Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Jason Ault, Coffman Media

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

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

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

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

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

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

How did you get into it? 

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

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

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

Is that something that you guys help out on? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, why would you have three software partners?

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

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

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

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

Jason Ault: Exactly. 

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

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

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

 Yeah, and you're sitting up above this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are those things pretty elemental?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, it is just part of their infrastructure? 

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

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

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

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

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

Do you fight with that at all? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Ault: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And where's the Coffman coming from?

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

Fair enough. Is the Coffman family still involved? 

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

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

Jason Ault: Good point!

Alright, Jason, thank you.

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

Tobias Lang, Lang AG

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

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

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

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

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

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long has the company been around? 

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

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

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

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

That always helps, doesn't it? 

Tobias Lang: It does, yeah. 

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

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

So these are effectively entertainment venues? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also means you're future-proof. 

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

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

Tobias Lang: That's true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And are there workarounds? Is this all being addressed? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And some of it actually was true micro LED.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernd Albl, Umdasch - The Store Makers

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernd Albl: Yes, that's definitely right. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To calm them down?

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

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

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

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

Bernd Albl: That's right. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernd Hofstoetter, M-Cube

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that a fair assessment or wrong? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's been your experience with interactive retail? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they mostly domestic companies? 

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yes, mostly domestic. 

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

Bernd Hofstoetter: No. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those are very different meetings, I suspect. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernd Hofstoetter: Yeah.

You are based in Paris, correct? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernd Hofstoetter: Thank you, Dave. Take care. 

Digital Signage Yearbook 2023

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

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

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

The good news - it's a free download.

Shane Vega, Userful

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

So you're missing the Calgary Stampede this week? 

Shane Vega: I am missing the Stampede. 

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

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

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

Yeah, just like Minneapolis. 

Shane Vega: Exactly. 

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

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

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

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

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

And it was mostly control rooms, right? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were two things that particularly interested me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you get that question at all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, and get everything working before the meeting starts somehow. 

Shane Vega: Exactly. “Who's got HDMI? Who's got DVI?”

So to that point, people keep talking about the convergence of AV and IT, and I don't know why. That convergence happened years ago. People are now starting to realize that because of that convergence, the IT organization or the IT departments within these larger organizations are going to be the ones holding the budget and are going to be the ones responsible for managing any AV resources on the network.

And so, we have intentionally built our product to cater to those IT stakeholders in the organization. When you say things like, “Hey, you can centrally monitor the entire platform from a web browser,” they really get that right. When you say, “We're an IT solution, we're not an AV solution, which means we're not going to put all this IP addressable hardware on your network,” a lot of the walls come down from their security concerns. You then begin to tell them that, look, you can augment your roles-based access control, and integrate with LDAP. Plus, we give you tools that are IT specific to help you monitor things like, what is the impact on my network? What is my current CPU utilization, or what's my current GPU utilization on the server that we're licensing? We give them all of those tools built into our software. So it's not just AV end-user tools that we're giving. We're also giving those IT tools that help the IT stakeholders manage deployments because we recognize these are going to be larger in scale. They're going to be responsible for a lot. Let's make it easy for them. 

When you talk about AV as a service, it's a term I've heard for a while, but you guys go at it quite a bit differently from what you're saying. 

Shane Vega: Yeah, we do, and Dave, I struggle with that, because we were flirting with the term AV as a service, and we started to use it quite a bit. But I know, coming from the integration world, that AV as a service historically meant we're going to just finance this stuff, right? We're going to get a leasing program, and we're going to build in the hardware, the software, the services, whatever we can into a monthly payment that makes it nice and easy for you guys.

We approach it differently by saying, we are software as a service that's for the AV industry. Therefore, we are AV as a service, meaning, we don't have all that hardware that you have to purchase. You're truly able to deploy all of these AV use cases and manage an entire host of AV applications from within our platform. And we are a software that you pay for based on subscription, typically three-year plans. 

That's what we mean when we say AV as a service. It's exactly that. It's a software as a service, which is which is the actual term, which is software as a service for the AV world. 

This strikes me as something that probably has a learning curve, as every software platform does, but it is almost something you kind of have to ease your way into?

Shane Vega: Believe it or not, not really, and I think that would be more pertinent if somebody was wanting to say, “Hey, I want to use your entire platform right now.” But as I said earlier, most folks are saying, “Hey, I want this operation center,” and they're familiar with Operation Center softwares. They know what they want. They know they want to be able to build custom layouts. They want to manage big, beautiful video walls. They want to be able to interact with sources with soft KVM functionalities so that they're not just visualizing the sources but they can engage with them because they've got tools, right? They got video management tools, and they've got access control, what have you, and so that software that we're providing isn't going to look and feel a whole lot different than a lot of the other softwares they're used to using. 

Now, we do it differently. So the real benefit, rewinding all over to the beginning of this conversation, is, yes, we're giving you all these software applications and features, but it's the infrastructure that really differentiates us. 

Along with removing different hardware components from this kind of a network, you're also removing potentially different software applications that you'd also need because you've got this stack of different things you can do? 

Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly.

To that point, Dave, when I showed this at Infocomm, when I gave my demos there, typically when you deploy an AV solution, let's call it digital signage, that's the background that you're most familiar with. 

In digital signage, let's say, you use it for corporate communications; you'll have screens all over the office. In some cases, they'll want to be able to integrate that digital signage into their meeting rooms as well, and when the screens are in standby mode, they want to be able to have some of those corporate communications as part of the digital signage strategy, managing those meeting rooms. But when you go into the meeting room, they'll typically need some type of infrastructure to support those meetings and local collaboration. Usually, it's a network of AV infrastructure, HDMI cables, or what have you, go into some form of a matrix switch that's going to be some type of tablet controller that can give you the ability to manage what laptop is being viewed on what screen. 

With Userful, because the software does so much, the screens that we manage are not tied to any one specific application, and that's really the beauty of it. So I can walk into a room where they're showing corporate communication. I can sit down, open my laptop, and immediately start a meeting by screencasting whatever's on my laptop onto the screen in that room without connecting a single AV cable. I could then open up my operations center software on that same screen and turn it into an impromptu war room or situation room where I'm pulling in multiple sources and building out customized layouts, and navigating through a crisis. So there are a lot of things that we can do, and it's not dependent on the screen, and, to your point, we've reduced not just the hardware need but the software as well. 

All right, Shane, that was super interesting. I know much more about this space than I did half an hour ago.

Shane Vega: It's been great talking to you, Dave. I appreciate it. 

Loek Wermenbol, First Impression

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

Things are changing - and both buyers and sellers are getting more knowledgeable about how to design and execute digital signage projects. But it's still nice to have a chat with an AV solutions company that resolutely insists on establishing the objectives behind a job before even talking about the technology that might get used. And how much of it.

The Dutch firm First Impression made its first impression with me when it kept getting recognized earlier this year at the global Digital Signage Awards, which were handed out back In February during ISE in Barcelona.

"Who are those guys?" I was asked.

"No idea," I replied.

But now I do know, because I met Loek Wermenbol, the company's Retail Strategy Director, at the recent Digital Signage Summit Europe in Munich. We found a relatively quite little area in the hotel lobby and had a great chat about the origins of First Impression - which is located down near Eindhoven. We talked about a lot of things, notably how it approaches engagements with clients, including the Dutch beauty brand Rituals.

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TRANSCRIPT

Tell me about First Impression. What do you guys do? 

Loek Wermenbol: We are First Impression, what we call on paper an AV integrator, as many companies over here …

But you're qualifying that.

Loek Wermenbol: No, maybe other people qualify us as an AV integrator in the market and we still are. 

They put you in that bucket, but there's more to it. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, there's definitely more to it and I think our proposition that we have is a little different than some of the other integrators in the market. First of all, strategy is a really important part of what we offer and we really try to help the customer to ask the right question, and sometimes that's needed in the process. Yes, they have knowledge, but most of the time, not all of the knowledge is needed to do really good integrations. 

Because in part, they're fixated on a display or something other that's captured their imagination.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. It can be technical or otherwise, if other departments are involved, information can be fragmented throughout the organization, and it might be hard to bring that together to form the right question, and sometimes there's just a lack of knowledge, and that's okay because it's a different field of play for a lot of retailers.

Yes, they have big online marketing teams, etc. But doing in-store communication, it's a little bit of marketing, it's a little bit of formula, it's a little bit of data, and that combines and is needed for a good integration. So if you help your customer determine what that right question is and where we actually can help them solve problems or help them with the threats they have in the market, or enlighten their opportunities. In the end, the ROI on what we do right and what we are going to install in a solution will be much better. So rather than just answer…

And it's gonna scale out as opposed to being one of.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, of course, and we're in the scaling business too, but you have to scale the right solution rather than just a solution, and of course, we also integrate Windows screens and sometimes that is just step one. 

Right, but then they're a customer and can ask you for more.

Loek Wermenbol: Definitely, sometimes the challenge is bigger, sometimes they already have digital in place and need to replace us, or want to make the second step or the third step in the process, and sometimes it's the first step for retailers in the world of digitization on the retail floor.

And then the steps are different, but still, you have to focus on where you want to be in three or four years also as a retailer. I think at First Impression, we help them really well in defining those steps towards that in three to four years, and step one can be an easy step. Let's do a rollout of Windows screens because it is almost in the industry, a no-brainer in integration. 

Still, you have to do that correctly, with the right content, etc. There is a lot to talk about. You can talk for half or an hour about just Window screens, etc. But, that strategy part is you ask what do we do differently, it's just one part. By offering a more holistic service package to our customers. 

So it's a lot more than where do you want to put it, how many do you need, and when do you want it in? 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. Because if you're a supplier of hardware, you're just a supplier.

Yeah, you're not a business partner.

Loek Wermenbol: Exactly. If you are more on the strategic side and you are helping your customers achieve their business goals or to tackle their problems, you are on the strategic side, and you're a totally different person on the table. When it's from a strategic point of view, rather than just a hardware provider and the added value is much bigger, and otherwise, it's just about how fast can you do it, what's your price, etc. 

Yeah, so let's back up a little bit. Did the company start that way or did they realize that this is the customer house and this is how we should evolve, and how long has the company been around?

Loek Wermenbol: No, it definitely didn't start that way at all. The company started 26 years ago already, and it literally started…

In the time of CRTs. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, one of the owners who started the company was a DJ and into music and creating cool parties, literally starting from the basement of his parents as many of those beautiful stories go. And he bought some materials to make the show a little bit more attractive, more materials, and at one point, he had so much of materials that he could rent out some stuff. 

That's where the business began and that's where the First Impression began. So that was really more the rental side of the AV technology, and through the years that of course had evolved and after roughly six to seven years, fixed installation became a part of the organization, and basically everything turned around and it became a bigger part, until where it's now. 

Almost the only thing we do is that we still have a little department that does temporary projects but it's mainly fixed installations as it goes in the market. And we focus heavily on retail. Roughly 80% of what we do is retail, and the other part is Oracle experiences, which can be an experience center, , a business center, a museum, or a building that has an experience factor in it.

And you’re based in the Netherlands?

Loek Wermenbol: Yes.

Is that the primary market, or are you kinda across Europe?

Loek Wermenbol: It started of course out in the Netherlands as our home market but definitely not our only market. We have an office in the south of the Netherlands, our headquarters is in Tilburg. We have an office in Amsterdam but also recently, we opened offices in France, and also in Germany. But we're already operating globally, and doing installations all over the world and on every continent.

Is that because it starts with something more regional and as they say, can you also help us out with the store we're opening up in Shanghai?

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and it really depends on the brand, for example, if you look at Rituals, those are big Dutch brands. 

What do they sell? 

Loek Wermenbol: All kinds of beauty products and everything you need as a woman to feel good.

So, nice high-margin products. 

Loek Wermenbol: Nice high-margin products. 

 They probably don't want to say that, but that's the reality.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. It's a really beautiful brand and it's actually a brand that a lot of trade retailers look at because they are there in the markets on lots of different levels and also in AV technology. 

And pardon the pun, for them, first impressions are, I suspect, really important.

Loek Wermenbol: They are, but actually there is a funny story because we really wanted that client in the beginning, but they were quite resilient against AV integrations because they thought it didn't resemble their brand because it's all about serenity and the body and the products, and if you look at their stores, you may figure out why, but we actually did two things.

One of them was to create a piece of content. It was really simple, but with a little bit of animation in it, in line with the branch values of Rituals, and the other thing we did, we made a breakdown of the comparison between the integration of a Windows screen, comparison with paper, and the number of replacements they did with paper. And that was a really interesting business case, and those two things together with the setup we created in our unique experience center in Tilburg, managed to get them over and finally convinced them to go into digital, with little steps. The first step is a window display, a cash desk display, the first thing most retailers will do. But now we evolved from that and actually, Rituals is the perfect client to work with because their teams now know how to operate in the equation together with us to get the best results and to do innovations that are unique in the market. 

And it's not just you going to them trying to sell them something new, like, “Hey we went to this trade show and we saw these new amazing displays. You should have some!”

Loek Wermenbol: No. Because then you're selling technique, and we never start with hardware. We always start with the right challenge and question. 

For instance, we created a unique piece for them that's all about perfume, and they didn't sell perfume for a long time because it's a hard category, lots of big competitors, high loyalty with brand loyalty with which potential customers look for themselves. There's always one fragrance that they've had for ages, so how do you convince people to switch? 

Yeah, completely foreign to me, but…

Loek Wermenbol: Maybe some listeners will recognize this.

But we created a really nice piece that not only looks beautiful but actually does the job of convincing people maybe to try one of the perfumes of Rituals, and in the end can convince them to replace a bottle that has been there for ages. Of course, if you look at that from an aesthetic point of view, it looks beautiful, but the magic is inside with how we use sensors and data to figure out which perfume fits the market. Actually, we were awarded that two times with the best digital innovation for retail in 2022. 

Yeah, I wasn't aware of your company, but if I remember correctly, at the Digital Signage Awards, your company won two or three awards.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. At the Digital Signage Awards, we won three and a recommendation. So we were getting back and forth to the pool. 

And I was like, who are those guys?

Loek Wermenbol: I know. I think we're a challenger in the market and sometimes it's good to be a challenger. I think one of the big advantages we have is we're still privately owned. So there's no private equity or something.

 How many people? 

Loek Wermenbol: Almost 200. 

Okay, that's a good size company in this industry. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, definitely, and did a turnover of 40 million euros last year. So that's quite a decent company to show it like that, and of course, you were there, last night, we were awarded as the rising star in the industry. I think that says a lot. 

We are noted in the market, not only by our colleagues and the industry itself, but also by retailers, of course, because we do something different and we try to help them with the total process of integrations, in a smart way that it also connects to the total customer journey because that physical space where we do the integrations in the end we’re a specialist in doing communications on the retail floor. We're more like an agency than a hardware integrator. We use the hardware components to make it possible, but in the end, it's part of a bigger thing. 

Yeah, I was going to ask about the creative side of it. Obviously, it didn't start with creative because you were doing DJ rentals and things like that, but did you add on in-house creative capability because external agencies, maybe the agencies of record for these different brands, didn't really get it, didn't understand it and was this a need, or did you just see it as another revenue stream?

Loek Wermenbol: No, definitely not the last one. In the end, you have to do that properly, and they will be additional revenue. 

But there's a skillset and insights that an agency isn't going to have. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah. We started roughly 10 or 11 years by hiring the first person that did content creation and mainly because we noted that we do a perfect installation, and then somebody comes along and puts on a piece of content and basically wrecks the solution because the most important part in communicating with the clients and addressing the purpose is that piece of content.

So if somebody's going to create it, who doesn't know how communication in-store devices works, ninety-nine out of a hundred times, it won't be the right piece of content. 

Yeah, and you talked about Rituals and the serenity idea or vibe, so to speak, and if you had third-party agencies who just drop something in, it would be visually jarring potentially.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and we did a lot of communication for them. We created, and we worked together because they have an in-house agency too. Rituals are kind of a different story in that way. So we helped them in the beginning and now they're creating a lot of the content themselves because they know how to do it and they have a really skilled team inside.

So that's how we work too. Sometimes we start off and create content first and show the internal agencies or people how to do it and otherwise in some other cases, we keep on creating the content for them. But it's so important because it is also for agencies that do generic commercials or socials, etc, creating content for this matter is totally different because there are so many factors that you have to think of. 

Dwell times, sight lines on and on.

Loek Wermenbol: Exactly. Position, lights, dwell time, passage time, angles, UXs, et cetera. Even the privacy of people, are we going to use a device when it's tilted or does it need to be flat, etc. It's all going to determine what your content looks like, and it is so important in the end to be successful with that solution and to have an ROI on that solution, and the content is a major part of that. 

There's been a lot of noise in the last, I would say, six months in particular around Retail Media networks, and I was interested, we were at this conference in Munich, and I've heard or spoken with a couple of people, it's all getting a little fuzzy to me after two days, talking about Retail media networks, incorporating third party advertising, programmatic advertising into a store, and that actually rattled me a little bit because it just didn't seem right. 

I understand the idea of endemic advertising for brands that sell in the store, but do I really want to see a T-Mobile ad in a Ritual store? I know they wouldn't do that, you know what I mean.

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, Retail Media is almost a buzz word right now, but we actually started operating our first Retail Media network for one of our clients already, I think, two or three years ago. 

And they've been around in some form for 25 years.

Loek Wermenbol: Yes, but in a serious form, it's not that long. And of course, retailers are starting to know that, “Hey I can create a valuable position over here,” and brands like it too, because if you do it correctly and which is important, then it will be an added value for everybody involved. It will be an added value for the advertiser because it's related to a product he can buy in the store…

…which encourages sales ideally. 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, it encourage sales, and of course, it is interesting for the operating party of the Retail Media network too. For instance, we do a big supermarket chain called in the Netherlands called,  Jumbo and they have almost a thousand outlets. We operate there in a Retail Media network with them but there's always a keen balance between commercial messages and... 

It's a slippery slope. You don't want to feel like you're on a highway. 

Loek Wermenbol: Definitely, if it's too much, it won't work. That's one way of a Retail Media network. Related to products you can buy right in the store you are in or entering. The other one is we also have a big Retail Media network in Basic-Fit, and Basic-Fit is a large fitness chain in Europe with roughly 1400 outlets in Germany, France, and Spain, and they have a lot of screens inside too. 

Because of that, they have a special proposition, they're on the low end of the market and they want to be able to operate clubs with one person to keep that cost low, and to get a low entry fee. 

Hence the name! 

Loek Wermenbol: But the funny part is that if you enter the club, all the products are really good, and it's a really good training facility, but if you want to do so, you have to do a lot different, and it's a lot of digitization within those store from training that you can do in a digital way and activate yourselves through all kind of other stuff, but also communicating with your clients, giving them maybe messages to motivate them or any health advice, but also just to inform you that maybe the shower is broken in the ladies room, for instance. 

But those screens are roughly around seven to eight in each club and of course, are really interesting for Retail Media too, because the target group that is coming into a sports club is pretty defined. If you know the proposition is on the low end of the markets, then you have real good statistics on demographics, which people are coming in. So that's a perfect match, and a lot of advertisers, of course, are really interested in that target group and now have difficulty in reaching them, especially in the younger generation. So that's also Retail Media.

So is that real money to Basic-Fit or is it a rounding error? 

Loek Wermenbol: Oh, it's definitely real money. I can't talk about figures, but it's real money, and basically, they're operating in two ways in operating Retail Media networks.

The first part is direct sales. There's a team within the Basic-Fit commercial team from Retail Media that is in direct contact with big clients to sell time on the screens. But there will always be leftover inventory, and what we did, I think it's one and a half years ago, we connected software that is able to connect on the backend to the big marketplaces the media companies use to buy their ads.

Like the Vistas and so on?

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and they can directly tap into the system and buy leftover inventory.

And you could put the parameters in so that it's not going to show a competitor on the screen with you?

Loek Wermenbol: Exactly. You can tailor it however you like. But it's a really good way of not getting rid of your inventory but basically sell out your inventory.

Of course, it's another price when you buy it in that way. It's going to be cheaper than direct sales. But in direct sales, you have the best spots and the best time slots, and maybe you want to only advertise in a certain area or maybe in a certain country, etc. So that's really interesting in Retail Media and it's going to evolve. We are going to see more spots within environments that show Retail Media, and you were mentioning, Dave it's strange when you see an ad for a wireless carrier or whatever in a retail store, and I think so too the market is really looking now, where are the edges of what we can and can't do, in approaching and maximizing our revenues from Retail Media, and on the other hand, not breaking down our brand. Because those go hand in hand. 

You spoke a little bit about the return on the investment of display and all the technology in a store. How is that being measured? Because I've seen companies who do audience measurement and retail measurement and so on, talking about conversion ratios and so on, and I'm always a little skeptical about how accurate they can be.

Loek Wermenbol: This is a really good point because this is not the same for every solution. It really depends. 

Of course, we love to measure everything because that gives us insight, gives us data, and will help us improve. But mostly, If you do an installation with a combination of techniques that actually can set up a kind of a funnel, for instance, where you can measure that there are so many people in front of my solution and making use of that solution, and of those people, so many people do step two, maybe go and pick a piece of clothing out of a wall of jeans. And we can measure that because we have counters in the ceiling, we also can measure how many of those people go into the fitting room and actually try on something, and if we know they're going into the fitting room, we can also measure if they come out and if they go to the cash desk, and if we do it like that, then we actually can create a funnel, and see what is happening, and not only see that happening but also tweak and improve. I mentioned the Rituals solution before, and I'm trying to visualize this in a verbal way. It's a beautiful piece of furniture with all the perfumes on it, and rather than having to spray the perfume off a piece of paper and smell it. In front of all those perfumes, there are little glass cones, and you can pick those up, and beneath is a little piece that we impregnated with the fragrance. So if you pick it up, you can smell it. And the important thing to know is if you pick it up, we measure your pickup, so we know how many pickups there are of that piece. 

So you've got some sort of sensor embedded in there? 

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, it's actually a light sensor that covers, and if you open it up, the content that is displayed when you pick up that specific color of glass, say I'm picking up perfume A, when I pick it up, on the display it will show the content of perfume A. But it's layered content, so the longer I have this piece in my hands, the other types of content will be displaced, like an information funnel, but it also gives you the information that a certain person is more interested in this piece than somebody that puts it immediately down because maybe they didn't like the fragrance and all that information gives us all that data, gives us information about that specific setup in that specific location because, of course, fragrances can differ in different areas, cities, countries, etc.

And it actually helps the divisional merchandisers to create a setup with the different perfumes on that piece of furniture that is matched perfectly with the audience they are serving at that point. Because we can use the pickup data, the content data, but also the data that is being generated by the cash desk, and if you combine those, then you have real information that will help. It's going to be more difficult if you want to measure the success of a window display because there are a lot of factors in place.  Why somebody will come in or not, or why it's busy in a high street or not, temperature or events… 

Yeah, you’d need some sort of a cookie on that person, otherwise, how do you track them?

Loek Wermenbol: Yeah, and then, of course, you have the tracking of people in general, and GDPR is a thing, so we have to take that into account in some cases.

Actually, we want to do really good management and measurements, and sometimes we can, but GDPR will limit us, and it's not only the effective GDPR, but it's also the perception of the user itself. It could be allowed by GDPR, but it is not received in a nice way by the customer because he feels monitored and on camera somewhere. So perception is really important to take into account, and if you use it, be open about it, and tell your customer about it.

Is it your software management platform, like in-house, or are you using a third party?

Loek Wermenbol: We actually do both. We have our software platform, and we keep on developing that, especially for certain clients with certain wishes. We tend to push the limits in the market, and often we look for things in software that just aren't available in the market. But on the other hand, there are really good products in the market too. So we connect with certain platforms to make use of that. 

 I was curious because at a conference like this and everywhere I go and everything I get in by email, there are so many software companies who state that retail is their key vertical, and what you've been describing, it strikes me as it would be very difficult for a very brand sensitive and brand forward store, retailer to just go with a software company because they really need and has benefit from all that front end advice and the simple poking at them to say, “okay, why do you wanna do this?” 

Loek Wermenbol: The software is relevant for the client only if he is going to operate it by themselves. 

Basically, which probably doesn't happen that much anymore.

Loek Wermenbol: No, of course, there's a little bit more to it. And that is because the interface and the user-friendliness of that product will be relevant. But if you look at the other way around, in the end, what's most important for the reader is whether will this be a successful integration in total, am I going to improve my customer journey, can I add more experience that is going to generate more sales for me? And it really doesn't matter what kind of software does the job. It really doesn't matter what kind of hardware does the job. That's almost a commodity. It needs to be good, and for the AV integrator, you need to have those four-letter words together. It's so important to keep those channels, have a good service proposition, and make sure those screens are always on 99.9% of the time, they sre energy saving, all that kind of stuff. 

But also in managing the content on the screen. It's important, but it's not the thing that matters most for the client and this industry tends to look more on the technology side and try to say to the clients that we have all of this. Yes, it's important, but if you're starting off with the wrong journey and the wrong question in the beginning, it really doesn't matter that you have really good stuff.

If you’re selling on features and specs, you're dead.

Last question, with retail, generally speaking, they want a business partner or service provider who's going to take them right from ideation all the way through managed services and run the network for them?

Loek Wermenbol: Yes and no. I say no because they don't always know that these kinds of offerings are available in the market, and if you don't know that, then you're not looking for it, and it's getting a little bit better. But we try to really focus on that holistic approach and offering, so that we can basically help our clients on every level. We have specialists on every level. We have 125 different types of roles within our company, if you think about it with roughly 200 people in the company, that’s huge. 

We have specialists for every occasion. So if it's about IT, we have specialists that can talk with the IT of the client. If it's about strategy, we have strategists that can do that. If it's about marketing or content strategy, we have those specialists. They don't need to use every offering in our total portfolio. But we offer it, and at least in the end, if they don't use it in our offering, we can talk with them on a high level about the specific topic then and help them anyway in that topic. I think that is really important as our business, especially retail, is transforming more in helping brands to communicate in the right way with the digital retail floor, and that's why I said it, and it sounds a little bit strange, it's more like an agency which is part of communication and knowing how to do that, and advising clients how to do that is super important. 

But we can only do that, and that's important, maybe last words, if we have everything really good lined up in the backend. We have super good people to make those integrations, super good technicians, and we can tell a beautiful story, but in the end, if we can deliver what we promise to our clients in our first talks, we're out of business. So that has to be perfect.

Jeff Hastings, BrightSign

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

If you are going to the big InfoComm pro AV trade show, coming up very soon in Orlando, you'll undoubtedly see a very busy BrightSign stand, and a crowd around CEO Jeff Hastings.

I've spoken with Hastings a couple of times now for this podcast, but it had been a while ... and I wanted to catch up and get his perspective on the state of the industry, as well as find out what's new with his company and its little purple boxes.

The Silicon Valley company is pretty much its own category in terms of media players - as I hear and read about solutions providers weighing decisions on whether to use PCs, smart displays, set-top boxes ... or Brightsign boxes. The company now ships about 1,200 units a day - based on its reputation for having a range of durable, reliable devices that hit different price points and meet needs from simple to sophisticated and powerful.

In this chat, we get into the state of the digital signage market (It's growing across segments, but not at 2022's pace), how the characteristics of end-user buyers has changed, and the role of AI in BrightSign's business, and more broadly, for the industry.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Hastings, good to chat once again. We've done a couple of podcasts, but you're a big shooter in this industry. I need to talk to you regularly. 

Jeff Hastings: I don't know if you can call me a big shooter, but I'm definitely hooked on the world and live it seven days a week, but it's good to check in with you, Dave.

I'm just sucking up. I'm not sure why, but I am. 

So where is the industry these days? I'm just curious because when I talk to people, they will uniformly say everything is awesome. While you can say that too, you're different in that you're supplying stuff to all kinds of different companies, so maybe you get a better sense of what's really happening out there.

Jeff Hastings: Yeah, I think one of the things that we do that's a little bit different is that BrightSign is really a horizontal platform, as I call it, so we work in pretty much every vertical market that has a display that's used. So we see from the broad market what's going on. 

Last year was a great year of growth for us with over 20% growth. This year has honestly started off to be a little bit slow, and I think most people are reporting that. It's definitely been a little bit slow at the start of the year. I think a lot of things are going on with the interest rates and people being a little bit cautious about the recession, but overall, the industry is still growing. It's not growing as fast as I think most people predicted after last year. But it's a very solid market. We see more and more what people call digital transformations, I'm not a super fan of that word, but essentially it means people are putting in more digital signage and retail continues to be a great segment. People investing in retail to create better experiences after the whole pandemic of people wanting to get back out and people see the investment in that kind of real-world experience paying off. 

Yeah, I guess you could call it phygital. Another term that I would be happy if I never saw again.

Why do you think retail's growing? Is it just simply that they understand the whole experiential thing and that you have to do more in a store? 

Jeff Hastings: I think a few points. First, the whole idea that we're going to buy everything online and just stay in our house, I think most people realize, yeah, there's a lot of things that work that way, and I can just have it delivered. But the reality is we are social animals. We want to interact with people, and just being stuck in our house is not what we like to do, and I think most people are now seeing that with the results of the pandemic that, being stuck in your house is we’re not built for that. It's almost akin to being in jail. A lot of people comment on that. 

So getting out is important for us as humans and having that social experiment and getting out and shopping and actually being in retail, part of it is actually physically buying the goods, but a lot of it is social. People just wanna be out in the environment. So now that you take that as a fact that people wanna be out in the environment, if you create a place where it's exciting to be in, and there are other people that are there, guess what? More people's gonna come to your establishment. So we really believe that's the fundamental basis of why people are investing in retail. That's the main reason. 

If you look at a secondary reason. A lot of the big retailers, their businesses boomed. During the pandemic, a lot of people talked about how online boomed, but actually, a lot of the bigger retailers boomed and they got a lot of new customers. I think you look at folks like Walmart, lots of people come into the stores, but during the pandemic, they had a dramatic increase of people coming into their stores. As we start going back to the normal world, folks like Walmart wanna make sure that they keep those people coming to their stores. Back during the pandemic, maybe they were the only stores that were able to be open so they got new customers, and now what they wanna do is create an environment where they keep those new customers. So I think there's a lot of that going on of stepping up their game. Before it was just about price. “Okay, we'll just go there cuz it's got the best price.” Now people are like, “Hey, I wanna go there and I wanna enjoy my experience.” So that is playing into this investment in digital science and kind of digital experiences in retail. 

Are you getting a sense from all the companies that work with you, that they're starting to open up new verticals? I've wondered when healthcare was finally gonna start happening. 

Jeff Hastings: Oh all the verticals are growing. I don't know of any verticals that are not growing right now. They're all growing and some of them are growing faster. I think ironically, which I wouldn't have predicted, the corporate sector is actually growing very rapidly right now. I think people are coming back to the office, maybe not a hundred percent, but they are investing in it the same way that retail is investing in the experience. People are realizing that an office is no longer a place where they have to come work, much like in retail, where you have to go there to buy a product, but you want to get people in that environment for the social aspect of it and the collaboration aspect and if you create a nicer environment, more people come to work. So there's a lot of investment in that going on also. 

And how does that manifest itself, like what are they doing? Big-ass video walls in the lobby or is it more kind of the operational side of it?

Jeff Hastings: It's literally all aspects of it. One, they create an impressive environment. So lots of LEDs, and lots of video walls going into these places to create a more exciting environment versus just a bunch of cubes. Secondly, more communications which are just kind of standard displays, ways of communicating with employees and more, I don't like the word infotainment, but infotainment, where they've got interesting things, are displayed to communicate with employees, but it's also a bit fun. These are things of just celebrating employees. We see a lot of that going on and kind of recognize the employees' communication about what's going on in the company. 

This whole idea of an intranet I think most people realize that, guess what, when they have an intranet, no one actually goes to that website. So that was a great experiment. I think a lot of money on intranet sites which ended up being a massive failure, so the ability to communicate with employees is very important, and what they're finding is, guess what, if there's a display up there, and it's interesting, people will look at it and now you're getting across a message, and that could be whether it's a benefits program or you name it, you're able to communicate with employees and engage with them in a way, especially with the younger crowd, that the younger crowd doesn't want something kinda forced on them. They want to be able to kinda opt into it and the displays actually allow them to kind of opt-in in this passive fashion. 

Has the buyer profile changed at all? We were chatting at some trade show or other, and you were saying how your guys are spending a lot more time talking to IT people than perhaps they did in the past.

Jeff Hastings: It's very much changed. I would say when I look back 10 years ago, maybe 10% of the deals that we did involved the IT group. I would say today, any large deal, the IT group is involved with, and this has to do with understanding how they're gonna maintain them because it's now moved from whoever was wanting to “buy” the digital signage, whether it's the marketing group or the HR group, that they're quickly realizing that the IT group is gonna own these things in terms of making sure that they're working every day, not putting the content on them. 

So the IT group is now very much involved in that because they know they're gonna own them, so understanding what the cost of maintaining them is gonna be. And then secondly, security is just an enormous thing today. I mean pretty much every large deployment we do we go through large amounts of security reviews. The great thing for us is that it is kind of the backbone of our product is security, and we've built our own proprietary OS. We have put in the ability that the security is super high. Our devices are used on navy ships on the most secure network in the world. So it's a thing that actually benefits us, but just the interaction with the IT involvement, any large deployment goes through literally months of security review and if you can't pass that, it doesn't matter what the other organization from a content perspective wants to have, it'll never make it. 

When you're dealing with IT and IS people, when you say it's our own proprietary operating system, does that present a problem or are you able to say it's derivative of Linux or whatever, and it's fine?

Jeff Hastings: Yeah, so at first, a decade ago, we would say that, and it would just make the hair stand up on their back rise up. But now what they've realized is there are a lot of these devices really classified as IoT devices, and they now understand how they fit into the environment, and it's not oh my God, we can't maintain it unless it's a Windows device. It's interesting that they now are able to classify these devices as kind of IoT devices with proprietary operating systems and understand how to run them. It's also that the larger corporations have now figured out how to understand the cost of a classic kind of PC. Not that's what everyone uses them, but they now really understand that and most of the companies are now, they use a number of around $300 as the cost to just have a PC in the work environment. They now understand what a cost basis really is for maintaining these and for us, they're giving much lower numbers in terms of being able to have one of these on the network.

And a lot of it has to do with the ability of these devices, if you're using Windows or Mac, these things are constantly updated, and each time those operating systems get updated, there's a percent of things that fail, and those are support costs. With our device, we don't do that, so it actually saves them a lot of money operationally at the same time, keeping the security level high.

So what happens when you do have a firmware update? 

Jeff Hastings: So on our system, the first thing you can do is you can test those, and most of our customers do actually test those to make sure that they're not going to get a failure with their system. That's very different from something that gets shoved down the pipe automatically to maintain your security level. So by doing that, it's a very controlled rollout, and typically it's a very rare exception on our platform that something has to go out because a security fix came out immediately. A lot of it is just because of how our operating system is first cryptographically signed, and secondly, that people can't put random applications on our platform.

Those two things raised a security bar really high so that when you need an operating system update, a firmware update, you can be controlled about it, you can test it and roll it out, and that really is where a lot of the savings comes in, because most of these operating system updates, it's not that the actual operating system is causing problems, it's the whole ecosystem of applications that people use.

And one of those applications breaks, and guess what, they get hundreds of calls coming in to fix it. Each one of those has to be fixed and dealt with, and that's where kind of the burden of cost really comes up, and if you think about digital signage, 99% of those new features in the operating system are never, ever used in digital signage. In fact, most of them are actually being defeated. People don't want them. You don't want a desktop in digital signage. 

Yeah. Is digital signage with the people you're dealing with now or your business partners are dealing with now, are they seeing it as a mission-critical application now?

Jeff Hastings: It's definitely moving towards that. I wouldn't say it's completely there. Some of them are mission-critical. We have folks in the F1 world that use our devices and I will tell you, they view our devices as mission-critical. The Navy uses our devices. They view them as very mission-critical.

Some of the marketing folks, maybe they don't view them as mission critical. They view them as very valuable, and anytime there's downtime, it's important to them. I'd say it's moved from a place where people would be like, oh, displays always go down, and they don't worry about it either.

Hey, those things should be working all the time, and that plays to our advantage. 

Ten years ago when the first system-on-chip displays came out from Sony and Samsung and then LG and on, they weren't very powerful, they didn't do a hell of a lot. They could do the basics. They could show a menu, that sort of thing, but they've been around for a decade now. They're pretty powerful. I hear people saying they're pretty darn good. 

Do these smart commercial displays now present a challenge that perhaps they did in the past? And are you looking at embedded solutions? I know you already do that with Bluefin, and you did a little bit with NEC Sharp back in the day. 

Jeff Hastings: Yeah. So, the way I look at these is the range of devices that can create this experience. You can look at a $35 raspberry pie that's going to do a bunch of powerful things. So the whole content side of it, I really focus less on that. We have a whole range of players from simple to very complex with the new XC product, and it's interesting to look at the content, but what we see more and more from our customers is the ability to maintain these and control these because the long term cost is really what comes into play.

So it's becoming less and less about. “Oh, can this play this piece of content?” Because that's being more and more commoditized over time, and what we're seeing is, as we talked about, like the IT organization, the ability to maintain these, the sustainability. There's a lot in sustainability, what's the power consumption, what's the lifetime of a display? And one of the things that we actually see, which is a vulnerability in the built-in displays, is that their storage is fixed. It's soldered down on the motherboard, flash memory is a consumable, and it has a limited lifespan. So that's one of the things we're seeing with our players, you can replace that media with a display that has it soldered down. Once that memory wears out, which it does, then you have to throw away the whole display.

So that means that all of a sudden you're taking, instead of a tiny little SD card that weighs a few grams, now you're going to throw away a whole display that's going to go to a landfill. So we push a lot on sustainability. Clearly, in North America, it's a little bit behind Europe, but in Europe, that is a big deal of sustainability.

The bottom line is that the built-in definitely has some advantages. The operational ability to deploy it is simpler, but it's not the panacea. There are still lots of things out there. The manageability of it, the ability to update and control things remotely, and the ability to change the SD card when it wears out are very important. And I love to make jokes about that. If I bought a car that I couldn't change the tires when they wore out, I'd be really bummed to have to throw away my car because I can't replace the tires, and that's the same thing with flash memory. It's the same thing as a tire. It's going to wear out. You'd hate to throw away your car.

So with the Bluefin, I know they have a range of displays now, and they're not just little shelf-edge ones. They go up to, I think, 40-inch plus or something. In those cases, when you've got an embedded display that's got a BrightSign inside, is it swappable or upgradeable? 

Jeff Hastings: Yes. So there are a few things about those displays.

So the first is that it uses the same architecture. So we'll use an SD card as the storage mechanism so that you can do that. Secondly, it's actually slotted. You can open up that display and can actually replace the player. 

So it's like the Sharp NEC ones going back Five years or something?

Jeff Hastings: Exactly, and so we standardized on a different kind of connector to really make the form factor very small. So both the media is replaceable, and the player is replaceable. We've even had some customers already do that, upgrading their platform from an earlier one to their next-gen, and they're all backward compatible, so they'll fit into the same slot, and you get the newer performance.

So yeah, we see that, as a market there's a class of customers that want to see more and more people, and at every show, if you stop by, we have more and more people who are doing the BrightSign built-in, and you'll see that trend continue. You'll see it continue as more and more people realize that's a really good solution. The platform, the ecosystem, the upgradeability, and the remote management are really important, and they want to add that to their displays. 

And it's a little thing, but the simple fact that if you can put up a display in an hour instead of 90 minutes or something if you're doing a big rollout, it adds up.

Jeff Hastings: It does add up, and like I said there's the upfront and then the ongoing. So yeah, there are absolutely benefits to it, but you have to make sure that you don't end up with a car that you can't change the tires on.

What about Apple TVs? There are three or four companies, at least CMS software companies, who heavily market Apple TV as their solution.

Is that not a concern, but do you see it as real competition or almost like a novelty?

Jeff Hastings: I see it mostly as a novelty. It's on the border of a consumer kind of operating system. It's a little bit different. But still, you're dealing with many of the same things.

You're fighting the platform. Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire, they're essentially all very similar. They're built for consumers. They're not built for commercial use, and what that means is that you're kind of fighting the platform. I routinely see people using the Roku TCL TVs, and they have their little digital signage application, and then when it reboots, it comes back to the home screen, and people are trying to beat that.

So if you look at large-scale deployments, that's where you get into this manageability and controllability, and those things are not optimized for that. It's not like I'm saying it, they're worthless. It's just in large deployments, it's difficult to deal with the little idiosyncratic consumer devices.

It's interesting when you talk about Roku because I don't think that many people know that BrightSign is, in effect, a spin-out of Roku, right? 

Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the BrightSign business was originally part of Roku, and in 2009, we spun out for them, and actually the core operating system is still very similar between the platforms, although we've taken it in the digital signage direction and added a lot of features and capabilities in digital signage and obviously the Roku guys have taken in their direction of streaming. But yeah, at the core of it, yeah, that's where the technology came from. 

Is there still any kind of sharing of ideas or anything between the companies, or are they very much different tracks and you share DNA but that's about it?

Jeff Hastings: It's really that we share DNA and that's about it. I'm still on the board of Roku, so I actively participate in their business, but yeah, there's no official sharing. But yeah, with me being on the board, we get kind of informal sharing. 

Yeah, I mean, you're sitting there actively listening and they say, we're developing this, and you're thinking, “Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe I could apply that.” 

Jeff Hastings: Yeah, and the same thing goes in the other direction. Some of the stuff that we work on is pretty interesting, as we do a lot of out-of-home advertising. Their model is built on a big advertising model in-home. So there are definitely things we share that also. 

You have high-end players that can go up to 8k. Are there customers using 8k or are they just buying those boxes with the idea of, okay, we're future-proofed?

Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the way I think about those players: 8k is a feature. It's not the only thing that you can buy those for.

Most of the people are not using 8k, and honestly, it's just a marketing thing because very few people actually use 8k. Most people buy them for the power of the experience. So very high-end experiences that people would've classically used PCs, for now, can get our device with the reliability of our operating system and maintainability, yet the power of a PC. So that's kind of what we see most people buy 8k for. The applications that we're seeing right now are kind in two sectors. One is people with consumer manufacturers of consumer TVs that wanna create an 8k experience that has all this interactive and all the great features they use. They're using our products and that, and then LEDs. So LEDs are probably the biggest area where we've seen the 8k as a single output. Those are very interesting cases because as the density of LEDs has come out and, folks like Nova Star now have 8k sending units, we can now plug in ak and instead of having multiple boxes of content rolling in, they can just have one big 8k pallet that they can split out to anywhere they want on the screen. That's a big market. 

Then the last segment that we see AK being used in is having content that spans over video walls. So if you think about a four-screen, 4k LED wall, right? 8k is perfect for that, and with the hiring unit, it's got four HDMI outputs. So you can just plug four TVs and adjust the bezel compensation, and now you've dramatically simplified having a video wall. So those are the areas we see people using our XC product which does 8k. 

I can't open an email list or go to any kind of technology site without seeing a couple of stories or a couple of pitches about AI.

How do you see AI fitting within what you guys do?

Jeff Hastings: o first, AI is super interesting, and especially with ChatGPT coming out, I think there are a lot of areas that you're going to see AI, at least in our world. So I see it as one, on the internal side, so helping our developers become more efficient. When you're writing software, there's a lot of what I would call mundane writing software that is done, whereas now, that can be automated. Actually, there's GitHub CoPilot that generates a lot of software inside Visual Studio for doing simple things.

Then using ChatGPT to do some of the basic frameworks that work really well. So those are tools that I can see, and maybe on the support side, being able to use AI to get a much better quality first-level support request. So I see those things as on the operational side of the business.

And then, when I look at the digital signage side, what are things that are going to be changing the world on the outside of digital signage? I think the biggest one that I see is content generation. I don't know if you've played with any of the tools on content generation. Let's be real. Many people need just kind of simple videos and imagery, and with these new content tools, you can tell it what you want. I was playing with one the other day and said, “Hey, I want an image with a hamburger in a retro look”, and it generates an image for me. If you think about what that would've cost to have a graphic designer, do that., I think the package I've paid for, it's 10 bucks a month. That one image would've probably cost a few hundred dollars for a graphic artist to do. So I think the content side is coming up there, and then the last part, which we're working on a little bit, it's still early, is for our integrators to be able to describe the experience they want and create a presentation out of it.

So that is one that I think is, it's the same way that you think about, giving our programmers and our software engineers a big head start, I think this is going to be the next step. So an integrator, instead of having to say, how do I use which tool to create this? They basically put this into an AI and say, here's what I want it to do, and it gives me the experience back. And at the simplest level, it's already working, which is, for doing some simple presentations, not that it's an enormous amount of work, it's just the learning curve. We've got it working where you can just tell it for a simple presentation, it'll put it together for you. So I think, and we're just at the early stages of AI, so I think it's going to have, over time, a profound impact on basically making digital signage easier and lower cost to do a lot of things. 

Yeah, I've been saying to people that, yeah, the generative AI stuff is cool, and the ability to generate images from prompts, as you were describing, is really interesting. But I think where this is really going to get used is behind the scenes for things like you were saying with coding, generating marketing materials, doing smarter monitoring, all that stuff that an end-user customer may never see, but is going to, as you say, make doing this business easier. 

Jeff Hastings: When you just look at it, all of these things lower the barrier to entry to having a deployment, which is just good for our industry, and I think the AI tools are just at the early stage of creating these experiences and content that just lowers the cost of doing it. So all of them are exciting for us. 

So you're going to be at Infocom, which by the time this runs will be imminent. It already is, but what are you going to be showing? I know you've got new players, new Series 5 players. 

Jeff Hastings: Yeah, we'll have the whole lineup of Series 5 players. They've been dribbling out since the end of the year. So yeah, we'll show the new XT5 for the first time in our booth, which will complete our whole Series 5 lineup. So all of them will be on display. 

We'll have more of the, as we talked about, BrightSign built-in displays in different form factors. Some interesting ones will be there. If anyone's out there, stop by our booth, the new XT product will be out there, and it will be exciting, and more of these built-in displays will be there. That kind of plays in that segment of the market. 

What's your booth number?

Jeff Hastings: I don't know our booth number.

I knew you wouldn't, but I had to ask. 

Jeff Hastings: Those things are not on the top of my list. We're in the digital signage section, and you'll see the power of purple being out there.

Just look for the crowd? 

Jeff Hastings: Exactly. 

All right. Thanks, Jeff. 

Jeff Hastings: Dave, thanks so much, and good chatting with you.

Steve Bernard, Ocean Outdoor

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.

Mark Coxon, AVI-SPL’s Experience Technology Group

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

AVI-SPL is one of the largest pro AV integrators on the planet, but for the longest time, if I was asked if I knew anyone at that company specifically on the digital signage file, I'd say "Nope."

As far as I knew, and the same for a lot of people involved in digital signage, AVI-SPL was much more focused on traditional pro AV work like unified communications and control rooms. While AVI-SPL delivered some digital signage projects, it wasn't a real focus. But that started to change a few years ago when the Tampa-based company spun up a new business unit called the Experience Technology Group, or XTG. Now it has some 30 people working on projects driven by the impact of visuals, and directly involving other architects, designers and creative shops.

Now, that's 30 people in a company that has 3,700 other staff, but the group works with some 300 customer-facing sales people, and gets pulled in to opportunities and projects when clients start expressing interests or needs that are about more than just function, like whiteboards and conferencing systems.

I had a great, very thoughtful talk with Mark Coxon, an industry veteran who joined the company about a year ago and is one of XTG's business development directors. We get into both the science and emotional sides of experiential projects, and how these kinds of projects work when they're guided by ideas and desired outcomes, and not just the Wow Factor of big screens.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mark, what is your role at AVI-SPL? 

Mark Coxon: I am a business development director in our XTG division, which is our Experience Technology Group, so what I do is work with our regional account managers as well as our partner ecosystem to identify opportunities to build amazing experiences. 

So your regional people would come across an opportunity, let's say, it's a corporate workplace that says, “We want to put a big ass LED display in our lobby. We don't know what to do or what to put on or anything else. What do we do?” And your regional person might have a kind of deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction and call you or somebody on your team and say, okay, I need help here.

Mark Coxon: Yeah. So a lot of our opportunities do arise within the regions themselves, right? Because AVI-SPL is a huge corporation. We have, I think, 300+ sellers out in the marketplace, across the world, talking to clients, managing accounts where they might do a lot more of the typical AV that you see out in the space: conference rooms and auditoriums, et cetera, and they'll come across customers saying, “Oh, I think we want to add a wow factor to this lobby” or “We're thinking about building an experience center to show off some of the new innovation that we came out with this year.” And so they'll engage our group, which is an overlay to the whole company, and bring us in, and we can really start to give, I guess, some form to that process and make sure they get what they want at the end of it. 

So you have a BizDev role, but it sounds like there's a fair amount of sales, engineering, and front-end consulting involved in it.

Mark Coxon: Yeah, it’s funny. AVI-SPL isn't really known in the market for experiential work, but we've done a lot of it. We've done a lot of it in pockets over the years for these customers, but it was never really organized under a division, and so that's why XTG exists. We've organized this portfolio of work in this division and assigned it to a team of people. We have about 30 people on our team now that overlay the country, and that team consists of people like me, business development directors, and we come from different backgrounds, some come from fabrication, some come from the consulting world, some like me come from all over the place within the industry from an integration perspective, and then we also have technologists on the team whose job is really exactly what you said to be those people who are thinking about the art of the possible.

“All right, this customer's asked for this outcome. They have these people coming to their building. They want them to feel this. They want this actionable insight out of the space.” And they're the ones who actually come up with the ideas on what kind of technology could we use to execute this and if we were to pull this off, what would it take for us to do that? And then they start to come up with rough sketches of what the technology would be to execute on that outcome. 

Yeah, it's interesting. Through the years, I've been asked who do you know over at AVI-SPL and I'll say nobody from the context of digital signage, and the company's been known as a very large company, and it’s very active. But doing more, if this is the right term, traditional AV work in the corporate workplace, that sort of thing, and as you said, pockets of activity in digital signage, but nothing organized.

So was it recognized within the company that we need to aggregate this and put ourselves forward as being directly in this as opposed to people discovering that, oh, you do that too?

Mark Coxon: Correct. XTG's definitely a targeted branding effort at consolidating this work and this expertise we have in things like executive briefing centers, museums, welcome centers, visitors centers, hall of fame experiences, et cetera, that we've done over the years for enterprise, higher-ed, and really creating some emphasis around that type of work that we do, for sure. 

Is there some cross-pollination happening when you do that? What I mean is, if you do some sort of immersive, experiential environment for a corporate workplace. Do they then two years later say, oh, by the way, we need new video conferencing capabilities or new meeting room signs, that sort of thing. Do you do that? 

Also, vice versa where you're already in there doing collaboration work, and they say, we want to do something in our lobby with Wow Factory. Can you do that? 

Mark Coxon: Yeah, obviously, we see both of those happen. Places where we're brought in maybe to do some specialty work, and of course, the other work at that point seems like more low-hanging fruit because it's work that we excel at already and have a huge portfolio of as far as auditoriums, meeting spaces, et cetera, and then, yeah, like you said, vice versa. We're coming in, and we're doing a lot of work, and you walk through this amazing lobby where people are going to come in their first experience before they come there to meet. 

So let's say somebody's bringing a customer into their building, and they're going to pitch a multimillion dollar sale with this customer that they have. How are they defining what that experience is gonna be within the building and just asking that question sometimes, who's doing this space? This looks like a customer-facing, marketing-driven space, and a lot of times they don't know that we do that work, and yeah, we stumble upon it that way as well. 

Do you guys go into prospective customers or existing customers pitching the idea of experiential spaces, or are you really operating off of their interest and initiative when they're saying we're interested in this?

I suspect it would be hard to pitch somebody saying, “You should have a big-ass LED video wall in your lobby.” 

Mark Coxon: Yeah. I call that technology in search of an application, and that's definitely not what we do. There's a great quote by Cedric Price, who was a mid-century architect, that says, “Technology is the answer, but what's the question?” And that's really what my job is within the team, and the business development team's job is (we have a few business development managers), but our job is really what are you trying to accomplish in this space? What business outcomes are you trying to achieve when you're looking at building this space?

We're in this weird mode, right? Where a lot of companies are re-evaluating what it means to have an office in general, what it means to have physical space, whether that be retail, we just saw Bed, Bath & Beyond looking at closing up and citing online competition as one of the reasons, so what does it mean to have place-based retail today? And if we are going to build a space, what should it be? And really starting at that level. So I try to start with that level with people all the time, even in the enterprise. 

The question isn't what do we do with the lease that we have or this space that we have? That's part, but that's the bridge. The real question is, if I had nothing, what would I build? And that's really the end goal of what you should be moving towards, and so many times we really start breaking down the problem of: what are the impacts that you hope to make by having a physical office or a physical retail location? And then how do we move backward from that into how does that now affect what we design into space, including the technology that will go into there? 

It's really reversing that. If we go in and just start telling people how cool it is to have an LED wall in their lobby, we're selling from the wrong perspective. But if somebody says, you know what, when people come in here, they come in here, and they sit, and they go into their phone. So they're waiting for a meeting. They come and sit in our lobby. They start looking at their phone, and suddenly they're stuck in their email. They're thinking about the seven things they have to do when they get back to the office, and they're already moving past our meeting. We want to create something that actually creates some anticipation, some foreshadowing that tilts them into the anticipation of the meeting they're about to have and not pull them out of our space and back into their workday. How do we accomplish that? 

And those types of conversations are much, much more fun to have and that could result at the end in having a 400-inch video while in the lobby, or it could result in maybe taking physical objects that the company's made if they're an aerospace company taking some of the innovations they have like rocket nozzles and things, and putting them on a shelf and letting people pick them up and play with them. And as they do, content launches, ambiently, around the room as they interface with these objects or whatever that happens to be. But really starting with who is here, why are they here? What are they interested in, and how do we engage them more? So that when they leave, they remember being here, and they actually take the actions we want them to take. So it's a much different approach than screens first, right? 

Yeah. As you might expect, I get bombarded with emails and pitches and everything else every day talking about different projects and capabilities of companies, and I see the words experience and immersive overused and abused quite a bit, and I'm curious how you define immersive and how experience is defined because I get a sense that there's this idea that experiential and immersive means that, you have to have a video wall that's got gesture recognition and you're going to wave your arms in front of it, and all these things are going to happen, or they're synchronized lighting, or God knows what. 

But from my point of view, there are times when an experience is just something that tells you if you're confused about which way to go, things like that, something that just makes the space better. 

Mark Coxon: A hundred percent. So it's funny that you mentioned that because although I'm on an experience team, I'm a big fan of the calm movement. How are we decreasing the technology we use for mundane tasks or throughout the day to create these analog, tactile, calm moments. I agree that the best definition of experience I've heard, and one I tried to adhere to was by Brian Solis. He used to be at Salesforce, I think he's now at Service Now, but he's written a lot of books on the experience economy.

And he said, an experience is an emotional reaction to a moment in time, and as you said, that doesn't have to be an overwhelming jaw-dropping experience. It could be a relief like you said, that now I know where to go, or it could be a silent pause that allows you to reflect. I think there are a lot of ways that you can create an experience for a company. 

For me, immersive just means that it's drawing the person in. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing. Are there ways to do that? Yeah. I've given, and I'm going to give a course this year at Infocom on creating the new connection center. I've given some talks before on utilizing biology to give a deeper connection to your message. So things like engaging peripheral vision work because more of your brain turns on when your fight or flight response is activated when your peripheral vision is being activated. And so are there ways that we can use, potentially waves of light to focus people inward on a screen or on a position in a room. Are there ways to draw people through space to a place where we want them to dwell? How do we create experiences where we don't, I guess, create congestion, right? Like putting a screen in the middle of a hallway, it could be a good idea as long as you're not encouraging people to stand there for 15 minutes, as long as the dwell time there is 15-20 seconds, et cetera. 

So I think experience is also just how people interact with the space themselves, and immersion is a combination of all of those things. So engaging more senses always creates more memory, but that doesn't have to be an active participation either. I think the things that are often overlooked in experience are opportunities to create, if it's a movement of air, if it's gentle waves, if it's mechanical movement in a ceiling, if it's an ambient soundscape that fills the space instead of white noise, all of these things can lend to experience, but they're nothing that somebody stops and focuses on. They're things that happen in the background that enhance what's going on, without the person experiencing it really focusing on it, if that makes sense. 

Yeah, I'm listening to that, and I'm wondering how the people on the other side of the table are responding to that. I suspect some of them are leaning forward and very interested, and other ones are going, that sounds expensive! 

Mark Coxon: You do get that. You can definitely get that, and I think that's why the co-design process is so important and not coming in with an idea of what you want to sell. Like earlier, you talked about me coming in and telling somebody why this experience is going to be important for them. Again, that's me pushing something upstream that I've got an idea about. 

I always say my best tool in a meeting is a blank piece of paper. Because if I sit down and really listen to what people do in this space, what they're trying to accomplish, all of those things, I'll pick up little notes. I had a customer the other day who, the architect, had put together a mood board of what this space wanted to feel and look like. They built a lot of these common spaces that they're talking about in architecture, We and Us spaces is what they're calling them where they're building these cafes with a lot of biophilia and wood and stone, and all of these things, and they're like we want to do sound masking in here, and you're like, okay, that's great. So obviously, you want to keep the sound from moving back and forth, but what you've really created here is almost an urban park or a community park type feel in this space so instead of just flooding this with white noise or paint noise, why not create a nature scape or something like that'll also keep the noise transfer down but really reinforce this idea that you're outside in this natural environment as opposed to the hush of a quiet office or the hush of a pink noise or white noise air chiller or something that a lot of times you put in a office space where maybe you're trying to focus on deep work and not on connection, right?

So it's just really listening to those things. When you start to identify those, when people start to, I guess self align with certain ideas as you're walking through what the different pieces are, they're more invested in that. Then when you come into that space where the cost comes, they really then weigh that against the impact as opposed to comparing it to what four speakers playing white noise would cost in the space.

Is it like that book about a village in terms of these kinds of projects where it's super important to have the architect involved, the engineers involved, all the different players who collaborate on a finished project as opposed to just the AV team coming in and executing this part of it?

Mark Coxon: A thousand percent. So many times, when we are brought in, what we end up doing and what I do with clients when they ask for an experience like this is one of the first things we want to do is almost a gap in overlaps kind of analysis with them. There is an ecosystem of partners that is necessary to create an experience. You're going to have somebody that's creating custom content. You may have two or three companies creating custom content. You may have to have a company specializing in video and live-action, live actors, et cetera, maybe somebody specializing in creating interactive user interfaces for touchscreens and all of those things. So you have these content creators. You do typically have somebody as an architect in this space that's obviously defining what the space looks like. Many times you have an experiential design firm doing the story, right? What's the strategy, what's the story? How are we walking people through this space? That's working with the marketing team in the company. Then you have custom fabricators building all this set work that the audiovisual goes into to create the look and feel that everybody has drawn down on the paper. 

So it does take a village, and many times that's part of what we do, is we educate what it is that players are involved in a successful experience. Who are the stakeholders that you have involved with now? Do we need to get more stakeholders involved? Many times it might come through IT because they see it as a technology buying exercise and you really find out that marketing and the C-suite and human resources need to be involved because this is a system that's meant to reconnect the employees of the company to the mission of what they're doing every single day in space. And now all of a sudden that becomes a much higher strategy-level conversation on how it's executed, and so it does take a village and it takes a great ecosystem of partners. I know that word's overused too. I've used it twice. 

But it takes this great array of partners, which is one of our core strengths is that we have a partnership manager that works specifically on making sure that we have a broad array of partners that we can introduce into these projects with our customers to make sure that none of these gaps are left untouched and that the experience we deliver at the end is not just a piece of technology installed on a wall because the technology itself, you don't get the value out of it when it's installed in the building, you extract the value out of the system. The ROI comes from the use of the system over time to drive the outcomes that you were looking for and thinking of this as a construction project where I delivered the 400-inch LED screen, so we're done, and the customer got what they paid for, they haven't actually extracted any value out of that piece of equipment yet. It's a depreciating asset until they play something on it that gets them the result that they want.

So we really try to focus on that instead of just our one part, and our, as I said earlier, we have our team. Our team, from a business development perspective, we walk through those things. Our technologists design the technology, but we also, when we take on a project, we have a program manager. And they're involved from the beginning, they listen to the intent, and just like in the programming phase of architecture, when you talk about what is the intent of the space and what are the ways that we're going to actually make some design decisions to facilitate that, the program manager really carries that spirit of the job and make sure that those partner handoffs, et cetera, are all going well and that everybody's involved in delivering the final result and so we built a process by which we deliver that, and we believe in it, so yeah, it does take a village for sure. 

What is the breadth of services? 

I'm thinking of one company much smaller than AVI-SPL, but they can do the full experience including metal fabrication and creative design, all that. So they can pretty much go from inception to delivery out of the same shop as opposed to using partners, but for a large company with a whole bunch of partners in play, how much do you want to own and how much do you want to cross-pollinate and work together on things?

Mark Coxon: We've doubled down on partnership when it comes to that. Our core strength is delivering technology. That's why our business was built, and that's what we do best, so we focus on the design and implementation of those technology systems, and for the other pieces, we partner. So you know, w don't build a lot of content. We do have a division called Video Link that does some content for video production for meetings, et cetera. 

But are we going to create computer animations for how our power plant works? No. We're going to bring in a partner that knows how to do that every day to do that. Are we going to define for the company what their story should be based on their seven customer personas? No, we're going to work with their marketing department, and if they need some help really coming up with a storyline, we're going to bring in one of our branding and creative strategy partners to help with that because that's what their core skill set is.

So we try to focus on what our operational excellence is, and that is delivering technology systems. But from the standpoint of the way that we approach the sales group, we're not engaging in a process that's designed to sell a particular technology. So it's the difference between focusing on what we're really good at and letting the cart dry the horse. I love the Maslow quote, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We try not to approach this, well, we need to sell 600 extra square meters of LED this quarter so this customer will get a video wall. That's not the way that we approach this. 

We don't approach this from a technology-centric lens, but we know where we play well and what we deliver value in the market with, and that's the technology portion.  

I wrote recently about a company that was, maybe not pivoting, but evolving into doing AV as a service, with the argument being that a lot of end-user customers would rather just have the whole project done as an operating line item as opposed to all the upfront costs of capital, and they don't want to worry about recurring support and all that. They'd just rather pay a number and let somebody else do it. Is that something that comes up and that you offer? 

Mark Coxon: Yeah, it comes up all the time. I think customers are always looking for ways to understand how much of this you want to own from a content update perspective, from how you manage refreshes, from even how you buy a system, as you said. Is it an operational cost, or is it a capital expenditure? Is it a construction project, or is it an ongoing cost month over month? 

One place that we see this very specifically right now is we're doing some virtual production and XR opportunities for clients, especially in the corporate space where they're wanting to elevate their all-hands meetings or their product launches or any of those types of things. They're often already buying those services in an operational cost format where. They're going out and renting a studio, or they're hiring a production company to come in and do these meetings for them. So they don't want to take on a capital expenditure. They want that to continue to be an operational cost. So yeah, through things like creating a plan for leasing equipment by having a breadth of services onsite, like we have onsite managed services where we can embed an AVI-SPL employee in one of our businesses to run a center per se, or to run a virtual production studio for the customer so that they just come in, the stakeholders come in, they talk about the product they want to talk about, and somebody's running all the front house, back house doing the streaming out to the other participants, et cetera. 

Yeah, we offer all of that, and that's one of the great things about working with somebody like us is because we do have such a large footprint, we do have such a presence, we have 4,000 employees across the world, and we have onsite managed services available. We have the ability to buy things on the customer's behalf and lease them, et cetera. That's one of the great advantages of someone with a big footprint like us is we have the ability to do those things. 

What are the reference projects that you bring up? So you're sitting in a meeting, and they say, “What have you guys done? Impress me!” 

What do you come back with? 

Mark Coxon: Yeah. There are always a few that we show. The Museum of the Future in Dubai is an amazing project that we did, and people were like, you guys did that project? I'm like, yeah, we did that project and delivered it through our Dubai office, which is an amazing office. That team is, hands down, an awesome team. But we show projects like that because that's a space where people pretty much ride an elevator, like a space capsule, up into a space station and then come back to Earth in a future state, and the museum architecturally is beautiful, it's an oval with a hole in the middle of it. You even wonder how it suspends itself, as well as just all the different things that are in there. There's a touch interface where a half globe, a half spear actually swells up out of a flat table, and you can use it to articulate the earth. Who's ever seen an interface like that before? 

So obviously, there were some great creative partners involved in the content and in that fabrication. But that's obviously a showcase project that we talk about a lot, and then we have visitor centers and executive briefing centers. A lot of our executive briefing centers are very impressive, Honeywell and Charlotte is a beautiful center with everything from transparent LED to kiosks to volumetric displays with physical artifacts to a full four-wall cave immersion room with a touch interface in the middle to navigate through 3D environments.

And so we show a lot of those pieces. We try to show projects that have, I guess, a variety of execution styles because not everything needs to be a touchscreen. It's to show someone that you could have 3D printed objects on a table, and as you pick up those objects, the video changes, and as you articulate that object, you can actually affect different parts of the video to launch. Those kinds of things are really cool and just show people that it doesn't just have to be a touch screen on a wall. We're not looking to put a big black rectangle on the finish you spent six months working on with the architect. We're going to make sure that's integrated into the space in the proper way.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of subtlety and just little things like present sensors that cost a few bucks to incorporate into a design. But you walk within a certain range, and it changes what's on a screen, and “Oh, how'd that happen?” It's great, but it's not fancy, you're not issuing a press release about it. 

Mark Coxon: Yeah. We've been working on some projects where they're talking about using real-time location services as people walk through the building. So they get badged in, or they get a card, and that card has a profile that maybe they've entered in, and as they walk through the space, the experience is personalized slightly to them, based on their profile or using things like data generated art. Humans are great at pattern recognition, and so if you're putting audio/visual in a space that people work in every day, or people go into the office every day with these screens are in the background, you don't want them to be counting down 15 seconds to read and then 32 seconds until the screen goes blue with white text and then: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, cue the video of the kid running through the park. 

That almost becomes like water torture at some point, right? It's just the constant dripping of this repetitive content that goes on in the background. So how do we use things like occupancy sensors, and time of day weather outside, all of which create effects on these screens that are more ambient in times that they're not being actively used for customer communication or employee communication? 

A lot of those things are really cool. So what you said, that subtlety, and really thinking of just the different moments. These are canvases that we can use for multiple things. Sometimes they need to be quiet and soothing for people to do their work. Other times they need to be loud and inspiring to get somebody's attention and be able to design something that does that and know who to partner with on the backend from a hardware perspective for something like a content management system that can be on a schedule or can use sensor-based inputs to trigger different modes is really important.

Are you sensing or seeing any kind of a shift in the marketplace in terms of rising interest in a particular thing? 

I know you mentioned experience centers, but those have been around for a while, that's an area where I get a sense because of the pandemic and everything, they're elevating in importance because you don't have as many people in the offices.

Mark Coxon: Yeah, I think experience centers are becoming more and more prominent. Companies are seeing if they can bring their customers in and create a memorable, relevant experience around their value story, that pays dividends for them.

I think we're seeing more and more interest, as I said, in virtual and extended reality, virtual production, and extended reality stages for elevating corporate communications. Suppose every single one of your communications goes out in 16 squares on a VTC call. How do you punctuate those meetings so that the important ones are elevated and look different, feel different, and actually engage people differently? We're seeing more and more of that. 

I will say, honestly, the big push is this: The challenge of physical space in a world that becomes more and more online, we have to get away from the idea of just utility because utility is going to be provided more conveniently, virtually. I can easily join a meeting from my kitchen table. I can easily buy a pair of pants on Amazon. So if we're just looking for the utility of work or the utility of shopping or whatever that place is built to do, if we're focusing on utility, we're always going to lose to the online experience because it's more convenient and the utility is the same. So we really have to focus on the personal experience.

Gensler did an experience index on public space a few years back, pre-pandemic, but people are in multiple modes when they go shopping, right? People are in the task-based mode of finding something to buy, but they're also in a mode of exploration. They're in a mode of connection. They're in a mode of aspiration. Who do I want to be? What do I want to be? I want to be inspired. They're looking for cultural connection. There are all these other motivations at play, and it's the same when people come to interact in an office, when they join their team, when they go to a movie theater versus watching something on Netflix. There's a reason the movie theaters haven't died. It feels different to watch a movie in a movie theater, not just because of the scale of the screen or the audio, but because it feels different being in a room, having a shared experience with other people, hearing their reaction to something, hearing when they go silent, when they laugh and when they cheer.

Those are things that we can really build an experience around, and I always say technology has advanced to a space where technology is usually not the limiting factor, so technology's no longer a huge challenge, space isn't a huge challenge, to design a space or to be able to build a space that facilitates these things. So really, now we are in the challenge of getting somebody back to the office, getting somebody in a mall, it is a human-centric problem. That's a human-centric exercise, and if we don't start with experience design that addresses the human motivation of why they would go somewhere, and we just address the utility of how big a store need to be and how big a screen need to be for somebody to read the text? We're never going to solve a human-based problem on why space is relevant, and so I think companies and customers are starting to see this more and more if we can start talking about: what is the human experience, and then how do we use space and technology to facilitate that? It's just a different way to solve the problem. 

We have to flip the model in its head. We can't start with a square building, add technology, and then hope people come and use it in the way that we designed it. That's not experience design. 

All right, Mark, thank you very much—very interesting chat. 

Mark Coxon: Hey, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.

 

Brad Koerner, Koerner Design

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

Brad Koerner is a Harvard-trained architect who has spent decades looking at how technology affects and defines built environments. He has a specific interest in technologies like lighting and digital displays.

An American based now in beautiful Amsterdam, Koerner works with both end-users and technology companies. By his own admission, he's obsessed by the question of how digital and interactive technologies are starting to disrupt centuries-old thinking about architectural design.

We met recently at Integrated Systems Europe, where he did a well-received talk on his ideas and observations. He later sent me the presentation deck, and it was pretty clear I needed to get him on this podcast.

In our chat, we get into a whole bunch of things - but focus quite a bit on the terms immersive and experiential ... what they mean and how they get applied.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Brad, thank you for joining me from Amsterdam. Can you give me a background on what you do and what Koerner Design is all about?

Brad Koerner: Yeah, thanks, Dave, for having me. It's really an honor. So Koerner Design is my own design firm, and I focus on the future of the built environment, iSPAN, architectural lighting, digital signage, and circular economy product design.

What would be a typical engagement? If there is such a thing as typical. 

Brad Koerner: A typical engagement for me is working with lighting design companies to create sustainable products. I've been engaged with a few digital signage and marketing firms looking at trends in digital media. I'm also working with DC Power folks, thinking about sort of infrastructure-level improvements that help lighting and digital signage.

So a company would come to you saying, we are thinking about doing this, but we don't have our heads wrapped around how it would all come together? 

Brad Koerner: Yeah I speak a lot. I talk about the future of the built environment through a variety of different channels, and a lot of people find inspiration in the pieces that I do. For example, I just spoke at Integrated Systems Europe on immersive digital environments, and an earlier presentation I gave was called “Every surface is a screen, now what?” 

The year before that I presented at Integrated Systems Europe, also on DC Power Systems. These videos go out there and they get people really inspired. They start to see these industries in new ways. They look at their problems with a fresh mind, and they really want to engage them in an innovation process, right? A proper design-driven innovation process. So I help them do a future envisioning session: what are the trends, what are the options, what do they have? Then we turn that into a sort of proper wishlist of product concepts or new business concepts, and then we drive it into the roadmap where it's scoped and prioritized, and they focus on that. 

I also then take it all the way out and help 'em with product marketing and marketing communications for those new launches.

So they would come to you because you're not selling them anything other than your insight and expertise as opposed to trying to angle them toward how they're gonna use a fine-pitch LED wall? 

Brad Koerner: Correct. I'm agnostic when it comes to all the technologies and equipment. 

You talk in your presentations a lot about immersive digital experiences and I'm very curious about how you define immersive because I just wrote the other day about a company that described a billboard along a roadway as immersive, and I thought, boy, that's really stretching to call that immersive, but maybe I'm wrong.

Brad Koerner: I think it's helpful for your audience to understand by background. I'm an architect. I have two degrees in architecture, and when I was young, I always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer as a kid, and that's what drove me into architecture, and then as a side interest, I took up theater lighting and stage set design.

So I really think of immersive digital experiences from that sort of the architectural point of view where you are in physical places, you are surrounded by six surfaces and in today's world, all of those can become digital, they can become luminous, they can become a portal to the internet or to the digital world in some form or another. I've said this because I cross over between architectural lighting and digital signage a lot in my work. 

Every pixel is a light source and every light source is a pixel in these modern building projects. And a lot of people still don't quite understand that concept yet. An immersive digital experience is becoming how you design an architectural space, and I think particularly a lot of architects and interior designers are really trailing behind the technology. They look at signage as a thing that's applied after the fact almost like a typical signage project, non-digital signage. They don't yet understand how to take everything they've been taught about architecture placemaking, creating thresholds, creating progression, creating a sense of space or wonder, efficiency or economy for working environments, or branded retail experience. They don't know how to take what they're so good at and apply digital to it and mix digital into that and use digital to create something really engaging placemaking. That's what I mean by immersive digital experiences. 

You say they don't know how, but is it the case that they do want to?

Brad Koerner: Some for sure, some absolutely not. I saw Michael Schneider from Gensler speak at the Integrated Systems Europe show a few years ago, and Gensler has a whole group now that's called the Digital Experience Design Group, and this is exactly what they're focused on.

Gensler hired the Head of Imagineering at Disney.

Brad Koerner: Bob Weiss, right? So they get it. For every Gensler, that's out there, There are a lot of architects that think of digital experience design as well, “Don't put a TV on my wall that's gonna show a Coke ad”, right? And they don't get it right. They still think of architecture as concrete and steel and glass and like Le Corbusier's famous quote, “It's the magnificent play of forms bathed in light”, and I've inverted that many times and I've spoken and I said you know what happens when the forms themselves emit light and they become digital, how are you gonna design that? How do you design the element of time? 

And with the element of time, you get this sort of very active storytelling capacity within architectural placemaking. So it's no longer enough for you to design a wall and it just sits there forever. You have to think about how that wall will change over time, right? These sorts of cycles of time, whether it's days, weeks, seasons, hours, minutes, or whatever that is, that wall can change dynamically. So why will you change it? How will you use that for placemaking and creating engaging experiences? I don't think most traditionally educated architects and interior designers can really get their heads around that yet. Even lighting designers have this sort of classic preset scene notion when it comes to controls. They're struggling with getting their heads around digital media and that live data stream, live media, and sort of interactivity. 

But you seem to be suggesting that this is a matter of time as opposed to maybe it'll happen because I keep writing and talking about how that time is coming fairly quickly when architects and people who design physical spaces are thinking about LED and projection and other technologies as design materials, as design considerations. 

Brad Koerner: Yeah. I think it's inevitable. The best science fiction has shown this for decades now. It's shown this amazing potential world we can live in, both the positive and the dystopian use of it like Children of Men. I just spoke in Integrated Systems Europe and I started my presentation by saying, “The future is now!” You look at Blade Runner, you look at Minority Report, you look at Star Trek, and all of those things that everybody still thinks of as like out there decades away in the future, now in fact, is decades behind us, right? And people haven't admitted to where we are, right?

The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed and digital signage is definitely a world where that is super true, right? You go to the trade shows and a few years ago Sony had an 8k native-resolution digital wall that was eight meters wide and four meters tall, and it was hyperrealistic. That technology exists, but then you go to clients out there and you know they can't afford at any budget, anything, or they simply won't choose to do that, and I think it's inevitable. These architects that are afraid of it, I think what happens is somebody will put a digital sign in their space whether they like it or not for other reasons, and the worst-case scenario is it does become an ad, right? And that's not what they want in their space. So they better get their head around it and integrate it actively into their design concepts and really look at the poetics of it. How can they use simple things like beautiful motion graphics and beautiful textures?

Just like an interior designer would make a material sample board, a swatch board, they need to think of the digital media like that. What is the sort of swatches of digital media that they're presenting to their clients when they're designing these grand lobbies or offices or retailers or whatever?

I wonder though, with Gensler, they are an extremely well-established company with huge clients and everything else, and they work with Fortune 100s, fortune 500s, giant airports, and everything else. But there's a whole bunch of designers that are working with like a regional insurance company or something like that, and they're just saying, we get what you're saying, but our customers aren't gonna spend that money. They want a defined ROI. They don't want something that's just artistic and ethereal and vague in terms of what this does.

Brad Koerner: I think you're talking about a couple of things, right? So first off, there's just cheap, right? You'll always have customers that can never be cheap enough, right? But you have to segment the market, right? There are always customers at the high end of the range that wants the newest, the coolest, the hottest things at the beginning of the cycle. I joke that it's the sort of corporate lobby art budget crowd that always seems to have the money to do those sorts of fanciful things.

But the technology keeps plummeting in price, right? A lot of this technology was indeed available even 20 years ago, but it was at such a price point no one could afford it unless you're like U2 going on a concert tour with a LED screen with the width of a football field. They could afford it but no one else. 

Or Comcast and their lobby because they were a cable company before streaming! 

Brad Koerner: Yeah, the Comcast lobby, right? What is that already 15 years ago, right?  It's like I said, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. So the price points just keep coming down until they become more and more common.

Could you have imagined even a decade ago that every little restaurant and coffee shop, and donut shop would have digital menu boards? It's amazing how fast that swept through the market, and right now we have these sorts of virtual production spaces, right? I think it was, what, just three years ago, the Mandalorian showed sort of the first instance of that, and there was that movie First Man Before, I think was the first that used an LED screen in camera on film. Now it's everywhere, right? Every studio around the world is installing these virtual production facilities within a year. 

The accelerating rate of technological innovation is a term that’s thrown around, and I don't think people understand what accelerating rate means. AI image generation six months ago exploded onto the scene, and now everyone is using it every designer is thinking about how it's gonna disrupt them, and every content producer is thinking about how they can suddenly reduce the cost of their content generation using this sort of AI image generation, or increase their margin.

That was just six months ago, so I think with the technology becoming so cheap, it's low cost to visualize the concepts. It's such a low cost to design, commission, and program them. The hardware is continually plummeting in costs, so you to open up new opportunities, right? The menu boards in little mom-and-pop restaurants. There will always be the high end of the market going down into the middle end of the market, and they will use these, right? And they will have very smart design teams that come up with real ROI stories for why these things work, and it becomes fanciful and sci-fi today or yesterday, tomorrow just becomes normal and accepted. People don't even think about it anymore. The bottom end of the market will always be cheap. There'll always be people who can never save enough money or be stingy enough. That's in every market, right? Lighting, construction, you name it. It's always like that.  

You're suggesting in your presentation that the digital and physical worlds are fusing in that with physical spaces being portals to a virtual world. I'm curious about what you mean by that, and maybe you can give me a couple of examples of how that's actually playing out.

Brad Koerner: Let me go back to when I was in school. I have a Master's in Architecture from Harvard, and when I was there, I did a thesis titled ‘Active Object Surfaces and Zones’ I looked at using physical interactive controls for retail displays and lighting, and this was in 1999. So I was a bit ahead of the scene on that one. 

But in the early 200s, I believed that physical spaces would become the best interface to the internet which is, I know, a wild concept for many now. But you have to remember back then we were still using 20-inch Sony Trinitron screens were like the hot technology, and people were still using three-and-a-half-inch floppy discs and dial-up modems but the internet showed so much promise and there were a lot of designers doing really amazing websites and that was very spatial, right? And even just the notion of hypertext itself is very spatial. 

So I kept imagining that physical spaces and using your body as the control and creating progression and threshold and a lot of the sort of architectural principles that you see in the internet experience could be combined. But then, in 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, and little black mirrors hijacked our internet experience, right?

Now though, I think people are over that, and we're saturated with personal devices and little black mirrors everywhere, the retailers are finally waking up to say, Hey, we need that digital in our physical experience, and so are the hospitality providers and healthcare providers. And they're starting to think, wait for a second, now we can tie all this digital data o tour spaces, right? And we can take all these great media that we have on our little black mirrors, and we can put it into our physical spaces. We can create these great experiences, and we can complete this cycle of gathering data from the real world, using it to drive great media content creation, live and interactivity and use it to drive behavior back in the real world, right? And it completes that virtuous cycle, and that's what I mean when I say architecture becomes a portal to the virtual world. A portal you can go back and forth between, right? The digital might come from into the space, and the spatial actions might drive digital data, right?

Can you give me some examples of where you've seen this applied and you think it really works because I've walked into some spaces that retail spaces and other spaces that are called immersive and experiential and thought to myself, being an old fart, cranky and everything that that's nice, but I don't see the point of this and I sometimes struggle with how they're gonna see a return out of this? 

Brad Koerner: Yeah, I haven't seen many. Long story short: I think you just have this great divide where you have, for example, a lot of startups doing smart buildings, right? And they're deploying all these sensors, and they're gathering up all this data, but then they don't return that data back to the spaces. The data does very little to act on the physical space. Then you have all this great media content that's out there and you'll throw up media content on these screens, and it's not tied to anything that's happening in the space, right?

So it has no recognition of if somebody's even looking at it or not, much more if that person is gazing at it or wanting to engage it. There's been a lot of crazy stuff. There's indoor GPS positioning using lighting systems and apps. That was a flop. People have tried to tie app experiences into the real world. Not a lot of that has any real success story. You see a lot of these sorts of art-driven installations where I call it the be in Me and My Shadow problem. You can put a stereo vision camera system in space and track people exactly, but then, all they do is show the person's presence on some huge digital wall, and it's like me in my shadow, and there's no other point to it, so you have to think about why you need interaction in a space, right? I say for lighting and digital media, you can deliver the right light or the right content at the right place at the right time. You can use it to create really memorable human experiences, or you can use it to drive action, right? And those are areas that are not well explored yet, right? You don't have a lot of good designers out there connecting all of those systems together to create genuinely good experiences. 

I actually worked with a startup called Digi Valet that makes a hotel room control system for luxury hotel rooms. So they make an app that sits on an iPad, but the other half of their system is this black box that interfaces with every physical control system in a modern hotel room like the thermostat, the blinds, the lighting, the media, everything that's Bluetooth, the Bluetooth controlled faucet on the bathtub, the Bluetooth coffee maker, the Bluetooth perfume/scent sprayer, and all that stuff.

And it was great because they asked me to help them. This had a lot of customers, these hotel chains wanted to develop a brand of digital media and lighting experiences as part of this iPad app, right? And it was a fascinating way to think about it. So you're in this hotel room, and you click, I want to watch a movie. It immediately says on your iPad, okay, can we set the cinema lighting? Yes. Can we lower the blinds? Yes. Would you like us to order you champagne and popcorn? Yes. 

It totally changes the way you think of the room, right? You don't have lighting control pads and blinds, and you don't have to find the remote control for the TV. It's all about having this really smart butler that just knows what to do when you want to watch a movie. 

So if you're a frequent flier or whatever, you travel between different Marriotts, and you use your loyalty card, and it just sets it up in your room. So you don't even do anything; that's your configuration. 

Brad Koerner: That's the next level, right? That's future beyond that when you can add in the CRM systems on top of that so it remembers your preferences. Then the next level beyond that is there's almost this genie-like ability where they begin to understand your desires so well that they can start  to add magic to your experience that you are not even expecting or the hotel can't do it at scale, right? I just think that's fascinating, like how could you take those principles of experience design and apply them into high-end retail or high-end healthcare, or even just a commercial office environment, right? It's a beautiful UX/UI experience in a space. We desperately need to see more intelligence and creativity around using digital in physical spaces. 

Yeah, I wanted to ask about the discipline that needs to be enforced at the start of these things. When I've done consulting in my dark past, I would try to ensure the first question out of my mouth that I would throw at the customer or a client was: why are you doing this? What do you want to see out of it? And so on. 

Is that the sort of thing that needs to be addressed super early so that it's not just, “We've seen these big video walls and other lobbies, we want one too.” 

Brad Koerner: Usually, the first question I ask is, what's your budget? But that doesn't work too well.

Can you afford me? 

Brad Koerner: It's both of those, right? It's what's your budget and why? I think that, first off, many of these companies have a lot more budgets if they want. They just don't want to at first, they don't understand what is possible, they don't understand what it would cost, and they don't understand the ROI on that investment. So it's a real uphill battle, and that tail is as old as time, that's an architect preaching an upgraded finish on the oak panels, or that's a lighting designer preaching adding dimming into the system. It's always like that in these construction projects, and you are right, about the why, you can have all this technology in the world, right? Anything you can dream, you can do, right? So technology is not the limiting factor. It's imagination, right? Imagination is the limiting factor and thinking is almost like a movie director or the early stages of any media content where you have to think in storyboards, right? You have to think in moments of time. You have to think about their journey, what's the user journey, and what's the user experience, right?

If you've seen any of these big design firms, they map user journeys, right? Throughout the omnichannel retail experience, they create these huge flow charts that take up a whole wall. You have to think about that in physical places now. So if you're walking into the shopping mall, do you put signage at the door's threshold? Classically, in retail design, you don't put anything really important at the threshold of the door because you need a sort of decompression zone where people charge into a space. Then they slow down, and then they look around, right? 

There's just a lot of classic common sense design stuff that is not being employed in digital signage, particularly in any interactivity, right? You need these new combinations of skill sets that just don't exist yet. You almost need to take a game designer with a world-class architect and make them work together and see what happens, right? You need to take a Hollywood storyboard artist and combine them with a technologist and make them work together and see what happens., and that's what's missing right now from all of this, and I think you have companies like Moment Factory and Gensler and some out there are on that bleeding edge that they are trying to do that. Here in Amsterdam, there's Purple Storytelling, and there are lots of little groups that see the future that they struggle with, right?

I think they struggle to see, and get the clients to understand the potential. I think things like Unreal Engine and live rendering and that sort of starting with a game engine, which is so powerful with live rendering, is going to make visualizing these scenarios so much faster, so much more profound, instead of starting with a classic architectural sketch, and then you went to an architectural photorealistic rendering, but it didn't move. Now architects are using things like Unreal Engine to make these animations, particularly in the luxury real estate marketing firm. Have you ever seen what some of these high-end luxury real estate developments are doing for their marketing? It's unreal. It's Hollywood-grade special effects from just 10 years ago, and they're using it just to sell condos. 

You start to take the power of that, and you add it into very specific segments. So, retailers, have their very specific sort of customer flows, customer journeys, and ROI expectations, and hospitality operators have their very specific desires, healthcare facilities, have very different customer journeys. With Unreal Engine, you can now tie together these professions. It's the first time in my career that I've seen this flow complete, that you can use architectural models in BIM in Unreal Engine, and you can show these scenarios. You can animate them, you can set up the interactivity, right? Cuz it's a game engine at heart, and then you can use that for commissioning these systems. I think that will be the next step in all of this. 

But are people like architects and those who design physical spaces, are they conditioned and trained and understanding about the ROI needs of their clients? Is that something they've always had to address, or is this new because of this more mysterious ROI that you would see out of an immersive space? 

Brad Koerner: It's a great question. I don't think they are. I have two degrees in architecture. I was never trained to think of a business scenario. Again, it's combining different skill sets, right? It's almost like you need to combine an architect with an MBA and think about why, what's the point? It's a real challenge, right? Obviously, if you're a high-end real estate developer and you're doing luxury condos, you know that if you add marble to the lobby, you're going to get a certain ROI. You might not have it calculated, but you understand your customers, and you understand it's going to help with sales. You understand that it's worth it, right? You can't just put chipboard and cheap carpet in, you have gotta do the upgraded finishes, but you also know where not to spend the money, and you know where it’s not going to get return value to you.

And there's an intuitive aspect to that you can never just set up in a spreadsheet, and $5,223.32 will be your ROI in 32 days. You'll never get that precise, and that's why you need a creative mind and a business mind, and they need to come together to figure these things out, but it will happen, right? If you create a great experience for a hospitality provider, right? They'll know it. They'll know it from the customer feedback, reviews, and qualitative comments on that, right? And eventually, that drives revenue for them. But those sort of attribution problems for ROI is vexing in every industry.

Marketing goes through this all the time, but it will happen more and more in physical placemaking with these systems, and I think it's a skill. Again, people have to get good at this. It doesn't exist now, and it's tricky because it combines several skill sets that have never worked together in the past and you have to fuse them to sort these things. 

Yeah, I listened to a panel at Digital Signage Experience, and I believe it was somebody from Moment Factory who was saying that in terms of a return, they're now starting to hear from the HR departments of companies who are saying that having an experiential aspect to their lobby and their overall space is incredibly important in terms of recruitment and retainment of employees these days that particularly in technology jobs where you may have several choices as to who you're going to work for, what that space looks like and how you feel in it matters.

Brad Koerner: Yeah. It's like in the commercial office section, right? I forget the exact numbers, but it's $3 a square foot, $30 a square foot, and $300 a square foot, right? Three bucks are your cost of energy, and 300 is your cost of salary, right? So should you focus on saving a few pennies of energy, or should you focus on saving hundreds of dollars of efficiency for your employees and salaries? That's just the concept that has to be employed everywhere. There's this sort of scale of effect that is critical to ROI. Understanding that is often siloed, right? You get a salesperson running in with some smart building system. They're talking about saving energy because we'll turn all the lights off more. And they don't understand that will create a lousy experience for the workers, right? And it will really damage the effectiveness of the workers and retention and all that, right? Same thing with digital signage, anything, right? If you put a big LED wall into a commercial office, will you just put a waterfall on it? Is that going to help make your employees happy? Maybe, maybe it's as dumb as that. But could you do something more sophisticated with it? Could you recognize employee accomplishments live? Could you show employee performance live depending on what your business or industry is, do you give people a pat on the back instantaneously? There are so many scenarios that could be developed around these technologies when, again, when the surfaces you're surrounded by become digital. You need to think about what they do, how they react to you, and how people react to those surfaces.? What is that cycle of action-reaction? 

It sounds like you're saying there's more to this stuff than eye candy.

Brad Koerner: Eye candy's great. I'm not going to argue against eye candy. There's a lot in this world that is just for eye candy's sake, and that makes a big difference, right? This is a classic design. This is architecture, this is interior design, this is a brand design, and retail design. Some of it is just eye candy, and people know how to justify that, right? That’s a tale as old as time, right? It's making a statement. It's making a brand, culture, making, and experience. Why does Starbucks charge $8 for a coffee when they spend 50 cents on it?

Because they've invested heavily in how their stores look, they feel and smell and sound, and there's just a lot of eye candy there, right? They consciously built all that so that they could charge that price premium. So yeah, it will just be eye candy for some of the digital stuff. I joke about the waterfalls, but can you beat the waterfall? In terms of your media content, it's mesmerizing, right? It's biomimetic, it makes you feel comfortable. I think humans have these deep-seated connections to natural effects. Maybe you just put a glorious force scene on your huge LED wall, and somehow the best thing you can show, right? I don't know. It could be as dumb as that. You have to test it. 

I think the other thing people have to get savvy on is that you don't just build it and walk away. You have to build and operate it, and these teams that are developing these concepts will have to work with the operators, whoever it is to tweak it, right? To look at, we're going to make a whole bunch of assumptions, right? There are cycles of time, there's media content, there's interactivity, there are all these new things that people have to figure out. They can simulate it upfront. Nowadays, they can go into the virtual world during the construction project and get it mostly right or pretty close. But then, who will fine-tune that in the field over time or refresh it over time? Most people don't even think of the media budget. How many people forget about, oh wait, you mean we need a media budget for all these screens we've built? They can't even do that, and it's a long way before you're going to have clients actively spending the money to tweak this stuff and make sure it's optimal over time. 

All right. Great conversation. I think we could have gone on for three hours, but gotta cut it off at some point. If people want to find out more about your company or perhaps bring you out to speak to their company or a conference, where do they find you online? 

Brad Koerner: They can find me on LinkedIn just Brad Koerner or KoernerDesign.com. 

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

Brad Koerner: Great. Thanks, Dave.

Brandon Harp, Electrosonic

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

When I see an ambitious new visual display project lit up at a new or reno'd airport, office tower or attraction, I just about assume that if it's in the US, the company that put it in is probably Electrosonic.

The company is, technically, an AV systems integrator, and there are lots of them out there, of all sizes. But where corporate meeting spaces, control rooms and reception areas are the day-to-day work for most of those companies, the bread and butter work for Electrosonic is in locations where experience is the primary consideration and mindset.

The company - which has offices in the US, Europe and Asia - has a ton of experience and expertise in delivering AV and IT jobs that involve more than getting infrastructure in place. They work a lot with creative design and technology shops who are fantastic at the big ideas and compelling visuals, but want and need to hand off the install to a seasoned team.

I had a great chat about Electrosonic with Brandon Harp, a senior business development manager working out of the company's New York offices.

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TRANSCRIPT

Brandon, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on Electrosonic and what it does that's different from a lot of the AV integrators who are out there? 

Brandon Harp: Sure. Thanks, David. I appreciate you having me on the podcast. I've been a longtime admirer of your content and so forth, so I've been following you for many years, so I really appreciate the opportunity.

So Electrosonic is a technology professional services firm. We design, build and support innovative technology solutions that create unforgettable experiences where people live, work, and play for many years. You probably know of us from the museum and the theme park world but we've expanded over the years and have really started to focus solely on immersive and experiential environments, and so for us, we're a bit of a specialized firm. We do consider ourselves still a boutique-style AV systems integrator, but the kinds of projects that we work on are global level and span a multitude of different industries, including corporate and retail and attractions and a multitude of others.

You said you expanded into this from museums and those kinds of attractions. Was that a conscious decision or is that just where the business was going? 

Brandon Harp: Right after Covid, we made a decision to go back to our roots, which were always these complex sort of custom environments that we had been working in for many years, which our clients best knew us for. We've done away with just the kind of typical hang-and-bang conference room projects. We still do a portion of those if there is an element to a more project that fits better into our scope. But we've really done a good job, I think, as a company of being able to identify where our strengths are and where we can really add value for our customers. And that is really in that experiential and immersive sort of environment working with video walls, various different interactives, projection mapping, and things of that nature. 

Is it a situation where you don't really want to do the meat, potatoes, boardroom, collaboration displays, all that sort of stuff because there's no money in it or minimal money in it, or is it just not terribly interesting?

Brandon Harp: I think it's a combination of all those things, Dave, I think with the standard corporate conference rooms, it's really become a race to the bottom, and we just as a company have recognized where our strengths are on delivering these projects and really our delivery model best lends itself to more of these custom really high-end engineering projects where we need a certain level of technical ability that not all integrators have, and so those are the kinds of projects that we're setting our sights on, and that's the ones that we continue to get hired for because of our ability to not only project manage, but engineer and design. 

Something you might not know about us is that we actually have a full design consulting firm within our larger company, and we look at things through, I would say, a much more creative lens. So it's less about just engineering a system, and it's more about looking at it through a creative lens and saying, all right, what's the user experience? What is the story that you're trying to tell? How does that all get fused with the architecture? And then really thinking about at the end of the day, what is the human connection and what are they gonna feel as the system gets implemented and they go on to use it.

Yeah, you've found this niche and pretty lucrative niche in that a lot of the AV/IT systems guys can be very good at the technical side of putting something in. But they've probably not spent a lot of time with video walls or projection mapping or inversive environments, and you just start talking about that and they're looking at you like, could you say that again?

Brandon Harp: Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to our roots, working on dark rides and so forth in theme parks. If you can imagine some of the complexities of being able to projection map in an environment like that, we've been able to essentially replicate that and bring that same methodology, that same sort of design consulting and engineering into corporate spaces, briefing centers, visitor centers, lobby attractions, things like that where you've got this sort of experiential element that we're best known for, and then we help you think through it creatively and our creative technologists and knowledge experts can really help the clients think more about, okay, what is that user experience? What do you want them to feel? As opposed to just looking at boxes and squares on walls and trying to price technology. 

So our approach has been a bit different, but it seems to be very effective with our clientele, and they like the fact that we're not afraid to take the technology away from them in order to really think through that content experience, to think through what is it not only short term but also the longer term for their environment. 

It's interesting because so many places are now being defined as attractions. So 20 years ago, an attraction was a theme park or a museum but now, as you alluded, a corporate lobby is an attraction.

Brandon Harp: That's right. We've seen a big uptick in that right around the time of Covid, so 2020 and onward. What we're also seeing is that there are quite a few real estate developers now who are trying to take on these attractions. I think one that you're probably familiar with, that everyone has either been to or is aware of now, is SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, where SL Green was the real estate developer behind an attraction like that, which is an observation deck that spans multiple floors and is multi-sensory. 

So working with real estate developers like that who have a good understanding of real estate and square footage, how do we apply that to an attraction-based environment and help them be able to have the very best system to create that guest experience, and that's what we've been doing and that's why we've continued to get hired for these large scale projects that seem to have those sorts of elements.

For that one in New York, what was driving SL Green? 

Brandon Harp: What was really driving SL Green was the vision that their CEO, Mark Holliday had to have this observation deck that sits high above the clouds in New York, and as part of a major building that went up just next door to Grand Central Station, which is One Vanderbilt and so 90 stories up in the air, you've got this multi-sensory experience where people can not only come and see and enjoy the views of New York but also be immersed in these various different rooms and environments that really lend itself to something for everyone. 

You don't necessarily have to be a tourist to enjoy it. You can also be a local or someone just passing through. But it really lends itself to something for everyone, and now we're starting to see more and more of these major supertalls that are going up, that are changing the New York skyline, having an element of an immersive experience in it, whether it's an observation deck or a lobby experience, an elevator experience, things of that nature.

And where did they see the money out of that? If it's an observatory high up, I assume they're charging for that. 

Brandon Harp: They are. It's a paid attraction. So that uptick in paid attractions inside of corporate, what were typically fully corporate buildings is now something that we're seeing more and more of.

Yes, you may have, all the other floors in the building are corporate tenants, just like One Vanderbilt. But it also has this attraction there that spans four floors. So you're starting to see this mix of not only corporate, but attraction-based entertainment, and think about it, in New York City, it's not a theme park like a Disney World or a Universal, where you've got lots and lots of acres to play with. We're talking about going vertically here for these attractions that go up in New York City. So we're starting to see a real uptick in that and really being able to apply all of that methodology that we've developed over the years in how to deliver those projects successfully for the theme park business to these corporate institutions.

I'm assuming it's a bit of a delicate dance for these property developers if they do that sort of thing because if you turn your building into a tourist attraction, you're at the risk of a lot of crowds and people wandering around, and the regular tenants are fighting their way to get to the elevators and things.

Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think to combat that, what they've done is for example, One Vanderbilt, they have all the tenants have their own lobby, so they're actually utilizing their own elevators and so forth. So their day is not interrupted at all by anything in terms of crowds or anyone trying to get into One Vanderbilt. For the observation deck in SUMMIT, it's got its own separate entrance and it's actually very well thought through. I think what impressed me most about SL Green was their ability to adapt to the ever-changing kind of design and environment, and they really did a good job of listening to all of the consultants that they brought in.

Again, they're real estate developers, and so to take on a major attraction inside one of the largest buildings in Manhattan is something that was a bit foreign to them. But they really brought in great consultants to help them think through every aspect of this, which is why it runs so effectively and efficiently now.

You mentioned that you have a design consultancy. What is all that about? 

Brandon Harp: So our design consultancy practice is based out of Las Vegas. We do have design consultants now that are remote as well. So we have a few here on the East coast and in Denver and a couple of other strategic places around the US and overseas in Europe.

But for us, it's very much about AV consulting. What you may not know about us is that we also do security surveillance, access control, as well as information communication technology, which is your structured cabling as well as acoustics. So oftentimes we find ourselves in these conversations very early on with architects and owners and people who are designing these experiences, and so they want us to be a part of their team to help steer the technology decisions, and so we're finding that we're being hired more and more early on in these projects because we look at things through that creative lens. We consider ourselves creative technologists, very true to our trade and very client-focused throughout, and being involved very early to help steer and guide the solution through master planning is very important to the outcome of these projects, and so now what we're seeing is an uptick in design-build as well, because we're working very closely with the owner and the owner reps at an early stage to really flush out the design and the intent, and then if we're able to come in and do the AV build, which we're finding is happening more and more, there seems to be a real desire to have one hand to shake at the end of the day when it comes for all design-build and all the way through to support, which is what we offer.

Do you find that the end users, whether they're property developers or just building owners or major tenants or whatever, that they are smarter or more sophisticated about what they wanna do than maybe they were 5-10 years ago? 

Brandon Harp: That's a great question. I think it's still a mixed bag. Honestly, I think there's oftentimes when clients come to us with blue sky ideas, or maybe they have some sort of concept renderings that they had hired a firm to put together for them and then they ask us, "How do we execute this?” and “What do we need to be able to be successful?” And I think that's where our design consulting practice comes in. We help them really think about not only the technology but more importantly, what's the outcome, how the user feels and what are they gonna experience here that's gonna make them want to continue to come back and continue to talk about this.

So getting in early like that has really been very effective for us, and then the build portion of it as well, which we've always been very known for. Having a good understanding of the project from day one has really made it very effective for us.

How important is scale? We've seen all kinds of press releases about a LED video wall that's 60 feet wide or 100 feet wide, whatever the dimensions are. But I'm wondering if you're starting to see a more sophisticated approach where you are not just thinking about the scale, but how it fits, how is this gonna work within the environment? All those sorts of things. 

Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think some of the clientele has thought that through or they've gathered information from other projects. Some do have maybe a bit of a more sophisticated approach, or they have someone who's a technology advisor who's been helping them think through things. I think where we come in is really to be able to help them take that to fruition, right? And take it to the next step. So I do think it's still a bit of a mixed bag. 

In terms of the scale itself, it depends on the project. I think we do a number of projects that are gonna have multiple locations over and over again, and we create this blueprint for those, but we also do a lot of these one-off projects, as you can imagine, especially when it comes to museums and theme parks and briefing centers and things of that nature where it's one of a kind experience and we really have to be able to deliver on what the client's looking for. 

Yeah, and that's a bit of a challenge I would imagine. One-off projects are awesome when they come along, but it becomes a bit of a roller coaster ride as opposed to the predictable recurring services you might be providing. 

Brandon Harp: It is very much and we find with these one-off projects that because of the size and the scale of them, typically they take anywhere from a year onwards to be able to complete. So you can imagine that requires a great deal of patience and skill and making sure that we have updated schedules just strong project management, and strong design engineering early on to make sure that we have the very best system in place. But, also the supply chain is another thing, right? And so not to go too far of a rabbit hole on that. But if your projects are typically a year to a year and a half in length, often what we're finding now is that the client wants to know right out of the gates, are there any stumbling blocks in terms of supply chain challenges? And then we have to order this material, and equipment very early on in the process in order to combat that or we have to find something else that we can use in order to deliver the system on time and within budget. So it's a bit of, as you said, a rollercoaster is a great way to describe it.

You said a year and a half. With some airports and let's say hospital campuses, that's probably more like a 4-5 year planning cycle, right? 

Brandon Harp: Certainly, yeah. I think the year to a year and a half seems to be average, but yes, to your point, we often find ourselves involved in airport projects and so forth where the delivery date is 2026 or 2028 even now. And again, I think it has to do with being able to get in early with the right people, make sure that we're providing them with what they need to be successful, and then staying  in touch and in tune with what's going on through the life cycle of the project and the management of it. Project management in AV has always been a hot point, right? 

And so for us, it's very much about the project managers being able to see through a project of that length properly and show it the adequate attention that it needs to be successful. 

I'm also guessing that because you're sometimes looking that far out for an airport or something like that, you really need to stay on top of emerging technology and think about, okay, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to put in right now with what's available right now, I'm thinking about what's going to be out there three years from now, which might be micro LED or something else that isn't really commercially available right now. 

Brandon Harp: That's very true and that's a great point. It's certainly something that we take into consideration on all of these projects.

I think you have to look at the manufacturers and the longevity of their companies. Are they gonna be around for many years to come? And what does the product roadmap look like? And I think that's why we have our key partners that we work with who are very good at understanding what's coming, what's future, making sure that they stay top of mind with all of our designers and our engineers to ensure that at the end of the day when the system is installed, that it is the most recent and up to date technology, and it's not something that's going to be phased out or end of life that just simply isn't feasible when it comes to spares or replacements, anything like that.

So Thinking that through, especially on these longer projects is really important and that's what makes us effective. 

I've been intrigued when I've seen big design agencies like Gensler or content-driven technology shops like Moment Factory where they've worked with you guys a lot because I get the sense they know what they're good at, they know how far they can take a big idea, but at some point, they have to hand it off to somebody who's good at the execution. 

Brandon Harp: That's exactly right. We have developed, I think, the kind of the secret sauce for being able to work with companies like Gensler and Moment Factory, because you're right, at the end of the day, they're the big thinkers, right? They're the creatives who ultimately generate the user experience that is on those LED video walls, or on the digital signage or the interactive, or the inside of the projection mapping, and so forth. 

For us, we have to play that supporting role and not every project is exactly the same, but we do understand what their strengths and capabilities are And then we play a very supporting role in that, and we've now made it so that it's a well-oiled machine and as partners, we're very agile and limber enough to be able to say, we need to pivot a little bit, or we need to look at this a little bit differently than the last one. And again, not Two projects are all the same, and so I think it's our ability to work with them and adapt to ever-changing circumstances and projects and environments that allow us to be as effective together as we are. 

Do you try hard to stay in your lane, so to speak, and not get into the creative stuff?

Brandon Harp: I think at the end of the day, you have to have a creative vein in you to work here, right? That's ultimately what we do. We're constantly pushing the envelope of what's possible, but we also have to put the trust in our partners, and I think we do a really good job of that.

We've never been a company that's done content or experience design, and the reason for that is that we have a multitude of partners who do and who do it very well, and so for us, it's more about playing that supporting role with making sure that the technology is something that they can work with when they're creating their content but it's also something that is gonna be easy for the end user to use if that's a requirement, and really just play that supporting role. 

I think that, at the end of the day, what people see in what they view on these large displays, as you talked about, is really the product of the creative minds that go into the content and the storytelling, and we're there to play that supportive role.

I think that's more what I'm asking is: you guys conceivably could have a creative team that would produce the big visuals and so on, but because you work with some great partners, you do your thing and let them do their thing and don't get into a competition.

Brandon Harp: That's right. There's no competition there. Where I think we do is supplement them very well is our executive consulting. So we have Will Bolen, Chris Conti, and Chris Moore, who are executive consultants who work for us, those three individuals are super talented. They've got a great deal of experience, both working hand in hand with clients to help them think through what it is that they're looking to do with their space. But they're also very technical, right? So they come up with sketches and little drawings and things like that can really make them multi-faceted individuals within the company, and that's why they're so effective. 

Oftentimes they get paired with the likes of Moment Factory or Gensler or an architect or an experienced design firm who's looking to help their client uncover what is possible with the technology and then from there, we work it through design consulting and into systems integration, and then all the way through to service. 

Do you have end users who are coming to you and just basically saying, “I want that!” because they've seen something? 

Brandon Harp: Yeah, believe it or not, they do, and I revert back to SUMMIT One Vanderbilt again because it's very unique. It's award-winning and it's just something that everybody, I think is aware of or familiar with now, especially in New York City and they constantly are saying, how do we create that, or even in the airport environments like we just did Terminal A at Newark, I've had multiple airports say to me, “We want that 232-foot long video wall right at departures or behind the check encounter” and our response to that, Dave, is often, do something different. 

It's great to be able to pull inspiration from other projects, but no one wants to see the same project replicated. So how do you pull inspiration from something that's that unique, but then put your own spin on it? And especially in an airport environment, because it is high traffic, it's a public place, millions of people and users go through there. How do you do something that differentiates? And that's what we always try to coach our clients into thinking about, what is it that's gonna make you the next talk of the town? How do you get yourself to that point where people are taking selfies or people are talking about the technology and the experience that they had as they moved through the airport? So those are the kinds of things we keep in mind.

Yeah, there are really two tracks in airports. You've got the big immersive experiential, almost like public art installations, but then you've got a lot of LED and flat panel displays that are just about making the experience of getting your way through the airport to a gate and onto a plane easier.

Brandon Harp: I actually think there are three, Dave. I would add the digital out-of-home experience as well there, because there's the Clear Channels and the Intersections of the world all have these large contracts with these airports and real estate owners who have their screens as well And in a lot of these airport environments, like Newark for example, there are over 80 displays there that is specifically geared towards targeted advertising. 

Then you've got your art piece, which you mentioned, which is more experiential and immersive, and then the third pillar is the typical airport communications, right? Because people have to know where their flight is and how to get from point A to point B, whether it's wayfinding or something of that nature. But there's really a multitude of digital endpoints that go into any airport or terminal experience.

Yeah, I have been blabbering away lately that if you really wanna see the state of the art of digital signage and how that technology is applied in different ways, go look at a renovated or new airport terminal. 

Brandon Harp: It's true, and the government's flushing a lot of money into obviously the infrastructure and redevelopment of these airports.

That trend we feel is gonna continue and it's gonna continue to push the envelope for what is possible. I think at the end of the day, you're finding that these old, outdated airports really just need a refresh, something that's gonna make people wanna fly out of there. Something that's gonna set the tone for the trip that they're about to go on. But also just as silly as it sounds, put a smile on their face. If there's a way to make people feel at home or comfortable or keep them entertained so that they're buying more concessions within an airport environment, that's a huge win for that terminal and that airport.

I just wanna know where my gate is, how to get there, and how long is it gonna take me to get through the various lines.

Brandon Harp: And maybe where the bar is? 

Never. (Laughter)

Is there a trend that you're starting to see emerge?

Brandon Harp: Yeah I think there is. I think, just at the start of 2023, we've seen a real uptick when it comes to experiential and immersive environments in higher education, but also in sports. 

We're finding more and more of these higher education institutions wanna give students access to a big video wall that may have a multitude of interactive touchpoints and ways of being able to use the system itself and interact with it across a multitude of different tracks throughout the school. 

So there's been a lot of that recently and then sports as well. These kinds of one-off experiences within stadiums and training facilities and things like that. There really has been an uptick in those through since the start of the year and we're expecting that trend to continue. 

Is there a big project that you're allowed to talk about that we're gonna see in the next calendar year? 

Brandon Harp: I can't really get into the specifics and the name of it, but the one that comes to mind for me is an immersive museum experience that's gonna be happening downtown in Manhattan, just outside of The Oculus, so a well-traveled area. It's a building that probably anybody who's from New York or has been to that part of the area is gonna be revamped and it's gonna be led by an immersive artist and a team of people who are really invested in not only the video but the audio portion of any given museum experience.

So you can expect upwards of 20+ video walls and large-scale rooms with huge projection-mapped walls, floors, and ceilings. Just a variety of different experiences as you travel through each room. So it's something that's on the horizon, and the scheduled opening date is right around Labor Day of this year. So we'll see if that holds true. But in any case, it is something that's upcoming and we can give you more information on it as it unfolds. 

That’s led by a real estate developer? 

Brandon Harp: It is another real estate developer, so much like we were talking about earlier in the conversation with SL Green, this is another company that's very prominent in New York. This is the first real venture for them into more of the attractions type of space. So they do need a lot of help, but we're there to provide it and the support that they need to be successful, and we really anticipate this being a game changer for them and especially for lower Manhattan.

All right, Brandon, thank you! 

Brandon Harp: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on today.

   

Mark Ossel, Global Signage Alliance

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

When I was doing my initial recon walk through the many halls of ISE a few weeks back, I went by a stand that was highlighting something called the Global Signage Alliance, which was unfamiliar to me and made me curious.

The stand's occupants weren't there, and I was on the go, so I never got a chance to get filled in at the show. But I asked some questions and made some contacts after the fact. I assumed this was a Euro-centric version of the Digital Signage Federation. There have been 2 or 3 of those, I think, and maybe this was another. But it turns out that's not what the GSA, as it is called for short, is all about. It's a formalized user community for Samsung digital signage software and smart display products.

The cynic in me thought "OK, this is kinda like big pharma and energy companies that form institutes." Imagine me doing air quotes around institutes. But that's not what this is, according to GSA chairman Mark Ossel. He says the organization was initiated out of common needs among companies - starting in the Netherlands - who wanted to share information, ideas and business opportunities ... who were all, also, using Samsung's CMS software MagicINFO, or Samsung's smart signage displays. It's the shared purpose, strength in numbers thing at play here.

However, Ossel did say that Samsung does now provide some financial support. This makes sense, at least to me. A user group has the interest and mission to stay closer to a product and its evolution, as opposed to being disparate end-users that end up with new functions or features just getting dropped on them by a technology company. Which happens.

For Samsung, they can be closer to some key customers and support a user community, without perhaps doing as much heavy lifting to build and nurture that community.

Have a listen.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mark, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what the Global Signage Alliance is all about? 

Mark Ossel: Yeah, my pleasure, thanks for asking. The Global Signage Alliance is a user group, meaning a group of companies, and individuals from the digital signage world, coming from the creative side, coming from the services side, or being an end-user company using digital signage. So it's all kinds of companies who basically come together in the organization. It's a nonprofit organization, on a global scale, to exchange information, and share experiences but at the same time where there are opportunities to work together because these days more and more opportunities cross country boundaries as well as of course cross the own area of specialism. So you want to join forces with other companies to basically be able to fulfill the requirements of a proposal, tender, or procedure where you basically need to combine hardware, software, services, implementation, installation, integration, whatever it is, beyond what your own capabilities are.

So it's working together as well and then last, but not least, joining forces for marketing events or all kinds of exposures, which we jointly do to promote digital signage and the capabilities of the group. Moreover, the group as well secures the quality of what is being delivered by, in fact ensuring training to employees, and staff members, raising the bar in the quality of what is being delivered.

In the future, we want to create a quality stamp to let the market and the buyers know that these are companies that have the right skills to deliver a quality solution. 

What's the backstory? Where did this come from? 

Mark Ossel: It started in the Netherlands with a few companies in digital signage who basically understood that it makes sense to work together as well as to exchange experience, and information sharing and those companies had in fact an informal network, then it was growing with other companies across Europe, and then basically, yeah, it came to the point that we said it makes sense if we formalize this as a nonprofit organization with the structure of members, have a dedicated staff, have a formal board and comply with all the necessities you want to have as a decent organization. 

When I was at ISE two-three weeks ago, I was walking through one of the halls, the digital signage hall, and walked by the Global Signage Alliance stand. Unfortunately, someone must have stepped away for a break or something like that, there wasn't anybody there to chat with, so I'm catching up after the fact. 

I assumed when I was walking by that, oh, this is like a European version of the Digital Signage Federation, and there's been a couple of runs at that by different organizations In the past, I'm not quite sure where they're at, but when I'm digging into it a little bit, I actually see this is not necessarily a broad community, it's really focused around Samsung and Magic Info and its platform. Is that accurate? And why is that if so?

Mark Ossel: Well spotted and, no one was there at the time you passed by, but it was interesting because we wanted to raise awareness for the GSA at ISE and ISE basically does recognize that we now start to represent a segment of their target audience and of the market, and they were willing to give us the ability to be there on the stage. 

Yeah linked to Samsung platforms, not only Magic Info but any Samsung platform. The reason is, you need to make a choice as a company on what technologies you use, and approximately half of the screens come from Samsung. We do believe in the architecture and the embedded capabilities in the screens. So it made sense that all those companies joined forces using the Samsung platforms and believed that it was a proper way forward. We also get some support from Samsung and that works both ways. 

As a user group, we are now recognized by Samsung as well as a proper sounding board for them, providing input on the requirements of the market. So they listen to us, we talk directly to their developers and give direction to the developments and the next generation, based on what we feel we need as a market and with new products, of course, we are the Guinea pigs to test it before it gets to market. So it works both ways. It works quite well to have a loyal dedicated highly skilled group of companies working with Samsung on moving digital signage to the next level

Yeah, I could certainly see the business advantage to companies to stay close to Samsung or some other company that's developing a platform like that, because you can either have the new advances, the new thinking dropped in your lap, and hopefully it makes you happier or you can be contributing to what that development roadmap and product roadmap looks like by being tight with them.

Mark Ossel: Exactly, and now we not only get to know it in the beginning, but we basically drive development as well in the direction, and we have the discussions on next-generation technologies because there might be a time delay of one or two years from development to market release. So we are involved in the early stage but as well with any changes to current products and new requirements or taking with new products as well, the migration path from one to another or the coexistence. It all comes to play, and then, yeah, being able to provide feedback from the market, from real people who work with it on a daily basis. That is to the development team of great value as well. 

Did Samsung as a corporate entity approach a loose-knit group in the Netherlands to formalize something? Or was this something that this group formalized and then went to Samsung and said, hey, we wanna do this but in order to make it happen, we need some financial support ‘cause there's just the day-to-day of a nonprofit and you may have a small budget, but you still have costs?

Mark Ossel: Yeah, sure. So it went the first way. So the group of companies coming together created the organization, regardless if Samsung could support it or not. Because we saw the need and the benefit of a group of companies working together, like exchanging information and all the things I said to work together on larger projects and we had seen the benefits already of that. So the drive came from the market and Samsung, they do welcome it. 

What happens if you are a digital signage company that works across a number of platforms and not necessarily just Magic Info and Samsung's embedded smart displays? Is there any value in being a member and can you be a member?

Mark Ossel: Good question. Although many of the members we've got today are dedicated to using the Samsung platforms because that's where their skills and knowledge are based upon. So I don't see many of them using other technologies as well. But if there would be a company that has a mix of technologies, yeah, sure, they're welcome as long as they use the Samsung platforms as well. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense to join. I'm pretty confident that over time, they will use the Samsung platforms more and more because of the added value of focusing on a specific platform and technologies. If you spread your knowledge over a number of platforms and development tracks, your staff becomes too thin, instead of being really deeply focused and trained on a specific technology. I'm in favor of focusing in every respect, that means as well on skills. Knowing a little bit about a lot of platforms does not give you the advantage of knowing some technologies and platforms very deeply.

How many members do you have right now? 

Mark Ossel: We started, in fact, just before the Corona. The timing was unfortunate, so we had to put it on hold. There were no events. It was a bit of a strange world. So we held a ceasefire for some time. And in fact, this year we relaunched the organization. We have a few dozen members right now. It's good to see that even during ISE quite some companies basically were interested, and a number of them signed up on the fly immediately. There are some, of course, who have had to request permission internally or approval from their senior management to join.

But most of them, if not all, see the benefit if we talk and explain what we're doing, and the fees are so low that it’s not a showstopper to become a member. We expect during the course of the year, to bypass a hundred companies as members, and then of course grow beyond. 

When you have somebody walk by the standard at ISE or elsewhere and they say, okay, give me your elevator pitch. Why should I join? What do you tell them? 

Mark Ossel: Ah, good question, and that question of course we answer quite a lot of times. But basically, If you are in digital signage and if you have projects which cross your own area of expertise or cross geography boundaries, you need to act to basically have a partner network of companies you can rely on, data level quality as well. You build a family network. You can work together as well as you can benefit from the experience or the complimentary solutions which the other parts of the family have, then it makes sense for you to join as a member. 

If you basically now look at the memberships they're mainly from Europe, but we are now expanding as well. In fact in Africa, and South Africa, we have members in mid-Asia, and Eastern Europe is growing. We get some interest from the United States, so it's getting more global as well. 

Is Samsung helping raise awareness? 

Mark Ossel: Oh yes, they welcome it in many respects. First of all, this has become a channel to market for them. A way to communicate to the market as well as new products, provide training. We are using doing where Samsung does presentations as well as where if our members do presentations or demonstrate showcases of successes they have implemented, then we see Samsung staff joining those webinars to learn about how their products are being used in the market. 

So in that sense, it works and vice versa. They like the success stories, they like to understand how those products are used and see those showcased, and we basically create a portfolio on our portal as well through online sessions, get the messages across on what can be done or what has been with the technology. 

So in a lot of ways they're encouraging a user, community, user forums, and user discussion without having to directly manage that themselves and not create the illusion, but have that degree of separation so it doesn't feel entirely like, “Here's our Samsung forum. Come here, and oh, by the way, while you're here, we'll sell you our pots and pans.” 

Mark Ossel: Correct. It's to some extent, of course, related to technology and discussions on exchanging information about how they deploy the technology, but it's the other wider discussion on trends as well. Take the trend to the cloud. Not only as storage but also as software in the cloud. The integration of all the social media, the metaverse type of concept, and the impact on digital signage. We spent quite some cycles on security. We did as well security audits on some solutions. Interconnectivity and interactivity as a topic is being discussed, where more and more sensors of any kind, any format are being applied where the interconnection between applications to basically have more data-driven content, use more artificial intelligence in the backend, between the different applications, which through APIs, access data. 

The market demands more flexibility, and more real-time interaction with the end user, and the consumer as well. There are so many trends in the markets that can be discussed and discussed between members. If you look at the younger generation, they want experiences in every respect being in a museum or in a retail store. How can you create that experience? How can you create that interaction with the social media platform? It all comes to play. It's as well, regardless of the lower level technology, these are the topics that are of interest to all the members and yeah, if you talk about it, you hear the different ideas, and it triggers your creativity as well. 

So once in a while, we have those sessions where it's a bit like sitting with friends at the bar and discussing major things and trends, which basically trigger your creativity to gain some new ideas on how to apply that as well. 

For the interest that you've had from North American companies, has there been any kind of pushback or questioning about, “I'm already a member of the Digital Signage Federation, why would I also join this or do I have to choose?” 

Mark Ossel: No, I don't think we get the matter of choosing. In most cases, we talk to them and they see the advantage specifically for American companies that they now get access to a network in Europe, and if they have a customer, like a retail chain, which basically has a global presence, it's of great interest to have access to partners network, friends, and family in Europe, which basically in rollouts or in that kind of thing, it's beneficial to basically expand the network, in fact, beyond the United States.

So if there's a let's say an integrator that is using Magic Info for actually, I'm thinking of a school district in Florida that has an integrator that does a ton of stuff like that if they somehow end up getting questions about, could you take this platform to France or to the Netherlands or Belgium or whatever if they're part of your alliance, conceivably would have business ties or at least exposure to companies over there that could maybe do this in tandem with them or in collaboration with them?

Mark Ossel: Exactly. You got it, and of course, if they have built a great solution, why not promote that in Europe? And it might be something that works, as you said in the case of that school district, maybe that is an application that could be a perfect showcase here, and it gives them access to this market through the network of partners here.

One of the things that were happening at ISE, apart from the black-walled fortress that Samsung weirdly had limited access to their whole stand, was discussion around the evolution of Magic Info and how there was a new platform coming called VXT. Is that something that your group has been aware of and has been talking to Samsung about?

Mark Ossel: Oh yeah, sure. Long before ISE, we started discussions with Samsung on that new platform, VXT. So yeah, as said our alliance is not limited to Magic Info, but all the platforms of Samsung, so this will be part of it as well in the future, and we have discussed functionalities as well as coexistence migration between platforms and so on with Samsung.

So would you say there's been a benefit around that in that you somewhat have insider knowledge of what's coming ahead of perhaps some other companies that are just now starting to get exposure to what this thing is? 

Mark Ossel: Yeah, absolutely. Before ISE, we had conversations about it already and at ISE we even had a specific session with Samsung and some of the members were present on this topic as well. Yeah, we are at the forefront of that development as a group. 

Now, there would be some people who would suggest, it's got some similarities to, let's say, pharmaceutical manufacturers who create institutes and associations and alliances and things like that as a front for their company. It gives them separation by doing it that way. 

Are you getting those kinds of questions or even criticisms at all, like this is just a Samsung thing and they've called it an alliance, but it's not really a nonprofit, and so on? 

Mark Ossel: No, in fact, I don't get it.

It is truly a non-profit organization and independent. It's our own choice to work closely with Samsung, and we see it as mutually beneficial. We get early insight, we have the ability to give feedback and change direction where we feel it would be required. Samsung sees the advantage of having a loyal group that provides professionals with proper technical knowledge to provide valuable feedback. 

It's a win-win. There is no dependency either way. It is beneficial for both sides. 

And what's your background on this? How did you get involved in the work that you do in digital signage, what is that? 

Mark Ossel: I started a long time back, with a video company that goes back to the early 80s.I have been in the IT industry as well since the early 80s. So the combination of audio, video, and digit digitization has been my path. Been on the board of a signage company for 30 years. 

Oh wow. Which one was that? 

Mark Ossel: It’s DVC, a Dutch company, pretty significant. One in digital signage and in traditional signage. But yeah, I have some other activities well in the energy sector, and it's funny to see that all those things now perfectly come together. Energy and sustainability have become even big things in digital signage. It's one of the major topics and concerns of many customers, ranging from, how much energy a screen use? Or how can I manage the energy consumption or sustain it? 

In a broader sense basically reflects everything from packaging to your total CO2 footprint which now becomes a topic in many discussions as well. So that's one we see as well in the development conversations of hardware and what you can drive and manage through software in this sense on this hot topic.

Yeah, that's such an interesting area now that people in North America, like me, have looked at Europe and thought, okay that's a different circumstance. Few people in North America seem to be asking questions about energy consumption for computing devices and displays and so on, and then Ukraine happened and everything else has happened around it and now you're even hearing people in the United States and Canada asking the questions around, how much power is this consuming and how do we limit that? 

Mark Ossel: Exactly. It's simple things like, what's your standby power? How can you control the energy? How can you measure it? And I'm assuming it goes a step further. Even if you look at content, some content can be created to use less power than others. 

You use all white it's blinding and it's really sucking it up. If you use black backgrounds, it's not using power.

Mark Ossel: Yeah. Those simple things start to make a difference. But then as well, if there's nobody walking nearby can you dim it, can you have the sensors checking and dims if there's nobody it's the area, why would you have streetlights on if there's nobody in that area at all, huh? And so more sophisticated solutions to address this topic are hot right now as well. 

So if people want to find out more about the Global Signage Alliance, where do they go? What do they need to do? 

Mark Ossel: First of all, look at the website, gs-alliance.org.

That's where they basically have the initial information and the contact details to our staff who basically then provide them with anything they want and then we'll take it from there and welcome them as a member. 

And it's just one tier of memberships, right?

Mark Ossel: Yeah, it’s simple. 

EUR 250 and you're in, as long as you qualify, right?

Mark Ossel: Exactly EUR 250, then you're in and you start making money if you really use take advantage and use the network. 

Thank you very much for spending some time with me.

Mark Ossel: Thanks, Dave, for asking the right questions and giving the opportunity to get the GSA across to your audience as well Thanks for that opportunity, and continue with your great programs.

Ted Romanowitz, Futuresource Consulting

Ted Romanowitz has been around the commercial display and tech sectors for a whole bunch of years, and for the last two or so, has been an industry analyst for the research firm Futuresource Consulting.

Futuresource is in the UK, but Ted works out of the Portland, Oregon area - spending his time looking at professional display technologies, ranging from projectors to mini and microLED video wall products.

He was at CES and he'll be at ISE this week, meeting with manufacturers and walking the halls, seeing what's new and interesting.

We had a good chat about where the different display technologies are at, and how miniLED is seeing a lot of traction for fine pitch LED displays. We talk projection and we spend quite a bit of time discussing the state and vast potential for microLED.

One thing I particularly liked was his qualifier about "true" microLED, as all kinds of manufacturers market their premium products as microLED, when they're really miniLED.

Ted, thank you for joining me. Can you explain what you do for Futuresource and what Futuresource is all about? 

Ted Romanowitz: Oh, I'd love to do that. I'm a principal analyst at FutureSource Consulting in our business-to-business (b2b) practice. I lead the entire professional display Segment. So we cover everything Projection, LCD panels, tiled LCD, and interactive displays, as well as my forte, as you may know, is LED. I have more than 10 years of industry experience in LED with Planar, Leyard and Christie Digital. It's wonderful. There's a lot going on in pro displays right now. 

So what would you be doing primarily? Are you producing research reports? Are you talking to companies? You know, what's your day-to-day?

Ted Romanowitz: We do three really big things. One, we do quarterly trackers for all these technologies. So you can look at the data by company, by specification, by country, and comparatively by brand. We also do annual reports. We've just published a video wall report as well as a strategic market outlook. We've got a big digital signage report coming in the springtime. We're looking forward to publishing that, as well as a refresh of our true micro-LED report coming in the first half of the year.

So we do a lot of annual reports, and then the third bit is custom research. So if there are any companies out there that have a specific business need for the information, they can reach out to me and we'd love to talk to them about a one-off type of project to get the analytics that they need to make an informed business. 

How hard is it to get the data from all the different display manufacturers and to talk about their sales and their market size? 

Ted Romanowitz: It is definitely a challenge and I think, especially during the Covid timeframe, to keep relationships established has been challenging. We just came back from a major trip to the Asia Pacific in November, so we were literally the first company meeting these large pro AV vendors in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. We spent two weeks over there face-to-face and you just can't say enough about building face-to-face relationships and having those conversations and that's why we're so much looking forward to ISE this year, getting everybody back together. 

So when you say you are the first company, what do you mean by that? 

Ted Romanowitz: A lot of these vendors haven't had research companies or other people come and visit them face-to-face. So they were really glad, almost ecstatic to have us show up at their doorstep for a meeting. It was wonderful to rebuild a lot of relationships. It's so much different to do it face-to-face. It's more meaningful.

As opposed to at a table in a trade show booth?

Ted Romanowitz: That's also face-to-face, so I think those are good as well. 

It's hard to get good data, setting yourself aside, there are one or two other companies that are focused on this, but there's this avalanche or a steady torrent of crap coming out of research factories from India. Do you have to fight against that? 

Ted Romanowitz: I think what Futuresource is really good at is having these long-term relationships. We've been doing this for two decades. We have relationships with the brands. We're getting data, hard data. We're having not only quantitative discussions, but we're having qualitative trends impacting the industry, what's coming next, and those sorts of things, so it's much more robust practice that we do, and that's why people are coming to us wanting our research. 

And part of your routine as well is going to the big trade shows, I believe you're just at CES and you're planning to go to ISE as well?

Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely. It was my 14th trip to CES in my career, and it's like a little bit of a family reunion for me actually. But it was amazing to see the energy and people actually queuing up to be able to get into some of the booths there, the larger booths because they were controlling the traffic for Covid and everything. But the energy was there, a lot of great new technologies. It was quite exciting, and as a little preview, I know we're gonna talk about micro LEDs at some point, but I was able to see the industry's first true micro-LED displays, so that was worth the trip, just that one thing. 

Yeah, I get asked every year, am I going to CES? And I say, I've done it, don't want to do it again, too many people line up for everything. But the biggest thing is it's consumer electronics and it's pushing away to some degree it seems at least from displays into gadgets and cars and everything else, so I'm curious if you said that one thing alone was worth the trip, but for somebody who is maybe not as well versed as you, is it worth going to CES if you're in the digital signage industry? 

Ted Romanowitz: There were digital sign signs everywhere, even in some of the smaller halls like North and West, there were LED signs in almost every single booth promoting different technologies and companies, brands. It was amazing. But yeah, I was also amazed at how some of the big consumer brands were starting to bring in LED technology in particular, and showing the consumer applications of that and it's still not gonna be sold through a CEDIA channel, it's going to be sold through pro AV consultants. So it's our heart and soul still for some years before it becomes priced for the mass markets if you will.

Do you get cues from CES about, a product that comes out for TVs whether it be OLED or QLED whatever the case may be, are those cues to what's gonna happen on the pro side or does it not necessarily track that way?

Ted Romanowitz: There's not one way or the other, but I definitely think, specifically to LED technology, that is primarily a pro-AV thing and it is starting to creep into CES and that's exactly why I was at the show. 

Venetian had three floors of smaller companies, and it's amazing how much of our ecosystem is starting to show up there. Different companies looking for ODM and OEM arrangements were in the Venetian, showing prototypes and whatnot of not only LED but also see-through LED and transparent OLED. 

I was curious about one of the announcements at CES where LG unveiled an OLED TV that was wirelessly powered. Now there was a box that you still had to plug in, but between the box and the display panel itself, there was no wire. It was being transmitted by IR or something or other, I forgot. Is that something that you see as coming or is it just an outlier that nobody would actually use?

Ted Romanowitz: LG had a wireless OLED display. But my understanding is that it was wireless connectivity on the data side and not necessarily on the power side. But that's certainly something I think it'll be interesting to see if that shows up at ISE, and definitely, a trend that we should all watch, especially in historic buildings across the east coast of America plus Europe, where you have a historical building and you wanna hang a display in this space, but you don't have power to it, and you don't want a god awful power cord, video signal cord running down the beautiful brickwork or whatnot. There could be some real applications for it. 

Yeah. I know a company in Israel. I did a podcast with them and they now have wireless power technology and they insisted it’s safe and everything else, and you don't get fried if you walk in front of it, or anything.

Ted Romanowitz: Interesting. I'm not aware of that. I'll have to get the information from you so we can have a good look. 

So what display segments are growing right now? 

Ted Romanowitz: Overall, the pro display is growing over the next five years at about an 8% compound annual growth rate, which is healthy. That's really being driven primarily by direct view LED, which is, over 20% year-over-year growth. So that's really where the growth is. LCD is still showing basically flat growth over the next five years. It's very slow growth, but yet by 2026, it's still 50% of the pro displays marketplace, and we won't see that shift between LED and LCD until we have some of these advanced technologies like mini LED, as defined by flip chip COB, which I think we're gonna see some really interesting demos at ISE on this technology finally.

There have been technical and manufacturing issues that have held it back from mass production. So I think 2023 will be the year, we're predicting that 2023 will be the year when companies will come into mass production and resolve these manufacturing and technical issues. So that's where you get pixel pitches under 0.7, 0.6, perhaps even 0.5 with flip chip COB that will start to challenge LCD panels, which are really that close-up viewing experience really predominant. 

Yeah, I remember Leyard’s CTO or he some kind of title like that, he was saying once you get to about 0.7, you're very close to the pixel pitch that you would have on an LCD. 

Ted Romanowitz: That is correct. It's around 0.5-millimeter pixel pitch on an LCD screen. So yeah, LED is getting there, and then the really last bit is, once you have that close-up viewing experience, you can put it into, let's say small to medium room sized meeting rooms as well as digital signage, eye level, close up wayfinding, informational displays, those kinds of things. It gets really interesting for LED, but the price differential right now is still fairly substantial.

What is it now? I understand there are a whole bunch of variables.

Ted Romanowitz: That's a loaded question. I wish I could just say, oh, it's X percent but it depends. I hate that answer, but it's the truth. We're seeing these advanced technologies in LED come in the mass volume where you get economies of scale, you're gonna see that differential shrink. So that's first with this flip chip CEOB, mini LED and that gets you to around, 0.5-0.6 millimeter, certainly 0.7 so you're on the verge of competing with LCD panels and then with what we're calling true micro LED technology, that is sub-100-micron chiplets mass transferred onto a TFT backplane with an active driver technology.

So that is what one of the brands was showing at CES Samsung. They had from 55-inch to about 140-inch displays. They weren't able to give me pricing on that officially, but we know they estimated it last year at about $150,000 for a 4K display over 100 inches. And that's probably not gonna go into your house or mine, although we aspire to that. But over the years as they come into mass production in the next five to seven years, it's going to drop from $150,000 down to around $4,000 is what we're estimating and volume production, once you get under, let's say 40,000 or 30,000, it'll start showing up in the CEDIA channels. So it'll start shifting from pro AV consultants to the CEDIA channel but they'll need lots of help to figure out how to do it, and then once it gets into the $4,000 to $5,000 range, it's definitely more of a broad consumer electronic, still very expensive for you and I, a lot of people will really want to jump on this technology. It looks really beautiful.

The stuff that Samsung was showing at CES was that when you frame it as true micro LED, as the Samsung stuff part of the wall series and they're now doing genuine micro LED with that? 

Ted Romanowitz: That's a great question, but they had the wall separately. These were consumer television sets that are true micro0LED, but they weren't ready yet to do an announcement in the pro AV space but one could reasonably assume that might be coming, that they'll offer this true micro-LED display, and whether they brand it ‘The wall’ or whatever else they're gonna call it, that's up in the air. 

But it looks fantastic. It'll start to impede LCD panels in a significant way, and then shift the industry towards that where right now, LED is already in video walls the predominant technology that has the highest value. Within five years, it'll be three times the value of a tiled LCD. So LED  is taking over the video wall. We see in the broader pro AV space, not in the next five years, but certainly, within the next 10 years, LED will be the number one display technology. 

Yeah, I think there's always going to be a demand for LCD for some kind of meat and potatoes digital signage, like menu boards and ticketing information, all that sort of stuff, but you get into any kind of specialty application or something where shape needs to be flexible, they're gonna go to mini or micro-LED once the price is there.  

Ted Romanowitz: Yes, true micro-LED eventually will also challenge LCD panels in that more, I guess what you would call hang and bang, on the commodity side.

I believe that it'll bring LCD prices down. There'll always be a place for LCD technology but LED will start to take over where image quality, where impact is really important and there's just a smaller uplift in pricing for that better experience where people and customers want that big impact, it's going to be LED. 

I was at Touch Taiwan about four years ago, pre-Covid, and I left that trade show with a distinct impression from manufacturers that they saw mini-LED as kind of an interim technology, and it was mostly gonna be used for LCD backlighting like addressable zones, local dimming that, all that stuff. But it seems like mini-LED is getting a lot of take-up as a direct-view LED product as well. 

Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely, and LG has a version of their consumer LED product showcased at CES. It was about a 150-inch display and had some really good features. I think it was 1.2 millimeters with beautiful image quality but it's $300,000. It's still the consumer market that is very expensive for them to get into. But, then again, personally, as a product manager for LED, I've worked in multiple companies where we have done high-end homes with LEDand, putting up a $750,000 wall in a Bel Air home wasn't a problem They have the budget. That's again, not my house as much as I would like that. 

Yeah, as much as I'd like to be a midfielder for Manchester United, I'm too small and way too old, I don't think I'm gonna have that kind of salary.  

Ted Romanowitz: I think you and me both, but we can still hope, can't we? It's not too late. 

Oh, I think it is for me at least.

Ted Romanowitz: I think another important thing is with projection, you were talking about where the pro AV industry is going and all of that, projection both front and rear are in relatively steep decline, and some people would say, oh my gosh, that's super scary, there are so many projection companies out there, and we see so many demos at ISE and at CES, there are a lot of consumer protection companies displaying products. Even though projection is in decline, double-digit decline over the next five years, in the end, it's still a $4 to $5 billion market, it's massive, and so it's not like projection is gonna go away, it's just getting a little bit smaller. 

So I think there's some hope there and we're seeing high brightness being a big thing over the last year. Already we've heard whispers from several of the projection brands that they're gonna be unveiling new high-brightness projectors. A lot of demos on projection mapping, blending, warping, and those sorts of things to support immersive, really engaging interactive displays. 

Yeah, in the right physical environment and lighting conditions and everything else, projection is awesome because it's got that ability to surprise you. It just shows up and forms around things in a way you can't do with more conventional displays.

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, and if you need to have a large display of information or whatnot, there's no more cost-effective way to do that, to show a big image, let's say in a theater or something other than projection, right? LED is just far too expensive to do that, although some brands are in customer-facing theaters. Some very large technology brands are putting in LED displays to impact their ecosystem, and their end customers in a very impactful way, but still, projection is wonderful. It has legs to continue for decades but LED is the up-and-coming thing. 

Why is projection getting better, like they're able to do brighter, is it because of laser, or are there other factors?

Ted Romanowitz:  Yeah, it's the laser technology that they're implementing. I think smaller form factors, are quieter, as well as the prices are coming down as well. Those are all factors that are gonna give it legs for quite some time. One other thing too, I think there are so many immersive exhibits that are happening now, right?

In Portland, Oregon, we get one every month or two where they're using projection and or a blend of projection in LED to provide a really amazing sensory exhibit. And when our team was in Japan, we went and saw the Team Labs exhibit there and it was wonderful that you actually took your shoes off, and put them in a locker. You roll up your pant legs and you're about knee-deep in warm water and, it was really cool, the projection map Koi onto the water that you're walking through, and the fish react to you. So you can reach out or, as you approach one of the fish, it'll look over at you and then scurry off as if it was a real fish. It was just an amazing experience to go do that. 

I'm curious as well about OLED and light field displays and I recognize that light field displays are still probably a few years off, but are you seeing advances in that? 

Ted Romanowitz: That's one of the things that we're going to be doing some further research on at ISE and it'll be interesting to see how that trend emerges, and OLED is really interesting. On the transparent side, a lot of companies have been working on that to help with merchandising or promoting products, putting them in an OLED box and putting marketing messages around the product even while you're able to reach in and touch the product. 

Those are some super creative things, but at the LG booth at CES and a couple of others, they're showing transparent OLED and transparent LED applications where you can get a 10-foot high glass wall and cover it with an image. It's just cool. It's beautiful. It'll be interesting to see how corporations and other organizations invest in that, and what the adoption rate will be, and that's definitely an area where we're going to be researching further. 

Yeah, the LED on film and LED embedded in glass particularly when micro-LED matures, that seems exciting as hell in terms of the amount of brightness you can get and the fact that you can just make it part of the building material.

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, yes, and you look at all these big cities. I don't know when you were in China last, but you go to Hong Kong and you're sitting on the Calhoun side at night and the choreographer does some choreography with music and a light show of all the major tall office buildings on Central. It's just amazing. And Shenzhen, Shanghai, a lot of cities in China are doing these light shows and lighting up all the buildings and in America, we're starting to see that as well. Obviously, Las Vegas is a great example, but I think it'll be interesting to see how that evolves, not only in America but also in Europe with all of the historical buildings, what the regulations will be and you know how they'll allow technology to be used architecturally and artistically on some of these historic buildings, or if we'll just keep doing projection onto them.

Which you can do without affecting the building, which I'm sure makes the people who protect buildings happy. 

Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely. 

You're going to ISE, I assume. For somebody who's going and they're particularly interested in seeing what's new and what's emerging and what's important to know on the display side of things, what would you recommend? What should they be looking for?

Ted Romanowitz: I definitely think the big trends will be the flip chip COB, and mini-LED. I don't know if a true micro-LED display will be shown, but they're certainly, if not from one of the big brands, I would expect some of the manufacturers like BOE or Seoul Semi might be showing some things in their booth, so that's one thing to look for. I think projection is gonna be sexy. People are gonna be doing projection mapping and blending and warping and all of that. 8K displays, I think you'll see more and more of those out there. Yeah, those are some of the big things. There's the digital signage section as well. We're gonna be spending a lot of time out there. 

As I mentioned, we are doing a digital signage report in the next few months. So we will be looking at that as well. 

Would that be a display report or software? 

Ted Romanowitz: It'll be both. It'll be the whole ecosystem. 

This is great because it's so hard to get any credible research on the software side of this business. 

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, and It'll be hardware and not only just the displays itself but the media servers, players, the content in the cloud. All of the above. It's gonna be a really exciting report. We're very much looking forward to that one. 

Good. All right. Ted, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

Ted Romanowitz: Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you in Barcelona. 

Absolutely. Tapas!

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly. See you there!

Darren Wercinski & Kiersten Gibson, Reach Media Network

Reach Media Network has been around the digital signage ecosystem since 2005, and like many of the companies in this sector, its focus and strategy has evolved a lot based on customer needs and marketplace conditions.

The Minneapolis-area company got its start as a place-based media network, putting screens in venues on its own dollar, and making that investment back through ad sales. As pretty much anyone who's done a Digital Out Of Home network will confirm, ad sales is hard work, no matter the environment and audience.

Reach was generating real money from ad sales, but with a business focused first on screens in community ice hockey rinks, the network's growth potential was finite.

For the last several years Reach has been going to market instead as an end-to-end digital signage solutions provider, building up a pile of clients in sectors like corporate and health care ... and realizing reliable, recurring revenues from SaaS licenses.

Reach is seeing a lot of success, despite operating pretty quietly, by servicing the hell out of its customer base, and putting a lot of investment into software integrations.

I spoke with CEO Darren Wercinski and Kiersten Gibson, the company's EVP for Sales and Marketing.

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TRANSCRIPT

Darren and Kiersten, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the summary that you would rattle off when someone asked you what your company's all about? 

Darren Wercinski: Sure. Thank you for having us on the podcast today. We're excited to finally get to talk to you and share a little bit more about Reach. We actually started in 2005 and I feel really old as I tell stories today, thinking about sort of the company in general, but right now we have over 6,000 clients, and we manage around 30,000 screens. We really run the gamut, from large Fortune 500 clients, we do signage for Hormel, Caterpillar, and a lot of the big companies that you might be familiar with on a lot of college campuses so Northwestern, UCLA, and USC are all of our partners, and then likewise, I guess we've expanded a lot in the healthcare and Mass General and just a lot of industries and verticals. 

If you've been in the industry as long as we have, you definitely get customers for every vertical, but the company has about 50 team members right now, we actually have 10 open positions. So we're really growing and we tell this to a lot of our clients that we feel like we're in a sweet spot of just big enough to provide a robust digital signage solution with a budget that we can afford to invest in things, but at the same time, kinda that small focus on customer service and support.

Quite honestly, we've been in the industry so long, we've seen lots of things change. Dave, especially you’d know companies have come and gone. Business models have changed. Our own business model has changed and evolved. There's been consolidation in the industry, but as a whole, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a really great ride. 

So where do you start and stop in terms of your services? You've got a software platform. Do you do managed services, aftercare, or that sort of thing as well? 

Darren Wercinski: We would consider ourselves a full-service solution and what I mean by that is there are some signage companies or CMSs, and that's really what we are, that really focus on just downloading the software and you're good to go and go off and running. 

Ours is a little bit different because we do provide the end-to-end solution. So our clients may say, Hey, we want screens, players, the signage, we'll sell them all that and then in addition, we'll actually use install cords to get them up and running and trained. We'll use our own creative team to build all their layouts and assets and really get them up and running from that perspective, along with technical support that's unlimited and account managers help them along the way. That's the way we look at the business of providing that end-to-end solution, which is a little bit different than other people as well.

Is that an ask that you're seeing quite a bit in the marketplace? 

I get a sense and have for a few years now, that large companies are interested in digital science. They see the benefits and everything else, but they don't wanna fully manage it and they would really prefer to have an outsourced solution that says, “This is what we want, you guys to do it”?

Darren Wercinski: I wouldn't say we're an outsource solution. I think that our tool is so easy to use in terms of our content management platform. We try to make it so that clients can easily go in there and update and publish their content. Really, at the end of the day, that's all they really wanna do. So that's why we build the layouts for them, all the integrations, everything, and they can come in and easily manage the content. 

Kiersten, what are your thoughts on that? You deal most with the clients. 

Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I would say, it boils down to the service and what the client’s looking for. As Darren said, we'll be as hands-on or hands-off as needed in terms of that implementation, getting them up and running, building out everything for them. 

In terms of the ongoing managed services, we're not necessarily creating the day-to-day content for them, but we are providing them with the support that they need. So for example, six months down the road, they might have a rebrand, or they might have a whole new group of users, or maybe their content is going stale and they want to get some automated applications into the signage, just so then maybe there's safety messaging or health tips or something like that that we can really assist with and provide that automated content.

So I would say it just runs the gamut of what the client's use case is and who they have managing it. I think that's one of the things we've learned, especially with these larger projects. If they don't have that from the beginning, it might be something that they implement in six months and that's where we come in. That's where that support continues to be unlimited and ongoing, and we provide that whole service solution. 

Darren Wercinski: I would say that reaches a very hands-on customer focused, client-focused company. We are here to help them. We're here to be flexible with their needs and I think that's really been part of our secret sauce in terms of adding a lot of clients across many industries.

Kiersten Gibson: Just the one thing to add to that, with really the shift from our business model, we are SaaS-based and that service at the end is really the thing that we focus on. As Darren said, it's the software, but it's also the service and we provide, both end-to-end solutions that way.

Yeah, I was gonna say that I've certainly run into companies through the years, software companies that are very good at sales, but it falls apart in aftercare. They close the deal and they're onto the next one, and they're not really paying much attention to their clients and as a result, you see a lot of attrition, a lot of churn, where end users have a contract with one company for three years, and as soon as that contract is lapsing, they're moving to somebody else because they're not seeing the kind of service they want.

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, I mean we love the fact that these companies keep getting bought up by private equity firms and the first thing they cut out is their support. Even though I know you got bought out by a private equity firm, our secret.

I'm on our support team, so… 

Darren Wercinski: But I mean that for us is good news because it's just that model, which is when consolidation happens, usually support is one of the things to go, and that's where we can differentiate ourselves against bigger competitors and say, listen, they might do some things. They might be bigger, but we're certainly gonna be better on the support side, and we've seen a lot of new customers come over from companies that have and industries that have been left out there and we've swooped in and one I can think of, we just took over Texas A&M from a competitor that was for a number of years and now it's a network of over 400 licenses and they seem really happy with the service and excited to keep expanding. 

I'm curious about that one in particular. We don't have to dig into it very much and cause any trouble, but I'm curious when they're making a switch, it's more about service and that sort of thing, as opposed to price, which used to be, and I guess still in the case in some situations where the reason why people switch is that they just wanna trim their budget.

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and I definitely think that and I'll just say the names, I don't care, it doesn't matter. When we go do RFPs against Four Winds or AppSpace or even Spectrio to some degree, it does come down to price and we try to add both the value component and our software, the service component and the price component, we're certainly gonna be under those three in particular, and we try to bring that value equation and lots of references from our other partners who may have used those guys or others in the past, who say, Reach is a great option and they're a little bit less expensive and they frankly do a better job. 

I've been aware of Reach for many years now. It's been a little bit confusing because there's a whole bunch of companies out there that use the term ‘reach’ if they're associated with media in some way and of course, there’s RMG Networks, which confuses things for me. 

Darren Wercinski: We actually, at one time, this is very long ago, I think his name was Gary McGuire, correct me if I'm wrong, and so that's how long we've been around. And so we were actually working with Lifetime Fitness and Lifetime Fitness was both working with our Reach and Reach Media Network and RMG and we had even a legal at Lifetime Fitnesses send us each individual contract for the wrong company, so that's how confusing it was and stuff. So we've just been around a long time in space, but really in our roots and I think that's maybe where some people don't know as much about Reach or just our story. 

So we actually started out with Mark Klein, my business partner, and co-founder, this was years and years ago, so I think in 2005, we were thinking about a business model that could really attract in sort of the youth sports space and so I was working at Best Buy Corporate at the time in the strategy group, the one thing I realized was going to be a real challenge for Best Buy was the price of Plasma screens, if you can think that far back were gonna collapse. They knew this capacity was coming on in China. We knew the cost of screens was going down and so a $3,000 screen for 50-inch plasma was gonna go to $250 in two years or whatever the number was. 

I was thinking about that space. Mark really liked to use Sports space and we decided to actually go with an ad-based model where we would give, in this case, ice arenas, which are big in Minnesota, by the way, in Canada, as you know. We would provide them with the software and the technology that could show their locker rooms, and that was really their pain point because they used to have those white easel boards out that would show you like they'd write on them the locker room assignments. So we actually started and integrated with some software companies that would show the locker room assignments and we'd go out and sell basically local ads to really fund it and so that's how the company grew and grew.

Outside of Minnesota and Canada and a little bit on the East coast ice arenas just aren't really that big of a deal, and that's how we started expanding into other verticals, really more fitness-centric, so YMCAs, community centers et cetera, and we grew this ad-based market, and if you know anything about ads, and I think you do, especially in the digital signage, ads are certainly not bought, they're sold and it is a very grinding business. You're cold calling, you're relying on reps to really mow some commission base to go out and sell every year. There's not a huge high renewal rate on ads renewing every year. So that means you're going back into these same locations and trying to resell ads, and I'd say Reach has been a startup twice. So we actually built that business model just through ads and I'll say we think we had about a network of about 500 screens at the time.

We built it to about a 5 million local ad business, which in that space is pretty amazing. So I'm always indebted to our ad team who helped build that out. But really at that time, I could see the writing on the wall that, in terms of trying to scale that business, which is next to impossible and actually there were some other companies doing that as well, and about that time, we either got to the point that our good locations or ad locations, they didn't want ads, they just wanted to use our software, and they said, “Hey, we really love your software. We don't want the ads on the screen. Can we just pay you a fee?”

And I started thinking, yeah, that sounds great because it's that recurring fee, and at other times, we had ad locations that were terrible and in a bad part of town, or we couldn't sell ads, so we went to them and said, listen, we're gonna close this thing down unless you want to pay a fee and they said, sure, we'd love to, and so we slowly started transitioning our business model and we started getting into more colleges and just using our entire application to solve many of the use cases that we still have today. 

Do you do any digital out-of-home stuff now?  

Darren Wercinski: We do a little bit just because I'm so damn loyal to all those reps who've helped build the company. So we do still have a little bit of that business, but primarily it's almost everything is geared toward software as a service.

At one time, I'll say eight years ago for the platform we had about 20 reps, one IT guy, maybe one other support guy, and the rest were just grinding through ads, and so now we have almost 20 developers and IT people, we have a variety of different teams.

Kiersten, you could probably tell me more about how the company's changed over those years. 

Kiersten Gibson: Starting out with what Beer Pong lunches on Wednesdays with a group of 10 of us?

Darren Wercinski: Those were the good days. Those were the fun days, Dave, where you could just relax at lunch and play some Beer Pong and sometimes the problem was a Beer Pong extended from lunch into the afternoon, into the evening.

Kiersten Gibson: There's a lot more structure. 

Darren Wercinski: No, there are maybe some good stories.

Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I was gonna say, definitely 10 years ago, that's when I started with the company, I sat next to our one developer. There was one support guy who also installed too. So we still installed the screens for these ad-based facilities, but, the one thing I would say, as Darren said, is we have 20 developers now from the one when I started, but then also just our customer success teams. We always knew that support obviously was a big component. We've always had at least one support person when the company started. But now we have just different customer success teams that we continue to build on.

As Darren said, our install coordinators are more or fewer project managers for that implementation. We have an account management team, we have a support team, we have a design team. We're building our marketing. So one of the things that are really exciting, especially what I've been involved in, is not only expanding our clients but building our partnerships, not only with our hardware providers but some of our integrator partners. Like Darren was mentioning with the locker room schedules and everything, just really expanding on that because at the end of the day, building their confidence with us is only gonna help build our client portfolio as well.

I found it interesting when you were talking about the locker room schedules, Darren. 

Going back to the mid-2000s doing data integration like that, and that's fundamentally what it was, was pretty rare. You would see it in airports on departure screens and so on. But that was pretty much it. So you were doing what I call boring signage, but boring being a good term, going way, way back. Is that still a substantial amount of what you do?

Darren Wercinski: The integrations are the key to our entire business, and that's how we also differentiate ourselves in terms of our integration. So it's a skillset and a capability that we built early on, and you're right, you have to think of a way that makes the signage actually useful to your end users and creates value to not only the people seeing your screens, but into the locations, and so they have something that people actually wanna see, and so in our case, our first hook was really around pulling and scheduling information, and we've expanded that into so many different areas. So our capabilities around the integrations are really key.

And I know Dave, I've seen in some of your other podcasts, or you even mentioned a little bit about the way you think that some CMSs are too generic in nature and that they should be industry-focused, and I agree with you in one respect, but I think on the other, you have to have a capability that's really meaningful to clients over time, that actually does give you some stickiness and the other thing I was thinking about and why you don't know as much about Reach is I think we took a little bit different path in terms of our own marketing and how we grew a lot of our clients, whereas some other CMSs may have just focused on going to the sort of the industry trade shows, which we went to as well, we would go heavy into a vertical trade show. 

So we would find a vertical we like, maybe it's churches or car washes, and we'd start hitting all these industry-specific shows. So we would be the only digital signage company that would be setting up a booth at these kinds of random verticals and it started to really grow because we'd be the only ones there, and you'd start to take on 10, 20, 40, 50 customers. So you develop some capabilities within these industries. So you'd become the car wash guy or you become the church guy, or you become this variety of verticals, and I think that really helped in our growth.

Now that we've expanded with so many clients, we don't do quite as much of that anymore, but it's really the way in which we navigated our client growth and our go-to-market strategy. 

Yeah, and I think that's really smart. I've written about that a few times, about companies that don't put all of their marketing eggs in the Infocom or the DSE basket. They show up at these weird little shows like airport technology or airport security conference. Yeah, and like you say, you're the one pretty girl at the dance. 

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, it's made a huge difference in terms of that, and I think that kinda gets back to our support too. When you start to build these relationships and people refer you and you grow your market space there. 

You mentioned, you're doing more work in hospitals and corporate, is that because you've focused on it, or is it just an area that seems to be growing?

Darren Wercinski: Kiersten is our EVP of Sales and Marketing, and she is the one that's really talking to the customers and has the most insight. I'm just the one that watches the sales come in, and smiles at the end of the month, hopefully. 

And yells at people if they don't come in!

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, that's right. I do that. Thank you, Dave. I like that. 

Kiersten Gibson: I would say in terms of hospitals and our corporate clients, it wasn't like we were going after that industry by any means. I always think of it as a use case. We could provide the same exact use case for a corporate company that we provide for a hospital, that we provide for education, and my examples always go back to say break rooms. So employee communications, it really doesn't matter which vertical you're in, that use case is pertinent to any type of industry. 

I think with Covid, that's where we saw the biggest uptick in corporate and healthcare for us, Mass General was one of the biggest ones that came to us pre-Covid and really working with their Head of IT to build the network within Partners Healthcare, which that's what Mass Journal is a part of. So that's just one example. But in terms of our corporate and employee communications, where we really started seeing it taking off again, going back to those integrations, we really focused on the integrations that were most common amongst our entire client portfolio. So one example is Power BI. We were one of the first CMSs to build a Power BI app that was easily authenticated by pulling their reports and dashboards, we built a OneDrive integration. We built Zoom, WebEx, and Teams integration. So all these are small integrations that they don't have to pay extra for, they can easily do it themselves. That is something, I think that's where we saw our corporate footprint really start to grow.

Darren Wercinski: The other thing that's funny about that, because I was on some of those calls, and I was thinking about the Power BI one in particular with the client and they're still our client, they've been with us for five or six years and they've grown quite a bit.

We were on the call, and they said, can you do this? And I'm eyeing my Head of IT. His name is Nate Davis. He's outstanding, our chief technology officer, and Nate's always great cuz he says there is definitely a way we can build this, how much it's gonna cost and how much time it's gonna take might be a different thing. But we ended up building this and I committed to the customer at the time, we're gonna get this Power BI app built and we built it in, I'll say four weeks or whatever. But it's a great application and that's kind of the way in which we go to market in terms of if our clients are asking for something and we think we can build it for them and then, and obviously leverage it to other clients as well, that is certainly something we will do to help win some deals and show that flexibility and our willingness to partner with our clients over time.

Is that why you have 20 developers? Because it seems like a lot of people for a relatively small company to be focused on development, but there's a lot of work to do those integrations, right? 

Darren Wercinski: There is, but that is twofold. One, we have a goal of doubling our revenue in the next two, basically two years. So we feel like we're in a really good spot. We're really aggressive now in hiring people and coming out of Covid and realizing the success that we've had and we'll continue to have. We really wanna hit the accelerator. So I've been spending a ton of money on the team. We're doing a giant CMS rewrite that we're spending almost $2 million on and we're all in to try and take the company to the next level, and I don't even mind telling people this, because it's just part of our vision, a year ago we were at $5 million in recurring revenue and. We had a great year last year and we expect to be at $10 million by the end of 2024. So those are some big aspirational jumps, but that's what we're going for.. 

And how is this being funded? Is it just out of your own revenues, or are you docked? 

Darren Wercinski: I guess I had some original investors. Thank you, mom, my uncle, and my cousins, but it's all been I just raised a little bit of seed money when I first started, this is 2005. We haven't raised money in, I don't know, 10 years, and I bought out a lot of the investors along the way. They literally put in $10,000-$20,000 bucks. It's a lot of money, but relatively speaking, it was small, but I've always focused on making money. So that's the one thing. I never wanted to be beholden to investors or banks or anybody else. I've never taken VC money because I had a vision for the company. I wanted to control it, and I was perfectly fine by the way, running on a path that was different from others, I was fine with incremental or continuous growth and making a profit at the same time and maybe that's why we didn't grow as fast as we could have because I had a budget and I stuck to it. But at the same time, I think it puts you in a much better position. 

When you're scrappy all the time, it forces you to do different things, and I'm not saying Kiersten and the team would call me cheap, would you ? Don't answer that! 

But I was very prudent, and I really wanted to invest in the things that I thought added the most were the most meaningful for our clients so support and, being flexible with them and trying to, provide free services, like creative and all these things that, that really add value over time. To answer your question, I think our paths have been a little bit different but certainly one, I won't go back on. 

Are you getting the phone calls and the emails and, how are you doing from private equity and VC people? 

Darren Wercinski: I do, but I don't respond, and it's been nonstop, and actually, so there are different stages in the SaaS company: if you can get to $1 million, you can grind out and do that. If you can get to the $2 to $3 million, that's a win, and when you get to $5 million, it's an interesting thing because private equity and some VCs, start to come hard because they like the model and it's working. They have a lot of cash available too, that's in the industry. So they're trying to make investments and do things. But for me, it was never really about the money or trying to sell. Obviously, we have had the company for almost 20 years, I love the employees. I love what we're doing. I think for me, resetting our goals of trying to double our revenue was really exciting because we also had to redo, we had to add staff. We're adding some new leadership right now in terms of a Customer Success Director to really manage the team and hopefully take our customer success to the next level, and so to me, the challenge is trying to grow that revenue and really redo things in a company and build in new processes that are gonna make us scalable to that $10 million bogey.

Put it this way, I'm not gonna be sitting on a beach and Nova Scotia with you, Dave, counting all the cash that you made. 

That's right. You wouldn't want to today anyways. It's snowing, although not as bad as it does in Minnesota.

I was curious, about one thing you said where you are doing a complete software rewrite, and is that kind of a nod to web services and everything that's emerging with technology right now where you can't just continually build out something, traces back in some respects to 2005. I know a company in the UK that built their platform in I think 2015 and by 2019 or so, they said, you know what, we're tearing it up and we're gonna rebuild just because they could see all the new capabilities out there. 

Darren Wercinski: There are two answers to your question.

One is: we were getting customer feedback which may have been great by the way. Our NPS score is super and we love that stuff they give great feedback every time that we can really use, and some of it was: It's a little hard to use now. It's a little clunky. It's a little this thing. We love your stuff, and we really needed to just take a look at our c m s and make it easier to use the challenge. So going back when you try and please every customer, you end up building a lot of one-off stuff along the way, and all of a sudden you look at your application, and yeah it's robust, but it's not exactly intuitive because you have to do X, Y, and Z.

And we built a lot of this stuff quickly to try and get those deals closed and build it out. So one first part was just, you know what? We need to refresh and reset and get more customer feedback and more UI and UX capabilities into our platform. So that was the trigger number one.

The second was: the industry's changing too, by the way. It's not just signage on a screen anymore. You have to be able to reach people outside of your traditional office setting or facilities, and so we've spent more time trying to make our application flexible so people from home can see our digital signage on their computers through teams or through websites digital signage, or just a more flexible approach to meet people because they're not always coming into the office anymore. And the communications team still wants to reach people. We just wanna be a more flexible platform to do that. 

Kiersten, do you have any additional thoughts on that? I know you talked to the clients quite a bit. 

Kiersten Gibson: I was gonna say, going back to when I started too, one thing you might not know about me, Dave, but Darren hired me as our project manager for our mobile application that he thought was really gonna take off

Darren Wercinski: You test and you'll learn, okay, Dave, you test and you learn and you evolve. I have no problem making mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and learning from them. 

Kiersten Gibson: So learning how to code without having a degree in coding was very interesting. But we did it. But no, I would say, one thing I've learned over the years is, we tried to add on all these additional solutions. What we learned was we can't be everything to everyone and really focus on what we're good at, which again goes back to that digital signage. But we do have these additional solutions we still support. The mobile app still brings us a decent amount of revenue. So our mobile application that employees can download to view more information, it can be, again, going back to those fitness centers, maybe they're viewing schedules, things like that. But what we've really tried to push people towards is, like Darren said, the website digital signage, where it's say, embedded in their intranet. 

So they can push the same messaging from their digital signage into the website. So remote employees can view the same messaging and it's right there too. So you're not expected to say it's a screensaver. It's not something that a particular employee can disable. It's something that they're forced to see because they have to go on their intranet every day. So I'd say that's what we've seen. It's just kind of an add-on to their digital signage network if you will. 

Are you finding that the average customer is more equipped with knowing what they want and how they're going to use it than in the past when, I'm sure, 10 years ago the conversations you had were just explaining what the hell digital signage was and I assume now that they know exactly what it is and they know how they wanna use it? 

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, if you think about it, I'll say even five years ago, we used to sell a hell of a lot more hardware in this all-in-one solution where we would sell them the screen, the media player, the installation, the mounts, we'd sell all because that's all they knew, and so over the last couple years, our hardware has gone way down, which is awesome because that's one industry we don't want to be in, and we're repurposing a lot of stuff. So we repurpose some competitors' players at times, we start to just sell more software and it's already set up as well where we're just replacing stuff that they have.

I am also curious about AI and how that plays a role in future development, or does it? 

Darren Wercinski: For us? Not really. I can't say that's been a question, I know there are other companies out there that actually do that. They may be more retail-centric or whatever. I wouldn't say retail's a huge industry for us because there are certain things that other companies do better than us. We have not spent any time really thinking about AI. We're really trying to focus on trying to expand our “reach” outside of the traditional office setting through those applications that Kiersten had just mentioned. 

Yeah, I know all the AI stuff for digital science to date has been focused on computer vision, but I could imagine all kinds of capabilities around content production, smart scheduling, smart triggering, and all that sort of stuff down the road. But it's still just evolving right now. 

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and it's just a capability. As Kiersten mentioned, we can't be everything to everybody, and we're really trying sort of stick to that. 

Reach has been notoriously famous for creating applications that were about 80% done, we would get them to work, but we never really got that full implementation, and communication out to the client. So that's actually the one thing that I changed last year in terms of the beginning of 2022, maybe it's all my fault, but it was a direction we set where we really were trying to always, and now it’s like no, let's just hit the pause button, let's do things that are meaningful, let's say things that are purposeful that our clients are asking for, and that we can communicate back out.

And so that was one of the big shifts that we made at the beginning of last year, and to get user feedback, we would build stuff sometimes with basically never talking to our clients or assuming what they wanted, and then it would sometimes be right but sometimes be wrong, and so we really hit the pause button and changed our strategy around real development, and that's also why I think we added seven developers last year and just changed some processes. As I said, these are big investments in space. 

All right. This has been great. If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online?

Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, you can find us on our website. There is a contact us form that they can fill out to learn more. So our website is reachmedianetwork.com 

As opposed to the four or five other Reach Medias that you'll find if you Google it? 

Kiersten Gibson: Reach Media Network Digital signage.

Darren Wercinski: You know what's funny? One last thing is we were actually BroadSign's second or third customer, just to give you a sense of how long we've actually been in the space. RIP Brian Deseo because I was sorry to hear that. But I remember working with Brian and they were actually out in Idaho at the time, that's how long ago it was. But I just thought about it, thinking about the company and our journey over the years to see Broadsign where they're at and where we're at. But we actually were the second or third customer way back in 2000. 

Back in the day, yeah. All right. Thanks again for taking the time with me.

Darren Wercinski: Appreciate it, Dave. We look forward to seeing you at your next party. 

Kiersten Gibson: Thanks, Dave. 

Chad Hutson, Dimensional Innovations

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

Experience is one of those terms that's being heavily used and sometimes abused these days, as companies in the digital signage ecosystem talk about what they can do for end-user customers.

Everything, it seems, is somehow experiential or immersive. But what does that really mean and how does it manifest itself in projects that use display technology?

I had a really good chat with Chad Hutson, who very much qualifies as an experience design expert and has the project portfolio behind him to back that up.

He ran a well-respected agency in Chicago called Leviathan, stuck around for a few years after it was acquired, but this past year hooked up with a company that would have been a competitor in the past - Dimensional Innovations.

He's now DI's Chief Strategy Officer, and spends his time working with the DI team and with customers - working a process to understand needs and then develop solutions that deliver on those needs, and realize an experience that can be everything from simple to elaborate.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chad, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Dimensional Innovations is all about and what your role is there? 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, you bet. We’ll call it DI for short, to make it easier for both of us. DI is an experience design and build firm, based in the US, down in Kansas city, and they are really robust at not only designing and building the physical experiences but all the fixtures that can be built out with the wood shop, metal shop, paint and a giant two-story, high 3d printer, which is pretty amazing, we also use, but also on the digital side, we have deep roots in technology, both in being able to figure out what's the right technology for the experience and then creating the content and the interaction that goes within those experiences as well. 

So I'm the new Chief Strategy Officer, it's a new role at DI, I started about eight months ago with the organization and that role just organically evolved. They were kind enough to say you're making a positive impact and we'd like for you to do a bit more. It's good stuff so far. 

So it sounds like the company bridges a few things like there's some traditional AV integrations side to the business. There are some elements of a creative technology agency, but there's also a fix-your-fabrication kind of company as well. So you're into a whole bunch of things. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, that's a pretty good encapsulation and it’s a team of about 300 people, so they're not messing around.

And you're up in Chicago, right?

Chad Hutson: That's correct. I'm in Chicago when I sleep at home. I travel around quite a bit, both down in Kansas City and wherever the clients are as well. 

And Kansas City is what, like an eight-hour drive or something like that?

Chad Hutson: From Chicago, that's not too bad. I think like maybe six and a half, but I’m always flying though, always in the air.

You don't wanna drive in the middle of the winter? 

Chad Hutson: No, flying in the middle of winter is already a challenge enough. 

So people are gonna wonder, people who know you that you came from a company that you founded called Leviathan in Chicago, much more of, I would say, a creative technology shop, at least that's the term I use. 

I'm curious, as somebody who founded that company, what compelled you to leave? 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, that was an existential issue, I guess you could say, just trying to debate with myself, what can I do in the future? Yeah, Leviathan is still a great shop, although it's going by a different name. My partners and I sold it to another digital agency called Envoy back in, I think, 2017 and I was happy to stick around for a while. I think it's been close to five years since I decided to stay put and continue to run the organization. 

But I'd say where Levithan was just all about that hybrid of digital and physical experience, Envoy as a larger group, they are versed in everything from e-commerce to branding, and I don’t know, just felt like what I love was maybe not as front and centre as was what Leviathan did, so there is certainly no bad blood whatsoever, it was good to stick around and see it through a lot of great accomplishments there. But DI was always in my side view and they were always staying in touch and said, we'd love to talk about what the future could be. At some point, the stars aligned and that's why I went over to DI. 

That's a decent run anyways. When a founder sticks around, they might stick around for a year or something, so three to five years is pretty good. 

Chad Hutson: I agree, and the cool thing about the DI is, for me personally, it filled that missing gap BECAUSE whenever we were contacted about a digital experience, it could be like a lobby or experience for a theme park, it was always just limited to that digital scope, and it was later in the conversation. 

So with DI, because they are involved in the entire experience from even very early days what is the purpose of this space and what can it serve? Who's gonna be there? What kind of experience do we want them to have, digital and analogue? That's really the reason why I went over there, and I really love it over there. 

Yeah, I wanted to get into that. What is the whole process involved when you engage with a new customer? 

When I have done consulting in the past, the first thing I say to a new client, or even just in the early stages when we're having our first conversation is okay, why do you wanna even be talking and looking at digital? And I suspect these days when people start talking about wanting something experientially designed into our new space, experiential is such a huge catchall and somewhat abused term that you really have to enforce some kind of discipline to figure out what's gonna work here.

Chad Hutson: Yeah, you're absolutely right. The process is really, I don't wanna say it's not much different than any other firms, but we're very curious people, and so we want to ask our clients, what do you envision for the space, who is going to be there? What kind of assets do you already have from a content perspective? What's your technology infrastructure for the rest of the space? We don't want to build something just in a bubble from tech and IT standpoint. So really getting the lay of the land and asking a ton of questions, not just logistic or technology-wise, but more just thematic and just really trying to figure out what they know, and more importantly, what they don't know, so we can help discover what that is. So thinking about that space, we want to have the right purpose and the right functionality. 

So then we get into high-level ideas of what it could be more like rough sketches along with even rough buckets of what budget could look like for those experiences, and they may say that's perfect or, that's a bit rich for us. And then from there, we start to refine those ideas and also refine the pricing and what the technology solutions might be and what the narratives might be from a visual and oral content standpoint, and then we start building it and we never leave our clients high and dry. After we build, we always like to be involved when we can in content refreshes, in support of that experience and yeah, hopefully, continue those relationships for years to come. 

There's a business reason why you wanna stick with the customer and do the content refreshes and so on, but I suspect some of that is just simply that you wanna stick with it because it's your team's baby, so to speak, and you’re enrolled in it.

Chad Hutson: That's right, and since 16:9 has a touch of snark to it, I'll say that we would definitely want to keep the good children but for those who are grown up and ready to leave the nest, we welcome them leaving the nest. So we do try to nurture the right relationships in the right ways.

When you're engaging with new customers, I'm curious, about how often they really know what they want to do. 

Chad Hutson: That is a great question because when we speak with clients, we know that they know their brand better than anyone else. We can't come into that conversation with the assumption that we know them inside and out, that's absolutely not true, but from a guest or user experience standpoint, I feel like we can balance out what they know about themselves. For example, sometimes the conversation leads with technology. “Oh, we absolutely want to use VR here”, or “we want an immersive experience” and as much as we get excited about all those conversations, we also have to say, why do you think you need that? And we want to make sure that is the right solution from a narrative or technology standpoint. So yeah, that's what I have to say about that.

I was curious how often you have customers who are saying, “Yeah, we want a big LED video wall in the lobby”, or we want this particular type of technology and they're just thinking in terms of the wow factor as opposed to what this will actually do.

Chad Hutson: Oh, every time, and I'll also pick on architects a little bit. I think some of the larger architecture firms are definitely getting better, they have their own experience design teams.

The Gensler and so on, they've got people who know that stuff now. 

Chad Hutson: Exactly, but otherwise, depending on who's making the decisions, it is truly based on grandeur, so having the largest screen, “I went to our competitor's lobby and they had a giant screen, and I want ours to be bigger.” 

So sometimes it can be down to that, but I think what is thought of just so little is content strategy, meaning, some folks think about content, what can we put on the screen, but okay, that's great, now what's going to be there tomorrow and the next day, and that can become prohibitively expensive if it's not thought of the right way and how to get the right content there. Some of it can be big and beautiful. I know that what used to be Obscure Digital and now they're I think they've been folded into another organization, but people talk about the Salesforce lobby and still talk about it even now, and it is a beautiful experience, but it is that exact same experience over and over again. So how can that be more dynamic? We'll have those ooh-ah moments, but we need something else to fill the space and not just be a pretty screensaver.

Yeah, I've seen some projects and the narrative is describing the projects after they've been lit up where they're talking about how this changes the whole experience of travel or whatever it may be in a rail station or an airport, and a vast screen or a set of screens with all this very expensive content and so on and I'm thinking if I'm a traveller, what would be a great experience for me is something that says, “Track 14 is this way” because that is what really matters to me, not being uplifted by this amazing content and all that, just show me where the hell the train is. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, it has to be practical as well as transformative. I feel like if people are travelling, yes, let's get them excited about their destinations, let's give them a moment of surprise and delight but let's be practical about it too, and use elements of wayfinding. Not everything has to be wow, and flutter and fluff on these large screens.

And I suspect it's difficult at times to convey to the client that there's a technology investment here and so on, but you have to keep this refreshed and, you can't just have your quarter-million dollar data visualization piece from some artist and just run that thing forever?

Chad Hutson: You're exactly right. I think I might know the data visualization artist you might be speaking of, whose work I do love, don't get me wrong, but you're absolutely right. 

If a client's investing upwards of half a million or more on a display and they automatically assume, I need $25k to $50k for a video or I'll just use stock footage, that is just a bad investment. There's so much more you can do.  The reason why you have a screen in the first place is to show content, it's not just to have a static piece of wall art hung up. 

Is it now a case when you and your team, as you’re Chief Strategy Officer, I'm sure if there's a whale client, they pull you into it? You mentioned you're travelling a lot, so that's probably why. You immediately start thinking about how digital fits in here or do you try to kind of park that and listen to the client and then think digital would be good here, but maybe not? 

Chad Hutson: Oh, great question. Certainly from my previous roots, thinking through a digital lens has been instinctual somewhat, but since going to DI, it is definitely starting with more of the basics and leaving digital and analogue out of it.

It's more about fact-finding and learning more about who they are and what they want to accomplish, and then the solutions fall from that. So that's been actually a welcome shift that not everything has to be tech-savvy, but I'm a techie at heart, I can still remember coding on a radio shack color computer using BASIC way back in the 80s. So yeah, I'm a geek and I like technology. It's front and centre of my mind a lot of times. 

When you think in terms of experience design, how do you define experience? And I realize that's a big question. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, that is. So not intended to be a shameless plug, but the thing about DI is that they work across not only pro and collegiate sports organizations, but also larger brands, museums, retail, and entertainment, so theme parks and such, so the experience is different across all those, but I think consistently people want the experience to be intuitive.

I guess some brands don't have a clean brand, but in our opinion, we want the environment to be clean and welcoming and not intimidating. Perhaps if you're going through a frightening exhibit at a Disney park, maybe we do want that to be more thematic and scary, but a good experience just makes you feel something, and I know that some people might roll their eyes and go, oh my gosh, if we're walking through a company's headquarters, do they really want their guests to feel something?

And I would argue, yes, whether it wants someone to buy something, or want them to have moments of surprise and delight, even in a museum, you want them to learn and take that piece of information with you. So the experience, I think initially, no matter what you do or how pretty it is, if you don't feel something that you're not gonna remember that experience and I think that's ultimately what these destinations are about. Do you want folks to remember it, remember you as an organization or tell your friends about the amazing experience you had? So I would say that it is really front and centre, the emotional component. 

But the emotion isn't necessarily “wow” or being bowled over by the scale of a screen or the 3d anamorphic illusion on a screen or whatever, it can be as simple as, “I'm feeling calmer about being in here” because now I know where I'm going” or “I feel better about the meeting I'm about to have with this company” because I'm seeing the company's history on this video wall, it’s explaining everything that they do and I'm thinking, holy shit, these guys are amazing. 

Chad Hutson: Oh, a hundred percent, Dave. I'd say there's a sliding scale of what you want people to feel and we don't always crank that to 11. I think y might need certain degrees of it, like a moment of surprise and delight, in a customer's customer sales centre or in a museum like, oh, wow, I wasn't expecting that, and that's nice, but not everything has to be “whoa” and gigantic and expensive. 

It's adjustable depending on what we need people to take away from that experience. 

Yeah. I just wrote about a project the other day that was in a residential lobby of a building in Boston and it was a pretty small kind of corner wrapped LED that was only 10 feet square or something and I was thinking, okay, that makes sense in that kind of setting, that it's not enough where the residents are thinking well, now I understand why my condo fees are so high, but it's just something that helps give the lobby a bit of a lift, but also has information on there that's useful. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, isn't that the beauty of display technology? It is dynamic. So it can be so many different things. Sometimes it could be too many things, and so we want to pick the right bitsto have in that space, but it's dynamic and it can be evergreen . 

What about budgets? I imagine, as you were saying in your kind of project scoping and everything, that you're trying to get a sense of what their budget restrictions are, whether they're bottomless or tight, and is it possible to deliver an experience on a pretty modest budget? 

Chad Hutson: Yes, I would say so. There are some simple tips and tricks that can be used. I would say that much like with an artist of any sort or any kind of designer, sometimes working with constraints yields some of the best results, whether you’re out of time, you're out of money and you just really have to become inventive on how to make that work out.

If any clients are listening, I would never want to encourage purposely limiting the budget just to see what kind of brilliance can come from that. But yeah, I've certainly seen some very impactful experiences. It Doesn't necessarily cost a ton, but you can be inventive in how you use those lower cost solutions and make it effective. I think about the analogy of the giant lobby screen, instead of having one giant screen, can we break that up into different sections and pieces so it has an interesting footprint and ne minute, we have content on individual screens and the next we have this larger canvas that is, even though it's broken in pieces, everything works in concert with each other. So value engineering is the mother of invention sometimes. 

I'm thinking of the project in Denver at a Wells Fargo office tower where there was obviously some nod to budget limitations where they did these five or six vertical slats that made it kinda look like you're seeing out through fence slots, and that was a way to have big LED strips that wouldn't cost the same kind of money, and they didn't have to be particularly high rez because you were seeing them at a distance, but that was a way to create visual impact, but not have something like the scoreboard at the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

Chad Hutson: Yes, and I think I know exactly the one you're talking about. They're really tall and narrow as well. But yeah, they are certainly impactful, I would agree.

Do you also have products now at DI? I was looking on the website and it said like you had some package products as opposed to everything just being custom to the client.

Chad Hutson: Yeah. Good eye there, Dave. So there are some products that we have developed and clients say, oh, we really like what you did for this client, could you do something similar? So after doing that a number of times, we just realized we can take some of the best parts of some of these projects and not necessarily repurpose them. But clients oftentimes are saying our budget is limited. What can we do? Can you repurpose this? 

So that is in essence what we have done with a few different things. There's something we call it, coloring wall, which essentially we use gesture sensing technology to let people, oftentimes kids, let's have a low touch, very simple and intuitive experience where they can stand in front of what looks like a giant coloring book page, it's just a white page with black outlines and waving our arms or running past it, and it fills in the color in a very painterly fashion. Once we figured out that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, let's take some of these ideas and repurpose them. We can do them, we can replicate them and we always improve upon them, I think every time we do that. 

And you can also reduce some of the cost too because you've already written and everything, right? 

Chad Hutson: I guess we could say we're trying to be benevolent and generous to clients, but we're also trying to make money off of what we have, IP we have created in the past. 

The gestures that you're describing, kids are naturals to interact with those sorts of things and have fun and all that, but I've seen a number of cases where that same sort of gesture technology is designed for brand advertising or experiential. activation, so to speak, and I've wondered, do these really work with adults? 

Chad Hutson: I remember when the Kinect first came out, I think that was around 2011 or so. My team at the previous firm were actually hacking it before there was even an SDK or software developer kit available and I think we were all just amazed by it and assumed this was going to transform how everyone interacts. 

But what we figured out along the way, I know the DI team has this figured out also is that there's no international language, if you will, for gestures. You can wave and say, hello, you can flip a bird, if you're really upset, you can use a right turn or left turn, but I think that with these sorts of gestures, particularly with adults, they're not gonna wave their arms around like a crazy person. 

I can't imagine many CEOs doing that willingly. So we've figured out that we have to keep those gestures very simple. It's more about standing in a place and it triggering content, or as I mentioned with kids that can run and be silly and that can fill that coloring book page very easily, but for the rest, it has to be super intuitive. If you are having someone raise their right hand or raise their left hand to advance an icon or a cursor, then those instructions have to be given in, I don't know, 15 seconds or less and have it figured out instantly. 

It's been my experience that with experience design, that the ones that really work are those where the architect or person who designs the space, the physical look of a space is involved early, so that the screen technology doesn't look like it was added on, it's built in, like it's part of the original design. Is that a fair assessment? 

Chad Hutson: Oh, so fair. Otherwise it's just just another giant rectangle, sitting in a lobby. It stands out, but more like a sore thumb than it does something that's integrated into the architecture. So I'm a big fan of all the involved parties talking as early as possible. 

An architect's thinking we can integrate a screen here, but speak to the technology partner and think about what's the right pixel pitch, viewing angles could be an issue or ambient light. So I feel like the more that all the right people can talk early on, it can be beautifully integrated and it can be the right technology and the right content.

That's one of the ways you can reduce the cost, right? Because if you really think about it, then you can use like LED ribbon strips instead of a giant rectangle that you were describing to have the same kind of impact 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, absolutely, and getting creative with almost a sculptural version of a display. I think I know a lot of people in our industry who talked about the beautiful work for the AT&T Discovery District, and there were many groups that touched that, but there is a sculpture that was fashioned after AT&T logo that's in that space, and it's it's also has embedded LED ribbons similar to what you described and yeah, it makes for an interesting experience and that brand touch is subtle. So kudos to that team on creating a pretty cool experience. 

Yeah, it's like a halo sort of tunnel thing. 

Chad Hutson: That's the one! 

Yeah, that is nice. 

With LED rapidly emerging and evolving, is that kind of the main go to thing now for DI when you're thinking about digital or are you still looking at OLED and LCD and other technologies? 

Chad Hutson: Yeah. Direct view LED is in almost every conversation I feel like just because it is a great technology. This is not a slam on the AV industry, because I know technology can only advance as fast as it's able to. The supply chain is an issue, the pandemic was an issue. So I feel like not that tech has stalled. It's not the case at all, but I feel like advancement has slowed a little bit. 

Definitely LED ribbons, direct view LED, some things that we've been playing with more recently, there's it's more of a smaller format now, but I'm sure that the size is growing. Actually I'm certain, I've seen some larger versions of it, but displays like the looking glass factories, the display looks semi holographic. You can use other gesture sensors for that. So that is a more of a one-to-one experience versus a giant shared experience. But I'm excited about that. Even outside of display technology, seeing what is being done with AI and creating visuals, platforms like Dall-E and Mid Journey, where you can simply type in a prompt and boom multiple versions of what the computer thinks is the right image for you, and I think that's also starting to step into video creation as well. It’s mostly static, but I've seen some early images of video. 

I think that talk about being able to have dynamic content. Data visualization is one thing, but constantly having even photo realistic or having what looks to be an artist creation being done on the fly is pretty amazing.

Yeah, my son is heavily into all that stuff and DALL-E and he was just asking me to give him a prompt and I gave him some crazy prompt, like squirrels playing croquet or something, and 30 seconds later, there it was!

Chad Hutson: It's nuts. I'm gonna try that, squirrels playing croquet, wearing pink tutus in a desert and yeah, I bet it'll give me exactly what we want. 

Yeah, and god knows why, but there you go. 

Is the kind of flexibility that we're seeing now with LED important in that you actually have physically flexible modules, but you also have ribbons and you have LED on film, LED embedded in building glass and so on. Do those open up new opportunities? 

Chad Hutson: Absolutely, they do, Dave. If anything, the first question is: can we do it? And we get excited and then it's a matter of pricing and availability and that's sometimes because it is so new or brightness could be a factor, or the glass has already been specked out and it's a matter of could we retrofit it, and it's just not as feasible, but now that we know those technologies are available at least for future endeavors, we are absolutely thinking about that as often as we can. Maybe it's a little bit of a gear list, but also it could be the right solution for a space.

Clients sometimes say at least, from a large scale perspective, we don't want anything that's going to obstruct views or have something where you can see wires or pieces or parts of the technology, and sometimes that's unavoidable, but I think if we can have the slimmer format of some of these ribbons or the embedded LED into glass, that solves some of that. So we're really excited about the future of those. 

Is there a particular lesson that you've learned through the years that you apply to a lot of work now? 

Chad Hutson: Honestly, if we're talking about an experience that does have a digital component, it is really pretty much what you and I have been harping on a lot in this conversation, which is just bringing the topic of content upfront, before decisions are being made about technology. 

I'm a huge supporter of the AV industry and that beautiful content can't be as inspiring sometimes if it's not on the right kind of display or the right scale either. But I'm thankful for the integrators and other technology folks that I know that always ask the first question of: Yes, you wanna display but why, and what would go on a display and why do you want that, and yes, we're an AV integrator, but you need to have conversations with the architect or your creative agency, whoever it may be, so that's not falling flat because honestly, for, if there's a lesson learned, it's folks in the AV industry. They can be blamed if I spend a million dollars on this giant lobby screen and it doesn't do shit, and that's absolutely not true. If the right content solution is there and the experience that is intended is considered more heavily up front, then everyone looks good in the end. 

Absolutely. All right, Chad, thank you very much for spending some time with me. That was super interesting. 

Chad Hutson: Oh, thanks. It's good to be back on 16:9 and hope to talk again soon.

Tom Goddard, World Out Of Home Organization (WOO)

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

The World Out Of Home Organization has been around for decades, but under a French acronym that didn't mean a lot to much of the world. The non-profit changed its name from FEPE International to its new handle a few years ago, and has never looked back.

It now has members from all over the globe - with outdoor advertising companies of all sizes and stripes signing on to benefit from lobbying, networking, policy discussions, standardization, research and education.

The organization also does a heavily attended global conference each year, as well as at least a couple of regional versions in APAC and the Middle East.

I had a great chat with out of home media veteran Tom Goddard, a London-based Irishman who gives his time and experience as the organization's President and Executive Chairman.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

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

Tom Goddard: Yeah, nice to be here, David. I'm in sunny London. We're having a Mediterranean type of summer, which is a hit and miss here, but we're having a lovely summer at the moment and I'm right in Hyde Park, so I'm looking into the park and all the joggers. So it's a lovely spot, it's about 28 degrees, so pretty cool. 

Hopefully you have air conditioning! 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, but I hate using it. I've had to use it a bit lately, but yes, I do. 

So you are the head of the World Out of Home Organization? Can you give me the background on yourself and what that organization is all about?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, of course, David. For my sins, I'm President of the World Out of Home Organization, it's an honorary reposition and the World Out of Home Organization is a not-for-profit body and its purpose is the same now as it was when it was set up 63 years ago. It's really to drive sector growth. 

When the organization was set up in 1959 by Jacques Dauphin who was one of the pioneers of French outdoor media alongside JCDecaux, it was originally called FEPE which is short in French for  Federation European Publicite Exterieur, and in later years, it expanded outside that footprint and became a truly global organization. So in 2018, we decided to rebrand as the World Out of Home Organization, which we launched the following year at our Dubai Congress, which happened just before the pandemic, and so we're now the World Out of Home Organization, but we are 63 years old. 

Yeah, I have known a few people who would make reference to FEPE all the time, like Sheldon Silverman when I was in meetings with him, and I didn't know what he was going on about, but when the name was changed, I was like, “Oh, now I get it!” It’s a more universal name.

Tom Goddard: Yeah. It's very plain and it says what it does. 

With regards to your background, are you a media owner guy or an agency guy or something else?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, I'm a media owner guy. I come from the media owner side and I've had a long career on the media owner side, all the way from a small company started in Ireland to running the International division of CBS Outdoors, as it was then called. More recently I was the chairman of Ocean Outdoor in the UK, which is one of the leading digital out-of-home companies in the premium sector.

Are you still active, or are you still working? 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, I'm still pretty active. I just stepped down from Ocean, just about a year and a half ago, but but I have also got a business called, Out of Home Capital, which I've set up with with eight other very experienced out-of-home professionals, and it's a global advisory business that helps all sectors of the out-of-home ecosystem to achieve their strategic plans. So I'm busy with that alongside my active work in the World Out of Home Organization. 

Out of Home Capital, is that also a funding entity or purely advisory?

Tom Goddard: It's mainly advisory, but we do have access to capital sources, and we do advise, for example, out-of-home media owners who are perhaps getting ready for a sale or getting ready for an IPO, we do advise them on how to go about preparing for that and also we have sources that we can recommend in terms of of capital investment.

Is that a going concern that keeps you busy or is it one of those things that's a little little bit of peaks and valleys, where a project comes up and you're all busy and then there's not much going on and you can relax and then something else comes up.?

Tom Goddard: We set it up a couple of years ago and within two weeks we had our first project, which was a New York Bank making an investment, needing a due diligence report, and since then we've been steadily busy, including working for a large private equity operator who were examining the potential sale of Clear Channel’s European assets, and we have three European city projects at the moment where we're advising European cities on their out-of-home strategy and on their smart city strategy. 

So it's really getting traction now, David, and when we set it up, we wondered how it would go, but everybody seems to tell us that there was a gap in the market, there was a need for this global advisory business and that seems to be the case. 

I did a lot of consulting for a bunch of years now. Now, I'm just focused on Sixteen:Nine, but I would get emails and phone calls from people asking about whether I could do advisory on digital out-of-home and I would just flat out tell them that there are other people out there who know a hell of a lot more about that particular side of the business than I do, and I would point them that way, because it's just not my thing. 

And we’ll talk about it later, but I’m eternally confused by the whole programmatic business. I understand it at a macro level, but boy, it's complicated. 

Tom Goddard: Absolutely, but if you get any more referrals, just send them my way.

But interestingly there are not a lot of advisory units out there who really have the depth of experience needed. For example, we're just in the process of advising a large Asian media player who wants to get a tall hold in Times Square in New York, so you can get things like that along with major retailers who are looking to maximize their digital assets in their supermall.

So there aren't many companies that have the ability to assess the audience value and also know about the aesthetics and the environment. 

So how global is the World Out of Home Organization at this point, are you covering every continent and how many members do you have?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, it's really taken off in the last few years, particularly since we rebranded, David, it's amazing what that has done, but we now have over 150 members worldwide. That's mainly large out-of-home media owners like Lamar, OUTFRONT in the US, and then JCDecaux in Europe, Out of Home media in Australia, Phoenix Metropolitan in China, and we also have lots of national out-of-home trade bodies, like the OAAA in the US and FAW in Germany, Outsmart in the UK and the Outdoor Trade Association in Japan. 

The other good thing about our organization is we also admit service providers in the out-of-home sector like Daktronics and BroadSign in the US are members and most of the ad tech providers like View and Hivestack and Vista are members, and of course all the major BD buying agencies as well, Kinetic Talent and Rapport. So we totally embraced the entire 37 billion out-of-home ecosystem. 

So if you want to be a member or you're considering being a member, it's not really the case where you go, do I join World Out of Home, or do OAAA or whatever, you can be a member of all of them, and it's not a conflict, and you're not choosing sides? 

Tom Goddard: No, in fact the World Out of Home Organization is an international global body whereas the trade associations like Outsmart in the UK and the OAAA in the US are mainly national associations, and what we do is we connect with them and help to amplify the work they're doing and also help them to develop standards and best practices. So it's an entirely complimentary thing that you would join. 

And also you would join it to be a part of a sort of a sharing and learning platform and to get access to our extensive database and active networking forum, and of course you get favorable discount rates to all our events. Somebody said to me recently that our annual Congress is really now a must attend event. 

Is that the big thing, the resources and the conferences and so on? Are those kinds of the main motivators for joining? 

Tom Goddard: They used to be, David. We used to very heavily rely on our annual Congress which is highly attended by the senior people in out-of-home. But we are now doing our annual event, we had one recently in Toronto and next year's is in Lisbon in June, but we're doing two fairly major regional events. We've got one coming up actually in October in Southeast Asia for APAC and that's based in Kuala Lumpur, and we've got one coming up in February in Dubai covering the MENA region. 

So the events are a big attraction, but there's a lot more to the organization now, including monthly global Zoom calls with members, webinars and lots of other stuff that's going on throughout the year.  

Is it a case where you have media companies, particularly those who cover multiple companies competing in many respects, but this is a forum where they can collaborate and share ideas and the competition goes away for at least a little bit? 

Tom Goddard: That's a very astute question, David, and that's the tightrope all trade associations walk and what we do is we try to focus as hard as possible on sector growth and all the things that contribute to sector growth. And what you get is fierce competition locally at national level, between out-of-home media operators, both at the media owner and the media agency level. But there are lots of areas where it makes sense to collaborate and cooperate at association level to drive the sector because there is hard evidence now that a 1% sector growth is five times more valuable to your bottom line than a 1% growth within the silo.

So when you talk about the sector, are you talking at a macro level about out-of-home or digital out-of-home? 

Tom Goddard: I'm talking about out-of-home at a macro level, and don't forget that, 63% of global revenues still come through the classic out-of-home channel or static, as I think you call it in the US, but that is obviously tipping year by year in favor of digital.

Some markets are at 80% digital and other markets are a lot less than that. I never foresee a situation where the market will be all digital. But I think the majority will be digital, but there will still be great work to be done with classic billboards, doing directional work for the likes of McDonald's and other big retail operators. 

Yeah, there's any number of instances where I've seen digital in play and thought that wasn't necessary, it was almost like they did it because it's digital, that makes it shinier and newer and more attractive and a poster, a printed stock would've been just fine. 

Tom Goddard: Yeah. I guess because of the capital investment required, out-of-home media owners are pretty cany when it comes to the ones that need to be digitized. It's usually a very high value site. Sean Reilly at Lamar has a statistic that shows something like 4% of his inventory produced 27% of his revenues. Forgive me if I haven't got the numbers right, but we are moving into an era now where less is more. So I think you'll see a rationalization of out-of-home inventory around the world, but it will be higher value and more digital.

Yeah, I'm curious if your organization has a role in mentoring a lot of the startups that come along? These are the companies that want to put screens on everything, I just wrote last week about a company in London that's putting them on delivery scooters, and I tend to roll my eyes on a lot of these new kinds of efforts, but I thought that one was actually pretty spot on given the way London works and everything else, but there are so many dreamers out there that think they can put a screen anywhere and it's the road to riches route for them. 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, as we would say in Ireland, David, “God bless them!”

We would say, “Fill your boots!”

Tom Goddard: The simple fact is you put multiple screens where there is a huge audience, and on the back of delivery bikers is not exactly the place to get a return on that investment. But I think that there's always gonna be left field entrepreneurs coming into the industry. 

Where you see the big changes is with the high value sites around the world, and of course, lots of advertisers are cleverly using trophies or marquee digital sites on their social media as well. Most people who buy space in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus in London get wonderfully extended coverage and amplification on social media. So I think, in terms of dynamic content, in terms of the fact that involving memory and encoding digital motion really scores very high in those areas. 

So is that part of the reason why you're seeing like lights, particularly in Asia, you're seeing a lot of these, anamorphic collusion types of creative that they are hoping will also get picked in social media and so on, so it's extending the reach?

Tom Goddard: Absolutely, David, this is a really very exciting new innovation and Ocean calls it deep screen, and there are various sorts of versions of it.

What we're finding, which is very exciting in our sector is that there's two levels of creativity, the traditional great ideas that the great creatives come up with as well, and then there's the great creative technical applications, and what you've just described, that is a great example of the attention getting the ability of these deep screen ads and they just go viral on social media. 

Yeah, I've found that there's only been a few campaigns that have somehow rather threaded the needle between really interesting visuals but actually an effective ad. There have been ones where I'm trying to figure out okay, who is even the brand for this, but once in a while you see the ones where they've managed to achieve both.

Tom Goddard: Yeah, the people who invest in these types of locations also use them as part of their annual reports in their own collateral material, they use them in their websites. They get tremendous mileage out of them. 

Most of the great creative directors of our times always say, if you can get it right  on a poster, on an outdoor ad, you get it right on all media, that's as true today as it ever was. 

Because it's short and sweet and to the point, right?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, you've gotta get the message across swiftly and you've gotta be entertaining. 

Yeah, I try to emphasize in my past life with consulting clients, that this is not a storytelling medium, it's a glance medium. You've gotta get your message across really quickly and somehow resonate with them. 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, you're dead right. 

One of the challenges through the years, particularly in the early years of digital out-of-home was getting acceptance from media planners and buyers, that they would understand the medium, that the level of measurement was good enough to mirror what was happening online and elsewhere, and it wasn't just guesswork about audiences. Is that a hurdle that's now being cleared? 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, very much, and of course the research is very robust now, in terms of the work that digital out-of-home does. 

At a broader level, David, we are now in a global media market that's all about screens, and of all the legacy media, out-of-home has converged best with the digital era, and is regarded really as text friends, so I think we now are an integral part of the digital screen world and there's a terrific amount of research to back that up.

We recently spent a year updating and distributing the audience measurement guidelines, because it didn't include digital in the previous version, and it now fully includes the digital part of our medium, so we're well covered there. 

Is it possible to have global standards or is there just too many differences region to region or even country by country?

Tom Goddard: No, it absolutely is possible to have global standards, and that document, which is a 100+ page document put together by Neil Eddleston and Gideon Adey, two of the accepted global gurus on audience measurement, that has received tremendous endorsement from organizations who are all consulted in the process. 

You can have a model that fits most markets that is adjustable for the physical state of the local market and the level of maturity in that market. But yes, the important thing is to try and have an accepted level of research across all the markets so that the CMOs are talking the same language when they're buying out-of-home.

I know you're not a hardcore technology guy, but I have to ask about LED just from the lens of LED has opened up the opportunity to get beyond standardized billboard shapes and standardized kinds of locations, so you're now seeing the sides of entire buildings, including the Burj in Dubai being lined with LE  lighting that at a great distance can look like an ad.

Are we heading to a time where it's going to be like a few of the movies out there, like Children of Men or Blade Runner, where there are billboards on the sides of buildings and blimps and everything else? 

Tom Goddard: I think we're there now, David, certainly in China. If you go to Shanghai, it will blow your mind, and what's great is that there was a time when out-of-home media owners didn't have the greatest relationship with municipalities in cities, but cities now and out-of-home media owners are working collaboratively to integrate great digital treatments in the fabric of the cities and to connect with the smart city technology.

I think most mayors in the world now would regard large format, digital media and small format, on street furniture units to make a statement that this is a progressive city, this is a city that's moving fast in the digital age, so I think we're there. I think you can do nonstandard formats, particularly on super premium, as we see, and even now, we see some incredible treatments, with groups of drones being brought in for special occasions, so digital out-of-home is really, as I said, of all the legacy media, it has embraced technology best, and I think is really well equipped. Because when we started this organization, when our forebears started this organization, it was for the same reason which was to drive sector growth. But then, the big tech guys came in with television and later color television and now out-of-home is competing against the tech giants that are preeminent in digital marketing and in digital media. 

So we have to move along with that, and that's what we're doing, and this is why digital out-of-home is the second fastest growth medium in all of media . 

Is it part of your organization's charge to demystify or simplify some of the enabling technology, because I'm somebody who's been involved in the industry at various levels for more than 20 years and I struggle mightily to understand everything going on with programmatic, and if I'm having trouble, I suspect a lot of other people are. 

Tom Goddard: Yeah, you’re dead right. I've been banging on about this at various conferences. I think what we have is that programmatic is really simply computer-to-computer trading between SSPs (supply side platforms) and DSPs (demand side platforms) and it's gotten a bit complicated in out-of-home because we've added multiple layers on top of that, such as data stacks, real-time bidding capability, dynamic content, etc, and all these additions are meant to enhance the process and make it even more targeted and precise, but you're right, they also increase the complexity as well. 

We often have programmatic panels at our conferences and I appeal to the panelists to speak English and stop talking in all their tech language and we are getting better, but I would have to admit, David, I think it's unnecessarily complicated, or we make it unnecessary complicated, and certainly that's something we need to work on.

Yeah, I wonder if some of it simply has to do with all the different vendors, almost inventing terms so that they can differentiate themselves from a bunch of other companies that are doing roughly the same thing? 

Tom Goddard: Yes,. I think this gets back to my overriding point: our real competitors are not the other outdoor companies, our real competitor is at sector-level. So the more standards we have, the less complicated it is for media planners and CMOs to look at the medium and buy the medium, the faster the sector will grow. 

You and I are absolutely aligned on that, and it's something that we work on constantly. 

In terms of the overall organization, if you had to identify what your main sort of challenge or thing that you wanna accomplish in the next couple of years, what would that be?

Tom Goddard: Yeah, fortunately, David, in out-of-home, there are way more opportunities than challenges at the moment, but the ones that are in my mind that need more attention are audience measurement and sustainability.

We still have huge deserts, huge markets, and regions around the world that either lack or have suboptimal audience measurement systems, such as China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and again, getting back to my point that if we can all get up to speed in terms of industry standard and languages, you know, I was down at the WFA, the world Federation of Advertisers Congress in Athens a couple of months ago, and listening to the brilliant CMOs talking on the platform there, and they look at things globally and they move around a lot, so it's very important for us to get all those markets that don't have audience measured, and we're introducing ourselves an initiative following our 100+ page guideline book called “Measure the World” to encourage those markets, to put the investment in through their national associations.

And then of course, the second thing is sustainability, which is a big challenge for every company and every citizen. 

Yes, and I guess the other one that is steadily coming up is security and network security and locking down your billboards and your digital posters. 

Tom Goddard: How do you mean? 

In terms of not getting hacked!

Tom Goddard: To be honest with you, David, it's a very rare occurrence, but it does get a lot of publicity when it happens and it's usually from a novelty point of view. I saw something a couple of days ago that was rather amusing, but it's very rare and our security levels are very high and that's why it's very rare. So I don't see that as an issue. 

Yeah, I think the mainstream media companies certainly understand it. It's the smaller kind of entrepreneurial operators who are trying to cut corners and then they discover, “oh, we shouldn't have cut that corner.” 

Tom Goddard: That's right. 

So if I'm an organization that is listening to this and thinking, I wanna know more, I perhaps want to join the World Out of Home Organization. How do they find you? 

Tom Goddard: As I said, the World Out of Home Organization is a not-for-profit organization. Our board of directors, which is like a who's who from the out-of-home media owners association, all give their time voluntarily to the organization. Its only function is to improve and promote out-of-home globally, and to drive sector growth. 

The membership fees are pretty nominal and the value that you get from the association makes it a no brainer. So you just log on to our website and there's a place there where you fill out the application form and join, and we are enjoying a very steady growth of new members at the moment. But it's not just about getting membership fees to cover the basic cost of running the organization, it's about learning and sharing, and everybody, as I said in Toronto, at the Congress, whether you are big or small and you have a story to tell, we do a weekly newsletter and everybody has a chance to tell their story in that.

So from my point of view, but of course I would say this anyway, David, it's a no brainer to join the World Out of Home Organization. You are doing only good. 

It's worldooh.org, correct? 

Tom Goddard: Correct! 

All right, that was terrific. Thank you for spending some time with me.

Tom Goddard: It was a great pleasure and I hope this nice weather continues, and let’s chat again sometime to see how much progress we've made.

Absolutely.

Jimmy Hunt, Spectrio

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

Spectrio has been around the digital signage and on-premise media spaces for a bunch of years, growing both organically and through acquisitions, and increasingly making digital signage the main focus of the Tampa-area company.

I've known of the company for a long time, but REALLY came to know some of its people in the past year, when we got into discussions about Sixteen:Nine being acquired by Spectrio. That happened, and this podcast and publication are now part of Spectrio.

But my business partners have been fantastic about letting me continue to just do my thing, and make my own editorial decisions. I've wanted to do a podcast for a long, long time with Spectrio, way before this happened. We finally managed to make it work ... in a conversation here with Jimmy Hunt, who is the VP of Channel Sales for the company, working out of Dallas.

We had a great conversation digging into how the company's partner channel was formalized last fall and how it now works for Spectrio. We also get into what Hunt and his people are seeing and hearing in the end-user and reseller marketplace, notably how customers are now tending to fully understand and value the importance of well-executed and relevant content.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Jimmy Hunt, thank you for joining me. Can you give me an idea of what your role is at Spectrio? 

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. My role is VP, Channel Sales and Business Development. 

Specific to the channel or overall? 

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so my main focus is within the channel. I handle all of the indirect sales, so resellers, channel sales, the sales and the account management side, all roll up to me.

Okay. So you're nurturing a ton of partners? 

Jimmy Hunt: A ton, yeah, and it's been very interesting to develop a good blend across media publishers, AV, IT, and the agency space. 

You've formally launched the reseller program back in November, but I'm guessing that you had resellers prior to that?

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so I've been in the reseller space for about 15 years. My sole focus has been selling through the channel. Our methodology is pretty straightforward and simple. It's one-to-one-to-many. Previous to Spectrio, I focused mainly on the media and publisher world. So dealing with some of the largest media companies in the country across TV, radio, print, and digital. So we had a program in place yet, but it was great in Q3/Q4 to really formalize that and make it applicable to Spectrio moving forward, as well as the other industries, such as AV, IT, manufacturers, distributors, et cetera. 

How many partners do you have it at this point? 

Jimmy Hunt: So we are roughly over about 120. Prior to that announcement, we had about 60-65 meaningful partners. So we've doubled since then. It's been a busy Q4 and a busy Q1, but it's been great, really doubling down on the things that are working, and we've seen a lot of excitement across space.

I was curious about your qualification of meaningful. I have seen lots of partner pages on websites of companies where I'm looking at their partners and thinking, "I wonder if they even really know each other?"

Jimmy Hunt: That's a really good point. So for us, I always tell my team that we only win when our partners win. So if we're going to be a vendor and we're going to sit on the sideline, then expect for for that partnership to not be meaningful. So when I say meaningful, we really dig in with our partners. We try to position ourselves as true thought leaders to be consultants, to be advisors about our partnerships, but overall the space in general.

We have to make sure that we can not only address the day to day, week to week, month to month, but also help steer our partners and educate them on what's happening in the industry, and a lot of times, it's really just connecting other partners together. Maybe it's a product or service that we may not even sell or be interested in, but if we know partner X over here does this very well, and they're good people, we like working with them, then we'll connect them with a partner Y. 

So this is a lot more than preferential pricing, or wholesale pricing, or whatever you want to call it. You're doing buddy-calling. You're doing support and training and all those sorts of things? 

Jimmy Hunt: Oh yeah. A 100 percent. Again, the only way we win is when our partners win. So we have to make sure that they understand the products and services from a training perspective, from a server's perspective and workflow perspective, really understanding again, from the very first conversation to delivery of signage or whatever the product may be, that we at least have a hand in that. And there's some partners that want us to be super hands on, have things white labeled, and there's some that say, “Hey, we're going to sharpen the spear. We just want you to support us.” 

The good thing about our leadership and the way we built the partner program is that we can cater to any type of scenario, right? So whether we're working with a global distributor or a local agency, we can find a way to dig in and be flexible and fluid to help their goals, and really it's at the end of the day it's understanding what benefits them, how can our product and services and moreover our partnership benefit our partner.

And when you're doing that, there's obviously a lot of digital signage CMS and solutions options on the market. How do you distinguish what Spectrio brings to the table versus the other guys?

Jimmy Hunt: It's three main things, especially in my role. Number one, it starts with that partnership. To be quite honest, when we're talking to new AV, IT resellers or anyone in the reseller space, we actually rarely lead with a product or service. We lead with our ability to be a good partner, and so everything you said earlier, all the training, all the collateral, certifications, et cetera. That's really what we lead with. And I've found that there's a lack of that partner support, partner management. So that means applying as an account executive on a particular partnership and everything under the sun there. 

I'd say secondly, what I'm listening to more and more is content. I think Spectrio is really primed right now to set ourselves apart by not just providing a great software and a great service through digital signage, but then taking it a step further and saying what's going to be on the screen and asking that simple question. Do you have a strategy to showcase the highest quality video content or static imagery possible? And sometimes it's, yes, we have a strategy, but a lot of times it's no, and they haven't even really thought about it. They may have an internal marketing team. They may have an agency. Doesn't really matter to us. We can again work and fit into their strategy. So we're finding right now, one of the biggest things that's setting Spectrio apart is our ability to produce video content for digital signage and really for the partner itself and their clients at scale. 

Dave, we're producing upwards of, I'd say 7,500 to 10,000 pieces of content a month for partners all over the world, and again, that's my background. A lot of the folks come from the reseller space at Spectrio, they come from digital signage background, but I come from a media and content background. So being able to blend those two has been really fun and really exciting, and I think third, to answer your question is, as you're aware, we've acquired a lot of different platforms, right? So now we have what we believe is the best in breed to say, okay this piece of this functionality really applies to this industry and this vertical with these types of clients versus just saying, Hey, we have one platform, use it or lose it. We can really customize our strategy and our solution to go across the board and help many different industries in many different verticals. 

Yeah, I'm guessing that's a bit of a challenge in that, through acquisition, you've acquired a number of CMS companies that have different variations on the same thing, and how you sort out which is best for each. It must be helpful to say, let's build this around content and not worry about features and specs so much. Let's think about what's the best platform for that need is? 

Jimmy Hunt: Exactly, and we have a lot of experience, first of all, for C-suite across the board is really specific and careful about who we're going after from an acquisition standpoint and they have made some really amazing choices, and allowing us to really highlight and compliment what we're doing today without being extremely disruptive and/or taking a 180. I would say, second, especially in my role in the Channel/BD world, it's really about leading the sales conversation with discovery, going back to that core value of what are your pain points, what are your roadblocks for you as a partner, but more specifically, and probably more importantly, for your clients, right? Whether it's working with the AV/IT reseller that focuses specifically in the finance category or whether it's a media company that has 25,000 automotive clients, it's really taking a step back and understanding how we can help you get from point A to point B and then from there that helps determine which platform and what pieces, and what pieces of the functionality we can apply to best help that partner. 

So who's doing the discovery? Because you could have salespeople and channel salespeople who have pipelines to fill, they've got quotas to hit and they don't necessarily think of themselves as content and strategy consultants. 

Jimmy Hunt: That's a great question. It's a unique blend between marketing, product and sales. Through some of our acquisitions, we've just obtained some of the absolute best, most brilliant brightest folks in the space, I'll speak about one specifically, Christian Armstrong came from Industry Weapon. Now he's been doing it for 16 years, and he manages our two largest partnerships, as well as our largest clients through those partnerships. So he has a unique role where he has taken on as a sales engineer as well as a product specialist role, and then we bring in our VP of Product who's just another wonderful hire from a couple of years ago, a guy named Brandon Mullins, who's just a genius. 

He runs all of our product and BD efforts. So having him really scope out from the get-go, “Okay this is something that is viable for the Spectrio. This is a good target”, and then really once we do that, we really try to capture that and productize it. Now, every partner industry's different, but although we are flexible, we still like to put things in a “box” and then scale. For me, it's all about scale and volume. So it's finding the partners that have a lot of endpoints, a lot of clients that we can then go after, and a partner and produce a high volume of revenue as well as endpoints.

That's interesting because I would imagine some of the industry perception of Spectrio is, there's a company that's been growing through acquisition, they're acquiring IP and they're acquiring customers, but I don't know how many people think in terms of, they're acquiring human talent, as you just described. 

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah. So I think that's honestly one of my biggest missions this year is to get the Spectrio name and the vision and our methodology out in space. I think you're right, Spectrio is sometimes seen as a big or a growing company that's growing through acquisitions, and we are, obviously, but we have really focused on getting the right people, and I think that allows us to do both. Having Christian, having Brandon and some others as well on board allows us to grow the right way. Even the folks from the ABN acquisition, they are surprising me, and in a good way, every single week. Just how they went to market, obviously focusing on the automotive industry, but how they went to market was different from how Industry Weapon went to market and very different from how I went to market. But we're trying to find the commonalities both from a strategy standpoint, and then also finding the right people to take what they've done in the past, tweak it for a future focus and really grow the partnerships that way. 

What is the size of the company at this point?

Jimmy Hunt: We're a little over 400 people and growing. We have a headquarters in Tampa. I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and we have people all over, but a big population in that Tampa, Miami, Florida region, as well as Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Oh, okay, and the Charlotte office, that was one of your acquisitions, going back 3-4 years, right? 

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, the Charlotte offices mostly consist of sales, management and there's a handful of marketing folks there as well. 

Are you active in other countries? 

Jimmy Hunt: We are, yeah. So we are international, I would say a majority of our focus is US and Canada but we are active in other countries. It depends really on how we want to grow our international presence. It will be very specific and strategic and we'll most likely go through resellers and partners. Obviously, it's one of the easiest ways to get traction their fast.

But there are, I guess there's 30 million plus SMEs or small to medium size businesses across the US so there's plenty to have here. But some of our acquisitions in Canada have been very interesting and allowed us to have a different perspective and to really see growth there, as well.

Yeah, you bought Screenscape about a year and a half ago, two years? 

Jimmy Hunt: Correct. Yeah, and talking about a couple of guys that have stayed on. One of my top top sellers that stayed on lives in Canada and really took on that whole channel market himself and has just done very, very well.

In terms of vertical markets, where are you guys seeing growth?

Jimmy Hunt: So I'll start with my team, and then I'll talk about the Spectrio at large, but really from our focus, again, from the channel side, we're are targeting resellers and channel partners in three main categories, and so that's media and agency, TV, radio, print, digital, etc.

Second and probably our largest and fastest growing is AV/IT. So that's where all the big players are and again, through the acquisitions, I would say we work with 60% to 70% of the top players in that space, but there's a whole bunch that we can also go after and then the third is  an interesting mix, and these are more true partners than they are resellers, and that's every one from manufacturers of screens, mounts, et cetera. So think of Sony, LG, et cetera, all the way to a Brightsign and more of that player manufacturers. And those have been really interesting for me because it makes so much sense, right? If someone is out there securing deals and lots of endpoints selling their hardware, and they can have the conversation to say have you thought about a CMS provider? Have you thought about the software piece? That's where we've seen a lot of growth, and those partnerships were fun, right? Because like I said, it's less of a sale. It's more of a true value out of saying, okay, we have this 2,000 location retail chain that we're trying to chase, and we know that they need hardware, but they're also gonna need software. So let’s introduce the Spectrio folks at the right time. 

So that's our chase from an industry perspective. From a vertical perspective, it's probably what you would imagine, it's healthcare, QSR, retail, automotive, higher education. For me, personally, higher ed has been super fun. I'm actually having a blast with that, just because I'm talking about an industry that could really use most of our services. You go on site to a big university or college campus. You can say their auditoriums and their stadiums and basketball arenas that have tons of screens that also need high quality content and as well as wayfinding capabilities for the campus itself. So it's been really fun trying to dig into that vertical more.

They can be messy though, can't they? The higher ed, because you have individual schools that have their own IT departments. 

Jimmy Hunt: Oh my goodness, you're absolutely right. Not only that. It's the schools, it's also the athletic departments, and a lot of the build-outs of the various buildings and infrastructure are all different, right? As you know, you would have one part of the campus be renovated a year ago, and the other one hasn't been touched in 25 years. That's why having the product and sales engineers alongside with me pitching those types of clients has been crucial, and also just understanding what their needs are now versus what will be their needs in two or three years.

There's been endless discussion about how the IT & AV worlds are converging and they ought to be best friends forever and so on. I would say it's only been in the last couple of years when you've really started to see that happen. I was intrigued by Diversified bringing on a new CEO and their founder is not stepping away at all, he's going to be very reactive, but much more mentoring, but their new CEO comes out of IT Services. So they absolutely see where the future is. 

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, so without having specific details on why they did that, I think overall, that is going to be the trend we're going to see, and it's not just IT. I think you could slot in content there. I would not be surprised if there's some big changes in the C-suite across the various resellers, bringing in people that have strong content backgrounds as well as IT, I think we're going to see more of a blend, right? 

We're getting to the position where it's almost annoying, I can't go anywhere without looking at screens, and I was in the airport yesterday. I probably sat in and it was technically my day off. I was visiting my family in DC and my team was like, please stop texting us. But I was in the airport just taking videos at the bar, at the restaurant or in the Concourse and all these different types of functionality and services and I think it's becoming so apparent and just consumptions and consumer behavior is really going to help drive this blend of, okay, AV actually needs more of a lock step with IT as well as content. So I'm not surprised by that move at all, and I think it's probably gonna work very well for them.

Yeah. It's interesting that in the last little bit, I haven't seen anybody stand up at a conference or publish something that says, “content is king”, which was an eye-roller for a whole bunch of time. But now it seems to be baked in there that people get it, that this is not about the screens, it's not about the software. It's about what's on the display and you've got to get that right. 

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, David, I think that's absolutely right. I would even take it a step further. I think a lot of times, what I'm hearing is it's all about what's on the screen, but moreover, what story can you tell? And that kind of goes back to the “Mad Men” days of advertising, what story are you going to help that brand tell? It's actually really fun and exciting to see. You could see it come full circle with a new type of media, right? Signage is relatively new. I know it's not new, per se, but in terms of TV and radio, I think digital signage on site is a little bit different, and I think it's been really refreshing to hear people across the board, whether it's this type of industry or that, saying what story can you help us tell? 

Because, in my opinion, I think that is the real value. Because it's not just pushing an ad, it's not just having a menu board. It's what story can you tell, which will then inflict some type of behavior or feeling for the consumers, and if we do that well, then you're going to see all the good things such as higher retention rates, probably higher sales at point of sale, et cetera.

When you're talking to particularly the IT Services people who lead with that sort of thing, what are the questions they're asking and how are they sorting through who they want to partner with? Because I'm guessing things like security come up as being quite important to them. 

Jimmy Hunt: Oh, so I would say security is number one. I would say scale and not just scale within, again, there’s scale in a campus. There's also, if it's a multi location franchise that has locations all over the world or all over the country, can you reproduce this in 500 different cities? I think that in itself is a challenge. I think the installation piece and the survey piece is super important. Again, going back to the infrastructure of how something is built, whether it's a a financial service, it's going to be different than a college campus and that will be different than an attorney's office. So having the ability to not just be pigeonholed to one vertical is super important for us. 

And do you have to, particular running channels, be careful about how you are establishing what your lane is and how you stay in it? Because there are lots of software and solutions companies out there who describe what they do as turnkey. “We can do the deployment, we can do the framing and consulting. We can do whatever you need us to do.” But if you have partners, that's what they want they do.

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, I guess that's been one of the positive challenges and roadblocks that we've had with growth. We start to have a little bit of growth in a particular industry or vertical with a certain reseller type, then you want to pursue that, but it all has to run in parallel to the overall goals, objective of Spectrio. So I would say, outside of my world, we're pretty aligned and locked in. 

I would say with the channel and the resellers, first and foremost, we will always want to lead with being a software company. We want to provide the best CMS. But I think to your point, understanding where we can be flexible and be more fluid with particular partner requests or types, and it could be anything from, how we receive the orders. It can be that simple. It could be, “Hey, we have a certain CRM or some type of software tool that we use to capture orders and send out orders or, billing, et cetera.” But it's being very careful about how we move forward. I think, again, that when we first started the channel partner program officially in Q3, we still have more of a shotgun approach, and that was purposeful. That was a strategy that I wanted to pursue at first, just make sure I was covering all my bases to understand that we didn't leave anything out, and from then that focus has been more and more narrow. 

So now we are hyper-focused on providing the best partnership experience to AV/IT, media and agencies, as well as those hardware providers.

Spectrio started out as doing stuff like music on hold, when people used landline phones and things like that, and in-store music, all those sorts of things, and those still exist within the company. Are they helpful in rounding out the offer for some of the jobs to try to do particularly in retail?

Jimmy Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll answer that in two ways. First a 100 percent, we were started as this in-store on-hold music and messaging company and that allowed us to scale and scale quickly, and then it is still a really big part of our business today, especially when COVID hit it was hard for us to pick up the phone and try to sell signage when a lot of locations were closed, but there were certain products and services such as the on-hold that went through the roof, and it was because everyone was picking up the phone and trying to figure out if their local pharmacy was open or if their favorite restaurant had changed business hours, and people really trying to take advantage of that, saying, "Okay this is one way that we can actually continue to communicate, update our clients with some type of messaging."

But then I think now, to your point, yes, a 100 percent, if we can offer a more holistic solution, a full suite of services to our partners and to their clients, we absolutely do and I think taking a look at the broader partner world, the ones that are consuming multiple products are the ones that are staying longer, that have lower churn, that have higher ASP, that have higher overall MRR with us, and it just makes sense again, and that kind of goes back to how we started this. 

Let's start the conversation with discovery. Let's understand what the pain points are and though signage may be the sharp end of the spear, what typically happens if we're being a good partner, if we're providing that training and collateral, not just sometimes, but all of our products and services. At some point, I bet we'll have a shot at selling in music or selling in content or selling in WiFi. That's been a charge from day one is let's win the business with what makes the most sense, which is 99% of the time signage. But also having the ability to go, what are you doing for music? And isn't that a pain point, and then really trying to find the commonalities between our products and services. 

Yeah, and I assume your resellers and your end user customers are happy as clams if they ask that question, can you do in-store audio too and you say, yeah, we can, because if you don't, they have to go out and find another vendor. 

Jimmy Hunt: Oh, yeah. You're a 100 percent correct there and it's been interesting talking to some of these some of the leaders in the space. Most of our conversations is around signage, but it's always interesting to see their perspective and to hear their delight saying, hey, obviously we're going to keep the conversations around players and signage, but oh, by the way this client or reseller is asking about music, can you also provide? 

And from my perspective, again, it goes back to being a good partner, but what it does for our partners is it allows them product and vendor consolidation, which sounds just like a simple thing on paper, but it's really not because every vendor a partner brings on, that's typically another individual, another workflow, another billing unit, another escalation point, and so if we can help our resellers and their clients consolidate their vendors, that's sometimes is enough just to win the business. Then obviously the second thing that we really lean on in terms of multiple products and services is product diversification. So again, partnering with Spectrio allows, let's say just a typical AV/IT reseller to go, okay we can give you a signage, we can give you software. But now we can also provide you with music. We can now also provide you with content, and that was a big play for me in the media space, because you think others in the space, they started obviously selling just radio, just TV, just print, but over the years have gone digital and, having that digital component can encompass a lot of different things. So having us provide one or multiple products or services allows our partners just an easier path to success.

Last question: we're now starting to do trade shows again. Finally, I've actually got airplane tickets to a trade show for the first time in two-plus years. Where will people in the signage industry be able to find you guys in the next few months? 

Jimmy Hunt: We've been very active. Again, it's been a challenge across the industry. I think people are starting to get more and more in tune and okay with getting back on the road, rightfully so. It was a devastating, challenging time for everyone and every single industry for two years, and it still is. So we've been super-active. I would say future focus, we will be at DSE. We'll be at InfoComm, and then we are in the very near term, there’s a media event out in LA called Localogy, and I'll be speaking on that. I'll be speaking on a panel about content and digital signage and how to bridge the gap between the two, and it's interesting, that is typically a media publisher conference, but we've actually invited a lot of our friends over at Sony and Brightsign. 

My selfish goal is to help blend these two industries saying, these are some of the largest media companies in the world, and I selfishly want them to be in tune with digital signage, and here are some of the brightest and sharpest individuals in the AV/IT digital signage space, let's actually step out and blend the two. So I'm very excited about that. We'll have a presence at several more, but I'd say InfoComm, DSE and Localogy are the three that we're going to really double down on and we hope to see everyone there. 

Absolutely. All right, Jimmy, thank you so much for taking some time with me.

Jimmy Hunt: Dave, thank you so much. This has been great. Being a fan of it for so long and now hopping onboard has been great.

Fred D’Alessandro & Eric Hutto, Diversified

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

New Jersey-based Diversified has grown into one of the world's largest AV integration companies, and certainly among the most active in digital signage.

The company was started almost 30 years ago by Fred D'Alessandro, who just recently announced he was shifting his role in Diversified to make way for a new CEO. He's still going to be very much involved, but says former Unisys executive Eric Hutto is now very much in charge of the company.

The two of them kindly set aside some time recently to talk about that big news, and what's ahead for Diversified. Among many things, we get into the steady convergence of AV and IT.

Fred also relates a story I'd not heard before, about how and why Diversified got started, which funnily  traces to a job he didn't want at the Home Shopping Network.

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TRANSCRIPT

Fred and Eric, thank you for joining me. Fred, congratulations on your decision to slow down and Eric, welcome to pro AV!

Eric Hutto: Thank you. 

Fred D'Alessandro: Thank you. I don't know about slowing down, but thank you. 

Is this a transition that's about to happen or it's been underway for a while and you're now just talking about it?

Fred D'Alessandro: No, it's been under way and it has happened. So yeah, Eric is the new Diversified CEO and I couldn't be happier to have him on the team. Absolutely great move by us, and I'll say it by myself as well. 

You finally did something right! 

Fred D'Alessandro: Exactly, only took 29 years. 

So why now? 

Fred D'Alessandro: A lot of good reasons. I've been blessed to start Diversified in 1993, really as a startup, it's a garage story and to have the opportunity to lead it for 29 years, create a $1 billion organization, I think the first ever in our industry, which is, absolutely exciting and just a real honor, we have an army of industry expertise in the organization. But what the organization doesn't have is somebody with Eric's leadership at this level, when you're trying to build an organization that has a clear path to being a multi-billion dollar organization. So from,the strategy, from the vision, from the operations, how to, I would say, continue to exceed our client's expectations and our employees development, it's the right time and it’s the right team and the right place. So yeah, thrilled. 

Coming out of COVID, we're financially sound. So now's the time. 

So this is not just you deciding, you know what, I want to go down to Boca Raton and lawn bowling?

Fred D'Alessandro: No, I'm a young 63 year old, so I have a lot of energy. But you know what I feel why my value at this point in time for the organization can be used in other areas. I think strategic accounts and clients that I've known for years, employee mentorship, development, things that, again, I know that I'm really good at and I know Eric's really good at taking a financially sound organization, and I've said this in the past it's not so much about how big we are, it's just really continuing to be the best as we get bigger, and that's really important. 

To me, as a founder, again it's about being unselfish and doing what's right for our customers, doing what's right for our employees, and Eric is the right guy to do that for us. So I'm excited. 

So sometimes when a company is founded by a particular person who's still there and when they maybe not step aside, but step back into another role, it could be a bit of a balancing act to say, “No, you need to go talk to Eric about that.” How are you going to work that out? 

Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah look, there's no ego in this organization. 

I've met people there.

Fred D'Alessandro: There's no ego at the leadership level, let’s say that and I will be the first to say that, I am here in a different role, I've made that very clear over the past week to all the employees and that Eric is going to make the decisions on the strategy, the operating model, so the vision is going forward. I'm going to help him as a chairman of our Diversified board of directors. So from that perspective, I'll listen to Eric, I'll challenge him. But at the end of the day, he's going to make those decisions. And if somebody comes to me, I'm pointing them to Eric.

I said this again and again last week, I am very content with the role and making the decision to do this, and really to bring Eric on. We're fortunate to just think sometimes you need luck, and hard work brings that, but yeah, Eric's are going to be great for this role and I really feel he's going to take us to the next level and take our clients to the next level.

Was there somebody you knew or was this kind of a headhunter thing? 

Fred D'Alessandro: So we did a search. Fortunately, the timing worked out so it happened rather quickly. I've spent the last month with Eric, spending a couple of days here and there just to get to know the person and to see how Eric would fit in the organization, and like I said, in many ways, I felt like his skills and tone were similar to mine, but his expertise and where he's been through his career, it's hard to beat. Like I said, it was a pretty easy decision on my part at the end of the day, after spending, like I said, the last month with Eric. 

It's interesting. The pro AV community, particularly people like Gary Kayye, have been going on and on for some time now about how pro AV and IT are converging and pro AV people need to be thinking about this. So to bring somebody on as CEO who comes from pure IT services seems a really sharp move and something that had to be done in a lot of ways. 

Fred D'Alessandro: I would agree with you. I think it is converging. It's been converging, it is more an IT managed services play in a lot of ways. And again, Eric’s expertise is spot on, and we have, like I said, we have an army of AV knowledge and expertise. There's no shortage of that at Diversified. Now it's just bringing that all together with everything else that's happening and training. 

Eric, you come from Unisys IT services and consulting and so on. I'm curious from your background, were you hearing the same thing, but on the flip side that IT people need to be more aware of video delivery and AV in general, in terms of their overall practice? 

Eric Hutto: Yeah, I think, the pandemic simply heightened it. We all got sent home. So if you think about the audio video, quality of calls and the ability to keep things running right, it is a bit different now and I think that forced people to get more educated, appreciate more of the components that go into it versus just servers and storage in clouds and I think it has merged the IT industry over 30 years and has just been completely collapsing all the stacks of technology, and now its technology product gets out and it gets software updated and it lasts for lot longer than it used to because it can be updated.

And I think that's where we're headed with this, I think of it as experiential experiences that we're going to be having in these environments. We're going to have to come together. The morning show can't be broadcast in the afternoon because you went down because of your cloud or your server or you were hacked. So I do think it is the natural progression to take all the sophistication that Fred and team have built around how to create a great experience in a stadium. But now we move just beyond that, to what's coming into the stadium, and how do we keep that under control? Because bandwidth and those things affect the quality of the experience.

I think of Diversified in deployment integration, traditional pro AV roles, but I know you also do services. Do you see Diversified getting more and more into the services and consulting side of the business? 

Eric Hutto: Absolutely. Where we're headed with this digital world, It's all about design thinking. Now I do think that one thing that is core to Diversified that I've seen already is the ability to sit down and really design and layout to an outcome. Where we do that is in big, large, complex things. Not to say that we don't do that in Google Rooms and so forth. Now that's going to have to get a bit more sophisticated, right? As we bring cloud, bring security, bring software-defined networks into the conversation. 

I think I was reading the other day just to get up to speed on what's happening in the business. They say that by 2030, there'll be another $10 billion invested in stadiums. So they're not standing still. It's not a place of slowness. It's speeding up, but it's going to speed up in a software platform as a service model, and people are going to be able to really track and see what's happening almost at the seat level, if you can imagine that at, in a stadium, when they're having a concert of what and how they move sound around. I think it's going to be all software and it is going to be really important.

I come at this from the angle of digital signage. So that's always what I'm thinking about and less so about some of the more traditional sides of IT and AV collaboration and that sort of thing. I've always thought of Diversified in the sense of the last decade or so as among the big integrators, the one that by far was paying the most attention to and most active in digital signage.

Fred, do you still see it that way or the other guy is coming on and realizing, “Hey, we need to do more in this area”?

Fred D'Alessandro: No, I would agree. I think, look, it's still a key business unit for us that drives a lot of value to our customers, and I think continuing to innovate. That is most important, especially in these kinds of markets.

So large network deployments, content creation is an experiential piece to what that digital signage is going to do for the eyeballs that are looking at it. So it continues to really be a focus for us and it is growing. Coming out of the pandemic, we have large opportunities to grow even bigger in that area.

One of your main competitors now has an experience design group for, big, wow factor, corporate office, campuses and things like that. You guys have always worked with the Gensler's and the ESI Design, that sort of thing, and stayed in your lane. Is it important to do what you're good at, but let the experienced people do what they're good at as opposed to compete with them? 

Fred D'Alessandro: Look, that's always been my philosophy. Best in class, usually at the end of the day wins the day. When you're trying to create that total solution and you don't quite have the best people on your staff, it's usually not a good outcome for the client and that's what it's really about. 

What is what's best for the client? I think our approach is the best. 

The IT services business, and I guess to some degree, the AV services business has grown because you have enterprise level customers of all different stripes and sizes. I gather, saying, “We want to do what we're good at. So can you guys take this other stuff on for us?”

Are you seeing that and seeing growth in that area of being turnkey for a lot of these kinds of projects? 

Fred D'Alessandro: It  usually goes in cycles, but I do think that clients are realizing, especially on a global scale to have a single partner that could provide various solution sets that we have, and I think Diversified is the only company in the world, honestly, that has the portfolio of offerings, and then it's managing for the clients, all these different technology platforms and services and we've seen a tremendous uptick in that requirement and the ask of clients, the technology, even though a user base often feels easier to use, the behind the scenes, the back end and all that stuff, it's complicated, and so many customers don't have the staff that can actually operate or maintain the technology. So that's a big growth area for us, for sure. 

Eric Hutto: One of the things that I've learned over 16 years in IT services is that it is a relationship, and that relationship is trusted and you don't get to be a trusted partner advisor if you’re making decisions that are oriented towards yourself, and I think Fred's right, it's always been outcome-based, and I do think that it gets hard to be the best at every single component of the solution, because it's so complicated these days. There's so many things that you have to consider. 

I absolutely would and I have always leveraged specialty partnerships where they bring it. Even Apple doesn't necessarily do all their own gooey work for their applications and what we interface with because they're very good at what they do, and I do think that's exactly how we'll look at this going forward. Will we need to have some knowledge, onsite with us that understand cloud or security? Absolutely, you always want that, but we'll use strong partnerships in areas where people are really specialized to get the best outcome for the client. 

Yeah. It would be difficult for you guys to hire on the level of creative to compete with the guys who you instead partner with? 

Eric Hutto: Right, and that talent wants a place to grow, and we're not a creative company by core, even though it's something that we can do. 

Yeah, you go into the kitchen to have your lunch and you end up talking to somebody who's a sales engineer and you can talk about football or baseball or whatever, but not so much about the core discipline.

Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah, and we're a company of scale. So again, you can't have one person that understands it and believe that you have an end to end solution, which is quite the story in many cases. 

Eric Hutto: Yeah, and just the IT industry skills are going to evolve in our company. If you go back 15 years, you had storage people and server people and network people. You don't really have that as much anymore. They're still out there, but it's all converged and so integrated that we all have different types of enterprise, and I would imagine it will evolve as this stuff converges, as things merge, as we get more platform oriented software that helps us extend our services and capabilities of the people who will need, will grow into a different skill set.

Security has been obviously a huge component of IT services. Fred, have you started to see that becoming a demand on the AV side as well? 

Fred D'Alessandro: It absolutely is a demand. As all the AV equipment, digital signage players have touched the network, it is absolutely a vulnerable point for IT. So yes, the bottom line is it's been going on and it's just every day gets more and more.y scrutinized and restricted. So you have to have that skill. 

French. You mentioned that 29 years ago, this was a garage story. I don't think I've ever heard that, how the company got started? 

Fred D'Alessandro: I'm a broadcast engineer by trade. I was working in the New York, New Jersey area for the station I worked for, I was blessed to be able to work in many different departments. So I got a well-rounded education for my first seven years of employment there and the home shopping network purchased our TV station when they started up, and it was a decision between going to work for the home shopping network and I'd taken a shot at going out there in the world and doing it on your own, and that's literally what happened. 

I was like, “Let's go. Let's try to make something happen,” and yeah, and so again, we went everywhere up to 300 television towers, replacing antennas to studios. So yeah, absolutely whatever dirty work we could get, we did. 

Wow, I had not heard of the home shopping network thing. I was like, do I want to spend the next 10 years sticking an ice pick in my eyes or move on?

Fred D'Alessandro: So that's why I say, things happen for a reason. I'm a true believer in that. 

So today what's the scale of the company? You're much more than just a US company now and there's a lot of bodies, much more so even than 10 years ago. 

Fred D'Alessandro: Now, our revenue is around a billion dollars. We have around 2,700+ employees worldwide. We have 52 offices, 35 of those are in the US, the rest are overseas. All our offices are sales, integration, and service. So they're not just sales offices. We build and service out of those locations, and about 80% of our revenue is out of the US and about 20% is currently overseas and growing and our latest international operation opened up in Bangalore, India and it is really exciting. 

That's a big road trip!

Fred D'Alessandro: Yes, it is. But when I look at all the players in the industry, what I'll say is by far Diversified has invested the most internally to be a global organization. We use partners but our goal is really to be our own entity and work through the rest of the world, and provide our customers with a consistent and standard experience. 

Have you been going to other countries because you see North America as somewhat capped out or crowded in terms of competition versus other markets, or is it just that there's a lot of growth potential in India? 

Fred D'Alessandro: The view of this and the strategy has always been to be where our customers are. So it really had nothing to do with North America being saturated and there's no more business. There's a lot of business here going forward, but those customers that we work with and touch our global customers. 

So if you want to service them the right way and the best you need to be where they are and so that's been our strategy today. 

Is that a demand, when you're working, as you say, with a global customer, like a Fortune 100 kind of company where they want to roll in multiple countries and in the old days, you'd have to say we can do it here, and we'll see who we can find to do this in France and see if we can find to do this in Japan and so on?

Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah we want to make it easy for them to do business Diversified. So that's a saying that we've had in a company a long time: make it easy for our customers to do business with us, and so being able to work and have established entities in these various countries, you're able to buy in the country, you're able to transact in the country for them, and you just avoid a lot of the inefficiencies that you get when you're trying to do things from just the US. 

Eric Hutto: Just like a lot of companies in IT, you get taken to places by clients, right? So you have to be able to operate where their clients took you. Over time, I think as Fred alluded to, we're going to have our competencies and our direct associates, if you will, but there'll be markets that we're choosing to be in because we see the growth in versus we got taken there by client, but we will always have the ability through partnerships and other relationships to service a client wherever they need to be.

I think that's the balance of, direct labor, indirect labor, having more of a variable bottle. It allows you to stay extremely nimble and flexible, but at the same time where you have decided to be in a market, that is where your associates are. 

Has most of the growth that you've seen both domestically and internationally being through acquisition, or are you going into some markets and just opening up as Diversified and starting to hire and do sales?

Fred D'Alessandro: I would say all our expansion has been strategic. We've absolutely never just gone in and said, we hope there's business there and that we're going to sell. So I think Eric's point is very true, you look at what opportunities are in the country, and who our global clients are and where they are. So when you put those two together, you have a really large opportunity. 

Eric Hutto: In my initial, what solid 14 days, Fred, what I have seen in talking with, and I've talked to surprisingly, quite a few people. That's just how I work and learn, I start at the frontline and work backwards. We are growing a lot and mainly from relationships we have because we're tried and true, and we've always done great quality work. 

So I see a lot of organic growth really in this year, Fred, I would say because we've learned how to, really get in with a client and understand the problems and solve them and they continue to consume more from us, and as our portfolio expands and we're able to do other things besides just to your point earlier about integration and putting things in, we just continue to create a stickiness with our clients and create the value. 

Where do you guys see the opportunity over the next couple of years as we get out of this mess with COVID?

Fred D'Alessandro: What I'll say is, I see a tremendous amount of opportunity with, like you said, returning to work is one, which obviously is the collaboration and that piece of it. I think when you look at how digital signage, how media, how IT are all stitching together these disparate technologies into one experience, for, I think our customers, their employees, their customers, is what is really exciting and the opportunity that I think with the pandemic brought a lot of new thinking into our organization about how we can help our customers, not just during a pandemic, but long after and make what we design, what we create, what we install and maintain more valuable than it was in the past. So there's a big opportunity in all these stitching together. 

Did you learn things out of the pandemic as well? 

I saw a lot of investments, a lot of marketing of products that were pandemic-specific like thermal sensors, temperature scanners, alternatives to touch screens and so on, and while there was a lot of noise around it, I didn't see a lot of commercial take-up of them. 

Fred D'Alessandro: Yeah, I would agree. I think that at the end of the day, some of those were needed at the time, but, I don't think there's a future for a lot of these products. As I said, when you think to the core of what companies need to do, their employees need to collaborate. Those types of tools I think, we'll continue to add value. 

When you think about streaming and media and virtual events, those will, I think, continue. So there are a number of things that I think the new workplace and a workforce will embrace, and I think it will add efficiency and it will be a better outcome for all.

Eric Hutto: It also gives us a chance to help companies rethink their work environment. Because even when I was at Unisys, we didn't have everybody coming back to the office yet, but as they start to come back, what kind of office is it, right? And really what people need is collaborative spaces where they can come, engage, connect, get things done, and then move on. 

But I think that's a huge opportunity for us to, again, help them think through the design of what it is they want to achieve with their associate base when they do come back. 

A lot of what I've seen around the workplace has been so focused on the front of house, so to speak, the white collar areas, the offices, and not that much about the production floors, the warehouses and all those sorts of things. Have you seen more understanding of that as an opportunity and a need? 

Fred D'Alessandro: We see a lot of digital signage, IP TV opportunities in the warehouse workplaces, because corporate communications is key.  I mean we have Rachel on the phone here with us, but I think that's one of the things that you learned, especially during a pandemic of how important communication is. So I think companies going forward will need to step up their game, to make sure that everybody is connected because everybody is now always in the office or in the warehouse these days.

So it's important, but that's where I see digital signage, corporate communications, IP TV really being the leader and that's what we do really well. That's an area we've been doing extremely well in. 

So just the last question, what's been the reception around the industry to the news that you're taking on a different role and Eric stepping in?

Fred D'Alessandro: Well, from my perspective I'll say, look, everybody's congratulated me. 

Are they saying, “Oh, thank God”?

Fred D'Alessandro: Exactly, to some degree. People are happy that I'm not going anywhere that I'm still around. But again, as I've made clear, Eric has the football now and I'm here to support him and I'm here to support the organization and our clients. So yeah, it's been really positive, very rewarding. I'm humbled by a lot of the emails and phone calls. 

Well, congratulations to both of you and a pleasure chatting with you. 

Eric Hutto: Thanks, I appreciate it. 

Fred D'Alessandro: Thank you. 

David Crumley, HUSH Studios

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

Experience is one of those soft, squishy terms that gets used a lot in the context of digital signage - using displays and content to attract, engage and leave a desired impression with the people who go through a designed space.

There are many projects that get described as visual experiences that aren't a lot more than screens on walls that are running stuff, but a Brooklyn company called HUSH Studios is absolutely in the business of designing and delivering visual experiences that can communicate the mission, values and products of big corporate clients.

HUSH has done interesting work in the corporate spaces of some of the biggest and most familiar brands in the United States and beyond. The company came on my radar after it pushed out a case study last year showing what was done at Uber's newly opened corporate campus in San Francisco. It's a digitally-driven space, but much more inventive than just a big fine pitch LED on a feature wall.

I had an interesting chat with David Crumley, the Austin, Texas-based Technology Director for HUSH. We get into the thinking and technology challenges of these kinds of projects, what works and why, and his life being the guy who has to make the big ideas into something that exists or can be made, that makes sense, fits a budget, and works reliably.

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TRANSCRIPT

David, thank you for joining me. What does HUSH do, and what's your role? 

David Crumley: Hush  is an experiential design firm based in Brooklyn. Our mission is to design experiences for the most dynamic organizations in the world. Our work is around the globe. Our goal is to seamlessly integrate architecture and digital technology to create custom experiences for the workplace, employees, guests and transform the built environment with technology. 

My role is the technical director and I focus on the kind of AV hardware and systems side of it and we have other technical directors that focus more on the software side. 

So you would go onsite, do site surveys and all that, at least in normal times, and basically work with the big thinkers who say, “we want to do this” and you say, okay, or sure we can do that?

David Crumley: Yeah, that's actually a great way of describing it, and how I often will talk with my team. We have an amazing creative team of art directors, architects that come up with amazing concepts, sketches or quick renders and then my job is to then look at that and figure out, okay, how do we make that? What technologies can we use? Hopefully it's something that exists already, so it's not building something from scratch, sometimes it is. 

And then working with a huge ecosystem of partners on the client side and the build side to bring it all to life.

So at least part of your time is spent understanding the emerging technologies and building relationships with different vendors to understand whether these guys will deliver or they're going to be a problem?

David Crumley: Exactly, right. We spent a lot of time working with LED manufacturers, lighting manufacturers, AV integrators, fabricators, physical computing partners all over the place to figure out, to know, and have a jumpstart on what products or options are out there. What will make the most sense to be permanently installed? Because our project has a lifespan of 10 plus years. So it's crucial to have those relationships in that knowledge of all the hardware and technologies out there. 

The company's key statement is: we mix content, space and technology to communicate an organization's mission, vision, and products.

I'm curious how you get to that, because there's a lot of corporate mission statements out there that somehow managed to be lofty and, in their words, but also empty. Like I'll look at their mission statement, I go, okay, what does that mean? 

David Crumley: Yeah, that's a good question and to be totally transparent, that is not my area of expertise. Thankfully, we have a huge team of strategists and creatives that spend a lot of time upfront working with the clients to distill that down, to figure out the essence of what we should be creating and what should be built and what the messaging should be to actually translate the company's brand and mission and identity in to these experiences that can easily turn into something where it becomes more complex or convoluted.

I think Hush  does a really great job of distilling that down and finding the essence of what needs to be communicated and doing it in an artful and thoughtful way, which is one of the main reasons I've worked with them so long and enjoy the work we do there. 

Do projects lead with digital or is it more a case of, it's just a common outcome because the technology makes sense? 

David Crumley: It's a bit of both. We do start with digital, that is our bread and butter. We are excellent at taking data and content and using that to create amazing visualizations and content and lighting animations, and what not with these projects, but we also do a lot of strictly analog work as well. So super graphics, like fabricated elements that go within the building itself. 

We have a few that have no digital components at all. It's just strictly analog type work. It really depends on the space, the client, the brief, bost of our projects do have digital aspects. 

Do the clients or potential clients come with a brief in mind? Do they have an idea that we want to do a huge video wall in our lobby or whatever or are they saying we want to communicate our mission, our brand, what should we do? 

David Crumley: It's a bit of both, honestly.

We prefer whenever it's the latter, because we have more of a blank page to work with and we can do those extensive strategy design concepts in phases and really figure out what makes sense for the client, their brand and for the space. But on the other side, we do get a lot of projects where the building is built, they have SPECT hardware, they have a big system, but they have nothing to go on it and so we come in to figure out what kind of content or what makes sense on it. So we do a bit of both of them as well. 

I would imagine the latter is maybe not problematic because it's work and it could still be interesting and all that, but to you you're confined to what you can do, right?

David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly. 

Your company's worked with a lot of very big global brands. Why do they come your way? 

David Crumley: That's a good question. I think they are drawn to the work we do that I kinda mentioned earlier where we will work closely with them to distill down what the message and what the concept is.

I think we do a great job of integrating media and content into the architecture, to where it's not just screens on walls or big video wall, like you said, and for the clients that want to have that tight integration between architecture, technology, content, storytelling, I think that's where we stand out and our body of work and luckily that gravitates with a lot of clients, and when they come to us, that's what they want and that's what we do well. And so we're typically set up for success in that regard. 

You mentioned storytelling. I found a lot of corporate lobby video walls and experiences or whatever, it's not so much storytelling, at least with the early ones, it has been more about just the wow factor! 

David Crumley: Yeah, that's very true, like big, bold, fast content, just trying to do that initial kind of wow moment, like you said. And another approach we do is like a slow burn where there is a wow moment in the scale and the architectural elements, but we're not showing all our cards or all the things that technology can do. It's a bit restrained, both in the content and the tech and it allows the content to be a longer enjoyable thing, especially for employees that come into a lobby every day where they don't see everything it can do the first time and it just becomes repetitive.

Yeah, it's interesting when you say slow burn, because I often talk about how the wow factor jobs tend to have a best before date or an expiry date where it just becomes this very expensive, big piece of wallpaper. So, yeah, strategy is super important for that. 

Let's talk about a project that got Hush  on my radar, the global headquarters for Uber in San Francisco.  Can you describe what was done there?

David Crumley: Yeah, so we were brought on very early. So it was one of those ideal situations that I mentioned, being a blank slate where the client knew they wanted to do something in their lobby for a new headquarters building built in San Francisco. It's a multi-building complex and there's one building called, MD2, that is the main entry point and it's an amazingly designed building that has this beautiful open lobby space and they knew they wanted to have some sort of interactive installation there. And we were brought in to do strategy and figure out what made sense.

We did a bunch of concepts, but then they would narrow down to two that we luckily had the time,  budget to actually build out and flesh out both of those concepts with full renders, motion tests, some initial drawings to really flesh them out and all the different content modes, presented our way up through the organization and got buy off on one of those concepts, which is called, The Stream and that was ultimately what was built and the concept behind that on a super high level was just translating Uber's activities into beams of light and motion that would be constantly flowing through the lobby and resolving in a kind of high resolution canvas at one end of the lobby that could be used as a means of providing storytelling, not traditional content, but it would at least be a have the resolution and surface area to provide, video content and a mix of motion graphics and whatnot.

So we worked on that project for, I think the design was about three years, design, construction fabrication, so it was a long-term project and we installed it last year and it officially launched this year, and components of it are being scaled to other Uber lobbies throughout the world that we are in the process of doing now.

I believe at one end, there's a fine pitch LED video wall, if you want to call it a conventional video wall that you might find in a lobby, but a lot of what was done was custom fabricated LED almost like light tubes and things,right?

David Crumley: Yeah. So you're exactly right on the LED wall. It's a fairly standard LED wall but it's about eight feet wide, about nine feet tall. And, above it, and throughout the lobby are these custom tubes. We worked with a fabricator called Machine Histories down in Los Angeles. And again, going back to the privilege and opportunity to have a long design process. And the time to prototype, we worked with them to create two prototypes of these LED tubes and they are utilizing the Martin DC strip, which Hush has used on quite a few projects. And I'm a huge fan of it because it has long cable runs for the power supplies and 16 bit color depth, 60 frames per second,. So I knew I wanted to use that to begin with, but we had a challenge in that we needed to have the tubes as thin as possible, like everything in our architecture team wants to do as thin and sleek as possible, but we also needed to have the content viewable as close to 360 degrees around the tube so we spent a lot of time figuring out the right diffusion, the right placement of the LED, figuring out cable management actually almost productizing the tubes where we worked with the fabricator to make a custom PCB connector from tube to tube, so all the tubes can be easily removed and replaced for maintenance.

But in the end, we ended up having over 2200 of the Martin 15 millimeter strips used in these tubes and there's an overhead component that's suspended from the ceiling that makes this a tube array above your head, as you walk in through the lobby. And that's I think just under 90 feet long and at its highest point, it goes up to 25 feet. 

The lobby has a single height area and then it opens up into a double or triple height space and the tube array actually bins up and goes up to the upper area over some suspended bridges. And then we also built a large wall behind the reception area using the same tubes that forms about a 22 foot high screen by 28 feet wide low-res with the same tubes, but it makes this huge statement that has a bit of transparency to see the stairs behind it in between the tubes and you can actually get behind the tubes and see the same content from both sides. 

I don't know the budget or anything else, but I assume that if Uber really wanted to have high-res tubes or just make the whole thing high-res, they would have the dollars to do that, but they've gone this way. Why was it done that way? They just liked the idea of keeping it low-res or is it more visually interesting that way?

David Crumley: There are a few criteria. One, the visual aspect since the architecture of the lobby has lots of slats and repeating linear elements that the tube array compliments really well.

To your point, the LEDs are premium LEDs from Martin, the tubes are custom fabricated, there's a lot of work. So certainly that money could have been put toward more traditional LED displays or high-res, but having that kind of art more integrated into the architectural design as well as something that just looks different and unique to the space, and we also had another criteria to keep in mind is that this lobby is an unconditioned space and we could not add any additional cooling. So we were trying to keep heat energy consumption to a minimum within the space, which the LED strips are great for.

= So it's an interesting overall discipline that Hush has in that there are creative shops who produce the material for big LED video walls and corporate lobbies and so on and there are vendors who could come into that space to say, yeah, we can put a 1.2 pixel pitch wall right along the whole breadth of the lobby here and there, nut in order to really pull this together, you've got to be creative, you've got to have technology sourcing, and you've got to have a whole bunch of engineers in the middle to pull all this together right?

David Crumley: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about Hush is that we have architects on staff. We have more traditional art directors and designers, motion graphics designers, myself as the hardware background, creative technologists that do custom software dev. So running this actual experience as a custom piece of software that our team built in open frameworks and actually multiple applications written but that does a mix of rendered motion graphics as well as real time content that uses a whole interactive system that I haven't even touched on.

So yeah, I feel like to do what we do, you have to have all these different kinds of departments and disciplines under one roof. 

Yeah, if you don't have that, can you really even be competitive in these kinds of jobs? 

David Crumley: Yeah, it's difficult, because if we didn't have this mix, we e could potentially do the initial concept and then that would then have to be bid out to another firm to build and then potentially another firm to do the software. It becomes costly, I would imagine the cost would then be probably double what it was. 

Yeah, and finger pointing!

David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly. One throat to choke is a good and bad thing, but depending on whose throat it is. 

You referenced content, I'm curious, when you talk about being able to visualize Uber's activities, what's going on there, are you tapping into an API that has analytics that are showing how many drivers are on the road right now or whatever? 

David Crumley: We sourced data but there's no live data feeding it, which we do a mix of content for our projects. Sometimes it's the live API, sometimes it's an existing data set. And with this, we use existing info to build our content around. We do have some things, future content modes we're working on, that'll pull more live data.

But the real time component of this, the interactive mode that I mentioned, is using an array of nine depth cameras that are in that overhead array, and as guests walk under that array, you are disrupting the stream of information flowing above you in the tubes. So you can see ripples within the content, and then as you approach the high-res screen at the end of the lobby, once you reach a certain threshold, it reveals a curtain animation that reveals a more traditional video content on the high-res wall. So you can actually trigger that content.

I recognize that you're on the technical side of this, but I have to ask this anyways, experience is a really soft squishy kind of term. How does it get defined with these kinds of projects and how do you measure and know when you know something is working, that it is delivering an experience?

David Crumley: Oh, that is a great question. I'll take a beat to think about that. Because I'm very much on the technical side and not on the more feelings side of it, for lack of a better term. But I think I personally look into social media posts or seeing what people's reactions to the work we do and how photos are being shared and how they're connecting to it and we, as a company, do analytics in terms of number of guests, their engagement time,what videos they trigger, dwell time, all those things, which we turn into actual intellectual reports for our clients to determine that. 

But I think it's more the kind of personal anecdotes that I find appealing, just how they talk about it's this amazing experience they haven't seen before, or even this particular experience is viewable through the storefront windows and this building is across the street from the arena where the Golden State Warriors play, so it gets a lot of pedestrian traffic. So you see a lot of photos of other people talking about it as well. 

With the pandemic, we've had this shift of head offices being the Mecca, so to speak, and that's where you go. Too many companies have people working from home. I'm curious if that has changed the business, changed the way you have to approach corporate spaces and are companies scaling back, or are they seeing this stuff as even more important? 

David Crumley: I think it's the latter. We were worried at first, a couple of years ago when everything happened. But then as we talked with clients and saw briefs coming out and seeing articles and blog posts from industry thought leaders, we came to realize and also we agree with the stance that things like what we do and Uber’s lobby and other headquarters, I think helped make the office a more appealing place to visit, because it's to actually get employees there especially with content that is refreshed or ever-changing, or that's data-driven because it's something special to see and interact with. 

And so luckily, since the pandemic started, the work we've been doing hasn't slowed down and we're still seeing briefs and clients wanting to do these types of engaging experiences in their offices, public space. 

You mentioned content being refreshed, is that something that you have to really push on clients to understand that guys lighting this up is a great first step, but it's a first step you need to budget and think about what's on this display and what's in this experience for, as you said earlier, 5-10 years? 

David Crumley: Yeah, it's extremely important. I think anything we do, we prepare a content matrix and we'll propose evergreen content that can live throughout the life of experience and then also content that needs to be refreshed or changed or in the case of it being data-driven or built off on a data set, the frequency of that. So there's kind of incentive to keep it fresh, like you said, and for a lot of our projects, after we deploy, we'll build in a certain amount of time for content updates over the next year, two years. That's part of the scope so we can help make sure that happens because it is easy a lot of times for it to be up, everyone's happy and then forget about it. 

Even though we build our own content management system and adjust it to each project, and even though it's user-friendly to use and built to update, it's not always used by every client, obviously. So it's extremely important to do that and continue to update the content like you said.

What do you do in cases where you have a corporate client or potential client who already has a corporate digital signage network with standard flat panel screens in the sales area, maybe other areas as well and they're using already have a CMS of some kind that they use and they have a certain way of doing things and you're trying to plug into that, does it become problematic? 

David Crumley: It's tricky, I'm not going to lie. And we always get the requests like why can't you just use the CMS we have? And it's possible, it's not easy and by the time you factor in all the customization that's required, it’s typically more expensive than just using the custom CMS that we built and then editing it or adding features or modules to do everything that's needed. 

So we almost always will use our core CMS and in the scenario that you said that's come up recently and we're actually building a feature for our CSM so as you use it to create content that's real time and targeting our custom displays, it will actually render out that content in a video format. And so the company can use their existing digital signage system to use that video as well so the content can be shared across. 

So you would have a reverse API, so you could push stuff out to other systems?

David Crumley: Yeah, exactly.

Is there technology, let's say super fine micro LEDs or the LEDs you're starting to see embedded in architectural glass that you're waiting on it to mature and then use? 

David Crumley: Yeah, I feel like over the last two-three years, so many projects or clients or partners have recommended doing LED glass or the LED film that can be applied on glass and it's getting close. We haven't used it yet because it just hasn't been the right resolution or the right brightness or for a myriad of reasons. I am certainly excited by it, but I'm not quite there yet to be able to spec it. 

And even the OLED displays, we haven't really spec’d those yet for the same reason, for content burn-in and just how they work, but I think this year, I'm starting to feel more comfortable with those and we're starting to include those in some of our designs and proposals. 

And yeah, the micro LED, I'm extremely interested in. We had a project last year where I tried to use it, which didn't go super well because the product just didn't live up to expectations. But I think again in another year, I think we'll be close if they can get the kind of coating process down to be consistent across it. But I have not seen that yet. 

You're using a lot of LEDs. Do you have to worry about proximity to people? Are you encouraged by the increasing number of manufacturers who are doing these kinds of coated modules?

David Crumley: Yeah, I'm interested in the coating. That's what I was referring to, not being consistent across the panels yet to where we had a project where it had the coating, but then it almost looked like you painted a brick wall with different shades of paint.

Since we tie it so tightly into the architecture, we try to incorporate ways to naturally keep people away. So like for Uber, for example, we have a nice trim piece around and then the interactive spot for you to deal with it is 10 feet away and, it's a natural stopping point and so it's just using the human nature of not getting too close to a big, bright wall to help protect it. 

Do all the business systems now seem to be a lot more secure, but open through APIs. Are you able to get out a lot more data? 

David Crumley: Yes and no. It's still a little tricky in most regards to get truly live data from a lot of companies for exactly what you said for security, privacy reasons. And then just making sure that data format of the API doesn't change drastically, that's been a big challenge for us. So typically, we'll use live data, but it'll be in a way that can be formatted or have an intermediary step to then make sure it continues to work with our software app.

Through these last two years I would imagine the standard practice when you're working on a project like the Uber one that started well before the pandemic, you would go onsite, you'd be in San Francisco for two weeks or whatever, figuring all this out. 

Have various Hush people had to mostly do this remotely?

David Crumley: It was a mix. We started the design process before and then we did a few site visits before everything shut down. And then we luckily did the prototype review the year before, I guess it was 2019 that we did a lot of the prototype reviews, both in LA and our studio in New York with the client and then during construction, we were not on site until it was essentially installed or close to being installed. And we had a small team that went during the tube and hardware installation. So myself included, I was on site for a couple of weeks at, but it was still a very small team and limited, and we had to do multiple trips spread out over a long period of time, but it was close to normal, but it was still very hard and tricky and you never knew who was actually gonna be able to be on site because of COVID protocol and which team you're going to be working with. 

Last question, if you can even answer this, what is Hush working on that you're allowed to talk about?

David Crumley: That's a good question. I mentioned we're scaling the streamed experience that we did for Uber's headquarters to multiple locations and that's wrapping up now for the main locations and it doesn't have the tubes, it has various just direct view LED walls, but what's nice about that is they're each a little different because they're all tied into the architecture of the space. One is a fairly traditional, single flat wall, but another one has a mitered 90 degree corner and is a very long canvas, I think the resolution's a little less than 7,000 by 900 pixels, so ultra wide format. And then another one has a radius corner around the wall because that's how the architecture was. And it was nice on our end that we developed the software to smartly scale the content across all these different aspect ratios, sso that's deploying now. 

We have a few projects for some financial institutions that are launching now that one of those uses LED strips, this time from S&A, along with a direct view LED wall that is incorporated into these kinds of fins that does this kind of reflected light back on the wall behind it, which is really nice. Hopefully I will be able to talk about it more in another month or two. And then, we have some other things early in the concept phase, but probably not allowed to talk about any of that.

Yeah, I would imagine when you talk about account wins and all that, in certain respects, it’s a much bigger win when you also have the contract about being allowed to talk about it until it’s done.

David Crumley: Exactly. And that's, going back to the Uber project, it's nice that it's ground level, public accessible. So many of our projects are on the top floor that you have to get through security or be invited to see. So, we love the ones that are a little more public facing.

Yeah, me too. There's been a few times when, like the LAX airport with the international terminal with all the work Moment Factory did there, I wanted to see it, but I had to go through post security on a flight to Japan or something if I wanted to see it. So never have. 

David Crumley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've been to LAX so many times. I've not been in the Bradley terminal to see it. And then one time I tried to get to it and had a long layover and tried to connect my terminal to it and it was an exercise in futility and I could never get there. 

All right, David, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

David Crumley: It was my pleasure.