baggage lobby in Atlanta, and I believe there's one coming or already in Detroit. We did a pilot because of the layout of the one in not Atlanta. There's four kiosks for the self tag bag drop. So we did use some sensors to feed a digital display that was in the queuing area that would show you which one is occupied and which one is available.
Unfortunately it didn't really pan out. It was either too sensitive or not sensitive enough because it was basically looking at an area in front of the kiosk to tell somebody was standing in front of it and if they moved out of that fence off the virtual area, if we set it too sensitive, as they're moving around with their bag, it was flickering, between open, closed, occupied, and then if it wasn't, if we dial down the sensitivity, then it was somebody would leave and for too long it would look like somebody was still there. So we abandoned that aspect of it, but our screens are still there explaining the process and wayfinding and directionally, where you go after you drop the bag off.
Yeah, I assume in airports, just like in retail, particularly given what's happening in the last couple of years that I've been saying a lot that digital signage is even more important than prior to the pandemic, because there's more of an emphasis than ever on self-service, more technologies being introduced and whether it's frictionless shopping or whatever in retail, you need screens that explain, “This is what you do. This is how you do it. This is where you go”, all those things.
So I'm assuming that the journey that starts at check-in, you guys are thinking about the full journey, all the way to the boarding ramp for passengers and using digital signage to guide them.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. I think you nailed it. You really do have to look at the whole experience from a passenger perspective, from curbside to a baggage claim and on, so there is a lot of emphasis and there's a whole team that does look at that experience, not just from a digital signage perspective, but from every aspect of that traveler's journey and so we're partnered with them to make sure that we're aligned with how we want that passenger to experience Delta and digital signage is a key part of that.
I guess it's one thing when Delta owns the terminal or has blanket rights to it or whatever, versus ones where you're a tenant in it, how difficult is it to coordinate with all the different systems and displays and data sources and everything else that may be in like a secondary, I'm pulling one out of the air here, let's say Kansas city, Missouri, or something like that, where maybe you're not a hub but there are all these systems that you need to work with?
Ryan Taylor: That's a good question. I don't know that I have an answer for that because I haven't really had to deal with that piece. Generally, we are brought in after they've already sorted those kinds of details out.
Yeah. I was supposed that regardless of whether new digital signage is in there, they've always had flight information displays and that sort of thing?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, and I don't really do the FIDS, but I know that some airports, they like to use their own FIDS and their own data feeds and then, areas like Atlanta those are FIDS, they're managed by us so and obviously we're just showing our flights there because you're on our concourse.
So it definitely depends on what the airport wants or allows us to do, versus you know I think in our view, we would want to have all our stuff, be owned and operated by Delta.
In the sky clubs, the frequent fire lounges, are you doing anything beyond FIDS display?
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. So in the sky clubs, we specifically manage our team on the outside, the ladder boards, affectionately called the SKIDS for sky club information displays.
I've learned about RIDS and SKIDS today.
Ryan Taylor: Oh I'll tell you all about it, we've got more “ids” coming. LaGuardia is getting SQUIDS.
Okay. I have to ask what that is.
Ryan Taylor: SQUIDS is security and queue information displays.In LaGuardia, there'll be these freestanding totems that will let the passengers know that this line is for general boarding. This one is for precheck, so that segmentation. So those will be actually very cool. They are about 12 feet tall, and they're kind of, I call them monoliths, because they're triangular shaped and they'll have LED screens on two sides of them. They're very striking. They're going to be a really cool different looking digital signage, right? Not your normal 16:9, and not to bring up your brand, I do feel like there's going to be a lot more digital science that comes out, especially with the LED technology that breaks that mold of the ratio, which I think is great because it's become so ubiquitous.
I’m definitely going off on a tangent here, but I think the challenge, especially in an airport environment is there is a proliferation of screens. If you're looking in the gate area, there's so many screens hanging down for your attention and if we could rethink that and figure out a way to make it less cluttered and clean up the gate area, I think that would help with some of the chaos of visual stimulation that you can become bombarded with.
Yeah. I think that the chaos and reducing that has gotta be the biggest goal of any of this sort of stuff in something like an airport, and I really appreciated it when I think it was Orlando airport, they started using flat panel displays at the TSA screening areas, that would say, this line is for business class and so on, and if things changed and a new aligned open up or whatever, the screens would automatically reflect that, and just anything like that operationally that makes the journey a little easier and a little less irritating, I think is amazing.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. I think there's a lot that can be done to inform but also, make it just a little more palatable. I think one of the dangers with digital signage is it's easier than ever to put up a screen. The cost has come down and especially with these large format LED screens, even in your city cityscape, you're running the risk of saturation to the point, I mean, I don't think it's there yet, but in certain places that can be where you're creating that future mystic Blade Runner scenario, where there's a screen on every building and you're just overwhelmed with stuff.
So we definitely have to be thoughtful on how we deploy and what we're putting on there and is it useful, right? Is it serving its purpose? Or are we just adding to the clutter and teaching people not to look at these things? Cause that's what you don't want to do.
Yeah. I think that's the great example of why airport digital signage is so good because of all those “ids” and they all have a point except maybe the advertising, which I know you guys don't do, but all those other ones serve some express purpose.
Ryan Taylor: Yes.
All right, Ryan, this was terrific. I learned a lot today, including about SQUIDS.
Ryan Taylor: Yeah. If you ever get to New York, I'd love to show you around and if you're ever in Atlanta, we can host you here if you're interested. There's a lot of stuff we're proud of and we can show you the RIDS, we can show you SQUIDS.
There’s nothing more exciting than going to LaGuardia.
Ryan Taylor: I know, right? By the way, our back walls are affectionately called BFLIDS, which stands for Big Friendly LIDS. You can choose another word for friendly features, but that's how we refer to them.
I'll have to start coming out with my own “ids”.
Ryan Taylor: You can get creative with them.
All right, Ryan. Thanks again.
Ryan Taylor: Thanks, Dave. It was good talking to you.
Wednesday Mar 02, 2022
Jason Cremins, Signagelive 2022
Wednesday Mar 02, 2022
Wednesday Mar 02, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
One of the terms the digital signage community is going to start seeing more often is headless CMS - the idea of getting away from the walled garden nature of many to most digital signage platforms and instead offering something that is open and flexible.
Most software platforms out there are still variations on walled gardens, but I've been hearing from a few companies that have re-architected their code and platforms to be some version of headless. One of the early adopters - very predictably - is Signagelive, a UK CMS software firm that has a knack for staying very current with technology advances, and for developing a platform that is very open and malleable ... but also secure.
CEO Jason Cremins was one of the first poor souls nutty enough to come on this podcast, and I was surprised to sort out that it had been almost six years since we had that first chat. I was very happy to catch up with him, and dig into what headless CMS is all about, who's using it, and why.
We also get into another interesting thing the company has developed - secure dashboards, a stable, secure and easy way to get visualized data on digital signage screens.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jason, thank you for joining me. We've spoken in the past. We've spoken many times actually, but for a podcast, I looked it up and saw, it was like six years ago. So you're one of the first victims.
Jason Cremins: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I can't believe it's been six years since we had that conversation.
I wanted to talk to you to catch up in a lot of ways around Signagelive, but I was particularly interested because for the last year or so, I'd say you've been talking up a concept that is just nibbling at the edges of Digital signage consciousness, if you want to put it in that way. People are just starting to understand this idea of headless CMS, and also talk a little bit about another product of yours, secure dashboards because they're two concepts that I'd say are not terribly well known within the digital signage industry yet, but will be.
Jason Cremins: Yeah, thanks for that. The whole concept of headless for us has come about really through the need from the channel partners that we have and the customers that we have and at its core, what it really allows us to do is expose absolutely everything that you can do with Signagelive as a platform and in terms of the management and the control of players through a series of API APIs and those API APIs then allow third party organizations to build solutions around the core signage like capabilities.
So this is a lot more than that old concept of white labeling a CMS platform, so you don't really know who the vendor is, but you're still using it the way it was written and the UX is there and everything else. These are the tools, and then you can write it and use it the way you want, right?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely. It's code level control really. We are the engine underneath the hood, we’re the delivery platform. I suppose in the same way that organizations are building solutions on top of AWS for web apps, we're looking to achieve a similar proposition for our partners who want to build custom solutions on top of signagelive for a whole range of applications, and I think one of the key things is digital signage is just one of those, the outputs can be many varied.
So why would they want to do that? My understanding is you've got organizations that produce content for a whole bunch of end points, not just digital signage endpoints, just a whole variety of them, and they don't want to have to back out of what they use, the tools they use for all those things, and then log into digital signage to do that one little piece of it and then back out and do the other stuff. Is that a fair assessment?
Jason Cremins: I think it is.
It depends on who the customer is, so where the need needs being driven from. So if it’s a specialist, digital signage reseller who is providing a full managed service for their customers, then it may well be that they want to present a portal or a user experience that is unified across maybe different tools they're providing that customer, different management tools.
We've got one partner, for example, who has got some really good connections into the Google Chrome management device environment, and the APIs that Google provides and they want that to be wrapped up with the CMS capabilities, and so therefore they're using Signagelive for that component. So yeah, certainly from a point of view the integrator is very much about presenting a unified solution, their own custom user journey effectively and workflows for that, for their customers, and then what we're finding for end-users, it's very much about those community developers and organizations, where they've got existing business logic and workflow in place, and they want to avoid having to replicate those tasks. So how can we just move digital signage and publishing of data and receiving information about the device and the status into the existing tools that we all use within the business?
So what would that look like in something like, let's say an interactive agency, that's doing a pile of work for a big corporate client?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, what it would look like for them is that they would typically work with us. We'd set up a development environment. We've got obviously extensive documentation and examples of what could be achieved. We would assist them in terms of setting up example code and just really working through, I suppose the story, what is the problem we're trying to solve? That's what we'll try to do in businesses is how they're trying to solve a problem for a particular customer, and then what we would do then is point them in the right direction of the various APIs that we have.
So if it's, for example, the ability to either hard trigger or soft trigger content, we've got APIs that allow you to do that. If it's the ability to take data and ingest that and have that display within HTML5 content again, we've got APIs that allow you to do that too. So we've got a range of entry points around the core platform APIs and SDKs, and it would allow us to work with that agency really, to build a solution for their customers.
So would they then have to build a brand new interface to deal with all out or could it be layered into what they're already using?
Jason Cremins: Totally laid in. So it is what they're already using. If they're using modern web technologies, typically they have API capabilities or certainly they've got accessibility or capability within their teams to be able to build out those user interfaces. Obviously in recent years, with the way the web technologies have moved, there's been very much a separation between the visual experience and what's being delivered on the front end to using portals and UI/UX is whether it be, across mobile, across the whole range and the actual business logic and the doing behind the scenes, database distribution and media management, et cetera.
So yeah, very much they can build it however they want, as long as they adhere to the APIs that we have in place.
Is there a degree of transparency? So let's say you have a reseller or an integrator that you're working with and they have a big corporate client of some kind, a retailer, QSR, whatever it may be. Do they know that it's Signagelive under the hood or are you completely big behind the curtains?
Jason Cremins: We’re completely behind the curtains. From our point of view, everything is transparent. For example, the customer would be looking into their portal so therefore we are the code downstream of any actions that they're taking on that portal, there's no reference to Signagelive.
The way that licenses are procured and added to devices, the way those devices are presented is all again, completely transparent, and the partner can decide what that's called, how that looks, without any reference to Signagelive, and then when you're on the device end the pages such as activation codes or notices of expiring or those other things are completely customizable as well and programmable by the partner.
So yeah, from our point of view our role there with those organizations that we're working with is to provide them the support, and provide them the tools and extend the API as they require and allow them to go and build their book of business around that code.
Does this require a different kind of support for your reseller ecosystem, in terms of, if it's your own product and it's visibly Signagelive that you're working with and you make a new version release or whatever you push it out and everybody knows about it.
With this you have a tool set and then you have an integrator with its own toolset or its front end that it's written on top of. So do you have to say we've changed this about our API or whatever that you need to deal with?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think that starts from the outset, because the minute we've done the initial discovery and the qualification that there is genuine interest, and also they've got the capabilities within their organization to undertake the type of integration that would be required with our APIs, then the commercial team completely steps out of the way, the regular end user and channel support team steps aside, and those partners are provided direct access to the development team.
So it's very much a developer to developer conversation around utilizing the tools and the various code samples and all the other bits that are required and that's a completely separate Slack environment that those guys can work on together, and have that kind of trust, and build up that relationship to build the solutions without with us commercial and regular support team getting involved.
What took you down this path? Headless CMS is a broader concept in Web 3 or whatever you want to call it, but did you see this as a trend that you wanted to get on top of or were you being asked about it?
Jason Cremins: A bit of both, I would say. I think one of the things that we were looking to do was re-engineer our own platform and it made sense that we became the first consumer of our own APIs. So I think there was a conscious decision to do that and that journey probably started 3+ years ago, and every line of code we've written, the sense has been API first. So we've crafted and come up with the API architecture and then decided, we're going to build on top of that in terms of the user experience within Signagelive.
So I think that was one of the key things, but then also we were getting a lot of requirements for integration with say business workflows and tools that people were already using beyond just shuffling content from a third party platform down to a screen, and then also extending that capability into local environments. We've got an APIs that allows us to, to trigger either immediately or soft trigger, IE, do this next, and then we've built out another API, which we call real-time events, which runs across the different devices we support that allow us to extend that further through code to interact with non-web technology. So things like serial devices, lighting controls, all these other things that are required, when you get down into a physical presence, you want to build an experience that’s beyond just sending web requests.
So yeah, it's been a combination of both and that's been both end-users that have approached us and we've had conversations around their needs and also then the partners and integration organizations that we're working with who are building out these experiences based on what the customer wants to achieve.
And this isn't just conceptual at this point, you have clients who are using it in this way now, right?
Jason Cremins: Yeah. From our point of view, the commercial model is really the thing that determines where the split is, so we traditionally sold licenses and then subsequently services and plans, and they've gone through the traditional channel model, whether it be distribution, resellers,
This is more of a consumption model. So it's an ability for at the first level of the ability to activate licenses as required and deactivate those as required. That's been a big key element of all that we've done, and then further on with as we'll get onto other products, it's true consumption is about the actual amount of usage that you need from the platform.
So are there companies and projects that you can talk about that are actively using a headless CMS model?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, we can. One of the organizations that we're working with and they're actually included in the white paper that's on our website is Entwined who are down in Australia, and we've been working with Entwined now for the last two and a half years as they start to build out their digital signage strategy, and they were disillusioned with the challenges they had trying to work across multiple different CMS platforms to meet the needs of different customers in different sectors. So we work very closely with them to become their engine for their success.
I think one of the big attractions is that we've got this very wide support for different player technology into the 30+ different platforms that we support in different variants, and they wanted that. They didn't want to be restricted by a single CMS’s support for a certain hardware tech, or a certain operating system. So we work with Entwined to build that out and we've got some significant wins together, but we will allow them to make those announcements as they come along.
So in that case, there is mostly a managed service model for them?
Jason Cremins: From their point of view, it is absolutely a managed service model. We support them as a technical team and to ensure they've got everything they need, and from their perspective, they are providing a fully managed proposition for their customers. So they are direct to their customers providing a full installation, maintenance, content services, marketing strategy, everything that's required to deliver a successful solution.
Yeah, that's interesting because I was saying to somebody the other day that one of the trends I see happening is you have “solutions providers”, “integrators” companies that normally just do installations and so on, adding more service capabilities because there's more recurring revenue there and it would be mightily challenging if you are at the mercy of the software companies to get a particular piece of functionality or whatever added to their roadmap, and then, you wait for it to actually come together and so on, and then you've got to, as you said, support all these things versus having a lot more control over what you can do and narrowing it down to one provider. But I guess there's still the challenge that even with that, they're still waiting a little bit on functionality to be delivered at year end, right?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, occasionally. I think most of the time, what we're seeing is there's an opportunity to bring in other adjacent technologies. So with Entwined and with other partners we're working with, for example, Audience Analytics, we've got certain partners and work that we've done in that space, but if I got a particular partner they're working with, and there's absolutely no reason why they can't combine what we're doing in terms of providing proof of play and accountability in terms of what the player is doing with a media playback, and then combining that in parallel with other information, and then delivering that as a complete set of data and set of insights for individual customers.
So I think it's about really understanding what the need is. If it's not core to what we're doing as an organization, if it doesn't benefit the wider community of companies that we have. Bear in mind a lot of the APIs that we do develop at their core are for enterprise customers and so if we see things the other way round as well, is that it's exciting for our API headless customers when we can say actually, for example, we've built out out granule user permissions model which has now got over 150 different flags you can turn on and off per user, and by the way, we've got a new hierarchy of infrastructure coming along and we just launched 2FA for security.
So they benefit from all of those because all of those are available through the APIs, and a lot of that is then listening to the same customers they're approaching with a complete solution that maybe we're having conversations with other territories where they're overtly using Signagelive as a platform.
Do you see headless as being a pretty significant part of your business and will you always balance the Signagelive familiar UX that some companies are going to use Or a lot of them are just going to headless?
Jason Cremins: I think there's definitely a trend towards more integrated solutions. People talk about user experience platforms. I heard that kind of thing mentioned and talked about by others and I suppose it is about that, and it's really whether we build something that. I don't want us to be a constraint for our partner or for our customers. So we will take our product and develop it where we feel it needs to go and where the mass market requires Signagelive to go.
But I think what we're finding with the headless proposition is that it does allow that kind of wider thought process and say, a partner or someone looking to create their own brand in the space or integrate with their own backend digital asset management platform or workflow systems, they can decide what features they want to present to the customer, and some of those will be from Signagelive, and others will be from other third party web apps that they're talking to.
You only have to look at the way things like Zapier have blown up over the years in terms of connecting A to B to C to create a solution and we want to be part of that. We integrate with low-code and no-code platforms, for example, which basically takes the development and the ability to build applications, not just from a curly bracket low-level coders, but it puts that into community code, as they always say about low code, “if you are capable of driving a spreadsheet and creating macros, then you could build a low code application for your business”, and we want to be talking to those community developers within organizations as well, who go, “Do you know what? That's great, but I'd like to do something slightly different or I need to make sure it shows not just this, but that as well from our other systems we have.” And we want to make sure we're part of that solution.
One of the reasons I find this so interesting is It gets away from the whole idea or notion of a walled garden, which it still seems like a lot of digital signage software companies operate within in that they're not really paying attention to what the larger, particularly web centric development world is doing.
Jason Cremins: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think you can't win on features alone. It's a fool's errand. If you look at any organization that's making money in digital signage today, 90% of the features are going to be tick boxed yes certainly when it comes to an RFP. We can all argue that we do things better or have you, so there's got to be reasons why you're successful, and I know you've covered it and your podcasts and your writing, Dave, that you either go super niche in a particular sector and use case, or you provide a true platform that is pliable and capable and can bend and flex to the needs of the kind of solutions that we're not even thinking of. These are organizations that have got particular problems we haven't even heard of yet.
So we don't want to be measured or contained by our thoughts on what we think the world needs. We want the ability to go, Hey, we can do this bit. We've got these APIs and capabilities. By all means if you want us to extend those, that's exactly where we want to be spending our time. The experience you want to build in terms of logging in and what you want that to do on the screen at the far end.
The other area I've talked about, I guess there's a bunch of things I've not heard about through the years, but it is data-driven content. And this is something that there were a handful of companies going back to the mid 2000s, like the Omnivexes and Scribers, when that was around, that were doing that sort of thing, and then it grew more common and everybody was saying, yeah, sure, we've got APIs. We can tie into data tables and stuff like that.
But the data sync services and secure dashboards that you're doing you're saying this is different this is its own approach?
Jason Cremins: Yeah. I think we are trying to solve the same problem in a different way, in a more scalable and robust way. I think that's the way of looking at it.
I've got admiration for those that have gone before us, in that sense, in terms of trying to solve the challenge of getting data from backend systems up into a screen in an automated, scalable and updatable way.
What we’ve come up with is a solution whereby from the backend, we have secure dashboards that you can log into any web app, whether that be a Google-based app or Microsoft, any of the Microsoft suite through to people like Grow.com who we use for our own power BI and in business intelligence dashboards and login once, login smartly, as we call it, because the system will actually, determine how it needs to log in and what it needs to press. It does all that in the back end for you, and then from that, you can determine what you want to capture and where you want that to go. What we're effectively doing at that point is whether it be an individual metric on a dashboard, whether it be the full dashboard itself whatever the determined frequency needs to be. We're securely capturing that data as a JPEG and there's a real conscious reason why we've done that as a JPEG, because we want to make sure it can play back on any player that we support, not be restricted to the latest, greatest, web browser capable player that can run super fast, HTML5, because that's so restricted. And then deliver that content security to screens.
So we've seen a big need for that. I think one of the things we wanted to avoid was a reliance on having to do this through creating a macro with a Chrome extension that you have to run through that sequence in a browser to capture the dashboard and then it saves it back to the server and it says, don't worry, I've got that. I'll do that again. We want it to do this centrally and do it once. So if something changes, you can go in, make a single change and all your dashboards will then be republished to the screen.
We've also with that solution and working through the initial B2 customers that we've got, realized one of the key aspects is what happens when things go wrong. So we've built a complete debugger there. So it actually walks you through every single stage that we're doing, the macros that it's running in the back to say we've got this, we've now pressed this button. We've cleared that popup that came up, don't worry right now, we've prepped the metric. “Is this what it looks like? Yep. That's what I'm going to send to the screen.” So you can script that as you need to go and capture the data.
So we have tremendous response from organizations looking to get that data out of their backend systems and their web apps and the security gets that in front of their users on screens in the various departments. Big application, obviously with the deskless workers in particular and getting data around. We're working with one big logistics organization at the moment who have got updates in terms of the status for goods in and goods out, buried in a proprietary system and they want the dispatch base across a hundred locations. And so we can show them how that works. They set it up once. The way it goes and that's it, and it will just keep publishing that, and obviously, you can still be dispersed, you can still multi-zone it, and you can run it with other content as required but it's very much a Trojan horse for a lot of organizations because it's the one thing that's been particularly tricky. And theyI don't want to get into having to, while I can get that data out into a data table and then I've got to ingest it, then I have got to map that into some form of layout in a third party CMS, before I can then get it onto the screen. They want to do this in its native form, in the dashboards and the tables that they are using in their web app every single day.
If it's a JPEG, that's going to limit you in terms of the frequency of updates, at least a little bit, or you're going to have a bandwidth issue as well, but I'm assuming there aren't really that many applications out there that need true real time, something that’s changing every second or whatever, if it's production status or whatever, every minute, or even every five minutes is probably fine, I assume?
Jason Cremins: Absolutely. Yeah, and that's what we're finding, and we are asking that question and there are solutions to real-time, but it just isn't this technology. It's not built for this, and real time is more a case of building those custom HTML5 widgets and connecting to a data point somewhere and having that is also refresh. And, we have those too, we have those bespoke instances where people need that level of update, as it happens, push updates. But for the vast majority, as you quite rightly said, it's more a case of, I need to know what the stats are today within the last hour. I need to know what's happened in the last five minutes. So we more than cope with that at scale using the secure dashboards platform.
I'm curious when you talk about sekless workers and production floors, and so on. I thought this is still a somewhat untapped opportunity for the digital signage market to get mission critical information out to people who don't have desktop monitors that they're staring out all day or don't have emails or anything else. How do you keep them informed? And it seems that this is particularly a good way to do it.
Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely, and I think one of the things that we're excited by is the number of applications we've never heard of before that people are testing. We've got on our website 30-40 applications that we test and we just keep continuing adding to a Sheet that we update pretty much every day with new applications we've got.
We were working with a big mining organization who used some platform I'd never heard of before. They tested it, they got it working and they went, let's use it, and they went on to deploy that to all the locations where they're drilling and mining and show the performance statistics there. So that's the thing that's exciting because we built this in an open, agnostic way. We're not saying that we've got a particular integration for Power BI or we've got a particular integration for Salesforce or Tableau or all the other leading ones. We've built it in a way that will accommodate all of those, and if it works for all of those, it will work for any others as well.
Can you get into some of the more exotic platforms like an SAP ERP platform, that kind of thing??
Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely. It really comes down to user access, so how are people currently accessing that data?
So if you were logging into that platform through username, password authentication, single sign on, for example, and you can navigate from your browser to that content that you want to display and it can be full screen. It can be just a zone on the screen that you want to capture an X/Y set of coordinates, then it will work. If you can do it from your browser, we can do it from the backend and set that up. So yeah, it's very doable.
I think the other aspect of this is the actual, as you mentioned, data sync services that are built on top of secure dashboards, these are built on top of which is the underlying platform. There will be other modules alongside that. We will be looking at certain instances where it actually makes sense to have dedicated apps for maybe SAP, maybe there's some additional functionality that we need to get out of Salesforce, right? We'll just build a custom integration with Salesforce at that point.
Or as we're finding with others, there's just a custom dataset there. Do we need an agent somewhere on a server that's grabbing the data that brings it back through the same machine that we've built and pushes it, whether it be in a graphic or into an HTML5 page but uses this data sync services platform to achieve that in a very secure way.
I assume when this gets raised with corporate clients, they're very concerned about the security implications. How do you deal with that?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely. Security is at the core from our point of view. So we're completely transparent in terms of how the platform has been built. We're open to inspection. We've been running quarterly penetration tests on our whole platform since 2015, and we make those available under NDA to prospective customers and existing customers, and in addition to that, we obviously achieved ISO 27,001 last year. We're extending that out across the world as well.
We take data and data security to the highest level and we want to make sure we're open and honest with our customers in terms of what we're doing with our data, how we're encrypting their data, and we're open for that to be fully tested. There's not been an instance and we've got some pretty significant organizations across a range of sectors. where, we've passed their security tests with flying colors, and in many cases they're saying, you're taking security to a level that we're or even doing ourselves, because we're not exposed, we haven't yet got there. You're dealing with things from a variety of different angles that we just don't currently have in our business. So it does give them the confidence that we've got those angles covered.
Let's wrap this up on a broader topic that doesn't require the same technical acumen. I'm just curious, how are things going? How is the business hopefully coming out of COVID?
Jason Cremins: Good!
I think like everyone, it was May 2021, when we saw the early signs of what was happening with COVID. There was a bit of a good kind of stop and take a breath moment for everyone to think, right? Where's this going to leave us as it was, we had a very strong year. We did right by our customers. We made sure that those that were struggling, we paused all of their payments. sp if they were on monthly billing with us, we said, just come back when you can, and that's bounced back tremendously for those that we were able to support, if it was organizations that had bought term licenses, multi-year licenses, et cetera, we made sure we extended those licenses as long as it was viable for both parties to ensure that they could shut those down and not lose that licensed usage is such, so when they come back online, we’re not asking them to renew, and that's been fantastic, and I think that we're able to grow, we added five people to the head count at the back end of last year and seeing some of those announcements probably coming through on LinkedIn.
We've done goog, we grew again last year, and I think the cool thing is we’re very much focused on the two strategies, one of which is going very much into the upper mid-market and enterprise customers, and as I mentioned earlier, in terms of the functionality that we were developing in the core platform itself, but then equally is very much this approach towards headless and whilst there's other organizations that provide really good solutions for agnostic device support and building your CMS on top of those platforms, we go to the next stage. We're actually giving you a full headless CMS and device support platform, and I think that's one of the key areas that we're looking to grow. So if organizations are either entering the market and once to get into digital signage with their own brand solution, we want to be there for them to have that conversation.
Yeah, that's interesting. What you just finished saying, it's so important to think about the infrastructure and the real tools, as opposed to the pretty UX and the capability to support, protect our piece of functionality. Who cares if everybody does it?
Jason Cremins: Yeah, exactly. And then also the pedigree of it, we've got customers that have been with us for decades literally now, and we've been at this for a long time, since ‘97 from my point of view. So we're a long way in, but we only feel as though this aspect of the market is opening up now.
The days of fighting out on the UX features and capabilities and hoping you'd tick the boxes of that particular customer wants it, I'm not saying it's gone, but it's certainly going or being caught up by organization going, how do I code my own solution on top of your APIs?
Yeah, and if you're going to mid to high level enterprise work, the whole race to the bottom price fight goes away, right?
Jason Cremins: A hundred percent, and this is why we've seen a massive push with regards to people moving on to plans. It just makes sense. It was always licenses and then networks, and then adding maybe training to a network or to a customer, and then you start adding additional modules and active directory and secure sign on and all those things, and for many reasons, those organizations don't want to buy in piecemeal ways. It's a big lift for them to actually get a PO through their organization. So they just want to say, look, I know what I want to achieve. I know roughly how many players I'm going to put online in the next six months. So you can give me some flexibility there, but can I just at least have all the bits in place to get this up and running, keep all the departments happy, keep IT happy and that I don't have to go back to procurement every month when you turn around and say, oh, you need this additional module?
So the move towards the plan structure has been a real positive for us for those mid-market enterprise customers where they expect that.
Jason, great to catch up with you.
Jason Cremins: You're welcome. Thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you again, Dave.
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
Jared Jones & Alisa Semyekhina, DBSI
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
Wednesday Feb 09, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are a few companies in digital signage that have picked a vertical market, got into it, and stayed very much in that lane.
But I can't think of any other companies in the sector that operate like DBSI, a Phoenix-area company that provides and manages a full-featured digital signage solution for its retail banking customers, but also designs and builds branches, among many things.
The company has been around for 20+ years and its customers range from small regional credit unions to whale accounts like Wells Fargo.
For the last eight years, DBSI has done a survey of banking customers that benchmarks the adoption rate, state and trends with respect to in-branch digital efforts. I've been through the deck and noted a lot of interesting insights about how on-screen messaging is being used, and how banking customers see the ROI.
I spoke with a couple of folks from DBSI - Jared Jones, a Digital Transformation Strategist, and Alisa Semyekhina, the Head of Digital Signage.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jared and Alisa, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DBS is all about, where you're located and what's the range of work that you do?
Jared Jones: Yeah. So DBSI is located just outside of Phoenix, Arizona in Chandler. In short, our mission is really just to redefine the banking industry.
We found a very unique way to fuse together the design build aspect, the equipment aspect and of course, technology up to including to be a little bit more parts of this podcast, digital signage.
Yeah, it's interesting, I assume DBSI the DB is designed to be built, and it's interesting that you do the actual design of bank branches and credit union branches and so on.
And that digital signage is not just a bolt on thing. It's like a big part of what you do, Right?
Jared Jones: Yeah, absolutely. All too often, what we're finding is our clients. Whenever you use the bolt-on approach you get a lot of finger pointing and the messaging is concise with the staff, the members and customers get a very choppy experience to where it's whenever you're able to house it all under one roof. It allows you to really take a very intentional and proactive approach to all the different elements of the bank branch process.
And this is what DBSI does. You're not also servicing the healthcare industry or hotels etc. Like banking is your vertical.
Jared Jones: Exactly. Exclusively we are vertically actually. And that's really one of our competitive advantages. Simply due to the fact, whenever you work with a local architect.
We found that the banking credit executives have to spend, I've seen it everywhere for a week to a month, really just educating them on the industry or maybe industry’s best practices, what their customers and members are really trying to achieve. How do you really try to guide the flow?
So by exclusively dealing in the banking industry, it allows us to develop our own best practices. That way we can almost take a driver's seat and really educate our clients on the industry, what it's really evolving into, how we can maybe stroke the footprint. We understand what a teller cash recyclers.
We understand how to move into MADEC too, to where we can lower that to you and things of that nature. So again, my us exclusively dealing in this industry and allows us to take the driver's seat. And really educating our clients rather than having to local educate a local architect.
And I assume that with the banking industry, like many industries these days, really don't want to have a whole bunch of service providers doing one aspect of what they do. So if they can nail it down to, okay, you guys just figure this out for us and help us with it as opposed to let's put together a team of vendors and make this happen.
It's just cleaner this way. Right?
Jared Jones: So it's not really that single point of contact. And it just allows us to really take ownership over the entire project and allows us to ultimately own the project and allow us to deliver.
So is it strictly in the United States? Are you in other countries doing work?
Jared Jones: Presently, we were just in the United States.
We have either current or past projects in all 50. But we do not do it internationally.
So, I live in Canada, I don't really know the banks down there other than ATM machines when I'm traveling. But if I were a U S resident, what institutions would I.. Are you guys active with who they might know and that you're allowed to talk about?
Jared Jones: Wells Fargo, we do a lot of business with a super regional down there in the south, Navy federal credit union, they utilize our technology. And I would say those are probably our big three. A lot of your listeners will understand the reality of what you do.
So you have big whale clients like Wells Fargo, but you also do small or regional credit unions sort of thing.
Jared Jones: We've done business with, like I said, I went from Wells Fargo to and obviously they are in the trillions and asset size to where, we also deal with very local community credit unions 700 million assets.
We're having this chat because you guys as I'm interested in speaking with you, anyways, but so you have a benchmark report that you put out that looks at the state of digital signage and the adoption rate of it.
How was that put together and how often have you done that?
Jared Jones: Yeah. So we started doing the annual digital signage benchmark about seven or eight years ago now. And essentially what it is like I told you before, we tried to take that very intentional approach, very data centric, data driven into our process.
So with that, we really want to understand what the industry was saying and how they are leveraging it. Of course you don't allow us to better refine our best practices. But now we've actually grown to about, I think just over 400-430 respondents different banks and credit unions and allowing us to get an insight into how, or I guess if and how they're using digital signage in their branches and headquarters
So you are doing a survey of some kind?
Jared Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So it's an incentive-based survey. It's actually a unique approach we use because there are a couple of barriers, sometimes whatever they are accepting guests from different vendors. We actually offered a $10 gift certificate either to the executive filling out the survey.
Or we were going to donate that $10 in a charity of their choice. So it was fun. It allows us to give in their name cause I don't know how familiar you are, but that's actually one of my most passionate favorite parts rather than working with community banks and credit unions is their true commitments to their community.
So through this, obviously we get the data that we can share with the industry and then they get a continuation of their mission to do right by their community.
Okay. So let's talk about what you found in the 2022 report. It's called off the charts. Were there any surprises?
Jared Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So a work surprise that I actually found was that only 6% of digital signage content was going to be utilized for onboarding to a little lower cost channel or either mobile platform. For whatever reason, this has been a hot topic item for probably the last 10-15 years.
We're making executives try to actually onboard their clients to a little bit lower cost channel. And I don't want to speak for other industries. I can only assume that being the same, but it is a lot cheaper for me to sign up for a different financial product, like a savings account or checking account, or maybe even a credit card.
Whatever I can offload it into a mobile channel. It allows them to take it from, I think it's just over maybe $3-$4 a transaction, all the way, I think maybe 20-25 cents. So that was probably my biggest surprise, but at least I think you end up more.
Alisa Semyekhina: Yes, definitely. I actually had a lot of surprises from the survey.
I would like to share study with content management like flex systems. So we noticed that the increase of actual expenditures for the software increased, but with that also increased the stress level. So I was actually interested to see the correlation between that. And one of the interesting facts was that our clients will, but then or just banks and credit unions marketing manager teams, they'll be looking for features and capabilities.
So again, just displaying content is not good enough for them. It's actually looking for a fast approach to deploy to all branch networks. And we're talking about not just one or two branches, we are talking about 300 plus branches. So how efficient you are with that? And the next part is about the IT side because again, if you're using, let's say flash drives, you are not going to be efficient. You need the whole team or facility teams, or IT teams to go to each branch and deploy content. And that's where, again, that disconnect is. So many different vendors teams are working on content or deploying content that you can not be on time with weather information, weather rates change, or anything like that.
And with that your branch team is left with no support from the marketing team. So that's where I found one of my biggest surprises.
Yeah. I was interested in that, the big pinpoints. Within the banking industry with respect to digital signage was managing the content and creating content for it.
And also worrying about the side of it. I find it quite amazing that you still have vendor or primary end users who are using flash drives and don't have scalability or anything. Is that just a function of this version, one of what they were doing and that they learn the hard way that they should not have done, or are they just keeping with what they were doing originally and not even understanding that there's an easier way?
Alisa Semyekhina: I think your spot on Dave I think it was the conceptual phase for even proving that digital signage has a place in their branches.
And with studying, and that's like having the conversation with quite a few of our clients who are transitioning to a different solution. And as we are not only partnering with software companies, but also content creators. So with that, when we have conversations we are coming from different perspectives.
Again, what's the best solution for them? And of course, again, the ease of deployment, ease of creation, content, ease of updating content. And it's also on the goal. Now, everything has to happen on the goals. Yeah. When you update your content from your cell phone for example, or bring that experience, that's differentiating you from anyone else down the street?
So if I'm coming to a branch and they see my name on the screen welcoming me. Yeah. I would love to see that. But can software support. So I think it's proving the concept and then moving into a different level where, how do we do that? And that's where I think most financial institutions need help.
Is it a function of the financial institutions and the communicators within those companies, understanding that this is not a technology investment, as much as it's a communications investment, and you have to think content first and the technology is important, but it's the underlying stuff.
Alisa Semyekhina: I think it's also an interesting point where both of them need to be going hand-in-hand.
It has to be a strategy of what technology as well as a strategy for content. And they believe Jared has some more thoughts on that.
Jared Jones: Yeah. So to your point, yes, of course it is a technology investment, but it's also an experience investment. All too often, what we're seeing inside these branches and headquarters is a stale environment. Wherever you're actually gonna have to take that intentional approach behind your digital signage strategy, it allows you to have complete control over your end points with the right content and system.
Anywhere from as granular, as changing the hours that your content is going to display, whether you want it client facing or staff facing, or it's that very hyper customized content. What Alisa was just talking about, where either I can say, what am I walking or make your credit union say welcome Jared or something of that nature.
So really it's an experience investment is how I think about it.
And do you have a sense I'm sure you do have, what's truly impactful content and messaging in the branch. Because when I go to my local branch, after I do this interview, I've got to go to the bank. I'm going to walk in there and it's going to have digital signage behind the counter showing me news headlines and the weather, and then some kind of generic messaging about the branch.
And I'm just thinking they've made the investment, but they really haven't thought through the content because I just came from outside. I know what the weather is. And I don't need news headlines when I walk into a branch.
Jared Jones: And really, that's where we start to differentiate ourselves as you're well aware and I've listened to several episodes.
I get your understanding of it, the placement of screens, and you have the quality of the screens, but really that's just one pillar. And really, I would almost say the second pillar is going to be this content development. It's not just saying, Hey, now we offer free checking or here's the local news headlines, or maybe the weather or something of that nature.
It's really about getting that hyper vocal content. One of the more rewarding things that I get about working with these community banks and credit unions, like I said, is their community involvement.
So whether it's setting up scholarships, whether it's going to be volunteering for habitat or community, whether it's going to be charitable donations, Whenever, each branch has its own, little fun mission.
It creates a little bit more sense of community. It allows a little friendly competition and ultimately it allows the communities to win. I don't want to speak for other industries but I think right now people are more concerned with the missions of the businesses that they do business with. So whether it's Tom shoes, whether it's going to be, I buy a pair and they donate a pair of Bomba socks.
Again, I bought a pair of hair. I want to feel good about where I'm spending my money, where I'm spending my time. So whenever these banks or credit unions can educate their client base saying, Hey, I just raised $52,000 or something. It makes me feel good. Hey, they're actually taking my money and they're investing it back for my community, which obviously I care much about. I really like that approach.
I'm looking at some of the results of the survey and what gets shown on the screens more than anything else is promotions and branding, right? Is that the right approach or is that just what people are doing and you would move more towards community messaging?
Jared Jones: That is an approach. That's really where we're going to work with the marketing teams and really understand what their overall overarching business objectives are. Yes, of course, product education is one. Then we're going to actually move into that community involvement piece, then we're going to go to meet the team that way we build a sense of trust and a little bit of camaraderie that way I can understand who my Baker's going to be.
So there were seven pillars and actually I want to pass it back over to Alisa to go into a little bit deeper dive from content creation on where would you like to focus for that embraced strategy?
Alisa Semyekhina: Dave, you raised quite a great point about promotions. So many promotions, as traditionally speaking, have short legs, right? We are talking about just something very actionable. There is a headline, there is a copy and so in so many cases, it's not actually thought through based on the campaign-level because the campaign-level it's, again, we are connecting on an emotional level and we are connecting with our customers' members from the lifecycle approach, what's important to them, where they are right now, why they actually add the branch and how we can help them?
So we're moving from that transactional mindset into an advisory mindset and be able to speak to them and see where and what they're doing right now at the branch, how we can help them, how we can migrate them, let's say to mobile channels to again, be time efficient, give them time back because rather than coming to the branch and coming to the branch only for very specific reasons, like are we starting out something, are we at the stage where we're setting up our business or we're buying a new car and all those questions being answered, not something where we go and Google, which we can, but it will be that approach where you actually mean something and that’s personalization of experience.
And you saw the report as well, one of the surprises I saw was that displaying rates were 46%, I believe and that's a high rate of displaying just the rate and you're competing with a cell phone. So if I see a rate on a screen, I want to know, am I getting the best of the best rate? But if I’m actually connecting with my members or customers on an emotional level. For example, if I had refinanced, if someone else got a fantastic experience and they shared that experience, I want to know what happened, I want to work with that person, because again, I want that experience as well.
So I think a lot of marketing teams realize that, and they know that they probably just don't have time to implement that moving from a promotional side into the community side.
Yeah, it sounds like if you, for cost and resource reasons, use commodity information like financial rates, that sort of thing, it's great in terms of the amount of time you have to allocate to this, but you're not resonating, you're not reaching your customers. You're not striking an emotional cord with them. You're just telling them stuff that they can get elsewhere.
Alisa Semyekhina: Absolutely.
Looking at some of the outcomes of the report, one of the things that I found interesting is that the perfect formula for doing content is a blend of in-house and agency work. So if you just do in house work, maybe you don't have the creative chops and the understanding of reaching people emotionally, if you just do agency work, it's going to take all your budget.
Alisa Semyekhina: That is very true, but we also work with teams of 1-3 marketing teams, and they have to actually not only spend time on digital signage, but on everything else, they're wearing so many hats. And they have ideas, the question is always time and priorities.
We've been working with many small towns and we are amazed at how many great ideas they have and what we are actually doing is we're helping to streamline, help them to actually set the structure to content calendar, to again, content creation and helping them where they need us. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to do everything for them, because like you said, if you're outsourcing everything, then you lose that connection with the core of your institution. And if you are doing everything in house, you don't have time for everything. So with this, we're working as a partner with our clients to make sure there is that balance.
And of course, sometimes you want to outsource something because it could be time consuming. So for example, we are talking about animations or drone videos or any other fun projects that you would like to bring into your space, whether it's headquarters or a branch, but again, you have to hire someone or you have to look for someone and that's where our expertise comes in.
One of the other data points from this year’s report, I was struck by how built out the banking industry and credit union industry is. The great majority of them and particularly when you get to the larger institutions have digital signage, but I also get a sense that while there's a lot of digital signage activity out there, maybe a lot of it isn't done all that well yet. Is that a fair statement?
Jared Jones: Yeah, it is. And that's what Alisa was talking about as far as we've had the pleasure of working with teams of all, consisting of one to probably two or three dozen, depending on the size of the institution.
It's really interesting and it's really not just from an asset size of the bank or credit union, as far as their sophistication or their level of intentionality that they're able to put beyond their concept development because marketing teams tend to wear very many hats. So unfortunately they are constantly being pulled in all these different directions. So I guess in short, to answer your question, there's not really a rhyme or reason as far as the size of the team. It's more so just the priority list of the bank or credit union for the content development.
Another point that was made is that the understanding of what to do inside the branch is pretty broad. Maybe some institutions could do it better, but the next big area to be looking at developing is outside the branch. How would that work?
Jared Jones: Yeah. One of the things that we're actually trying to leverage in digital signage is really trying to take it from the interior approach to also increase its reach from the exterior and that of course means implementing it into the pillars of the drive-through to actually implement two-way video in the drive through lanes themselves.
And essentially what that is, is what we like to say is almost like a 24/7 sell element while the basic credit unions are traditionally only open for about eight to nine hours a day, whenever you have a strategy that's going to be going branch and exterior wise, it allows you to really gain potential clients that you could be having in that community and allows them to just draw recognition to the branch and invoke that feeling to get them to come in.
There's an argument to be made and I've heard this a few times that the pandemic and the need to restrict access into retail operations, including banks and so on has forced people who were maybe digitally hesitant to learn how to do online banking and mobile banking and so on and therefore the branches which were already started being narrow in terms of their audience are getting even narrower and forcing banks to rethink what a branch was all about and how it worked and so on.
Is that happening and does that connect to how digital signage is being rethought in those branches?
Jared Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Just internally here at DBSI, we've seen a drastic shift from the way our banking and credit union customers interact with their clients to where you actually see a drastic shift into the drive through and that's where we want to try to pivot. And say, hey, we need to get that homogenous feel from not only from your social media and interior. Now we actually need to start pushing this digital signage into your drive through and then actually we started looking inside, incoming into the exterior branch and the pillars.
So it's really not just a one trick pony, if you will. There's a very intentional approach to where we ensure that it's a proper placement where the clients really interact with it.
If you had to define an ideal mid-sized non flagship branch indoors and out, what would be the mix of things that are there and what are you showing on those screens?
Alisa Semyekhina: I would say it's going to be a lobby screen and something behind the teller line. So it could be a single screen. It could be 2x2 video walls, but again, we're talking about non flagship branches. So usually you're going to see some two screens or maybe one screen depending on the footprint and the mix of content and that's where the strategy of content is coming into play, like what's the percentage of content to show behind the teller line and in the lobby area. So that's where the community involvement piece, business recognition and involvement in charitable events are coming into play.
You already made that point about whether to use all kinds of information. We don't want to see that. We want to connect with our community, with our members and customers, and then provide them The advisory function and educational function behind the teller line, because that's where we see a lot of financial education and security content. Especially in the past two years, I saw the increase of that content over there.
I would say from the interactive experience, tablets in medium-sized branches are going to be more prevalent than interactive kiosks. So you will see those more in the flagship branches. And again, allowing that mobility as well at the branch.
And when it comes to interactive, what's the content mix? When people interact with touch screens, what are they using it for? Because I've been in branches where they had touch screens and then blinked away on them and thought I didn't really need to use this. I could have used my phone or I don't see the point of this. That's just like, “Hey, we've got a touch screen, please use it!”
Alisa Semyekhina: You are so spot on, because again, there has to be a strategy for having interactive digital signage in your branch. Just placing the interactive screen on a tablet doesn't mean that it is magically going to be utilized and you'll also need to train your branch team to actually use that technology to their advantage.
And what we've seen when we are working with our clients is actually the information about getting them to understand that this is your tool to dive into the products and services onboarding tutorials. We actually create those and recommend our clients create those, quick 1 to 3 points with maybe even videos or static images on how to quickly onboard on whether it's mobile banking, IE statements, or anything like that. Because again, our clients have 60-70 products and services, you cannot remember all of them. So this is the tool that they are going to be using. So it's probably not specifically for customers and members, it's more for the branch.
The last thing I wanted to get into was ROI. One of the questions in your survey was, why are financial institutions investing in digital signage? I was intrigued that one of the big reasons was modernizing the branch look and feel, but the biggest ROI thing that I came across which was encouraging, was it boosting sales.
Jared Jones: Yeah. I think going on three or four years that we’ve seen that we made this approach or assumption transitioning to ask on this question, because all too often, I feel like marketing teams are being asked, “what's the so what?” Is it just a matter of looking pretty as it, like you said, it says it is just about modernization.
As Alisa was just talking about, the average financial institution has anywhere from 50-70 products and sometimes even more. And also the play there is, depending on what publication you read, if it's going to be hovering around this two to three, as far as average financial products per household. If I consider you my primary financial institution, and really the main contributor is that just a lack of knowledge? So let's say I have a credit card at one credit union and then maybe a checking and savings account at another bank. And then now I'm going to actually have my brokerage account, and my insurance with each individual institution. So that's going to be four or five different FIs there. And that's simply because I didn't realize that the credit union or bank that I primarily go to deal with three-four miles away from my house has all those products and services.
So really what we just educate our clients and their customers is just gonna be centralized around product education and more importantly, product utilization, because it's not about just increasing your financial product. It's more so about helping your clients really guide them down that financial journey.
All right. This was super interesting. The benchmarking report, how does one get that? Do you need to be a client?
Jared Jones: So we actually have it published on our website at dbsi-inc.com under our blog section. Of course, I'm sure our contact information is going to be listed in the podcast so please feel free to either reach out to either myself or Alisa, and we'd be more than happy to get you a copy.
Alright. I appreciate you guys taking some time with me and I hope you're enjoying the weather down in Chandler, which is way nicer than it is here.
Jared Jones: Just a little bit, just a little bit. You'll get the last laugh in summertime though, I promise.
That's correct. All right. Thanks again.
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
Dave Ianonne, First Arriving
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
Wednesday Feb 02, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I'm a big fan of digital signage companies that identify a niche and go after it with a lot of focus - in product development, sales and service delivery. A lot of companies are generalists who broadly do digital signage, which I think can be deadly ... because you're then competing mainly on price and UX.
That's why I really like a company called First Arriving, that is very specifically in the business of providing digital signage solutions to first responder departments and other local government agencies that have a lot of moving parts in their operations.
The Richmond, Virginia company started out doing marketing services, and kind of fell into adding on digital signage about five years ago. Now it's the main focus, and First Arriving's products and services are widely used by the people who run towards emergencies in the U.S. and Canada.
This is not just HR stuff on screens in the break and meeting rooms of fire halls and other venues. The company has scores of integrations with the other technology and information platforms that feed into first responder operations, creating visual dashboards that give crews steadily updated, on-point situational awareness to 911 emergencies.
I also like that these guys are not just selling into that vertical market. Many of the staffers at the company are former first responders, or still active as volunteers. I spoke with Dave Ianonne, who founded the company and was himself, for many years, a volunteer firefighter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Dave, thank you for joining me. Can you summarize what First Arriving does and offers?
Dave Ianonne: First Arriving is a company that started as a marketing company, targeting public safety primarily, and a few other secondary markets, and then we moved into digital signage by chance back in 2018 with an acquisition and that is by far our fastest growing part of our company, and then we're building products off of that digital signage concept in the future.
But essentially we're a marketing and technology company, now more of a technology company more focused on public safety, and rapidly expanding into local government as well.
Okay. So based on what I've seen on your website, the marketing stuff you were doing, websites and all that stuff was for first responders?
Dave Ianonne: We do a variety of things, websites, we manage a few different associations. We do recruitment videos for volunteer fire departments across the country, typically through federal funded grant programs, so a wide variety of typical things which an association management or marketing agency would do, and the websites tie the technology piece well as a SaaS based business.
How did you get into this?
Dave Ianonne: I was a firefighter and a journalist and I combined those two things when the internet started, to launch a website called firehouse.com, which was pre-Facebook back in the day, was the largest website for firefighters in America, and then we built some websites for law enforcement, EMS and security and other industries.
So that's how I got started, and we built a very large social network for firefighters in the mid 2000s, and that kind of spun into starting to do services directly for agencies as opposed to being a media company. So we saw the writing on the wall with the media space specifically, especially large magazines and large websites when Facebook came along. So we started doing direct delivery of services to manufacturers, associations, and so forth.
Interesting. So you've evolved as technology has evolved?
Dave Ianonne: Exactly. Yep, I couldn't tell you what digital signage was five years ago other than seeing it at McDonald's.
I'm a big fan of what you do because I consult companies and write about them and I get a lot of material from software companies saying, here's our stuff and here’s what we do. I look at it and say, I'm sure their technology is fine, but it's a very general offer and they’re basically saying, they do digital signage and I always encourage companies to find a niche, and mine the hell out of it and be the guys in that niche.
You guys are the poster child for that more than anybody else. If I was a first responder department of some kind, I would automatically go to you because this is what you do. This is what you know, it's not like one of the things you do.
Dave Ianonne: We definitely feel like we've got public safety and local government as a real niche, and we're starting to get into other areas. We’re in a gold mine in Nevada, for example, we're in a Disneyworld's local government, so we have a variety of different tactics and markets to serve, but we're not trying to be a consumer focused WYSIWYG based digital signage platform.
Our platform is the opposite of that, it's all custom. We give a lot of tools to our customers to update their content from very simple ways like Google Slides and Google Sheets to more advanced, direct messaging, broadcast alerts down to the individual dashboard itself, the individual digital signage itself all the way globally. So we're constantly unleashing tools to give people access, to manage their content, and we have a lot of content with over a hundred integrations that feeds in automatically. So a typical fire department might be using five or six or more different technology platforms and we're able to give them a quick dashboard view of the key metrics from all of those platforms in one dashboard.
So you're pretty much staying in your lane, so to speak, and if a regional QSR came along and said, “Hey, could you do digital signage for us?” You'd probably be saying, “Yeah, maybe we could, but it's not our thing”?
Dave Ianonne: It depends on what their need is. But yeah we're trying to stay in our lane and really be focused on the B2B, local government, public safety space, and anything that kind of an offshoot of that. So there's security and construction safety, and a lot of different options that'll keep us busy for a long time.
What's your installed footprint?
Dave Ianonne: In terms of number of customers, I think we have almost 700 customers, about 3000 digital signage across the country and a couple in Canada as well. So the average customer has four or five dashboards in their station, offices, the chief's office and some in the field on tablets and desktops. So we do serve tablets and desktops as well.
During the peak of early COVID, we gave our customers a free desktop license across the board to put in their emergency operations center so they could see what the fire departments were doing on the streets, pulling other dashboards from the local government that could all be viewed in one single place. So we probably rolled another 500-600 during the peak of COVID back in 2020 but as a courtesy, we didn't charge customers for that at all.
I'm guessing at that number, there's still a lot of opportunity out there to sell this into, god knows how many volunteer fire departments and formalized fire departments are out there in North America alone?
Dave Ianonne: Yeah, there are 3000 fire departments. There are just as many police departments. There are some 80,000 local governments. So we're currently pacing for that number to double this year, and let it double again next year.
We really didn't have a full-time marketing staff and sales staff until early last year, it was a bootstrap kind of operation. We acquired this on a shoestring budget from a furniture digital signage company that had built this as a pet project of one guy who now works for us. They built it and had some clients, they've had it for a couple of years actually. They weren't familiar with the public safety market, even though they had quite a few customers and we started reselling it and then, somehow three months later, I owned it. It was very rapid. I actually found this platform because I was looking for a digital signage company for my own fire department to just simply put photos of new members on a TV screen. That's how I found this platform, and then just business wise, we happened to acquire it a few months later.
So you've got an immense amount of potential growth you could see?
Dave Ianonne: Oh yeah, for sure. We expect to be at 10,000 screens by the end of next year, and as you scale up into local government, we have quite a few local governments and the fire department might have 10, the police department might have 10, the entire local government might have 50 or 60 in parks, departments, courts, and a wide variety of different organizations and at the core of it, they’re all using this because all other platforms get ignored. Emails get ignored, texts get ignored.
You come in for duty, you go to the TV screen and you know exactly what's going on, who's working, what events are today, what vehicles are in and out of service, what the weather is and it constantly gets updated. Chiefs can push out video messages or text messages to all the screens or to a single work site. So we try to give people access to as much information as it makes sense to digest without overwhelming them.
So if I'm in a typical firehouse or EMS station or whatever those are called, what's the mix of things that you're going to see on a screen or sets of screens?
Dave Ianonne: The core of it is scheduling, so who's on duty or who's coming in for duty, weather, live radar, we offer folks what events are coming up, what their response times are, so they do metrics against each other in terms of how quickly they get out the door and what their typical turnout times are. Quite a few departments have a live feed of their unit status so they can see other stations, are they on a call? Does that mean I'm more likely to get a call for instance, and then certainly when a call comes out, it pops up on the screen. It shows a map via a platform called Esri, which is a big maps and data player in local government.
So it displays the running round and also hydrants nearby. So they get a quick glance of where they're going. It shows Google street view. So it gives them kind of a situational awareness of where they're going into or what the details are. So it's a wide variety.
We have people use it for everything from, where they need to be event wise, to who owes what to the house fund, which is the daily meals that people do in a firehouse. So they track pretty much everything. They get very creative in how they use it for sure.
You talked about a hundred plus data integrations. Having those integrations would be absolutely essential because nobody's got time to just sit down and blink away at a browser or an update for this stuff, it's like when things are happening, they're happening, right?
Dave Ianonne: Exactly. It's real time. Some of our integrations are every couple seconds, especially when you get to the volume of calls and things like that. We take data just about any way you can possibly imagine from real-time API to nightly update it, CSV files. So if it's data, our general mantra is we can take it and do something with it.
There's a lot of investment and time to figure it all out, right?
Dave Ianonne: Oh yeah. We have a fairly significant development team in-house as well as some South American developers that we have. So it's a constant, not just maintaining the integrations, but building new ones. We're constantly adding new integrations as we onboard new customers. They actually help with those relationships.
We have a lot of customers who go to our integration partners and demand more of them to put up on our screen. So that's very helpful.
Now, there would be other software companies that were feeding different functionality into these kinds of operations, are they ever contemplating while we could do digital signage too? Or do they do what you do and stay in your lane?
Dave Ianonne: I'm sure that some of them could.
We have some dispatch platforms that we work with where their dashboard doesn't offer the same number of features we do, and when the call comes out, their dashboard takes over our dashboard while the call is dispatched. So we have some unique relationships with that. But certainly if there's ever going to be a competitor, it's going to be there's all kinds of scheduling platforms and things like that but our view is we're Switzerland. We want to take in everybody.
So we have probably 25 different scheduling platforms, and if one of those scheduling platforms decided, “Hey, I want to do a dashboard”, they probably would not let the other 24 in. It gives us kind of an advantage at that point. So if the fire department is using that platform now, but moves to a different one in two years, they don't need to lose their dashboard.
You mentioned you're a firefighter, I believe you're a volunteer firefighter?
Dave Ianonne: I was, yeah, I'm still involved administratively, but for the most part, I was active for about 25 years as a firefighter.
Don't want to climb up ladders anymore?
Dave Ianonne: No, in my youth, that was better.
I find that interesting in that in most cases, I would say in digital signage, the companies are run and the technology sold by people who maybe know an industry, but are not from that industry, like they sell into retail, they sell into QSR or whatever, but they've never been an operator, and maybe they made fries when they were teenagers or something like that, but you expressly understand the space and I get a sense from your staffing profiles that you have any number of people who are either still active in first responder communities in some way, or definitely know it.
Dave Ianonne: A lot of staff are, I am. My business partner is. On the marketing side, we have quite a few people who do that. Even on the technology side, we have a sales rep who's married to a firefighter. We have multiple SMEs who are firefighters. So being able to walk the talk is a big piece of that, and as we grow passing that education onto our new sales teams and marketing folks who don't come from that industry, because it is a very specific niche, so when the chief is talking to somebody, they want to know that person understands the fire service, and isn't just trying to sell them some random technology. They want to hear the use cases and understand how it's going to benefit them from a communications standpoint.
And I'm going to assume the sales cycle is fairly long for some of these just simply because they're government?
Dave Ianonne: It's the government, but it's also individual fire departments. It's volunteer fire departments.
I like to say we have the only SaaS based product that people can see, that's the big benefit of digital signage. We have customers who come and say, “Hey, I saw this other fire department. I don't need a demo. I need five of them”, and the sale is done, and certainly we have very large customers in Fort Worth, San Bernardino, California, where it might be a two year sales cycle because it's a significant capital expense, not just all the license fees and the hardware, but also they're going to buy the TVs, they have to get them set up, they have to get the infrastructure involved. So it's really all over the place.
And there's RFPs and everything else in the larger ones too, right?
Dave Ianonne: Some. We're able to sole source for a lot of reasons because in a lot of ways we have so many integrations and no one really has that number of integrations. So we're fortunate, at least for now, not to have a big competitor who can come in the door and say, “I can do A, B and F and X”, and that's what that department needs. So we sole source quite a bit.
We are starting to see more and more RFPs, especially on the local government side, certainly that were involved, but I'd say RFPs are maybe 10-15%.
And what's the breadth of the services that you offer in the context of digital signage and kind of related to it?
Dave Ianonne: Digital signage is the big thing. So certainly the typical big screen TV, we deploy the equivalent of what shows up with a big screen TV to desktops and tablets. So we have a Chrome based platform that can deploy those devices, whether it's a PC, Mac, either way.
We're starting to build some apps and some internet style products that feed the same information, but there is a different use case where you can navigate it more easily and get it pushed to phones and upload documents and do some things that are beyond just pushing information, but letting them access information directly. Because again, it's all the same challenges.
“I want a single source of truth for all my information”, but the average firefighter does not need the 10,000 foot view. They just need to see what's in their face at that moment, so things like, “I need a document. I need to see what the weather is. I need to see who's showing up tomorrow.”
So do you have a professional services kind of thing where you look at the systems that a department works with and match that up with the APIs that you already have and build a show so to speak for them? Or do you say, “Here are the tools, you go at it”?
Dave Ianonne: We build everything. So when it comes to the APIs and things like that's all on us. We don't really charge our customers for APIs, unless it's something that only they would only use. So if someone has an existing platform and they want to add new functionality that no other department is using, if we feel there's a use case for other departments, we just roll with it.
So they might want to display scheduling or their turnout time data a different way or squeeze the integration partner for some new data points that we couldn't otherwise get, and we share that around and do a good job of getting that out there to all of our other customers.
What about creating content, you do that?
Dave Ianonne: We don't really create content, certainly on the marketing side we do, but on the technology side, it's more about using their information. We certainly have tools and our expanding tools where we can push information at the zip code or state or national level, so national emergencies and written regional emergencies. That's something that we're rolling out soon in terms of us pushing content to them.
What do you tell customers about what difference this will make for them, what this is going to do for them if they’re skeptical?
Dave Ianonne: Streamlining will save them a whole rack load of time communicating. So people ignore emails, people ignore texts, or there's just too much information put at them through too many platforms when really they just need to know this little nugget and this little nugget from those two platforms. So really it's about just the mission critical information that they need to know right now to do their jobs without having to read a five page document, they missed an email. They were off for a week, so they missed a memo or they missed a meeting and they have no idea what's happening with the different equipment or what's the new standard operating procedure, especially during COVID, where things are changing almost all the time in terms of SOPs and procedures and all those types of things.
So that's our mantra and that's the challenge, whether it is local government or police or fire, the people who find us, everyone's challenges are exactly the same, people just aren't seeing that the critical information I need them to know, and in a lot of cases, people will put the top five things from a standard operating procedure in a simple Google Slide and put a QR code right on the screen that says, take this photo to download the rest of this document, but here's the things you must know, and it's right there in their face with a photo, with whatever graphic, et cetera.
Is there any monetization of these screens in terms of just in the same way all these integration partners are selling stuff into firehouses, I assume there are specialty companies that make equipment and all the way up to vehicles, co they advertise on these networks?
Dave Ianonne: No, and we don't really push that. Certainly we've had people inquire about that and manufacturing facilities have asked us about that, but I think we generally try to stay away from that because the departments are paying us to push their information to their folks, and it's not like someone's gonna stand there and watch a commercial, especially because the screens are in a bunk area or they're in the kitchen or they're in the day room where someone's already watching TV, so the noise would just be noise for lack of a better explanation.
Yeah. I wonder though, and I don't know much of anything about fire departments and so on, but I assume a fire truck costs a couple of bucks and the manufacturers of those things could sponsor screens going into firewalls and everything if they wanted to?
Dave Ianonne: Yep. We've explored that, especially with our integration partners for packaging it in there, essentially sponsoring it for them or just making it part of their existing relationship with them. But it's not something we've significantly focused on just yet.
Where do you think you're at in terms of the breadth of services that you provide? Are you still scratching the surface or are you pretty much covering things off at this point?
Dave Ianonne: No, I think we're still scratching the surface, especially as we talk about expanding the digital signage concept and information into other platforms like desktop and an app beyond what we're doing right now.
Local government could be a market that's 10 times the scale for us and a whole new slate of integrations, and more importantly, how those inter agencies talk to each other. So pushing data from the fire department to the city council, so the city council office can show how many calls the fire department ran yesterday, how much overtime they used, those sorts of things.
So it's about pushing information and I think long term intaking the information and then splitting it up, and parsing it out as a data aggregation platform.
Yeah. I'm just going to look outside my window and we've got a nor'easter that's coming through and there are trucks out there salting the roads and sanding, and then there'll be plowing and the whole nine yards and that's a whole other kind of first responders, but it's same kind of thing, right?
Dave Ianonne: Exactly. Where to plow, what roads need to be plowed. The dispatcher can get real time information via the AVL in the trucks, in terms of where their trucks are located. Some AVL platforms have that, some don't. So real-time status of what vehicles are broken down, what equipment is, etc.
Do you have software companies as competitors or do you pretty much have the market on your own?
Dave Ianonne: If you Google fire department digital signage or police digital signage, there are certainly regular digital signage companies that are more consumer based who have a page in their website targeting those markets. So they're certainly picking up business by chance and we find we've picked up probably a dozen customers in the last year who were using one of those standard digital signage platforms and just couldn't get the flexibility they wanted, whether it was integrations or data aggregation and so forth.
So they switched to us and left those companies because those companies aren't going to build the APIs or they'll have the API tools that a third party like the fire department could do, but most of these fire departments don't have the bandwidth to go build a custom API. Some certainly do, and they very well may, but not the vast majority.
Yeah. You could do a basic communications channel and, with HR messaging and staffing messaging and that sort of thing, but what you're describing, what you guys do is like several many notches above that.
Dave Ianonne: Yeah. You'll get an IT guy at a guy or gal at a fire department who's really gung ho and says, “Hey, I can just build this myself.” But again, that's a very rare instance, and they get something super custom but not nearly at the same speed, where they want to add another platform. If that person leaves there, they're stuck.
Yep. That's the age old story of digital signage. Somebody says, “I could do this, we don't have to spend money on it” and that'll get them started, but it's not sustainable.
Dave Ianonne: Yep, and we don't pitch ourselves as some high dollar platform. So they're not paying thousands of dollars per screen per year, despite that's the value they're getting.
Our pricing is probably similar to most digital signage platforms and our customers are very likely to last a very long time and not switch between platforms and not leave us once they realize the value. The only handful of times that someone's left us, were customers from over five years, even before we acquired it, probably six or seven years where a chief changed and he just didn't like it for some reason, or they got it and they're not maximizing the use of it so they don't get the value, no matter how much we tell them all the different ways to use it and throw case studies at them and have all these departments singing our praises.
If they don't engage with the content and update it frequently, no matter if it's us or anybody else, they're not going to find it useful,
When it comes to the volunteer departments, is it a challenge for them to find a budget?
Dave Ianonne: No, we are at a pretty good price point. So the volunteer fire departments that have one or two stations, that's not really our main focus. We certainly have quite a few of them, but we're really going after the departments that want to have 5-7, they might have two or more stations so that's our real wheelhouse, and then we're starting to get into much larger agencies, like I said earlier, Fort Worth, Palm Beach County, San Bernardino county, we're in dozens of fire stations, hundreds of boards, just for that one county.
All right. This is great. I'm a big fan of what you guys do. I love anybody who's got a really pure focus as opposed to, “We do digital signage. What do you need?”
Dave Ianonne: I appreciate that. Like I said, five years ago, the only digital signage I knew was at McDonald's so if you hadn't told me five years ago, I probably would just would've laughed and been like, what?
But then once we started getting into it and realized that the challenges we were solving for people and saving so much time in communication, I think we got really excited and this is our big area of focus and we've got a whole lot of investors who are interested in helping us accelerate the needle.
Yeah, for sure. All right. Dave, thank you very much.
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Henrik Andersson, Instorescreen
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
Wednesday Dec 15, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Retail experts have long spoke about the so-called zero moment of truth - that time in bricks and mortar stores when shoppers are in the aisles and making the decision about which product they're going to pull off the shelf and put in their basket.
Getting digital signage into stores, with screens doing messaging when people are in a shopping mindset, has always been a big business driver. But putting screens right in the aisles has been a challenge for a few reasons - the main one being how conventional screens would eat up shelf space.
Display manufacturing has advanced to a level now that it's possible to put strips of high resolution LCDs right on the shelf edge without getting in the way - introducing color, motion and the possibility for things like dynamic pricing.
But the solution is not just the display. There has to be a whole system behind it, and that's where Instorescreen comes in. The Hong Kong-based company has a solution that actually meets the scaled needs of retailers and brands, so that you can do things like drive as many as 96 ribbon displays - with different content to each - off a single Lenovo PC.
I had a good chat with Henrik Andersson, the CEO of Instorescreen.
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TRANSCRIPT
Henrik, Thank you for joining me. We've spoken a few times in the past, but for those who are not familiar with Instorescreen, can you run through what your company does? What are you all about?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, So Instorescreen is a manufacturer of hardware, mostly monitors and technology for digital signage. We are 20 years old and today, an exclusive partner of Lenovo.
It's a curious set up in that you're based in Florida, but you're Danish, I believe, and a lot of the company is over in Hong Kong, is that right?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong, and I'm very close to Danish. I'm Swedish...
Ah okay, you're Nordic.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong. We have three manufacturing sites in China and yeah, that's what we are doing today.
And is it privately held or are you publicly traded?
Henrik Andersson: We are privately owned.
One of the things that has struck me about what you do versu and what's historically happened in retail digital signage is, I would say the different waves of signage and retail have involved putting conventional flat panel displays all over stores, which was then followed by doing video walls instead hiving them all together, and the third wave seems to be now that the technology is there to try to put displays right in the aisles, right where consumers are making decisions, as opposed to just being part of the overall look and feel of a store.
Is that kind of why you went on it the way you did?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So the story is that Instorescreen is created to be a supplier that works outside in, instead of inside out. If I explain that very quickly, we come from true OEM manufacturing and we have been listening to the customer to see how we can make the right product for the customer in the right location? That has been the key.
Inside out is more like if the customer calls in and you show them what you have, and we didn't want to work that way. So what we have done is that we have created different solutions that are OEM based, but we have based them on a whole, like retail. So for retail, we have been looking to see how we can replace or how we can add screens and technology into the retail environment. Based on that, we created shelf edge displays. We worked through the biggest manufacturer of LCD screens, and we have been working very closely with them to create the right size, length and height.
When that's finished, we have a solution that could be on the shelf edge. It can be on the header and so on. The second step here is how are we going to drive them? What is the most intelligent way to drive them? And that's where it comes in with our solution, where we call it inDAISY, it's a data chain technology where we can utilize one 4K computer running up to 96 screens. Second generation that's coming next year, we'll also be able to push power through to the DAISY chain. So we will be able to push both power and data through one single cable.
This is the partnership with Lenovo, and with the DAISY chaining, is it one signal to as many as 96 displays, or could it be addressable, like it could be 96 different signals?
Henrik Andersson: It’s 96 different signals. So each screen will get an ID, and based on that ID, you can have different content, so each screen would have different content.
This wouldn't be 96 pieces of video, though, right? It would be images?
Henrik Andersson: No, 96 pieces of video.
Wow. That would take a pretty serious graphics card.
Henrik Andersson: No, not really. Our data chain works as the way that you think about a canvas that's 4K and each ID is taking a spot from that canvas. So for example, if you have the header display that’s 1920x360, the first header takes location 0 to 1920 down to 360, that's ID #1, ID #2 starts besides that and takes from 1920 to 3840 and down to 360, and then the shelf chassis starts below and they are taking left-right, left-right, and then by utilizing the Lenovo computer, we could have four 4K outputs so we can get four times that resolution.
So with retail in the many years that I've been involved in this space, one of the challenges has been trying to get displays right into where the merchandise is.
But the problem has always been that if you put a conventional flat panel display into that space, it's going to eat up merchandising space. It's gonna eat up the shelf space that you want for talking about the product. One of the big drivers here I assume is that this takes up space. That it's a way to not take away from that merchandising space and stockings space?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have been working very closely with the manufacturer of the gondolas to figure out how much space we can take without taking up on any merchandise. So we are taking up about one and a half inch to 1.7 inch in height, and then we are following the two foot three foot and four foot lengths.
And this is using LCDs?
Henrik Andersson: That's LCD, yes.
And I gather that the reason you're able to do this now is you can now natively manufacture LCDs at these sizes?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we don't use any resize. When we started this project like eight years ago, we used a resize to test and see how we can get it to look and how it should work.
Today, we are natively producing them. There are benefits of natively producing them. One of the biggest is that you get the same every time. So if you put like 10, 15 of these side by side, you want all of them to have the same backlight. You want all of them to have the same color, of those kinds of features.
And the biggest one is probably to get down in price. By utilizing a cut down like a 55 inch down to be making one shelf edge. That's a lot of waste doing that by using native screens. If the volume reaches X, we will be able to be very competitive. We are calculating, we should be able to go way below.
A hundred bucks a foot.
Yeah, because I remember when these thin ribbon LCDs first came out and I would see them at places like NRF, about six, seven years ago, the salespeople work in the boosts wouldn't even tell me a number in terms of price, because I gather it was ghastly, but that's changed.
Henrik Andersson: That's changed a lot. For example, we could have a two foot display today for around 200 bucks.
And who is putting that in? Is it the brands or is it the retail owners?
Henrik Andersson: It's both. It's both. It has been the latest 4-5 years. It's a lot of brands. It's getting more retailers, and today, it's mostly retailers on end caps.
And do they see this as part of their business model, their merchandising model that they'll sell end caps and now it's digital.
Henrik Andersson: Yes, and that's information they see that they have, by just using packages, they cannot inform the customer of what the product is doing by utilizing video screens. Now they can inform me what's the benefit with this product and that product they can also do in different flavors.
They can tease you by looking at how good this is with their eyes and so on, and one of the key things everybody's talking about right now is dynamic pricing. You will be able to change the pricing very quickly. You're able to change products on the shelves. You will be able to Collect external data.
For example, if we say which employee has allergy medicine and so on, we can publish the pollen count onto the shelf fetch in real time.
Are these replacements potentially for electronic shelf labels or are they kind of complimentary to them?
Henrik Andersson: Today, it's a compliment. I can say that mostly due to the price, but as the price is still getting lower, I think they are direct competition to the ESLs, I think they are, because you have more dynamics on an LCD screen than you have on an ESL.
With an ESL, you can do the price and maybe a barcode or something that's maybe two or three colors. That's about it, right?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, here you can have a full color spectrum. You can have movies, you can have touch screen functionality. There are so many things you can do. We can integrate the sensors so you can scan your membership and get your special price.
There's so many things that we are investigating right now. What's going to be next?
And doing that is contingent at all on the kind of back office systems that our retailer has as to whether they have the data and everything to make that?
Henrik Andersson: Here is where we work very closely with a lot of partners that build softwares.
So we worked with, for example, Microsoft, Oracle, all of them where they have the backend for the retailers, and then we were working with the digital signage companies, that’s how we can get data between those two systems.
Is that a challenge at all in terms of working with the different digital signage, CMS options out there that they need to have a platform that can work with this high-end Lenovo box?
Henrik Andersson: No, it's not a super high end Lenovo box. It's a computer called P 340. That has an Nvidia board inside before 4K output. So a signage software will work with our solution and most of the times when we talked to a signage company, they found this complicated and it took them 15 minutes and said, oh, this is so easy.
So yes the Daisy chain and all of that kind of feature sounds very advanced, but we made all the technology on our board. So the digital signage company doesn't have to think. That technology, they just have to follow publish on our full 4K cameras.
I guess they would have to, depending on how their CMS works, maybe introduce some new resolutions that they didn't previously have, like 1920x360 or whatever you were describing?
Henrik Andersson: No, they publish 3840x2160 full 4K resolution, and then our data chain board based on the IDs are taking spots from those full 4K canvas.
What about LEDs? I have seen some manufacturers at trade shows again, who were showing shelf edge strips that were based on fine pitch LED. Is that a consideration or not the right way to go on this?
Henrik Andersson: The problem we have with the LEDs is the heat. We have been investigating working with LEDs because there are benefits where you can easily make new sizes. We have to make a tool and new tooling costs about $1.5 to $2 million to make a new size.
So if someone says, we don't want 3 feet, we want 3.2 feet. That's a very expensive thing. But in LEDs, it's doable. But we have power usage, it's almost 10 times more, and then we have the heat. So if we take a whole retail store and we put these LEDs out, it could be that you have to start getting more air conditioning units, basically.
I never thought of it that way. Certainly think of all those LEDs, even though we all think of LEDs as being incredibly energy efficient, if you're using thousands of them in a whole store, maybe millions of them, and that's just a lot of little lights to feed.
Henrik Andersson: They're made for outside. You could use them if you could spot the installations. I think they're fine. LCD is more energy efficient.
The problem that I've seen with the LED versions is simply that to get the resolution, the granularity of the information down to a level that is legible like an ESL or an LCD is you're talking very fine pitch and it adds to the cost.
Henrik Andersson: You cannot do it. So if we look at our header display, for example, it's 1920x360 in resolution. That means we have 360 pixels in height. If you go to an LED, you're down to maybe 30- 40 pixels.
And the net result of that is the visuals just don't look very good, vright?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, I guess they will have a resolution of 150x30 or 150x40. Right now, our is 1920x360.
So it looks like a 1994 desktop monitor?
Henrik Andersson:It depends. From a distance, and if you do the content right, it will look quite okay. But if you go down to price tags and QR codes, coupons, things like that, they will never work. And we can do that as well. We can publish coupons and everything to the shelf edge.
So maybe down the road 3-5 years after micro LEDs mass manufacturing gets sorted and the yields are up and everything else, maybe that's an option, but certainly not right now?
Henrik Andersson: That's something we look into. We have really started looking at that, but it's way too early.
What kind of research has been done to measure the impact of a planogram that's just conventional shelf labels and things like that, versus a portion of a planogram that has your digital shelf edge elements to it?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So what we have seen now is that it's a wow factor. That's one of the things. If you walk in the store and you’re making about 80% of your decisions in the store, and if you get a wow factor, you get something that triggers your brain, you will buy that product. On top of that, you have tools and gadgets, things that need to be explained.
It would be like powered rails. So we say vitamins, anything that needs to be explained, an energy drink, those kinds of fine benefits. I like telling you that by using this product we give you these benefits. We are seeing between 20% to about 300% based on product.
Sustained or just like when it first goes up?
Henrik Andersson: It continues. We have some data from pharmaceuticals when they're explaining a product where we have 300-400% uplift, and we have also inside retail on produce and stuff like that. We have a huge growth.
Are those brands the ones that have used other types of digital signage, like more conventional, flat panels around a store and maybe I assume it wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact, just because it wouldn't be as close to the product?
Henrik Andersson: That has been a thing. They have advertised on digital signage screens in retail, but most of the time they are too far away from the product. So due to the impulse of buying.
The further away you are from the physical product, the less sales are you going to make.
One of the things that you were telling is your solution in tandem with Lenovo, your partner, you're doing in-store analytics as well?
Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have a solution that we are introducing at the NRF which we call smart vision. It's a full analytics platform utilizing Lenovo servers and multiple cameras to collect data from the retail environment.
This is also applicable not only to retail we're doing even in transportation, education, fast food. It's about collecting data on how many people are happy walking in, or sad walking out, where they're walking. We can see the paths of walking. We can see where most people are spending most time, and how long they are standing in front of that product. We can also trigger things. We can see for example, that there has been a spell of a drink in aisle six, and we need to call the janitor to get that clean up. We are also working on things to see if they are putting things in their pocket, or they're putting things in the cart. We can see if someone is acting violent or has a tendency, if something could happen. This is what we work on. We'd like machine learning together with Intel to figure out what kind of information we want.
So you're using Intel's OpenVINO?
Henrik Andersson: Yes, we are using OpenVINO as the base.
Retail analytics using computer vision has been around for 15 years, maybe even longer. So that part is not new. What's distinct about what you do versus some of the more familiar ones that are already known in digital signage?
Henrik Andersson: It’s probably our dashboard, an easy way to get an overview and also the flexibility to pick the things you want. We are trying to do the same here as we do with the screen work outside in, instead of inside out, we don't tell the customers that this is the data that we think you should have. We are asking them what data do you want to make your business better.
Most of that is basically to combine multiple cameras, to get the whole view. Instead of having one camera inside of, by one header display by using this, we can see the moving paths in the store. We can see, for example, during X hours a day, we have this many visitors, but we only have this many cashiers open. Then they can move things around in the store to create something more streamlined.
You want green lines across the whole store. You don't want to, like some aisles are more visited and otherized. You want all of them to move like a typical Ikea. Where you want to go, you have to go with the whole store, even if you want to get the thing at the end of the story.
Yes, you do and it's not my favorite way to shop, but...
Henrik Andersson: That's the way to create impulses on the way to the thing that you're intended to buy. Look at the carts at Ikea. You buy so many things on the way to the exit that you'd never planned to buy.
The reference case that I'm familiar with for your company, is a seat to table store down in south Florida? Is that still your biggest deployment for this, or, where have you put your screens in?
Henrik Andersson: That’s the biggest single-store deployment. We are deploying in multiple stores, but often as a single end cap or category, and there will be a lot of announcements next year of full grocery stores that are getting this installed.
More than just an end cap, but if it takes you to tape, for an example, we have about 200 screens in that store, including shell fetches, header, square screens. So that is an Intel Lenovo and initial screen show, and everybody's welcome to come down and look at it.
So that's your living lab, or you can walk people through and go here's what's possible.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So that's where we test everything from the analytics to the screens to do dynamic pricings, everything is tested there and that's better than having it in our own office.
Lenovo is one of those very large computing companies that has been on the edge of digital signage and some of these companies like HP and so on, they're in they're out. You don't really know what they do, but it sounds like Lenovo has made a concerted investment of capital and people into the space.
Henrik Andersson: Yes, Lenovo has grown a lot in the OEM division. I think when I started working with Lenovo OEM, there were about five guys. Now they're up to 50-60.
And just working specifically with you or are they active in other areas as well?
Henrik Andersson: Basically, it's the whole thing. If you're working outside in instead of inside out, trying to figure out solutions for each individual company. It could involve computers only or it could involve computers and monitors.
One of the things we did in 2020-21 was a full line of monitors with anti-microbial coding on them. So they are like killing viruses and bacterias. But one of the key things as well is that the whole chassis is aluminum. So it's 95% sustainable.
And is that an ask that you get from retail now?
Henrik Andersson: Mostly Europe, because they don’t want anything that has plastic in them anymore.
That'll be a big change if it starts to happen here.
Henrik Andersson: So if you go to a grocery store in Sweden, for example, you have to pay 50 cents for a plastic bag. That's what it cost. If you want to bring the groceries home, you have to pay 50 cents for the plastic bag.
Yeah. That's starting to happen here in Canada as well. And I'm constantly buying more bags cause I forgot to bring the ones I have in the car.
Henrik Andersson: Every Swedish guy has a car full of such bags.
What do you see happening in the next couple of years with the kind of work that you do? Do you imagine there are going to be other companies developing copycat solutions? For instance, I was in Taiwan when we still could travel about two and a half years ago, and I know that AUO, which is a huge LCD manufacturer, has a whole feature wall of odd shaped ribbon displays and things like that, so it seems like this would be accessible to more accompanies now.
Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So AUO is one of our partners. So if we look at a couple of their sites that they have, we have been part of their engineering process. We are being part of developing the size, the functionality, the backlight, all those kinds of things.
So AUO is one we have HKC, we have BUE, we work with all of them. Will be the products similar to our products on the market. Yes, there will be. We are trying to be innovative. We are trying to make it easy. Most of our competitors are basically working as if each screen is an individual screen. They're using an Android board put in there and by using an Android board inside, you will be able to push one content to that screen. The problem you're going to face is if we put multiple screens up, for example, you have a limitation of how many units can be connected to a WiFi network.
You would have a limitation of power plugs. You need so many power plugs to have power to each display. Think about the digital signage licenses. Now, this is nothing but fun for the signage company, if you have 3000 screens in a store and each screen has a built in a hundred players, that 3000 licenses. And also about servicing them, it should be easier to take one away, put one back, you know what a computer is, you have something that needs to be updated in one location, not 3000 locations.
So in other words, you could source something like what Instorescreen has off of Alibaba or wherever you want to go. But the simple question that you would ask or somebody smart would ask or somebody else who's smart would ask is will it scale? And it just doesn't, as you just described.
Henrik Andersson: No it doesn't, and to get it with the, know what we are able to today to have very smart servicing options. We have longtime warranties. We have technical people on 24x7 call. It's a disaster if a retail store shelf edge goes black. For example, we need to fix that very quickly and not call an Alibaba contact and you get a new screen in three weeks.
Yeah. That doesn't work so well. All right. This was great. If people want to learn more about your company, where do they go online?
Henrik Andersson: They can contact Lenovo OEM or go to lenovo.com or they can go to instorescreen.com.
All right. Perfect. Thanks for your time.
Henrik Andersson: Thank you very much.
Wednesday Aug 11, 2021
Doug Lusted, AdStash
Wednesday Aug 11, 2021
Wednesday Aug 11, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Much has changed through the years in digital signage and digital out of home, but one thing that's been pretty constant is how small businesses like the technology when they find out about it ... but don't want to pay for it.
Doug Lusted has seen and heard that for many years, having founded a Canadian startup that was doing proximity marketing and venue analytics almost a decade ago.
He gradually, with his team, started pulling together the idea and eventually the platform for AdStash - a service that enables small business operators and service providers who target that sector to get digital signage in place, and make money from the screens, instead of paying monthly bills for them.
The core premise of AdStash is small to medium-sized businesses - from one-offs to groups of venues - can tap into advertising dollars from a dozen supply-side ad exchanges and generate incremental revenue. They don't pay any recurring subscription fees, and the only upfront cost is an $80 Raspberry Pi media player.
Based in suburban Toronto, but virtual in most respects, the company is investor-backed and already has a footprint of some 70,000 screens in the U.S. and Canada.
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TRANSCRIPT
Doug, thank you for joining me. We've known each other a little bit for quite some time now, and I would say your company has been on a bit of a journey because when I first ran into it, I believe you were doing proximity marketing, right?
Doug Lusted: That's right, and we're still doing that. That was our first product and we're heading out to our second one now.
And that was called, Linkett, wasn't it?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, so to clear it up because branding is often a question. The company name is Weston Expressions. Our first product was Linkett, which is an audience measurement platform that still operates today, and then our second product is AdStash, which we'll get into.
With the first product, what was that all about? That was NFC-based, right?
Doug Lusted: It started out to be NFC. We were trying to track engagement and impressions, but ultimately that morphed into WiFi. So it's predominantly a WiFi tracking platform today.
Because every smartphone has WiFi probably turned on or at least available, and not everybody was equipped with NFC and not everybody had it activated, right?
Doug Lusted: You got it.
So this was just a better way to go, and now you've launched AdStash. Can you tell me and the listeners what that's all about?
Doug Lusted: So what AdStash does is provide digital signage networks the technology they need to go programmatic with no monthly fees, and so on a deeper level what that really means is that the core technology we've built is an API that connects your digital signs to multiple programmatic ad exchanges at once. So it saves you all that integration time and money.
And if you become an AdStash customer, what are you getting and what are you using?
Doug Lusted: It depends on your network. We're pretty flexible. We've got a bunch of different pieces to the puzzle.
But basically, an API connection that lists you on all the major SSPs or most of them. Now, if you need a media player, we can provide you that. If you need a content management system, we have a free one. Those are typically used by our smaller networks. And the enterprise users generally stick to the API because they've got all of that in place already.
Okay, so if I'm already on Brand X CMS, there are hundreds of them. You don't need to back out of that and use your CMS platform or anything like that. The CMS is meant more as something that enables it for smaller businesses?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly, and sometimes what happens is we'll have a customer who's growing their network, and they realize, I can use this CMS that doesn't have any monthly fees. I'm going to switch to that now while I'm deploying. But yeah we can integrate with any CMS. It's a fairly straightforward open API.
I guess it becomes a delicate dance of working with other CMS companies, because if they're hearing that, you don't need to use a commercial or fee-based one, you can just use ours for free they may be thinking, “I don't want to work with you.”
Doug Lusted: Yeah. It's a good point, and to add a little more color to that, it's a very light, basic CMS, right? We can show videos on full screen, maybe a traditional L-bracket, but that's it.
It's very light, more kind of aimed towards small and medium-sized businesses. If you're a large enterprise digital signage network that needs some bells and whistles, sticking to your current partner is probably the best bet and we're pretty open about it.
Is that intentional or is that more a function of, “if I want it to have something that was a lot more robust, that there's a whole bunch more time and dollars that I need to put into it to get to that point”?
Doug Lusted: So we found that most of our early adopters were small and medium-sized businesses that weren't too picky on what's going on the screen? So it would be hard to give out a content management system that's free that has all the bells and whistles as I said, so I think it was intentional. It's just like a backup plan.
One thing we noticed in this industry is that there's a massive amount of supply in the market that is just a mom-and-pop shop with the TV turned off. So we're just trying to make it as simple as possible, like “Hey, here's this box. There are no monthly fees, plug it in and you're ready to go.”
And if they opted for this, let's say I have a nail salon in a strip mall because every strip mall has a nail salon and they want to do this. How does it work? What do they get out of it? How do they use it?
And in terms of what they get out of it, what kind of revenues would they see? Is it something that just is going to just pay for the TV in a lot of respects?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, sometimes. So basically if you use our full tech stack, you get the media player, plug it in just to HDMI and power, and then WiFi or Ethernet and then a free content management system that's cloud-based, the nail salon often puts up their own content on the screen, hours of operation, promotions, that good stuff, totally self-serve, and then we, just like almost any programmatic platform, we aim for a 30% fill rate with third-party ads that we're getting from our programmatic partners.
Given the infancy and where we are with programmatic, some months we hit 30%, some months, we don't, depending on a whole bunch of variables. But the idea is that I think for a small mom and pop nail salon if you look at our data over the past 24 months, minus the closures, due to the pandemic, the average locations making about $50 to $70 a month in revenue that they wouldn't have gotten elsewhere.
And for a lot of businesses, that would be like, you know, who cares? But is that a meaningful number to these people?
Doug Lusted: It is, and especially with COVID impacting a lot of the revenues of these businesses, they're hungry to figure out any way they can earn a couple extra bucks, and most of our clients aren't necessarily one-offs, they own 10 stores, they own 50 stores, and so when you start scaling it, it becomes a nice little incremental piece of business that doesn't require much work.
One of the big challenges that I've seen through the years with these kinds of initiatives is, working with small to medium businesses is not terribly efficient. You've got to sell them one by one. You don't just go in and get an enterprise deal for a thousand locations or anything else.
How do you deal with that side of it and how do you sell it?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, it's a great point. So in the very early days, our Guinea pigs, we were going door to door on these businesses directly. But now I would say 99% of our business is through the digital signage channels so digital signage distributors, smaller and medium place-based digital networks looking to go programmatic, and if you look at the adoption curve, it's similar to any company, start with the little guys and you start climbing up the chain. So we've taken that route and we're working on the channel right now.
So using the example of the nail salon again, how would they find you then? Would it be through like a Synnex or Ingram Micro or something like that? I can’t imagine a nail salon knowing what Synnex is.
Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly. So we do inbound marketing, right? So they'll probably find us online. But like I said, it's a small portion of our business, but they'd be able to find it through any of our paid campaigns, whether it be through Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, etc. Word of mouth is probably our biggest channel, right?
Somebody starts making money they didn't before and they want to tell their friends, they want to move it to the other properties they own. So organic's been a big one for the smaller customers.
Yeah, and if they need it, you provide an $80 media player. So I guess if they make $50 to $70 a month, they pay for that thing pretty quickly. What is that? Is that a little Raspberry Pi or...?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, it is a Raspberry Pi with our firmware on it. It's got a couple of extra little components to it, like just some USB antennas and things of that nature, but under the hood, it's a Raspberry Pi.
The analytical side of the business that you started with, is that bundled with this, and would a small business need it/use it?
Doug Lusted: It is bundled with it, but it's generally hidden from the small businesses.
The reason why we need it is that we need to know what traffic is in front of the screen when ads play so that we know how much to bill these programmatic partners, everything's impression.
Would a nail salon really need a big data platform to understand its user’s behaviors? Probably not. So we hide it, but it is built in there so that we can gauge traffic levels for our advertisers.
So if I am the nail salon and I opt in, what am I using to update content and manage the thing?
Doug Lusted: In terms of our content management system, they're logging in and uploading their own creative. We don't provide a designer tool or any type of creative tool ourselves. They just upload whatever they have.
Okay, and they do it off the desktop or can they do it off mobile?
Doug Lusted: They can do it on desktop or mobile.
Specific app or is it just the web version of the website?
Doug Lusted: We have a specific app as well. So on mobile, we have an AdStash app. You can download and manage your digital signage network just through your phone if you'd like.
I've always been curious about the mindset particularly of the small to the medium business world. By far, the most active blog post on 16:9 is one that lists all of the free software options out there.
Do you find that generally for small to medium businesses, digital signage is not a major core initiative of what they're doing, it's just something that maybe they can use, that there's a real resistance there to spending any monthly fees?
Doug Lusted: I think so. We often A/B test this ourselves to test what is the bigger value prop, the ability to make money on programmatic ads or save money on subscriptions? It's really a mix of both, but the smaller players for sure are interested in anything that isn't going to be recurring, and we also have a lot of requests from the digital signage groups that they outsource this to.
Like I said, our average user has got about a hundred screens. So this is generally something they've outsourced, they've told their digital signage partner, “Hey, you've heard of this free AdStash thing, check it out!”
Okay, and what's your installed base right now?
Doug Lusted: So across North America, we have 70,000 screens. The US is a lot more dominant than Canada. We've seen some pretty exponential growth there. But in Canada, we've got about 6,000 screens and then the rest of the US.
Okay, and what do you figure you have to be at in terms of footprint to get something akin to critical mass? Or does it not really matter as much when it's programmatic?
Doug Lusted: It doesn't matter as much when it's programmatic, and I think that's one of the huge attractions to it, especially for the medium size players.
If I've got a hundred screens, maybe 50 in Toronto, 50 in Montreal, that's not really big enough to attract a national campaign, but programmatically, by nature is grouping everybody together to try and attract a national campaign. So I think that's a really big thing.
Most typically for these small business screen networks, it's hyper-local advertising. It's like the local injury accident lawyers and mortgage brokers and that sort of thing. What kind of advertising are you seeing on the screen?
Doug Lusted: So given that we only do programmatic advertising, most I would say is national. Now we do have some local, right? The Calgary Stampede brought in a lot of local ads, even though like DoorDash will do a national campaign, they'll have custom creative or calls to action based on each local community. But for the most part, at least for now, we're seeing a majority of it nationally.
And with the analytics that you're able to generate, what do you see or what are you learning about sites?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, so traffic data is the most important for sure. Impressions or visits, right? Unique visits, dwell time and frequency are the big three per location.
It's really interesting to see the dwell times. That's what I'm interested in because, during the pandemic, medical was really one of the only things that were open, and you can see our dwell time doubled so the average person sees twice as many ads. What does that mean? How is that going to affect things?
So the most important thing right now is traffic. A lot of these exchanges, like HiveStack or BroadSign, have geofencing technology, so they can gather demographics on their own. We have that capability, but most of the time the exchanges say, “Hey, we got that covered.”
With the rise through the years of computer vision for doing on-premise venue analytics, once in a while, something bubbles up and people get all freaked out about the idea that there's a camera looking at me.
We've seen that a few times in Canada and it comes up elsewhere. What's the situation with your users when it comes to WiFi. Do they care? Are they alarmed in any way? Like they seem to be well on the camera side?
Doug Lusted: Some of our bigger customers are, but we've been pretty proactive in being GDPR compliant. So from a consumer perspective, they don't see anything. They don't see a camera being pointed at them. There's a little box behind the TV that no one sees. So we don't really get any questions on the consumer side.
From the actual kind of business side, yeah, just, are we GDPR compliant? Are we collecting any personally identifiable information, which we're not.
Where are your servers? We get asked those questions a lot, but after they read through what we're doing with the data and they realize it's very anonymous, high-level traffic counting. We've never had any problems with it, and in fact, It's helped us in a lot of deals. Like we're an airport, and as I said before, we're in medical clinics where you can't put a camera. So we carved out a nice little segment of the market, where we seem to be dominating that market share, at least in Canada, just because of those regulations around those venues.
Is it easier to compete with some of the other kinds of focused networks out there? Through the years, I've seen bar networks and hair salon networks and nail salon networks, and everything else. Because you're broadly based, you're not saying, “We're the guys for this.” Is it easier to sell into a broader diversity of businesses?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, it is. But it's also a little confusing because any other place-based digital network, in some sense, if they're on programmatic and not going through us, they're competitors. But on the other side, they're also prospects. So if it gets very confusing, okay, who's a competitor and who's a prospect who should we target? And there's a lot of his “frenemies” in space, and it's getting even more complicated as more and more programmatic platforms come into play.
When your resellers and channel are meeting with a company that has a hundred screens across a network, do they even get into what programmatic is and how it works or do they just say, put this in, we will sell the ads for you and it’ll start showing up within three, four weeks and you should see a check of $50 to $70.
But I'm guessing they don't really want to understand, is this a demand side platform or supply side or any of that stuff? You're just basically saying it's like Google Adsense, it will just show up.
Doug Lusted: Exactly. They don't get into all the nitty gritties.
You go into a nail salon and try to explain what a supply side platform and demand side platform are, it's probably not going to work out.
It's getting more and more confusing as more and more are popping up. But yeah, it's basically, “Hey, we're going to install this new box to your TV, ads are going to show up hopefully and make some revenue”, and another thing is like a lot of our channel partners, they're selling ads directly themselves, not programmatic, just traditional direct sales. So a lot of the time, it's not just us who's responsible for revenue. We're just adding the icing on the cake.
Okay. So that would be like the guy in your part of the world around Toronto, who's got some medical clinics and he's using your platform, but he would have direct sales as well that he could go to a medical equipment supplier or whatever, and say, “do you want to advertise on these?”
Doug Lusted: Exactly. So our agreement, with our customers, is that we have the exclusive rights over programmatic sales.
We're going to connect you to all of the SSPs that we're partnered with and we're going to handle that relationship for you. That's the value we bring, but we're not shutting down your existing line of revenue when it comes to traditional sales.
And that's why you're talking about like a 30% fill rate that there should be this broad understanding that, “Hey guys, this isn't your sole answer if you're an ad network, this is part of your answer.”
Doug Lusted: Exactly, and I think that's where we're at in the programmatic industry is this strange hybrid model, where we're putting a bed on and focusing on that or predicting that more of it will shift the programmatic as adoption increases across the industry. But right now, yeah, this isn't your only source of ad revenue.
So I'm HiveStack and I'm working with you guys. What visibility do I have? Like what do I see when I'm trying to place an ad of some kind or drive a campaign across your screens?
Doug Lusted: We try to be as transparent as possible. What you'll see is an address obviously, of where the screen is located, their analytics will tell you the type of audience that's in there. We'll provide you with the traffic counts that are in there. We even require our users, when they install a device to take a picture of the screen, so that you can actually see what the screen looks like and that it exists, and then you'll just obviously see the playback reporting o how many times did your ad play there and whatnot.
And I'm assuming the analytics side of that is increasingly important, even if it isn't to the venue, it is to the programmatic side?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly, and I think, anybody who's been in this industry for a while understands that that's one of the biggest bottlenecks of programmatic right now. There's not a clear winner of measurement. There are a whole bunch of different vendors, and we ourselves, as the digital signage industry are confused about it, which then makes it almost impossible for these programmatic exchanges to wrap their heads around it, or come up with any standards.
And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, and one of the reasons why is, I think that we need to understand that there's going to need to be different methodologies and technologies to measure outdoor screens versus indoor screens. These are two very different things, I don't think one solution is going to be able to cover both. So we need to really think, how are we going to frame this, how are we going to put standards around it and take the time to educate these ad exchanges on how it's gonna work?
Do you get pushback at all from, let's say some of the larger, more established to programmatic platforms saying, I don't know who you are, you're not big enough for me or anything else, or do they all look at this as more inventory and it's properly described and the analytics are available and so on. So, it doesn't bother me that it's a nail salon and it's not a major international airport?
Doug Lusted: So in the early days, we got pushback from programmatic exchanges because we didn't have that many screens, and it's that chicken and egg problem. So we went out and started building our supply base, and I would say now, we're one of the bigger players with 70,000 screens.
So they look at it and say, not necessarily, this is more screens, cause that's not always how they think, but they say, Hey, this more audience profiles. This is more traffic for us.
And I assume all of your venues are data tagged every which way?
Doug Lusted: Yeah. So not only just what type of venue it's in and where it's located, but what size is the screen, what things are around it, there's a lot of data that's associated with it, and thankfully we are not tasked with having to have a UI for that, that the advertiser has to see, that's basically our programmatic partners job and that's not an easy one.
Going back to the nail salon thing, I signed up for it and I'm running a set of nail salons, which is about as bizarre a thought as I can come up with. Who would do the data tagging for that?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, we do all of that. So once you install the device, you do take a picture of your screen once it's done. We have a list of venues that you can select from a dropdown that is in accordance with the IAB standards. They just find and select a nail salon, which is one of them, and that's basically it. We do everything from there, everything is pretty much automated,
So it's a free service. The obvious next question coming out of that is how do you make money?
Doug Lusted: Yeah. So we take a commission only on the programmatic revenue that we bring to the table, that flows through our pipes. The commission depends on volume and how many screens you have, but that's how we make our money.
I think I saw the baseline was like 30%, and it scales down from there with the larger jobs?
Doug Lusted: It does scale down, yeah. Sometimes it'll actually scale up depending if you're missing core components of technology.
So someone may say, “Hey I don't have this feature in the CMS, can you build it or can I have it?” And they'll say, yeah, but if you don't want to pay for the custom dev time, then the way we'll make our money back on that is maybe 35%.
Even in that case, it wouldn't be fee-based, it would be built around the commission?
Doug Lusted: We're pretty flexible. Most of our customers have come to us because they don't want to pay fees. So it ultimately ends up being a commission, whether we like it or not.
Is that just a concession to the realities of working with a small to the medium business world is that they would like to have this, they just don't want to pay for it. So let's work with them as opposed to just saying, “We won't work with you, goodbye!”
Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly, and I think that's the whole notion of AdStash, and one of our big hypotheses is building this business as there are so many screens that are not being added to programmatic exchanges because they can't afford the technology that's required to do so.
So whoever activates, all of those screens are going to own a huge portion of the supply in the market, and nobody's pulled up their sleeves and gone after that segment of the market because nobody wants to pay for anything.
So was AdStash something, going back to 2013-2014, that you were thinking about, or is it just through the years you came to this realization, having worked with a lot of end-users that there's a hole in the market for this, we can build it and get there before somebody else does?
Doug Lusted: It was a bit of both. So when we were really focused on analytics back in 2014, we weren't thinking about it, but we heard rumblings of programmatic and we always thought to ourselves, audience measurement is great, but it's hard to tie return on investment to, especially if you're talking to a digital signage network, like, “why should I invest in in analytics, if I can't guarantee I'm going to get more ads?”
So we always thought, in the online world, advertisers demand it, and then so when we heard of programmatic coming down and we're like, wow, our data is actually going to be very valuable here and mandatory. So this is a good space for us to get into, and then we were just really early adopters of it, we started working with Campsite right when they started in Toronto and Montreal and it just escalated and we rode the wave.
And how many programmatic platforms are you integrated with now?
Doug Lusted: So right now we're live on 12. We've got a few contracts signed we're just finishing up integrations with, but as of today, we're on the 12th.
I'm not as close to programmatic as a lot of people seem to think I am. Twelve is what, like half of them out there, or my impression is 12 is like 1% of them.
Doug Lusted: So it's a little complicated. There are SSPs and DSPs. The DSPs, yeah, there are 80 of them out there, but not all of them are doing digital out-of-home advertising, only a small fraction of them are.
What we're doing is aggregating all of the SSPs into one link, the supply side, the supply-side ones that actually do digital out of home. There are tons of supply-side platforms out there that you can join your website, but for digital out-of-home, there aren't that many out there yet. So I would say, of the active ones right now, we have a large majority of them.
Tell me about the business. You founded it. Is it completely bootstrapped, self-funded or have you been involved with private equity or VC companies?
Doug Lusted: Yeah, we're VC-backed. So in 20014 ish, when we were just doing the analytics, we raised a small seed round, and we went through an accelerator in Silicon valley called 500 Startups, and then when we launched AdStash, we raised a second round of funding, a bigger round of funding to help push this product.
Where are you at in terms of the size of the company?
Doug Lusted: So right now, we're at 13 and growing. It's been unique for us during the pandemic, we’ve done fully virtual and we were hiring during the pandemic too. So it's been interesting to have a team with some members you've never met before. We were surprised to figure out that some of our employees are like 6’4”. We had no idea they were like these big people, so it's been a unique experience, but a majority of our team is software developers.
We're not a heavily focused sales and marketing organization because that's what our programmatic partners do for us. They're doing all the sales. So of that 13, the majority of them are software developers.
And we were talking before we turned on the recorder that you moved from downtown Toronto to the burbs. Based on the last year and a half, are you concluding that, hey, we don't really need a physical office or any of those things? Maybe we have a kind of virtual rented office and a mailbox kind of thing and it'll do because so many tech companies have gone that way?
Doug Lusted: Yeah. Speaking on behalf of our company, I don't think we need an office. We like to do monthly hangouts where we'll all meet somewhere. Just rent an office for a day and talk strategy and whatnot. But when it comes to the day-to-day operations, we don't need an office. Again, software developers, most of the time, are locked away coding, they don't really need an office.
They don’t want to talk to other humans anyways.
Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, as long as they have a kitchen nearby, things are good. So for us, we'll keep doing the virtual way.
That being said, it has presented interesting scenarios in terms of culture. It's very hard to build a company culture virtually, there's only so many things you do. So that's why we really like to implement at least monthly hangouts where the whole team comes together in person and does something to try and build that culture.
That is what's probably important to keeping virtual employees nowadays, because if they can get a new job without having to move and just simply saying yes, you gotta build that company culture to want to entice them to come work for you every day.
Yeah. It would be pretty easy to leave if you have absolutely no emotional attachment to the people you're working with. You don’t know how tall they are. (Laughter)
This has been great. Just a quick question. If people want to know more, where do they find AdStash? I'm guessing, it's AdStash.com.
Doug Lusted: Yeah. AdStash.com. Best way to get us.
All right. Thanks a bunch.
Doug Lusted: Thanks, I really appreciate you having us on.
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
Sean Wargo and Peter Hansen, AVIXA
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
Wednesday Jul 14, 2021
The trade organization AVIXA invests a lot of time, resources and dollars into trying to get a handle on what's going on in the audio-visual industry, and regularly publishes reports, briefs and even video explainers for members.
One of the big efforts is an annual industry overview, and the the most recent one provides a picture of industry that got kicked really hard in the shins in 2020 but appears to be coming out of it now.
Sean Wargo, AVIXA’s Senior Director of Market Intelligence, and economic analyst Peter Hansen kindly set some time aside to walk through some of the findings, and drill down a little more specifically into how digital signage was impacted in the last 18 months or so, and how things look going forward.
The good news is things are already looking up, and the forecast is pretty darn sunny for AV and signage.
The cloud platform I use for recording had a bad hair day, so you will come across a little back and forth about who could hear who, and Peter's audio eventually just disappeared on us from the file, so the episode is about five minutes shorter than normal as we nipped out the dead-silence and stitched it together. Things happen but it is still well worth a listen.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hi guys, thanks for joining me. AVIXA does a lot of research about what's going on in the marketplace. You recently pushed out a big one. What's that all about and what did you find? I know that's a big question.
Sean: Sure Dave, happy to be here. So we do an industry forecasting effort every year, that we refresh every year, we call it our Industry Outlook Trends Analysis (IOTA), Since we're in the tech industry, we have to have acronyms, of course. But the idea is that we're hoping to essentially provide guidance on the size and direction of all things proAV. We've drawn a pretty big definition for what that means, some more IT-sounding technologies are sometimes included.
Long story short: the idea there is a revenue forecast that companies can use to see where the opportunities lie, challenges, etc. As you can imagine, particularly important as we come out of the pandemic and are looking towards recovery.
Now, is that something that as an AVIXA member is expected, or is it a bonus part of membership? I don't belong to a whole bunch of industry associations, so I don't know if this is normal or something you just saw a hole and decided it needed to be filled.
Sean: Yes, in the sense that most trade associations will do some sort of industry forecasting effort. AVIXA, formerly known as InfoComm, had studies that had been done through the years. We decided to do it a few years ago, it was to step up the game a little bit, go a bit deeper, broader with our analysis, and expand upon that forecasting effort. So we have a two-part offering to the marketplace.
There is a lot of that research that we will share with the membership, whether in the form of briefings, webinars, presentations that Peter and I will do out to the membership to help them understand the broader trends. But we also offer it as a paid offering. So dashboards, deep reports, forecasting notes, a whole bunch of additional deliverables that a company can buy into for those that are really needing to immerse themselves in data to make strategic decisions. So a little bit about a little bit of both.
As somebody who spends all this time looking at this industry and writing about it, one of the challenges I've found is finding useful, relevant, trustworthy information about digital signage in particular, there are endless reports that you can see pop up on Google alerts, but they're all coming out of India, and the handful of what I would call legitimate research companies that are taking a look at this space are also generally looking at other stuff.
So there's this real sort of absence of focused information about AV and particularly signage, at least it seems that way.
Sean: Yeah, definitely true.
I think there are a lot of offerings out in the marketplace for market research about any given topic, especially if it has any currency, if there's any buzz happening in the marketplaces about a certain issue, you're going to find a lot of studies that you can subscribe to.
I think we wanted to approach it as an industry kind of insider, having the direct need for the information ourselves, we recognize that there was a gap, as you're noting, for digital signage conference and collaboration, all the bits and parts of the industry just really weren't well captured, measured, forecasted, etc. So it was part of why we stood up for this improved version of forecasts a few years back.
Also because while you might find say bits of pieces of research on a certain segment. There's not a lot available that tells you the complete package, the complete story of pro AV. We recognize though, as you're noting by the lack of offerings in the marketplace, what that's telling you is there's not a lot of people that know a lot about the business. And so we also wanted to make sure we partnered with a company that has broad subject matter expertise, lots of analysts covering the underlying product categories, to provide that expert analyst commentary and input to crafting a forecast. So methodology and vetting of partners were really important to us as we built this out as well.
What's the important stuff that companies should be paying attention to?
I get asked every week by somebody, what's the total bullet total addressable market for digital signage or for workplace digital signage or whatever it may be, and I also see endless presentations that assign a value to the overall digital signage marketplace, whether it's North American or global, and I look at this big ass number and think, okay that's an impressive number, but what does that mean and is it meaningful for a company? Or is it just a big number to impress people?
Sean: That's a great point, and I think, what you're hinting at is that it's a starting point. So what a lot of companies are looking for, let's pick a manufacturer as an example. If you're a display manufacturer, you're wanting to see how big that total addressable market is, so you can calculate things like market share, you can plot your own growth forecast off of it, you can say, all right if the market's growing 80% compound annual growth rate, we're expecting better or worse based upon our specific situation. Maybe we can do better and get to 16 or 20. So it's a starting point. It's a reference point.
What a lot of companies are looking for is that kind of reference point, whether it's global, to a specific geographic area, to a specific product segment, to a particular market they're serving. They need input and validation or a challenge to inside expectations. So that's what we're hoping and wanting to provide out there is that third-party view of a market situation. Understanding that in some cases that big fat global number that everybody likes to point out may not be useful to a very local company. But it can, when whittled down and segmented via some of the filters, can provide them a TAM number that they hey can then use inputs to craft their own forecast.
Peter: Everyone disagrees about what a TAM of digital signage exactly means, and that's where we like to help people get dashboard access.
So they can understand, “do I dip my toes into the content side?” You know, the server storage, transmission and that are billions of dollars there. Or, I'm really focused on exclusively the screens along with the infrastructure, mounts, and stands, et cetera.
And so you end up with these different numbers there and to some extent, we try to take a stance and say it's a big market and an AV company, it can be working with all this, but also, we allow and encourage folks to dis-aggregate because we also don't really want them to take a step where if they are doing digital signage, they have to do XYZ. Your business should fill whatever niche it thinks it's best at, and that one number, as you say, can be a little ridiculous just to look at a single number from the perspective of most companies, because no company probably will fit exactly. “I only do North America for all parts, all every single product that goes into that number that is on the headline.”
It must also be a challenge to draw a distinction around what is digital signage because I have seen no end of product pitches out there that have talked about collaboration displays as being digital signage and vice versa.
How do we wall this off? How do we say what digital signage is and then assign a value or a forecast?
Sean: Yeah, that's probably the most important step of the process of forecasting is your definition phase. How are you drawing a circle around that particular segment or the industry as a whole and as Peter mentioned we want to make sure that we're including in our definitions a broad enough opportunity set.
Digital signage is a great example because I've seen digital signage forecasts that really are only the displays, and that's it, as if digital signage was only a display on a wall, forget the mount for a second, forget the media servers and AV servers that are feeding the content to it, forget the networking backend that may have to be built out to support the content distribution. So there's an ecosystem there that when we did our definitions phase, we purposely drew our circles a little bit larger, our definition is a bit broader to allow for a company to talk about, you know what, I'm in digital signage, but I'm going to serve this particular segment of it, this particular facet of it and that'll be my opportunity area.
An example for us in signages, we include a very big number for what we call media servers, and the reason is that as we all know, you put a display. We think of it as the hungry display now needs to be fed, it needs content, and so you need servers to basically aggregate, distribute, optimize that content out. So that's a big area of spend within the signage category as a solution area. Soit's the right question to be asking, as you're looking at numbers is how do they define, and then of course, how do they measure, what assumptions are they making? What inputs do they gather? Those kinds of things to evaluate the research offering.
So we're coming out of... I hope we're coming out of a very rough 17 months or so and COVID-19 obviously had a pretty significant impact. I'm looking at a slide here that said 2020 was $214 billion in revenue for the AV industry globally. What had been the expectation for 2020 prior to the pandemic?
Sean: Sure. I think when we did our forecast in 2020, it was around when we started it in November of 2019 ‘cause that's when you start your forecast process, you gather your input. So right around March, April was the time we're looking at our numbers and saying, okay, here's what we had thought would happen. Now we have the pandemic. What do we think is going to be the impact? As you're sitting in May, which at that point, the assumptions we made is, maybe this is like many other viruses that have hit us where it's one or two waves and then it goes out, and so possibly by the end of 2020, the situation is improving and that there are vaccines being distributed, that most of the waves are done, all that kind of stuff, and we expected a return to business. So we expected 2020 originally to be only about a -8% in terms of revenue decline. In the end, when you look at all the surveys we did through 2022 AV providers, manufacturers, distributors, the final analysis said it was more like -17%. So double the decline that we originally forecast, and that's often what happens is you only know what you know at the time. You tend to be pessimistic or optimistic. I would say we were about the middle of the road. But we ended up providing that down. So the two 14 numbers that you're looking at now is much less than it would have been in normal time, say normal trajectory, but there's an upside to that too.
So because 2020 was worse, we seem to be in that recovery mode meaningfully. Now that. It looks like the trajectory coming out is even steeper. So you have bigger growth percentages in 2021, in 2022, and then it starts to level out by 2023 and 2024. So that we're able to say by 2022, we think a good portion of the globe is starting to look like what it did in 2019 and exceeding those revenue peaks as we come out of this.
Is it deferred spending or that money that didn't get spent in 2020 is lost, and this is a new budget?
Sean: It's a bit of deferred spend, certainly, but it's also an adaptation. One of the big trends that we've highlighted in our reports is that the pandemic was a disruptor, not just because it shut down industries and economies, but also because it forced us to shift to remote everything, work, play, education, et cetera, and there are some lingering effects. I think we're in an experimentation phase right now where we're trying to see what does return to work look like. How hybrid is it? How virtual, how in person?
So some of the spendings are an adaptation. It's learning t, and now emphasizing and investing in new ways of interaction, new ways of engaging audiences and workers and students, et cetera. So there's a bit of both, but I would also point to innovation. One of the things that disruption does is you start to think differently about the way you do business, and so new solution areas that we probably haven’t even fully thought of yet that kind of come out of this also is the mother of growth and an investment in our industry. But we look from a macro econ side. So Peter probably has some addition he can add to that in terms of how the economies and industries recovered too.
One of the things that we cover, we have a strong macro econ section of our reports and one of the primary things that we look at is how is GDP expected to change, recover, et cetera, as we come out of the pandemic. And so, that has looked brighter and brighter. 2021 has a strong GDP estimate for us in many parts of the world. There are some challenging areas but we then benefit from that as that improves, we start to grow and improve as well. So I will look to that economic improvement as a kind of contributor and a driver of pro AV growth too. Not without challenges though.
When you set your filters for zeroing in on information, can you get a sense of the hit that happened overall for global AV in 2020? Can you drill down to the hit on digital signage?
Peter: Yeah, so digital signage is actually one of the technologies that have been mostly closed to AV overall in the last year and this year, which I don’t think is that surprising.
We talk about AV and how it pertains to the wider economy, we usually link it kinda at the start of our presentations, reports to GDP because it reflects the economy because AV is an in-person specific technology in general, thinking about live events, sports, museums, but it also has its collaboration side. And digital signage is a minor part of that, so big solutions that are used at stadiums, it’s part of branding in malls, etc. But it’s also part of the communication: a grocery store needs to communicate restrictions to its customers, a fast-casual restaurant has a platform to use maybe for point of purchase assist as well. So it suffered from the lack of in-person activity. But it’s also been supported in some areas because it's such a flexible communication, a distanced, safe way to communicate to clients.
In the last year, it was a little bit over 15% drop and it's recovering quite strongly this year about maybe 10-12% bounce back in 2021. So kind of following the overall industry numbers with those percentages.
In terms of what's happened in the past year. Obviously, a lot of it's coming back. Some of it's deferred money, some of it is new money, but when you take billions of dollars out of an industry, not everybody's gonna be able to weather the storm and come back. Do you have any sense at all of what the impact was on the numbers of companies and jobs?
Sean: Yeah. Good question. We did some survey research in 2020 to track this, to see how providers were being impacted along the way, and what we were seeing is, unfortunately, a steady, let's say 1-2%, each week that was saying, I've had to close my doors for good. And so there was real attrition.
What was the total? It's really hard to tell because of things like stimulus and other modes of say, sustaining your business to where people may have gone into almost a hibernation mode or a sustenance mode just to keep things rolling, but it looked like in terms of attrition of individuals, so laying off riffing roofing employees, it was probably about an 8% decline in staffing over the firms that we're tracking and were surveying throughout the process. So yeah, real impacts to real people and real businesses.
One of the interesting things that I could see happening was companies, particularly live events companies, who obviously couldn't do concerts or conferences or anything else. Some of them pivoted and started doing some interesting things like virtual audiences in sports arenas and things like that.
Did you see much of that? And were these things short-term measures or did they turn into industries?
Sean: Yeah, the jury's a bit out in terms of how much that's going to be a lasting impact, but those kinds of pivots or innovations, creative uses of their skills in technology and services is what allowed live events to not go to zero. So we saw a 60% decline in revenues for live events in 2020, just a dramatic horrific impact on that business. But I think they did shift over to things like content distribution, streaming services, capture, and optimization of content for then later streaming.
As you noted, they did support virtual events. In some cases, event managers would stand up on a store virtual studio and still would use some technology. I know, for example, AVIXA, to support some of our events, we would rent a green room in order to do some footage that we could then port over to put a virtual backdrop and all sorts of stuff for some of our creative presentations. But yeah, I think it's that kind of innovation that helps these businesses to at least persist through the period. If not, in some cases, perhaps shut down temporarily in order to re-emerge as businesses re-emerged.
Yeah, and some things like those extended reality virtual studios just came out of nowhere, but seemed to be a really hot trend now.
Sean: Yeah, definitely. I'm curious to see how much of that stays because what we've learned is that trade shows don't work virtually. I think we've all tried that and replicated that booth to booth experience, the trade show floor experience just doesn't happen very well on virtual. But a conference track does. So you can really imagine a world where let's say a major trade show could wrap around its edges, some virtual content to hype up the show before it starts, continuing the long tail of content afterward to engage audiences, and so that gives a live events company opportunity on-premise, while the show's going on, but a tale of opportunity around events too, to help capture and read and distribute content.
So I think there's a number of interesting business models that could come out for a live events company around this kind of audience extension, content extension, content optimization, virtual studio, all that kind of things. It will be interesting to see.
if you go back 15-16 months to March of last year and started to look at the industry and start to do some of these forecasts. Are there things that you expected to happen that didn't happen and other things that did, that surprised you?
Sean: Originally, we did not expect the conferencing and collaboration category to boom, quite as much as it ended up. So our original forecast around conference and collaboration, which in all fairness, largely was about conference rooms, auditoriums, in-person kinds of venues for office buildings. So we expected that industry, that market to decline a little bit, let's say a few points, so not bad, and in an environment where most things are, double high or low double-digit declines, conference, and collaboration, that's a pretty strong outcome.
In the end though, we saw a flood of money going into it consistently through licensing, through kits for remote work support, all that kind of stuff just really made up for it. So the whole support of remote was an even bigger phenomenon than we originally had forecasted, probably partially because we did, as I noted before, we believed that there would be a return to more in-person stuff earlier in the process, late 2020, and by now we'd be pretty much fully back. So that would be one of those things that was a bit more pronounced than we had originally thought, and that's a lot of what it was is not necessarily complete surprises, but more pronounced versions of things than you would've expected originally.
Okay. Thank you very much, guys. Just one last thing for Sean, just very quickly, if I'm listening to this and I want to have a look at the latest report or highlights of the report, where would I find that?
Sean: Sure. Probably best to reach out to me, at swargo@avixa.org. We have some resources on our website, avixa.org, but starting with me can point you in the right direction probably a bit more efficiently.
Thanks again for taking some time with me.
Sean: Thanks so much, Dave.
Tuesday Jul 13, 2021
David Weinfeld, Screenverse
Tuesday Jul 13, 2021
Tuesday Jul 13, 2021
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Advertising is hard - and a lot of companies, from startups to majors, have found out the expensive way that creating and running a screen network that's funded through booked ad spots is no walk in the park.
There are lots of programmatic advertising options out there to make access to brand advertising easier for network operators, but a start-up called Screenverse is going down a different path - basically saying to a lot of companies that have screens: "You focus on what you're truly good at, and we'll take over the ad sales and management of your network."
So in the same way that some solutions providers are the outsourced digital signage operating units for companies like QSR chains, Screenverse is doing the sales and related work for companies that happen to have a screen network as part of much larger businesses.
A great example would be TouchTunes, which has 1,000s of digital jukeboxes in bars, with screens on them that support booked advertising. Screenverse now runs and sells the ad display side of the business, so TouchTunes can focus on what it is super-good at - music content curation, licensing and overall ops.
The company was started by a couple of guys I have known for a long time in this industry - David Weinfeld and Adam Malone. While less than two years old, started just in time for a pandemic and nuclear winter for out of home advertising, Screenverse is making money and recently announced a quasi acquisition deal to bring on the sales experience and business ties of The Danaher Group, a boutique media sales run by Sue Danaher, who many industry people will know from her days running the DPAA.
David and I go back to the days when we were consulting partners on The Preset Group. It was terrific to catch up, and get a better understanding of how his company fills what is a pretty obvious need in the market for companies that want to monetize the screens in their network, but struggle (or would struggle) trying to run ad sales and media operations within the walls of a company that otherwise knows very little about advertising.
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TRANSCRIPT
David, thank you for joining me. It's been a while since we've caught up. The first thing I wanted to ask is what you've been up to? Cause we've known each other for more than a dozen years and you've done a few things lately and then got into starting Screenverse.
David Weinfeld: Yeah, absolutely.
So prior to starting Screenverse, I had been working in different startups, largely in the digital, out-of-home, and digital signage space. Most immediately, I was at Vistar Media leading their global supply-side sales team, and that was an incredible experience, really being able to see across the whole of the landscape, building out their enterprise software business that included their ad server and player software and building that out and enterprise relationships with companies like Top Golf, RedBox, etc.
But even as I was doing that and playing on a lot of the experience that I had in the industry, even dating back to our days at the Preset group, understanding that there continued to be this prevalence of networks that at their core weren't media businesses, and so they might've had thousands of screens in grocery or Walmart stores or in office buildings, but really weren't in a position to maximize the revenue that they could generate.
They were seeing success by connecting to an exchange like Vistar, but I just saw so much more potential in the way in which they could monetize those assets, and as I started seeing that, I really got the idea for this vision of the business, Screenverse, playing on my time, working with you at the Preset group, consulting to major display manufacturers like Samsung and LG and others, but then really looking at the networks that I most enjoyed working with were networks that were just entirely new to the media side of the business, and as you and I both know, and most people listening to the podcast, there are so many stories that we can tell of the digital out-of-home networks that have come and gone. The skeletons of past networks that otherwise you would've thought, there's a foundation for success here, and sometimes it's the expectation of, if you build it, they will come, and the advertiser is just going to knock on our door, and what I've since learned is that's obviously not the case, and programmatic, there does open that door to a degree and create some of that opportunity, but really Screenverses exist to really blast that door wide open on behalf of our network partners, and so when I left Vistar pre-COVID, it was with a very clear vision of the business that I wanted to start.
I was lucky enough to found the business with another great industry professional in Adam Malone, a friend who I've known for over 10 years, and in doing so, we built up a company whose entire focus is on ad management and monetization for digital screen networks and really taking networks like Pursuant Health and there are 4,600 screens in Walmart stores nationwide. Our partners at Corner Media, Touch Tunes, Touch Source, Paramount, Smartify, Spin, and others, and really being able to best package and position their inventory, no matter however a brand or agency wants to transact against it, whether that be through a direct IO or by way of a programmatic channel.
If you had to do your elevator pitch, the 25 words or less of what all that you do, what would you say?
David Weinfeld: Yeah, I would say that we turn our network operators' side business, which is bringing third-party advertising through their screens, to our main business.
So that includes everything from ad operations, media packaging, CPM management, optimization of deal flow and management of their inventory, both through the direct and programmatic channels, in such a way that's going to maximize the revenue that they see from agencies, brands, and demand-side platforms. There are some analogous companies in the digital space. Some of those companies are Inc.’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies in 2019. There’s a comany by the name of Freestar, who I really admire the way that they've grown and built their business.
Cafe Media, Adpushup, are all examples of companies that exist to really demystify for publishers and companies, how to maximize their revenue generation and take advantage of existing technology. So we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're most certainly not trying to be a supply-side platform. But our goal is to be the best possible service layer, leveraging technologies like a Vistar or Place Exchange and others, and being able to build lightweight technology on top of that, whose entire purpose is to realize greater revenue and greater efficiencies in the sales and ad management process.
So you've got companies who have screens associated with their business, for whatever reason, like during waiting rooms or in Touch Tunes that have digital jukeboxes that also have screens that you can sell ads on, but it's not their core business so effectively they can outsource all of that to you, to people who understand the game, understand the process and everything else, instead of trying to understand that internally and be a skunkworks and a business that spends 98% of its time on other matters, right?
David Weinfeld: That's exactly right, and what I've seen historically is that it's very hard for those types of businesses to hire really strong and capable media salespeople, and for good reason, because they're not media businesses, and so they ultimately are challenged from the outset, whereas it's much better and actually a lot less costly and creates a lot more opportunity and potential against their inventory to bring in a company like Screenverse where that's our entire focus.
I really like to think about companies and their capabilities. What can you be the best in the world? What is your superpower? Well, our superpower is monetizing digital screens in the physical world, and so if we have companies like Touch Tunes who are incredible in building out distributor relationships and building out the largest footprint of digital jukeboxes in the US and globally, or a company like Pursuant Health, who has kiosks in every single Walmart store nationwide for blood pressure, BMI assessments, and other major health assessments. That's what they're best at in the world, so let us manage the media business and the media side, and especially as programmatic becomes an increasingly important part of the digital out-of-home landscape, understanding the nuances of that channel and how best to navigate different SSPs and DSPs, agencies and the way in which they're transacting, whether direct or programmatic becomes really important. And it ensures that their inventory is getting in front of the right buyers and that they're seeing the greatest value from their inventory and by packaging partners together, we're able to create some really unique audience segments, such that, by itself, a network might not have the scale to get the attention of a major brand, like Starbucks or Unilever, but together complemented with other assets and other inventory, it tells a complete story.
So a digital out-of-home network, in something like let's say waiting rooms or whatever, they could do direct sales themselves, but they're going to have to hire people to do that. They could get a rep shop, but they rep all kinds of things that might not even be digital, or they could think that they could just use programmatic, but the reality is programmatic isn't going to fill their inventory.
So you need to have this hybrid and you either do it internally, or you go to somebody like your company, right?
David Weinfeld: That's exactly right, and there are a lot of companies who really media or being ad supported is their core focus. So you have companies like Doctor's offices, patient points, or you have companies in gyms, Zoom media, right? Those are not our target partners because they already have in-house sales teams and the entire business is built on how do I monetize those assets? But we really look at companies that otherwise might be in similar environments.
So we have a partner in a company called Touch Source that is one of the largest providers of office building directories and screens and major healthcare offices to the tune of 10,000 screens nationwide, whose superpower is building out these great solutions and interactive experiences and managing tenant databases and directory user experiences, but there is an advertising opportunity there, and one that in order for them to hire an in-house sales team and think through all the nuances of how they marry that against their existing business, is we formed a partnership with Touch Source, such that we can really manage and own that and act as a consultative partner, and we certainly work together to strategically think about which screens within their overall portfolio of 10,000 make the most sense to bring third-party advertising to, and we're not recommending or saying that, “Hey, our expectation is to light up advertising on all 10,000” but we are in the process and we're at a hundred buildings today, but our expectation is to be in the not too distant future at a thousand buildings, where you're talking about is a network that has multi-million dollar media sales potential in a post-COVID environment, and one that otherwise would have struggled to access those dollars, even by just connecting to programmatic pipes like a Vistar Media or Place Exchange.
You still need people, even though it's technology-based and there are automated workflows, you still need people to manage these systems and there are still relationships at the core of the transactions that happen, and so that's really what we say, there's an opportunity to connect to an exchange and gather low-level dollars but you understand CPM, you understand the dynamics of the demand and supply within the ecosystem and what the competitive landscape looks like, and all of a sudden we became not just a cost center to our business, but we realized success in partnership with our network operators, such that it hopefully is an easy decision for them to work with us.
Yeah, it's been interesting to listen to this because I admittedly didn't fully understand what Screenverse did, but now I do, and one of the reasons I understand it is I've lived it. Years and years ago, I started a network in the pedestrian corridor system underneath downtown Toronto. There's like miles and miles of walkways with retail down there and everything, and hundreds of thousands of people. Great media environment, in a lot of ways, but this is 2003-2004, and people didn't get it. So I needed professional salespeople to do that for me, and I tried doing partnerships with companies who were already digital out-of-home, and while they understood the pattern and everything else, they just weren't fully invested in it because they had their own product to sell, and at the end of a meeting, they went, “Oh, by the way, we have this thing too. I'm not quite sure what it is, but are you interested? No? Okay. Bye.”
It just didn't work. You need somebody who's focused.
David Weinfeld: Absolutely. It's really where opportunity meets execution.
And the understanding and we're entering an environment and thanks to programmatic, and I really, especially the more time that I've spent on the demand side, I have a much greater appreciation for the work that Michael Provenzano and the earliest employees at Vistar did, and frankly, building out the programmatic market.
But now that they have, and now that it's much more robust and it's still in its early innings, there is an opportunity for networks like that to get access to dollars that they otherwise would have been challenged to, but to do it entirely on your own and not understand the advanced capabilities or options that are available to you, it is essentially leaving dollars on the table and programmatic is all about minimizing loss and maximizing gain, and so if you can be in a position where you can bring in the right partner, and again, we're a partner. We don't physically own any screens. We haven't invested capital in building out screens. So we don't have any interests that could otherwise be muddied by bringing on additional networks.
We curate the partners that we work with. We say more “No” than we do “Yes”, and it's really important that we think about how they fit within our portfolio, not just in the near term, but in the longterm and how our sales team, frankly, can be successful on their behalf because the last thing I would ever want to do is set unrealistic expectations, which I think can very easily happen, not just in this industry, but really any media space of well, I have this many millions of impressions that equates to this media value so I should generate a million dollars a month and that's nice on paper, and it's nice when you build out projections, but the reality tells a very different story.
And one of the things that, myself, Adam, our team prides herself on as being very open and transparent with our partners and setting very clear expectations of this is what we believe your network is worth, this is what we believe that we can deliver in terms of value. Our hopes far exceed those numbers, but we also don't want to go into a relationship where the numbers far outweigh what we think the market can bear. We do have very high hopes, or as optimistic as I think anyone in this space around where digital out-of-home can grow and what it can become in the media mix. But the reality is that programmatic is still a small part of digital out-of-home spending, it's around 5-6% of our overall spending, and thanks to COVID in industry and out-of-home in the US that was approaching $9 billion, got knocked down to between $6-7 billion and is fighting its way back. But I've long believed that in order to unlock the greater demand and revenue that should be coming into out-of-home in general, it's going to be by way of digital buyers. It's going to be by way of buyers who understand that, layering in contextually relevant digital playspace like with a partner of ours, the bulletin who was in a high rise, residential apartment buildings in major cities in the US, layering that with targeted campaigns, it's hard to beat for a D2C brand like a GoPro or Hell Fresh, or Uber eats, but right now they're not really thinking about that within their total strategy. That of course incorporates Facebook and Google and Instagram and connected TV, and so if we can get any access to those budgets, we should become a much more important, incredible part of the total media landscape.
Is there a distinction between endemic and non-endemic advertising at this point or is it all just like data flags?
David Weinfeld: We really think about it on a network by network and kind of category of venues standpoint. So with the network, like Touch Tunes and, by way of our acquisition of the Danaher group and bringing on incredible talent in the form of Susan Danaher, former DPAA President, CRO at Ad Space (now Lightbox), SVP at Viacom, Victor Germaine, who was a VP at Screen Vision and major sales leader at GSTV and bringing those individuals into our business, but their specialization and where they really focus their energy were on vice categories naturally like beer and alcohol, who were endemic brands through the bar and restaurant category, just as much as you might say for an office building network. That would be B2B financial services or a retail-based network. Endemic brands are much more CPG-focused, but we do see also across all categories because we see a lot of otherwise non-endemic spend from insurance companies and others that you might not immediately connect with a bar and restaurant environment, but who make a ton of sense, just the nature of the audience.
So it really depends upon the brand and agency and what their objectives are. If their objective is to really be where the product is sold, well that's why we do a lot of business with Anheuser-Busch and Heineken. But if you're also thinking about a brand that has a relationship by category adjacency, or just reaching that audience. So think about any of the brands like Uber, Lyft advertising in a bar or restaurant, or a brand like a USAA advertising in a Walmart location, the product itself isn't sold there, but certainly, the constituency that they're looking to reach, that they target by way of other channels are very present in those environments, and so we have a mix, but it really speaks to how we position different networks, and the reality is when you undertake a business like Screenverse, you end up having networks across a variety of categories. It's our responsibility and job then to figure out how best to package and curate that, not just for ourselves, but for the market et all.
So we're not just going to an agency and presenting a disparate menu of offerings but we understand their client mix. We understand the way in which they buy and what their objective is. So we might just say, “Hey, for the types of brands that you represent, and the fact that you're looking to reach a millennial audience, then you're best suited reaching them in bars and restaurants or reaching them in high rise apartment buildings in cities like Chicago, New York, and DC” versus a brand like USAA, that's looking to reach a much broader population across the entire country, and that's where you start pushing them into inventory, like in Walmarts or grocery stores or convenience stores where they can segment potentially against an older demographic or certainly a broader segment of the overall population.
So if I did a spreadsheet exercise of costs of taking ad sales and media operations, in-house versus outsourcing to Screenverse, how is that going to look?
Is it going to be more costly to do it internally or more costly to do it through you guys?
David Weinfeld: Yeah, so we actually, in many cases do this modeling with our partners and it's definitely more costly internally to make that happen. But the other aspect is even if the model shows that it might be less costly, by way of, “if I hire three people, I can build up this sales organization”, you have to look at it and say, what is the success you're going to yield? And that to me is even more important than just doing your cost exercise and saying, all right, I'm going to need two senior sellers and an ad operations person to build up any type of sales business unit, but that alone isn't really going to be successful and do those individual sellers. It's not an easy thing to find people that know the digital out-of-home space and know how best to navigate out-of-home agencies and digital agencies, and are they going to be equipped to really tell a story that's large enough to get your network noticed, but that's also why we look to have our model based on success, such that we're not a hard and fast cost against the business at the outset, but we see success when our partnerships see success. So ours is really a percentage of revenue-based model, such that it's not, you need to make this large upfront investment. We actually believe as much as you do in the potential of this, and we're going to invest a lot of time and energy upfront to get our team trained upon the inventory, to package the inventory, to leverage our relationships across the industry to tell your story and activate you on programmatic platforms if you haven't done so, help you build out those integrations, if you don't yet have them.
And so there's a lot of nuances in that, but I would look really to what's the totality of success that a network could realize trying to go it on their own versus trying to partner with a company like Screenverse, and what we found with a lot of those partners is it becomes a very large challenge to try to do it on their own. And I give everyone the absolute best of lock-in and I support any network that wants to build out their own sales team and thinks that if it's core to your business and you can be the best in the world at selling your inventory, then you absolutely should be the ones to do it. But if it's something you're trying to do on the side, and it's really not part of your brand value, it's not part of your overall culture, overall story, I've seen that very hard and it feels like an extra appendage that doesn't necessarily fit within a company. What we can do is say, we're going to be here and consult you. You don't need to worry about becoming experts in this because guess what? We're thinking about this day in and day out, hour after hour, and we're going to meet with you regularly. We're going to provide you with updates. We're going to demystify the industry in a way that I'm hopeful that, even if we have a network relationship where after two or three years they go, you know what, you've helped us so much, we've actually now had the confidence and belief that we can do this in house, I still see that as a successful outcome because we delivered on the promise of helping them grow their business. I, of course, would love to be with our partners for 10+ years and really build out the highest level of success. But if they decide to bring that in-house, after we've helped them level up their understanding and connections with them, that's successful.
Yeah. Everything you said is so spot on and I wanted to say something about cultural fit and you did, just cause I have seen that as well, where you see a media operation bolted onto the side of a very traditional company and I've watched it play out and it almost never works just because, as one person described it, we’re the land of misfit toys, you just don't fit!
David Weinfeld: What's funny too, and I look at it this way and I wake up every day energized by trying to change this mindset. But even if you look at out-of-home overall, so out-of-home is a marginalized part of the media industry. Overall, it really occupies sub 5% of total media spend. When you look across all channels, then within out-of-home, digital out-of-home is the minority of revenue. That's certainly changing and shifting in the US and other parts of the world. But then within digital out-of-home, digital place-based, this is very much the marginalized aspect then is looked at as a subcategory, knowing that digital billboards take up a lion's share of dollars.
And so I wake up every single day excited because I'm in the area that is that diamond in the rough that has the greatest potential that is maybe being undervalued and underutilized, but it's growing, and it's in an area that I do believe in its efficacy and value, and there are so many studies and so many data points that I know you've read, and the readers of your blog that you published, that people have talked about on this podcast of the efficacy of marrying digital out-of-home with mobile, with social, with connected TV. I just believe in my heart of hearts and I know it's taken longer in many cases than a lot of people have expected. But I so directly believe that once more people start seeing those studies and realizing the results for themselves and leading into space and thanks to programmatic and DSPs, like the Tradedesk and Verizon media and EMOBI and Adelphic and others leaning in and ushering those digital buyers that have access to larger budgets into our space. That's really what's going to drive a sea change and that's what I wake up each and every day, knowing, we're nowhere near where we need to be or where we can be even as a company or as an industry overall. But boy, if I can be part in any way, shape, or form of ushering that forward for my team, my partners, the industry overall, that's what drives me because I look at it as if we can bring more revenue to our company that otherwise looked at advertising as this headache, or this is a tough thing to manage.
But all of a sudden, by working with us, they're seeing seven figures of revenue and they're much confident with understanding, right? It can be hard when you look at programmatic and you see peaks and valleys of revenue and disparate spending come through, and it can be very confusing. But once you have someone that can walk you through the dynamics of how people are going in and spending and how we build deeper relationships with them and what's happening indirectly. Now all of a sudden you're part of a business that, maybe you're not driving the car, but you're a much more confident passenger. And when you're a much more competent passenger, the great news there is you're much more willing to then make investments and build out your network and build out your infrastructure, and ultimately that benefits the networks, it benefits the advertisers, it benefits the SSPs. It benefits the DSPs. And that's what really drove me to start this business and why, when I was at a company in this space, like Vistar that was innovating and driving change and was very successful, that I just felt this push, that there was an opportunity for someone with my background and experience and with Adam and now bringing on Susan Danaher and Victor Germaine and our larger team and the expertise that each of them brings to the table, we have the opportunity to really build a company that has staying power that can ultimately bring an enormous amount of value and also create some efficiencies for SSPs or create efficiencies for networks that they otherwise might have been challenged to find on their own.
Are you bootstrapped?
David Weinfeld: So we've raised a small friends and family pre-seed round of just around $400,000, but actually we'd been profitable in 2020.
We officially incorporated the business at the end of April 2020. We were profitable in 2020, we're profitable today and, we're thinking about it what does raising funding against this business look like? And we look at it, not as a requirement, but as a mechanism to accelerate growth. You know the most important pillars of our business are great people and great network partners.
So the deal you did with Danaher Group, it's probably more like a joint venture sort of thing in a lot of ways? Because obviously, you couldn't buy them out in the traditional sense of a private equity deal or something.
David Weinfeld: Yeah. So I would definitely categorize it as more of an acquihire, and so really being able to bring those individuals in-house. Thanks to our growth and thanks to the revenue that we build, our equity has value. So there are definitely mechanisms within our partnership that involve that, and so that the Danaher group team that's now joined with Screenverse can participate in the success and growth, and that's really ultimately how we were able to put that together, and it was on the back of getting to know Sue for many years in this industry and really aligning on the vision.
I had such admiration for the business she had built at the Danaher group and the importance of the relationship that she and Victor and their operations lead, Taylor had with touch tunes so much so that they were truly an extension of that company, and I said that's so much in line with the vision that we have for the partnerships that we form on the supply side at Screenverse, and we would love to bring your leadership, your knowledge, your experience into our business, and oh, by the way, we get an incredible network in the form of Touch Tunes, and we can just have that part of our overall growth and at a time where bars and restaurants have been challenged in light of COVID.
But now that we're starting to come out and restrictions have all but been eased across the entire US, Los Angeles and California were the final metropolitan areas that had any restrictions on bars that have since been lifted and really say, “Hey, bars and restaurants are hopping right now”, and so if I'm going to double down on any piece of inventory, it's going to be in that segment. And if I'm going to double down on talent, it's going to be with people like Sue Danna, her Victor Germaine, and Taylor, and that team and their knowledge and so much of what they bring into our business is fueling growth, not just against Touch Tunes, but against all of our partners, and as we bring on additional sales directors, as we bring on additional operations, team members, it's really all geared toward how do we maximize success for the network partners that we work with and how do we ultimately build campaigns that are going to drive tangible results for those brands, such that they continue to invest, not just in us, but in digital out-of-home and digital place-based in general
All right, David, that was terrific. We could have talked a lot longer, but I'm afraid we gotta wrap this up. Great to catch up with you.
David Weinfeld: Yeah, it was absolutely great to catch up with you, Dave. You're someone who I have absolutely, in the past, love working with, who I have such great respect for in this industry.
Thank you for having me on the podcast and really look forward to being able to continue having these conversations and sharing the growth story of Screenverse with you and your audience.