Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Jon Niermann, Loop TV

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

Bars and restaurants have long been a targeted venue for digital OOH media start-ups, the attraction being scale, dwell time and lots of products and services that could be put in front of people sitting around having a drink or three.

But there's been a lot of roadkill through the years, because selling in to these kinds of venues was time-consuming and hard, the cost of installs was substantial, and most of the operators didn't want to pay for anything.

Much of that has changed, except for the evergreen fact that venue operators are highly attracted to free, with benefits.

A couple of ambitious start-ups have emerged in recent years chasing the space, and arguably the most aggressive has been the LA firm Loop Media, which markets a service called Loop TV. The selling proposition is very straightforward and familiar - qualified venues get a free media player and free video and music content.

What's different from the past is Loop's service is all built around streaming, and uses the connectivity and TVs already in a venue. So the capital cost to Loop is just an Android set-top box, and that gets put in a box or envelope and sent to the venue - which then plugs it in, connects to the Internet and uses an activation code to get things rolling. Minimal hardware costs and zero labor.

The company is now north of 71,000 screens, with venues in all 50 US states. And it's now expanding beyond the U.S.

I had a great chat with CEO and founder Jon Niermann, talking about the company, how ads are sold, what content resonates, and how he found his way from high-level executive jobs with Disney and Electronic Arts into connected TVs in places like bars, health clubs and small retail.

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TRANSCRIPT

John, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown of what Loop TV is all about? 

Jon Niermann: Sure Dave, you bet. We provide streaming TV for businesses. It's free, ad-supported or you could do a subscription if you like, but a majority of the businesses are free ad-supported. Think about what you do at home as a consumer using Roku or perhaps Firestick and then do streaming on that. The difference is you're watching TV series and movies primarily. In public venues, like we support, it's premium short-form content, Think of music videos. We're the largest provider of music videos, for example, across the nation. So very contextualized, customizable type of content. 

What's the business model?

Jon Niermann: So we provide it for free, it's ad-supported. Especially coming out of the pandemic, a lot of these public venues were looking for ways to cut costs. So what we've done is we've taken the cost of what you might have to provide for cable and satellite, for digital signage if you're doing menu boards for licensing if you're doing it correctly and we've taken that all away and put it into the loop player. If you don't mind showing ads, which a lot of public venues don't, because they're already doing that anyway, you could get this content for free. 

Our model then, is the ads that we get for the content that we work with various ad supply partners, or if it's a subscription, then we have a set price per month if you don't want ads to change the vibe of your venue. 

I'm guessing a hell of a lot of people are willing to have ads if they don't have to expend the operating expenses on the service. 

Jon Niermann: You guessed right, it’s over 90%. That's typically the way the model goes and people are more than happy to have that experience because like I said, you're out there anyway, you're partially distracted at a bar and restaurants or the doctor's office, or you're just captive. So they don't really mind it as much as they do at home ironically. 

What's the footprint that you have right now? 

Jon Niermann: We're in all 50 states. We're in Canada, we're testing in Australia, New Zealand, and soon in the UK. But we started in the US here in 2020, we rolled out and we've got all the major metro areas. So we've got anything as small as a corner pub all the way up to a university campus. Think of everything in between. It could be an airport, it could be a mall, It could be a gymnasium. You think of it as a public venue and that's what we cover. 

And does it tend to tilt quite a bit to bars and pubs instead of fitness facilities? 

Jon Niermann: The largest percentage of our business for sure are bars and restaurants.

But gyms, I'd say are probably one of the top three, doctor's offices are great. For gyms, think of it this way, we provide music. So even if you're at a place where you watch sports and you have multiple screens, chances of having one of those screens on audio is pretty low. So venues will still play music. So why not have a screen showing music videos, you just play it overhead and it covers that aspect of the business. So really anything. 

If you could think of changing your oil in a Jiffy Lube, for example, thinking of sick of the junk that they have on some of the TVs, you like sitting there in a bar and having Judge Judy scowl at you, Dave, it's no fun. You don't need that. You're out having a good time. You just don't need Wolf Blitzer, it just doesn't kill the vibe. 

And do you hear that from your venue operators, they just want something that's just inoffensive? It's not Fox News. It's not CNN or MSNBC, and it's not Judge Judy or anything. It's just providing passive entertainment. 

Jon Niermann: Exactly. It really enhances the environment, so I talked earlier about contextualizing. If you're at an Italian restaurant, and you want nothing but Italian music or Sinatra and drone footage of Italy all day, you could do that. So it really just adds to the atmosphere.

And if you've got local news or something playing, a bunch of talking heads. It's not exactly that escapism moment that you're looking for when you're going out and enjoying that time away from reality. 

You mentioned that it can cut out some of the costs of digital signage. Do you enable a venue operator to have some time to put in, such as Thursdays are happy hours, starting at three and running until seven or whatever?

Jon Niermann: Absolutely, and it's super easy to just get on your laptop. It's very intuitive how to walk through it and throw your logo on the screen. So if you're Billy's bar and Grill. You got the old Billy's logo up at the corner and happy hour, as you said, every Tuesday and Wednesday night, on Saturdays we've got Billy and the Beaters here on Saturday.

So everything that you used to do with digital signage, you could have crawlers underneath. You could have full screens. You could have a split screen. You're able to do that with your Loop system, all part of it for free. 

That was going to be my question. It’s not a fee-based one that's included in what you're doing if you get the media player for free in the whole bit. 

Jon Niermann: Exactly. So we provide the media player for free. We try to make it as very low cost and low barrier as possible for people just to plug this Loop player up and get going. 

The players are Android boxes, right?

Jon Niermann: Yes. Correct. 

So low cost. When you do a deployment, all you're really doing is sticking in a UPS envelope or whatever and sending it off to the site and you're done. 

Jon Niermann: Yeah, that's it. And if you think about how, a lot of these bars and restaurants, especially worked in the past and still many of them today. You've got these giant AV racks full of computers and big expensive equipment that's bulky, and our players like it a little, it's about the size of a Roku player and Apple TV. You can Velcro it to the back of your screen. You can put it on a rack underneath. It's just something you're used to, and it's odd because this really never existed over the past few years until then because it's just the AV stuff, but everybody's used to using that at home. So it's quite easy for them to take that into their businesses and get it hooked up. 

Yeah, if you buy an Apple TV box and plug it into the back of your TV, then it loads and you find the application. In this case, you'd find a Loop app, and then there's probably an activation code or something. 

Jon Niermann: Yeah. We have for us, you have to have a specific Loop player. So we don't want to have other types of content or anything that may not be licensed. But yeah you load it, you sign in, you put in your code that you get from us, and you're good to go.

And there's a bunch of channels, right?

Jon Niermann: Yeah, we've got about a hundred music channels, so think of them as playlists. One of our popular ones, for example, is Beach Country. Who knew, right?

Yeah, I don't know what that is, but okay. 

Jon Niermann: So you get all these. We have Darcy Fulmer; she is fantastic, just in terms of customizing and putting all the playlists together for us and curating and really on the pulse, long-term time music industry executive, a great relationship with all the labels. So she really knows how to customize these things, and we weekly look at what are popular channels, we could adjust, we put in seasonal channels, we put in celebratory type channels. Obviously, with a bunch of Halloween ones now coming up, Christmas is always a popular time. So the venue has over a hundred of those to choose from, and then you've got about 50 non-music channels. 

So if you want everything from Looney Tunes, believe it or not, it is a popular one for people to choose from because again, you are just looking at the visual type of stuff. But for failed videos, viral videos, we got the TikTok channel. So it's a great brand, World Surf League. So if you're at a surfing store, hunting, fishing, anything that, again, is contextual and customizes that environment, if you're in autos and cars and you want that type of playing all day, you can do that too. 

So, I'm guessing you have a pretty big content edit team and also have to have folks who specialize in licensing rights and approvals, that sort of thing, right?

Jon Niermann: It's funny. Our team is so small. The company itself has about 70 people. I think on the content side, we're between the studio, the creative team, and the curators; it's less than 10, believe it or not. So we're very lucky. I already mentioned Darcy, but we have Justis, who runs our content, and Luke and all the guys who have been with us for a long time who understand.

What the customers need. We talk to the venues, we get ideas of what they want, and what's going to be popular, and then we strike deals with these companies. We do the editing, and the customizing and get it all ready to go. 

So are you able to say to the surf channel or somebody like that, that here's the format, here's the run times that we would like and so on, and they will send that to you or do you pretty much have to take their stuff and then touch it?

Jon Niermann: It's both, so you're right. There are some that could just do an RSS feed and just say, here you go, and we give them the specs, and that works. Others will just dump a bunch of stuff in a folder, and then our editing team goes at it.

Are there obvious trends and things that you know that people will like and other ones that you've tried and thought, let's just see, and then you find out it resonates or it doesn't? 

Jon Niermann: Yeah, it's funny you say trending-type things like what's popular now; people like to get those headlines. So, if you could picture a screen, it's full of visuals, it's full of subtitles and context because you have to be able to understand what you're looking at without lip reading. 

And that's part of the reason we know that talking heads are sitting down, even like you're used to with say, ESPN or some of those shows, it doesn't necessarily work that well if you just got a bunch of people up there talking. So we've gotten that feedback. We understand that it's a very strong visual. It has to be short, like a two or three-minute type thing, and you have to have enough hours per day where it's not repetitive, and that's super important as well. 

So, would a three-hour window or whatever run every day for a week or a month or something like that? 

Jon Niermann: Yeah. Typically, for us, we'll do at least six hours. Some of these playlists are 20, believe it or not, and then not only that but if it repeats, it'll shuffle. So, the chances of actually seeing it really don't exist. So you can understand if you've got all those files in there and you're shuffling, you won't see the same order again. So it's not only the customers, it's clearly the employees that you don't want to get fatigued. 

Do you call this a digital out-of-home, or is it like consumer TV or some sort of segment having to do with fast streaming, or what's the nomenclature for this?

Jon Niermann: It's a fantastic question, and I laugh because it's what we're talking about all the time these days because it's trying to define it to the advertising community, especially. For us, it's simple. It's just TV. Just think about where you're watching your TV. If you're on your couch or if you're in a bar, you're watching the same TV, it's different content. This is premium television. This is not just all YouTube user-generated stuff. We've got branded partners. 

So for us, we're very much connected to TV, CTV for out of home. So when we talk to the ad partners, they are like, look, you can take your CTV budget, and you can put this towards a Loop because it is premium TV. If you think lots of times when they're thinking out of home or digital out of home, they're thinking of billboards, they're thinking of that type of display, as you know very well. So we're developing and introducing that space of, it's just TV. It really is. It's CTV. So think of Loop that way.

Yeah. It's interesting. I've been involved in this space for, God, almost 25 years now, and I can remember when I started a digital out-of-home media network in the early 2000s, going to media planners, and they're looking at me with their heads tilted and going, What the hell are you going on about?

At that time, the people who were advising me or I was working with were saying somehow or other we have to tap into the TV bucket and call ourselves in some way TV because there's way more money in that bucket than there certainly was at that time in the out-of-home bucket. But that's changed a lot, but I would imagine that connected TV is still probably a bigger number to tap into than out-of-home.

Jon Niermann: For sure. It's significantly higher still. I think both are growing to your point. Digital out of home, the budgets are certainly increasing. It's one of the fastest-growing components of the advertising mix, which is great, but CTV is also that way.

People have shifted away from the traditional linear TV, Cable, et cetera. They moved into streaming. So, it's not unlike any evolution. It's something we often try to talk about as well. If you think back to 2007, when Netflix started and then Hulu came on and all these channels, you're like, who the hell are they? I'm used to buying NBC and Fox, and I just wrapped my head around the weather channel and ESPN, and now you're trying to introduce this streaming stuff. Today, of course, most people are buying streaming, and so for us, we're in that same evolution for the businesses with out-of-home, kind of where they were in 2007, and consumers like, look, this is another form of television. So you've got to treat it that way with your funnel of advertising span. Otherwise, you're really missing out on a fantastic mix and opportunity to reach these consumers in a captive way. So it's always a constant education going on when you're introducing something.

You’re competing against all kinds of media, but more specifically, Samsung TV and LG TV show up in your smart TV, whether you want it or not.

Jon Niermann: Yeah. Again, it's about licensing. Many of these companies aren't licensed out of home, believe it or not. It's a whole different set of licenses, especially on the music side. You have to have performance rights. You have to, and venues could get big fines. You cannot plug your phone in and play Spotify, for example. You can't turn YouTube on and play those videos.

But they do, and they will continue to do that. Just like people are seeing the 65-mile-an-hour speeding thing, they're going to get away with 75, push it up to 95, and you're pressing your luck. So, if you've got a lot of venues out there, they will do random checks. So for us, it really truly is about, we can't control that side of it, but what we can control is providing a reason for them to use us, and that's typically through the content and just through easy use and affordability.

So you can say to your end-user customer base, “Use us, it's going to be reliable. It's stable, and guess what? You won't get a cease and desist letter from YouTube or Spotify or anybody like that.”

Jon Niermann: That's right. Yeah, or the associations like ASCAP, BMI, all those guys out there that are just tracking and waiting to find people for public display. 

One thing that interested me was how you are doing, I think this happened within the last year or so. You've activated self-serve ads. I'm curious how that works and why you went down that path. I suspect it has a lot to do with somehow tapping into local ads that are really hard to sell unless you've got an army of salespeople.

Jon Niermann: That's exactly right. You nailed it on the head. As for your time in this industry, local ads are a big part of it, you've got your national and regional ads, but local ad budgets are large and growing from what we can see. So the ad server that we created, Bob Gruters, who's our chief revenue officer, came from Facebook and Instagram, and he has a lot of experience with the ad server that they used over there.

And it's very easy. It's a self-serve type of thing. So we're being innovative and providing this for an ability for you to put your ad on TV that way, where you could go in as any type of business and if you want to have your ad on Loop and across our network, whether it's locally in your town, your County, your state, you'll be able to do that. So it's a very simple way just to go and upload an image or a video and have that play. 

Do you give them any help in terms of video production or through templates and things like that?

Jon Niermann: Yeah, we do. There are easy templates for people to follow, and again, we try to make it as simple as possible. The closer you can get to plug and play for everybody. 

First of all, they don't have time, they don't have patience. If it's too complicated there, they've got 50 other things they'd rather deal with or have to deal with. So you've just gotta make it super simple for them. So, for us to be able to say, if you just want to throw your logo in, we'll do the rest. It's that automatic.

You've done this like a third-party partner, right? I think it's Orca TV. 

Jon Niermann: Yeah. Orca TV, they're here in Santa Monica with us in the LA area, and they are fantastic partners. They've been a partner with us for a couple of years now, and just some really talented people like Mike Woods over there and their ability to develop, they've just done a great job.

I assume this is something you theoretically could have done on your own, but then you have to support it and keep it up and secure and everything else. It's just easier to go with somebody who focuses on that. 

Jon Niermann: Yeah, it is. And Liam McCallum, who runs our tech, has been with us from the beginning. In fact, Liam came with me from Electronic Arts. He used to run EA's kind of online gaming out in Asia. So very capable, smart tech guy, but with a small tech team; coming to my point earlier, sometimes we just have to work with others to get it done, and Mike and the Orca team, we had a great relationship with, and they have the capability and the ability to do it now.

In terms of sales, are you going direct? 

I realize for hyper local, you're using this self-serve platform when you can, but do you have a direct sales force, or are you relying on programmatic partners? 

Jon Niermann: We do have a direct sales force. That really only ramped up, I'd say, over the last quarter, so about the last three months.

Prior to that, we had to really build our scale. We had to build our distribution. Once we got to about 20,000 venues last fall, we could start to sow the seeds directly. And as you know, that just takes time. So, over six to nine months, we went out there, spread the word, and then the deals started coming across as we continued to grow; we're over 70,000 now. We've had that ability to move from just pure programmatic. 

I mean, we were in programmatic, like an open auction, and that was it, and then the bottom kind of fell out of that market, as we all know, the end of last year and the beginning of the year. So having the diversity now of direct sales and local ads is going to be much better for us going forward.

Yeah. I was curious about programmatic. I was in New York last week for a couple of days and dipped my head into the DPAA conference and chatted with some people and I got a sense of frustration and disillusionment from them about the promise versus the real return that they're seeing out of programmatic, which is always challenging to me because I don't understand what the hell they're going on about, but I gather that it's not really generating the revenues that operators like you need.

Jon Niermann: I think it's a couple of things. I think there was definitely a dip, and people for no fault of the programmatic partners, the advertisers weren't spending as much, but that's come back, and I think the other thing is probably what you were tapping into or hearing because we were also at that conference and we just discussed TV. How do you define where those monies go with programmatic, how did the agencies allocate them, are these programmatic partners doing a good job and really advocating for television, CTV, and digital out-of-home?

That's potentially where some of the tension could come from, but we've been very fortunate to have some great programmatic partners step up and then we've also felt like there's some that could do a lot more, and certainly in defining this, the way that we're talking about would benefit them as well as the clients and it would obviously benefit people like us down the stream.

Is the right mix having you primarily sell directly and then supplement that with programmatic versus relying on programmatic? 

Jon Niermann: I think it just takes a minute to get there. I think it's always going to be probably a best-case, like a 50-50 type thing. I think programmatic is always going to be a big part of it.

Direct needs to be built, but programmatic works. It's efficient. There are some great ads, and there are some great dollars that kind of come through that. You have all different types, right? You've got everything you need, but as part of the mix for us, I think direct and local will certainly increase.

You're not alone in doing this. There are a handful of other companies currently chasing this kind of business, and it's a medium, so to speak. It's been around since the early 2000s, the whole build it and they will come at that time, it was very expensive to do now as you know more than just about anybody, it's not as expensive to do it.

Where are you at with it? 

Jon Niermann: It's funny, because where are we ever on the evolutionary scale? It's like you started a business ten years ago. How many times have you heard people say you were just too early? You were just ahead of your time. I think for us, to your point, people have tried. I don't know if the timing has been right. I don't know if the content or the technology has been right, but it feels like it's right now and certainly coming on the success of streaming, and how that blew up, it became huge and “ the streaming wars,” and everybody's talking about it. They completely ignored out-of-home, and I get it; the consumer pie is bigger, but this pie is not small. 

So I think the big companies aren't focused on it because if you're those big companies, you've already built your libraries with the content of TVs, and movies, you spent billions of dollars. You'd have to do a whole different thing to build this. With this type of content and targeting, and even if you're a big player consumer, it doesn't mean you can all of a sudden have 50,000 locations overnight. It's a long selling process for a lot of these venues. So, I think we're at a very good place. I think that we're about 2% penetrated in this market between us and the other players, and there are a few private players that are doing this streaming TV either by ad-supported or subscription and if you add us all up, I truly believe that we're about maybe 1%-2% penetrated. So, a great green field ahead of us. 

I'm sure you don't want to go on at length about your competitors, but how do you distinguish yourself from them?

Jon Niermann: I think if you look at other competitors out there, some will charge an activation fee, some will take a credit card. Those are barriers to entry that we don't think are necessary and not great for customer relations. The minute you throw that credit card down, you feel better as a company, I think, because you think you've got a path to revenue or more secure revenue, but you start having things, where you just disagree with a customer and credit card comes into play. It's not a good thing. 

So, I think for us, it's just more of a pure relationship of let's make this work. So, I think people are trying different models. There's nothing wrong with that. Even if it's ad-supported, a subscription, it goes back to the old cable days as well, remember there used to be big activation fees or they waived activation. So, it's just part of the business. So I think for us, we deal in premium content. We, by far, I believe, have the top premium content. We're really the only one that had those music videos with Sony, Warner Universal, and even Disney. We've got all the licenses from the majors. That really sets us apart. 

Your background is with Disney, as you just mentioned, and with Electronic Arts. How did you find your way into this back in, I think it was 2016. 

Jon Niermann: Yeah, it's funny. I was with Disney for 15 years. I went out to Asia with them at the end. I was actually president of Disney Asia for several years and then went over to Electronic Arts when they were really growing their online and mobile games. In fact, we launched the first online and mobile game for EA out in Asia. That was just a really big and opportunistic time for me to learn about that industry, so I really enjoyed that, but also, you got that entrepreneurial bug. 

You see all these companies being built around you, and you're thinking, I really want to do that. I took about 22 years in corporate and decided that I wanted to be linked somehow to entertainment, media, and technology, and we had a couple of different iterations before it ultimately ended up here as Loop. 

What did family and friends think about going from pretty substantial companies to a media startup?

Jon Niermann: Oh, the typical mix that I lost my mind. Let's just start with that and stop with that, probably. But it was like, why would you leave these jobs? These stable jobs have great titles and access, and it’s true. You've got that card, with Disney, EA’s President on it, you can open up a lot of doors, and then all of a sudden you become a co-founder, CEO of Loop Media, it's like who, what? 

Everything just has to start over, in a sense. But I found that exhilarating, and it's been up and down and sideways and easy and challenging and rewarding and regretting and every emotion that you go through. But to get to where we are today is extremely satisfying. And again, going through bumpy times this past year. The previous year was great. We launched our company. Our revenue went from 5 million to 30 million. We went to the New York Stock Exchange. In this past year, we got hit, but we're fine, and we're coming out of it and looking forward to this coming year.

That's a good way to wrap this up. I am curious what we'll see out of the Loop in the next 12 months. 

Jon Niermann: I think you will see us be aggressive with distribution. I think a couple of things that we lack awareness of, we're undiscovered. So a lot of people just don't know about us. So you're going to see more marketing. You're going to see more brand building, more partnerships, and more engagement with clients, consumers, and venues. For example, we're launching a new Trivia product that's hosted Trivia. You have the opportunity that'll become interactive soon.

We're looking at various other things that'll become interactive within the venues. So I think it's a very exciting year to just increase that engagement and take advantage of connecting with those consumers. 

Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned some of them like doing other things in the venue. That's one of your competitors, maybe not a direct competitor, but it does similar work. They've focused as opposed to just pure entertainment. They've focused on kind of venue operations and helping to sell more stuff and communicate to staff, and everything is you're angling towards that as well.

Jon Niermann: Yeah, we do. I mean, you could take your Loop player. We have it right now and use this back at home for staff communications because a lot of staff members are not going to read email, so if you just have this screen with the messaging going back of the house, you can certainly use a Loop system for that. So engagement is definitely a big part of what we're looking at in the future.

All right, John. This was terrific, I appreciate spending some time with you 

Jon Niermann: Thanks, Dave. I appreciated it.

Gil Matzliah, Novisign

I bumped into Gil Matzliah at a conference this summer, and told the software executive we were long overdue to do a podcast about what's happening with his company, Novisign.

We finally nailed down a date and time, and as it turned out, it was just days after the horrendous violence that broke out in Israel - where Matzliah and his company are based.

We chatted about the situation and the impacts on his company. He's fine, his family and staff are fine, but everyone is understandably rattled.

We then got into the roots of Novisign does, what's different about its CMS solution, and what they're seeing and hearing in the marketplace. Novisign was an early adopter of Android and it remains its primary go-to operating system.

Though Israeli, more than half of its business comes from the US and another quarter from Europe. And now the company is growing business in Japan.

Transcript

Gil, thank you for joining me. You’re in Israel, where a few days later things went crazy there. I have to ask, how are things going? How are you? And I assume the family's fine and everything? 

Gil Matzliah: Yeah. Thank you for your concern. Yes, me and my family are all good, also the team members that are here in Israel are good. Last Saturday was a very hard day in Israel. It's something we never expected would happen. But now we are good.

Your offices are pretty close to the West Bank, aren't they? 

Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, Israel is a small and tiny country. It's not too big. So everything is close to everything. Our office is close to the West Bank, the conflict and all the issues you hear now in the news have been in the south area of Israel with the border of the Gaza Strip.

I hope everything continues to be fine for you and things settle down there.

Gil Matzliah: Yeah, we also hope so. At the end of the day, we like to work, we like to have peace, everybody wants to build good things together and so do our neighbors. In NoviSign, we have Arab Muslims, Christians from all around the world, Jewish people, we all work happily together and that's what we hope the world will go for. It's just this thing with the Gaza Strip that... and there's an organization called Hamas, who is making the issues and challenges for our regions, which I hope will be better moving forward. 

Has staffing been affected at all? Have you had members of your staff be called up to the military?

Gil Matzliah: Yeah, in many countries, they call some of the stuff but you can say it's less than 10% for a team all the time one or two people in total.

Yeah, it's just one of those things which you can't help but be directly affected in some way because of the size of the country and the way things operate, right?

Gil Matzliah: Exactly. Yes. 

All right. So enough of that. I don't want to dwell on it and no doubt by the time that things will have changed and hopefully gotten better. 

Just for the benefits of people who maybe don't know your company, can you run down what you do, how long you've been around and how you distinguish yourself in the marketplace as NoviSign.

Gil Matzliah: Perfect. So, we are NoviSign. We do digital signage software. Our company is based in Israel and provides services from all around the world. We have people in the US, Germany and Japan. With a team of more than 200 partners all around the world, we give a global software as a service for digital signage.

I started a company with my colleague, Avi 12 years ago. It was 2011. We established it here in Israel, with the dream to be a great startup, changing the world and leading the digital signage software. 

Have you changed the world? 

Gil Matzliah: It's not so easy but we're sure we'll do it. We are making changes. We are progressing. Opening a startup 12 years ago, that's a long journey and like a roller coaster, you go up, you go down, but you keep going forward all the time. And after a few years, we started to see the good results coming and since then we are growing and growing constantly every year. 

Good. So if you were lined up against, let's say, 10 other CMS software companies out there and somebody said, all right, I've looked at all these other ones. What is it about you guys that's distinctive and different and important? What would you say?

Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, first it's the team. We came with a lot of experience in software programming. We are technical people. We are software programming people. We have opened the company to lead in the platforms that enable people to do that. So, it's the team that you work with. It's the technology behind the servers, the player, the communication, the integration and it's the offering that we have.

We have a wide offering, which is very reliable and secured and trusted by thousands of customers around the world. 

You mentioned security and I know you're SOC 2 certified. Was that important to do? 

I'm hearing more and more from a variety of different companies saying that the security piece of this is really important, maybe much more so than it was even a couple of years ago. 

Gil Matzliah: That's correct. So more and more organizations are looking at security, but also it's the maturity of the company.

So when NoviSign started with few installations, what you are busy with is just building software that works. And then after it works, you start adding more and more features. And when we started, we were looking at a small and medium businesses. But slowly, as people saw, we have a nice, easy to use platform, then the bigger companies started wanting it. But when you go for a bigger company, and as time changes, all these medium and large companies today want better security, they looki at all these RFPs, abd you really need good security in order to get these customers.

Have you evolved like a lot of companies have, where they started with the small to medium business market and now they're more focused on enterprise?

Gil Matzliah: We are not focusing on enterprise yet, but this is the growth engine that we have. So if you had asked me like five years ago, we wouldn't work with banks, insurance companies or bigger Fortune 500 companies. But if you look recently in the last five years, we started to work with a few banks and corporations and insurance companies worldwide and there is the bigger number of bigger business we work with now.

I'm curious when you say five years ago, you wouldn't have worked with a big bank or somebody like that. Is that because your platform wasn't ready for it or a very large customer, as I've said to some other people in the past, they could be great, but they can kill your company because they just get so involved and they can be so needy?

Gil Matzliah: It's a good point. So if I look at that, I can tell you an interesting story. Like a year or two after we opened the company and we have the website and we started to do promotions and we started to go to shows and I'm sitting in my home and suddenly I'm getting, today we have people in the US, but back then we were just in Israel, and a call was redirected for me from the US and it was the MTA of the New York transportation company asking about our platforms. 

And you're not really ready for these types of companies when you are less than 10 people, a small company with a new product. But once you are in almost 10 years or so, and you have enough people to support, enough understanding of the security, the features, the integrations, the platforms, then you get ready to serve the bigger companies. 

You work with a lot of different platforms and therefore hardware partners. I know you're on Android, you're on different SOC platforms for smart displays, all that sort of thing.

Is it a challenge to manage the variety of, they're all are just similar in certain respects, most of them are Linux in some way or another, but how easy or hard is it to stay on top of all those different ones? 

Gil Matzliah: It is a good point. It is a good challenge because looking at that, when you're a small company and at the beginning we started with Android.

I think we've been one of the first, if not the first, to develop an Android based player, an APK back in 2011. There are more and more people on Android, it's not the most of them. And then we started to add ithers, we added Windows, we added Chrome, we added Linux, now we are adding HTML Player, we are adding Tizen, we are adding WebOS, and we're adding more and more features. It's becoming very complex to support them all because once you have a change, you need to see it's working on all the platforms. 

And when you speak about the Android platforms, just the Android platform has so many versions. And we even have, lately, forced all our customers with Android that is less than 6.0 to stop using the system because until half a year ago, there were people that were still using Android 4.4 with us and the difference between Android 4 and Android 12 is huge. So imagine that fixed security support, as you say it's becoming to be more and more challenging and you need to grow the team and it's slower for you to add new features because you need to see that it's working on all the platforms, but we do believe we should be always hardware agnostic because what is differentiating a CMS software from a Samsung LG and all the other display manufacturers that are doing the software is that we work with all the platforms and they work just with their platforms. So we keep it as a focus for us. 

Is technology enabling you to go towards being operating system agnostic without having to make compromises in terms of, yes, we can work across all of these different platforms, but we can't do everything on each of them or whatever, which I've heard versus, natively written software that's native to Tizen, native to WebOS and so on.

Gil Matzliah: Yeah, it's hard to do 100 percent of your features on all the platforms. Not all the platforms, not all the OS work equally. So our main player from the first day until today is the Android, which we can do 100 percent of our capabilities. When you go to Tizen or WebOS, you are limited in some way, and then you need to give away some features sometimes when you're developing your platform.

Are you finding that the marketplace end users and your reseller partners are starting to settle in on certain solutions, like they're settling in on Android or whatever it may be? 

Gil Matzliah: I think you probably know better than me the hardware, the platforms, the ways to do digital science is like a big jungle. There are so many things and choices, even the software, you always say that there are many more CMS platforms. 

So there are so many varieties there. So I don't see anybody locking on anything and that's why we keep the diversity to be able to support the most.

For the technical people at AV companies that are just starting to get into digital signage or the AV IT people for end user customers. Do they look at this space and go, come on guys, can you just establish some standards and continuity and not have all these varieties of options? 

Gil Matzliah: They're asking for that. We are asking for that. I think the world needs that. The one thing, we do see that Android, since we started 12 years ago, and imagine 12 years ago, you didn't even have a set up box of an Android, or just the first one was just coming in 2012, like the year after we started, or the first year of NoviSign.

And today, most of the world, most of the set up boxes around the world are Android based. So we do see that Android... both the system on chip and both of the players have been the main platforms for digital signage. For us for sure, more than half of our installation and most of our installations are Android based either with a player or with a system of chip. I find it very strange that Samsung and LG are still struggling to stand out technology and not going with the mainstream. 

That seems to be changing. Samsung is moving away from its software partners, at least it certainly seems that way and marketing its own platform and LG WebOS now has a standalone player, a WebOS player, as opposed to you having to buy their display so that they've got some flexibility there.

So I think the big guys are seeing the need to either adjust or just decide, you know what, yes, we have partners, but we are going to do our own thing as well. 

Gil Matzliah: We believe in Android, but we still believe that we would need to be hardware and OS agnostic.

Partner and end user demands, have they changed through the years? Like what they wanted when you got into it or maybe even five years ago, is that different from now? 

Gil Matzliah: That's an interesting question. I don't notice a big change in the partners. But one thing is for sure, customers, partners, they want everything all the time, so we need to be there to deliver it for them.

The impression I get generally is both for the AV/IT ecosystem and particularly on the end user side, they understand the technology a lot more, they understand the benefits and so on. So you're no longer having to put stuff up on a website or elsewhere saying what is digital signage and here's the reasons you want to use it and so on. 

They get it, they understand it, perhaps they've used it, and now they're looking for their second generation of software because the first selection did the job, but didn't really do what they wanted or limited their capabilities. Are you seeing that? 

Gil Matzliah: Yes. I think the world is more familiar with digital signage. When we started 12 years ago, not many people would knew what it was, what you do with it, how you install it. 

And today, every new project of signage is an integral, internal mass part in all these new setup locations, public places, and when more and more people are dealing with that, then they have more knowledge about it and then they start to learn more, to ask for more and this is something we do see.

Are there particular vertical markets that you're seeing a lot of growth in and that you guys are focused on? 

Gil Matzliah: I can tell you about the geographical region. So most of our business, more than half of our business is coming from the United States, which is the easiest market to work with. The faster trying thing, understanding thing. Then we have the European market with a quarter of our business coming from there and they’re more conservatives, what they're getting, how they're getting, planning, trying and so on. And then, we have the rest of the world and we are focusing and growing in the last five years in Japan. We have a local team over there in Japan and in Japan they are testing more, asking more. If you deliver and if you have a lot of patience, then it grows. So these are the regions that we work with. 

As for the different sectors, we really don't have anything which is like more than 20 percent of our business. We do have hospitality, we do have health care, we have the cooperation, we do have retail. 

But we started a new initiative, which we spoke about in the past a little bit. We established with some partners a company named which is focusing on the retail industry. So everything which is fanning out from retail. Today, we are moving to this new initiative that we built and generally the sectors. 

Are you mainly selling through a “channel” or do you sell direct? 

Gil Matzliah: We are acting both direct and on the channels and both of them are significant for us. So, there isn't one which is more or less significant than the other.

A lot of our partners are white labels. There are so many installations around the world, which are based on the NoviSign signage that you won't even know. 

Which I assume is very important to these partners. 

Gil Matzliah: Yes, because for years, these partners have had their their software, their brand and our support behind it and we give them like instances and so on.

We give them confidentiality, of course, if an end user will turn anything upside down and look and research, after some time they’ll find us, but it's working fine for our partners and for us.

Are your partners layering on managed services so they're white labeling and then saying, we can run this network for you or at least keep an eye on it?

Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So when we're working with a local partner, and we have more than 200 of them all around the world. The nice thing is that, if a customer is calling us and say, I want to install this hotel, this hospital, this restaurant, this city hall, we'll tell him the first thing, we are a software company. We are SaaS, it's a do it yourself, we can support you over the phone.But if you want installation, if you want hardware, if you want initial setup, if you don't have the right people in your organization, then we can refer you to one of our partners. 

Our partners, they are integrators. They know how to build the right hardware, how to configure our software, and how to set it up for the customers, and they do it because they know it much better than us.

So, if a customer just wants to get the SaaS subscriptions and they're going to do it themselves, then your partners aren't going to really see anything out of that anyways. They're looking for the services and the hardware integration, all that stuff, so they're not too fussed if you go directly on that but if there's an opportunity to layer in things, then you throw it to your partners. 

Gil Matzliah: Yes, because we are not going to do meetings with our customers. We are not flying to customers. We are not driving to customers. We do everything software, everything from remote. As long as you need a meeting then it's not going to be sent anywhere.

Are there, “whale accounts”, big reference accounts or they could even be small ones that you, when you get asked about who you're working with that you're able to talk about? 

Gil Matzliah: One of our biggest accounts is Worten in Portugal, which is like Best Buy, that has more than 10,000 endpoints with us and we do have some other big corporations and hotels with us as well. In Israel, I can tell you some names like Ikea, Coca Cola, most of the hotels that are working with us here and many other big brands.

In that Portuguese big box electronic store, what are they doing in there? Is it strictly just big displays or are they doing interactive?

Gil Matzliah: It's more like a display of things, but they have a lot of initiative, they're very innovative and for more than five years, we work with them and they are always one step ahead of the market, whether it's very nice gates and video walls and presentation layers and everything related to products. In a way, when you go to the Worten store, it will dress the entire store with a special occasion, holiday, festival and the promotion that they do.

I'm curious about how your company is using AI. You come from a part of the world that has, pretty serious number of technical people, and some of the AI companies have come out of Israel. Are you applying it or are you looking at it as something you can use? 

Gil Matzliah: We know and believe that AI will be a part of digital signage. We know it's important. We know it's just the beginning of it now, so the value you can create with it, it's not big yet, but we know it's coming. So, at this phase, we didn't release anything or expose anything, but our technology team is looking at that and trying to do a few things. We might present something in ISE, which is coming at the beginning of next year.

And would you use it for… I moderated a panel the other night in New York about all this and I said the presentation layer of using AI for generated visuals and so on, is interesting, but to me, the truly interesting stuff is back of house automating routine tasks and creating marketing materials without a whole bunch of work involved, and one of the guys ran a media company was talking about data input and harmonizing data and all that sort of thing. So somebody looking at this from afar, they might think that's pretty boring, but it can be pretty valuable. 

Gil Matzliah: We are less looking on the operation side, as AI will help us see the operation side of the signage. We're more looking at the content creation for the signage itself, for the inputs. 

What about on the technology side? There's endless buzz about LED displays and new emerging display technologies on the display and the playback hardware side. Are there things emerging that you think are going to be important?

Gil Matzliah: We don't go into the display technology, the LED technology for us. It's more agnostic. So as long as it can get a resolution of a screen..

It's an output. 

Gil Matzliah: The one that you get as an input or an output is the way you look at it.

What about on media players and just computing power? 

Gil Matzliah: Yeah, the media player is the important stuff And the main question we all the time ask ourselves is, Is the world moving to a system on chip? Would it stay on the media players? Would it be a combination of them? Would the resolutions and the quality grow performance? And this is something we invest a lot of effort, thinking and development, especially working with all these different platforms which is a lot of maintenance to do.

Yeah, I think one of the interesting things and I'm racking my brain trying to remember who, but the idea of system on chip, but with an upgrade pass, so you could pop open a smart display and put in a new SOC three years out that has more graphics processing or some other capability that maybe that didn't have when you first bought it.

Gil Matzliah: That's an interesting direction. 

Alright. So if people want to know more about your company, where would they find you online? 

Gil Matzliah: You can look for NoviSign.com. All the information is there, the phone numbers, they can contact us, and we are looking for new partners all the time, that will work with us, innovate with us and take our software to maximum customers and locations.

And also, if you're an end customer and you want to learn more, you want us to support you with innovative technology and especially software, we'd be happy to have you visit at NoviSign.com. 

Alright, Gil. Thank you. I hope things calm down there and when I see you at ISE in a few weeks or a couple months. 

Gil Matzliah: Actually, we're planning to be in MEDICA in Germany next month and then in Las Vegas and then ISE in Barcelona. So wherever you're coming, I will always be happy to see you. 

Las Vegas and Barcelona, I'll be there. 

Gil Matzliah: Oh yeah. You have a mixer at both places. Me and my colleagues are looking forward to them.

All right. Stay safe and I’ll see you soon. 

Gil Matzliah: Thank you very much. 

 

DSF Cocktails and Controversy, NYC 2023 - AI In Digital Signage

The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at Sony's NYC offices can have a listen.

Consider this a bonus podcast, and I have not added an intro or exit ... so it's a bit raw, but just fine for listening.

The topic was AI in digital signage, and you will hear from me, but much more usefully from Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, Jeffrey Weitzman of Navori and Jim Nista, who has a boutique creative agency out in LA.

We covered a lot of ground and tried to zero in, very much, on what AI means to digital signage and how it is already being applied.

Thanks to the folks at Sony for getting me the file!

 

David Title, Bravo Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Title: The Revlon Spot?

I'm thinking of donuts.

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

Okay. So you can talk about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what's your perspective on it? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Lord. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said they didn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Title: I think there's a mix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is a very narrow-angle typically. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, go ahead. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call them shower stalls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim O’Malley, E Ink

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

Right, so the ESL market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 And more cost, I would imagine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim O'Malley: Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the refresh rate on that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm curious again about mass transport.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim O'Malley: Yes. Very impressive. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's also a very long sales cycle. 

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Chris Grosso, Intersection

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

The out of home media company Intersection is probably best known as the operator of that network of smart cities display totems - called LinkNYC - on the sidewalks of Manhattan and New York City's boroughs. But the company has a much bigger footprint around the United States - mainly mass transport systems, but also the flashy Hudson Yards mixed-use development in New York, and United Airlines.

I had a good chat with Chris Grosso, who took over as CEO a couple of years ago, but had already been with the company for a few years, having come over from the broadcast and digital world.

We got into several things - like the state of the DOOH industry and the evolving needs and demands of the municipal governments who become business partners for Intersection. Smart cities needs, for example, are shifting.

We also get into Intersection's recently announced addition of AI-driven ad and content targeting, with the idea of making what's on screens not just relevant to the city, but all the way down to neighbourhoods and streets.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Intersection Is all about? 

Chris Grosso: Sure, and thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here, Dave and I very much enjoy reading your publication and the newsletter, and the email all the time. I’m Chris Grosso, the CEO of Intersection. We are a leading out-of-home advertising company in the USA focused on major US cities. We really are differentiated from the other out-of-home companies in three ways. One is typically we put in consumer amenities in center cities, most notably things like the LinkNYC program in New York, so Wifi kiosks across the city of New York. We do customer information and advertising systems for places like Chicago Transit Authority and SEPTA Transit Authority in Philadelphia.

And we do bus shelters in many US cities as well. So very much driven by bringing consumer amenities and partnerships with cities and transit authorities. The second biggest differentiator for us, which is most relevant to this conversation, is our focus on content and programming. We like to put useful content on our digital screens, and we wanna put entertaining content on our digital screens, and that could be anything from what time your train is coming to what the weather might be to art or fun facts. We want to program these screens just as you program any other screen in order to make them entertaining and engaging for consumers.

And the last piece of our business we pride ourselves on is selling data-driven advertising. We like to be very focused on the data that helps our advertisers understand who they're reaching when they advertise with us, as well as what happens after the release. 

So the idea of consumer amenity that I gather that the smart city-ish kiosk that you're putting on the street and other things like that, that’s a more modern version of the amenities, to use your term, that outdoor companies have been doing for a whole bunch of time with bus shelters, right? 

Chris Grosso: For sure, and we're also in the bus shelter business as well. We do some stuff with Bikeshare, and I think it's a long tradition in out-of-home advertising to bring the amenity to allow us to get access to the public right of way to put the advertising in, and this is very valuable for a city transit authority because they're getting something that they don't have to put up the cash for. So it's a real value-creating event both for the communities as well as the advertisers. 

Is it the price of entry now for particularly larger urban geographies like New York and so on, where if you want to play, you're going to have to provide infrastructure as well? Can't you just put in display totems?

Chris Grosso: I think it really depends on the municipality and the deal structure. In some cases, companies have to put up the capital and bring the amenity and bring the service into the community, and that can both be the infrastructure, but increasingly also the software and the services that you can bring. But there are also some cases where, you know, particularly with the Infrastructure Financing Act, that the city or municipality might want to put up the capital for the infrastructure themselves, in which case we'll partner with them to create the revenue stream as well as overlay the data and the software to really get the most out of the infrastructure.

In all cases, I think that it's important is being able to have these digital screens up, having software to put the right content in the right app at the right time a big is an important part of the equation and a big differentiator for us. 

Does that happen much where you have municipalities that are making a capital investment?

Chris Grosso: It depends on the deal, but yes, and there's a couple of different ways you do that sometimes the municipality puts up some of the capital themselves. In other cases, in many of these deals, we recoup the capital through the revenues. So we might if we put up the money and then recoup it out of the payments to the city.

So there are many different ways you can do a deal. 

Chris Grosso: There are many different ways you can do a deal. There are a handful of companies, of which we are really good at this and have built a strong team that knows how to work with cities, work with transport authorities, and create value, both for us and also for the cities.

I think one big differentiator for Intersection is we are a mission-driven company, and we are very focused on making cities better through our products. 

You came out of Broadcast & Online, which is very much a digital entity, and now you're running a company that has to do a lot of infrastructure and has to do these sorts of capital-intensive deals. Was that a big adjustment? 

Chris Grosso: It's a different business. There are a lot of similarities between being in the digital media space and the Intersection space. But certainly, in the last few years, I've learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about trenching and conduit and coin fiber and a lot of construction.

I like to say I was in consulting, and then I was in media and software. So this is the first job I actually had, physical things to deal with, and it's an interesting and exciting part of the job, and it's a real differentiator for us at Intersection. Because we have people who are very good at digital media, but we also have people who are very good at working with cities. And we've got an extraordinary team of folks who really understand how to deploy and operate these things in physical space, and that goes for even the guys who are out, cleaning and posting. We've got a really great team of professionals and field operations who really understand work in physical space, and part of what makes our business both fun also gives us a leg up is we're good at these different disciplines. 

You also, I assume, had to learn a lot about politics and about city bylaws. 

Chris Grosso: We've got people who very much understand that world for sure. 

Which is a bit of a labyrinth.

Chris Grosso: One could say that.

You have to deal with them, so you're being careful. I can understand that. 

Chris Grosso: I think the level of talent in these city governments is really impressive and we benefited at Intersection when we started, we were put together by a historic business Titan, which was an out-of-home advertising company, and then Control Group, which was a digital innovation company, we put together to create Intersection in 2016, right before I started.

But we had the benefit of Dan Doctoroff being our chairman, who helped put the deal together and was an alumnus of the Bloomberg administration. We've benefited from some folks who come out of that world, who really understand that and did a great job in government and then can help us understand how to do stuff with the government in a way that creates value for the population and citizens, and people who live in the cities for sure, but also, creates economic value for our business.

When the whole Smart Cities thing bubbled up with LinkNYC and other initiatives like that, there was a lot of noise around it. This seemed to be the way that digital at home was going, that anything that was going into big municipalities was going to have to be a smart city initiative in some way. Has that really played out? 

Because I don't hear as much and/or read as much noise about all that now, and I know that we can maybe get into this a little bit of the LinkNYC has had its revenue struggles through the years. I don't know where we're at with that now, but it doesn't seem like smart cities have the same kind of energy around them that maybe they did in the mid-2010s.

Chris Grosso: I think the definition of what a smart city is has evolved, and I think the parts of the smart city that are important people might not have thought of as smart cities but are huge trends in the changing nature of cities. You really saw that during the pandemic. 

So what I mean by that is if you look at the evolution of mobility in a city, which wasn't the classic under the rubric of Smart Cities. Still, you think about how people get around cities now versus how they did 10 years ago with Bikeshare with Rideshare, with changes to how the transit authorities function, all of that is a much smarter way to run a city than several years ago and requires data and requires real-time information. So I think a lot of the ethos around the smart cities just got absorbed in how cities are operating, and particularly a lot of that got accelerated during the pandemic.

One of the biggest areas of smart cities is what do you do with parking? And that's outside of our world, but if you think about the pandemic that happened. It really made people reimagine what you do with street-level parking in cities because all cities, particularly New York and others in the United States, suddenly put restaurants on the restaurants due to the need for giving these restaurants the ability to run their business without indoor dining, and that reimagined the whole way people do parking. Is that a classic smart city type of initiative? I don't know, but it totally reimagined how the street works, and I think if you walked down the street on the Upper West Side today versus what you saw in 2019, it's a completely different experience with the bike share and the outdoor dining and other things of that nature. 

So, are there still demands among municipalities to have these smart city kiosks/totems that are multipurpose devices that they're advertising totems? Obviously, there's an interactive thing, maybe there's WiFi built-in and sensors and so on.

Is that still being deployed and asked for? 

Chris Grosso: I think the form factors are changing, and I think the needs are changing in the cities, and I think that there are a lot of fundamentals that cities need. So it may not be a totem, but cities need bus shelters, and now it's not just a bus shelter, it's a mobility hub.

Cities need advanced wayfinding to manage this multimodal transportation system that's coming out of the pandemic. Cities have always needed it, and I think we all underestimate going to smart cities. Still, we realize now that cities need the ability to broadcast content, localized content at street level. Whether it be what time my train is coming, emergency messaging, or just education around when the community board meeting is, that has a ton of value. So I think the original premise of Smart Cities is let's take an iPhone and put it at street level. I don't think that's turned into the right answer, but I do think there are applications and amenities in the right of way that are required that cities want and are ready to ask and get deployed.

And I do think you'll continue to see these kinds of initiatives. It just may not be in the form factor of totems. It may be a bus shelter because, you know what, you can put WiFi in a small shell in a bus shelter, and by the way, the bus shelter provides shade, and that's really important in certain municipalities, shelter from the rain, and that's important. So I think smart cities have evolved into what are the real needs of the people who live in the cities where before it was, “Hey, we've got a cool thing. Let us give you this.” and even if you look at the Link, the core propositions of Link like free WiFi and phone calling for sure are hugely used and hugely important. But what we also recognize is Link as a megaphone to broadcast real-time information to the city of New York is also hugely valuable and something that the community has been able to leverage effectively. Most recently, we played a big role in the we love New York campaign where, you know, if you put content on Link, we can reach, I think, 90%+ of New Yorkers a hundred times a month.

That’S a massive megaphone that can be valuable to advertisers, but it also can be valuable To the city. If there are schools that get shut down for a snowstorm, flip the switch and tell everyone the schools are shut down due to the snowstorm, that's a big value for a city. Is that a classic 2015 Smart Cities thing? I don't know, but it's a huge value. If you are a parent, figuring out whether your kid's going to go to school or not the next day. 

So where is Link at in terms of rollout and viability? 

There've been a number of stories through the years about revenue challenges and pace of rollout, and so on, but I haven't really seen anything for a year or more. So I'm curious where it's at, and as you said, it has its value, and people like it and everything else, but is it still the way forward? Would you continue to deploy this? 

Chris Grosso: Yes, so during the pandemic, working with our partners ZenFi, we actually have a new form factor for a next-generation Link, which we call Link 5G, which has many of the original features of Link, like the free WiFi and the tablet to make phone calls, but it's taller, and it allows for multi-tenant small cells, to support New York City's 5G rollout. We are in the process of working through deploying those now with our partners ZenFi, who run Fiber and telecommunications.

So this would, this is a nice little partnership for you because they'd be able to share the infrastructure cost, I assume. 

Chris Grosso: Exactly, and also they have the expertise in telecommunications. We are in the media content advertising space. We really understand media content and advertising software. But we're not telecom companies. ZenFi is a world-class telecom company. They understand fiber, they understand dealing with carriers and that kind of thing. So it is a good partnership. They've been great partners for us. 

Your company recently announced, and you've been talking about localized content, that you're doing localization of content using AI. It strikes me as, great, this is something that absolutely should be done but it was also very reminiscent of stuff that was done, as much as 20 years ago when they would call it hyper-local. 

But hyper-local was very difficult to achieve and very difficult to plan at that time, and it seemed more like an aspiration than something that was possible to do it in a way without a whole bunch of work. I assume that's changed hugely because of databases, APIs, and also AI. 

Chris Grosso: Yeah, so we've always done localization, and given our screens are often deep in neighborhoods, it's a very effective way of doing stuff.

We've always done it, though, with structured databases, right? Weather: give me the weather in a zip code, right? Transit: give me what's going on at the closest train station when the trains are coming. Top 10 lists of the best songs in this neighborhood, but it's all very much tied around structured data, and rules engine and APIs, and we're very good at that. 

We have a whole suite of dynamic advertising products. We've got a great product, for instance, that you're a retailer, you put the ad up for the retail and then a map at the bottom to tell you how to get to the closest retail location and that's highly localized, but it's all based on structured data—the big difference now what AI is that it allows you to do things with much more unstructured depth and much more visual creativity, which we're very excited about testing and rolling out. So, for instance, if you have an ad for an alcohol brand, how do you put that alcohol brand in context for a neighborhood? Maybe you show what's the relevant drink for this block, and the AI can figure out that this is the block that Edgar Allen Po lived on, so it'll be Edgar Allen Po’s drink. Trying to do that manually would be impossible. But you can do that using these AI engines and then on the visual side as well, which is very exciting. Maybe there's a mascot or character of a brand, and let's actually put that brand in context in the neighborhood and dressed up as someone from the neighborhood. You can do that kind of thing with these AI engines that if you were rying to do this yourself, you may not figure out the creative idea, and could never have the army of people who take to build all that creative. So that's why we're very excited about using these tools to do localization for unstructured data, and yeah, more creative types of ideas than the classic, “Hey, here's the top 10 songs being played in this neighborhood.”

It expands a lot of possibilities. But how do you do the gatekeeping on it? Because, as many people have described, AI can sometimes have these “hallucinations” and come up with a strange list that maybe isn't the top 10 songs in that neighborhood.

Chris Grosso: Yeah, for sure. One way you do it is to control the prompts and make sure you're being smart about how you're doing the prompting.

The second is: We still would envision having a layer of humans looking at all the creative before it goes on the screen to catch stuff that just doesn't make sense. Over time that problem might go away, but you still want some level of quality control, but it's very different to have creative designers take a look at a hundred pictures over the course of an hour and just check everything to make sure it looks good as opposed to trying to create all those mocks literally. It's a huge difference, and so I think, at least to start, we're going to have some level of human quality control in this for sure. But I still think the ability to use these tools to be able to do things you never could do before because you just didn't have the army pf people and it would not be cost-effective to work is really what we’re moving towards.

In the old days, my understanding of digital out-of-home was a media planner would develop the plan, and the media company would execute it based on the insertion orders for that plan. When you're getting into hyper-local AI-driven targeting and original content by the street, who's doing that plan?

Chris Grosso: I think it's often in partnership with the advertiser or the agency, right? There may be cases where the agency has a really good idea of what they want to do. There may be cases where the agency says, help us think this through, and we've always provided creative services to our clients whenever they needed it. So this is not far afield from what we do already. 

When I mentioned some of these dynamic advertising, oftentimes, we build them on behalf of advertisers and our agencies as part of our partnership. So we envision it in the same way. 

David:] I gather that programmatic is on the rise. The usage level is up. The last number I saw was like 15% of digital out-of-home ads are now booked out of programmatic platforms. Is there a bridge between programmatic and this AI-driven hyper-local stuff, or do they have to operate independently because it's just how it works?

Chris Grosso: I think to start, you have to build out these campaigns, and these campaigns will be more high-touch than your classic programmatic campaigns. So I think to start, these really have to be directlt sold because a lot of this is around the creative idea and creative concept, and there needs to be back and forth with clients to really get this right.

As opposed to programmatic, which is really about scale and tonnage and efficiency, and we spend a lot of time on programmatic as well, for sure. We launched a Place Exchange, which is an out-of-home ,SSP and we actually spun that business out because they did a lot of work with us, but they were doing work with all the other publishers, too, so it made sense to be an independent company.

We have very deep integrations with Place Exchange and several other SSPs. So we're very focused on programmatic and do view it as a growth driver. But I do think the creative side has to be much more, and I really think long term the way the business goes - I used to work for Tim Armstrong at AOL who used to call it the concept of the barbell - and I think you're going to see continued growth of programmatic, and then the direct sales really going to be about driving solutions for advertisers that are highly strategic and deep partnerships with advertisers. It could be something like the AI program, or it could be like other things we do, for instance, where we have advertisers sponsor train stations or whole train lines for multi-year deals where we work together to rename a station or a train line.

In New York City, the Bet MGM renamed the line that goes out to the Meadowlands, and we do this in other places as well. So I do think you're going to see the direct sale be much more solution-driven and working very tightly with the advertisers and the agencies to build these really cool things, whether it be AI or long-term sponsorships or big programs and then on, on the flip side, you'll see the programmatic businesses continue to scale as well. 

Has the characteristics of venues and the type of venue partners evolved over the years, like the old Titan was about transit and street furniture, but you have other companies that are very active in airports and other mass transport hubs. 

Is that evolving for you as well, or are you very much about kind of street-level advertising? 

Chris Grosso: We're about cities and the the key thing is street level advertising in cities is really really important for us, and a big area of focus transit remains a big area of focus as well.

And then we've done a little bit in airports and airlines. We've also done work with some of the next-generation multi-use developments like Hudson Yards, where we put in the wayfinding directory system and the advertising system, and that's a great business for us. But our criteria for whether or not we want to partner with someone really comes down to being able to do something value creating in big cities, top 25 cities in the US. That's what we're good at. That's how we're differentiated and sure, the types of partners that we work with will continue to evolve just as the audiences are evolving. 

If you think about the transit business, the transit business includes street furniture. It includes signage outside train stations, it includes buses, and it includes the train stations themselves. I think during the pandemic, what we found is the vast majority of our revenue, and where all the growth was is on the outside of the train station, the outside of the bus stations, everything that's at street level. And that offset the fact that the train stations themselves have fewer people, but there are still tons of people outside the train stations, and that's where we put a lot of our emphasis on the ad side. 

Has the business recovered from the Covid era? 

Chris Grosso: Yes. It looks different given our revenue mix, but we're largely back to pre Covid revenue levels. The bus exterior business and the street furniture business are well above. The train station part of the business is still somewhat below because the ridership is just not there. Then we're continuing to look at new types of inventory, whether it be multiuse destinations, as I said, like Hudson Yards, airlines and new forms of street furniture. For instance, we've got a great ad campaign on the bike share in some cities. 

Do you have to look at municipal opportunities differently now? Because of the way Covid changed things and the urban downtown areas not being as heavily populated with office workers as they were in the past. It's different in New York or something, but let's say in Cincinnati or Minneapolis, or something where not as many people are coming into the urban area.

Chris Grosso: Yeah, we do the exact same methodology when we assess the deals that we look at, which always starts with where the audience is, and we've got folks who are really good at looking at GIS and traffic patterns and people patterns to understand the scale of the audience on all the different assets we might either deploy or take over the ad sales for.

That mechanism, we do exactly the same mechanism that we did in 2018-2019, we do today. What comes out of those models is a little bit different, for sure. But what's great about a lot of our business is we typically cover the entire city, not just the central business district.

And a good example of this would be in New York, the LinkNYC. If you look at the impressions, both ad impressions generated by the LinkNYC network before and after the pandemic on a network level, they're pretty close. However, the Links in Midtown Manhattan, where people are going to work three days a week are lower, however the Links on, say, the Upper West Side or in Brooklyn are actually higher because of things like outdoor dining and people working from home.

So the people are all there. They just moved around different places, and so the methodology we use, which is understanding where the audience is, works fine, we look at everything the same way. But what comes out of those models is different based on how cities evolve. 

I talk a lot to people in Europe, and they have asked me where are things at in terms of what they call Green Signage and are there North American digital signage and digital out-of-home network operators that are concerned and doing something about energy costs. Is it something that comes up with you, or is it something you're trying to address? 

Chris Grosso: We are definitely looking at sustainability to the extent it's part of our assessment for screens on how much power they use, and then we are also looking at how to make these networks more sustainable. Ways you do that. So, for instance, one is, we do static bus shelters, but they still need a backlight, and we will use solar panels on those shelters, which has the benefit of both being greener friendly, but also just cheaper because you don't have to pull power to the shelters. Regarding digital signs like LinkNYC, we've looked for opportunities to source electricity from green sources and that's been something we've done successfully. 

But then also we look at our footprint on how we take care of our infrastructure. So we've started to test, for instance, electric vehicles in one of our markets. All the trucks that we use are electric right now. Running that as a pilot it's gone very well. The guys love the EV trucks to the point where we had a couple of EVs and a couple of gas guys just fighting over who got to use the EVs. So instead of being a half-EV, half-gas pilot, we put everything on EVs in that market because everyone's fighting over to drive the EVs. 

Are you being banged on at all by municipal authorities or by public interest groups saying, you need to do something to reduce energy waste. These displays on the sidewalk are not mission-critical. 

Just like Europe, where they were saying you need to turn these off for certain periods of time, they don't need to be running 24/7 anymore. Is that something you have to worry about, or are you hearing about?

Chris Grosso: I think municipalities want you to be sustainable, but I think we would argue our signs are mission-critical and should be up 24/7. But no, no one's asked us to do anything otherwise, but if you think about the importance of real-time information, if you're looking at when my bus is coming, or the weather and the sign's not on, that's a problem.

We like to think, and we would insist all of our signs are actually pretty mission-critical. Now that being said, there are things you can do around how much power you use and dim the signs at night, and that kind of thing to reduce the energy load and optimize that, and everyone consents to do that. And then again, to the extent we can source power from green sources, we do that as well. 

Last question. What can we expect to see out of Intersection in the next year? You made that announcement recently about generative AI. What's next? 

Chris Grosso: So I think we're very focused on product innovation around serving, meeting our customers on the needs that they want.

So I think you will continue to see more innovation around ad formats. You're also going to start to continue to see more innovation around measurement and attribution and our ability to help people, help advertisers understand who's seeing their ads and what they do after their ads and that's a huge focus for us and a big area of investment. I think you’ll hear a lot about it, and then, we're always looking at new partnerships and new deployments, and we've got some stuff cooking right now that we're hoping to be able to talk about towards the back half of the year as part of our continued expansion.

All right. Chris, thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Chris Grosso: Thank you, David. I appreciate it.

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.

Luca Gonnelli, Algo

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

Tools that fast-track or reduce the costs of video production have been around for many years - often based on templates that can be brought into design software or extended to cloud platforms. These kinds of tools make it possible to produce a professional-looking video spot quickly, or with a newer breed of them, produce dozens, hundreds or thousands of videos really quickly.

An Italian motion design studio saw both the demands and possibilities for video automation, and launched a sister company in Turin called Algo. It has some similarities to what's out there, but takes what you might call a hybrid approach. The design process is very much like a traditional agency, with briefs and storyboards. But once that phase is completed, Algo's customers use the platform as a service.

If you have an electric vehicle and have used a Volta charging station, you may have seen motion infographics on the screen that used real-time data from Bloomberg to visually show local air quality conditions on the charging totem screen. Johns Hopkins University used Algo to develop a daily COVID tracker during the pandemic.

Algo's main market is the business side of social media - so more Linkedin than TikTok. But it has already done and expects to see more work coming for digital signage and Digital Out Of Home screens. Automated spots can run on screens in much the same way as digital signage platforms tap into subscription news, weather and entertainment feeds.

I chatted with Luca Gonnelli, one of Algo's founders.

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TRANSCRIPT

Luca, thank you for joining me. We've not met in person and I've never been to Torino, but maybe one time, I'll get there. Can you tell me what Algo does? 

Luca Gonnelli: Sure. Hi, Dave, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So Algo is a design studio, basically, it's a creative studio specialized in data visualization and in particular in what we call video automation, which is basically software or a dashboard to create videos.

Okay, and what does that mean in real terms? So if I'm a digital signage network operator, obviously we're talking about digital signage part of this, and you're doing all kinds of work for different end users, but what's that gonna mean for that person, for that end user?

Luca Gonnelli: Sure. We are working on different types of campaigns and it's super interesting to talk to you about digital advertising, out-of-home, et cetera. That's normal, not often, but sometimes that's part of the equation, while, of course, the other part of the equation is social media and digital overall. So yeah, we really like to work on campaigns where we help our clients showcase data in a very meaningful way, and possibly very easy to understand for the end user, and also it's a kind of way for companies to avoid sensationalism and try to communicate to their users in a respectful and positive matter about data. But of course, it’s a way for companies to profit from their data, and use data in their day-to-day communication, which is not often very common. 

In terms of the types of campaigns we work on, it's gone from completely autonomous ones like the campaign we did for John Hopkins University tracking the COVID pandemic where we were creating a video every day that was automatically tracking COVID based on the data, and this was only for online, but in some other projects Where we lean more towards the manual input of data. So sometimes we work with teams with our clients to empower them to create videos effortlessly without having to have video knowledge within the whole organization.

And so yeah, in some cases, for example, in a project for Volta and Bloomberg Green, we did just that, and the output was of course on digital advertising. 

Would it be fair to say this isn't necessarily what a listener might think of as a conventional video? It's not people or landscapes or that sort of thing moving around. It's more dynamic/motion infographics. Is that a more accurate way of saying it? 

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah, that's correct. Before being Algo, we also ran a motion design studio called illo. So Algo is a kind of a technological sister studio, and of course, our background is very much in motion design, but at the same time, Algo really can work with any type of medium, even footage, for example. So of course we tend to go towards a look, which is more graphic-oriented and more based on graphic design but at the same time, in some projects, we also have footage and photos and yeah, that's of course less live-action than maybe average. But, of course, that can be part of the equation. 

So when you're using video assets they're like an element within a presentation as opposed to you're generating original video out of it. This isn't an early-stage AI, MidJourney thing, or whatever, right? 

Luca Gonnelli: No, but at the same time, we use AI a lot for many different things. So we really tend to define ourselves as Video + AI, because we are not a kind of stable diffusion type of algorithm. But we use many different tools for doing different things from the simplest ones, like transcribing an audio to even generative things like generating a picture or generating audio. This is, for example, a really good use case that we are doing right now quite a lot. 

You mentioned that you have or this is a sister company to a more conventional motion design studio. Did you create Algo because this was work that kept coming up, and you thought, okay, we need to set up its own initiative to do this?

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah, absolutely. A few years back, we were seeing that communication, the social media world especially were asking for more and more video every day, and our clients could not anymore rely on one piece of advertising every six months, but they needed to be always on and always communicating so that's definitely something that's starting from our technological background, both me and my co-founder and some of them earlier team members have a technological background at the same time, it's coming of course, from the needs of the market. 

We were seeing that this was something that was coming in more and more frequently, and of course, also with out-of-home advertising, it's great because you can have different content for different cities for different times and update everything across time and locations, which is great.

There have been video automation platforms around for a good 10 years, arguably longer than that, depending on how you look at it. But a lot of the early ones were template based and you would put inputs in and hit a button and it would render something and give you something back in five minutes or half an hour, or whatever it may be. What's distinct about this? 

Luca Gonnelli: We are very different in a way given that we decided to approach this from a very studio point of view, rather than being a product or a platform, which we are not. When a client works with us at the end, they have access to a dashboard. So there's a kind of a product part of it, but really we don't believe in the one size fits all template solution, and so what happens is that we want to remove the humans, the animators, the interns that are doing these things from the equation. But at the same time, we think that the designers and the animators at the very beginning of the project when you're building something tailored made to the specific use case and to the specific location or to a specific client are really important aspects.

So yeah, we just tackle this as a service business and of course, it's a service and then turns into a product because then the client has access to a dashboard and can create videos really like it, just like they would do on a SaaS kinda platform, but yeah, it always starts with a service.

So if I'm a financial services company and I want to do something like what Bloomberg did, I would come to your company and there would be a brief and everything else, but you would basically design a template that would be the working wireframe or armature to produce videos as often as needed and quickly or even automated. Is that accurate?

Luca Gonnelli: That's super accurate, and yeah, most of the time, the starting point is really understanding what data can be used and what data the client has available and what's their objective in their communication. So what they want to obtain from communicating, and so yeah that's really it's a work that we do together with the client. It's rare that we get a brief and we start working. It's more like, I have an interest in automating something. I have the data about this and what, what can we do together?

And so it's really about helping them sketch out concepts and understand exactly how this could work. But yeah, then, of course, we get into the data analysis phase, the conception and storyboarding phase, then design, animation, and then all of the technical phase later to make this possible. 

Do your clients have their heads around how all this works? Do they understand what's possible, or do you get into these discussions and say actually we could do a lot more than that? 

Luca Gonnelli: Since it’s not yet a super common thing to work on automated videos, we definitely help our clients understand what's possible.

For example, could be the fact that maybe financial clients know that we can create a campaign with a weekly video that's doing a recap of the financial markets, but then what they don't know and what we try to tell them is that you can also trigger a video when something happens, so for example, if Bitcoin is up right now, plus 20% compared to yesterday, that's the moment where you want to communicate. So we can automatically trigger and generate a video at that moment. That's one example of how we try to make our clients understand the possibilities.

How much pre-planning and rules and everything else do you have to put into making that scenario happen? It's not a smart thing where it's just going to know “Bitcoin's up so I better generate a video” - there are parameters, and everything is set, right? 

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah. We connect to different sources of data. I think over the course of the last few years, we connected to really hundreds of different APIs and data points. But yeah, of course, what you do with the data is the interesting part, and so each time is really about deciding what these rules are and what rules are meant for the specific client. So it's definitely a process and it's definitely an iterative process. 

So we start with an idea but maybe 20% up is not the best because maybe it won't trigger very often. So we want to put that at plus 7%, and so yeah, that's definitely a lot of back and forth, but it's super interesting and it's super meaningful when you start to see that videos coming out are really talking about the important stuff for the client are on top of the news. It's super interesting. 

Another example of this would be we are using an AI called Feedly to basically select articles that are relevant in a specific sector and create videos on top of those articles, basically transforming those articles into videos, and that's another similar but very interesting approach where you completely give the AI the ability to create videos on different topics. The only thing you do is basically say, okay, I want to follow these new sources, I want to follow Bloomberg and the New York Times and the Financial Times, and then I will track these topics: Crypto, NFTs, and so at that point the AI will come out with videos that are trending and that has just been published and are interesting. So you completely give the AI the ability to create videos, which I think is very fun and interesting. 

Is there any kind of gatekeeping in there?

What I mean by that is let's say you’re using an AI tool and it decides it can generate a video about something and it's not correct, which can happen, I think they call AI hallucinations or something like that, and it's the wrong thing. So if I'm a financial services company, I obviously don't wanna be putting out inaccurate information. Can they review everything before it goes up? 

Luca Gonnelli: Exactly. So the first thing that happens in this particular kind of project is the fact that of course the video gets generated and the editorial team on the client's side can review the video and can both edit the video if something just needs a little bit of correction or can skip the video completely. So there's an option too, if it's not connected straight away to posting. We have a connection to posting, but it's normally after human review, which is always needed at this point. 

So if you had really trusted lockdown data sources, like the financial numbers for a company or whatever that you know is secure. Those could be automated, but other things you'd want that just checks and balances on. 

Luca Gonnelli: Exactly. When the AI comes in, it's accurate 97% of the time, but of course, you want to make sure that 3% don't get published so there's always a manual check, which is needed. But actually, the interesting thing for the client is that you can have a kind of newsroom producing video content for you in really high numbers per day, and the only job remaining on your side is to just watch the videos and approve them or edit them in case you want to add something.

You're in this interesting position where you're a creative agency, but you're working a lot with AI and you have all the discussion right now about what AI means for the creative process, does it remove the creator process to some degree, or is this good or bad, or you have a somewhat unique perspective? 

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah, it's been quite a lot, actually. Since we started Algo, we also have had animators and designers coming to us and saying, Algo is trying to replace my job, and we are always replying to them, the first project we did started because we wanted to work with a client in the sports sector for the Italian football league, which is a very huge topic, and basically, they wanted videos coming out every weekend for the whole season, and it was like a nightmare of a brief, and we decided to tackle it with automation. So we tried to save ourselves from doing this project manually, and so yeah, in the end, what I'm always say to people that are scared about Algo replacing them is basically the human needs to do the job of the human, which is the conception or the design, and thinking about the, how the design changes in the function of the data.

While, of course, updating the content, the template and super quickly and putting it out on social media, it's something that our machine can do better and so we can get rid of that part of the job, which I don't think people like, and on the AI side probably is something similar like of course, it's crazy because you see these super high-quality images coming out and it's getting to the video also quite quickly. I'm very positive towards technology as a person, and so I think that this will be a huge change but at the same time, it's somehow very interesting and manageable in terms of what you can build with it. The whole change that's happening is super fast and so it's scary, but at the same, I feel that we are in a good position.

I believe every market around design, around creativity, is going to be much more saturated because many more people can access it, but at the same time, we've seen that in other markets. For example, if you think about it, creating a website that's a super-saturated market compared to maybe video today. But of course, the most interesting and the most high-end shops producing amazing websites are still there even if all these Webflow or Squarespace or all these platforms came out to make it easy for anyone to get a website.

So I really hope that there will be, of course, a much more saturated market, but at the same time, if you are in the high-end space, that's probably going to be more a value add than something negative.

When making notes ahead of this, I was trying to get a sense of the big attraction would be and I wrote down speed, scale, recency, and relevancy. The fact that you can have something that just happened up on a screen 15 minutes later or whatever it may be. What are the main attractions to this that you're hearing from customers? 

Luca Gonnelli: No, that's definitely correct. The ability to scale up your production, so for example, coming to our Volta project I was talking early, the project that was being distributed to digital screens across the US with EV charging stations. The objective of the campaign was to provide a way for people that are charging their cars to not only see ads but also see this additional content, which is basically an air quality forecast of their city, so it’s connecting the objective which is living in a city with cleaner air with what you're doing. So by being there and using the charging station, you're participating in improving your city's air. 

It was a really interesting project. The videos were super short, and it was challenging to think about them in a way that they could work for people just passing by. From social media, for example, because of course on social media, people are scrolling all the time and it's really difficult to get their attention the same, in a similar way, but it's similar but different. So yeah, we try to work with that.

But definitely, in this case, we work creating content every day for the 12 different cities. So this is an example of the scale that we require maybe a few different people to work on this constantly just to produce this while Algo was working completely autonomously and yeah, the speed, that's definitely, sometimes especially when working with sports or finance data, speed is important, and so yeah, we can get to have a video out maybe 30 seconds later than something happened, and so it's really almost real-time in a way that that's crazy, and so it's also very interesting in some projects. 

Is it reducing the costs of production? 

I realize that you're able to knock out a lot more stuff than you would normally, and a company like Volta or whatever, probably, even if Shell owns them, probably can't afford just to have original videos produced for 200 locations every day or whatever it may be. But is cost a factor here? 

Luca Gonnelli: It's definitely a factor. Of course, we are positioning ourselves as a high-end solution. It works when there's an opportunity to use a format and communicate through a reusable specific format. We work a lot to ensure the format is not perceived easily and yeah, when working on a video campaign, our objective is always to try to make it so that the end user doesn't understand that it's automated content. So yeah, becoming transparent. It's always our goal. But cost optimization compared to working manually, it's definitely an element of it.

And the more you produce, the bigger the output you have and the more that is fundamental, for example, sometimes we even work with campaigns where we produce content for a specific person. So imagine the kind of Spotify Wrapped type of campaigns, where you’re providing content specific for every single user of an application, and in that case, we're talking about millions of assets, and so it's definitely worth and basically the only way to produce these kinds of campaigns through Algo. 

So you can do that kind of industrial-scale stuff then?

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah, absolutely. We use different technologies and one of them, which is based on a library called Lottie which Airbnb creates to incorporate animations into mobile apps and the web. We use that and with that, scale up to potentially create millions of videos per month.

Yeah, I saw on your website the reference to Lottie, and went a little cross-eye, what is that? And how about you explain it?

Luca Gonnelli: It's super interesting. That's an open-source library that was created by Hernan Torrisi and co-developed by Airbnb and basically, it's a way for animators that are working inside of After Effects, which is the software that we are using daily together with others.

But yeah, it allows you to animate in After Effects, and you do that with all of the best tools that animators are used to working with, and then you output that as an SVG animation. So it's code-based, web animation that can run in the browser or inside of a mobile app, a native iOS or Android app. So it's a great way to come out with the tool that every motion designer loves and uses and gets to code and so that's a super amazing way to scale things up and to reach numbers that, for us, were impossible by using only After Effects. 

What are the file formats that you're outputting? 

Luca Gonnelli: All of the video file formats. So it can be mp4, it can sometimes be when working with TV can be MXF or anything, literally, so anything that can be exported from Adobe software. So static PDFs or GIFs, that's also another format that maybe sometimes it's not so useful maybe on digital advertising, but it can be exported. So yeah, we have many options. 

So there's nothing proprietary about it? You don't need to write some sort of player software, or something like that to make it work?

Luca Gonnelli: No, Lottie is basically a JSON file with a JavaScript player, it's open source, and it's amazing. It's nothing proprietary on that front.

So if I'm a digital out-of-home network operator or a digital signage solutions provider, software company, that sort of thing. How would I work with your company? 

Luca Gonnelli: We could work on a project together either for a client or for themself, but basically, it's about understanding what kind of data they want to talk about and what kind of solution, so it can be very free and pretty open, and then, of course, we would work on design animation and then on the output side, for example, for the Volta project, we were delivering those automatically to the screens directly. So we integrated it into the platform that they were using to deliver the videos to their screens but I remember that we also evaluated other options like going as a video directly or of course the Lottie thing can be a good solution as well, because of course, it's outputting a very lightweight web animation.

We could of course start the project from maybe our dashboard that we built. Where the client can input the data and change and see how the design changes in the function of the data, and then yeah you just click a button for creating video, and the video gets generated in a few seconds and gets potentially delivered to the distribution servers so that, yeah, that things can proceeds mostly directly to the screen.

So it doesn't sound at all like you get into a situation or a conversation with somebody who says, yes, we'd love to work with you, but it has to be done this specific way. It sounds like it's pretty flexible.

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah, we tailor the solution for every project. We build something custom, and so yeah, there's no particular way of doing things that it must be done in that way. We can really adapt, and we change technology, and we change the way we work, so that's also part of the complexity. We are trying to make people on our clients understand that there are a lot of potential solutions that could happen. 

But at the same time, of course, we have some previous examples which we can share. So it's easy to see some real-life examples. 

I have a feeling when you get the question of how much it costs that there has to be inevitably the qualifier of: well, it depends. 

Luca Gonnelli: Yeah, it really depends a lot on the needs of the client. But yeah, the pricing works normally through a setup fee, which covers the whole project setup. Normally we start from a couple of months of work, and yeah, the pricing can also vary a lot in function of what kind of data we are using. There's licensing of this data, or how complex the output is, if it's more generative so we are actually designing our, creating an output, which is changing every time or if it's that more relying on some rules that we'd predefined. 

But we normally start with this kind of two months of collaboration where with our design team and animation team and technical team to build a project, and that's a one-time fee covering all that, and then when the project after testing, a lot of testing after testing when things are going live you subscribe to a much smaller but recurring fee based on the function of how many videos you need to create or how many animations web animations, and so also that is very variable, but yeah, it's a closer to SaaS kind of approach.

 So typically, you might have a significant, depending on the brief, upfront cost to put it together, but after that, it's just it just becomes an operating line item? 

Luca Gonnelli: Exactly. The first year, you're investing in creating this format, and the more you use it later, the more it's going to be cost-effective. Of course, the one-time fee, it's only due the first time. Normally Algo projects are running for around maybe two or three years and of course, sometimes we also do updates and work on refreshing the project after a while since it's a video project, so we can always do that later. But yeah, normally it's an investment in the first year, but then it's paying off in the following ones. 

With AI and all the generative stuff emerging at a dizzyingly fast pace, is it worrying or confusing or whatever to try to stay on top of this and stay relevant to when you've got all these little apps coming out saying, you can do all of this automatically. You don't even need to have a photo library anymore, you can just generate it. 

Luca Gonnelli: I really find it super, super exciting because I'm trying to follow it as much as possible. Of course, it's moving very fast. But how the way we are approaching this is really to see which tool is the most effective in helping us obtain what we want to obtain for projects. 

So just to give you an example we are using GPT4 right now on a project to basically summarize an article and turn an article into a video, and that's amazing how you can just simply use the summarization feature which is super well done and so yeah, we are actually making GPT4 write the script for the video based on just a long-form article which we're passing to it, and that's the only suggestion. So you copy-paste the URL of the article, you click a button and you will see structures adapting function of the content that's been analyzed by GPT4, and so that's super interesting to see how this can evolve and how to use, for example, the next step could be using another AI service which is called Play.HD, which would be love, which is voice synthesis. It's like creating human-sounding voices, really super realistic voices that are almost indistinguishable from voiceover actors to basically record voiceovers for the videos so they sound warm.

So just with those two things you've written a script based on a long, preexisting, long-form article and you have a voiceover for that, and so then we focus on the design side. But yeah, that's super exciting. Of course, we're not developing ourselves. We're a small team, and we're not developing our own machine-learning algorithms, but we're literally using all the interesting ones that are coming our way for all the projects.

Really interesting. Luca, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

Just before we go, where do people find you online? 

Luca Gonnelli: Sure. Our website is algo.tv and most of our socials are also @algo.tv. 

Very simple. All right. Thanks again. 

Luca Gonnelli: Thanks to you. 

Sean McCaffrey, GSTV

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

In the early years of digital signage networks - particularly those that were ad-based - operators would often describe how their medium was captive. The proposition was that people stuck doing something - usually waiting - would pass their time looking at a screen.

Then smartphones came along, and there went that notion. Except in places like gas stations, where people still needed to be somewhat focused on the task. A company called GSTV has been running a digital signage channel on the screens of fuel dispensers for almost two decades, and is deployed at more than 25,000 locations.

The company dominates its category, and the mix of programming on the pump screens has 100 million unique viewers.

The pitch to planners is far more sophisticated these days than the captive audience thing - something very obvious in this talk with CEO Sean McCaffrey, who gets into a lot of detail about the benefits for consumer brands and for the gas station and C-store operators who work with GSTV.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Sean, thank you for joining me. It's almost weird to think about, but your company and your medium is actually a pretty mature medium now. 

Sean McCaffrey: It is. I still look at it as very new. I've been with the business for five and a half years, and when I describe it to people at a backyard barbecue, and they ask what I do, I say: I run a six-year-old startup that happened and have a one-year proof of concept. So to your point, we've been around for 15+ years as a sector, if you will. 

For people who maybe don't live in the United States, describe what it is that goes on. 

Sean McCaffrey: Yeah, no problem. So GSTV  is a national digital video platform in 205 US markets. Out of 210, we reach about 50% percent of US adults every month, about 116m monthly unique viewers, and we connect with consumers three to five minutes at a time, three to five times a month when they're fueling up their vehicle. So think about it as a very habitual serialized engagement week in and week out when someone stops to fuel up as they're running errands on a road trip, on their way to the ballgame on a Saturday, that sort of thing, and we partner with the fuel and convenience retailers in the US to put in this amenity, provide information, entertainment, that sort of thing, and focus on building value for brands, agencies, retailers, and consumers, and we work with a variety of large chains, small chains middle market, kind of everything in between.

And the nut of it is you've got a screen embedded in the fuel dispenser. 

Sean McCaffrey: Correct. Our screens come embedded in the fuel equipment, which is a long-term hardware purchase decision for fuel retailers. The retailers get it as an amenity, and they get a small amount of promotional time within our show. There are shared economics amongst the parties obviously as well, and then we build a consumer experience that provides value to the retailers, value to consumers, and then brands and agencies can integrate in any number of ways. The way we look at it is we program a show every day. Every station is like an addressable household. The household has more family members, so we could have tens of thousands of different versions of the show on any given day, depending on what content and what advertising is running. 

Now, we don't go probably down to that level of customization just based on how brands use it. But think about urban, suburban, weekday, weekend, all those lake and beach communities, let's say all summer long, that is a very different population from Thursday to Sunday, let's say in July versus January. So lots of ways to customize the entertainment, content, commercials, advertising, and so on.

I have a bit of a past with this stuff going back to the early to mid 2000s when there was a Canadian company also looking at this, and at that time it was extraordinarily challenging to put a piece of electronics on a fuel dispenser that's sitting on top of a reservoir of thousands of gallons of flammable liquid. It was a little nerve-wracking. 

Is it now a standard piece of kit, so to speak, for the fuel dispenser manufacturers like the Gilbarcos of the world?

Sean McCaffrey: It is, and you're right, that era in the early to mid two 2000s, not just in our space, but really in broader digital signage or digital outta home, if you will, in general.

There was a lot bigger hardware literally and figuratively, hardware and software challenges to solve. Now, they're not done today, but all of this has come a long way. So for our business today, yes, it's a very standard part of what our great partners at Dover and Gilbarco both produce. The retailer can make a choice on the equipment that they want to buy and everything comes kitted out for them. There's an upgrade opportunity if they have equipment already. There's a new equipment purchase opportunity, so there are obviously several different SKUs of hardware products they can buy, and then it's all IP addressable, and all enabled that our team runs. And we have a network operating center that it's all built on and enabled programmatically in terms of scheduling as well. 

So it's really come a long way. Anyone that is involved in digital signage or the digital out-of-home space knows that mid two 2000s era, call it 15-20 years ago, there were lots and lots of networks trying to put signage out there in hopes of I think advertising would follow. A lot of it was probably a solution in search of a problem, as they say, and today, we're very focused on our place in the value proposition, so to speak. So our retail partners really care about that 20-foot consumer journey. Someone fueling up and then going in the store and buying anything. The hardware partners, they want a great product and to be able to offer this as an amenity, and then for consumers, our time is precious today While it's not a channel selection, you're not gonna binge watch hours and hours of our programming, let's say, in the way you might Netflix or Peacock. It is an opportunity to provide value to consumers, entertainment information, and that sort of thing. So come a long way in all regards, I think, and not just hardware. 

And so you can retrofit an existing fuel dispenser, right? 

Sean McCaffrey: They're some of the old SKUs of hardware, not necessarily, but yes, for the most part, it's generally an upgrade available. 

And is that something you put on top of it, or you replace the screen that's in there? 

Sean McCaffrey: It replaces the equipment that’s already in there. One of the reasons that the businesses came together in a joint venture in early 2017 was first of all to provide some scale in the space. But second, there was a push from the credit card companies for a payment processing upgrade. So the EMV technology Europay, MasterCard, Visa. There was a requirement from the credit card companies that all the fuel and convenience retailers in the US had to upgrade their credit card technology. So that was an obvious time then for every retailer to decide on a larger upgrade cycle what they wanted to do, and many of them chose to augment it with screens that they didn't have previously. 

So this is not a build it and they will come thing at all where you're incurring the capital cost to put this in, it's the fuel retailer? 

Sean McCaffrey: Correct. That was the earlier generation of the business where some of the predecessor companies you probably know, or the company that you mentioned where there were screens that sat on top of the fuel dispensers of various sizes, and you then incurred every challenge you have beyond CapEx, just the installation, the maintenance, that sort of thing. These are all dispenser-integrated units. So the CapEx is built into the economics amongst the various parties. 

And is the primary motivation to get people into the convenience store, because most few retailers these days seem to have a retail store associated with it, or is it the revenue share that they might see out of it or they do see out of it?

Sean McCaffrey: It's primarily to drive people into the stores. A couple of percentage points of growth in soda and snack sales is I think a lot more interesting to most than the advertising revenue. 

That's not to say the advertising revenue is not substantial or interesting, but there's lots and lots of data that the industry publishes every year here in the US about the volume of consumers that fuel up and just drive away, don't go in store, the volume that does go in store and what they purchase, and so any opportunity to drive sales in-store and raise basket size once somebody is in the store, for example, it gets you to buy a snack instead of just a soda, get you to buy a snack and a soda and a lottery ticket, you name it, is useful, and there's a great deal of sophistication in the space as well. 

I think most consumers in the US are familiar with the largest brands, the 7-Elevens, the Circle Ks, and that sort of thing. But there are a number of what I'll call major and mid-major regional chains anywhere from 800 to 1000 stores down to maybe 50 to 100 stores where they've got a loyalty app, they've got a promotional program, so very sophisticated folks in the space that I think a lot would be surprised about to learn. I think the difference in fuel and convenience in the US to, let's say, grocery or big box or some of the other large physical retail channels, there isn't consolidated ownership that you see in those spaces. So at times, I don't think consumers really understand the size of the sector, but the fuel and convenience space is more than 3% of the US GDP. So it's a huge economic driver, and so back to the retailer, they care about that 20-foot consumer journey and getting more people to come in and then buy more once they go inside.

I'm assuming that in the early days, you were selling the dream that if you do this, people will go into the store, but now the, the, there's analytics, there's the level of sophistication that can give you some data that will prove out that, yeah, this they saw this and then this happened, or how does that work?

Sean McCaffrey: Absolutely. It's a great question. So obviously, the retailers have their own first-party data relative to sales. So they have an understanding most directly if something's being advertised out in the forecourt, and then sales go up in the store, they know. But we work with a number of third-party partners, IRI and Catalina, as two examples to measure sales lift both in the store and then nearby, in adjacent grocery stores, big box retailers, pharmacies, that sort of thing. Because there's an old cliche in advertising, right? That half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half, and that's not been good enough for a long time. We had 135, I think the number is, research studies in the field last year with clients from upper funnel analytics, brand favorability, and brand recall, down to much lower funnel direct sales and sales lift metrics.

And so we've been at that for 5+ years now, and we start to see to some degree what you would expect, in other words, for CPG products in the fuel and convenience store. For very mature trademark brands and large-scale products, we might see a 1-3% sales lift which is huge for really established, CPG brands. For newer brands, li brand extensions, and things like that, we might see high single-digit, low double-digit sales lift, which is also great, and that's been validated by a number of the CPG brands that we work with as well. Obviously, the larger ones have very sophisticated in-house marketing sciences teams and do all sorts of market mix modeling. So even though we fund studies with IRI and Catalina, which are really well-established partners. The brands also do their own modeling and report good results. 

It's a lot of what you would expect, I think, in that there's an opportunity to drive someone for an impulse convenience purchase when they're 20 feet away, if they're slightly hungry or slightly thirsty or many of the fuel and convenience retailers have pretty sophisticated food service programs these days and so if somebody's grabbing lunch or dinner, they've got a lot of choices. They can go to a grocery store and get a prepared meal. They can go to a drive-through at a QSR next door, or in some cases, they can go inside the field and convenience retailer and get pizzas and sandwiches and other things. We've got hungry consumers and a big opportunity to influence them but from a measurement standpoint, we've got lots of ways to draw a straighter line between the advertising impression and the business outcome.

If you're doing that volume of research that repeatedly suggests that there's still some skepticism among the brands that they go, prove to me that this works.

Sean McCaffrey: I wouldn't characterize it as skepticism as much as I think there's a spectrum depending on the category, and for example, an auto brand, the KPIs that they're looking for are dealer visits or site visits or someone going in and starting to build a vehicle. CPG brands obviously look at sales, and financial services brands look at card usage, card signups, and that sort of thing. So depending on the category, we've commercialized research capability with a couple of household names: Foursquare, Axiom, MasterCard, ISI, Catalina, and plenty of others. So our sales and marketing team can simply say “yes” when a client says, can we measure it?

Some categories are more mature for us, for sure. Auto, CPG, financial services, insurance, you name it. There are some that are earlier adopters to us. Entertainment's one, for example, where we can show the trailer and tell somebody to tune in tonight, binge-watch it this weekend, et cetera, and so we've got a good diversity amongst categories. So in some cases, it's a newer brand, and they want to test and learn and then measure and grow. In other cases, it's brands where measurement is just a part of every single thing they do. 

To my earlier point when I came up in advertising, I worked in a legacy radio business, a legacy billboard business where those are classically regarded as more, upper funnel reach media where we weren't typically asked to measure business outcomes or direct results, and I think today, especially in the current economic environment, particularly over the last decade, advertisers are looking to measure every marketing dollar they spend realizing it doesn't all do the same thing, right? The Super Bowl ad is not the same as a buy-it-now ad on social media or something like that.

But the research that we do is on some well-established clients and some new clients, but I wouldn't say it relates to skepticism more so just that brands today expect everything to be measured, 

And you also, I believe in the last two or three years have introduced capabilities to not only push people into 20 feet across the Forecourt, into the C Store there, but to the grocery store that might be five blocks away, that sort of thing is. Why did that happen, and what are you seeing out of that? 

Sean McCaffrey: So the interesting thing I've learned more than I ever thought I would know about the fuel and convenience space, much less consumer behavior on the day people fuel, so we produced some research about five years ago with MasterCard, and then we did an updated version with a much deeper dive the last year with Affinity Solutions, which has credit card and loyalty card data to basically look at the way people spend money every hour of the day, every day of the week, online, offline, with then one filter, if you will, added: the day people fuel up and is anything different, and it turns out it's really different. Fuel Day is a surrogate for a lot more grocery shopping, a lot more QSR visitation, a lot more pharmacy stops, big box retail, do-it-yourself, that sort of thing.

So Fuel Day is a very differentiated day for consumer behavior and consumer spending. So with the rise of retail media as an investment channel over the last couple of years. In other words, with Walmart starting a media network and Kroger starting a media network, we started having more and more of our CPG partners come to us and say, “Hey, we want to apply this sort of thinking, this retail media, commerce media thinking in the fuel and convenient space. But there isn't anyone with consolidated scale and the way there is in grocery and big box.” So as big as the biggest retailers are in our industry, you put the top five together, they have less than 20% of the sector. So we are the largest consolidated network in US fuel and convenience in terms of ad-supported media.

We launched a product called GSTV Amplify, which is really a parallel path. Number one, it's about driving sales in the fuel and convenience stores, which is critically important, and then number two, it's recognizing that our consumers are 5-7 times more likely and spending that much more on the same day to go next door to a grocery store, QSR, you name it. So the agencies and brands that are spending money across retail media, in grocery, retail media in the big box, they can leverage that data, they can apply that thinking with us. 

I had one Head of Investment at an agency say to me, this is basically the last TV ad someone can watch before they go into the grocery store. And I said if that framework helps you, sure, that's one way to look at it. We're in the solutions business. So from a scale standpoint, I mentioned our business. If you took the food and beverage sales at our stores compared to the largest grocery chains, what is the 10th largest grocer in America? If you added fuel to that like Kroger and Albertsons do when they when counting the numbers, we are the fifth largest behind Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and Albertsons. I'm not selling produce, I'm obviously not building physical retail stores, but I say it just to give an example of consumer purchasing power, right? And that's what brands and agencies are trying to find, the proverbial right place, right time, the right moment to find real attention and impact consumer behavior.

Is there any kind of an audit trail? So if I'm on my big shop day and I stop at a fuel retailer and use my MasterCard to buy 12 gallons or whatever it is, and then I go to Costco, and then if it's me, I'll probably go to the wine store or something. But is that traceable? Is there a way of saying, okay, Dave got fuel at 11, and at 11:30, he bought stuff at Costco and so on? 

Sean McCaffrey: So yes and no. Yes, in the sense that yes, we can do what you're describing. No, we're not tracking Dave specifically, right? We do not collect first-party data.

So often, a question I get is if people are swiping their credit card at the field dispenser, so you know it's me. We do not collect and track that credit card data or any other data. What we have is a naturally data-rich environment. There is that credit card swipe, there is a device ID typically in the vehicle or on the person, and device IDs and credit cards are well-worn ways to connect to household identity graphs, loyalty card data, and other ways. So yes, so what you described, we do with partners. So depending on the category, CPG brand, or auto brand, we can do that walk back to impact to show sales lift, brand lift, or any other KPIs. We do some direct surveys. 

There are companies, obviously, that do mobile location surveys that push advertisers for different things. But we work with well-established privacy-compliant industry partners to track that. As well as work with many of our brand and agency partners directly. Because the big agencies all have their own data operations these days, most of the big brands have an in-house marketing sciences team tracking all this. So what we decided to do when we were launching our approach to data analytics and research is not to build another black box that nobody was asking for, or nobody needed.

What the big agencies and brands said to us is that we just need input. We need to be able to input the GSV exposure into our tools the same way we input a CTV impression or a YouTube impression or you name it, so they can understand the impact on the campaign because it's obviously never one thing. All of these ad impressions combined to provide impact to the brand and agency. But one of the things that were interesting to me when I consider joining the business is that it is much more of a mid to lower-funnel ad exposure opportunity. It's naturally frequency capped, right? We're going to see somebody three to five times a month, not three to five times a day when that banner ad follows you around the internet. So the fact that we do have these data signals that we can use, again, in a privacy-compliant way to track success metrics is important and a differentiator for us.

Is it easier to do all that stuff now because of all the API integrations and AI and everything that's come along as opposed to in the past where yes, we have that data, but we're not sharing it with you? 

Sean McCaffrey: It has, I think for a lot of different reasons, whether it's the rise of retail media, whether it's the acceleration of machine learning, tools, and this sort of stuff, or the big agencies all purchasing their own or building their own data operations, whether it's Epsilon, Axion, Merkel, that sort of thing or others like Omnicom. Everybody understands they need a privacy complaint consumer to opt-in to track this stuff, but then it's also important to have interoperability between all of this to measure. It doesn’t do anyone much good to have a bunch increasing. walled gardens, right? So today, whether it's a cooperation-type environment or an industry-standard environment, it's a lot easier.

At least in the US market, combined with the changes in the advertising market over the last decade. In other words, the value of the living room wall. Is certainly challenging now compared to when I was a kid, and there were three TV channels, and it was, every night was must see tv. Today we spend our time as consumers quite differently. That change was only accelerated with Covid as far as people splintered viewing habits, and then the disruption in signal loss and digital now with device IDs and other things being sunsetted, the deprecation of cookies. It's moving most advertisers into more, I think, middle-of-the-funnel analysis. In other words, not everything is a buy it now button sort of conversion—the proverbial last-click attribution of a decade ago. So for us, GSTV, is what we hear often from our advertising partners anyway. If we have the scale of broadcast, which they like because of most categories, you just still need a lot of people. We've got some level of digital muscle memory for targeting attribution. Then it is this real-world consumer opportunity, which is what people generally get excited about around mobile and out-of-homes.

So it has the sort of DNA of several interesting things to advertisers, and we've built a team around the business on the sales and marketing side that comes from various big firms in the digital and video space. On our retail success team. I have a great team that literally helped build the network going back 10 years plus, and those two teams really parallel paths are commercial relationships and client service. So we have a retail success team that is just as focused on our commercial relationships with our retailers and our hardware partners. As is, our sales and marketing teams focus on the brands and agencies.

The retail success team that's nurturing the footprint that you already have, are you still building that footprint, or is it built out? 

Sean McCaffrey: Yes, we continue to build it. So a natural upgrade cycle still happens every month, every quarter, and every year, where we have retailers deciding to upgrade their equipment and add new sites. And then we have a very high 95+ percent renewal rate from retailers that have us already, and so the network is about a third of the fuel and convenience sector in the US today. At some point, it'll probably get north of half, and then beyond that, there's a point where we've probably ended up getting every retailer who's wanted this as an amenity because it is a different retailer. It's a retailer that is generally a little more focused on the customer experience, a little more focused on Forecourt conversion, a little more focused on end-to-end sort of promotional comms, and so on. 

So there's no mission here to get every fuel and convenience retailer in the US just due to the nature of the space. But yeah, we continue to grow every month, every quarter, every year. 

It's a case where it sounds like you have most of the markets that you'd want to be in any way so once you get to all that number, I forget what you said, it was 240 or something like that, at that point, adding more screens maybe doesn't matter all that much, right?

Sean McCaffrey: Yes, you're right. It's one way to look at it. But I wouldn't say we'll be happy once we feel we've partnered with every fuel and convenience retail in the US who like us, I think their business continues to change. So as they think about forecourt-to-store conversion, integration with their loyalty apps, and promotions, we're talking to some commerce partners, some loyalty partners, and different people like that where can we potentially provide a service and another service and amenity to the retailers? Not everyone has the wherewithal or the financial structure to build that on their own. Can we go into parallel and adjacent spaces? We've typically not gone inside the store. We've not wanted to compete with our retailers in a way.

But several have come to us lately wondering about their own sort of digital consumer experience journey, and there is an opportunity to partner together. So we're talking about that, and then the actual incorporation of the company. We do business with GSTV, but the actual incorporation of the company is destination media. And there's some thought to that in the sense that. We are a national digital video platform consumer, the literal consumer journey. There might be other places and spaces, high dwell time environments where it's somewhat similar to what we do today, where there's a premium audience we can define an entertainment and information amenity, and so are there opportunities to continue diversifying our consumer touchpoints, Channels within a platform-type environment where we can provide some additional value to the people we think about today, which is a long way of saying we're not going to build more screens or buy more screens just to get more screens. But I think there's some natural one plus one equals three or four or five with other potentially parallel channels or spaces beyond the fuel and convenience store. 

Yeah, you would think that. My experience is that end-user customers are not looking for more technology vendors. They'd like to slim out the number that they have. So if you have enabling technology that could do the video marketing inside the stores they'd probably be pretty motivated to go that way as opposed to sourcing some other vendor. 

Sean McCaffrey: We agree. I think there's a moment in time right now that to me feels a bit like that era you referenced earlier. In other words, in the mid 2000s where I think there are a lot of people, at least at this moment in time, running around suggesting hang screens anywhere you can hang screens, create experiences, sell ads and there's almost a suggestion that it's just that simple or just that easy, and anybody that's done it knows it's not, and it's really hard.

And also, it needs to be there for a reason. In the mid two 2000s, there were a lot of networks that were well-funded and had great management. And, 2008’s, recession aside, never really got off the ground because they were building a solution that really no one was looking for, vs. today, I think whether you're building a commercial real estate project and you're considering digital signage or you're doing something like we are, you have to think about how are you providing value? 

And for us, we're doing something that would otherwise be overhead for the retailers and difficult to do at scale, and it was challenging when five or six companies were doing what we're doing, and they all were pretty small. It was tough to get the attention of larger brands and agencies. So yeah, whether it's the hardware and software capability, or the sales and marketing engine, or the combination thereof, we're happy with what we've built so far. By no means do we think we're done, but we're looking to be a solutions provider to partners and if somebody has a network or is considering building a network and we think we can provide value, we're certainly going to talk to them. 

Do you have competition? 

Sean McCaffrey: There is one small provider in our space that I believe has a couple of hundred locations right now.

They work with a different hardware provider that we're contractually unable to work with. We're very focused on the fuel and convenience space from a retail partner standpoint, but from an advertising standpoint, I often get, who's your competition? Is it people in the movie theaters, or is it people in the airport or the malls? And no, we don't sell screens. We don't charge $100 a screen or $200 a location. We sell an audience, and you can slice and dice that audience in several different ways.

So when we talk to advertising partners, it might be a major national CPG this morning, and they're launching a new product in the southeast this summer, and we're talking about that. We might have lunch with a television team at a big agency that's trying to find people who buy reach curves and things like that. And then late afternoon, it might be a digital auto home team at an agency looking for proximity to a QSR, and they want everything within five miles of a particular QSR. 

We're competing for ad dollars in the television space, the digital video space, the retail media space, and the digital out-of-home space. And we don't have the luxury to say we're only one of those things, but I think we've got the opportunity to compete and take share across that spectrum, and that's really how we've grown. So the business has more than doubled in size in the last couple of years, both in employees and revenue. And it's mostly because our sources of advertising revenue have come from just a wider and wider part of the advertising landscape. 

Does the business runway have an end to it because of the rise of EVs and EV charging stations and so on? I would imagine it does, but I think it's probably like 15-20 years out.

Sean McCaffrey: We don't think of it as an end as much as an evolution, right? No one is debating the emergence of EV vehicles, no one is debating the eventual roadmap of electric vehicle charging. I think everyone, at least in the US anyway, is debating how long it's going to take, number one and number two. Number two, perhaps most importantly, is how's it gonna be paid for. There's never going to be enough tax subsidies to support all of it. So there we announced last year, we announced a partnership with our labs in ChargePoint to build an ad supporter network with ChargePoint, who's currently the largest large provider by a long stretch by probably a factor of five, the largest EV charging infrastructure provider where just like our business today, we think there's an opportunity for an ad-supported amenity to build out that infrastructure, and there's a bunch of advertising-supported models that have helped build out critical infrastructure going back to the early days of television and radio and everything since. Ad supported models help build us out. So we're excited about the relationship with ChargePoint and a number of their partners, and we think the journey for consumer behavior is going to be a long time, still a multi-decade transition, and as I alluded to earlier, the way we think about our business and the broader destination media sense is the platform and foundation we built in fuel and convenience is hugely important and hugely critical infrastructure today.

But whether it's the EV platform, that's really our second network or a third, fourth, and fifth one to follow. We think time spent outside the home is going to continue to grow and add supported opportunities to identify those consumers, and serve them something relevant, measuring the success on the campaign is going to continue to be critical.

So we remain pretty excited about the future, both the business we have today and the evolution it can drive for us. 

That was super interesting, and time just flew by. I had many other questions to ask, but we'll have to do this again if you're willing. 

Sean McCaffrey: Yeah, I'd be happy to. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me. 

Wes Nicol, Videri

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

If you've spent any time in bars and pubs - not me, but I've been told - there have always been signs of walls promoting beverage brands. They were neon, or backlit plastic, and they were there to perhaps be the last thing someone sees before a server asks, "What'll you have?"

Imagine if you could do that instead with digital displays that were changeable and had the kinds of motion graphics or video that drew eyeballs and influenced decisions.

That's what a New York-based company called Videri offers up. Very quietly, guided by a whale client it can't talk about publicly, Videri has almost 100,000 networked displays operating around the globe - driving brand awareness and delivering a consistent 30% sales lift, month to month, on promoted products. That means an ROI on the investment for the brands who put them in that's measured in months, not years.

The big reasons why it works? It's a turnkey solution based on super-thin, super-light custom-manufactured all-in-one flat panels that a beverage brand's field staffers can install and activate in a matter of minutes. If they can hang a picture on a wall, they can put these in.

I had a great chat with Wes Nicol, who came on as CEO about a year ago and is busily bringing Videri out of a somewhat stealthy period, and making some broader marketplace noise.

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TRANSCRIPT

Wes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what Videri is all about? 

Wes Nicol: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. I am excited to be on the podcast. I've been a longtime listener, first-time interviewee. But yeah, the history of Videri, it's been around for about ten years, in 2013, we started with digital out-of-home, ruggedized products working with Outfront, which was CBS Outdoor at the time, and then subsequent to that, maybe a few years later, developed a series of thinner indoor displays, Videri Canvas that we built hand in hand actually with one of our large customers And then continue to expand that globally. 

We're typically more of a white-label shop. You don't really hear much about vi I think when we talked before you mentioned, “I have never heard of you guys.” That was probably on purpose. We can talk about that later but we have a complete end-to-end solution: we build hardware, CMS & device management software, and I’m happy to get into the details. 

I had heard vaguely of you in the past, I think one of the jobs that Videri was doing, you mentioned Outfront was on the MTA in New York? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly. So anything that you see on the MTA is our product. 

Oh, okay. Now, do you still do that sort of work, or was the move to these thin canvas displays something of a pivot for the company? 

Wes Nicol: We're still doing that. We are still actively deploying right now at the MTA, and there's gonna be a refresh cycle that we're hoping to participate in. But I think strategically we want to become more of a software company and there's a lot of green space in the indoor product. As you know obviously in the industry, there's a lot of opportunity there. So that's kinda where we're focusing most of our efforts right now.

You have been very quiet. I would say almost stealthy, but in the past year, you started to make some noise in the market, right?

Wes Nicol: Yeah I'm new to the company, so I joined about a year ago…

So you're the noisy guy? 

Wes Nicol: Exactly, and I'm Canadian. So typically we're pretty humble folks, but it's funny. We were at the ISE show. I think we saw you there at your event, at the actual show itself, people are saying, “Hey, we've been trying to find you guys like. We've seen this product somewhere, we just didn't know who made it”, and there's nothing written on the actual display that actually says, Videri on it. You have to kinda pull it off the wall, look at some serial numbers and do some Googling to figure it out.

And that's been great because some of our partners love that. They love the fact they got something really special and unique, and we're going to continue to do that kinda white-label approach. But when you see your list of the top display manufacturers in digital signage, we're nowhere near where I think we should be based on deployments, and that's cause we're not really being captured. 

We're in a lot of cinema projects. We're in many of the top beverage brands obviously we're in QSRs, and there are tons of retailers that you probably wouldn't even realize that it has Videri. 

I have this interesting story that I relate of my experience at DSE, going back to November, and being just like dead tired on my feet and some guy from a company called Videri asked if I could come to their hospitality suite at The Aria, and I didn't wanna go. I was just so tired, but it was right next to the hotel where I was staying, so I figured, okay, I'll go and I met him and we went up the elevator and then walked down a hallway that was, I swear, three miles long to the end unit in this hospitality suite and said hello to some people and they brought me over to the product and it was three skinny monitors on a buffet or whatever you wanna call the thing, and I was thinking to myself, really, I did all this to see some skinny desktop monitors and I thought, please god, get me out of here. But then your guy started to explain to me what was going on and I thought, oh, wait a minute. This is actually interesting and how I've since described it to others is it does a bunch of things, you can explain all that. 

But what I said was, if you think about bars and restaurants that you've been in that had a display on a wall for a beer brand or some other beverage brand and that used to be neon and then it became backlit plastic, printed out plastic. Now it's digital, it's skinny, it's changeable, and it can go up in a matter of minutes and be fully managed on a network and affordable and there's an ROI out of it.

 Is that kind of a fair description of what you're up to?

Wes Nicol: Yeah, absolutely. So that was the kind of the need of this large customer, which shall remain nameless, that worked with us, and the idea was like, you've gotta build something that's gonna fit nicely into a bar, a restaurant that's gonna fit in the environment. There are weird wall situations. It's gotta be something that can fit in. Just like you're hanging a picture effectively, and it's gotta be easy to deploy, being like the sales rep that is working with that bar, the restaurant has to be able to be one that actually installs it. You don't need a third-party installer to come in, roll a truck out and do it. 

Cause that's $150 an hour or something, right? 

Wes Nicol: Exactly. Plus there are all the costs, so these people are already going there. They're dropping off the beverages, they're dropping off merchandise, they're talking to their clients. They have to be able to deploy this in 15 minutes, that was the requirement, and so that spurred a whole bunch of things and thinking about how that is being used in that environment. It's not a tv, right? So part of the importance of this is that we're able to build this cause of what it doesn't have, right? So there's no need for a tuner, no need for speakers, no need for HDMI cables. We have media players embedded inside, a SOC running Android, and they're really thin power cables because we're not actually consuming a ton of power, and we need to be able to store a certain amount of content locally that is connected though it can be modified and centrally managed.

And so the way that works for the restaurant or bar owner is they can have customized cocktail lists, they can do menu boards that will benefit them, but the beverage brand in this case can showcase their products and maybe include that in a cocktail or do some branding exercises and that can all be centralized and managed.

This particular brand which shall remain nameless manages, I think over 40,000 locations globally in 80-something countries now with one person managing content with two interns, and they're managing content globally, and part of that is as part of the installation, obviously, the sales rep is able to just screw it into the wall, there are two screws that you pop it on, plug it in and then they use this app to connect to the WiFi and then connect the network, and effectively they walk away, but they can, with the bar owner in this particular example, customize that content, do some stuff, and so the way we've had to create our CMS platform and device management platform, Is to enable hierarchy of permissions and it maps into this particular customer's CRM system. I think you're using SAP so if that rep is no longer part of the company, they lose their permissions to access those displays. But they can only access these 10 locations and they can work and the bar owner says, Hey, I wanna change this content. I wanna manage this or do something different. That rep can manage that. But the global programs, the programmatic marketing, it's all done centrally from the headquarters, and so by building this product, we were able to then see other benefits, right? 

“Oh wow. It's really thin, it looks beautiful, that's an advantage for events”, and so there's been countless sort of offshoots from building this core product. 

And was it a case of the European beverage brand, I know we're dancing around this because you wanna make sure you're not doing something that's going to upset an apple cart, were they already doing screens in these kinds of environments and thinking this is too challenging, we need something different. Can you help? 

Or were you already working with them and they said, this is a start, but we need to work with you to fine-tune something that really suits our needs?

Wes Nicol: This particular brand has always been very innovative. They've always been pushing the envelope in terms of on-premise marketing. When you're consuming products on the premise, you've got, as you mentioned, like kinda the neon signs, those types of things. That's been kinda standard. They are always the first ones, and so they were testing different digital signage options and they were never really getting what they're looking for, and then they said, we kinda gotta build it ourselves, and luckily through the initial relationship the connection was made and we started building this and testing it and they said, ok, we'll run a pilot, and we'll see what it does. They ran it in a number of locations. Over a period of time, they said, this has to be a one-year ROI or less. That was like the requirements of the pilot. 

They significantly busted through that. It was a lot quicker, and they've seen a 30% increase consistently over four years and tens of thousands of displays consistently driving that because when you're in that location, when you're in that bar, you don't go to a bar thinking, Hey, I want a gin and tonic. Yeah. You're going in there I wanna go for a drink with some friends, right? And oh, what are we gonna have? What do you have here? What's on the menu? Oh, that, okay, great. I'll order that, and so it's kinda that power of influencing people subtly in the background. We're not like a big TV that's showing a sports game, right? We're something that's in there as part of the environment that's. So it was built for that purpose, for that kinda subtle influence of that decision at the point of sale and the deployment, in terms of the requirements of the hardware, they weren't happy with buying TVs.

Like when I came to the company a year ago, I said, hey, TVs are a lot cheaper. We should just make TVs, and they're like, absolutely not. We've built this for a reason, and so that really kinda made me understand the product a lot better.

So when you say 30%, that's a 30% lift on sales of that item in that venue?

Wes Nicol: Yes. Consistently,

Wow, month over month. So that would pay for itself in I don't know, six weeks or something, right?

Wes Nicol: It depends on the product and we've seen in other environments, like in a retail store, get a return on investment in two weeks, it's crazy.

And that's the thing I think about this whole industry. I'm coming from a different industry before, but coming into it, realizing like everyone I talk to about my job here at Videri goes wow, never thought of that. We could totally use that in my industry. And people from all different spaces, and I feel that in this market, there's such a green field opportunity. There's been the traditional stuff, QSR that's been done, but there are so many different areas that I see this potentially going into and when you see these kinds of impacts, like if you're at the point of sale and the customer doesn't really know what to get, think cannabis and others, there's a whole bunch of new industries that you just need a bit of guidance, right? I don't know what I'm coming here to buy, but I want something, and just being able to explain to that customer in a digital way. We have the tools now. We didn't have them before, and yeah, it's really exciting. 

I suspect that the kind of turnkey element of it is also very attractive in that if you want to do something in, let's say a bar, you're gonna have to buy a display, buy a media playout device, or maybe there's SOC on it, but you're gonna have to buy them out. There's a whole bunch of parts involved, and then you've gotta identify software that you're gonna work with. Is it compliant? On and on. So it can become complicated and expensive quickly, and the end users just say, you know what? Maybe later, but not right now.

And they're just selling the dream, so to speak, as opposed to you, because you've got this client and some other clients who can actually say 30% consistent lift month on month, it's like holy shit, where do I sign? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly. Even as you were mentioning, I'm thinking about my TV in my apartment here in New York. I hung it up and I screwed it up a million times, right? And it's heavy, and you're trying to hold it up against the wall. These things are super lightweight. We stripped out everything, right? It's just really down to the bare bones, but it does what you're looking for it to do, and so you're absolutely right. The idea is a very simple consumer-like experience in terms of out of the box, installation. We're talking about a simple iOS app and you've gotta connect to the cloud and then you can manage that through the console, and we're just about to launch a whole new refresh of the platform that is like super user-friendly that will make that possible, and I'm not able to announce a big partner that we're launching other than this beverage brand that's gonna make this a lot more accessible to the average SMB taking advantage of those key features. 

Because you worked pretty closely and continued to work pretty closely with us particular beverage brand, did that restrict who else you could work with?

Wes Nicol: They frowned upon us going with their competitors directly. But not necessarily, no. There's no kinda exclusivity there. But they are pushing to build a product specifically for them and they have got some unique features that they put in that we can’t use with others, but those are software features, so no, we're open, we can work with others. 

Does it become a challenge in the venues themselves where they say we've already got these Videri screens for this beverage brand, we're tapped out, we don't have more wall space, or we don't want competing ones here, this is good enough? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, that's the genius of this idea. It probably wasn't even Videri’s idea to go and do this, but it was this beverage brand’s idea like, hey, this is a bit of a land grab, right? There's only so much real estate in these locations, and if we can own that space it's a win-win for the bar, restaurant, and brand but if we can go and get out there, and they have an aggressive plan to expand then they own that space kind of indefinitely since these things last for a while. 

So that's one of the models we're looking at where the brand is being showcased in a third-party location and the brand owns the display and that's unique and I think it's gonna continue to play out in a few different areas. The other one we're looking at, and we're starting to see some real interest in that, is that the actual retailer owns the display and they have a closed network where they are already getting the brands to spend money on merchandising in the stores. Think about a Telco that's launching a new Samsung Galaxy phone that is 23 or 25 or 57, whatever version it's now, and they wanna buy space in that retail location, they can actually use these displays to, number one, pay for themselves immediately, but also be revenue generating for merchandising in that closed network. I'm not talking about connecting to an exchange or anything, I’m talking about a private closed network and we've seen a lot of it. 

It's just endemic advertising. 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think wireless retailers are like the poster child for that. It is perfect because there are always new products and there are always new plans and features and everything else and the compliance issues of having the right posters up at the right time and all that are massive in that kind of environment, and if you could just all do it digitally, that would be great, but historically retailers tend to be very cheap, would be the impolite term for it, they don't want to spend the money on that infrastructure, they'd rather have the brand come in and do that. 

Are you seeing that shifting? 

Wes Nicol: No. Retailers are under a ton of pressure, you know, 80% of the sales that happen in the US are actually in brick-and-mortar. I didn't realize it was that high, so they're under pressure. But I think the idea is that we have to find a way to displace ourselves. So you've gotta figure out an OPEX model, or maybe it's a three-year term or something like that, and then you charge them monthly, but ok, it's gonna cost you X, but you're gonna make 3X back in a month, let's do a trial for free for three months, see what happens, and they say, wow, like this is actually gonna be generating money from your marketing as opposed to, it's not gonna be a cost set, it's actually gonna be positive. It can show the results immediately. 

So part of the issue for us is like we really need to be able to report that and tell that and really ideally getting access to the point of sale information and say, Hey, like when we've displayed this, we put this out there. We've been running these particular promotions, we've been focusing on X sneaker brand, and that sneaker brand increased dramatically and increased margins at this location by X and Y and really making it affordable and that's the whole thing. I think in terms of the adoption of digital signage. You just have to make it easy to deploy, whether it's a partner that does it or it's in-house, if you're able to make that happen, like this beverage brand, and I think others are able to do it, you still can have a partner come in and it's inexpensive for them as well to kinda just deploy and manage. And so it has to be I think on a monthly basis and it has to drive that business return on investment, very quickly. 

If you pay upfront for the hardware, these displays are expensive cause you're buying the hardware, that's when you're in the year ROI but if you're saying, I'm gonna advertise this over three years and it's monthly, and we know that we're seeing the return quickly, usually in month two or three you’ll find that it's actually paying for itself. 

Yeah. I wrote recently just the other day actually about a company that was starting down the path of AV as a service, the very high-end IT services and everything else related to that, and you're starting to hear about deals that kind of roll in all the costs of a digital sign network into just like a subscription, a monthly fee, to do everything, not just the software, the hardware, the whole nine yards.

Is that something that you are doing now or looking at? 

Wes Nicol: Absolutely, and we have partners that have been doing this for a long time. Here in the US, Velocity Managed Services they're one of our partners.

Oh yeah. Out of Dayton or Toledo, or something like that?

Wes Nicol: Yeah, and they provide a monthly all-in package. They've been doing a lot of stuff with cinemas and other brands. I don’t know if I can mention the brands. I'm just going to be really careful. But yeah, so that's already provided by them and they can also do a la carte: Do you want to have content management? Do you wanna have content development? We've got all the different services. They even do the installation as part of the monthly, so instead of paying upfront for installation, you can do it over a period of time. I think that's a good model. I think that you can see more and more of that. 

Yeah, because not every end-user client is going to have field reps bringing flats of drinks or whatever into a venue every three days or whatever it may be. With other ones, you're going to have to have some sort of an install crew, even if the labor costs are relatively low because it's quick.

Wes Nicol: Absolutely, and many companies don't want to deal with that, right? They just say just give me a turnkey solution. I want a partner to manage this for me, I'll pay for it, and that's completely reasonable because the business case justifies it.

You guys provided the screens at my mixer in Barcelona and we had multiple screens with content cascading over multiple screens, shifting back and forth. So there were many matrixes of rectangles and squares and so on. You could do interesting stuff like that. But what we've been talking about mostly till now has been with what sounds like single displays that would go up and replace a backlit display or backlit printed signs that might have been there in the past. Are you doing much in the way of these multiple displays?

Wes Nicol: Yeah, that's a whole other space, right? And this product is fantastic because of it, the name Videri means ‘to be seen’ and it's an interesting play on words in terms of, like, how do you want to be seen? How do you want your brand to be seen if you're at an event, if you're launching a new product, how do you want that to be seen?

You want an elegant, beautiful display, but you also would love to see an array of displays that's unique and different, right? You can do a wall, an LED wall, that's one thing but if you want a unique layout that's like Eye Catching, we built this orchestration software that really enables you to do that automatically. So you can pinch and zoom the entire video, and if you're able to see the screen behind me right now, and I know we're just on audio, but I have videos running across a number of displays in the back wall of my office that just automatically happens.

So when you're looking at events, activations, and others, unfortunately, a lot of our stuff we can't really share. We have some hidden places that I can share with certain customers, but yeah, so it could be like, you're launching a new car, or you're doing a new whiskey brand or trade shows. That's a huge opportunity for us. People didn't realize this existed, and since we've come out in the last few months here, we're getting tons of inbound requests, and we're going to an event in Kentucky that's a booth-building event. So Booth builders are looking at this product, saying, this is super light, I can hang this anywhere. I don't need special reinforcement. It's very thin, and then I can do these mosaics, and we have a lot of examples of doing an entire huge stand of 50-60 displays, all orchestrated content and it's kind of a unique way, and we've done some studies on that, and it really draws your attention because firstly it's unique, but we purposely put gaps in between the displays by the way, that's what we've learned as a best practice, at least an inch or two in between. So then your mind is drawn to it like you're trying to fill in the gaps and it just draws your attention more. So that's been kind of like one of the key best practices in terms of how we arrange these displays. 

It's interesting because the mantra in digital signage for 25 years has been to try to get to seamless and not have gaps or bezzles or anything else, but you're saying that visually it works the other way. 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, just to be unique, and to catch the eye. Like we're an LED wall, and the LED walls are fantastic, right? They're really cool for certain things, but we have a unique product that lets you stand out, do something different and draw people's attention because you can do things that you couldn't otherwise do. 

Are you constrained by the creativity of that? If a creative person is listening to this, are they starting to think, okay, what does this file look like? What am I doing that's different? Do I have to design something very custom? Or is it just a file, and it'll run on here?

Wes Nicol: It all comes down to actually how you mount the displays. You've got three ways to do it. It has to be a square, portrait, or landscape, right? And you can't have some weird triangle thing going on with displays because it looks kind of weird. 

But yeah, in our creative studio platform, it shows like certain content will render well in that aspect ratio, and so if we work with you on an event and you're saying, okay, we've got this wall that we're going to be working with, we can say, okay, we can do a couple of portraits, we can do landscape, we can do whatever, and then the content has to match up to that. But generally, all the major formats of video, and then you can go back to still images, to video. We can schedule all and manage all the different slots.

So if it's an interesting-looking matrix,, if you step back and look at it, you're thinking in terms of it being a 16:9 rectangle as the overall canvas, even though it might not fill all of it or a square, or whatever.

Wes Nicol: Exactly. 

Okay. So you've mentioned partners a few times. Are you mostly selling through partners, or do you sell direct, or a little bit of both?

Wes Nicol: This is kind of a miss, I think, over the company over the years is we haven't really set this up properly, and we're fixing that. But we have a lot of direct customers, and then we have a very small handful of resellers, a couple in the US and one in Israel. Having gone to this ISE show in Barcelona, realizing people want the product in Poland, they want the product in Spain, they want the product in the Middle East. So we set up a partner program that we just launched two or three weeks ago. We're getting resellers and distributors that will give us the products in the country throughout EMEA. That's like a big push right now. So the product can be sourced there. 

In the past, you'd have to get a shipment from New York and it would take forever to reach Saudi Arabia. Now we're gonna have a local presence with local distributors. So we're definitely actively signing up a ton of resellers and partners. There's been a ton of demand at the show, I think I mentioned that people were just like, wow. where have you guys been? I've seen this. I'm from South Africa, I've been trying to find this product for years and no one would tell me where they got it. So that's all that's changing now, and we're really actively recruiting partners. 

You guys did the reference design, I assume working with your big client or clients, is the manufacturing done in China or somewhere in Asia? 

Wes Nicol: That's correct, done in China. We do all the design work. Our New York office is the sales and marketing, and finance. But we have all of our engineering is done in Canada, based in Montreal. So we have hardware and software engineering up there. So we design, we got mechanical engineering, we deal with radio stuff, and like a whole bunch of designing everything from the display. We're actually building some other unique things I'll talk about maybe a future podcast that is taking advantage of some of the skill sets up in Canada. But yeah, all that stuff gets designed, and we work for the entire process. We're launching a whole series of products right now, and it's QAd in Canada and then it goes back to the manufacturers in China. 

Would that just be an evolution of what you already have or distinct? 

Wes Nicol: It's an evolution with some interesting new twists to it. 

Like what?

Wes Nicol: We can talk about it when you invite me back to get back on this show. 

Now, what about a large retailer that's already working with Brand X CMS software company. Can you integrate with them, or do they have to be like parallel activities that don't cross one another? 

Wes Nicol: We're completely open. We just had a big meeting about that. We're working with some other partners around integrating their CMS platforms. We've got killer device management. So I think our role, when we're working with other partners, we want to be able to manage the provisioning and, making sure the device has the right software, we're able to get a lot of really good insights in terms of CPU performance, memory, WiFi signal, temperature, all that stuff. We would continue to play that role, but we definitely integrate with any other CMS platform. 

When you were at the show, we were sitting across from Appspace, and we went, hey, can we run your Android APK on this? And within 15 minutes, we had Appspace running on our displays at the booth in Barcelona. There are some gotchas to this. We have to do a little bit of modification, but it's actually quite easy for us to start running some other CMS platforms.

Does that cannibalize your revenue? 

Wes Nicol: I don't know if you have my history, but I was at Blackberry, and we were talking about the fact that do we just stay focused on the hardware or do we open up our platform? And you remember Blackberry Messenger, and then they kept that unique to Blackberry because they thought that would help sell hardware, and you saw where that went. 

So I understand that we need to work with other partners. We have to be an open platform. We were talking about a potential partner of ours that's got I think a million displays that they're managing, we're not going to rip out existing deployments, right? We want to play nicely. Maybe they want our display. I see our device management platform being something that could be really valuable, and we'll take a small piece for that, and I think that's reasonable. 

You mentioned that you're in 40,000 locations with this particular client. What's the overall footprint if you can tell me?

Wes Nicol: With all our install base? We're around the six-figure number, but I can't say exactly. 

Okay. So north of a hundred thousand?

Wes Nicol: In that kind of range, yeah.

Wow. That's a pretty big footprint for a company that very few people have heard of.

Wes Nicol: Yeah, I know. I have to get that fixed. 

It's working. 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, it is. But I think there's just so much more potential and we need to make people aware of this.

The structure of the company. Are you privately held or public? 

Wes Nicol: We're privately owned, primarily by a family office here in New York.

Oh, wow, and you're able to just grow organically? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, for now, yeah. I mean there could be some potential acquisitions later on. But yeah, without going into too much detail, we completely revamped our whole software platform and refreshed our hardware platform, and invested in marketing. So there's a lot of stuff going on right now that we're just focused on kind of coming back out into the market. Once that plays out, then there could be some other things we can focus on. For now, we've got our hands very full. 

I appreciate you taking half an hour for me.

Wes Nicol: Thank you. It's great chatting with you and nice meeting you there in Barcelona, and excited to hopefully get back on here sometime. I need some more excuses to talk to you again. 

Absolutely. Thanks again, Wes.

Ney Corsino, Nanolumens

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

Nanolumens was an early player in the LED display space - known mainly in its first few years for innovative  display products that were super-light, thin and flexible ... at a time when just about everything else on the market was heavy, thick and solid.

The Atlanta-based company was still pretty much known for that kind of product when Ney Corsino was hired on as CEO, at the start of 2020. Experienced as a business transformation and turnaround guy, Corsino has evolved Nanolumens from a company with an interesting niche product to one that has a full range of display options - from conventional video wall set-ups and all-in-ones to transparent mesh displays and the thin, flexible units that first gained attention.

Nanolumens has also got more focused on some key vertical markets - arguably the biggest ones being airports and public spaces. Several new air terminals that have been built or renovated in the last couple of years have featured Nanolumens product in its signature public art, messaging and experiential installations.

Corsino and I chatted about how he has also put in the hours with his team to clarify how it goes to market, and how it specifically works with integrators and solutions providers.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Ney, thank you for joining me. You joined the company from Barco, so you would've already been well-versed in LED displays. What attracted you to Nanolumens? 

Ney Corsino: Thanks for having me. Yes, I came from Barco before Barco, and before that, I was at Phillips, Philips Electronics, a European company, and Barco, also a European company, and now at Nanolumens, a US-based company. But to be honest with you, at Barco we paid little attention to LEDs. We have a deep engineering base in projection there and we venture with click share. 

LEDs have been up and down at Barco and at Nanolumens, all we do is LED, so we are pretty much focused here. 

Because you knew the business, was there something in particular that attracted you to Nanolumens? Because they're relatively small and US-focused as opposed to a big global entity like Barco. What was your perspective on all that? Why join them?  

Ney Corsino: I think for good or bad, I developed my career in improving businesses, transforming and improving turnaround, and I felt that the impact I could continue to do would be more valuable in companies like Nanolumens. So I think it was a good encounter between a company that needed this kind of action and someone that had experience in doing this at a corporate level in many different business units. So now I could come, and exercise all I have learned all by myself and I'm very glad I did that.  

When I first got to know Nanolumens, let's say 10 years ago, their calling card, so to speak, was these flexible, almost rug-like displays with removable modules, they called them nixels at the time, and I think they still do. 

It was very unique on the market at that point, and those were the early days anyways for LED displays. I wouldn't say they're not still unique, but I don't get the sense that's the kind of the main growth driver for Nanolumens these days. 

Ney Corsino: The company has run for about 17 years. It has been one of the pioneers in the LED display market, has been involved in many innovations, and has almost a hundred IPs, but most notably, like you just said, it is the invention of the flex module, which is still called nixel where you can basically do smooth curve wall. So we hold IPs on that. But since then, it has evolved quite a bit especially in the last three years, we continue to do of course very well on the curve. But we have re-engineered and extended the portfolio for cabinet-based modular units, also mesh, all in one. So we now have a very extensive portfolio.

Now if you ask about the sales, it's almost half of it. It is still customized, which includes the curved modules, and the other half is more on the standard flat solution.

Why do you think it's played out that way? 

Ney Corsino: I believe that the brand commands that customization aspect, the DNA of creativity, wow effect, doing things that are let's say complex and difficult, but we engineer to make it possible. So I think that's the inheritance of the brand and continues to be. What we have tried to do, part of my arrival here is to continue that, but create us not a next segment that gives the possibility of of scaling up the business, and that's why, as I mentioned before, re-engineer the flat segment all in one mesh outdoor if it is more on the architecture. It's the one step in the direction of extending the portfolio to scale the business and find a consistent regular growth path for the business. 

So if you stayed primarily with these lightweight flex products as your main product line, that would restrict you to being a niche manufacturer as opposed to broadening it and becoming a general manufacturer that would give you scale?

Ney Corsino: Exactly. It is very architectural, customized, and therefore you could call it niche. It's a good portion of the market. We do very well there, but if we have bigger ambitions and big plans, then we need to play in other fields as well. 

In paying attention to projects that come on stream, and knowing that in many cases the customer doesn't allow the manufacturer to say who it is that's providing some of the technology, I still get a sense that Nanolumens is doing a lot of airports in particular, and I'm curious why that's played out like that. 

Why are you guys winning so much of the business in airports? Apart from that, I'm sure you're gonna say because we have great products, but, there have to be other reasons.

Ney Corsino: Yeah, that's a very good question and probably not easy to answer. The product definitely makes an important play there. But I would say, Dave, that the airport is one of the most complex and demanding environments. You have the airport itself, you have the airlines, and you have the advertising agencies or companies. There are a lot of things going on in an airport. You have very tight schedules where you can work and when you can’t. We have security aspects to it. 

I think over the years the company just got to understand how all these cards are played, and then more importantly, we learn and we learn to adapt and not fight the system, but work with the system, right? Whatever the constraints are, wherever the demands are, we translate that into a workable plan that involves product, involves people, involves a process, and there we go. 

How much of it does Nanolumens take on versus channel partners and integration partners? 

Ney Corsino: I think about the past of the company and then I have seen not only Nanolumens, but also in my past, there is confusion within the company as far as the go-to-market is concerned, and that's not a good thing. It was no different here. Nanolumens from its past behavior has confused the market in terms of whether it is going directly, is it going through the channel partner. So one of the things that I've done since my arrival is basically to clarify that and commit to a go-to-market plan, and it is my strong belief and that's where the company is settled now. We go to market through channel partners. So that's our approach. So there is no more to it.

So you don't do direct sales? 

Ney Corsino: No, we do have some house accounts, legacy ones but less than a handful, and whenever we have a company that wants to do direct business, we sit with them and we explain all the risks associated with taking a technology company that is focused on creating things and trying to make it a turnkey company that will be distracted with many other things. And through that dialogue, we always introduce channel partners that work with us very well, and I think, I think 99% of the time we end up in a good alignment that we will play through the channel to the end user, and everybody will be satisfied. 

One of the things that have come up in LED manufacturers for marketing is because a lot of the “channels” didn't really have a lot of background and experience in deploying LED displays, they didn't know how to specify it, they didn't really know how to sell it or anything else. So a lot of the manufacturers came up with these all-in-one finished displays with fixed sizes and they would come in a kit and everything's there and you just open it up and deploy, and it's a 186-inch big ass TV that sort of thing.

I'm suspecting that the channel partners you're working with are beyond that because they're doing mega walls and airports and so on. 

Ney Corsino: We do also have these big-ass TVs as you call them. It's part of the working out distribution model for the company. Our channel partners work with them from a very early stage where we train their designers, we train their salespeople of course if they are open and welcoming to it, and most of the time they are. So we actually work together to make them more comfortable with the technology and entertain the prospect of their business, but ultimately that will come back to us and we will engineer the solution as a final project anyways for them. 

So it sounds like this is more about getting the right channel partners as opposed to getting lots of channel partners.

Ney Corsino: Oh, definitely I mean there are thousands of them out there. We work very well with many, but I think there is a right balance and we try to be very cautious of it. 

The marketplace seems to be inexorably moving towards increasingly fine-pitch displays. Are you seeing that or are you still experiencing some customers who understand that the dynamics of the environment we're in 4 millimeters is fine or even 6 millimeters? 

Ney Corsino: I would say that the answer is: Yes. For the most part, every two-three years, the volume goes into the next narrow pitch size, right? It used to be the 2.5, and then it went to the, let's say 1.5, and to the 1.2. So it feels like it moves, 3-3+ years, and that is not changing. 

However, I think that's very interesting for the LED marketing industry. LED is going in places where nobody would have a screen before. That's number one. So it is growing into something new areas, new applications. The Second is also replacing some of the projection technology, and the third is also replacing some of the old LCD solutions. So it's a market that keeps growing, and I say that because, with that kind of penetration in so many applications, you end up with a need of almost any pitch size, any fine pitch, meaning, the 4mm might be very good for certain applications and the 6mm from some others if it is outdoor or indoor. 

I will give you an example. In airports, there are a lot of 2.5 millimeters going, and they say, why is that? Why don't they go finer? It's because terminals and lobbies are usually very big in airports, so the screens are far from the person and therefore you don't need a super fine pitch, a 2.5 does an excellent job. 

Is there a kind of a sweet spot, like I was hearing in the last couple of years that seems like the market has settled a lot on, as you were just saying, 2mm to 2.5mm works for most applications if you're getting away from really close end things in retail or museums.

Ney Corsino: Yeah. That is right, and I think there is a second trend toward volume on the 1.2mm, especially in applications where people don't want to have a tile LCD solution. They want to have a more smooth, seamless, and large screen. So therefore you also see in that particular part of the segment where people are closer to the screen, the market’s moving very fast for the 1.2mm.

I was walking around Integrated Systems Europe about a month ago, and looking at displays that were R&D products at that point, or R&D efforts but I saw 0.4 millimeters and I didn't see it personally, but I saw the PR after a Chinese manufacturer saying they had 0.39. So just a hair thinner even and I wonder, are they just marketing, trade shows, eye candy kinds of things? Is there really a demand for the LED to be that tight in pitch? 

Ney Corsino: Technology-wise, there is a pursuit for that, that's correct. I think one of the reasons is that you need that kind of super-duper fine pitch to reproduce what LCDs or OLEDs are doing nowadays in the market. Now for the consumer-based screens, you will need to go that low. So technology tips, pushing the boundaries, pursuing that route, no. When you look at the business side of it, the business is run in 0.9mm to above pitch size. Even when you say 0.7mm, many companies are now displaying 0.7mm, is it doable? Yes. Is it expensive? Yes. Are there volumes? No. There will be very, very selected products or screens being made on a 0.7mm at this point. 

So I just try to give you a relative situation between a technology that pursues eventually to be in a consumer kind of demand but still is in a professional kind of market. 

We've seen in the last few years the emergence of mini LED and then micro LED. Is most of what Nanolumens is doing still for, to simplify the description, conventional SMD or four-in-one LED? 

Ney Corsino: Yeah, so we do conventional. Nowadays also moving to COB and therefore going to mini LED. That's where we play. I think the term micro LED is a little bit overused in applications that are not micro LED. I'm trying to be polite, but there is a big marketing push on the use of micro LED at this point. 

Do you see your company going to that? If some of the mass transfer challenges and production challenges get overcome, because I keep hearing that when those get figured out, that's really gonna greatly reduce the cost of micro LED and make it something that you could use for something other than just super premium applications.

Ney Corsino: Yeah. At that point, it is almost like a process industry. If you don't control the yield it cannot be cost-effective. So they will have to operate at a very high yield. I think the company will go with the market. As part of the transformation from the early days of Nanolumens, we are now very market-centric and we will respond to the market demands in the short, mid, and long-term.

So when you say you're market centric, you mean you're focused on certain verticals like airports? 

Ney Corsino: Exactly, yeah. We try to translate unique aspects of those segments into the portfolio, and into the design that we will provide.

Does that kind of apply to going after larger public spaces, that sort of thing? 

Ney Corsino: Yes. So let me also give you a little bit of insight into the business. The largest portion of the revenue mix was on the airport and also in theme parks, so large projects that come every other year. But since then we are now having a very evenly distributed mix where we operate in airports for sure, theme entertainment for sure. But now we also do lots of business with corporate, large venues, but also, especially their lobby and briefing centers. Higher-ed has been investing nicely, Sportsbook, and last but not least, the golf segment. I think those segments are all growing for us, and that gives us a more evenly spread mix in the top line.

Why are all these different segments now investing in LED versus 2-3 years ago? Is this just a function of price and awareness? 

Ney Corsino: I think so. I think the product became more affordable. The product became better, therefore it can be applied in different ways, on different surfaces, and I think the previous solutions they had has already depreciated, and LED becomes the next technology that’s future-proof that provides a more immersive experience.

And I think not to overplay the word immersively, but there's an enormous trend in an immersive experience, and when can you achieve that? And I think LED from a screen technology is very capable of doing that. 

Yeah I've certainly seen this emergence, particularly of these experiential venues where they're using projection, and I love what some of them do. I've got a good friend who has one in Montreal, but I just wonder if that's a technology that's gonna be taken over by LED with time, because you've got more flexibility, it doesn't have to be a darkened room and you're not confronted by some of the environmental issues.

Ney Corsino: True. I think my belief is that no, the technologies will coexist. One technology opens up a new application like those new kinds of museums u or experiential centers that you mentioned. Eventually, some of them will move to LED when they find it is appropriate to have an application to do so. Projection will still stay there. So I think they will coexist, but they will find a new balance in terms of sharing the market. 

One thing I believe your company has expanded into in terms of broadening the product line, is some of the mesh LED products that are both for indoor and outdoor use. Are you seeing a lot of activity there?

Ney Corsino: Yeah, we started that more than a year ago. We installed the big landscape here in Atlanta, the TKE building. I think that got a lot of media exposure. It's a large surface up high in the building. 

It's an elevator test facility, right?

Ney Corsino: That's a test and showroom facility. So there's a lot of elevators going up and down. The building has a glass facade so people could go into the elevator and yet see the stadium down there and see the city, and they didn't want to block that view so we engineered a match solution where you go through the elevator and you still see through and enjoy the same view. However, if you are on the road, in the stadium and you look back at the building, you have this beautiful branding screen there, and that was designed about two to three years ago. It was delivered about a year plus ago, and since then we have seen the pipeline increase.

People became aware of it and the possibilities of it, especially the architects and consultants are very interested to see what the new possibilities are, and we've been engaging more and more in those conversations, and with that, the pipeline keeps growing. 

I assume that one of the reasons there's a lot of interest in that is because it's pretty lightweight, and as you say, it doesn't block light coming in, in the way that a solid kind of cabinet-based system would do. Is that a big attraction?

Ney Corsino: Yeah

You mentioned earlier working with the channel and with integrators. Are you also trying to circulate and drive awareness amongst the design and architectural communities because I kind of see LEDs becoming a building material. 

Ney Corsino: Yeah, we have a separate group within the company here that deals exclusively with the AUC group and we have lots of certified material for training. We do lots of hands-on learning, and we find out that, although we are a very known and improved and growing brand, there are still a lot of people that need to know us better. So that's definitely one aspect of importance for us and we enjoy it because it's not a sale conversation. It's more of a solution conversation in many cases. 

You're based in Atlanta, you do your design, all the specifications, and everything in Atlanta and like everybody else, you get some of the manufacturing done overseas. You're competing with a hell of a lot of companies that have sales offices here and maybe some degree of support, but most of what they do is on the other side of the Pacific. Is that a kind of a key marketing plank that you are based in the US and somewhat designed and assembled in the US versus the others? 

Ney Corsino: A hundred percent. We are very proud of it, and let me quote a customer the other day. The customer, it's a new engagement channel partner and he asked, “When we deal with your company, we actually don't need to use Google Translator. Is that right?” I replied, “No, we don't need Google translator. We are here. We have the full skills here. We are very easy to do business with. We respond very quickly, and we are very adaptive.” At the end of the day, if you put everything into Excel or into the papers it is more cost-effective to have it this way. 

And are you finding just generally that the people you're working with, they are familiar or they've had enough experience in the marketplace to understand that you can have a Chinese manufacturer that has a sales office over here, but support everything else is overseas and that becomes problematic?

Ney Corsino: True, and Chinese manufacturers knock on my door every single, and they offer me, and of course, they offer many other people out there. So then the question is, what's the value proposition? What's the uniqueness? 

So we are very tied with our supply chain. We have made improvements in the last two years. They are paying off nicely, and our channel partners working with us have appreciated all the value that we have been bringing to the table, and once we go through that experience, a hundred percent of the time, it's becoming repeatable and the repeatability of it gives me the comfort that we are adding value to their business, and we can do that in a profitable way for the industry, including ourselves. 

Where are you at as a company in terms of headcount and are you public or private?

Ney Corsino: We're a privately owned company. Therefore we don't share business metrics. 

But do you have 50 employees, 100 employees, or 5k employees? 

Ney Corsino: Around a hundred. 

Okay, and is most of that in Atlanta? 

Ney Corsino: I would say 70 to 80% in Atlanta, and the remaining part spread.

For your manufacturing, do you have people over in China or wherever you get some of your product made or components made? 

Ney Corsino: Yeah, so we work with a contract manufacturer but we have R&D and a supply base in China. 

If people wanna know more about your company, where would they find you online?

Ney Corsino: Nnanolumens.com. We have refreshed the website and brought a lot of tools into it, making the experience a lot more user-friendly and that's where we'll find us. 

Great. All right, thank you for spending some time with me. 

Ney Corsino: It was my pleasure. Dave.

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.

Ben Maher, Outernet London

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

I spent a few days in London, UK ahead of Integrated Systems Europe - in part to break up the trip and flights, but much more so to meet with several companies and see some projects that I'd only been able to see in photos and videos.

The one I particularly wanted to see was Outernet London, a very ambitious, multi-faceted development in the city's center that has, as its visual centerpiece, a huge set of wall and ceiling LED screens that are fully open to the public and positioned in such a way that they can't be missed as people flow from a main exit of the busy Tottenham Court Road Underground station.

I assumed, wrongly, that this exists primarily to run Digital Out Of Home advertising and compete with big screens like those in nearby Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. But there is much more to Outernet, as I learned walking and talking with the developments Chief Commercial Officer, Ben Maher.

The audio may be a bit hit and miss, as we did this on the go and in the crowds that were there even on a chilly January afternoon.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ben Maher: We have this incredibly famous set of assets on this side of the district, which is Denmark Street. So as a business, we've been a landlord on Denmark Street for over 25 years looking after the music stores and we've made, as we said, a huge number of acquisitions, meaning that we own nearly all of the property there by Parcel two or three, and we run a baker for Baker Policy. So if we lose a music store, we replace it with music because we wanna maintain it, sorry, I don’t know how familiar you're with Denmark Street, but as an asset, we wanna maintain this as one of the nice, iconic music streets in the world. 

The first music store opened in 1911, Charlie Chaplin wrote the song, Smile here in 1926. The Melody Maker was founded here in 1954. The Enemy was found here. The owner of the Enemy went around the street with a ledger of all of the music that was sold, and that became the first-ever music chart, which was compiled on this street.

Elton John had his first job as a runner here, and it was the home of the labels, the writers, it was the home of the lawyers, and the management, so people would hang out here in the hope of being discovered. But importantly, talent would wanna be discovered and they'd hang out in the cafe here, this was called the Gioconda Cafe and you'll see Tim Hannaly, the home of British music. But importantly it would be people like Marc Bolan, it would be Jimmy Hendrick, and David Bowie moved and converted an ambulance onto the street and lived here. So it really was an incredible, authentic crucible for music. We’ve maintained the music stores. We put in a 55-room luxury hotel residence, so you stay in the rooms where Frankie Fraser, the Richardson, the Gangland fame, their bar, which was called the Pannaly Bar. Number six Here, out the back is the News House that Malcolm McLaren rented for the Sex Pistols. So you can now stay in that, that's the Anarchy Suite. It's complete with their original graffiti. 

Did big pressure wash it down? 

Ben Maher: No. For better or worse, it's there and it's good. It has a great two listings on it now, but again, in a building like this, incredible history, and Hypnosis were based here. They were the world leading album cover designers. So they created album covers for the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon was created in that room.

When you stay in the rooms, they have names. Like Hypnotized for that room, and then Kiss the Sky is the name of the room where Hendrick used to jam. This is the store where Bob Marley bought his most famous guitar, which was destined for a dustbin for a car mechanic from Essex. This is where the Stones did some of their first-ever recordings and people recorded here all the way through to the likes of the Brit Brats, Adele, and other incredible artists.

So all of this is part of the district, and as I said, we've not tried to Disney-fy this area. We've tried to preserve it. The area dates back all the way to about the 7th century when the church was created to support the Hospital. But once you build infrastructure, communities develop, so this became one of the first slums in London. It was home to 3000 residencies, and over 500 distilleries and this is where Hogarth depicted the Gin riots. So when you see things like that's where that occurred, and this is where it's depicted.

You have elements like Dickens who live down the road in Bloomsbury, wrote Oliver Twist here, and Robert Stevenson. There's incredible history to the area. That is all really important when you're creating platforms and telling stories so that you understand the context within which you exist, not just the recent history. I'll come to some of the other music venues.

So now we’re going to enter the district. Importantly, we have 30,000 square feet of offices, we have 18 retail units, we have popups. We have 13 bars and restaurants and we obviously have screen-enabled spaces. So this first space is the arcade, The Now Arcade. As you can see, it's a full-screen enabled, three-mill pixel-pitched laden environment. All are equipped with acoustic audio. So we have venue-quality audio in all our spaces. 

And the audio is on the bars down below? 

Ben Maher: The district as a whole, through all the spaces, is made up of 230 million pixels. It has 192 kilometers of CAT6 table enabling this and I think it is really important, we have positioned this as a canvas. We've positioned this as a storytelling platform, and that's really important to start with content first so that you can establish the context and the interest of the audience to allow you to tell better brand stories and deliver brand messages. So that has always been the ethos of what we're doing.

We don't stand with one editorial voice or polarizing thought around what we say. We try to democratize access to the platform. So we try to provide as many different interest groups and users to create for the platform because, in all honesty, screens are relatively cheap against the cost of actually feeding them, and creating environments that remain interesting all the time is the biggest challenge we have. So again, one of the things we want to do by using multi-sensory environments is to hand back some of that control to the audiences, not only to create for the platform but also to control their experiences. So although we start with audio-visual, we're on a sort of a technical journey on a path to bleed out new technologies and ensure that people can then interact and control generative experiences for themselves. 

All of the spaces have cameras in them, for example, which will allow for interactivity. So you can come into this space, you might receive a standing ovation or trigger a Mexican wave. The joy of technology as it stands at the moment, and you won't hear talk of Covid. But the reality is people now understand better the reasons to be utilizing QR codes. So these screens can become a launchpad or anything: to commerce, obviously AR experiences, or anything else that we wanna leave. It makes data exchange a much cleaner and more natural sort of methodology. So really important for us to be able to control all of those elements.

As we head down, this provides a queuing function for our venue as well, we have a 1500-person capacity music venue underground, which is the largest new music venue built in central London in the 1940s. This is load in, load out, for the venue. So again, we've configured the streets so that we can have a clean, easy ecological load in, and load out so vehicles can come and jack power straight from the main rather than running their engines and things like that, which is smart.

As we come into the district now, you'll see that we have what was a very traditional maze of News Street. So this was Denmark Place, and we've got here the ability to gate and control the environment so we can create all sorts of experiences and fields and allow people to have events or dress a district in any interesting manner. So five different egress and ingress points across the district. On this side, we've got 14 more hotel rooms because the residences are based in 16 different buildings. So a really different unique point for the hotel. 

Here we have what will be the Denmark Street Recording Studio which will be a pro bono recording studio, again, adding to the ecosystem that we have, bringing people and rewarding talent, just as Denmark Street always did. This is the more historical and music side of the district. This is the more modern screen-enabled place. On the rooftop here. We have an 8000-square-foot modern Chinese restaurant called Tattoo. We have another restaurant on the fourth floor, which will open later this quarter that's called Cavo. They have a rooftop garden here which is joined by a glass bridge, which leads over to the fourth-floor restaurant.

So what you'll see here is we have 2600 LEDs across the runway here. So when we create a red carpet leading to the venue, we can light it up through LED color hues so that we can control those environments. 

So you've got show control, so you can orchestrate the whole thing?

Ben Maher: Brand colors, mood, you name it. We've obviously lifted up causes such as Holocaust Memorial and also for the Ukraine crisis and things like that, that's really important. We understand our environment, we understand the mood.  If you think of the context of certainly out-of-home and. storytelling, smart cities, and IoT play a big part in city planning now, and our environment should be able to adjust to those needs and requirements. We shouldn't just be screaming at audiences. We should be creating dialogue and also understanding the context within which we sit.

So for example, or within GDPR, if somebody comes in, I know if they're looking for WiFi, where their SIM card originates. I know what their default language is. I don't need to invade their privacy. But I can assume when the 50th Dutch person or the 200th Canadian crosses the threshold, I might play the national anthem and change the color of the district. So that creates incredible surprise and delight. 

And that would be data triggered? 

Ben Maher: Completely. We can utilize a custom stack, which controls all of the programs for the district, and that proprietary technology allows us to configure different environments, to configure the different spaces, either in unison or alternatively to have them operate autonomously. And I think it's really important, our point of difference is having that versatility of space. It doesn't just do one thing. We do four core things. We can hold events in our spaces, so that could be a private or public events. We have 32s spots in our spaces, which is, essentially a standard TVC, monetization.

We can do sponsorship. BMW has been a sponsor of our art program. We've presented our wellness program in association with Panadol and importantly, this new stage is gonna be about branded content, telling stories in a slightly longer form in an audiovisual sense in the public domain, and I think it was one of the most incredible moments I've had since being here, reaffirming that we've got an environment that has that versatility and what we wanna do is bring that longer storytelling moment to the form because brands are doing things with brand advocates, with talent.

They're doing things based on purpose or the craft that they create. So we've had driving stories. We've had the launch of the Beatle's actual master Revolver album, the videos that went with that, and again, that creates a different environment. It creates a different context. We've done interactive games, so again, as I said, what you don't wanna be in any environment is a terrible magician. If you do your best trick on the first day, or second day, it's diminishing returns. You're not doing anything innovative or different. 

That's a mistake made over and over again?

Ben Maher: Yeah, and I think it's also quite been quite cathartic knowing that we don’t know everything about this space because no one's ever done this anywhere in the world. So to say that we don't fully understand how the public reacts to work, we have to embrace versatility. So knowing, for example, on the left here we have popup two. On the back corner of the building, we have another popup, which is about twice the size.

These spaces are fully screen-enabled and audio enabled as you see here. If they're not being used for an event, they'll be programmed with our content so that they're relevant. TMP, for example, Take More Photos is a grassroots creative collective. They release briefs on social media and people can submit their photographs and then it curates an exhibition based on the brief. So they do one on Welcome to London. So this one's Welcome to Love in London. They'll do one for International Women's Month, or they'll do one for Black History Month. They did one for the World Cup, for example.

Now these are organizations that don't have budgets typically. So this is pro bono stuff, right? 

Ben Maher: Very much, but again, it exactly comes down to what I said before, which is we want to give access to the platform. We wanna hear different voices to be representative and inclusive of our communities.

Was that part of the pitch as well to Westminster Town Council or something like that? Look, we're building, but it's going to have all sorts of community involvement? 

Ben Maher: Good question. So importantly, when we were talking before, when I showed you everything in front of us, that's Westminster, the road here literally the line down the middle is Camden. So Camden has a very different approach to Westminster. They're just different borrows and it's what you expect, different councils. So we were applying to Camden for our licenses. This area historically had a number of late licenses and bar licenses for the different premises that were here previously and have historically been a musical district. So again, it's quite an entertainment-based space. 

Yeah, I was gonna say they'd be in the mindset anyways for this. 

Ben Maher: Importantly, they have embraced what we're doing, but they have also gone on the journey of understanding what we're doing. Because it's very new. So that is always a challenge. The building and its main purpose of it though is an interesting public space. So if we had created a new private, totally private and shut environment, I don't think we would've been received in the same manner. 

If you've got a second, you might want to stop for a second only because we're gonna watch the Summer Palace and it's about two and a half minutes long and you'll want to see this, but this is a good example of our house content. Something we commissioned to play in the public domain, which allows brands to sit alongside incredible experiences, and as you can see, people naturally get their phones out to record.

I'll tell you the story about how it began. So we ran a camp home for Italian Airways before Christmas, they were one of the first brands to use the space for a commercial message, and they made us nervous. We didn't know what was gonna come cause no one had we've got best practice guides. We've got creative specs, and they created an experience where planes fly over the head of amazing landmarks in Italy and people applauded. For somebody who's worked for 25 years in advertising, yeah, that's an incredible thing to be able to say, quite a lovely experience.

But this was part of the commission that we did or RFP that we did for people to create for the space, and it's an ethereal journey through space-time. But interesting it uses the ceiling as the main communication plan. 

I'm a big fan of these kinds of environments where you look at it and there will be any number of people here who will assume that that's real.

Ben Maher: Oh yeah, and the joy is we’re using a 3mm pixel pitch so you can create that depth of illusion. The total resolution size here is about 6k, so it's not without its challenges, and we have found it unforgiving for things like raw photo footage because it's just so unforgiving on talent so then we can use templating and things like that to accommodate lower resolution assets, but still have them looking credible in the space.

The use of negative space. So not always trying to fill every pixel is also incredibly powerful, so we're trying to utilize that as well. For this, I used to present this in VR, so people are presenting on teams and zoom in VR during the lockdown, trying to explain what we're doing because it's one. It’s one thing explaining a new ad format, but it’s a different thing explaining a new environment altogether. 

Yeah, I'm somebody who's been around this medium, if you wanna call it the technology for 20+ years now and not seen something like this before, particularly the way it's stitched together with everything else, quite honestly, not just, here's this big screen. Be excited!

Ben Maher: Yes, and I think we have to create, as I said, multipurpose and interesting use environments because cities deserve them. You've got, as I said, as many on the weekends as 350,000 people coming through this area and it is becoming an attraction. You, we have six to eight hours of free art programming in this building on a Sunday.

And people email and go, can I see this? When is this happening? And that I think is a good testament to doing things the right way. It's new. We are learning. When we first opened the now trending space, which is the smallest of the spaces, that silver Line proved an incredibly challenging threshold for some people. Because it was like an anthropological experiment. They didn't know whether they could step in. They didn't know what the transaction was. Because they'd never seen a free public entertainment space like that, and as you'd expect children and people who'd had a drink were the first ones to cross the threshold.

But then interestingly put seating in there and people act completely differently. So the psychology of the spaces is also important. Another thing that may be of interest is that this hero screen here on the south wall and the east wall here is permanent deployments, as you can see the slight lines between the wall here, these screens on the north and west are on rails and they can completely retract ah, and the building can open up. So it's one of the first buildings in the world with kinetic staging built in. 

You do have doors too, so you can close the area off for private events? 

Ben Maher: You can see better with the white there. You can see the slacks between how they work. So we'll be bringing new appointments to view to city centers where you'll come with a real-time of day to actually see something happen. You can see, in fact, these ones are usually completely closed and they've been open today for windows. The small area here can operate as a retail unit. It's been a trainer store for Puma. It was a classroom for Mercedes F1 MG with Toto Wolff. It was a studio for the photographer ranking. It was a red carpet zone for Sky. It's been a party for Apple, and NBCU. So again, having addressable spaces that can do a lot, this pixel pitch at 3mm is akin to what they use in the Unreal Engine SFX studios. So that's essentially the backdrop that they shoot. White, shiny floor shows content. The resolution there, as I say, is 3mm-5mm pitch on the outside here because up higher which is still the highest resolution out of in Europe currently certainly at that scale. 

Yeah, I've heard a few 6mm in New York, but not 5mm. 

Ben Maher: So we're really pleased with it. But at that resolution, it's interesting. We do need higher-quality content. Because of that pitch, it can be unforgiving. You'll see Netflix is doing an incredible job. They're a very frequent client of ours, but the animation on here will always look incredible cause it obviously scales infinitely almost. But they produce beautiful output and the resolution is incredible. 

That space, is it also leasable for if BMW wanted to launch a new electric vehicle or something, you could block off this?

Ben Maher: Absolutely. So we held the launch of the new FIFA 23 there and did the FIFA Women's Summit. We've done live boxing with DAZN and Matchroom, so we've held boxing there. We've done events for UNICEF. We've done events for Mothers of Gucci, which is a Gala event. So yeah, we can do private things, but the best way we like the district is having the public in because the more spaces that you privatize, the less inviting the world is, and we want people to come in, experience things free, be entertained, and create moments that ultimately they wanna share and create a destination In the cities we're in.

What would you do if there was a big England football match and I remember Lester Square got kinda destroyed, would you just close this off?

Ben Maher: So we face the challenges that any public destination would face, and we have to manage the environment. So we do risk assessments on anything. We have a really good security team and we do all of the listening and monitoring of those feeds to know what's happening.

We get advice from our partners like TFL, which are local. We've got Camden, and then we liaise with the greater London authorities and also the Emergency response services. So we got a good understanding of what's happening. But yes, we'll make a call based on what's going on to decide how we manage the district because we wanna keep people safe. 

How many people work on this, setting aside security and all that, working with the canvas, and everything else?

Ben Maher: So the Outernet team as a whole is around 80 people. So that'll divide up between everything from the scheduling to the sales teams to the data and center people, creative teams, et cetera.

When did it open?

Ben Maher: Officially, the arcade and the trending spaces opened around late August, and what they’re now building came online from midday each day in November. So it's not been open for long, we're still very much in our infancy but it's nice as I said, to see the behavior of the public and have been here just over four years, to see it come to fruition is very rewarding. 

Did it go through a lot of revisions? 

Ben Maher: Yes, in terms of what you were good at? I think there were about 11 years of planning before I was even anywhere near this, and then once the planning is in place, you have to then reinterpret it as an experience as a platform, both for how stories are told, how stories are configured, how content is rendered out, how content is served and then how it can be taken to market for brands, storytellers, creators, you name it. So yes, a lot of revisions, and we're still revising. 

There's a number of businesses, operating hotels, everything else. Is this element of it or its own business unit with its own P&L?

Ben Maher: Outernet is a media business, and we control the screen-enabled spaces that you see above ground here. 

I'm gonna assume that you're not plugged into programmatic or anything like that because it's a very distinct kinda canvas.

Ben Maher: That is correct. We're not plugged into programmatic. It's not to say that we would never do it, but the reality is the way that the content needs to be served today, it is very unique. As I said, it's a proprietary stack. It uses lots of familiar techs but it's more programmed like a channel like a traditional broadcast channel as opposed to a media. There's a little bit of rendering that's required, let's just say. 

I assume you know who was the LED supplier?

Ben Maher: The screens are from AOTO. We went and did an analysis globally of the best screen providers and for what we needed AOTO had a great product, and this is certainly the biggest one of the first in, certainly the biggest deployment that they've done of this product.

We're running one triple GPS and are now building a load. We did go as far as doing a sort of quality assessment. We visited factories. We even went as far as looking at where raw materials were mined, because of the importance of having single-batch silicon on a canvas of this scale to ensure that you didn't get that different, particularly obviously on the reds within this car, within this canvas was really important. Another important thing about the LEDs, we degrade panels at the same pace that they are running, so that if we need to replace them, we're replacing them either from our own environments or right into the environment. So again, they're in the same life stage of the panels to ensure high quality. 

You have a pretty big spares pool, I would imagine?

Ben Maher: We try our best, it's a revolving. If you look at this, this is a drone shoot done by one of the Wrigley Scott Associate directors that we met, and he shot it on an Icelandic beach and it is a music video. But if you look at how some of the B rolls so creating doesn't need all new assets, it can come from existing architecture.

The supplier of this kind of creativity told you, here's what we would like you to do with it, or do they give you a license to say, look we'd like to do an edit, this is how it's gonna look? 

Ben Maher: It depends on the creator, and it depends on where they are with them. If they're shooting for us, then we'd say, this is the brand kit and this is what you need to produce and this is how you need to play it out. We're always updating our learnings. We get new challenges and new opportunities and we learn from those. But as we see these mega canvases across the world. These sorts of fantastic pieces become more relevant because they'll play out across networks. Across other major cities. I think one of the questions you posed was, is London a model for elsewhere?

It is, and we're in discussions in New York, LA, the Middle East, and Asia, at launching these networks and then sharing experiences, interestingly, might always be this exact look and feel. This was put together over 26 years across a horizontal plane. If you go to Manhattan, you're probably gonna have to use a vertical plane, and so it becomes a completely different onboarding process and journey. So it's gonna be interesting how we take our learnings and then we utilize those in other environments. 

If you're gonna take this to other locations, does it have to be multifaceted in the same way, and that there's a retail component, there's a hospitality component, there's a restaurant component?

Ben Maher: Every case is different. So if you look at environments creating a campus or a district in other cities, particularly New York, or more challenging real estate payment tables or even the planning commissions. So we have to look at them in each case often partnering with other established institutions is wise.

We're lucky enough to have a huge foot here. In places like Manhattan, you have those big footfalls. In the other cities, you don't necessarily have this natural footfall. So you have to create a different style of destination or with another key destination to ensure the right sort of, so yeah each case on its own and understanding the needs and nuances of those cities and audiences as well.

Yeah, because there are a lot of immersive attractions popping up now. They're almost all projection, but they're very much ticketed locations and it's programmed and it starts at this time and you're there for 45 minutes and exit through the gift shop. 

Ben Maher: We're very happy to have you exit through the gift shop here as well.

And don't get me wrong, there is some incredible projection technology out there. We've looked at it in our venues and in other places. We have other locations with theaters and other things and, we would certainly consider projection there, but for the kinda canvas and certainly some of the gaming engines and things and future-proofing, we wanted to do this pixel pitch to create a very unique and beautiful canvas that to be fair, I don't think we could have achieved in the same way with projection. 

Yeah, it's very interesting. I've written about it and but it's so much more interesting to see it in person, but I think more than anything else, to kinda understand the macro idea as opposed to, oh look, a very big set of screens. 

Ben Maher: What are these guys doing? 

Why did they do that?

Ben Maher: Which again, isn't a difficult question always, and I think just seeing the way the public interacts with it has been enough of a validation that cities deserve these interesting cultural spaces and they deserve to be free and in the public domain. 

We're early in our journey. We need more brands coming and telling their stories as well, but telling them in a way that will ingratiate themselves to the public and, out-of-home has done an incredible job at providing public utility forever, in major cities. If we can this model out, certainly for multisensory spaces delivering that as well, I think it sets a good precedent for other cities and other developers across world.

Are you affected at all by energy conservation requirements or requests? 

Ben Maher: Yes, of course.

We are obviously subject to the rising costs of energy as anyone naturally would be, but we have developed the most energy-efficient product that was available on the market. So the sort of coolness and the control of the environment, importantly, isn't prohibitive to doing this. We're not creating a huge carbon footprint that we cannot manage. We have all the relevant ESG scorecards. We're working with the ISO qualifications for energy and for our social corporate responsibilities.

But it's also this sort of magnet or those people who are concerned about all the voice energy on these things, do they really need them versus other stuff that's drawing way more energy, but it's not anything you think about?

Ben Maher: I think the fact that we're providing a storytelling platform and we're not just screaming at people in the public domain. We're supporting arts and culture everywhere. We have a charitable foundation that donates time, and money for different projects. So we've done projects around sustainability with Unger. We're doing things around social mobility. We've done things for AIDS charities, so we work with lots of different interest groups to provide them with platforms. We even audit the popups so that when we're looking at the brands we're working with, we're not just working with the same generic brands that you get on every high street in the world, right?

We wanna ensure that these spaces are different and unique. So whether it's non-white owned businesses, whether it's LGBTQ+ owned business, female-owned, sustainable business, so again, being a conscious member of society, we don't just wanna be a bastian for people who want a big ass billboard. 

So I think we've gone around things in a very different way. There is some incredible landmark out home structures in the UK and across Europe. But I do think we have good USPs and we do complement what is already in the market but with enough points of difference, yeah. We wanna attract people to this space and not cannibalize out-of-home budgets by sticking the same offering up. So if we can get more AV budget and that encourages people to do better and more in out-of-home, then that's a fantastic thing. 

That's very impressive. Obviously, people like it. 

Ben Maher: We're getting there. There's a piece called Heaven's Gate that is the new art exhibition and it is on Sunday and it was absolutely crackers in here, it was just crazy to see how people enjoyed it and it just says conceiving something and then seeing it come to fruition is such a unique and pleasurable thing to be able to do. So we're very proud of what we've done here.

Alan Larson, 65cubed

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

65cubed makes and markets a technology solution that has the triple benefit of making commercial displays, like big roadside LED boards, look better, last longer, and still use substantially less energy .

The company has a small box that plugs in between the media player and display controller box of a display set-up, using a ton of graphics capabilities, smarts and supporting technology to make, it says, even lower-end, lower cost product from China look great.

I had an interesting chat with 65cubed partner Alan Larson about the technology - which I suppose is a form of video wall processing. It gets a little technical in parts of the discussion, but Larson does a good job of not taking listeners too deep into the technical weeds.

Color reproduction and image quality are important to brands, but the really intriguing aspect to this is the ability to get another year or two out of the capital investment in a big screen, while also reducing the month to month energy usage bills.

Power usage is a much bigger issue in Europe at the moment, but it's something that every media owner with big, bright displays should be looking at, as energy bills rise and, in Europe these days, energy availability is constrained.

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TRANSCRIPT

Alan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your company 65cubed is all about? I just came across it literally a couple of days ago and don't know a lot about it. 

Alan Larson: 65cubed is a color management server product designed for LED walls and other video sources. Its roots are better than a dozen years old in the high-end color management space that you might see in a very eclectic home setting, or more commonly post-production studios where color has to be absolutely spot on.

What we discovered a couple of years back as LEDs came on, was that as we modulated the color signature, there were significant changes in the power signature. So we started experimenting with that and discovered that we could apply our technology combined with some aggressive time of day, environmental conditions style algorithms to create an aggressive product for an environmental impact on LED walls and that's what sort of got us started.

We can make the color on a digital wall look very amazing, we've gotten literally cinematic events on walls before. We usually range between 18-20 to the low 30s on average for a digital wall, especially outdoor settings that are on 24/27 and it varies based on how the customer wants their image and what the foot traffic or automobile traffic might be. 

So when you say 18 to 30, what do you mean by that? 

Alan Larson: If you are using say 100 Amps peak on a digital midsize wall, the second we turn our system on at the same brightness and color correct it, it'll usually drop that peak amperage, down to 75-80% max, more typically it's sitting in the 60s, I would suppose because most people don't wanna blow their eyes out with the brightness, and a byproduct of that is we've noticed that a lot of people that sell wall time, the arbitrage people go through for the bids, is they request about a 10% grayscale on whites to lessen the risk of their walls being overloaded. 

By definition, when we take the power signature down, the advertisers are free to do what they want. We don't care what they do because we're not on that side of the game. But that's a byproduct. You simply don't get the power swings that you would in a wall that does not have our product.

So the advantages are both energy savings and better-looking visuals?

Alan Larson: Yes, and the byproduct of energy is that because you're not stressing those LEDs as much, they run cooler. We contend that lower stress on the system and its ability to react to external conditions of interest that that'll extend the display life and what that means is that the display owner is in it for keeps, in other words, we've noticed that some people just flip the displays. They bring 'em up and they're looking for somebody else, like any property, those that use it as a long-term investment are very interested in seeing the net present value of that asset go up and know it's gonna stay up.

And our guess is somewhere around 12-15% increased display life. In a display the size of a roadside, that's a very substantial saving over time. 

Yeah. So if you can lower the energy costs while extending the operating life, that's a double benefit there, right?

Alan Larson: The studies we've done so far on outdoor signage, to put in layman's terms, we estimate that the savings on an average wall, call it about 25% conservatively, because we can be very aggressive in low viewership time periods like overnight, is about the same as saving two average American homes electricity every year. 

And the media company won't really care about that, but they will care about what it means to their bottom line.

Alan Larson: And to your point, Dave, when I get asked who is your market? My market is typically the guy that owns the OpEx and the EBITDA for the company. As we've found again, our roots are on the studio side, but as we've talked to asset owners the price point and fulfillment of their displays are market-driven. Their costs underlying, they're the only ones that really care about it, because they're gonna get what they can get based on the location and so forth.

So if we can take 25% out of their most consistent ongoing costs, by definition, that asset owner's gonna earn more money. 

So would your typical customer then be somebody in Oklahoma, who has a small media company and they’ve got five digital billboards along a highway and they are looking for ways to save money on that? Is that most typical or are these big media companies?

Alan Larson: We don't care. If they have one sign, to us that savings are linear. Each sign has the same impact, of a given size. Our market is those asset owners. 

For example, I'm working on a project with a company that owns, I think around 40 roadside billboards, and they can blanket it across. Now they're in the rural Midwest, and what's especially of interest to them is that in the overnight hours, we can turn the savings model into the 40+ percent range because of the way we can manipulate the pixels on the screen and drive down the power consumption even further.

How do you do that? 

Alan Larson: It's probably best I don’t give away all our secrets because some of what I'm describing is in the patent-pending process. The underlying technology, I think, has around 14 or 17 patents in the color management space, and just by reference, the roots of this company come out of ex-Kodak people in their digital color division. 

The actual author of most of the patents is the retired Chief Technology Officer for that division with a Ph.D. in Color Physics out of MIT, so it's pretty heavy stuff. When I talk about some of the concepts of the color gamut, most people's eyes go shut in about half a second. So we have to be careful to tone it down a little bit. 

Count me among those! 

Alan Larson: The overnight hours, basically what we do is we sit between the video player and the wall’s controller. So in a production setting, you unplug the HDMI into the video controller and insert our box between the player and that video controller, and then put another little segment of HDMI cable and we're in line between the two, and what happens is, because we know a particular color red, let's call it the OU Crimson color. That's a branded color. We can reproduce that color to that PMS standard if you're thinking of it as a paper representation. We've never seen it. If someone says, I want to bid with pure IBM Blue, I think we'd probably win the deal. Now, what that means is that we put a scope against a screen, and we measure upwards of 8,000-9,000 patches. We call them patches, but they're effectively samples. So if I feed that OU Red to the screen, I'm gonna make this up because the numbers are huge. Each digital pixel gets a digital command that tells it what colors, how to turn the pixels on, how bright it should be, and so forth.

But let's just say in simple terms, the color for that OU Red is the number 1234. We have a very nice reference scope that looks at it and says, we got 1234, but the best that screen could spit back, because all the pixels in the world are made in one big bucket over in China, it spits back 1662. “Why?” It's cuz it does. It has nothing to do with the controller. It has nothing to do with anything else. Then we know. Oh cool. So that means we have to send at the number 1553, whenever we see 1234 for any given pixel and it'll spit back the actual image of 1234, and poof, we do that for all the colors in the gamut and that's what brings out the true color. 

Now, a lot of people talk about, moving the white point. That's a fallacy in our world because a white point is actually what's called D65 or 6,500 Kelvin is pure white. When you properly set red, green, and blue (RGB), when they're running to true calibrated and color-managed perfection, that white is the Venn diagram intersection of those color spaces. It never moves no matter how bright it is. So when we reduce the illumination of a screen, we're actually bringing down the mathematical values that told the LED to be bright, not the mathematical values that keep the color in perfect harmony, which makes a very nice cinematic look. In the evening, you can drive down the freeway or in Nova Scotia, a remote road with trees around it, and the colors are beautiful. And at night we take a much more aggressive use of the color black in a way that people can't see cuz black on an LED wall is electrically the value of 0 Amps. So if we query 20-30% of that screen in a mathematical way, no matter where we had it set, that amount of additional power is gonna disappear cuz those LEDs are physically not doing anything, but it really looks nice and we don't tell people how we do it because we can't do that.

And you're able to do more at night simply because you don't have to drive these things as hard, right? 

Alan Larson: We've never actually put up a light meter, I know we could, but we use the absolute location of the display itself, and the nice thing is the geolocation of every place on the earth has an exact sunrise and sunset time that changes every day of the year.

So that means in Nova Scotia, the Sun's gonna set at 4: 28 this afternoon, which means somewhere around 4 o'clock or maybe a little before, we'll start taking the brightness part of that mathematical equation, slowly move it over, perhaps 45 minutes or so into a full post-dusk mode where it'll be in an evening setting and then when the asset owner says, there's nobody on this road, let's flip in the low viewership mode because from, say 11 o'clock till 6 in the morning, only three cars go by, but we're required by contract to keep that wall alive. So it's a combination of how the marketing people wanna see it and what's appropriate for the marketing setting.

When we do things like Las Vegas, we can't be as aggressive, because they just love brightness out there. But I will tell you that some of those absolutely huge walls that you see, I'm assuming you've been to the strip, it's nothing to take 50 grand a year and cost off of those walls.

So when I am buying your product, am I purely buying the box and the technology that's in there, or am I buying a service and a platform? 

Alan Larson: Yes. The answer is the latter. The box is a computer. It's a very fast computer that has boatloads of GPUs and processors because it's creating absolute color, and saturation is different at each pixel level, which means we can maintain grayscale visibility in an almost black setting. 

Most of the time they dither out and they're just a blob. You can actually see the changes in the subtleties of the shadows, and I'm gonna go back to your question, but a point I wanted to make earlier is because of that purity, that absolute control at a pixel level, your image will be more in focus, and it's simply because the processor captures the subtleties between each pixel to the point where the processor doesn't give up and approximate them as a cheap TV would, and all of a sudden you see what the director intended, not what a lower cost video display processor was able to produce. 

Now, back to your question about pricing. We sell our product in a tier of four ways. For lack of marketing intelligence, we call it the base product. It's the kind of product you would use, say in a conference room or a church where you turn it on and you just want it to look nice and you're gonna turn it off. The energy savings piece is incidental because they don't care, and they plug it into a 110 circuit and call it a day. We sell that as basically the asset with the color management system and everything they want to use on it is basically a manual setting. 

Then the next one, which we affectionately call our Energy module and pops in all of the automated features for geolocation time of day, anything you wanna do that is environmentally based or schedule based, it'll take over. In fact, when we take the color way down to the point where you go, gosh, it's dim, the color management system can actually pull, this is the patented stuff, out warm colors or blue colors or whatever would add a little zip back into the picture. Now is it absolutely pure to the King's English studio? No. Does it look better? Oh yeah, it does. 

So that means you can create a very pleasant brand running it about 25 to 35% of the power signature, and I'd have to show it to you cuz once you see it, you go, huh? What do you know, those facial tones came out. So that part of the product is typically sold on an energy split, software as a service model, either as an asset purchase or as a software as a service, continued service. And it's based on an energy savings model. So technically if you were in Nevada versus New York, the price point for the same asset would probably be different in our eyes. But in all cases, the customer always wins. If they purchase the product, they will always be cash positive in less than 24 months and thereafter.

Yeah, that was gonna be a question was, yes, you could save money on this, but is the cost of the technology at a point where you're not really saving, you're just saving on your energy bill or whatever? 

Alan Larson: No, our play is, I gotta be able to look a CFO in the eye and go, you'll be better off with us. End of conversation. I don't care if you give a damn about color, you'll be better off, and quite frankly, the entertainment companies that have a customer that comes in for three days and gambles, they honestly don't care, right? ? Cause their market is to get people behind a slot machine.

And other people, if you go into a boardroom setting or someone that cares about their brand, oh heck, they don't care about the energy. They want it to look perfect. They're there to impress their customers. So it depends on the market. And by the way, the device is always hooked via a very secure tunnel to our server farm in Rochester, New York, which means nobody can actually get into the server. It's impenetrable, and the only way you access it is through a web app that can run on any device and you can watch the behavior. You can see how much the machine is ready. You can see how much if you elect to put onboard storage and so forth, and you can do all the manipulation of the screen via the web, no matter where you are.

Since I brought that up, I'll shift to the fourth piece of our product, which is smart automation. Because we're keeping a heartbeat pulse on that machine, if the video path goes away, either to or from, the technician on duty will get an immediate alert on his cell phone. If we're hooked to a UPS and the UPS is alive, so we're alive, but the network's connection goes down, then more than likely there's a power failure somewhere else. Once again, we'll notify them immediately, and the reason we can do that is that the server farm is that which actually notifies the technician, not the device itself. So it's saying, “I lost my baby out there in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna tell somebody about it.” As a byproduct of that, the third tenant that we sell to, and this is for people that just have a desire for it, we've been asked and have done camera installations. There are a lot of controllers that do camera installations, which is fine. It's nothing unique, but again if someone is having a hard time with a consumer paying their bill because they want absolute validation of their display ads, we'll just have the server snap a picture every three seconds and log it both locally and up on the server, and if somebody asks a question, here, knock yourself out. Here's a log of everything that happened, and if we throw an error at the system, then if the camera's up, we would immediately turn a live feed on and make that feed available to the technician via that text. So in rural settings like where you live and a lot of the mountain states, these guys in bucket trucks drive two hours just to find out they didn't even need to go there. 

For example, we were at a sports bar where the network went down for six minutes and the technician got an error. By the time he read the error, the system was back up. So he calls and says, What the heck happened? We go, go talk to your network people. That's exactly what happened. It's that kind of stuff. The idea behind this smart service is that we do not want the distributors that buy and resell our product to get a call at 11 o'clock at night because the consumer found something wrong. We want them to be able to call their customer and say, by the way, “if it's of interest to you, I remediated a couple of issues last week. No problem. That's just what we do for you because we care”, and that's why we built it. That was all based on the distributor. Because they have a business to run and every time they have to service a wall for no reason, it just takes away their bottom line above and beyond what the customer bought. This is a distributor feature. 

So I've been to many trade shows, but trade shows that included booths for companies who were specifically in the business of video wall processing for LED video walls. I'm thinking of companies like Brompton and I understand at a base level, I guess at most, that you're running your signal through these boxes, which optimizes and improves the visuals that get pushed to the screen and therefore make it look better.

Is that essentially what you're doing here or is this like another component? 

Alan Larson: No, it definitely conditions the video signal. In the high-end video market, a couple competitors I can think of, on a studio set, you'll see Black Box, where they actually condition the camera. I've seen Lumigen in high-end settings. 

We're similar in those products. There's a thing called a LUT box. We are the highest-resolution LUT box on the market. We got our name 65cubed because we're a 65x65x65, that's the cube, RGB-based technology. The nearest competitor that does something like this, I think is 37 cube and most of them are like 17, and most of the calibration style activities we've seen from all companies are one-dimensional, not three-dimensional, and again, we're basically hitting the color management system for a digital wall with a sledgehammer because we happen to own the asset.

Our sister company is owned by the same investor as we are so we have untethered access to all the software assets. 

So is this the sort of thing that you purely sell as a product or would you license it as well to a big-time, top-five LED manufacturer so it would just be incorporated in the overall product?

Alan Larson: We would welcome it because it's a lot easier to sell and implement, for example, there are two ways that our system gets installed. Because we can't control the quality of any given panel that goes on a wall, regardless of the manufacturer, we always scope the system to start with. 

So if someone owns some walls along Interstate 10 and they said, we want these fixed, we'll actually go in a bucket truck for a couple of hours and scope the screen, and once done, it’s done and every display that's of the same bin of LED, they're done. But if it's an oddball, you go do it. 

For a distributor when they receive their great big crates of panels from China, they take one out, they're usually like 6 inches x 12 inches or foot by foot or wherever there are. They just lay it on the floor, hook a controller to it, put the scope against it, and go home for dinner. And then that entire set of crates that came in the same shipment are all done, and so the customer never gets involved in it. But no, the underlying technology of our sister company is in thousands of high-end monitors that are used in commercial settings, high-end gaming, that kinda stuff.

Who's the sister company? 

Alan Larson: The technical name is Entertainment Experience. Their trademark company is called EE Color, and it's embedded in our technology. We're both owned by the same group. 

Is the product something that would be used across any manufacturer?

I mentioned the top five companies that perhaps sell a lot of this stuff at least to the major media companies, for the sides of buildings and roadside billboards, and so on. Or is this more the thing that's gonna really improve lower-tier, lower-cost products?

Alan Larson: I can't speak for the quality management of any manufacturer. The lower quality products, distributors that don't sell the top three or four name brands. They love it because they can go and compete for head to head. We have clever tools we give them. We give them an image that's basically duplicated side by side and play it in duplication on the screen, and then we tell our processor to physically not process the left side of the screen pixels and the right side we do, and it's visually impressive because the telltale evidence of digital walls that are pushing too much electricity and don't portray are people.

We went to the Infocom Show last June, I believe we went with a partner, a distributor that resells our product. We were the only ones that had people, not swirling colors and mountain scenes, right? Because we can produce the facial tones of anybody, whether you're Caucasian, of color, just as if you're looking at them in your face. When you get the people's faces right, I guarantee you the rest of the colors are in. 

Typically what happens is people look like they sat under a sunlamp all day. Another telltale evidence of a screen often aging is that white looks turquoise. That just means the whole color skew is pushed way out, and when we bring that back in, and by the way, when it's pushing purple, it's pushing a lot more electricity too. When you bring it into white, the white is is the byproduct of the red, blue, and green in concert. We don't create white, white happens, is what I'm trying to say. 

For the lower-cost products coming over primarily from China, one of the criticisms is that they use LED light admitters from a really wide “bin”, a wide assortment of bins with different Color properties, and everything else. Is the proposition here that that's not the same worry if you're using this kind of technology? 

Alan Larson: No. We usually tell the distributors who buy those. You have to pay attention to the bin numbers as they come in because yes, they vary widely and you find that the distributors are pretty clever. If they pull some panels out that look odd compared to the rest of them, they literally sort them. It sounds like a big pain in the neck, but they don't want their customer to have a checkerboard on the wall. 

But no, typically the rule is if you receive another shipment that the manufacturer declares is of the same bin, you hope that the manufacturer has integrity then you go with that. What you typically find is, let's assume the bins are off by 5% or 6% in the color signature, and it's on the side of a wall, along a freeway somewhere. The energy curve is gonna be taken care of. These colors won't be textbook, but again, you have a viewing discussion with the consumer for about two seconds when they look at the screen. otherwise, they're gonna hit that semi in front of them. So you don't have to be as particular on roadside displays as you do in company settings or boardrooms. 

You mentioned coming out of the studio world and so on. Is this primarily a product for outdoor displays that you're gonna see from a long distance or is this the sort of thing that you could use indoors for 1.8-millimeter fine pixel pitch walls?

Alan Larson: Actually, today I'm going over to a manufacturer's US distribution center, and I'm gonna be working with their team to set up a 0.5-millimeter, 5x9 foot wall in their boardroom. Now, the finer the pixel pitch, the more amazing the product actually. 

So last question: I was curious about energy savings.

I work quite a bit with a company over in Germany. We collaborate on things and they asked me about energy concerns in North America I say, people are aware of it, but it's not a point of discussion. Obviously, it's a huge point of discussion now in Europe. Are you getting questions at all about that and are the customers interested in that side of it?

Alan Larson: We're more interested than people we've found. In fact, one of the reasons I went to the DPAA shows a couple of weeks ago. One of my missions was specifically to look for potential distributors in continental Europe for that very reason.

I've traveled extensively in my career overseas and have put a lot of time into Europe and the Middle East, and it's a whole different world over there, and the weird thing about Americans, and probably Canadians too, is they've never been more than 250 miles from the day place they were born and like in Dallas where I live, you don't see any news about New York because it might as well be Germany. They don't get it, there's just not something that would register. So the European thing here is nothing more than news on the nationals every so often.

And you don't have US media companies or maybe Canadian media companies as well expressing concerns about the cost of energy and interest in your product primarily because of that. They're more interested because of the color properties? 

Alan Larson: If they pay the bill for that asset, they care. When I was at DPAA, I got killed with acronym soup because I come out of the high-tech industry, databases, applications, and computers, and I could have given you the same three letters and some acronyms, and I would've thought it was something different. So I sat there and just listened and looked for the context and by and large the word “energy”, and the word “perfect color” wasn't mentioned once in the five days I was there, and hence I met with an architectural engineering firm that’s all about energy and they went, you have uniqueness here that we believe as we do these great big installations will give us a competitive advantage, and that was the most productive meeting I had all week, actually.

So back to your question about the majors. I have approached the likely candidates that are the big display owners, the people that make them and some have amazing products, don't get me wrong, We've looked at a couple of them, call it the top three or four, and we go, you know what the difference is between some of the cool things they're doing and what we can provide, that just validates our market. We don't care if we so-called compete against them because that's goodness. Because they're doing the right thing for the environment. That we're trying to do. We're sensitive to that. So the European piece is very important to us. We're just attempting to get a foothold to get our product supported locally. 

All right, Alan. If people wanna know more about the company, where can they find it online? 

Alan Larson: If they go to our website, they can fill out a simple form that says, “I wan to know more” and that's about all it does, and I'll call them right back, or I'll have somebody in our group call them back.

That's 65cubed.com, right?

Alan Larson: Right!

All right. Thanks again for spending some time with me. 

Alan Larson: Thanks very much.

Giles Corbett, Cloudshelf

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

A UK start-up called Cloudshelf has come up with an accessible, heavily-automated and simple platform that helps small, mainly local retailers offer the same kinds of interactive display tools in their stores as deeper-pocketed and more heavily resourced major retailers.

The company has written code that crawls and analyzes local retail sites on Shopify's vast e-commerce platform and produces interactive experiences that are a lot more than just the online site on a screen in the store - something we've all seen and rolled our eyes at. In this case, it is curated and stylized to look and work like an in-store interactive site produced by a digital agency - probably for a lot of money.

I spoke with founder Giles Corbett about the origins of his company, how the platform works and is sold, and why the nightmare scenario of retail lockdowns and restrictions through the pandemic actually created something of a perfect storm for Cloudshelf.

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TRANSCRIPT

Giles, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what Cloudshelf is all about? 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, sure, Dave, with pleasure. First of all, I gotta say it's fantastic to be on the podcast. So Cloudshelf is a really simple idea. We call it in-store eCommerce. Now I bet you and the people listening to this podcast, you've all been into a store at some point, and you've gone in looking for a bike or a pair of jeans or some jewelry and you haven't found what you were looking for and you left the store disappointed. It turns out this issue of walkouts costs physical stores a trillion dollars a year. So it's a big issue, and that's just the immediate loss of sales, without even talking about all of the dissatisfaction, et cetera that it causes later on. 

Now, being such a big issue, it turns out that some of the most successful retailers worldwide have built solutions to go and bring digital experiences in-store that can alleviate this issue. But what Cloudshelf does is it takes this idea and just using an AI-driven platform immediately makes it available to even smaller or independent retailers that don't have the unlimited means or the technical knowledge of some of these super retailers and these retailers can very simply set up Cloudshelf in a matter of minutes and get fantastic digital in-store experiences, either interactive experiences or display experiences that help them sell more and close more sales in the store. That's what it's about. 

So how this would manifest itself in a store, a physical store, would it be some sort of a touch screen kiosk screen, whether it's on a counter or free-standing, or perhaps mounted on a wall?

Giles Corbett: Dave, all of those. It's always using some form of digital display, and Cloudshelf can operate either on interactive touch screens that you're describing, or it can even be on display-only screens. I'll talk about those maybe a bit later on. But indeed, typically retailers will have a kiosk that could, maybe imagine a fashion store with a small jewelry range and on the jewelry counter, you go and see a beautiful screen that's showing off in a stunning way all of the available jewelry, and you go and see the small range on display and you maybe you can't find exactly what you're looking for and the screen next to it will say, discover the rest of our jewelry range. You touch it, you can find what you're looking for, and even buy it directly off the screen. 

Now this is different though and I wrote about this recently, how I walked around the National Retail Federation Show and saw some eCommerce companies at that time. This is going back 3- 5 years, basically pushing their websites and their online presence to an in-store screen, but not changing anything. It was just The eCom site on a computer terminal, basically in the store, and from my perspective, that wasn't enough. 

I'm very old and I go back to the starting days of the internet and online news sites were filled with what was called shovelware, basically shoveling content from another medium onto a smaller screen and saying, we're done, and it looked like that. You're saying this is different, right? 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, putting your website on a screen in the store is a really bad idea. You wouldn't expect to go and find your website just running as it is on a desktop, or on a mobile phone.

Similarly, as a customer, you do not want to go and see the website running on a screen when you go into a store. If I go into a store and the retailer says, oh, I'm sorry, I can't help you. It's on the website. Please take a look at it. I'm thinking, hang on, why did I even bother walking into the store in the first place? Now the whole point is to go and create digital experiences that complement the magic, the delight of being in a store. You go into a store because you think that the person who's there is actually going to advise you on the best shirt that looks the best on you, or the bike that's the best for the kind of road that you want to go on, or whatever it may be. You want that level of advice, of contact, of engagement, and therefore you want a digital experience that complements that, and that's what Cloudshelf does. 

If you just put the website there, it fails miserably. Look, I will give you a really obvious example. Go into a clothes store and you have jeans, you have shirts, you have ties, you have suits, etc. If you've gone in wanting to buy jeans, you've gone up to the jeans area and you've had a look, you expect the screen next to that area to go and show you about jeans, not to go and show you that if you happen to be on the third floor of the store, you could also go and get swimwear or whatever it may be. So it's the idea of having this effectively interactive visual merchandising next to the product, and you want something that enhances that in-store experience, and that's what this is doing, and then there are a whole bunch of other reasons why it's different to the website. For instance, it knows a device it's on so that when you go and buy something, it knows which store it came from. It makes sure that you don't have to enter any personal information onto the device itself. If I was to go on the website and I wanted to buy something in the store, I need to go and type my credit card number into that tablet or that website, that would be crazy. So it does away with all of that, and it does a whole bunch of other things too. 

So the premise here is that you can take an already built and managed and populated eCommerce website from a cloud platform and largely automate and push a version of it, a curated version of it, to smaller screens without having to hire an interactive agency and have a 6-12 month project on a possibly a six figure budget to put it all together, right? You can do this pretty inexpensively and easily? 

Giles Corbett: That is a perfect summary. So indeed, we start with the existing eCommerce website. Why? Because for most retailers, that has now become the biggest repository they have of visual assets, product descriptions, et cetera. So that's what we use as a starting point, and just imagine if you're a retailer, you've invested a lot in your online website. It's fantastic if you can just reuse that automatically to go and create all of these in-store displays, so you're spot on. 

If you happen to be, for instance, a Shopify retailer, you simply add the Cloudshelf app. It analyzes all of the products that you have, and it says, what kind of a display do you want to create? “I wanna create one for trousers or jeans, menswear, whatever…” You want to say what it is, it will then go and propose all of the products to go and put into it, and it will go and create that. You then say which screen you want it to go on, and it displays that on the screen. It updates whenever you update the website. It chooses all of the best-looking images so that you don't need to go and go through and select them all independently. It does the whole thing in under five minutes from beginning to end.

So you would have templates, I would assume that would be the wireframes to do this in different ways? 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, absolutely. You could choose a number of parameters around how you want to go and lay it out, but you don't have to. You can just click ‘Create a Cloudshelf’ and it's there within seconds and then you wanna go and tune it, sure, you can tune it. 

Do you find if people are doing the kind of click-and-forget thing where it's just gonna create something that they're fine with that? Or do they want to tweak it? 

Giles Corbett: They definitely want to go and tweak elements that are key to their visual branding, so brand colors, logos, fonts, and things like that, and most of them will do that. 

But then what is amazing is they can just about forget about it because after that, whenever they do an update to their website, it is carried through and it's there and it's intelligently displayed. They go and put on promotional sales and it is carried through to their Cloudshelf automatically. So once they've spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing those initial branding choices, then the whole thing just runs. 

And that's because you're working at an API level with the eCommerce platform? 

Giles Corbett: Absolutely. So a big part of what Cloudshelf does is an incredibly powerful backend sync engine that just manages the analysis, and synchronization, checking all of the retailers that are live on the platform.

And you've integrated first by the sounds of it, with Shopify, and Shopify gives you a vast audience, correct?

Giles Corbett: Shopify gives us pretty fantastic API access. It gives us a vast audience and it gives us a growing audience. So what we see in all of the countries in which we started operating is that more and more of the retailers who maybe were using another solution are moving over to Shopify, and one of the things they love about Shopify is the ecosystem of apps that enable them to go and find exactly the solution they were looking for to address their issues. So for us, Shopify has been a great place to start and learn. 

It seems to me Shopify was noodling this, going back four or five years ago at NRF and some other eCommerce companies as well, why wouldn't they do their own as opposed to partnering with you? 

Giles Corbett: You know what? I think you are right that Shopify is going to be looking more and more at this. In their recent declarations,  they were really promoting in-store being the next growth vector for them suggesting that this is an area that they will be looking at. And you know what, when they do, I think they'll come up with something that'll no doubt be absolutely fine. 

But if you want to have the very best solution, it's gonna be Cloudshelf because we are the team that's just dedicated to this area of work and development. 

Yeah I've been involved in digital signage for more than 20 years now, and I've seen all kinds of very large, well-funded, deeply experienced companies get into digital signage, but, only kind of sorta, and it's a skunkworks operation. I'm thinking about past iterations of Cisco and Google and companies like that, and they're just not fully engaged and therefore the products are never all that robust. It's just like, “There, we did it!” 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, I think there's a bit of that, and let's go back to what Shopify is doing. They're clearly promoting and investing in their POS and making it better and better. They are going to spend time on this but we are at a slightly different segment where this intersection of digital signage, which is about beautiful displays, and eCommerce, which is all about driving transactions and this space that we've created for in-store eCommerce is all about the union of those two worlds.

Yeah, I would imagine you had to spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience, how it looks to people walking up to it, how they're gonna navigate it, and so on because it's not the same as sitting at a desktop or monkeying around on your tablet to shop. 

Giles Corbett: Absolutely. To begin with, it's a public screen, so the kind of information that you'd expect your phone to know or that you'd be willing to type into your phone, you do not want to be entering onto a public screen, so you need to have all of the handoff, the seamless handoff between what happens on the public screen and then what you complete to finalize the transaction on your private phone, and that is a completely novel experience.

When you're working with a big eCommerce platform like Shopify, were you just working basically tapping into their API and developing something, or were there sit-down meetings with Shopify folks saying, “Here's what we wanna do, here's what we need from you” and they were, in turn, asking you how we manage security and all those things?

Giles Corbett: It's a very interesting question, Dave. When we first spent some months actually prototyping all of this solution as a private app, something that was still allowed on Shopify in the early days, we were trying all of this stuff out and iterating like crazy with retailers. And then at one point we went to Shopify and said, listen, this is our idea, this is what we wanna do, this is what we want to launch, and they were scratching their head saying, “Hang on, we don't really understand. Is this POS or is it eCommerce? Where does it sit?” 

We said no. This is new. This is different. This is taking somebody's website and making it so that it renders and uses beautifully in their store, and so at first, there was some confusion on their side about where does this fit? And then the more we engaged, the more enthusiastic they became, and they've been fantastically helpful at giving us feedback and advice on a bunch of things. 

Do you have the back end sorted out as well? One of the things that I said to some of the companies when I was walking around NRF and they were showing this core idea was, what about device management? How do you know if the screen's active and working properly and so on, and they looked at me like I had three heads, it just had not occurred to them.

Giles Corbett: Dave, in a past life, I was running from West London, a network of 15,000 connected devices in, I think it was 350 cities in China and so yeah, we learned everything we needed to learn about monitoring devices. 

You have been through the wars.

Giles Corbett: Big time. Anyway, what I'd say is that if you go and look at the Cloudshelf code base, the bit that we call the engine, the bit that displays on the screens is probably well under 20% of the code base. The backend and all of the management tools are where all of the cleverness is. 

Yeah, that's an interesting comment because I've said so many times to people that getting media to play out on a screen is a technical challenge, but it's minor compared to all the work needed to keep the stuff playing on the screen reliably and manage it.

Giles Corbett: Yeah, indeed. Retailers are using Cloudshelf because they want to enhance the in-store experience. You do not enhance the in-store experience by having a blue screen.

Yeah, definitely. So where did this idea come from? I was looking at your LinkedIn background and your previous company was Ksubaka and it seemed to be about interactive in retail as well.

Giles Corbett: Yeah, so my background has always been around stuff that drives or is driven by end-user engagement. So it started off with mobile games, and then from mobile games, we thought about how we can use games to go and drive engagements in stores next to products, and would that be the beginning of a fantastic media platform.

And that's what Ksubaka was all about, and we developed that extensively in China, and then that sort of stayed in China, and we'd started developing extensions from what we are doing Ksubaka in the UK and in France, and we were supporting big retailers such as Tesco, Marks & Spencers, Next, and some others. And then the pandemic hit and Every single one of our retail clients closed down in literally a two or three week period, and that gave us an opportunity to think, reflect, go work on some of the back projects that we hadn't had time to work on, and while that was happening, there were two things that happened that I found absolutely fascinating.

First, we just became more and more aware of all of the small independent retailers around us who had closed their stores putting big signs in the window saying, “Come onto our website…” and they were all, every single one of them moving onto Shopify. So we started looking into Shopify a lot more and discovered that maybe there was something there. But you know what, the second thing that was really interesting is that all the way leading up to the pandemic, there'd been this kind of belief that all retail inexorably moving online. That basically, once a consumer had bought something online, that was it. They weren't going back into a store. 

Now in the UK, we are blessed with a lot of very impressive real-time statistics by organizations such as The ONS and they track all of the online and offline sales for the last five years, they've been showing quarter after quarter increase in the share of online, and by the time we hit the pandemic, online in the UK was way above what it was in the US. It was like 24% to 25% of all consumer spending was taking place online. We hit the pandemic and that number goes through the roof, 38%. McKinsey publishes its sort of big report about how basically online has just stepped forward 10 years in two months, and that's it. It's a point of no return, and then the first lockdown ended and it was really puzzling. We saw all of the stores around us fill up, and we started looking at the statistics and the share of online fell back to what it was just before that first lockdown. Now we had lockdown two and lockdown three, and each time the same thing happened: online shot up, but by the end of lockdown, online collapsed back to the level it was at before. 

All of these consumers had found out how to go and buy their jeans or their milk or whatever it was online, but yet when the stores reopened, not for all of those purchases, but for many of them, they decided to go back into the store. Now, that told us for the first time that there was absolute proof that something we'd always believed was true, and that in the future, retail was going to be something that would be completely hybrid. It was gonna be, yes, a lot of it online, but also a lot of it in-store, and the stores that would survive were gonna be those that would've invested cleverly, smartly in the digital experience to make sure that the in-store experience was outstanding and that became our customer base, and they were the people that we started targeting. So all of those things happened, and then a third thing happened. The third of my two things.

And that was the emergence of hybrid working. So initially full remote, then hybrid, and the bet that we took there was never gonna go away, that we would all spend more time working from home or elsewhere, but basically not from the city center than we had done before the pandemic, and that meant that there would need to be a shift in the fabric of retail and the structure of high streets around where people lived and that as there were many more places where people lived than their worst city centers, stores, brands, retail units would have to be smaller, and if they were gonna be smaller, then they'd need more digital to be able to offer the same range of services. And therefore our bet is that we are absolutely in line with all of those trends happening simultaneously. People are moving to Shopify, independent retailers, or retailers in general, learning how to go and digitize, and consumers wanting to go and shop more locally, and that's why we think this opportunity of in-store eCommerce is so exciting.

Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of chatter about the idea that larger stores, like big boxes and so on, would increasingly become showrooms where you could go in and have a look at something, but then you can order online or whatever, and I would imagine that it extends itself down to even small businesses who can expand their product range without expanding their footprint. 

Giles Corbett: Dave, it is fascinating. I was with the owner of a small independent store yesterday called Cherry Moon, and she's got a beautiful selection of designer clothes, and she has these two tables in the middle of the store that has beautiful jewelry by two designers and she was saying that the issue is that many of these pieces are unique or in very small quantities, and the designers can't afford to put all of their stock there in that one stop, so that means that they then can't exhibit it elsewhere, and all of a sudden, what Cloudshelf was helping her do was give these designers the ability to go and sell their entire range in her store without needing to commit all of the stock. And that idea is one that we've seen time and time again. 

I was in a meeting this morning with a retailer we're rolling out with this week, and they have five of their own stores. They have 12,000 SKUs and they have 200 stockers, and their issue has always been being their website is ahead of their stockers, who go and see the website as taking business away from them. And yet with Cloudshelf, it completely turns the whole story around because now they can go and have Cloudshelf presenting all 12,000 SKUs in these small stockers with the stocker knowing that if somebody goes and buys a product via the Cloudshelf, it will be allocated back to their store and they will go and get the same benefit from it as though they'd actually sold the product physically from within the store without having had to hold the stock. Now, that's a pretty amazing proposition, both for the brand and for the retailer. 

So you're rolling out with a customer right now. Where are you at? In reading some of the PR, it indicated you went through a series of trials, the company is not that old, and you went through a series of trials in London and Paris and are now deploying. So you're obviously past the testing stage and getting into operational mode. 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, so we are 18 months old. We started off with a small group of retailers that we called basically friends for life, pilot retailers, and the deal for them was that they'd get Cloudshelf for free forever, they just needed to go and give us feedback on a weekly basis on how they were using it, how their customers were reacting, what else they wanted to go and see in the product, and we worked with them for a year, basically iterating and improving the product, and then indeed, as you said a few weeks ago, we actually made our app live on Shopify and announced that we were now ready for business and I'm delighted to say that in the short time since then, we've actually had some fantastic successes. So we're going to live in Ireland at the end of this week with two retailers. We're going to live in Scotland also this week. So there's definite movement there.

There's been a lot of interest from many partners in France and we've just kicked off some discussions in Germany, and Dave, I really hope that in the next few months we'll be signing up our first retail networks in the US because this solution really scales and works everywhere. 

And Canada where Shopify comes from.

Giles Corbett: And Canada, of course, spot on. Now you know what? To go and help us work out where we needed to target, we built a really nifty tool that we call Store Finder. Basically, I go and put in any address anywhere in the world, and it produces a glorious map of every physical store in that area, and it tells me all of the ones that use Shopify, all the ones that use Salesforce, all the ones that use Magenta, et cetera, to go and power their backend.

So a super useful tool for prospecting. But I can tell you this one thing. Shopify has done incredibly well at promoting itself in its home market because the number of stores in Canada that use Shopify to power their back head is quite phenomenal. So yes, we should definitely be there.

So if I am a digital signage company, and I'm listening to this, and a software provider, and I target retail for, I don't wanna say meat and potatoes, digital signage, but for the other stuff around a store, are you a competitor? Or is there a way to work together? Are their parallel things?

Giles Corbett: Interesting question, Dave. If you happen to be a provider of screens, we are a savior. We are working with a bunch of screen manufacturers and resellers now who basically tell us that when they are selling into retail, oftentimes retailers will come along and say, listen, we want these digital screens, some in store for our merchandising, some in the window, et cetera, and how do we create the content and the digital science company goes, ah, yeah, that's a bit of an issue. 

Clearly, with Cloudshelf, we talked a lot about the interactive mode version on the kiosks a few minutes ago. We also have a second version that we called Display Mode. We haven't yet launched Display Mode. We're testing it still with retailers, but it will be launched in the next two, three weeks most likely, and what it does is it does the same kind of clever analysis of your product ranges and imagery, et cetera, as we use on the in interactive mode to go and create fantastic product-oriented visual displays. So you want to go and have something that goes and shows your various product ranges and et cetera in the store window to attract people to come in, Cloudshelf Display Mode will go and do that on the fly. 

Now what we find, In the retailers we've been interviewing, is that for a number of them, that's fantastic and that's exactly what they want. But we also find a bunch of them that say you know what, actually we want to go into great videos. We want videos from the brands, et cetera. Now you wanna go and put in some, some simple banners, et cetera, Cloudshelf helps you do that automatically, but you wanna go have a very sophisticated loop with all kinds, other stuff other than relating to the products in the store. Then, you know what? You go and find a digital signage company that can go and helps create the CMS to go manage that loop and Cloudshelf can just come in and be part of that loop. So we're currently working with two CMS providers of digital signage and that's exactly what they plan to be using Cloudshelf for. So they will go and see the retailers. They'll say, listen, you can have the Cloudshelf version or you can have a Cloudshelf version and you can go and slot in, the local news, the Instagram feed, whatever else it is that you want to go and have next to it. 

So if the website has something saying, “Baby clothing, 30% off, this week only” as a banner on the website, that could conceivably be curated automatically into a call to action poster for a screen doing that, but your platform's not gonna run a video wall on a big set of LEDs modules or something? 

Giles Corbett: So what our platform will do is it will work out and it'll enable you to go and promote the sale. It will also select some of the best products and the products with the best images. It will go and show those. It will allow passing by, maybe you're walking past the store in the evening, and you go and see a bag that looks super nice. It will of course have a QR code on it. You can scan it and it will take you directly to that bag on your phone. If you buy it, it will be recorded as having come from that screen in that store. So all of our backend magic to help people sell more. But now working also on, on display-only signage. That's what Cloudshelf display mode is about. It's about helping retailers sell more. It's not their whole branding experience. That's something that they'll work with other people to create. 

So what am I buying? Am I subscribing to this? Am I buying a software license? 

Giles Corbett: You're subscribing to it. It's a SaaS model. So it's just like your subscription to Shopify. You go into Shopify, you add the Cloudshelf app, and you get one display for free for life. So you can try it out, there's no limit. You can use it as much as you want, and then as the number of stores expands, or the number of screens per store expands, you then just go and upgrade the license. 

This was great and quite interesting. Can you just tell listeners where they can find out more online about your company?

Giles Corbett: Absolutely. Just head over to Cloudshelf.ai and hopefully, you'll be able to find out everything you want about the company. If you don't, call me, I love speaking with people, at any time of day or any time of day or night. I love it. 

All right, Giles, thank you very much. 

Giles Corbett: Dave, thank you so much for the opportunity!

Sean Riley, Barvanna

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

There are many, many stories of ad-based digital signage networks starting up in bars and restaurants, but many and perhaps most of those stories have bad endings - because of the high cost of the hardware that needed to go in and the limited ability to manage that tech.

A company called Barvanna is taking a different approach - effectively operating as a free channel on satellite TV receiver boxes. So if a sports bar in the U.S., for example, uses DIRECTV to drive the screens around its seating areas, staff can switch on the Barvanna channel by grabbing the remote and just switching to it. No logins. No software to manage. No dedicated box to tie in to local WiFi.

On the other hand, there's no localization on ads and no ability for local managers to do things like create and run spots for things like drinks specials.

Barvanna co-founder Sean Riley comes out of the broadcast business and gets all of that, stressing his service is not intended as an alternative to what a digital signage platform might do for a bar. It's complementary.

I had a good chat with Riley about his company's business model and footprint, and his team's challenge of making some 300,000 DIRECTV business customers aware that there's a new channel they can switch on to drive conversations in bars, and ideally get patrons to stay for another round or two.

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TRANSCRIPT

Sean, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Barvanna is all about? 

Sean Riley: Hey, Dave. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. Barvanna is an out-of-home entertainment network. So the network itself, the content is a combination of trivia questions, conversation starters, and action sports videos. So we do all short-form content. 

Nothing in the network is more than three to five minutes long, for the most part, and if you are at an out-of-home location and you see Barvanna, what you're gonna see is what we call glance-digestible content, and by that I mean you can glance up at Barvanna at any time on any screen, and immediately digest what's happening on the screen. So it could be a trivia question, it could be a conversation starter would you rather, or what would you do if… 

And to break up the text, we also deliver action sports videos in a way that works really well with our customers. We've got a lot of really positive feedback thus far.

So what's the business model? 

Sean Riley: So we are primarily an ad-driven model, right? What that means is that our primary revenue stream, of course, is gonna be in the form of advertising. So we need to find ways to measure the audience that we have in out-of-home, which we can talk about in a few minutes, and deliver a lot of value to advertisers that are interested in reaching these out-of-home consumers.

You know better than I do, Dave, about the out-of-home environment. I have an entertainment background. I spent 25 years in the television business with Fox Sports, with Liberty, Latin America, in the Caribbean, and some time with the Golf Channel, and so my focus is delivering a really top-notch entertainment network that works very well in, out-of-home with or without audio and with respect to the monetization, it's all about delivering tens of millions of impressions every month and showing advertisers that we can get them results. 

Because you come out of the programming side, by the sounds of it, you understand that you can't just put something and run ads and just assume people are gonna watch it?

Sean Riley: Yeah, that's exactly right, and that is, one of our biggest challenges, so our distribution model is a little bit different, right? So you have other out-of-home networks out there that are delivering Android boxes or Apple TV boxes, DirecTV in locations, and delivering networks that way, and that is really easy to measure because you know exactly how many screens you have, you know where they are, and you can do estimates on how many viewers are in each location. 

In our case, because I have a distribution and entertainment background, we've taken a different approach and we're working with distributors. So distributors like Direct TV and other cable and satellite providers, as well as really any distributor that can get us into these homes. I can't really go door to door or deliver boxes to these out-of-home locations. I just don't have the resources at the moment, so we feel a better model is to go through distributors, and so that creates some challenges, right? Our DirecTV agreement, for instance, has us in 300,000 locations. So what that means is that any out-of-home location that is a subscriber to DirecTV for business can access Barvanna just like they would ESPN or the Golf Channel or any other network.

And it's my job to work with our partners like DirecTV to market the channel to let people know that it's on, it's available, on their lineup, in their location. Whether it's a health club and people are working out, or a cart, a service shop, or a bar or a restaurant. That's the biggest challenge is getting people to know it's on, turn it on and then step two is measuring that viewership, and then the final step is monetizing that viewership with advertisers, and so we've done a lot of tests and we've learned a lot about what works and doesn't work in terms of what viewers like, and we're getting a tremendous response thus far and we believe that we can, like I said, deliver tens of millions of impressions every month through that distribution. 

So would this be like when I'm late at night reading and I just want some company and I'll go to Channel 585 on my cable box and it'll be the Fireplace channel? Is it one of the sorts of higher-level channels or a set of channels that you would just select using a remote and off you go?

Sean Riley: That's correct. It's not exactly a fireplace channel, but correct, it is a TV network on the lineup. It's designed to complement ESPN and the Golf Channel and complement regional sports networks that are commonly seen in out-of-home locations.

It's not available on the residential lineup of DirecTV, but it is available to every one of their businesses. Every hotel lobby and every car dealership, health club, bar and restaurant, et cetera. So that's how our model works. Now look, we have the technology, Dave, and we do have a number of customers that take our network directly. We have delivered Android boxes out under the street. There are bars and restaurants that have our network today. We can do more customization with those, but we really believe in the distribution model. You get a lot of benefits from working with a large distributor who can help you market the channel, can give you massive distribution. 

If you think about our competitors, and we don't even look at them as competitors, I'll tell you why in a second. If you think about people like Loop or Upshow or Atmosphere, I think the maximum number of screens for any of these guys you probably know better than I do is less than 25,000 or 30,000. Now I think that's from those that have been publicly announced and when you look at Barvanna, we have 300,000 screens out there. We have 10 times the distribution of our nearest competitors, and so granted, we've gotta get people to turn it on, we've gotta get people to watch. But even if only 10% of our base, of that 300,000, is using us for a few hours a day, that is 30,000 locations right there, times X number of user viewers in each location, and you can see how the impressions at an ad load of 8-12 minutes an hour can add up really quickly, and so that's our approach, and thus far it's we're very confident that we can generate significant ad revenue and deliver great value for advertisers using this model.

So your challenge is less about technology and raising the capital to deploy boxes in all these locations, you've got this big installed base, but you have to drive awareness and then usage based on that awareness, right?

Sean Riley: Yeah, exactly, and that's a battle for sure. It's gonna be a challenge, right? 

So what do you tell them, or what do you tell the bar owners and the restaurant owners like, why use this?

Sean Riley: So at the end of the day, what Barvanna does for any location is it allows the location to have an alternative entertainment option. All these locations naturally already have DirecTV in the example we're talking about and so what happens a lot of times, as Dave, during the day or into the early fringe hours, early evening hours, there aren't any live games in most cases, especially during the week, and even in the summertime, in particular, there are only one or two interesting games that are on. And so Barvanna gives patrons in the bar another entertainment option. It's designed to have something interesting all the time. It helps drive engagement. So it's not exactly a fireplace channel, it's not exactly a background channel. , it's designed to drive engagement, to get people talking. Everyone loves trivia and, at the end of the day, because everyone loves trivia, it is family-friendly, it's fun, and people get it as soon as they see it. 

So once a bar owner or a health club owner turns it on and leaves it on for a little while, they totally get the value because they see people engaging with it. They see people laughing along with some of the, would you rather questions and the engagement that they're receiving thus far. Based on our tests both in the United States and in the Caribbean, we're getting really positive results, and so from our perspective, when we go to a bar owner and we send them a direct mail piece and say, Hey, this channel's available now, check it out. We remind them that it's just another way to enhance the experience in the out-of-home location and that ultimately there's been research that shows that drives repeat business, keeps your customers happy, keeps them engaged longer, increases the dwell time, and again, provide another option because Dave, who wants to watch 16 screens of a talk show on ESPN when the guy is muted? 

So look, I mean ESPN is a great channel, don't get me wrong. ESPN, Golf Channel, regional sports channels, these are fantastic channels that every one of these locations has to have, right? Our theory is you really can't, in particular, if you're in a bar or other out-of-home home locations like a health club, it's really hard to cut the cord. You can't say, I don't need these other channels. You need them, and those are great channels, so we're placing a bet that all these locations will continue to have a package of networks, whether it comes from DirecTV or another cable operator, or even some of the new emerging platforms.

We're convinced that the package that includes sports channels like ESPN sports channels like Fox Sports One, and sports channels like the Golf Channel, will continue to be delivered in these out-of-home locations, and we just wanna be there right alongside them. Man, we just wanna say, look, this is another cool, fun option for people to have when you're not showing games or alongside a game, right?

Are the businesses paying for these channels? Is it an upcharge on their DirecTV subscription or does it just come with it? 

Sean Riley: Barvanna is part of the basic package, so everyone who gets a subscription to DirecTV for business receives Barvanna at no additional charge. 

Okay, and how many channels are there?

Sean Riley: We have one main feed at this point of Barvanna and at some point, we'll be expanding and growing and spinning off various versions of our channels. 

Can you do any kind of localization? 

Sean Riley: Not yet. So when we talk about the challenges, some of the challenges are that we can't tap into programmatic ad networks yet. Like a lot of out-of-home and a lot the fast channels can do today. So it's gonna be up to us to get out there and pound the pavement and get advertisers excited about the impressions that we're delivering. 

We can't regionalize the feeds yet. So I can't provide regionalized advertising. But over time, a lot of these savvy distributors are getting really smart with how they're delivering their content, and it's only a matter of time before we can do some more regionalization that will allow us to do customization. For instance, if we had a betting company like DraftKings that wanted to advertise on Barvanna, which is a perfect advertiser for us, we would be able to essentially serve ads in regional locations, if that makes sense. 

So all the ads you're selling are national ad buys?

Sean Riley: Yep. So we're doing a hundred per cent national ad buys and we have different programming blocks that we think are gonna appeal to advertisers. For instance, on Saturday morning, when you go into a bar or a restaurant to watch the college football games, that day one of Barvanna is showing College football trivia all morning, and so it's a great opportunity for a bar or restaurant to entertain their guests before the game, and the same thing on Sundays, we'll do pro football style trivia every Sunday morning. So if you come into a bar and you're there an hour early, rather than having to watch those muted pregame shows right on some of the networks. And that's okay. If you do at least one or two screens, we'll have a Barvanna on and you and your friends will be able to play along with pro trivia in those locations and it just delivers a great amount of value. It's really fun for the bar and restaurant, and it gets customers engaged and hanging out both before and after the game to play sports trivia along with their friends.

I think you did a deal, going back a little bit, with Radiant, a CMS software company involved in digital signage. That's a little bit different. Is that a different distribution model? 

Sean Riley: It is, yes. Radiant's a slightly different distribution model. Dave, with respect to Radiant, it’s a great company. They're really savvy in terms of getting their software technology out there and we wanted to align with them, with Barvanna, and we look at them as a distributor, right? I don't know the number of screens that they have today, what I do know is that they're out there pitching our network in a slightly different manner than DirecTV does, but at the end of the day, it allows their customers to access Barvanna as part of their portal.

So Radiant provides a tremendous amount of really high-quality options, and these are folks that are looking for display-style menu boards and the traditional, I think display networks, and they love the fact that they can offer some entertainment-style content and so we did one of our first deals with them early on, and we've been really happy with the success they've been having, and in their case, there's a fee for aligning. If you have Radiant, you pay an additional fee to access Barvanna, and we've been pretty successful with that. People really like it, and so that's where some of our feedback is coming from. Radiant customers have reached out to me directly and said, could you do more of this or less of this? Or we love what you're doing and so it's pretty easy to access my information, and so they've been getting some good feedback from them.

Are you working with any other CMS software companies, and if you were to work with them, what do they need to do at their end?

Sean Riley: We aren't yet. Look, as I said, we have our own technology. If there was a location that wanted to access us directly, we can certainly talk to them about doing that.

We haven't focused on really many partnerships yet with other companies, we've spoken to all the companies that you'd imagine with, RockBot and UpShow and Loop and Atmosphere and they're all doing similar entertainment networks in this vein in terms of what Chive TV does with all their action sports and their user-generated videos and what Loop does with their music videos, and so everyone has their own kind of unique offering and look. I don't really look at them as competitors, Dave. I really don't. I don't look at them as a competitor any more than I look at Fox Sports as a competitor, or ESPN as a competitor or in Canada, TSN or Rogers Sports.

And that, I think, our channel is designed to compliment them, and so if a bar's got Chive TV, great, that's fine. They're still gonna have a DirecTV subscription. They need that for all the great stuff that DirecTV delivers, and so if they've got Chive TV on one tv, great, it doesn't mean that they're not gonna take another monitor in the bar restaurant and put Barvanna on. So we don't really see them as competitive. We're offering a complimentary service that ideally is going to deliver value in any out-of-home location, whether it's a hotel lobby or a health club or a spa, you get your haircut or get your car fixed or even in a hospital, hospital waiting room.

So in some cases, going back as Bar TV networks have been around for as long as digital signage has been around and digital out-of-home home the venue operators have said, this is nice to have, but this does nothing for me. I need screens that are going to help me push drinks and appetizers and things like the high-margin items. How do you counteract that or address that? 

Sean Riley: Yeah, that's fair, and I get that and we do hear that, and I think there are solutions out there that are designed to drive food and drink, whether it is your own display network with menu type style, traditional type, advertising, traditional style display networks, I think there's inexpensive software, that you can get off the shelf, that you can create those types of offerings inside your location, and so you're right, in some cases, if I had to go out there and say, look, I'd like every bar or restaurant to pay $80 a month or $100 dollars a month for this service, that would be a tough sell if it was just a network. Now I can customize, I can certainly send that location a box, an Android box with our content on it, and I can customize that location and you could get, and I'll tell you right now, we have gotten over a hundred dollars per location in some instances for customized versions of our channel but if you think about the labour-intensive model that, we think it's way more effective and just as good for really the location to have Barvanna as the network feed, right? The nationwide network feed, and we're constantly making tweaks and changes and we're very cognizant, Dave, about what's going on in the bar, right?

On Halloween, what are you gonna see on Barvanna? You're gonna see six hours, from 5:00 PM till midnight and beyond just creepy, Halloweens type stuff. You're gonna see a little bit of Halloween trivia, but for the most part, we wanna complement what's happening in these out-of-home locations. On St. Patrick's Day, the whole channel just completely converts into a green sea of Ireland and trivia about St. Patrick, and we really try to make sure that we're complimenting what's going on in those out-of-home locations because that's the kind of stuff that really adds value.

And on Halloween, we get so much positive feedback from all the creepy, fun, Frankenstein-style videos that we put on Halloween night because it just adds to the ambience. So during the Super Bowl, a great example, I don't expect bars and restaurants to turn on Barvann on six screens during the Super Bowl. They wanna devote all their screens to the game, and so, during that time, Barvanna will put up something a little bit different. We'll put up some Super Bowl style trivia or some NFL-style trivia that if they wanna turn on at halftime or before or after the game, that really adds to the ambience, right?

So that's the kind of thing we try to do. It's a good question, right? Because this has been tried before. It's a distributor, bars and restaurants kinda shrug and say, nice to have, but wouldn't wanna pay extra for it, and so this is why DirecTV said, look, there are companies out there propagating a cut the cord message. They're saying, you don't need it, you don't need DirecTV, you don't need cable. You can just take our Apple TV box or our Android box, and we have enough “content” on there to satisfy your location, and that's just not the case, and so what DirecTV is saying is, look, we can do that too. We can deliver these types of networks, and so when they found out what I was doing, we talked to them and they and they decided to do an agreement with us. They don't like to work with companies that are trying to undercut them, undermine them, and so we look at ourselves as very friendly to cable and really any distributor, we're very interested in working with them because we think it's a good business model for us, and we get a lot of value from them just as much as they get value from us. They get to deliver a high-quality network that these out-of-home locations seem to like, and we get the benefit of broad distribution combined with some marketing and the ability to generate some advertising revenue.

So this isn't a case where you, as an operator, have to decide, this is gonna be my digital signage solution. I can't use anything else. I'm just gonna go with this. You could in theory have Barvanna, you could have Atmosphere and you could have UpShow running in the same venue at the same time?

Sean Riley: Absolutely, and that's really how we look at it, and that's perfectly fine with us because from our perspective, I think the more entertainment options you can give in these out-of-home locations, I think the better off everybody's gonna be. I think they could let the customers choose what they wanna watch and we would encourage anybody listening, when they go into a bar restaurant, ask them and see if they have DirecTV, and ask them to turn on Barvanna that's part of our business plan, and see how people respond to it and see how bars and restaurants like it and go from there.

There was a variation on this roughly 10 years ago with a company called RMG Networks that no longer exists at least not in the form it was in back then. They did a deal with DirectTV and at that point, I believe they had software that could do things like reverse-L wraparound bars and squeezers and things like that, and I thought at the time, oh, this is interesting. They've got a lot of distribution as you've laid out and everything else, but it didn't really go anywhere. 

Was there any history and understanding of that within DirecTV when you engaged with them? 

Sean Riley: We didn't actually talk about that in particular. One thing we have talked about is interactivity, right? I think there's another company that came out several years ago that really went all in on the technology and they had iPads on the tables, and you could interact with them, with trivia and things that are happening on the screen and we decided not to go that road. We just don't think it's necessary. We think that's a huge tech expense. We didn't feel like when people are in these locations they don't wanna do anything more than really glance up, play a few trivia questions with their friends, have fun with it and go from there.

We'll eventually create some complimentary apps and things, but I think that the networks that have tried this in the past and failed, have invested a lot of money, and all the interactive stuff and made all these promises to their investors about all this great cool interactivity we're gonna do, and we're going to collect all this information from these users, and we're going to get them to play along with all of our trivia, and it's just at the end of the day, when you're at a bar or a restaurant, when you're at a health club, you're on the treadmill, you wanna glance up, be able to have some fun, answer a few trivia questions, maybe goof around with your friends, if you're at a bar. But the idea that you wanna take your phone out or a tablet out and start interacting, I'm not convinced that is something, even for people in their twenties, in their teens and twenties. I just don't think it's something that is as engaging. 

Look, we wanna get people off their phones and engage and entertain and so that's our model, and so I'm not concerned about looks, as I said, I don't expect all 300,000 of these locations to turn Barvanna on, Dave. I think I expect a large percentage as we grow and as people learn about it, to understand the value and leave it on for long periods of time, and as I said, if we get 8-20% usage, we'll be thrilled. We'll deliver great value for DirecTV, we're delivering great value for our advertisers and at the end of the day, customers are gonna have fun. 

And do the restaurant operators get a piece of the action or their piece of the action is that they get a free channel? 

Sean Riley: That's it. It's just another value add from DirecTV that doesn't cost them anything additional. They don't pay for putting it on. Look, there are ads on ESPN, there are ads on the Golf Channel, there are ads on all the channels they deliver, and we want people to look at this as just something that naturally blends in. With the 5 or 10 or 15 other channels that you'll often put on in your location, and frankly, in some cases it is a better option for, say, a doctor's office where you have The View on all morning with muted sound, or you have CNN on, even these days, like news channels that become so polarizing that it's more challenging to put on a news channel these days because people create an opinion of your business based on your news network.

And so DirecTV has said, look, let's give them another option, let's give them an out-of-home channel that's only designed for out-of-home. It's specifically designed to entertain people when they're waiting to get a haircut or when they're about to go into the doctor's office. It's fun, it's entertaining. There's always something interesting on, it's family-friendly, and it's not controversial. It's designed to be used with no audio, and so all those checks, all those boxes, and when their competitors come out when DirecTV competitors come out and they say, cut the cord, take our out-of-home networks, distributors like DirecTV can now say, look, we have a channel just like that guys. We have a channel just like that, go to this channel on DirecTV, it's called Barvanna, check it out, and we're gonna deliver more over time so you don't need to do that. We have those and all the great sports channels. That's how we look at it.

I assume that your business partners, investors, I'm not quite sure how you're funded and backed and so on, but the people who are helping this growth are pretty happy that there's not a big capital cost involved in this? 

Sean Riley: That's fair. There's certainly a fair amount of capital with respect to acquiring sports videos and creating the content and curating the hours of content. There's certainly a fair amount of that, but you're right, I feel really confident with our business model that the numbers work. We're still a pretty small company with less than 10 employees, and we are growing really fast.

There are definitely some costs involved. Technology is also an expense, and because we still have to create a network, we program it full-time, and we still have to have a master control style playout system. In this case, it's cloud-based. We still have to deliver that to DirecTV. We have fibre costs and all that. Not to mention all the content costs. So there's a cost basis. I think it's better than probably most, but at the end of the day, there's still some cost there that we have to contend with.

And as we grow, we look to maybe start launching additional style networks that might work in the residential space and or other networks or DirecTV maybe we do roll out, we're looking at a channel called Easy Vibe TV, which is more of an Atmospheric type channel that you're talking about, where it's more of scenery and calm beach views and things along those lines that might also work out-of-home. So we intend to pitch those networks to our distributors as well and say if you like Barvanna, why don't you go with this type of channel as well for your out-of-home customers, because that seems to be working? 

Would that be the same 300,000 seats, so to speak? 

Sean Riley: Potentially, we would hope. That's what we'd want and look, we talk about DirecTV has 300,000 customers, that's just step one, Dave. Having worked in the cable industry and the entertainment business for as long as I have, we're certainly reaching out and we're talking to at least two other large distributors right now about Barvanna as well.

The idea would be to get Barvanna off the ground, let's see if we can generate some great value for our advertisers, deliver a really high-quality product for DirecTV, and expand it to other distributors if they like it, let's talk to them, let's talk to these locations, let's talk to our distributors, see what else they might be interested in and try to create products that meet their needs.

What's in it for the DirecTVs and the other distributors? Like, why do they wanna do this? Is it just another carrot for getting people to sign up or to retain them? 

Sean Riley: It's for sure a retention model, and there's cord-cutting going on at the residential level, and when I say cord-cutting, sometimes it just means you're cancelling your Comcast subscription and you're signing up for Sling TV or Hulu or YouTube TV. So all you're going to do is come from one package of channels to a different package of channels. You could argue that's not necessarily cutting the cord, you're still getting a great package of channels. But regardless, I think bar owners, and health club owners said, look, I cut the cord at home and now I'm just getting all my stuff from on demand. Could I do that in my business? And in most cases, the answer is no. In most cases, the distributors are still out there providing great packages of channels.

It's too difficult, David, if you're trying to run a sports bar, if you've got an office building or a hotel or lobby and you're trying to find stuff on Netflix and on other subscription services, which are great for all of us, we love those services, but, at the end of the day, it doesn't work for a business. You wanna have a package of channels that you can easily flip through, that when your customers say, I wanna watch the game or they wanna be entertained, you can easily go to networks like that. I believe in the model. I think that's growing, but at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, there are people out there saying, you don't need it, you don't need a cable operator or a satellite provider in your location. Just get rid of that and just take our music video service, and I don't think there's much of a threat right now. I think DirecTV is very well positioned. Even, despite the fact that you hear reports about some other subscribers going down, I think every location that wants to entertain their customers when they come into their location is gonna need a package of channels. That's my theory and my belief and that's why I think Barvanna is gonna continue to succeed really long term. 

Yeah, and certainly my impression of people who run or work in bars and similar kinds of entertainment environments, is they've got five seconds to make a decision and change something on a screen or whatever. They can't be standing there for 10 minutes going down the rabbit hole of what I should put on. So it's gotta work quickly. 

Sean Riley: Yeah, it's a good point. I think DirectTV recognize the value in that, and they've said, look channels are coming to come and go. Who knows what happens with the Sunday ticket package in the US and who knows what happens in Canada with some of the Premier League packages? And so you never know, when these things are gonna go, are they gonna come and go? Are other players gonna pick them up? And so I think smart distributors like DirecTV say, let's put the most entertaining content we can on in the out-of-home space so that if we do have a weakness here and there over time, then we'll be able to show what we're really trying to provide unique, different family-friendly options, entertainment options to retain our customers and to provide a ton of value for them. 

Your website says you have about 8,500 sites right now across the Caribbean and the US. How many do you expect to have, let's say a year from now?

Sean Riley: So we launch DirecTV officially next Monday so that will be the 24th of October, so we're gonna be in 300,000 locations starting on the 24th of October. We have now close to 12,000 locations in the Caribbean. That deal is also through a distributor. A distributor called, Cable and Wireless, which is owned by Liberty Latin America. I don’t if you're familiar with those guys in the Caribbean, but there are a number of countries they deliver us to, and, in their case, they have us in almost every hotel room as well.

I went to St. Lucia recently and I went to my hotel room and I was happy to find that Barvanna was on the channel lineup, so me and my friends hanging out having some rum in the Caribbean as we typically do, and, playing along with would you rather… would you rather be Super Man or Batman? We had a big debate about that. It's really great to see that they're having success. That was because our first launch was across those countries in the Caribbean. We do a different feed down there. 

Dave, the sports fans in the Caribbean are all about cricket, man. They love cricket and in Canada, they love cricket. They love football, of course, meaning soccer. They love track and field, Olympic-style sports because of all the great sprinters that come out of Jamaica and Barbados and Bahamas. So our sports trivia is a different feed in the Caribbean and we focus on all of those sports. We can't really show aside from the Dominican Republic, can't really show baseball trivia in the Caribbean and certain American sports. So we focused on Olympics soccer. Cricket and it's been very well received, and so we, again, it just goes back to being aware and cognizant of what's going on in these locations and what our viewers want and doing our best to serve them and to make it as relevant as possible for anybody who's partying or waiting or dining or having fun with their friends.

All right. This has been great. If people wanna know more about Barvanna, where do they find you online? 

Sean Riley: Yeah. So thanks for taking the time to chat with us. It's been really fun, Dave. I'm glad we had a chance to talk. So you can go to barvanna.com, and we have contact information on there, but we're gonna continue to grow and provide new products. So check back from time to time and you'll see other products that we're rolling out, and if you have suggestions, if you have videos you wanna send us and put us on Barvanna, we're certainly happy to put your videos up. We're certainly happy to take trivia questions and suggestions, and as I said, because we're a small company, I love having access to the viewers and access to bar owners and access to all of our customers so we can really get that feedback and make the channel as engaging and as relevant as possible, and look, you guys are doing great work at 16:9, I read you guys every day and we really appreciate all you're doing in this space. You guys are the experts. I'm still learning this space, Dave, so I'll be probably reaching out to you too, for more advice and feedback, but thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it. 

All right thanks again. Have a good one!

Erik DeGiorgi, MediaVue Systems

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

Mediavue Systems has the somewhat unique experience of being a PC manufacturer that started in digital signage, versus any number of companies that had personal or industrial computers with the dimensions, specs and pricing that met the industry's needs and desires at the time.

One hell of a lot has changed in the intervening 15 years, and the Boston-based company has shifted with them. Erik DeGiorgi co-founded the business with his dad Dave. He's now its President and focused on what he says is a major evolution of the company and brand.

His goal is changing industry perceptions about what Mediavue does, to a point that he now talks about the company more as a software shop than a hardware manufacturer.

That's because Mediavue has been steadily developing software tools - most notably for configuration, deployment, remote device management and security. The IT people they work with think much more about uptime and efficient management than they do about the size of the box or, in particular, the price.

I had a great chat with Erik about the roots of his company and where PC hardware and software sit in an industry landscape that now also has options for low-cost smart displays and single-purpose media players.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Eric, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on MediaVue systems? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, sure, Dave, first and foremost, thanks for having me on, and also thanks for the invite next month. Looking forward to seeing you and everybody else at the mixer. Nice to get back to reality there, huh?

No kidding. 

Erik DeGiorgi: But yeah, sure. I'll give you a snapshot. We've been around for about 16 years at this point. So MediaVue was founded in 2007. The initial product we brought to market was now what's called a media player. We started designing and building bespoke hardware for the industry back before there was really a name for it, and so we brought to market our first hardware device, I believe it was probably 2008 when we went to market, and the company's evolved quite a bit over the past 15 years. We initially went to market through our channel relationships with CMS partners.

So back in the day, we were a heavy SCALA house long before the StrataCash acquisition and everything. But we partnered with CMSs. We started to develop operating systems, include that on our devices and embed CMS and try to make it as turnkey as possible. The evolution of the companies really centred around the kind of product innovations and responses to needs in the market. So again, at the very beginning it was, let's build a device that can go and be turned on 24/7, play videos and not break as they all were. Then it was, okay, we fixed that, then how do we create it more turnkey because of all the problems we were encountering? The integration, putting the software in the hardware. Then once we resolved that it became an issue of scalability. So, if you remember back, 10-15 years ago, these large-scale networks would be deployed, but there'd be no network management.

The people would transition, and there'd be no way to know what was in the field. There'd be no way to cope with the problems when they would arise. It was just really an operational nightmare for the system integrators and certainly the end customers that were trying to scale these networks. So we responded to that and built out a robust network management platform. So that really was the kind of pivot point where we moved from being really a hardware company to a software company. So today, fast forward, what we deliver is really a turnkey operating platform. So it's a combination of hardware, it's a combination of our software management tools, support that goes along with that. It's the integration of CMS software. It's audience analytics, whatever you need to design and deploy and manage signage networks in an array of markets, we now have a fairly robust platform that supports that at scale. 

That's interesting that you describe yourself as a software company. I would think most people who know MediaVue would think, they're a hardware company. They make small form-factor PCs for signage.

Erik DeGiorgi: And I may be getting ahead of myself because, as I do, but we are actually poised to go extensive, top to the bottom rebrand of the company right now and teaser come January, the look and feel of MediaVue is gonna be quite different. 

So did you start the company with digital signage in mind or were you doing industrial computing and found your way into it?

Erik DeGiorgi: So David, our CEO was previously, his previous company was actually in display repair. So this was back in the 90s and the early 2000s. When people used to fix things, he was repairing CRTs and was doing that for all the major brands. He had service contracts with Dell and ViewSonic and Mitsubishi. If you bought a PC at Circuit City, you know the service contract would go to him. So he was doing large scale monitor repair, and by virtue of that, he got pulled into the digital signage industry because of early projects, this is 20 years ago, he had the service contract for the display and this was back in the day of, hanging a Dell Optiplex on the back of a screen in a large harness, and those things were failing left and right, and by virtue of having the contract for the display, they asked him if they could fix those, and so he got into that business and then looked at that and said, is there a way to build a better mousetrap here?

And that was the origin story. MediaVue was started, and we went to work on what became our first media player, but it was very much in response, having the exposure to the earliest deployments, seeing the catastrophic failure rates, and then coming up with a solution.

David DeGiorgi is your dad, right? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, you will see a common last name there. He and I sat down and started MediaVue in about 2007. 

Is he still involved? 

Erik DeGiorgi: He is still involved. I've read some of your recent postings and things, there comes a time in life when you maybe step back from some things and focus on some other things and, Dave, will never slow down, don't let me mischaracterize him.

Yeah. He's a bit of a live wire from what I remember of meeting him. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, he's 110% at all times. But yeah, we certainly work in tandem and have since the outset. 

And you're in the Boston area, right? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. Our HQ is just south of Boston, and we've got an international presence. We've got sales teams out in MEA and spread across certainly here domestically. But one of the things that I think is unique, going back to our roots, in hardware, we still have our assembly line in Boston, so since day one and continuing today, I think the majority of what we do is really in the kind of management tool set and all of the software stack and the integration and everything that we do at that level, we still design and assemble hardware, and we do that in the back half of our headquarters and we've got our assembly floor right there along with the front of house.

And how does that resonate with resellers and end users? Is that important to them that it's domestically made? 

Erik DeGiorgi: I don't know if it's there's a Made in USA badge on it, and that's important to me. I think where the value comes from having control over that process. So our assembly line is very adaptable. So we can very quickly respond to the needs of customers. So whether that's a hardware configuration, whether that's a setup and an integration with different software, we can do all of that and make very quick adjustments to our assembly line to accommodate the customer and I think that's where the value is.

Yeah, I'm sure there are people who do wanna buy products made in the USA but I, I tend to think there's probably a lot more who are buying for other reasons and like the idea that there's the support that is in 12 hours away and in Mandarin. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely, and the full experience that you get with MediaVue is based domestically, So everything, the account rep you get obviously is regional, you get attached with a Sales, Engineering, and CSE at the beginning, that's a person that's domestically based. That individual works with you through pre-sale. When it converts to a sale, that person maintains the attachment to that account. You have continuity there throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's how we differentiate.

Our origins are certainly in hardware, we're doing a lot more now. But we're never gonna be able to compete on cost with some of our OEM competitors out in Asia. There's just absolutely no way. So we have to create a lot of value add. We have to create a lot of it's an experience working with us. It's the whole lifetime of the engagement and the deployment, it's very hands-on, and that's how we've been able to differentiate. 

You describe the old days of Dell Optiplex hanging off the back of monitors and back in 2007, at that time, it was a big deal to come up with a small form factor PC. That doesn't really matter anymore, does it? Cuz everybody is like that. 

Erik DeGiorgi: The playing field has levelled, certainly on the hardware side it's, but it's in form factor, it's in computing power. The value proposition back then was, how many bits and bytes can I put in the smallest form factor and, run my 720p video and, do that successfully, and the playing field is flattened there. It's not as competitive as it was. The computing's kind of caught up. 

I always get a kick out of how many pixels can you actually put on a display before you have to be three inches away from it before you can tell, so it's like hardware is caught up, I think, to the industry's need if that makes sense. So now it really becomes about the value of Integration. How do you successfully roll out a deployment? How do you have that go as seamless as possible, both in the installation and in the ongoing management and maintenance of that network? Because we all know the greatest cost to doing that is getting people in the field, turning wrenches and screwdrivers. So the more you can minimize that ease, the burden for the integration partner. Certainly, that brings value to them as they're reselling things in managed services contracts. It brings value to the end customer because the cost of operating the network in total is far less. So really honing in on the stability, reliability, the scalability of these networks is, I think, more of our present challenge rather than, packing pixels on screens and having more gigabytes of processing power. 

I'm gonna guess that resellers and integrators understand that a lot more than end users.

Erik DeGiorgi: There’s certainly a learning curve. The ones that have been through it and felt the pain know it very well. You have to go through it to see that. We still get opportunities to come across and people will haggle on price and this box is a hundred dollars less than that box or something and we try to educate, we try to help people see the light, if you will, and look at the total cost of ownership of these networks a little bit differently maybe than they are, and it's one of those lessons that you have to learn. 

And I noticed on your product list that your small form factor, I forget the name of it, but it was a small box and it just had a Celeron running in it, and it used to be the case that people would pay a lot of attention to the generation of the processor and everything else and they might think that a Celeron not powerful enough, but they are now, right?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, certainly years ago, it was very much spec driven, and it was very important to, gigabytes of this and megabytes of that. Like I was saying before, the technology's kind of caught up to the needs of the industry and there's only so much you're doing. Compute power really is now doing onsite analytics and doing things like real-time decisions and stuff like that, that's pushing thresholds. It's just not as important a factor because there's just enough there. 

When you started it was PCs and PCs, that's what people used for digital signage. There was the odd sort of dedicated player type, like the old digital view boxes, and there were a few others out there. But then smart displays came along, BrightSign bubbled up, and now you have two categories that you're competing with. How do you sell against those? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so that's a great question. So we're rooted still in that PC tradition, and we do so because we're looking at the life cycles of these deployments and we believe that kind of platform has the required adaptability and scalability where some of these other architectures don't, simply I look at it as, if you're rooted in kind of this PC topology and architecture, it's built to do a lot of things versus doing one thing very specifically if that makes sense. So it has the ability to adapt not just to the initial customer needs, but throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's getting into some of the things we're gonna be rolling out first, at the beginning of next year, really rely on that adaptability, that topology.

There are also some big security issues, and it's something that's not discussed in the industry that is very much overlooked when you get into ARM-based products, and I will try not to get too technical here, like smart displays when I say system on a chip and stuff like that, that's a hardware stack, that's a chipset that is licensed and manufactured by any no name, chip house that you've never heard of versus say an Intel, AMD and the major difference from a security perspective is that you need to maintain Operating system, you need to maintain your operating system and have that be updated because a lot of your security, a lot of your threat mitigation comes from having a stable and current operating system.

What happens is when you use these unknown chip manufacturers to develop the SOCs and things like that, they don't maintain driver support for the current operating system updates. So what happens is you are unable to continually update your operating environment because you don't have strong driver support for those chipsets. So in our opinion, that creates significant security vulnerabilities. So it's yet another reason why we maintain the kind of traditional Intel and AMD chipset topology. 

Is it your opinion and perspective, or are you hearing real-world stories talking about that? 

Erik DeGiorgi: I don't hear many people talking about it.

I think it's one of those things like many things in the security world that is just unknown, and it's not something that comes up. So it's a message we're certainly trying to get across. 

So the devil's advocate argument would be if you're not hearing about it, maybe it's not really a thing?

Erik DeGiorgi: Maybe. I can't argue with that but it's not likely. We're a very technical company, so when we all sit around at the lunch table, these are the kinds of conversations we have about vulnerabilities. So we're on the pulse of it may be a little more than others and paying attention to it a little more than others, but yeah I do think it's there, and so it's a combination of that. It's a combination of a kind of being there are inherent limitations, capability, and limitations when it comes to those types of chipsets as well, you're not able to just load any software on it. You're not able to go and connect peripheral devices to it. It doesn't have that degree of adaptability. So it's for all those reasons, we've stayed with the kind of technology stack, the topology that we have. 

My perception, and I'm definitely not a hardware expert or a software expert, is that these days, if you have a simple application like digital menu boards or FIDS displays, those sorts of things you probably don't need a PC for that. But if you're getting into anything, complicated and challenging, and as you say, it needs to evolve and have some malleability to it, you're probably gonna lean towards a PC. Is that a fair perception? 

Erik DeGiorgi: I think it's a fair perception. I think it's consistent too with where we position in the market. There are so many kinds of more simple use cases, I got a menu board and that's up and running. I'm gonna say that with a caveat but I'll get back to that in a second. The majority of digital signage is putting a picture on a screen, right? And that's about as simple as it gets, and we obviously can do that. I don't think our value is in that kind of In that type of use case. 

And you're probably not gonna win on price? 

Erik DeGiorgi: We're certainly not gonna win on price, and we’ve got no problem with it, it's just not our market. We're really focused on how we can be a technology partner for a large-scale enterprise that wants to deploy signage and communications infrastructure as an asset for their organization, and we partner closely with them.

We work with, like I said, all of our software partners on the CMS side, and all our integration partners to put together a technology platform and an implementation program in order to deploy and manage that at scale. That's our sweet spot. Going back to the QSR example, menu boards, I guess you could say are simple, right? You're putting it up there. It doesn't really change much, It's just but then what happens when a menu board goes down? Because that's your business. If you don't have a menu, how are you gonna sell it? It’s where we bring value to say that the application is doing things where you might have content switching. You might have redundancy in those menu boards. So do things with a bit more sophistication to make sure you're managing uptime and maintaining uptime. You can look at something and see it as simple, but at the same time to do it well at scale, there's always increasing layers of complexity.

Yeah that's an interesting point because I think of digital menu boards as being really simplistic applications, but they can go down. So you need that failover and everything else. 

Erik DeGiorgi: There's that, and then it's also a really dirty environment. We’ve done QSRs and gotten devices back that you have to scrape the grease out. Again, there's always more complexity than you see at first glance. 

Is it fair to think that you probably tend to get more involved in projects than other companies that are just basically selling boxes? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Certainly, yeah. That's our value proposition, that's our model.

Our sale is as much our management tool, our ongoing support and service, as much as the device, if you will. We're very hands-on. We're able, again, to be very flexible and adaptable to the customer's needs and that's not just to get the project going. That's the long-term maintenance and management and of course in conjunction with our integrator partners. 

You have something called an Active Network Manager. What is that and why is it needed? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Sure. So that is the name of the management stack of our software that I've been referencing. And so that was designed and built. We started working on that maybe not quite 10 years ago but pretty close, and that was to solve the problem with scalability. As I had mentioned previously, the devices work, and the integration with the CMSs works, but it was very difficult to deploy and manage at scale.

So what that tool enables now, so if you partner with a MediaVue and purchase our product, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get an endpoint. You're gonna get a media player, a device that's gonna have an operating system installed on it that we design specifically for the content management software or other software that's being used and that is maintained. So part of our offering is not just the deployment of that, but we actually have a quarterly update scheme for our entire operating environment. So we will aggregate all the different updates and security patches and everything for the entire software stack, and then we test and validate and then bundle everything. So you don't get that kind of experience where your iPhone updates and all of a sudden your app doesn't work, so we eliminate that as a possibility, and then obviously stay on top of security. So you get that, and then the kind of software that brings all that together is our Active Network Manager, and that enables an installer to plug in the device, push the power button, and then have the network owner, the person that is, is managing the network to see that come up, to register CMS to go and set all of the, whether it's network settings, we that can take control of the display so we can make sure the display is on when it's supposed to be.

All of that comes through an Active Network Manager and that's the toolset that enables it. It's really IT team-focused. So whoever it is, we don't do anything with content. We don't do anything with that. Never have, never will. We're strictly focused on having a robust technology stack and a toolset that enables the IT team to manage effectively. So an Active Network Manager is the heart of all of that, right? And, facilitates a lot of the kinds of a lot of customer interaction with the platform and the user experience that I've been describing. 

So 10 years ago when you started developing that a lot of the CMS companies had either no or pretty thread bear device management capabilities within their software. You had companies like Diversified who had kick-ass device management way, way back then, but a lot of these guys have caught up now. So are these parallel things or can they work together?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, I mean there's certainly management as we're describing it now is considered a necessity, so everybody has got on board. There are certain things baked into the CMS, some certain CMS offerings that have some device management. There are some things that we can do for various CMSs, like I mentioned, registration and plug and play and stuff like that. Yeah, and there are certainly third-party companies, good friends that just have a management platform for anything. So management has become ubiquitous. I think what differentiates what we're doing is we're really looking at it as a total platform. So it's the combination of hardware and software. It's the depth of integration that we're able to do by virtue of owning that entire ecosystem. So it just enables more. You can do more. 

Sparing you all the technical details results in greater stability, greater security, and greater longevity of the network, and that's something that's different as well. We look at a successful network being 5+ years. So if we install the devices, we don't want them to be touched for five years. The current hardware is about 10 years old. It's obviously like iterations of that and it's not the same exact stuff but we have stuff that's been deployed that is the previous generation for 10+ years.

So we look at a 5+ year lifespan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think industry standards might be like two to three would be considered successful, without any major intervention. But we look at it as for at least five years. We wanna get the stuff out, we wanna manage it, we want it to physically work. We want to have the remote capabilities to make necessary changes without having to deploy people, and I'm careful with my words cuz we're gonna be releasing some stuff that even greater enhances that remote capabilities in the coming months. 

Do you have metrics around fail rates, like people talk about 99.59s and all that sort of thing? 

Erik DeGiorgi: It's funny you bring that up because we exchanged an email about potentially doing an article around that, and yeah so what I proposed and what we're looking at doing is we actually just did a full audit of every intervention last year that we had on the support side, and I think those kinds of numbers and statistics, it's almost cursory. It's just fine, how many .9999 can you put in? It's just, I don't think it really tells the story, and the story that I'm interested in telling and sharing, certainly with the industry is, yeah, the physical devices work. It's the stuff that works. Software is fairly stable, but it's usually like the interaction of things. 

I'm just thinking through the kind of statistics that we pulled from last year. For as many actual hardware issues as there were, there were many more issues with something happening within the operating system, a software bug coming up. It was an interaction between, third-party software that we've integrated onto the devices. It was a failure in setup, in installation. There were so many. 

Or stupid shit like the janitor unplugging the thing. 

Erik DeGiorgi:  Oh, for sure. That happens. That's real life. It's absolutely real life.it's that it's someone going and stacking boxes on the device and having it burn up, you know what I mean? We've seen it all. I hope it doesn't come across that I'm trying to avoid answering your question.

The complexity of these things, just tells a different story rather than, one out of a thousand failing every year, or even like MBTF, it's not even a really accurate way of analyzing things. I'm hoping that if we collaborate on that, we can share some insights on what is a company that's deployed this hardware and software like this for well over a decade and has tens of thousands of devices that are currently managing, what it actually looks like in the real world? And I'm excited to be able to share that. 

So in January you're gonna do a brand refresh and push a revised proposition out there. How's all that gonna roll out? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Well, with your assistance of course. So I think what we want to do and it is very consistent with what you're saying. Our legacy is that when people think of our company, they think of hardware, what we're doing and what we are, the company we are today is just so different. And it's really that entire ecosystem platform that we've created and we deploy, it's the way we interact with our customers throughout the lifetime of the deployments and the support and everything that we offer. 

How we're going to do it? It's gonna be digital, so the look and feel of the company online is gonna be very different. We're going to be making announcements through all the industry publications. So we've got a hard date right now of January 17th, so we'll see if we make it. But we're hoping to put out a kind of industry-wide blast and when people sit down at their computers on that day, they see something that they haven't before. 

All right. If people wanna know more, where did they find you online? 

Erik DeGiorgi: MediaVueSystems.com 

All right. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time with me. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Dave, thanks for having me on.

Marian Sandberg & David Drain, Digital Signage Experience

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

Digital Signage Experience is coming up in four weeks and I suspect a lot of people are very curious about how the long-running show will be rebooted by its new owners Questex.

I certainly am, as I had long thought the old DSE was a dead trade show walking, and that something different was needed.

Is this it? I dunno, and I guess the industry will find out in a few weeks in Las Vegas.

I asked Marian Sandberg, who runs several shows for Questex, and David Drain, who was brought on by Questex to build the programming side of the event, to join me for a chat about what people can expect from a new and different DSE.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, thank you for joining me. Maybe the first thing to do is: Marion and David, explain what your roles are at Questex and DSE. 

Marian Sandberg: Sure. Thanks so much for having us, Dave. It's really an honor to be with you and your audience and to have an opportunity to talk about this. 

I'm Marian. I am the Vice President and market leader for Questex. I oversee the DSE show, which we acquired last year, and we have not presented yet. It'll be presented in November, which is what we're gonna talk about, and I also oversee a show called LDI, which I know you'll have questions about.

And market leaders tend at Questex tend to have two or three or whatever number of shows that they have under their portfolio? 

Marian Sandberg: Sure, yeah, that's exactly right, and tend to be in verticals that make sense together, if you will. So I oversee a couple of brands that have to do in some way with technology. We have verticals in hospitality, bars and restaurants so they're clumped together. 

Okay, and David? 

David Drain: David Drain. I'm the director of event programs for DSE. So DSE is my sole focus at Questex. 

And a lot of industry people would know you from your dark past with Net World Alliance and The Digital Signage Association?

David Drain: Yeah, it changed the name to Digital Screen Media Association for a while.

So you've been around the industry forever? 

David Drain: Yeah, I have. I attended the first DSE in 2007. 

Yeah, that's early. I think the first one was in 2005 or something like that or maybe in 2004.

David Drain: 2004, but I wasn't there. 

Yeah. I started in 2005, so I've been going even longer than you. 

David Drain: Yeah, you win!

Marian Sandberg: I can beat you both, but not in the digital signage area with our LDI show. I've been with that brand since 2004, so a little one-upsmanship there. 

There you go. You must be so proud. Alright. So how is planning going? As we're speaking, it's about four and a half weeks out. 

Marian Sandberg: It's going great. We're super excited and when we get to this part of the year, frankly, because this has been more than a year in the making we're just ready to get out there and produce the show. We definitely have in the weeks rolling up still sales to do, and still registrations to bring in. But in terms of producing the show and the things that we know we're gonna offer that's mostly set, right? So we have all these great networking experiences we're excited to put forth, and as we're right across the hall from our LDI show, we're really excited to see the synergies there.

When we acquired this brand, we did a lot of due diligence. We spoke to tons of customers and tons of attendees, so those customers as well, to see what we should keep from the old show and what we should bring back, and I think the number one thing that we heard from people was maintaining the sense of community for the digital signage industry, that it's a dedicated show and that people still wanna come together in that community that maybe isn't addressed by other events. So that's been our number one focus, and we're in the home stretch now. 

Yeah, I'd certainly got that impression as well when DSE went down. I thought that it was a show that for many years was in trouble. You could see it in the diminishing numbers and diminishing enthusiasm in a lot of ways. But the overarching thing I heard after it went down was a disappointment because there needed to be some sort of an annual event, at least in North America that really pulled together the industry, so to speak, and was the only thing people were talking about that week versus like an Infocomm or ISE or those kinds of shows, which certainly have digital signage as a component, but it's one component among many endings.

You could bump into people in elevators and see they were going to the same show and realize we have nothing in common other than we're both generally in AV. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that was obviously one of our main focuses from the beginning in acquiring the brand is we immediately saw the value we knew of the show and of the market, although no one on our team back then had worked directly in it, and then bringing professionals on who were very much veterans of the market, like Brad Gleason, who joined us very early on, and David, of course, who has been running a curating and will be running a fantastic education and content program.

People have been really supportive of that effort and from the beginning saying, we absolutely want there to be a show in this market, specific to this market and there's a need for it. 

Because the old show has had its hair, so to speak, there are things that people loved about it, things they didn't like about it.

I've been referring to this as a DSE reboot that maybe isn't all that fair, but it's what I'm going with, and I'm curious what you think in terms of how would you position the show? Is this DSE 2 or should people go with the idea of don't expect what you saw before?

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that's a great question because I think we would be really remiss if we did not acknowledge that we are bringing DSE back in a sense, right? We're not gonna abandon everything that DSE was and that we want it to be, and people have asked us for it to be. So we have no intention of reinventing the wheel in that case. 

However, from our experience, and again from a lot of the outreach that we did, I think our intention is to put a new spin on it. Now, when you say, reboot, I absolutely agree, and I think that's gonna be maybe a little bit of a challenge for people to get their heads around.

David has said it quite eloquently, we wanna really hold onto the things that people liked and maybe not the things that they didn't. So some of the new things, for example, which I guess we consider new. We know that networking opportunities have always been super important. So now that we're right across the hall from the LDI show, we are really trying to leverage those two audiences without cannibalizing, and I don't think there's a lot of potential to cannibalize those two audiences anyway. We hope to bring in some new people and some new buyers, and we're tracking our registrations very closely, of course, and the kind of demographics that we have. And to date, I checked them just yesterday in preparation for this, of course, half of our registrations have never been to DSE before. Now I'm not talking about LDI people, I'm talking about people registered directly for DSE and as event people, as event producers. That number is super encouraging to us.

Now it could be in the last three years that we've just gotten more people in the industry. We all know that during the pandemic, on both sides of our business, people have left the industry, and people have come into the industry. It's just a natural ebb and flow when you haven't had a show in three years. But that number, even if you expect a lot of new people it is a great statistic for us that there are that many new faces. So we really hope that people coming to the network are gonna meet new people, but like-minded people like your reference before about having that sense of community and people who do similar things. But also that, of course, we want our exhibitors to meet new customers. So that's a really important thing for us.

For the people who don't know LDI, can you explain what it is? I've never actually been myself, even though I've certainly heard of it.

Marian Sandberg: LDI is a 30+ year organization and brand. It is a trade and show conference that addresses what we affectionately refer to as entertainment technology. So that would be basically everything in and around a stage except the performance. So concerts, touring, theatre, even clubs, venues, lighting, sound, staging all that kind of technology that goes around a performance or in a venue, and so a typical exhibitor at LDI would be moving light company, intelligent lighting as it's referred to in that in that sector or consoles. if you were at a concert and you wanna go up to the console guy or gal, ask for the set list, that stuff that's behind that in that pit is stuff that you would see at LDI.

So there's technology and creativity factor there that I think sits well along DSE so maybe there are people who do similar, are somewhat like-minded, but do different things. So I think it'll be interesting to see, who crosses over and comes together, 

Yeah, I guess the crossover as you say, more than anything would probably be the backdrop displays that you increasingly see with touring acts and the technology that drives those displays like LED backdrops and transparent or semi-transparent, LED backdrops, all that sort of thing.

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and the sort of persona who would attend LDI could be anything from very creative type, Let's say a creative director for a show, a lighting designer, and then, someone those folks usually tend to be creative and technical, and then we'll have very technical people who are like tech technical directors at a theatre or production manager for a concert tour.

And just like the way that AV and IT are worlds that are converging. The live events world and digital signage are converging to some degree because I spoke on a podcast a few months ago with the guy who does the wow factor stuff at the new arena in Seattle for the NHL team there and he was talking about programming at building not just what you see at the pre-show. It's the whole darn building that's coming together. I suspect that plays into how live events will increasingly be done. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, it’s interesting, we use the term, experiential, right? And immersive experiences and the thing that I think is so interesting, having come from that LDI world and that entertainment technology world is that, if you go to a theatre it, okay maybe immersive isn't the word, that kind of means something different. But experiential is what entertainment already is, right? You go to the theatre to experience something, you go to a musical or a concert tour, to be in this experience, and over the last few years, the way people are buying materials left and wanting to relish experiences. It's interesting how areas like retail and venue design and even museums are taking a cue from entertainment and that's what experiential really is, right? It's about being entertained more. 

So in a way that sort of LDI world has been informing a lot of other businesses in our spaces. So exactly what you're saying is if you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you're seeing all this fabulous screen, that content is trying to draw you in. Cuz it's being paid attention to, cuz you have to work harder to get people's eyeballs these days. 

Can we talk a little bit about where you're at in terms of numbers and how they would compare to the old DSE that we know? 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and I'm glad you brought up the reboot. We are thinking of it exactly the same way. So we don't have any intentions of trying to compete with the last 2019 DSE. We've had shows in our portfolio that was a record year and of course, the pandemic happening, we're cautiously optimistic about kind, trying to get back to those numbers. So especially with DSE that hasn't happened in three years, we don't think we're gonna replicate that in any way, and that's fine. Our goal for this show is to be between 4,000 and 5,000 registrations. We're absolutely on pace to hit those numbers. We're really pleased with the way registration has been picking up and people registering for content.

The new certification that Bron Consulting is running for us. It's not new, we've newly added it let me be clear. It's the same certification you all know and love. So yeah, the numbers are really encouraging to us and I think what we're gonna see, I think is gonna be surprising for people in the next four weeks is how much our registration picks up, right before the show, traditionally the last six, to eight weeks of the show or when Red registration really hits, and we saw that from the numbers in 2019 also, right? So when we acquired the brand that's just the way the show paces we're absolutely on pace to hit that 4,000 to 5,000 number.

Is that number unique registrations or is that roll up people from LDI who have opted to come over or whatever?

Marian Sandberg: Nope, that's absolutely DSE distinct registration. For the LDI show in 2019, we had 16,000 people registered for LDI. But like an average for LDI would be 12,000 to 13,000. So the numbers for DSE are unique. 

So Potentially you could have a couple thousand or more people drifting over from the other show hall to wandering into DSE, cuz I think you have reciprocity, you can get into one or the other. 

Marian Sandberg: Yes, your badge for DSE or LDI can get you into either one or the other as well as there are some great offers and discounts for the conference on either side, which are obviously, paid conferences. But also some of the networking events that are being offered on both sides I think is gonna be really nice benefits. Just an example. LDI has always had great after-hours nightlife offers. With your badge, you can get into a different club each night, and if you don't know, the clubs in Vegas are very expensive, right? It's not like your $10 cover charge to go see a band at your local club. They're very expensive. We have great deals with LDI that we've been able to extend to the DSE audience to go to a club, for example. Your badge gets you into the club, for free, which can save in some cases 70 to 100 dollars a night, and then we have some networking events. There's an on-floor party if you will, a networking reception for LDI that DSE guests will be invited to, and vice versa, LDI people will be invited to the DSE opening reception, and we were really careful, obviously, to not have them overlap or compete with each other.

Cause we want these two to come across the aisle, as it were. So I think that's gonna be interesting to see, and the LDI community, they're curious. They have that tech curiosity and that creative curiosity. So I think it is absolutely reasonable to think we might get a thousand or so people coming across.

So you're at parity or maybe even ahead of, ultimately ahead of what past DSE have done in terms of headcount, and with the spillover from LDI, almost certainly, where I sense that it's not going as swimmingly would be on the exhibitor signup side? 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, we are where we've expected to be. I know that you love to look at the show floor as you should, and when we were in South Hall, when the show was in Southall, before my time, obviously, the show floor looked different. But I think that our expectations for relaunching the show were exactly where we wanted to be.

We had expectations that were in line with, we have amazing exhibitors presenting, and we have over 90 varieties of exhibitor sponsors, people who are gonna be partners and presenting in some way, and I'm not talking about speakers, I'm talking about people on the show floor, and then I think probably in the next few weeks we're gonna see that number go over a hundred. So that's perfectly respectable, and we're proud of those numbers. 

Yeah, in certain respects that's a reboot and it's a startup again cuz you're having to win the confidence of vendors who have had a rough couple of years anyways and when DSE went down, I don't know if all of 'em were left whole after that. That's somebody else's story in argument, but yeah it, you couldn't, I would imagine just expect that, hey, all you guys who used to do this, come on back. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah. There's so much more of a story to tell there too, isn't there?

We have to regain some trust. We have to have people, who really loved that event and kind of look at us and say, Who the heck are you guys? Which is all stuff we expected. Early on when one of the first things we did was form an advisory board, and I know that you've reported on that, now.

Probably everybody on our advisory board and really we wanted that input and that help, and that was just kind of part of the research we did from the beginning. What was good, what do we wanna change? And I just think that journey has also included spending a lot of time with customers and there's absolutely our sales team talking to people, 3, 4, 5 times. It's not a slam dunk and that's okay. We didn't expect it to be, We never came in here with. Some kind of ego that we're event producers. So we could just walk into a new industry and take over a brand and do it without thinking about it with our eyes closed. 

We're good at producing events. We have a lot of leverage across our company with other verticals that we can look at to draw other buyers that maybe didn't come in from the acquisition, from our regular DSE lists, but we're really excited about presenting to those people. That kind of is where those first-time attendees are coming from.

I'm also curious, you've mentioned the community a number of times and the appetite and aspiration for the industry to get together. If you build an event around attendees, particularly if you're offering a lot of free passes to get into the show proper, then you really have to lean heavily on the exhibitor dollars and sponsor dollars and all that to do it. 

So does that become a challenge long term, that you've gotta build up that trade show side of it for this thing to work? Or can it work the way it's positioned right now? 

Marian Sandberg: We intend to grow the show? There's no question, and David can talk a little bit about the conference program also but, of course, we need to have a viable business here.

There's no question, and I think also, bringing in the right people and making sure that the audience is there was absolutely paramount for us, especially the first year. If you have the right people in the room and you have the right buyers in the room, the exhibitor's gonna be happy and they're gonna come back.

And I think it's a two-sided coin. You have to keep feeding both of them, right? To make everyone happy. The attendees wanna see certain exhibitors, the exhibitors wanna see more of, X, Y, and Z types of attendees. Yeah, our long-term plan is absolutely to keep growing. And we'll see how that goes. We have some plans we won't I won't reveal yet for next year, but I'm sure we'll wanna talk after the show. 

That was one other question I wanted to ask you, Marian, just before we jump over to David on programming and so on: for 2023, is it in November in Las Vegas?

Marian Sandberg: Yes, and I bet you're gonna ask about the Formula One race.

It will be in November, we are gonna move it about a week early. Yeah, we looked at that and thank goodness, being in production, we were hearing from all kinds of production folks about that kind of thing before it was even officially announced.

We were talking to the LVCC about doing it earlier and, we could try to produce something during Formula One, which would just be crazy. But even just for our exhibitors and visitors, we don't want to position the show to make it cost-prohibitive for people even to stay in hotels or have hotels sold out. So just moving it about a week or so earlier is just gonna be the solution. 

Yeah, that's gonna be like a CES week or something. Just insane pricing for everything and impossible to get around. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, exactly. 

Good move! 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, thanks. 

David, tell me, you're somebody who has been to DSE many times, very familiar with it.

So if people are coming up to you knowing that you're involved now and they're asking, okay, what's different, particularly on the programming and education side, what are you gonna tell them? 

David Drain: When I first joined Questex, really my first job was to think about the program and to focus on the conference and the education and the speakers. And so wanted to do that first, and that's, I would say, how we built the program and ort of the exhibitors came later, right? They needed to see what it is you guys are gonna do? What's your plan? And working with Brad and with Marian we looked at the flow of the event and so I think it's got a slightly different flow. There used to be a lot of conference programming before the show happened, and so what you're gonna see this year there is some programming in the morning, just before the show opens. Some, a bit of uninterrupted time during the show floor hours with some on-floor sessions and then ending the day with more sessions.

Really we have three keynotes. I don't know if DSE has done that before. So I think that's different. We will have one each morning. We're very excited about those, of course, Rafiq and Jason Cothern from SoFi Stadium talking about that 5 billion mixed-use development with the stadium and the retail and all that. Having everything from wayfinding to digital menu boards to of course the huge halo infinity screen by Samsung. So I think there's gonna be something there for everybody, and then, Nveen from Google, who you also interviewed for this podcast.

We've got a great lineup and the program came together in three ways. There were things that I developed. There were things that are Association partners like DSF and DPAA and OAAA developed, and then we got session proposals from folks, so we really tried to curate the best agenda that we could and so I think that people will see an increased focus and concentration on the content and the programming, and building on what Marion said earlier, I think just the number of networking events throughout the week and then the crossover with LDI, I think that's what's gonna feel different.

I heard there's a mixer on Wednesday night. 

Marian Sandberg: Mixer. I'm so pleased that you're bringing it to our show. So we can't wait to attend and we're registered, so we're showing up. 

Good. I'll make the bouncer aware. 

One of the things as the education programming curator, person, organizer, whatever you wanna call it, is you, I suspect, have to walk a bit of a tightrope at times, because you have paying sponsors who perhaps have expectations, realistic or unrealistic around what they can say and do on the stage, and you have to balance those needs with the needs of the audience because God knows, maybe not in the most recent versions of DSE, but earlier year versions of it, one hell of a lot of the presentations were just like product pitches by sponsors, and I would sit down, listen for two minutes and I would go and leave, and that's a tough one to manage, isn't it? 

David Drain: Yeah, and I've been managing these types of events for a number of years and so I certainly know about how important it is to make sure that it's got an education focused and so when I was building the program, really sponsorship had nothing to do with it. When I was building the conference program, what we determined as the best topics and the best speakers, and the program really came in process of building this show before the exhibitors that there really wasn't that kind of impact. We do have the on-floor sessions, and those are sponsored. We make that clear on the program. 

Those are kinda product demos and things, right? 

David Drain: They are product demos and even encouraging those speakers, those sponsors to have an education focus so they teach rather than pitch. 

Yeah, I always tell people, look, if you just get up there and pitch, people are gonna leave. If you say smart things, you will leave the impression that this guy and or this woman and this company seem to know what they're talking about, so maybe I should have a chat with them after. 

David Drain: Yeah, be a thought leader or present a case study, and then people will understand. You'll have an opportunity to tell them what your company does. You don't need to spend all that time going through the features and benefits of your product. 

Without trying to put you on the spot, are there one or two sessions that you know that aren't keynotes but are ones that you think are gonna be particularly kick ass and ones that people should have a look at? 

Marian Sandberg: You're asking to choose a favorite child. You're asking him to choose a favorite child, Dave.

David Drain: Yeah. There are just a number of great sessions and if you go to our agenda, there is a way to filter by type. So if you're into digital out of home, you can see the programming aimed at that, and I'm excited you know about the session you're moderating and I'm really not blowing smoke here.

Denny Levine came to me and proposed that session, and of course, he put together an all-star panel and people are very interested, obviously with these Vangogh experiences, immersive experiences that have popped up and been very successful around the world. So I think that will be similar, there's another session with Moment Factory and Dimensional Innovations on transforming lobbies into experiences, that's pretty exciting. 

Yeah, you got some good people like Jackie Walker who was just like, when I talk to her, I just, I always hang up thinking, that's a smart person. She knows her stuff. 

David Drain: Yes, and I listened to her podcast that she did with you and so certainly when she wanted to do a presentation, I'm like, yeah, I will just give you the room. You're gonna do great, and people will walk away with a lot of great information.

All right, so wrapping this up. This has been a great chat. If people are undecided and are on the fence, but hearing this and think, oh, maybe I will go, what do they need to do? Where do they go to find out more about DSE? 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, they can go to digitalsignageexperience.com. As we rebranded also, so it's digitalsignageexperience.com, or if you have any questions, you can certainly just email me, I'd be happy to answer, and my email is msandberg@questex.com. I would love to have your feedback, 

I suspect it's ddrain@questex.com, right? I'm smart that way, it had to be something. All right. Thank you so much for spending half an hour with me. That was terrific. 

Marian Sandberg: Thanks for having us. We're honored. 

David Drain: Thank you, Dave.

Ori Mor, Wi Charge

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

Anyone who has been on the ops or finance side of digital signage and digital out of home knows how complicated and expensive it can be to realize the simple task of getting power to a screen.

It's a particular challenge in settlings like retail - because store designers, until recently, didn't think much about the need to get power right in the aisles and in merchandising locations.

Battery-powered displays are one answer. Power over ethernet is another. And there's of course the often expensive and possibly unsightly option of running electrical infrastructure - wires and maybe conduit - all the way to the screens and other gear.

Wouldn't it be great if wireless power was a reality?

Turns out ... it is, and one of the companies leading development already has small displays for retail and hospitality that get their power over the air, using ceiling transmitters and receivers built into the screens.

Right now, Wi Charge's screens are just tablet-sized, but that will change.

I get the rundown on wireless power from Ori Mor, who is a co-founder and Chief Business Officer at the Israel company.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ori, thank you very much for joining me. Can you give me a background on what your company does?

Ori Mor: Hi, Dave, happy to be here. We are doing over-the-air wireless power, and over-the-air charging. But when we say over-the-air, we mean a range of 10 meters (30 feet) and not proximity charging, like charging pads.

So this is very different from just those close contact charges where you put your phone down and it does it that way? 

Ori Mor: Yes, very different. The phone charging is a type of docking station without wires, but a docking station. You still need to do it on your own, knowing that you are now taking care of charging and the docking station, the pad itself is being wired. We are talking about something that is more close to WiFi for power. 

Is this a commercial product or something that's still in R&D? 

Ori Mor: It's not in large volume yet, but it's a commercial product. It's deployed in Canada, the US, and Israel, and it's going also to a few locations in Europe and actually at the end of this month, also in Brazil.

And the company is in Israel, correct? 

Ori Mor: Yes, the headquarters and R&D are in Israel. Marketing and Sales are mainly in the US, but also in Korea and Europe. 

And how long has the company been around?

Ori Mor: 10 years. 

Did it start trying to solve this problem or was it something else that found its way into this?

Ori Mor: We started by doing over-the-air wireless power. The main application was charging smartphones, but the technology is capable of powering other devices as well. 

I was curious about the application for digital signage. I gather that you have a digital display that you could use in a retail setting, but it's a small display. You're not at a point where you could power a very large display? 

Ori Mor: Yes, that is correct. We started with the five-inch display based on demand that we got from prominent retailers and CPGs from across the world who were interested in being able to power devices at the edge of the shelf. Obviously, we can't power 16 displays. So we started with a small display. We are now doing seven-inch and nine-inch as well. But the promise is, as you said, being able to power devices at the edge of the shelf without the hassle of running wires or replacing batteries.

And is that the problem that's being solved here, just simply the unavailability of power, right at a, like a shelf edge? 

Ori Mor: Simply put, yes. People do display, people do CMS, and people do Digital advertising in retail space already, but usually, it's limited to very few locations and we are enabling it to be widely spread relatively easily. 

And the problem is, in a lot of older retail and older can be like 10 years old, That there just isn't power on the shelves, right? 

Ori Mor: Yes, That is correct. The gondolas are moving, The shelves of Heights are changing And as you said, there are in most of the retail locations, there are no wires. Maybe near the wall, but certainly not in the middle of the store. 

There's power over ethernet, but I gather that has its limitations in terms of where you wanna put it and the cost of it.

Ori Mor: Power over ethernet is capable of powering displays. The problem is, again, routing it to something that changes with time, usually twice a year or even more, and you need to wire it to every different shelf, which is expensive and cumbersome.

So the setup with this is a transmitter and a receiver? 

Ori Mor: A transmitter, and a receiver that is embedded within the display device. 

Could you do a retrofit, like a bolt-on receiver? 

Ori Mor: Actually, no. The displays are designed by us at this stage because we know how to optimize in terms of power consumption. It's a dedicated development optimized for wireless power. 

In the future, I believe that we'd be able to support existing displays but we start with something we can control. 

Is the power stable, or is it a bit like WiFi where it can kind of drop momentarily here and there?

Ori Mor: There is always a rechargeable battery in the device. So we charge the device and the device draws its power from the rechargeable battery. So it gets steady power from the battery even if power drops. 

Are you restricted with the displays in terms of what you can show, like is it just static images or to run full 30 frames per second video?

Ori Mor: We are doing full videos. 

Okay, and was that a mountain you had to climb or was that right out of the gate that would work? 

Ori Mor: It was pretty simple. That wasn't the challenge. 

With the transmitter, how does that manifest itself? I think it's something that you mount in the ceiling?

Ori Mor: Yes, think of it like a router in the ceiling with a range of 5-10 meters, the transmitter locates client devices and beams a directional infrared beam to the device where the device converts the infrared beam back into electricity. 

Does it have to be like a line of sight?

Ori Mor: Yes. Wireless power with meaningful power is the line of site technology. You can do non line of sight using RF, magnetic and even with infrared, but the amount of power that you can deliver with sight will be very low for reasons that I can explain if you wanna dive into. 

I probably wouldn't get most of it.

Ori Mor: Oh, you would get it. When you do non line of sight, it means that energy is being spread in the room and you only harvest part of it. It has two drawbacks, a) the amount of power that you draw that you receive is lower because you waste a lot, and b) you fill the environment with unwanted radiation that the regulator and the customer wouldn't want. So if you do choose to do a non line of sight, it's for very low power. 

And what are the safety issues? 

Ori Mor: We passed all the safety certificates worldwide. FDA in the US, IEC in UL as well. It's approved to be safe under all conditions and that's the claim to fame for the technology we can deliver meaningful power yet it is as safe as your optical mouse. 

You're walking around a cafe or something where this is set up and you let's say you work there. Are there any long-term implications of being around this radiation so to speak? 

Ori Mor: No. Think of it like it's even safer than your wifi router. The beam is very directional. So outside the beam, there is an absolute zero. It's not a wifi router that sends radiation to every location and only part of it is being harvested or absorbed by your cell phone. The beam that leaves the transmitter, a hundred per cent of it, reaches the receiver, a centimetre away from the beam, and there is an absolute zero, and when you cross the beam, it shuts off automatically, 

Hence the need for or the value of having a battery on board?

Ori Mor: Yes.

So how long would that last if somebody put a large chair or something in the way, and it was blocking, would that mean eight hours later, it stops working? 

Ori Mor: Yeah. It's a design criterion. We designed it to be able to last a full day on a battery, but you can design it differently. It's a trade-off between the size of the battery and the thickness of the display. 

So if you talk about larger displays, a 30-inch display, a 55-inch display, which is quite common in digital signage, at least. How long off are we from that being a possibility? 

Ori Mor: That's too big of a question for me. I'll tell you that we are not even trying to target this at this point in time, but I'll give you an example of how technology develops. You probably know that when we started using the internet, we used 2.4 kilobytes or something like that. 

I go back to 256K modems, I’m old. 

Ori Mor: Yeah, and we are now doing a podcast where I'm sitting on probably 200 megabytes per second. Whether the technology would take us there, we will have to figure it out by seeing. 

So this is a matter of time, more than anything else.

Ori Mor: Yes. Time, the economy of scale, components becoming more capable and scaling up performance. 

I would assume also that you guys don't wanna be a display manufacturer. You're doing it right now just to demonstrate what's possible, but I'm thinking you'd like to license this to the display guys, as opposed to making your own? 

Ori Mor: That is absolutely correct.

Wi Charge is a company that knows how to deliver wireless power and we do that for many different applications. We chose a few to show how it works. There's a big opportunity here in terms of market demand. We chose a few applications, one in commercial, one in smart home, and one in consumer, just to see the market and then to license it to the relevant guys that can do it much better than us.

When do you see that happening? 

Ori Mor: We've already had deals that are licensed-based and it's like a domino effect. It's like how penguins jump to the water. They all stand at the edge of the ocean knowing that the food is in the water, but still hesitating and then one jumps in and immediately after a hundred thousand jump in. So by showing the way, we would unlock this domino effect. 

There are some Korean university researchers I wrote a piece about last week that were also doing wireless power. Are there any number of initiatives out there doing this? 

Ori Mor: Yes, we have seen more and more companies or universities doing wireless power. What they're doing right now, we did 10 years ago, so it's nice that they’re catching up. 

We see over-the-air charging happening already and it's happening in different ways with different technologies that allow different value propositions. So you can expect to see more and more of this. 

Is your focus right now mostly on B2C (Business to Consumer)? 

Ori Mor: No, we are actually doing commercial applications, like the displays. Even the consumer applications that we do, start with commercial settings. It's simply easier for us. Consumer, we are doing very cautiously and very few applications, but actually, before the end of the year, you'd hear announcements about consumer applications from us. 

Right, because you've been at CES a number of times and before we turned things on here to record, you mentioned that the company would be back at CES in January.

Ori Mor: Yes. There's another reason why we are doing the display. It expedites the go-to-market. When we can actually do the turnkey product, rather than only the wireless power, we can offer solutions to end customers without hesitations. 

It's easy to do it in B2B, but we already have a few consumer applications.

What's getting traction for the product right now, like a particular use case? 

Ori Mor: The displays are seeing tremendous, overwhelming demand. The other products that we do are smart door locks, which you probably are not so smart, not because they can't be smart, it's because people are worried, designers, OEMs are worried that if they would add smart functionalities, batteries would run out way too fast and then the end user would be stuck locked outside over a dead battery. So we are unleashing this as well in parallel. 

Yeah, it would be the same with those surveillance cameras that people have at their homes, the Nest cameras and so on.

Ori Mor: Exactly. Since they need to go to sleep to preserve their batteries. There's a phrase, I think a professional phrase, which is called the back of the thief. By the time they wake up, the thief is already on the way out. 

You mentioned you were seeing tremendous take-up on displays. What's going on there? How are they being used? 

Ori Mor: In various ways. Edge shelf displays in retail locations. I'll tell you what I can say and there are a few other things you can publish, we will send you when they go live. 

It's the usual thing. The clients don't want you talking about them, right?

Ori Mor: So what I'm disclosing right now are things already out there that are available and in a few weeks there will be other use cases as well and I'll be happy to share them with you, both images and videos. So we are doing table-topping restaurants, this is already out there. We are doing edge shelves in grocery locations. And we are doing other devices for grocery locations, which are quite cool, but I'll wait on how they look till we launch them. We are also doing displays in shopping centres like jewellery and other stuff, it's a display it's so generic, you can put it anywhere. You can wrap it and you have advertising at the point of decision. 

And this is not just in Israel? 

Ori Mor: No, most of it is outside of Israel. Texas, New York, Michigan, Idaho, Toronto, and Sao Paulo.

I'm sure one of the determining factors out there is the overall cost. What this does in terms of cost versus what you would pay to run conduit, run power or ethernet cabling to a display that way and people would do a spreadsheet exercise and decide, okay, this is less expensive to do it your way. 

Ori Mor: Exactly. 

What is the cost of a transmitter? 

Ori Mor: Oh, you'd have to ask our partners. They're selling the solutions to the end customers, not us.

Okay, but is it hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars? 

Ori Mor: Hundreds, not thousands. 

And it would install in the ceiling just like you would put in a ceiling light? 

Ori Mor: Yes, it takes a few minutes. 

For the display, understanding that these are your proprietary displays and you've tweaked them and everything else, but the hardware cost for a receiver, is that something that's also hundreds of dollars? 

Ori Mor: No, much less.

It's nominal, so it'd be like another component inside a display? 

Ori Mor: Yes. 

Does the system also radiate WiFi? 

Ori Mor: Yes, the communication with the display is over WiFi, over 3G. So with the end customers, it depends but they can run the content through a CMS on their own, independently.

So in theory would a company that makes WiFi equipment, like routers and so on, could they conceivably add your capability into their product line? 

So if I'm a company that makes networking equipment, like Cisco or more B2C stuff, could they add Wi charge capability to their WiFi routers?

Ori Mor: Yes, but I'll explain how. These companies are used to creating infrastructure and delivering connectivity. They can do the same for power, power as a service, not just data as a service. The only difference is that transmitters should be located most of the time on ceilings rather than hidden in the closet, that's the difference, and now the 5G routers are on ceilings for the exact same reason. They are almost in the line of sight. 

You mentioned metering. With the energy issues that Europe's facing right now because of Russia, there's a lot of concern around energy consumption, and I wonder whether we're gonna get to a stage where power would be metered for this sort of thing.

Ori Mor: Let me answer this in two ways. Since it's a service, it can be metered. It's an extension of the electricity grid and the same as you paying for watt/hour for electricity, you probably would be paying a watt/hour for wireless electricity, so it's only a natural extension. Regarding power in general and sustainability. What we also discovered is that a single transmitter that we are now shipping saves up to 5000 AA batteries and that's even on our first gen only. So it's probably your and my body weight in batteries saved by each transmitter that we deploy. 

Is the transmitter always pushing out energy and therefore the meter's always going or is it more of a demand thing?

Ori Mor: No, it's a demand thing. When there's no demand, it goes to sleep. 

All right, interesting. That would be a lot more efficient. 

What about distance? You mentioned 10 meters right now. Will that improve, just like the other things? 

Ori Mor: We did a test for a government agency for 100 meters successfully. But then we decided that as a company we need to focus. It's either we do indoor for consumers or commercial, or we do outdoor for other types of devices and we chose the short-of-range options.

So the technology can easily do a hundred meters or probably more, and there's actually a company that does that. This is their forte. We chose to focus on the inside. 

Okay, but you could, in theory, have advertising displays on a sidewalk, and the same in drive-throughs, a lot of costs involved in trenching and everything else to get power out to the display?

Ori Mor: Oh, there's actually a company that we work with that is considering using our solutions for care pickup and drive tools. 

And there would be enough power cuz those are extra bright displays?

Ori Mor: So for them, we are considering making animated e-ink displays. As I said the large displays with LCDs or OLEDs are out of our range at the moment.

So if people wanna know more about Wi Charge, where do they go? 

Ori Mor: Website and LinkedIn. 

It's www.wi-charge.com

Ori Mor: Yes. 

Perfect. All right, Ori, thank you very much for spending some time with me.

Ori Mor: Thank you, Dave. I enjoyed it.