Episodes
Wednesday Jan 10, 2024
Eric Henry, Carousel Digital Signage
Wednesday Jan 10, 2024
Wednesday Jan 10, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system.
I had a really good chat, one that flew by, with Eric Henry, the president of Carousel, which is the digital signage side of a larger Minneapolis company called Tightrope Media Systems. The Tightrope side of the business focuses on broadcast.
In our chat, Eric and I get into the opportunities and challenges of working with K-12 schools, what typically goes in, and the types of content that help create a sense of community. He has some interesting thoughts about taking marketer's approach to messaging in schools, and getting beyond the predictable.
We also touch towards the end on the higher ed market, which has some core similarities in terms of need, but is also quite different.
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TRANSCRIPT
Eric, thank you for joining me. Happy New Year.
Eric Henry: Happy New Year.
I've done a podcast in the past with your colleague, JJ, but it's been a few years. For those who don't know much about Carousel, can you give me the background? I know that you grew out of tightrope media systems. Some people will know that, but others won't. You've been around since 1997, maybe not you personally but the company.
Eric Henry: Yeah, correct. Personally, I haven't been at the company since 97, but I've certainly been around since 1997. But yeah, Carousel started out as Tightrope Media Systems, actually still a division of Tightrope Media Systems.
So there are two divisions of the company, Carousel, which is the digital signage group and then Cablecast, which is actually our community television broadcast, part of the company and so I actually run the Carousel business.
We did start in 97. 1996-97, It's debatable in terms of paperwork and those types of things, but after a long time, it actually came out of the education space. So, our first customer was Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota for Carousel some 26 years ago, and we've been in that space for quite a long time. Obviously signage lends to many other vertical markets, so we are certainly in other verticals but our founder story is rooted in the education space
And going way back to the late nineties, what was a school district looking for at that point? And is it pretty much what they're looking for today?
Eric Henry: Quite a bit different today. So back in the late nineties, there were certainly much more tube televisions and we could update lunch menus and those types of things and that was really very early days of putting content on screens that wasn't broadcast.
So that was really the early days where schools were looking for a solution that wasn't really hard because there were only a couple of things that could actually put content on screens but they were fairly prohibitive because a lot of them were designed for much more retail, graphic intensive folks and not necessarily teachers.
Right. Yeah. I remember back to the mid to late nineties, there were early-stage quasi digital out of home companies that were in the business of going to school districts and schools in general and saying, Hey, we'll put a TV in the classrooms of your school and you can run school messaging on there.
But by the way, there's going to be advertising there too, to pay for the technology. That's a model that didn't work.
Eric Henry: No, it did not. And I think we've really been trying to find our way as an industry, for quite a long time. If you look at the early days, I remember being at a trade show and there were two higher eds from the same state.
And I asked them why they wanted to do a digital signage project and the answer was basically because the other one was going to do it. So, that's not a very compelling reason, nor is that really a sustainable industry. If we don't really understand what the value is that we're going to bring, why are we doing this thing?
And I think that has really been a long journey for us and we've been searching and wrestling with that question. We did a signage project because it was cool and because nobody else was doing it or because we wanted to put something on these new flat panel displays we wanted to buy but it's very different now in terms of what's important and what schools are thinking about when they're putting content on screens.
And what a K-12 environment does versus what a higher ed environment does can be very different, correct?
Eric Henry: They can be the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the same. How you reach that goal may look a bit different, right? In a K-12 versus a higher ed. I would say one of the major things, so the thing that is the same, what we see and this is true for any organization, our corporate customers as well in the retail space. This idea that people feel connected to their community, like the heart of us, is what we can do to give an organization tools to keep their people connected.
Ironically, we're suggesting more use of technology but using technology to actually bring people together in a relationship face to face. So the more that people are aware of what's happening within their school and things they can participate in. So extracurricular clubs or the sports scores from last night from the football team or the auditions for the play coming up. Those types of things or recognizing people within their community is really creating more sense of community through visual communication is really at the core of what K-12s do and higher eds do.
Now it varies a little bit. Higher ed, for example, the big challenge is getting students on campus and getting students registered for classes and those types of things. So the campus visits weekends and promotes what that university has to offer. So it is a bit more of a marketing tool for prospective students and those types of things, when you're trying to attract them to campus.
And then the signage becomes a tool that says, Hey, you're in the residence hall, just so you know, seven o'clock on Thursday, this math club is meeting or you can go into the writing lab and get a review of your paper. So, that is how across education it is creating community and creating awareness of all the services and things that we're providing to help you be successful.
So, let's talk first about K-12. What does that environment or what does the build typically look like for a school within a larger school district? And I guess I'm also asking, do you sell to a school district or is it school by school?
Eric Henry: We certainly have had both approaches. So in the K-12 space, what is interesting is it really depends on the district.
And now there are districts that have standardized on the Google ecosystem. There are school districts that have standardized on the Apple ecosystem and there are school districts that actually split between Google ecosystem and primary grades and Apple for higher secondary schools. So, in terms of environments that we see, we see typically a Google or an Apple environment or a mixed environment between those two, sometimes Microsoft.
So does that matter to you?
Eric Henry: It matters a little bit in terms of how we're thinking about a deployment, not a ton to us directly at the Carousel.
We obviously have to be mindful of customers' choices, right? So, there are certainly relationships that we have that are more ingrained or stronger or support devices that we have. We do have opinions around what devices we feel work best but if you've already made device choices, as Carousel, we need to work to support those devices. So with that said…
In a Chrome OS environment.
Eric Henry: Yes. But the qualifier on that environment, is it to the same level of support and performance as the Apple ecosystem or the BrightSign ecosystem? No. They run on Chrome but we don't invest top tier resources in terms of making sure that's the prime environment.
And honestly, because we don't have a lot of customers running on Chrome. That's what it comes down to for us. So as far as a K-12, what we see most often is common area signage and so not necessarily in the classroom. So when you ask a school, Hey, are you doing digital signage?
They would say, yes, we have five devices in common areas. So in each of the main hallways or however they break out their building. Sometimes they've had it at a district but many times it started at one school because there was a champion within a school. Sometimes we have a district that has three or four different solutions.
Some every once in a while, we have district-wide initiatives and we prefer that because whether you're going with us or a competitor, we think it makes more sense to think about your communication strategy more holistically. So it's a little bit challenging if you have three or four different solutions.
And I would say we see more individual schools choosing than we see full districts choosing. We've seen mostly common areas and sometimes, Hey, can we do something in the lunchroom? And what we've really tried to encourage schools to be thinking about is how can we get into the classroom? beyond the common areas because the reality is when I observed my kids in school they're cruising through the hallway as quickly as they can to get to class. So, there wasn't a lot of dwell time in common areas unless you're at lunch. So how can we get into the classroom in a way that's affordable?
And that's been a big challenge over the years with the devices that we have and especially the mix. As I mentioned, there's Google and there's Apple. There's also Lots of other devices that we see in the classroom. We have Immersive, we have Screenbeam, all these other multi-purpose devices that we see in classrooms, we've really tried to think about how we can lean in and support that.
And I've wondered about the other devices like Immersive and Screenbeam and Zoom rooms and so on. There seems to be a marketing effort for the schools to have this in their classrooms because you can not only use it for collaboration and teaching and so on but in downtimes, it can be used as digital signage messaging, a kind of screensaver-ish mode.
But I've wondered, does that actually happen?
Eric Henry: No. The short answer is no. The reality is it's cost-prohibitive. So if we wanna get into a little bit of where we're going as a Carousel. When you look at school districts, a K-12 or a higher ed, they have to be very mindful of their budgets and how we as digital signage manufacturers, CMS providers have priced our products historically.
You have a dedicated media player and we price per media player. So anytime we go to a classroom environment, you start talking about a 100 or 200 or 500 per school, which pretty quickly gets the school district out of the budget. So this is where as Carousel, we've backed it up.
And so talking about what is a K-12 or a higher ed trying to accomplish. I did have an opportunity to go and meet with a bunch of higher ed leaders and really hear from them what their struggle is and what they're trying to do and overwhelmingly the theme was, Hey, kids don't read emails, kids aren't engaged.
They don't really know what's going on. How can we reach these kids? That's the question they had for us and how can you be part of helping us with that? And the interesting thing is there's already like 15 ways we can communicate with people, right? We have Slack teams, all the different higher ed little solutions for back and forth communications with students like Patio and all these other ones and we have digital signage and we have Moodle and Blackboard and all these others learning management systems.
So thinking about all of those things, I backed up and none of those higher ed leaders were saying, boy, the thing that I really need is digital signage. It's going to solve all of my problems and so that was very clear to us. So when we started asking the question, what does my overall communication strategy look like as a higher ed leader?
What do I think about my communications as campaigns? Like retailers think about marketing campaigns. Here's all the places I'm going to place this campaign. Here's when I'm going to place it. Here's who needs to see it. Here's the call to action. When we start thinking about communication for a higher ed or a K-12 in that way, we understand that signage is one part of that much bigger communication.
And it moved us to this idea of let's think more about the audience that we're communicating with than the number of devices they're necessarily on. So, as far as where we're going in the future, we're going to a K-12 or in a higher ed and saying, you need to communicate within your classrooms to all of your students.
And you identify your student body as one audience. You should have an audience feed for students and if you need to communicate with parents, that should be a different audience that you're thinking about and even switching the value proposition of carousel and how we price based on that concept of saying, how many audiences, unique messages do you need to create to meet with your people?
And don't worry so much about whether that's a 1000 people or 5,000 people thinking about what audience you have because the interesting thing about signage and the way that it's always been is the more successful you as an organization are, the more expensive it is for you, right? And when we want to switch that, we want to say, look, we want the Carousel to be really helpful in actually accomplishing the thing that you're trying to do, right?
You want students on campus, you want them to feel connected, you want them to be successful. So the more people that know what's going on and the more people that see that information, the more successful you're going to be.
And I don't want you worrying about what that costs you. I want you to go, okay. I know that I want to target my freshmen, my sophomores, my juniors and my seniors with unique messages. So Carousel, we need four feeds. Cool. How many people are actually consuming that feed? Hopefully a bunch, because you'll feel like you got a lot of value out of those feeds.
And so that's how we're looking at solving that classroom problem and it sets us up for some other things that we're thinking about going beyond the screens on walls. It's still necessary. I think seeing that message and a dedicated screen on a wall is absolutely important.
Seeing it in the classroom is important. Seeing it on other devices and web pages and screensavers is also really important. So we're trying to think much more holistically about how we are thinking about our communication campaign and all the places that should show up
So, if capital budgets and operating budgets are an issue, as they certainly would be in most school districts and the schools aren't really multipurpose these other devices like the Immersive and so on for digital signage, how do you make all this happen?
Eric Henry: Well many times. We rarely see a net new from zero signage project, right?
They're making a big capital outlay for screens and for devices and so oftentimes it is, how can we take the investment you've already made? and enhance it and leverage it for new purposes. So for us, very often, we are going into a school district or we're coming alongside an LG or a Screenbeam or BrightSign or whoever that already have these deployments and saying, how can we make this deployment better? Because you're already using this device for something else. So, that's where we as Carousel come in and say, this is how we're going to price this thing. Sometimes these multipurpose devices are just playing a URL.
And so if the classroom signage communication is simple. It's very easy to do if it's a little lighter weight and as Carousel, it's more about providing the thought leadership and helping them strategize what they're trying to do in their organization and think about the inventory of all the devices that you have and what are the things which we can support, what an additional investment might you need to have as well to make this happen in a big way.
Then by the way, we have to make sure that it's simple enough for you to administer so that you're not hiring staff because nobody has the ability to hire staff just to manage signage networks. So that's how we think about it. Okay,
So you got to educate the educators.
One thing that I've seen come out in press releases here and there, I'm thinking in particular of Rise Vision that focuses a lot on K-12 is the use of students to do the content creation and actually in some cases, manage the screen networks within schools.
And when you start thinking in terms of a marketer and taking a marketer's approach to communication which makes perfect sense to me, that's not necessarily a mindset or a skill set that a 16 year old kid who knows their way around motion graphics has much experience in.
Eric Henry: Yeah, I think I love that direction because it's not just for the content creator kids, it's also for the tech kids who can manage the network. And so for us, we're working on some things that will come out later this year to really encourage, close to my heart is, diversity in tech.
One of the challenges with diversity in tech is that we don't have a diverse population of people to even hire to come to our company and so what I would love to do is move into the middle school, high school age of kids and encourage them to experience tech, event management of devices and configuration and those types of things.
On the back end, especially in areas that are much more diverse than we are here in Minnesota and so we're looking at things that we can do as a carousel to incite much more of that activity. I applaud what Rise Vision is doing because I think it's the same heart that we have, which is how we can get these kids engaged and getting their hands on things and thinking about things early.
Now, are they always going to know what to do and how to get it right? Not necessarily and so we have all the tools within the Carousel to do that in a pretty safe way where there's content approval workflows, there people don't get to post things directly to the signage network and so you'd have a teacher or an administrator checking their work and making sure they're not doing crazy stuff but I think that's absolutely important, like hands-on learning is valuable and getting kids a taste of, am I interested in communications? Do I want to create the video that goes on the signage? That's pretty cool. So, I absolutely love that direction.
Yeah. Giving logins to a group of 16 year old boys terrifies me.
Eric Henry: Yeah. You definitely have to make sure that your system is locked down and that your users are set up correctly, for sure.
So when you're taking this marketing centric approach and getting material up in common areas and ideally in the classroom as well. What are those messages that really seem to work well? Beyond the obvious things like, congratulations to the team for winning the local football championship or its hamburger Friday.
.
Eric Henry: Yeah, those are certainly the core things. I would say that student wellness has been a pretty significant area of focus.
What do you mean by that?
Eric Henry: What I mean by that is, around student wellness in the U. S. there's some discussion around social emotional learning is another term that they would use.
So, student wellness being, are you experiencing anxiety? Here's how to prepare for tests here. Hey, the emergency drill is coming up in two weeks. Preparing students, especially, coming back from the pandemic and kids not being in that routine. Trying to help with all of the things that students are wrestling with, Hey, here are the support services we have as a school available to you as a student, here's how to prepare for a test.
A lot of those. So when we talk about student wellness, their mental and their physical health, like really thinking about those types of things providing content. We actually interviewed some different teachers and administrators and found that they were spending a pretty significant amount of time trying to go and find that content online to put on their signage networks.
And so we actually hired some people to help develop that content professionals in that space to provide to schools, whether they were a Carousel customer or not. Just say, Hey, if this is helpful to you, here's anti bullying campaigns, here are things around deep breathing or other things and this is not my area of expertise but just giving you a flavor of the types of things that what we're hearing from schools are a lot of kids were anxious, a lot of kids were struggling, a lot of kids were acting out when they came back from the pandemic.
So how can we be helpful in even the messaging that they're seeing on screens? And so a lot of soft messaging I would say around, what do we want to recognize as a community?
A lot of recognition stuff around, in primary grades especially. At our schools, they call them the wow awards. What are you exhibiting the values of the school? And we're going to celebrate Caleb, the first grader who showed kindness, those types of things. Reinforcing what we want our community to be about.
And does an individual school have to have a champion, they have to assign whether it's a teacher or somebody in the front office staff or whoever who's going to manage this thing?
Eric Henry: Typically that works best. And this is true in education, in corporate, in retail, in healthcare, in every vertical, when we start talking about a signage network, the first assumption is we're going to have one person do all of this stuff, right?
Or two people and it's going to be highly centralized and that reasonably quickly becomes not sustainable. So back to the Genesis of Carousel and understanding who we were building the product for in the late nineties has always been part of, we have to make sure of the complex as this becomes and at enterprise scale that individual people can still manage their little world.
So fundamental to Carousel is how can we keep the user experience simple? If I'm a district and if I log in, I can't see other schools because I already don't know where I'm supposed to go.
Architecting your signage system in a way that I log in and I only see the two or three things that are relevant to me is very important.
You may have a champion at a school but you may have really targeted things like, Here's the PTA groups log in, here community educations log in for after school and they can only do certain things in certain zones and here's the administration from the principal's office and they're responsible for school wide messaging.
So we encourage the school or the district to really, let's start with your initial scope and think about who's going to own it and where are you going to get the content from? And then let's go from there but understand that all the tools exist for you to really break it down. So even as we were talking about students earlier, this is how you would use the carousel in a safe way for students.
And sometimes the safe way has to be for teachers too. Not because they're trying to do something malicious but because they might not know how to use a signage network. So for us, always the goal is how can we make this as simple and dynamic as possible? Some schools, the Carousel is the collector of all of the other information systems.
Here's an RSS feed of the sports scores. Here's what we're getting for the lunch menus from another system and just consuming stuff from other places and putting it together in a way that is useful and is highlighting the most important things that's really valuable because now I don't have somebody constantly trying to feel like they have to maintain yet another system
In the same way that in the business world for workplace communications and so on, the last four or five years have seen an explosion in the ability to use API's to tap into real time data and general data from business systems.
Does that work within school districts? Are there data sources available to you? And are they useful?
Eric Henry: Certainly. The thing that's a little bit challenging in the education space is probably the most valuable information system to tap into is the student information system. At the same time, you have to be very careful about that.
It's like in healthcare, like patient information. There are pretty natural things that you would connect to in a school. The things that are interesting I think are more on the content creation side, let's take Google Slides or Canva or those types of tools that schools are already using. I think those are probably more pertinent in the education space, certainly than they are in the commercial space.
They are fairly common, Hey, let's go grab the sports scores or grab a thing off our website or those types of integrations that are pretty lightweight but more than anything is probably like, can I grab my Google slides content that I made as a teacher and put it over here? So that's a little bit different. Corporate is much more, give me Power BI dashboards and hard data and those types of things.
The difficulty in schools is there's not like a Power BI and everybody uses it type thing in education and so we have to be a little more flexible in terms of, Hey, can you get it in RSS and consume it? It's hard to build APIs for everything that's out there.
Time is flying here but I wanted to quickly cover off as well the distinction between K-12 and higher ed because K-12 the students have to go and they go in their neighborhood or in their general area. But with higher ed, a lot of what's going on is about recruitment, right? Whether it's for athletes or non-athletes students.
Eric Henry: Certainly. So in the higher ed space, I think one of our customers that uses Carousel pretty significantly is the University of Minnesota right here in our backyard and they have the 3M innovation lab and they're highlighting all of the innovation and the things that they're doing throughout the world.
They're highlighting things like green buildings that are carbon neutral and all the stats of the building. So you'll see much more in higher ed space, I would say, much more around thought leadership and why you should come to this university, how well you're going to be supported here in certain areas.
And the beautiful thing about signage is it's flexible, so you can schedule everything. So, the higher ed will schedule things that if you have a campus visit weekend or you know that you're having incoming students, prospective students coming to campus, you can really target your messaging to all of that type of stuff.
Think about the possibilities of why we're an awesome university and all the resources available to you. Then when you get to regular campus life as people are coming back from break now, for example, now we can start talking about and here's all the things that we're doing right now.
Hey, remember students, this is the thing that's going on Thursday night. So you see things in residence halls that are reinforcing things that are happening on campus because students usually remember the thing that's right in front of them because they have so many things going on. So, that's what it looks like in higher ed versus…
I think the wellness thing would be even more important or maybe not more important but as important as K-12 in higher ed because you've got particular first year students who maybe moved away from home and this is the first time on their own and they may be extroverts who are just right in there for party central but there'd be all kinds of young students who are a little a bit terrified and very lonely.
Eric Henry: Certainly. And it's interesting because the services available in a higher ed are a little bit different than in K-12, right? So the messaging around wellness and availability of those services looks a little different in higher ed but you're certainly right on point.
Again, reminding the students that there is actually a wellness center. There actually are places to go to work out. There are places to go to get counseling services within higher levels that you can sign up for. The university my kids attend, that's actually a free service on campus for them and they didn't know about it until they saw it. They were reminded of it and they didn't read the newsletter that the university sends out but they saw it seven times on the signage and then they actually went. So that's the idea.
It worked. All things are possible. Eric, thank you very much. That was great. We could have easily chatted for another 90 minutes, but try to cap these things at about half an hour and it's been terrific.
Eric Henry: Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. It was great chatting with you.
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Meghan Athavale, LUMO Interactive
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point.
A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are things like fun, engaging games.
The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage.
The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD.
I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale.
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TRANSCRIPT
Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?
Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture.
Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.
When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are.
So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?
Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.
It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays.
So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.
So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend coding, how everything maps, but also, I think I saw there were something like 200 different apps in a library?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are 300 pre-made experiences, which they're constantly turning over. So we have some in there that have been there for 10 years that we will replace with something new. We're constantly rolling over those apps, and we take requests from our community, and that's one of the things that our business model gives us the freedom to do because we're not reliant on selling hardware and our community is very vast. We represent everything from education to large brands. Our community can make requests for new apps and we'll just make them and add them to our market. So we don't have the restrictions of having to charge through the nose for custom content development because we've developed these systems that make it very easy to pump out new content, and then the other thing that we offer as far as content goes, like out of the box content is we have an SDK for the companies that do have in house developers, and then we've got a number of different templates. So you can just say, I want to make a Koi Pond, and I want to throw my business's logo behind it, and you could whip something like that off in five minutes.
So are the templates purely done in-house or do you have third-party designers who are contributing?
Meghan Athavale: That's a great question. At this point, they're all done in-house. We are working towards outsourcing a lot of our content development just because it'll give us a wider breadth of content and make that content more available. We're just at the very beginning of seeing rollouts that are large enough to make joining a third-party content development team attractive.
We see this in gaming consoles all the time, where you'll have a new fantastic console that comes out, it's low cost, and they're trying to get game developers to create games for that console, but unless thousands and thousands of people have that console and are buying games for it, it's not really worth making a game for it so we're at the stage where we're starting to see enough of a widespread and permanent deployment of systems running on our platform that it makes sense to have those conversations with third-party development teams now and we're starting to have those conversations.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about scale because one of the particularly compelling things about your company and your offer is cost, in terms of, it's not very expensive at all to use this.
Can you walk through that and not really how the financials work, you're not charging a lot per instance of this on a monthly basis, so you need to have a lot of them out there, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's right. We still make a percentage of our revenue on five or six big custom projects a year. I would say that our MRR represents about half of our revenue. The goal is to reach a point in scale where we can just focus on the platform, but I do get asked pretty frequently why it costs so little.
There are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest one, I think, is just we want to make this, as you mentioned, democratizing the technology, we want to make this technology available and affordable to schools, that’s our primary business goal. I and my business partner, our moms were both special needs teachers, we've seen firsthand the struggles that teachers and educators have in getting technology into their classrooms they need it for kids with sensory issues or children with autism or ADHD, and we've seen how effective interactive digital displays can be in those environments, particularly for things like increasing social skills. A lot of these kids come in, and they're really stuck on screens. They're very stuck on virtual experiences, and so it becomes a bridge, where they can engage with one another and with their teachers socially while still having that digital feedback.
It's just very important to us that our pricing reflects our values as a company and that's one of our core values is making this accessible for education, but the other is that we really don't need to charge a lot for what we want to do. So at this point, our company's main work on the platform is around supporting hardware. So, as new devices come out, we're adding support for them so that you can download our software and you can plug in any of the commercially available 3D cameras, and it'll automatically recognize and calibrate that camera for you and take out the computer vision steps and specific requirements for each individual device, like DirectX. I think that would probably be the closest analog, you want something that you can plug and play regardless of which device you're using to achieve the tracking. So we want to focus on that.
We also want to focus on the tools that allow people to scale these projects to multiple locations. If you have an interactive display in a flagship store and you want us to put it into all of your stores, the step from running your proof of concept to scaling it to a hundred locations is very simple using our platform, and it's because we're constantly pushing updates and we do health management, we have a content management system, and those are the things that we want to focus on the long term. We don't necessarily want to focus on developing the individual games. We want to make the game development stuff as easy for other people to do as possible because we don't have all the ideas in the world, but we are really good at making sure that other people's ideas continue to run and don't go down.
Just so people understand, your top end cost is, if you work it out on a monthly basis, it's $74 a month, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's as high as it gets.
If I'm an agency and I decide I have a beauty brand client that wants some sort of activation that's an interactive floor or wall or whatever, that's going to cost like five-six figures probably, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, I mean, the part that determines the cost of any of these installations is the hardware you choose to use. If you're a brand and you're developing the content from scratch, maybe hiring our team or hiring a third party to develop custom content for you, there may be 3D modeling involved, there may be compositing, you might have multi-level programming, you might have second screen experiences, so all of those things add up.
But we can generally, when somebody comes to us and asks for a ballpark estimate, the only thing we really need to understand is where it is going and what kind of display you are planning to use, and we can generally come up with a range.
But if you're doing it, it's going to be a fraction of what it would cost if you just went to an interactive agency and said, “Build this, please!”
Meghan Athavale: Absolutely. But I think that something to keep in mind is that if you're going to an interactive agency and you don't have an idea yet, you're likely going to pay less. If you go to an agency and what you're paying them to do is to figure out what the activation actually should be, we're not an agency, and so we don't position ourselves as somebody that's going to do a lot of things like research and problem-solving. But what we can do is scale that.
You’re not Moment Factory.
Meghan Athavale: We are not and we don't want to fill that niche because it's a different skill set and it requires the ability to experiment with things on a one-time basis.
You may develop a solution for a brand or a display for the Super Bowl or something like that, where you're using a specific set of hardware just one time, and that's fantastic. I love that there are agencies in the world that get to do that, but that's not what we do. We look at it and go, how do we make this happen a thousand times, and that's a very different way of looking at things. So I think, if you want something that already exists, and you just want to put your stamp on it and create something that gives it a unique feel for your brand or experience, that's where you come to us. If you want something that's never been done before in the entire world and uses new technology that hasn't been proven long-term in the industry. TeamLab, and Moment Factory, are where you would go, but it is a lot more expensive for sure.
You're starting to use things like LiDAR and everything else.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. The risk is just so much higher, and you need people on the ground. You need to roll a truck if something goes wrong. However, with our systems, we're way past that point.
Yeah, because you've got the device management designed for scale and everything else, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we don't release anything into the market that hasn't been tested thoroughly in our labs for months and months at a time. We have the ability to guarantee things, whereas in some of these riskier projects, as long as you hire somebody that knows what they're doing, they're going to find a way to make it work, but they're not necessarily going to be able to tell you how from the beginning of the project.
So, for something like a classroom, what's the kit of parts, and what's the degree of complexity to put this in?
Meghan Athavale: Most classrooms either have an interactive floor, an interactive wall, or both.
Already?
Meghan Athavale: No, that's what they're putting in, and it's basically the same technology for either. We designed our software so it works with any projector, and a lot of classrooms already have projectors, so they'll just use what they have. So you've got your display, which in classrooms is typically a projector, a 3D camera, and a Windows computer.
We typically recommend that people use the sort of baseline specification on our site as an i5 or equivalent with a decent graphics card, you don't want something that's not going to be able to run games because that's basically what we're running, and the cost is usually like for including the projector for a classroom is usually around $2,000-2,500.
To set that up, is it the sort of thing that the school district or the schools, IT person, or people have to do, or is it simplistic to the level that if a teacher already got a projector pointed at a whiteboard of some kind, they can just do it themselves?
Meghan Athavale: So teachers can do it themselves, and we often help teachers do it themselves. But nowadays they're busy. Teaching is not an easy career right now, and we're typically dealing with the IT personnel for an entire division when these installations are going in.
If you're dealing with a full division or district, are they rolling out like that, or is it still onesie twosies?
Meghan Athavale: It's usually one per school across an entire district, is what we're seeing, and that's mostly in the U.S. We haven't really seen nearly the same traction in schools in Canada yet.
I didn't say at the outset, but you're in Montreal.
Meghan Athavale: Yes, that's right.
Why do you think that is just because of the way education works in Canada versus the US?
Meghan Athavale: I'm not entirely sure. I know that it's like that in all of our verticals. So it's not just education. I would say retail, events, and all of the verticals that we serve, we have faster pickup and larger rollouts in the US. It could be the population just much bigger.
I think we're just not risk takers, and I also think, to a certain extent, we're limited by things like weather and the accessibility of venues to having these types of, there are a lot more venues in the US that have built-in walls or built-in interactive components that we can just hop our software onto them. I don't think there are as many opportunities here.
You mentioned, in detail, education; what other vertical markets or segments are you seeing a lot of activity in?
Meghan Athavale: Events is the fastest growing segment, and this is like events of all different sizes and lengths, so it could be something that is like a week-long trade show, it could be like a birthday party for kids. It could be somebody who is a DJ, and they're bringing an interactive floor to all of their gigs.
It's really all over the map. We just did a pop-up in Times Square for a major chocolate brand. We've done interactives for movie launches, so like those short-term events where they're developing their own special content and it's on for less than a month, I would say that is our fastest growing vertical.
Interesting. We talked a little bit about planning before we turned on the recording, and I'm curious about how these things get planned out and how you ensure and how your users ensure that what they're putting up gets beyond just being eye candy/wow factor stuff because I often say that wow factor has a short shelf life.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you. I think there has to be a balance between the cost and the reward of experiences like this. One of the biggest mistakes that we see people making is they'll see something on the internet, they'll see something in video format, and they'll think, I need that at my event, or I need that in my museum, and they'll skip the part of like why they need it.
It'll be entirely like an emotional decision, and the challenge here is that there are so many more and more faked every single day. We get sent videos all the time with people asking us to do anamorphic illusions. People will see videos of that, and they'll be like, “I want that but interactive, can you make it?” And because they're seeing a video and the video is staged, and in some cases, the video is a complete composite. It's not even something that actually happened in the real world, they won't understand that it doesn't work from anything except for one very particular perspective. So, the person who's interacting with anamorphic content is not going to see what the person watching from across the street on a particular street corner is going to see, and the same thing with large-scale digital displays.
People will see these huge LED walls, and I think you saw this at our booth at LDI. When you walk right up to a big LED wall, you see the individual pixels, not the same image that somebody is watching from far away, so I think that those limitations are very difficult for people to understand and appreciate unless they've actually seen the installation in person. So I would say if you see something and you're planning to put it in an event, you're planning to use it in brand activation, go see that experience in person first. Don't make a decision about whether or not you need it until you've actually personally experienced it because seeing it on a video is not the same thing as what it's going to look like in real life.
And then the other advice that I give to people when they come to me with the wow factor criteria is like, what do you want the takeaway to be? Is this a shareable thing? Do you want a hundred people to come to your event to put up a hundred different videos and tag you in them? What is your metric for success? Because if that's it, then the content's going to be very different than if you want a hundred people to enter their emails in order to play a game or you need to know at the end of the day what you're walking away from after you've put that activation in place.
I've seen different iterations of this stuff. The applications in classrooms, I think, is fantastic and it plays to kids at their whims and everything else; they want to be involved. I find it's quite different.
A lot of the ones that I've seen in public spaces like shopping malls and so on, where you see the kids running around doing stuff, interacting with it, but you don't really see the adults, and that's fine if it's aimed at kids. But I wonder sometimes, when brands do these things, that the only real interest is with children and adults saying, “I'm not doing that, I'm not an extrovert. I don't want to do this trickery in front of other people.”
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think that's a very fair point. One of the things that we noticed when we first started putting particularly interactive floors into retail spaces was that we still have an entire generation of adults, and I would count my own generation in there; we've been trained not to step on screens like it's your impulse isn't to go running through the light. The generations who are comfortable with that and who grew up with touch screens and expect everything to be interactive, I think they're in their twenties and early thirties now, so we are seeing that change quite a bit. I would say that from about 35 years down, we aren't seeing that hesitancy to interact with things, but I do think that we still have a long way to go in discovering how the content can be used.
A lot of times, it's to augment like physical experiences is how you get adults to engage think like axe-throwing. Adding really cool interactive graphics to an axe-throwing experience is something that's going to really delight an older crowd. Same thing with bowling alleys, making those interactive. So I think…
So they're becoming Wii games.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think a lot of the time, people think that there's a choice between virtual experiences in VR and physical experiences like you would have with a traditional family entertainment center. But what our software allows you to do is combine the two, so you have a headset-free experience that does have digital interactive components, but you're also engaging with something physical. So we do a lot of Air Hockey tables, pool tables, and things like that where you're still playing pool and using physical paddles, but there are interactive digital visual elements on top of that. That's where we're seeing unquestionable pickup by older people.
Yeah, so where there's tangible fun or some sort of activity versus so often when I've gone to trade shows, if I see some sort of an interactive video wall thing, please walk up to this thing and dance in front of it or wave your arms, and there'll be light particles and that's nice, but I don't see the business case here, and I don't think it's interesting for more than 10 seconds.
Meghan Athavale: For sure, if you're in an environment where you're dancing anyway, having cool visual effects while you're dancing is like a good bonus, and I think that's how we have to think about it in terms of engaging an older audience, is you need to be augmenting something that they're doing anyways.
You can't expect them to do an activity that they wouldn't normally do just because it's like eye candy. But if they're doing something anyway if they're already in a curling league and you can make their curling more fun…
We’re getting really Canadian here.
Meghan Athavale: Right. I mean, I'm available for anyone who wants to try that. I've done soccer, I've done hockey, I haven't done curling yet. I would really like to make an interactive curling experience. But yeah, that’s where you attract adults by helping make something that they want to do anyway, much cooler.
Where did this come from, like why did you start this company?
Meghan Athavale: This is a very existential question. It's actually a pretty funny story. We started the company by accident. My co-founders, Keith Otto and Curtis Wachs and I, all worked at an agency together, and this was like 2010, back in the days when Instructables and a lot of those sorts of YouTube channels were just starting, and we started hanging out after work and just making stuff and it was all things that we would never get hired to make. We were designing our own touch screens. We created our own mist screen for projection. We did a lot of building projections and it was all for fun. We saw other people doing it all over the world. We thought it was really like a fun hobby. We started throwing parties to show off some of the things that we were making, and a friend of mine, Kayla Jeanson, who is an incredible videographer. She also has moved out to Montreal. This all happened back in Winnipeg, which is where my company is based.
So we're all back in Winnipeg. Kayla shows up at one of the parties. This was before Facebook, so it was an SMS-controlled wall where you were sending text messages, and it was making things happen on the wall. She took a video, and that video ended up going viral. We found out about it after the fact, and we started getting contacted by different businesses the University of Nevada, Reno reached out and said, “Hey, we'd really like to have something cool like this in our cafeteria.” and Curtis and I just looked at each other, we're like, wow, people will pay us to do this. We registered a business, and we all quit our jobs. We applied for CMF funding, and we launched as an agency designing these interactive experiences and, within the first two years, realized that the biggest challenge was once the experience was in place how do you maintain it? How do you make sure that it's going to continue running?
And that installation that we did back in, I think, in early 2011, in the cafeteria in Reno is still running, and part of it was just like starting by accident because a hobby that we were doing for fun led to some economic opportunities for us and the direction that we ended up taking was as a result of people liked what we did long enough to want to keep it running, to want to keep having us continue updating it. We've had a number of large-scale installations. There's one in Red Rock, Ontario, where they've done entire refreshes. We did our original installation for them in 2011 as well and just very recently replaced and updated a bunch of the software for them. The validation has been there, so the thing to focus on is how to make these experiences last, not how to make them cool for a week.
The company is quite small. I believe it's just like a handful of people, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. That's right. There are four of us.
And that's all you need to be because you're not getting into the weeds with the hardware, and I think you sell the hardware that you have through a reseller, Simply NUC?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we have a number of resellers, but Simply NUCis our preferred partner because they send us everything that they're selling so we can test it 24/7. So we're able to say with high confidence that anything you buy from Simply NUC is going to run long-term with our software.
I would like a bigger team. In all honesty, we had to let a few people go during the pandemic. I think one year in, we were like, okay, we're not going to be able to sustain ourselves with a larger team. So, I think we'd like to see some growth in the team within the next year or so. Because of the way that we've built our platform, we're able to outsource stuff that we can't do where we don't have enough work to bring somebody in-house for long periods of time, and there are also just amazing resources out there for outsourcing, now that didn't exist when we first started the company.
It's a small team. I don't anticipate that we'll ever be much more than 10 people.
But a few more wouldn't hurt.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, a few more wouldn't hurt. I'd like to build in a little bit more redundancy, and I'm getting older, and one of these days, I'm hoping that there will be some sort of a succession.
Because of the relationship that we have with our resellers and our installers, there's really not a lot of mission-critical stuff on our side. We push our regular updates. We create new content and respond to community requests and stuff. But not a lot of the work that we do is like on a deadline. It's a pretty chill working environment where we identify things that we think are going to be of value to the customer, and then we ask our customers, and then we build the thing. There's no pressure.
And there's also a knock on wood at this point: not a ton of competition because it's still a very niche market. We don't feel the pressure to be like the trade show that you and I met on; it was the first we've been in business for 13 years, and that was the first time we've ever done a trade show exhibit.
Oh, wow, and what was your takeaway from that?
Meghan Athavale: It was great. It was definitely time. We came away with quite a few new customers, and it was LDI. The reason we chose LDI as our first trade show is because there are so many companies that do events, and the total lifetime value of customers in the event space isn't as high as education would be or something where it's a permanent installation. There's just a lot more of them, and it's a lower-hanging fruit. We're hoping to bump up our revenue enough so that we can start expanding our team sometime mid-next year.
Do you have a reference case or a handful of reference cases? If people said, this sounds really cool. I can't really just walk into a classroom, obviously. Are there museums or public spaces or something like that where I could go see this?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are quite a few.
What we usually ask people to do is if they want to see an installation of ours in real life and they aren't able to set it up themselves, just contact us, let us know what city you're in, and we'll find somebody in your area that you can go visit. There are a lot of live public libraries and museums and buildings that are open to the public that have installations in them, and then the other thing that people can do is we have a free evaluation version of our software that you can just download and install.
So, for people who are getting into this on a commercial basis, it's a really good idea to set up a system for yourself, test it out, and play around with the tools. Don't pitch it to your customers until you've tried it, please!
So we make it possible for people to just install it for free and play around with it before they make any sort of purchase before they make any representations to their customers about what it can do.
Okay. All right. So, if people want to find you online, that's LUMOplay.com, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yep. That's right. LUMOplay.com, and if you reach out through the site, you will be talking to me. My name is Meghan.
All right, Meghan. Thank you very much.
Meghan Athavale: You're very welcome. Thank you, Dave.
Friday Dec 08, 2023
David Thomas, BudSense
Friday Dec 08, 2023
Friday Dec 08, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When cannabis started being legalized in US states like Colorado, and more recently across Canada, it struck me that it was a very interesting new vertical for digital signage companies to chase - because it was a greenfields industry that had retail environments offering up products wholly unfamiliar to a lot of the people walking in the door.
It's grown pretty clear, though, that while there may indeed be big long-term opportunity, cannabis retailing is also a very complicated industry - with rules and regulations changing by jurisdiction, a whole bunch of vendors and SKUs, and widely variable supply chains.
While there might be a common perception that getting the OK to sell cannabis is a license to print money, a lot of operators are struggling financially, and both retailers and the tech ecosystem underpinning cannabis are coming in and dropping out all the time.
A Canadian company called BudSense has a particularly interesting story to tell. The company, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, started out as a retailer, but found its way into technology to fill the gaps in what they needed to effectively manage stores and communicate to customers.
Now, software is the main business, and BudSense has a SaaS software product that is all about managing menus and other screens around dispensaries, and is very specifically tuned to cannabis retailing - as opposed to general digital signage software that could also drive cannabis store menus.
Canada has been the main focus to date, but co-founder David Thomas says BudSense has business in the US, and plans to grow that.
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TRANSCRIPT
David, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a little bit about BudSense?
David Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Dave. BudSense is a menu merchandising company in the cannabis industry. It solves the problem for our retailers of menu management.
And are you focused just on menus or are you doing in-store promotion, all kinds of other things within these dispensaries?
David Thomas: Yeah, we do some in-store promotion tool sets as well, pretty much anything that involves merchandising is the solution that we want to solve.
Your company's in Saskatchewan, right?
David Thomas: Yes, we're based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, where we got our start in dispensary operation.
So when you say dispensary operations, you mean you're actually running a dispensary?
David Thomas: We were, and we still are. I partnered with my brother, John, around legalization in Canada. We started by running four stores in Saskatchewan. We've since sold those stores and moved on to other retail footprints but that's when we started developing the software that is now BudSense.
What set you down that path? Because being a retailer is very different from being a software company?
David Thomas: Absolutely. So I have a background in engineering. My brother has a background in pharmacy. We actually started our business partnership before cannabis in real estate and we have an entrepreneurial spirit. We were always looking for opportunities and when cannabis was announced for legalization, we saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we wanted to participate so that was the catalyst that pushed us into the cannabis space. We went into retail because of our real estate and pharmacy background.
I have a lot of experience running teams and building systems. So we just put our skill set to use in a brand new industry.
So did you write your own software to run your store and that's what got you down the path or was it the absence of good software to do what you needed?
David Thomas: It was both. We solved whatever problem was directly in front of us. So it wasn't like we wanted to solve digital menus. It was more of a necessity and then we had the skillset to do it in that way. So when we started, we had four stores to run and that's very atypical from a normal business where you start with one and then progress if you're successful.
So from day one, I knew that we needed a system to manage merchandising from a central location. So we could know what was happening in the stores and there were some solutions on the market but they were pretty flimsy at that point and we just felt more comfortable building our own.
So, that's where we started down the path of digital menus.
At what point did you decide that you'd rather be a tech company than a retailer?
I think the perception when cannabis was legalized in Canada was if you managed to get permits, particularly in those provinces where they allowed for private operators, it was a license to print money.
David Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. The markets are very interesting with cannabis. I've watched them develop in our region, in the U.S., and other places and that's certainly the perception from the outside looking in and that happens a lot in an early market, whereas some of the permits are protected and ours were in the early days.
We actually sold what turned out to be the peak of the market which was an excellent catalyst for our next chapters. So now a lot of the markets in Canada are oversaturated. I've heard numbers thrown around something like 70% of dispensaries in Canada are unprofitable and that has to do with market saturation, but it also has to do with operations being a little bit bloated and not really having the efficiency needed.
BudSense is focused on driving some extra revenue but also tries to make sure your costs are under control and you're running an efficient operation.
I've also heard a number of times that the big challenge of a lot of the people who get into launching dispensaries is they know they're cannabis, but they don't really know retailing.
David Thomas: You've hit on something really interesting because even if they do know retail, which is very rare, cannabis is different. So you have this situation where no one has the perfect skillset so it's going to take innovation and learning regardless of what your background is because it's new and it has new problems.
So what happens is, regardless of your background, you go into it, you start trying things and if you're not mindful then your first go at it isn't going to be perfect. You're going to need to change your strategy. That's where people get into trouble with switching costs, with building systems that aren't necessarily malleable enough to change. So there's a ton of different backgrounds. Some people are more experienced with the product. Some people are more experienced with retail. Some people are more experienced with purchasing. It's really interesting because you essentially have to lean on your strengths while understanding your weaknesses and kind of build the business that way. There are a lot of different paths to success in cannabis and we see that with our different customers of BudSense where there's not one way to do this but it is challenging regardless of what your background is.
One of the big challenges that I've perceived is how things are licensed and regulated changes by jurisdiction. So for instance, In Saskatchewan, where your company is based, it sounds like it's privatized. Where I live in Nova Scotia, it's run by the Provincial Liquor Corporation. So it's very much regulated and I can go in and buy a bottle of wine around the corner and buy whatever you buy there, I don't terribly know but it's all incorporated and much more heavily regulated perhaps than in a private situation and I guess it's the same in the states where it can change state by state.
David Thomas: Yeah, you've hit on another one where it's interesting because your operation depends on the municipality (based on zoning) and the region you're in because one of the most important parts of it is your location and how protected it is from other competition, and then your purchasing is different based on your region. But one thing that we excelled at is it's very simple. We read the rules, and we read the regulations, and we understood them. And a lot of other times people would go in based on what they're doing in the U.S. or what they're doing in another market.
The problem with that, like a concrete example, was when we opened our stores in Saskatchewan, we didn't have a security guard at the front door because the regulations didn't say you had to, we were treating our customers as customers and a lot of people looked at what the U.S. was doing and they saw these security guards at the front door and they didn't necessarily understand the purpose of the security. The security guards were there because it's not legal federally. So it's purely a cash business and the insurance is extremely expensive. So when you have a cash business, your store is filled with cash, and it's a target for crime. So for those reasons and the illegality of it at a federal level, that's why the security guard is there. But when you read the regulations, there's no reason for one.
So it's little things like that where if you're not focused on the details of the regulations and respect the regulations, it's really hard to create a dynamic business without understanding them.
So if I'm a cannabis dispensary and I've just opened up, or I'm about to open up, and I determine I need digital menu displays and I would like some promotional displays as well, could I just use any old digital signage CMS software to run the store or would I be just buying into a whole bunch of work that I don't need to?
David Thomas: It depends how large your organization is and it depends how highly you value your menus. If it goes back to our conversation earlier, what is your skill set what do you value and how are you going to create value in your business?
If you're willing to enter all of your product information daily and keep it up to date on your menu, which some people do, there is a viable reason to do that if you want expanded information that says something BudSense doesn't offer. If you want a clean, tight operation, that runs your menus a little bit more efficiently and automated, that's where BudSense really starts to shine. BudSense manages scale really well. So you may be able to have an owner-operated store that uses a chalkboard that understands every product that's coming in, but when you get 5-30 stores under a banner that falls apart really fast. It again depends, but like we offer some powerful menu solutions that go beyond that kind of out-of-the-box, digital signage stuff that you're referring to.
And from what I understand, there's a whole sort of technology ecosystem focused around the cannabis dispensary business, including point of sale systems, information systems, inventory management systems, all that stuff that maybe you would never find in an apparel store or hardware store or something like that, but it's tuned to cannabis. Is that accurate?
David Thomas: It's very accurate and I'm fascinated by it because I think it's partly to do with our time in modern technology, where if hardware stores were legalized today or if hardware stores were invented today, I believe they would have a stronger tech ecosystem. I believe that we're using tech in cannabis more so than in other verticals at the start of their run because it's available to us and it's helpful.
That said, the nature of cannabis and the instability of the supply chain leads really well to these niche products. You mentioned point of sale, and for example, there's a seed-to-sale regulation needed where you're monitoring individual products from the time that they're grown to packaged, delivered to the store, accepted at the store, to sell to the customer, meaning seed to sale and that regulation is over and above most just out of the box point of sale systems, so that's why.
And that, again is down to the region. So these point-of-sale companies have to change their technology to support region-by-region regulations based on that seat to sell tracking and other things.
Wow. So it gets very complicated.
David Thomas: It does. It is certainly a unique set of challenges, and it's a really early stage too. So a lot of these challenges and underdeveloped technology fall on the lap of operators, and it's challenging.
As a tech provider in this ecosystem, is it challenging to get to scale because you've got all of these operators and as you said, 70 percent of them maybe aren't profitable, so they come in, they come out, they're cash constrained, and everything else?
David Thomas: It is challenging.. That being said, this is my first software-as-a-service company that I've built so I'd imagine that it's always challenging, but I do think it's particularly challenging in cannabis.
That said, I think it requires the right approach for this industry, and it's back to what I was saying, where just understanding the rules and, as you said, understanding the conditions that these operators are trying to run their business in is really important. For those reasons, we spend all of our capital on the product. A lot of our competitors spend more on sales than we do. And the reason why we spend on products is because exactly what you're saying, there's a lot of problems to solve and if people are going to go to business, I don't really value early market share that much.
That being said, it lowers the revenue that we can create out of the bat, but I feel like focusing on the product and focusing on trying to help our customers create success, drive revenue, and clean up their costs. I feel like that's a winning formula long term. It's just a little bit rocky at the start.
And where are we in that sort of evolution of the industry? Did legalization happen 10-plus years ago in Colorado?
David Thomas: Yeah, 10 years ago, Colorado. Five years ago, Canada. The Colorado legalization, like the legacy in the US, is interesting because they've been in an eye on an island.
So, tools such as BudSense haven't really hit them. They made do with what they had, and it created interesting market conditions. It's all in the US, also I don't think they've seen the growth and consumption expected and that's because without federal legalization they really won't see that three decade increase of consumption that we're expecting and when you go nationally legalized like Canada would see. But yeah, where are we from a tech standpoint overall? I think we're really early. I don't think it's been proven that a point-of-sale system can have international dominance.
It still seems to be region by region. I don't really think many people have realized how taxing regulation is on technology. For that reason, BudSense is what I call decoupled from the transaction, and this is counter to most traditional tech thinking where you want to get as close to the transaction as possible because that's where the money is but in cannabis, that's also where the regulation is.
So, by decoupling from that, we can spray it a little thinner and build solutions that are easier to scale across the entire industry. So industry as a whole, I think we have a long way to go. BudSense is making pretty significant strides in building powerful tools that take some of these retailers out of the dark ages, of the challenging period of cannabis retail.
And some of the surf riders have come in and out of the space as well or you contacted me because one of them was basically backing out of the digital signage.
David Thomas: Yeah, I've seen a lot of significant decisions of pulling out, coming back in, investing, divesting. It's tough for me to speculate, but yes, our main competitor in the US has dropped out of digital signage in the cannabis industry.
And you're speculating again, but I'm curious: why would they do that? It strikes me as if you get into something with them, then you've got recurring revenue.
David Thomas: Yeah, my best assumption is, first of all, Enlightened was purchased by a company called Weedmaps, which I believe is the largest Cannabis company in the world. So they had a larger parent company, and when a larger parent company is involved, and you're dealing with a subsection of that company, who knows what could have possibly happened?
But what I see time and time again is even a dominant player like Weedmaps, likely doesn't understand the whole scope of the cannabis industry. They get their part really well, but they don't necessarily understand the retail part or the cultivation part and the individual challenges that come with it. So when they think of digital signage, they're probably thinking of it as simpler than what BudSense has, and when you bring a simple solution to a really complicated environment, it's really tough to maintain and scale. So there's a chance that they're making the right decision for them, whereas that recurring revenue that they might have on their balance sheet, maybe it's not sustainable. And again, I don't know, but those are some assumptions that I could make to the decision.
Of those retail stores, dispensaries, whatever you want to call them in Canada and the US, are most using digital screens in some way or are some of them still analog?
David Thomas: It goes in trends. Canada has a higher digital percentage than the US. A lot of stores don't use menus at all because they just completely simplify the problem and use their Budtenders to communicate directly with the consumer.
But that gets challenging in terms of volume and staffing, right?
David Thomas: So many things, because then now you have personal bias too and your consumer, they don't necessarily want to get all their information from the Budtender. Some people love it. Some people don't like it.
I think one of the missing pieces in that ideology is that the menu isn't just for the consumer. It's also for the Budtender so that they can use the menu to discuss purchasing options together. With cannabis, there's a lot of information to process, and I think that some operators, they're around it all day, every day, and they lose sight of what it's like for a consumer to come into the store and just absorb and consume all of this information.
And what menus really do is help structure those conversations, regardless of how you see the customer journey happening, I think you're missing out if you don't have a well-thought-out merchandising plan. That said, if you're dealing with something that's inefficient and doesn't really work that well and it requires more headache than it's worth, there's a great argument to not do it at all.
If you're not able to do it well, don't do it at all. That is a methodology that I subscribe to for other parts of the business. So why not menu management?
Yeah, that's a long-running story in digital signage.
A lot of venue operators, whether they're retailers or QSR or whatever, invest in the technology. They invest in the original content load, and then it just becomes an orphaned bunch of screens that never get updated.
David Thomas: Yeah, I see that all the time, and then it's just in the background, right?
We see that in our sales cycle too, where our potential customers are using another solution, it might just be collecting dust in the background but when they see our software, they're more like, oh, this exists. This is out there to help me manage my menus and make it a little bit more meaningful. So it's fascinating. There is a difference in ways that operators manage menus, whether you're talking about ‘No menus at all’ or poorly managed menus or something more along the lines of BudSense.
Yeah. I was excited by the prospect of digital signage in cannabis retailing because you would have a whole wash of consumers who would be walking into these stores for the first time, completely unfamiliar with the product, and maybe a little bit uncomfortable because they don't get it. They don't know what they're buying. They don't want to be sold stuff that's overpriced or whatever.
I saw digital signage as a way to help educate, drive awareness, and streamline operations. But I hear a variety of stories, including from you about how well that works.
David Thomas: Yes, it's fascinating, right?
I think back to legalization and what consumers' expectations were of the store and what we had. They came into our store on day one, and we had 8 products for them to buy, like edibles weren't legal, we didn't have pre-rolls because they weren't legal and it was just in a lot of ways disappointing.
And when you look at it up close, it feels like a struggle. But when you resume the way out, I see a 30-year improvement cycle where we're getting better at this, and we're starting to pull consumption away from alcohol and towards cannabis, and I think that a lot of operators are a little bit too close to it where they don't see these new customers coming in because it might only be 2% of their customer base that is new, but that 2% over time is massive and it's exactly what you were saying where there's a feeling that our customers know how we do things, we know where to find the products that they want to buy and maybe they even already know what they want to buy before they come into the store. Yes, that's all true but there is this subsection of the consumer base that is intimidated the first time that they come into the store.
There are a lot of Canadians who still haven't been into a cannabis store, or maybe they went once, and they had a negative experience. So, exactly to your point is this customer journey. We really do have to try and make it as welcoming as possible.
And I've seen everything from cannabis stores that look like Apple stores, they're sleek, they're beautiful and I've seen other ones that look like Korean variety stores in suburban Toronto or something, you just run down and shabby and everything.
David Thomas: Yeah, it's interesting. That was the common thread of, “We want to be the Apple store of cannabis,” and I think we've softened that stance a little bit. A lot of those companies who had that concept in mind, they're quite frankly, they're bankrupt now or on their way out, and what happens is when you have a 30 percent margin packaged good product, you gotta be careful where you spend your money.
So, I think it's about making our customers comfortable, and the other thing is how much space do you need? I think, as a rule, even our early stores were too big and they were still half the size of some of these other ones. If you make your store small enough, you can make it as nice or as rough around the edges as you were saying, as you want. But it's really about where you're spending that money and how you want to design your customer experience from there.
So tell me about the company, what's your installed base?
David Thomas: So we have approximately 10% of the Canadian market right now. We started out focused, so we're in over 500 locations in the US and Canada. We're very focused on maximizing our current customers' use of the product; that's how we approach our development. And as we go, we build from word of mouth and inbound leads. As I said, we don't have a ton of sales efforts.
One of our early successes was based on my retail experience, understanding from first-hand experience what a retailer needs and building a product to suit that. But eventually, that kind of ran out, and I'm still involved in the space from a retail perspective, but what we started to realize was there are different perspectives of this, and there are different ways of doing it, and we look at every new customer as an opportunity to see a new perspective of how menu management can work in this space, and we try to build our product around those different stories. So each of our retailers might not realize it, but they have a voice in the development roadmap of our product, and that's how we see growth because if we can save our customers’ time and then once we save them time, we can start maximizing margins, and once we maximize margins, we can start boosting their revenue. We can really take some of these companies who are struggling and make their business better, and that's what we're focused on rather than store count because we're in the infancy of the industry. So, I see it as almost a waste of resources to chase early market share. I would much rather build a strong product.
Is it easier to work in Canada than the US because it is nationally legal?
David Thomas: I guess it really depends on what your goal is. It's easier to do some things with cannabis in Canada. For instance, we built a database of 35,000 SKUs in Canada to help our retailers with data entry.
That's not possible in the US. There are no barcodes from state to state, just because of the federal legality of it. That said, if you're going to do a more simple solution, the US could be easier. The reason why we focus our development on Canada is because it's a little bit more robust in terms of a national regulation standard. So we can build out our product in a way that kind of wraps around a nationally legalized structure, and then what we do is we take parts of that, and we distribute it in the US. So our Canada market is like an R&D farm, and then we pull out parts of our product and wrap it around a particular use case in the US, but if we focus on the US, it's so fragmented that it's tougher to build that cohesive system. It's better to build the cohesive system and then only use 30% of it rather than build 30% of it and not know what that 70% is supposed to look like if that makes sense.
The company is privately held?
David Thomas: Yes.
And how many people do you have?
David Thomas: We have 12 people right now.
And just dispersed, or do you actually have a bunch of people in Regina?
David Thomas: We have a head office. It's a pretty cool program. It's called the Conexus Cultivator, and it's a tech incubator. So we have about half of our team there, and then the rest is distributed throughout Canada and remote work.
You're in Victoria, BC, which is a lot nicer this time of year than Regina.
David Thomas: It is, yeah. I spent many winters in Regina. I do feel grateful to be here now in the winter.
Yeah, I'm a Western Canada boy, so I had to get the hell out of that one. I don't like minus 30 Celsius.
David Thomas: I feel like I've spent enough time in it.
You've paid your dues.
David Thomas: Yes.
All right. This has been great. Very insightful.
David Thomas: Thanks a lot, Dave. I appreciate you having me on.
Monday Oct 30, 2023
Jon Niermann, Loop TV
Monday Oct 30, 2023
Monday Oct 30, 2023
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.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
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.
Thursday Oct 19, 2023
Gil Matzliah, Novisign
Thursday Oct 19, 2023
Thursday Oct 19, 2023
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.
Monday Sep 18, 2023
George Clopp, Korbyt
Monday Sep 18, 2023
Monday Sep 18, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant?
That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform.
Using computer vision and machine learning, the idea is that if the platform can get a sense of what's making people stop and watch in a defined environment, then content can be optimized based on that interest.
The system finds and schedules content to push to screens based on engagement metrics.
How it all technically works is a bit over my shiny head, but I had a good chat with Korbyt CTO George Clopp about what's going on and its implications. We also get into what the future looks like for AI in digital signage.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Geroge, thank you for joining me. We've chatted in the past. For those who don't know Korbyt, can you give me a rundown of what the company's all about?
George Clopp: Hi, Dave. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. Yeah, Korbyt is at its root an employee engagement company. So we've got roots in digital signage, but our typical use case is using digital signage at corporate campuses and to communicate to employees, to increase employee engagement as well as to communicate real-time mission-critical stats as well.
Is that pretty much the core vertical that you guys chase, workplace?
George Clopp: It is. We are heavily into the workplace, meeting rooms as well. We do a lot with retail banks, a little bit into the retail space, but it's primarily corporate campuses.
For those who don't know the company, it actually goes back a long way to Symon Communications days, right? You guys were doing workplace communications long before the digital signage industry discovered that.
George Clopp: Yeah, exactly right, Dave. It precedes me. I've been here for seven years now. I can't even believe it, but that's how much I enjoy this space and the industry. I enjoy the company so much, but we had Target Vision, Symon Communications, and we've just evolved. I joined at the tail end of 2016 to develop the Korbyt platform, and obviously, we have to meet the needs of the digital signage industry, but we've had a really heavy focus on employee engagement as well.
Is it interesting to see all these other companies who have more general offers, find their way into the workplace because they see that as an opportune vertical?
George Clopp: Yeah, I view it as exciting. I think it's definitely a macroeconomic trend with the pandemic, post-pandemic, the modern workplace, everything is reimagining and reinventing and re-everything these days.
I think it's good. It's a legitimate macro problem that everyone's looking to provide solutions to. So, I'm really excited. I love the industry myself.
In some respects, you guys have been doing back-of-house, a lot longer than most companies would have. I mean, you're not just working in the offices, you're working in production areas and so on.
George Clopp: That's correct. Heavy in manufacturing and heavy in the contact centers, anytime where you're doing mission-critical real-time data, you're connecting to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or yard management system, and you want to change or orchestrate the display and the surroundings based on data changing, we've got a deep background in that.
Yeah, for contact centers, if I recall, years ago pre-arrival with the company, you were doing low-resolution LED readouts that were just telling people in the contact center about the average wait time on calls and things like that.
George Clopp: Exactly, and that's matured over the years and now we're doing that on the desktop and on the mobile device as well. We still have some supply chains and some yard management systems in a warehouse, where we'll do the little blinky boards over the dock doors themselves.
We range from the dock doors all the way to your mobile device now.
The PR that came out about a new piece of functionality, your marketing talks about a million endpoints, 250 cloud migrations, and 100+ native integrations.
A million endpoints, that's like a lot.
George Clopp: It is. Yeah, scalability and being able to expand out to touch desktops, normal, typical digital science screens, and mobile endpoints. It's been a real focus on us for the last four or five years. So we're really proud to announce that, and then the back end, like you were talking about those native data integrations, I think that's really what sets us aside from a lot of our competition is making those really hardcore authentications and then that real-time pipe between us and the source systems.
I know a lot of other software in our space that we run into, they talk about integrations. A lot of times it's really just a file, they're taking data from a source system. They're putting it into a CSV format or any kind of other format and then they're pulling that in. So that's really where we shine with that real-time data integration.
Is that important in terms of a distinction when solutions providers and users are looking at data integration and they see that a CMS says, yeah we do data integration, we can integrate with your platform? It sounds like you're saying there are different tiers of that, and there's real integration and there's just like a baseline.
George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. That's the right way to pick up on that day, for sure. When you need to orchestrate and change things in a 911 center or in a manufacturing-type environment and definitely in a contact center, speed is really the key there. So having something on a five-minute loop that's pulling a file, it's just not fast enough. So you need that real-time data, you need that high availability so that something was to break that you've got a backup in place and you can make sure that contact center, that supply chain, that 911 center is rolling smoothly.
They're not just getting their data, but they're changing the experience of the data. That's another thing that we do, we pull in stats, but we also augment those stats and do value-added calculations on the stats, and then we trigger on those values to change the screen, or change the mobile device or change the desktop. So if you've got too many calls in the queue or you're running behind on this loading dock here, we'll change the entire experience for you based on that value-added stat that we do.
I also assume that when companies talk about integrations, for very logical reasons, they're going to go to the most used platforms out there, whether it's Teams or God knows what. But if you have a hundred plus native integrations you're probably talking about some pretty exotic things that nobody's ever heard of, and if a company went in and said, we can integrate with their systems and they say, what those systems are, their eyebrows are going up, because they're thinking, I have never heard of that.
George Clopp: Absolutely, Dave. There are some low-level protocols where we just integrate at a TCP level with a very proprietary protocol, but I would say the bulk of it is more modern, JSON-based RESTful interfaces, for sure and we like to distinguish between data integrations, business application integrations, and SSO integrations, in three categories there.
So, like a Power BI or a Tableau or something like that would be more of a business application integration, and when we're talking data integration, we're talking more low level, running SQL against a data store, running web services, running SOAP-based web services, and to that extent. And again, that's why we call it out in our marketing because we do think that's a core differentiator for us.
So just to go back to something, when you talk about a million endpoints, you're including desktops..
George Clopp: That's correct. Desktops and mobile devices, basically all of the endpoints that we talk to.
Good. Back at the start of summer, you guys introduced something called, Machine Learning Broadcast. What is that?
George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. We were involved with machine learning, and AI before it was really cool, so this was actually something we developed in 2018. We've been honing the model, and then we re-released it this year. But machine learning is a subset of AI, and we all know AI is a super big buzzword these days and when you peel that onion, there's levels of accuracy involved there, and there's a lot of hype around the world.
But the reason why we called the feature machine learning broadcast is really to focus on the ML aspects of it, and it's a great business problem to solve because, at the end of the day, what we're really creating is a recommendation engine. And I think everybody's familiar with the Amazon recommendation engine, Instagram, and other social media platforms that are just, they're recommending content for you.
That's essentially what we're doing here. We're using KNN Analysis, which is supervised machine learning to look at content that has some engagement with it, and that engagement could be measured by computer vision on a digital signage screen, it could be measured by interactivity with it on a desktop or interactivity with that content on the mobile device and then behind the scenes, all we're doing is we're finding out second, third, fourth-degree order content, that's related to the content that was engaging and then it's a feedback loop. We go ahead and automatically schedule that content and see how that content is engaged with so it's a self-learning feedback loop there and the whole purpose of it is to find content that's engaging and show more of that content to your employees.
Could you give me a real-world kind of example of how that might work?
George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Let's say a company's opening up a brand new office in Buenos Aires and for whatever reason, people really gravitate to that content. They look at it on the signage screen, on the fifth-floor break room, they're engaging with it on their desktop, they're looking at it on the mobile device. We learn from that engagement and say, okay, let's go ahead and find similar related content there. Let's find content related to office openings in Buenos Aires, and then let's go ahead and go further out and look at second, third-order tags. So that would be content related to South America as well. And then we automatically play that content, inject it back into the playlist, and our customers have complete control over whether it's automatic and which players actually get this content and which devices get it and then, we learn based on that content. So it's a feedback loop, and you might find in that case that your employees are really more interested in the geographic region than they are in the new office opening.
So it's relentlessly relevant.
George Clopp: Exactly right, Dave, and solving a real-world business problem because one of the challenges our customers have is, it's really arduous to constantly schedule new relevant content.
The first couple of times you do it, you create a scheduled playlist. Yeah, it's okay, but it takes a long time and then, with Attention Deficit Disorder in today's modern world, people grow immune, and they tune out that same content over and over again. So, you need that fresh content injected to keep the employee's attention.
I'm guessing that somebody's going to be listening to this and thinking, that's cool, but where on earth do I get, or how do I develop all this content so that I do have this somewhat bottomless hyper-relevant content available?
George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. Right now, in its current stance with our ML broadcast, you need to have that content in your media library. We're not automatically going out to like copyright-free areas and pulling in content. But with our release coming out next year, it's called our AI employee engagement. With that, we'll automatically be creating and sourcing content for you on your behalf.
Yeah, I saw a demo of something like that over in Germany a little while back with another company who, I'm sure you'll be happy if I don't name them, that was all about using what was available through an intranet and an extranet, and other resources to auto-generate content for screens.
George Clopp: Yeah, it's opening up the whole world of generative AI. We're actually looking at both. Whether there are generative images, generative video, or generative text. Obviously, in our space, images and videos mean a lot, and there are different systems out there. There's DALI 2, there's stable diffusion. They've all got their strengths and their weaknesses. But we're combining that with templated-based content as well.
So automatically generating content that's relevant based off of a text prompt is super useful. But in some cases, it might not be the right content that's generated. So we also will have a mixture of templated content as well.
Yeah, I think templates are a big part of that. I've farted around with things like Mid Journey and so on, and you could see how it could go sideways on you really quickly if you left too much up to the machine.
George Clopp: Exactly. It gets into that whole thing of prompt engineering.
You got to be really good with your prompts, and they've all got issues like generating hands and things of that nature right now. But we want to be on the leading edge of this, use it where it makes sense. An area where we think it really makes a lot of sense, a preview into our AI Employee Engagement, is on mission values and goals. We feel like that's an area where our customers just don't communicate enough to their employees, like, there's cake in the break room, let's recognize employees.
That's all part of it, but really just reinforcing, Hey, your goal in the finance department this week is to close your books three days earlier. And so, mix that text in with some great video or some great images that are created in the background using this generative AI.
Yeah, I saw something on LinkedIn last night, and I commented on it because I thought it is great that there's a company that's using KPIs and messaging right on the production floor, and the person who posted about it said, this is not very sexy, but it goes to what's needed on the floor for those workers. But the problem was, it looked like hell.
It was just black and white, and they were slapping up a whole bunch of Excel charts, like a stock of them and you'd need binoculars to even see them. So it's important to think about the presentation.
George Clopp: Yeah, totally agree, Dave. I say this at all my speaking events: content is king, content is queen, and that still rules the day.
When we're intermixing real-time data with content, it has to be visually appealing. You can't have 20 different stats on the screen; all of those rules of graphic design, I still think, hold true here.
Do you see a day when things like scheduling and trafficking of content are largely automated and handed off to machine learning or some variant of AI?
George Clopp: That's exactly what we're trying to build, Dave, with a release next year. With the ability, of course, to intervene, the ability for the communicator to come in and approve the content or really go ahead and bias the content and say, okay, I've got these 30 categories of content I see that I really want to bias, what the content areas could be.
“Hey, I'm a new enroll. I'm a new first-time line manager. I'm a new director. I'm a new VP, and there's content associated with that new enroll.” They might want to bias that and increase the weight on it, decrease the weight on it, or take it out altogether. So there's still going to be that human touch involved in the ability to approve content, but the AI itself will take care of making sure that content is fresh and relevant.
And the big problem we're solving there is just that, again, attention deficit disorder people have, if they see the same thing on the screen, week after week, they tend to tune out. So how can we think of innovative ways to display KPIs, display goals, display things that are really important to the company and give it a great background, give it a great video so that it gets employees' attention again?
We're going to talk about machine learning. You reference AI-driven camera optics. Is that basically a computer vision?
George Clopp: It is. Absolutely is, yes.
Did you guys write your own, or are you using something like Intel's OpenVINO?
George Clopp: Yeah, the two big ones out there, we've used OpenCV, that is, Open Computer Vision, and TensorFlow, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but there are higher order problems we're trying to solve here, and not reinvent computer vision so we're using some libraries for that.
Is that just part of the mix of doing this sort of thing? Are there other technologies you can use to get a sense of dynamics in a venue?
George Clopp: Yeah, I think so. Infrared detectors, pressure sensors that kind of tell you who's in that immediate vicinity. You're basically correlating that to human beings in the vicinity, how many human beings are there, and what was playing on the screen at that time. Yeah, so there are less technological ways to do this and still get some good results.
AI is being talked about a lot as you've gone through about its potential to automate presentations. Are there other aspects to a digital signage company, the way your company operates, that you can use AI to help with marketing, help with customer contact, that sort of thing?
George Clopp: Yeah, without a doubt. I'm sure you're reading everything. It's revolutionizing all traditional roles, right? Not just engineers writing code. You got a chat with a ChatGPT engineer. With Microsoft's Copilot, it's going to revolutionize the way we all use Excel and Word and PowerPoint and things of that nature.
It's definitely revolutionizing marketing. Building product brochures for you automatically, things of that nature, and then, that naturally progresses into, is AI going to take all of our jobs, which I don't think so, going to help us all become more productive. The employees that really change and adopt the AI, I think they're going to be even more valuable than they are today.
It's just the employees that just say, I'm not going to do this, and they refuse to allow their cheese to be moved, those are the ones that I think you have to watch out for.
There’s an increasing number of companies. I just wrote about one today that has gone down the path of headless CMS. The idea that you can leave the final presentation later, the interactive element, whatever it is to software developers at a large company or who works with a large company as a services company and the digital signage CMS is just the infrastructure, the foundational platform that does device management, scheduling, trafficking, all that sort of stuff.
Are you seeing that demand in the marketplace?
George Clopp: We're seeing the opposite. What you're saying absolutely makes sense, especially with my background and the way we've architected our product with microservices. What we're seeing, especially with our large enterprise customers is, they want a little more white glove service.
Taking on the arduous task of piecing everything together, even with a microservices framework, is putting a lot of ownership on them. But that is not to say that there's not a need out there. We just really haven't found it. We've actually gone the opposite direction on our side, which has really served us well because we've gone from zero revenue in the cloud to 2 million. We brought on a new CEO, and we quickly ramped up to 20 million. I think it's working for us so far.
Yeah, you're a very different company than maybe prior to you joining RMG Networks, that was a weird little side trip into digital out of home.
George Clopp: It was. We see the artifacts and all that, but I think it's a great group of people here now. There's not a leftover where people have bad attitudes or anything like that. So really proud of where the company's been, the talent we've acquired. We've acquired people from all over the industry. Really love working with the current team and cross-functionally, not just engineering and support, which is what I run, but in sales and marketing as well.
Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned you've gone in the opposite direction of headless. I've heard that as well, particularly when you get into, like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 kinds of enterprise-grade customers. They want to outsource digital signage, by and large, in the same way that they've outsourced a lot of IT services.
George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely. That's the same trend we're seeing, Dave too. It's a little bit of both, right? Everybody wants their cake and eats it too, right? Like they want you to have the ability to do it, but then when it comes time to actually execute on it, we typically find, Hey, we can help them get faster to market if we help augment their team.
How important is security?
George Clopp: Oh! It’s Huge. We all know that the disaster scenario in digital signage, someone compromises your network and they put up some content images or videos that are not appropriate. Even more so with us being more omni-channel with desktop, mobile devices. We've got a data privacy officer, we're SOC 2 compliant. We do a lot of work in Europe so GDPR comes up a lot as well, data privacy. So I think it’s super important.
When I think you look at the different offerings out there and the first tier, we look and sound the same. So I think what you got to do with new prospects or new customers, they just got to peel that onion more. What does that really mean? What does it mean that you encrypt your data? Do you do it at rest? Do you do it in transit? Those kinds of things, and I think that's where you can tell the difference between different offerings.
And are the people in the first and second meetings with prospective customers different than they were 7 years ago when you started? I'm hearing the IT people who used to come to meetings and sit there with their arms crossed, thinking, dear God, how long is this going to go on? They're now tending to lead these meetings.
George Clopp: Yeah, I've seen it in multiple ways. Definitely, IT is still the big persona of the buyer here. But I'm also seeing less and less about speeds and feeds and players and hardware and transmission equipment and scalers and more about the final purpose of what we're trying to do.
I'm just starting to see that shift. Seven years ago, I talked to people, and it's the AV integration guy. I don't really care what's on the screen. I just care that it's not dark. I don't want a screen that's down. That's their most important thing, and now I'm seeing that shift a little bit more towards they do care about the content, and they're bringing in more of the HR and the communications group involved and making sure that the platform can grow. I can create content on the platform or I can integrate with Adobe or SharePoint or something along those lines. But I still see it, especially AV/IT as a huge influence in the buying process.
Yeah, certainly going back seven, eight years when I was doing some one-to-one consulting with enterprise level customers, that sort of thing, I would go into a first meeting, and I would say, okay, why do you want to do this? And it was always intriguing to see how often people would lean back in their chairs and say, I hadn't really thought about that. They wanted this thing, but as you say, they didn't really know what they were going to do with this thing.
George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. And there's a little bit of power in that too. There's power to putting the latest and greatest screen technology in your office and giving you that modern technology look and feel but then just carry it one more step in the maturity direction and start focusing on the content too.
Yeah, you can demonstrate innovation by having a big ass screen in your lobby, but if there's nothing useful on there, you're not really demonstrating a lot of innovation.
George Clopp: Exactly, and I think there's still room for that super wonderful creative experience that's human-curated that graphic designers make, and they spend a lot of time getting just perfect in those high profile areas, like the lobby of a company, and then there's also opportunity for, new content generation automatically for me so that I don't have to necessarily sit here and handle this thing. So I think we're going to live in a world where both will be applicable.
So you mentioned you, you're working on new iterations of AI-driven content. Is that the big kind of roadmap item for your company over the next year?
George Clopp: Yes, it really is. Yeah. We've got a huge, large-player ecosystem, all the data integrations, and omni-channel platforms. So where our new development team is focused on is automating the content creation, automating that entire feed, if you will, so that it really takes that arduous process away from our communicator.
How many folks do you have in the company now?
George Clopp: We're a little under 70 people right now. So still a small company and I love it cause everybody has to wear multiple hats, do multiple roles. You have to bring a lot of energy to the company, and I just love that. I've just grown so fond of it over the last seven years.
And is most of the team in the Dallas Fort Worth area, or are you all over the place?
George Clopp: Since COVID, we're mainly in Dallas, but since COVID, a lot of us have moved out a little bit. So I'm actually in Colorado. Some of my engineering leads are in the West Coast, some are in Pennsylvania. So we're really practicing what we preach, the hybrid workforce.
All right, George, thank you for spending some time with me. It was good to catch up.
George Clopp: Yeah, it's fantastic, Dave. Thank you so much for taking time out.
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Andrew Gould, Ditto (Squirrels)
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen.
I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring.
Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer.
Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions.
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TRANSCRIPT
Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product?
Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting.
So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here’s what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that.
So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.”
That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud.
The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a moment.
So, in essence, whether it's a teacher or a student or in a working environment, whether it's the person leading the meeting or somebody who's a participant, they could pull up their phone, their tablet, whatever it may be, and if they have the Ditto app, they can push their screen to the main screen in that room?
Andrew Gould: Exactly, and our big focus with the collaboration part of Ditto is that device agnostic approach. So we want any kind of device that's coming into a space to be able to share, not just if you have an Apple device, it'll work to this Apple TV, or if you have a Google device that'll work to this Chromecast.
We really push hard to make sure that each device that comes in, whether it's from a browser or from a native app on a platform, can connect and quickly share.
And that's important in a number of ways. A, it doesn't slow down the meeting, but it removes a lot of IT support and AV/IT support within an organization, whether it's a school or a business. Because I've been in those meetings where somebody says here, I'll just share my screen, and then 15 minutes later, it's still being sorted out.
Andrew Gould: Yes, and we've all gone into those rooms that have the laminated sheet of instructions of, “If you're using this device, it's these seven steps, and if you're using this device, you have to be on this network. Then you have to do these three steps, et cetera, et cetera.” All of that goes away with Ditto which means far fewer support calls for the IT staff, and just a more pleasant experience is that we have people come into our offices, accountants, lawyers, just general non-technical people, and they're blown away at how easy and fast it is to get their content up on the screen, which is all anybody wants.
We don’t care about how fast or how crisp it is or how cool it looks once it's up there if it takes you 10 minutes to get it connected. So quick, fast, easy is always our guiding light as we mature the product and move it along.
On the digital signage side of this, the way it's marketed from what I can see is, it's a tandem product, as opposed to, we are a collaboration product that, oh, by the way, we can also do this. You seem to be saying, “It's a full-fledged product on its own. If you wanted, you could just use it for digital signage.” Is that a fair statement?
Andrew Gould: Oh yeah, for sure. We have customers that turn off the mirroring capabilities and they just use it for digital signage. Menus in the fast dining have TVs over the counter where people order. We have customers that are just using it for that, that don't even care about what the original purpose of Ditto was, which was the screen mirroring stuff, and then we have customers that only use it for screen mirroring and we haven't got them up and running on digital signage ye. They haven't realized what the value add is.
But there are more customers doing both. They are mirroring, and then when it’s not mirroring, they are showing important information to the users. Whether it's connection information, things going on at the organization, stocks, or just the kind of stuff to keep it feeling more fresh, utilizing those screens. But yeah, it's definitely a product that can just be utilized as a standalone digital signage solution.
I'm guessing that you and particularly your customer-facing folks fight a perception problem in that there are other products out in the marketplace that were started as one thing and added digital signage on, and generally speaking, the perception I have and the feedback I've somewhat heard is that, “Yeah, it can do digital signage too, but we're not talking about robust digital signage. We're talking like we can run a set of files on a screen in an order and that's about where it begins and ends.”
Andrew Gould: We are not an industry-leading digital signage solution when it comes to features. There are incumbents that are far more feature-heavy than we are, but what we've tried to focus on are the things that the customers truly need to have a good digital signage experience. So it's being able to create signage lists, as we call them, which are basically playlists of media, ease of use of setting all of that up in the configuration portal, so that it doesn't feel like an add-on or a thing etucked into a corner. A lot of time and energy is spent on the part that actually the end user never sees, which is configuration managing of all the media files and also providing templates for people who don't want to or don't have the resources to create their own digital signage assets. Providing some really easy turnkey solutions as well to say, hey, if you just need to get some basic information shown and you don't want to have to pay a designer or something like that to create something, here are some really cool templates that we've put together for you and they're just WYSIWYG, change this line, change the subject, change the body, upload an image, add a video, and you're ready to go with really nice looking digital signage.
So I wouldn't say we are innovating digital signage by any means, but we're trying to create a package that doesn't feel like we just bolted something onto the side of it. That really feels like a first-class digital signage solution.
In a lot of cases, while there are certainly feature-rich software options out there, I suspect a hell of a lot of end users don't ever use more than 15% of what's available to them with those platforms.
Andrew Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We poll our users frequently about, “Hey, what do you like about the product? What don't you like about the product?” That's the most important part. We wanna make that better, and we ask, “Hey, here's a whole list of different things. How much would you use this?”
The feedback nears that there is 10-15% of features we don’t have that people say they might use, and most of the people say that they probably would never use synchronized digital signage across eight different screens or things that kind of fall into the more high-end solutions for digital signage. They just want ease of use, things that look nice and reliable. Those are what they care about the most.
Yeah. So if somebody comes to you and says, “We're putting a huge LED video wall in the lobby. Can you drive that?” You might say, I suppose we could maybe do that, but that's not what we're here for.
Andrew Gould: We've certainly had those requests and we've said, “Hey, here's how you would do that if you are ready to do it. But, to be honest, there are better solutions for that problem.”
Digital signage is not a one-size-fits-all problem. There is very high-end hardware that drives large billboards and there's our end where we're just trying to drive it on a 70’’ screen in a room. So we don't have to solve everyone’s problems. We're fine saying, that sounds really cool. We wished Ditto was designed to do things like that. You might be better served with something that's from the ground up built to power stuff like that.
You can stay in your lane, and it's a pretty decent-sized lane.
Andrew Gould: Correct. Yeah, it's a huge market. So there's plenty of room for lots of people to all be swimming, doing different things, and not really stepping on each other.
One of the problems I find with some entry-level, and I'm not saying yours is, but just in broad strokes, entry-level platforms don't have much in the way if they have anything at all in terms of device management, and I gather that your device management is done through third-party device management modules, like the Jamf and so on.
Andrew Gould: Yeah. So early on, we explored building Ditto with MDM capabilities. But what we experienced in talking with our customers is that most of them already had a solution to do those sorts of things. So we would have to convince them to switch to our device management platform and 90% of what MDM does has nothing to do with what we would need to do with it. So we'd be building out this whole lump on the side of Ditto just to be able to replicate the service they were already using so they would switch to ours.
So we ultimately looked at that and said, this isn't the right fit for us, rather than trying to fight upstream and convince all of these customers that already have solutions to switch to ours. Let’s just partner with all of these solutions and make it work really well. So we've partnered with the various Apple TV MDM vendors to make it really turnkey to mass deploy Ditto to hundreds of Apple TVs with literally just pushing a couple of buttons. So that's been our approach to it and that seems to be what the customer's like with us.
Yeah, if they're already using it, why would they go to something that's just dedicated to your application?
Andrew Gould: No matter what I do, I will always be inferior to a Jamf. They're a huge publicly traded company focused solely on MDM. I'm never gonna make an MDM as good as theirs, so why try?
What is your footprint, and what would you say are your core vertical markets?
Andrew Gould: The core vertical markets definitely K-12 and higher education in the United States. We have a footprint all around the world. We're in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America. We have a lot of business users as well, whether that's in office space or co-working spaces have been a big business for us lately, as people are working from home but wanna get out of the house occasionally and go somewhere else. Those office spaces are looking for easy mirroring as people come in and out.
But we’re really focused on the K-12 and higher education market because this solution just fits so nicely into that environment. It works great in business. It works great in fast casual dining and all these other places that people use Ditto. But what's cool about Ditto is that it is so universal as a tool. It can plug in all kinds of places. We have churches that use it to show the lyrics to songs as people are singing along. There are all kinds of really interesting applications that we set out to get into flexible and adaptable tools and put into a lot of interesting environments.
When it comes to education, how is it being used in classrooms?
Andrew Gould: So you've typically got it running on the screen at the front of the room, whether that's an interactive whiteboard or just a TV mounted on the wall or projector, whatever. It's usually connected to that, and then primarily, the teacher is using it to push her screen from a laptop device up to the screen, and then we can support up to four devices sharing at the same time. So then students will connect and we have an add-on application for Windows and iOS where the teacher can manage who's allowed to be sharing. She can approve or deny connections to hide somebody if she wants to emphasize on her screen and not the other students who are connected to that.
Then typically, when nothing is being shared, there's digital signage that's usually managed at the school level, but we do have some schools that allow the teachers to set up their own digital signage per classroom. So you're seeing that digital signage there and then it's spilling out into the hallways. They're putting TVs into hallways of even K-12 schools, higher ed common areas. They're running mainly just digital signage in those areas versus the hybrids that they're running in the classrooms.
Are school districts mostly using Apple TVs?
Andrew Gould: It’s about two-thirds Apple TVs and one-third Windows devices, that’s how our users break down. So it's not quite 50-50. I think it's trending more towards that 50-50 blend. Early on, it was very Apple TV heavy, and we're seeing a bit more of a skewback towards Windows devices.
I'm not sure exactly what's behind that trend, maybe it's the drive down of cheaper and cheaper Windows devices that can actually run 4k video and kind of stuff, the nooks, and the likes But yeah. So right now, the blend is really two-thirds Apple TVs.
What about collaboration displays that have systems on chips embedded in them, can you work with those?
Andrew Gould: So we've looked at the Android TVs and Samsung's OS and those sorts of things.
The feedback that we've got from customers is that they are not really interested in that capability. The limitation of that is usually given the horsepower on those devices; we can usually only show one or two screens at a time. It ends up making Ditto, a hobbled product for it, and most of the time when people come to us, they've already got Apple TVs purchased or they've got a Windows device, they're already looking to use, and they're coming from the, “I picked my device, now I'm looking for the solution” approach, and the Smart TVs don't come up in the conversations that much.
We're not opposed to it. If that's the way the market wants to go, we can surely adapt to that. All our technology is really flexible, so it's quick for us to repurpose a new platform, but just not what the customers are asking these days.
Yeah, and it's not like an Apple TV is expensive.
Andrew Gould: It's $150, and it'll run for probably 10 years before you have to worry about replacing it. They're really rock solid.
When you're selling into K12 in particular, are you selling district-wide or do you have to sell down to the school level?
Andrew Gould: It's typically district-wide. It's usually the IT coordinator or applicable semi-related role there that's looking to roll out an agnostic solution, and that's another place where we really shine is that schools are not one-to-one all the same type of device. You're typically seeing iPads in the lower grades, and then you're seeing Windows surfaces or Chromebooks as you get more into typing and writing papers and those sorts of things. So they want one solution that's going to work across the board for all of those things, and that's what Ditto's bread and butter is.
So that starts the conversation off right away: one solution, you're supporting one product across, whether you have three schools or a hundred schools in the district, it's all the same solution, and then we can start the conversations if you realize digital signage, you've got all these screens in the cafeteria or the hallways, how are you putting information up there? And a lot of times it's, oh, there's a USB drive, and we go around and collect them, and we update them once a month. Somebody's job is to update the USB with the media and plug it back into all the TVs, and there is a much better way to do that.
With a lot of schools using Chrome devices, is that problematic at all, or does it work with your system just fine?
Andrew Gould: No, it works great with Chrome. So Chrome OS used to have applications; they called them Chrome Apps. So we originally had a Chrome app that did all of this. That was in the store.
And then Google wound down Chrome apps just because they weren't really being utilized all that much on the platform. So we went to a pure browser experience. So you just go to our goditto.com website, and you enter the room code that's being shown on the teacher screen, and then we just use the web RTC built-in technology to capture the screen and send it over to Ditto receiver and show it so you can actually share without installing anything on a device, and that works on all platforms that support the browser capture technology.
There are other options out there for certainly higher ed. You've got companies like Rise Vision that's particularly strong in K to 12 in churches and things like that, and some others How do I describe them, CMS software companies that are focused on that market, and then you've got the companies like Zoom that have video collaboration that have added on some digital signage capabilities and the Air Teams, where people who do similar screen mirroring. How do you match up against them and how do you sell against them?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, so the Air Team and Immersive, they're selling proprietary hardware with a subscription service on top of it. So if you're looking for, “Hey, just give me a turnkey solution, give me everything. I'm not really worried about the price, I just want it to work.” Those are great solutions. But what we see in schools is they care very much about the cost and the pricing, and some of them have already made investments into hardware with Apple TVs or Windows devices, and they're saying, look, this is just extra cost that I don't need to do the same thing.
So how we position against those is just, “Hey, you can use whatever hardware you want. We're happy to run on either of those platforms and if you've already got them, cool, just buy our subscription, and you're ready to go. You don't have to worry about buying a five, six or eight hundred dollar hardware device, deploying it, or managing it differently than how you manage other things.” So that's how we match up against those.
The more CMS type things that are focused on, digital signage in those very specific things. Again, those are the incumbents, those are the people that have been doing this; some of them have been there for decades doing this type of stuff. So we're not here to try and outcompete those companies. We just see that there are certain niches that maybe those companies don't fill as well, and we're content to come along and fill those in and keep improving our product, and one day, maybe we'll compete with them. Maybe we'll have a platform that we've decided, hey, we should just make it do everything for everybody and look at going after competitors like those.
But like I said, the market is big enough that they can have that niche. We can have this niche, and it's a very healthy business for us, and we're happy to keep doing that. There are a couple of things that we know how to do really well versus, maybe, trying to get too big too fast, trying to do everything all at once.
Was having the digital signage component added to it pretty important because you've got companies like Google that have Chromecast that costs 35 bucks or something like that, that can do some degree of screen sharing, and it would be people who are really cost conscious, they could just go down that path?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, for sure. We don't really see many Chromecast in school-type approaches. For whatever reason, they still don't have basic security like onscreen code or passwords. They've only recently rolled out the ability to remotely manage those types of things. Adding digital signage wasn't really about competing with any particular thing.
The customers that we have and the ones that we're trying to get all value this functionality, and we saw it as a natural fit. It wasn't like we had to completely reinvent the product and take it in some radical new direction. It just seemed like a natural complement to what we were already doing and we talked with some customers. We're running two different solutions on an Apple TV, and they were trying to use Ditto for screen mirroring, and they were trying to use a different Apple TV application for digital signage, and they were trying to do crazy MDM scheduling, based on the class schedule, lock this app for Ditto, so it's open, and then when it's time in between class, walk the digital assignment solution, and we said, there people really want it that bad, maybe we can just be all of that in one and not force our customers to have to run two things like that. So that was the natural genesis of it versus we need to protect our position or something like that. It just made it evolutionary to move in a new direction.
So, how seamless and intuitive is it?
Let’s say, it is running in digital signage mode, the screen is, and the teacher decides, I want to push something to the screen from my laptop or my phone or whatever, and launches that session, does its thing. To then go back to digital signage, what's involved?
Andrew Gould: You just start sharing your screen and stop sharing your screen.
So it's directed from the device that wants to share their screen. So, when you open the app, you enter the room code. We make them fun, easy to enter, like red apples, big pineapple things that are easy, not like random numbers and digits that are hard for kids to type in.
And they push ‘Start sharing’ and boom, their screen's up there, digital signage fades out, screen sharing fades in. It's an instantaneous switchover, and then as soon as the last person stops sharing their screen, if you've got multiple people connected, it goes right back to the digital signage slide it was on when the person first connected. So it's very easy. There's no mode, nothing you have to tinker with on the screen itself.
So the management, whether it's the school, the district, or the individual teacher, they’re using a browser to plan out their digital signage side of what the screen's doing?
Andrew Gould: Yeah. It's all a cloud-based portal. So you can be in the same building, or you can be in a different state. We have businesses that are deployed with Ditto in offices around the world, and there are a couple of people that sit in California and they manage all the digital signage worldwide. So it's super easy right from the portal.
And what's the commercial side of it? What are you paying? Is it a SaaS?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, it's a SaaS model. It's a yearly subscription. We offer a monthly if people are using this in bursts, but obviously, you save money by purchasing for an annual versus monthly. And it's per screen that's running Ditto.
So the other thing that we allow is, if you have multiple screens in a classroom, obviously, you can show digital signage on those, but we actually allow one device to push their content to multiple screens. So we're seeing, especially in some classrooms, you've maybe got a screen in the front or to the side or behind as they set up classes less like when I was in school where it was just rows, everybody facing the front now that these little pods of kids are sitting at tables and not everybody's facing the same direction, so they've actually got multiple screens in the rooms. So we just charge per screen that runs the software, and that's it.
What's the fee?
Andrew Gould: So, it's $12.50 per month annually. So it's $125 per month if you're at 10 or more receivers in a school.
Is that just for the screen mirroring, or is that for the functionality, including the digital signage?
Andrew Gould: Yeah. That's for everything. That's one price for everything. We don't charge more for that. We view it as, “Hey, we took this thing that we charge this price for. It made it even better by giving you all the stuff, and it's the same price.”
And that includes the emergency alerts as well. So that ties into a protocol called CAP, which is how the National Weather Service and School Alert Systems all can send alerts. So we have a CAP server capability, where we can receive alerts from other servers, whether it's the National Weather Service, an alert system that, unfortunately, a lot of schools are having to deploy now, where it can push one button and text the parents and send a push notification and send all the alerts out to Ditto and Ditto immediately takes over and shows that alert. You get all of that for that one price.
Yeah, it sounds very much like this isn't a constrained compromise limited solution for the K to 12 market, it's gonna do pretty much what an average classroom and what an average school is going to need.
Andrew Gould: Yeah, we really tried to put everything in there because, again, we don't want people having to be like, “Well, Ditto almost does everything. It'd be great if it just did this one other thing, and then we wouldn't need this other solution.” The hope is that we can provide that one solution that everybody needs.
Tell me more about the company. It's been around since 2008. Is it privately held, or are you listed?
Andrew Gould: We're privately held. I'm one of the co-founders of the company, started it back in 2008 with my business partner.
When we first started out, we weren't doing collaboration. We were doing iOS app development. We had one of the first 50 apps in the iOS app store. We could actually get to the bottom of the list.
It was a TV guide app where you could put in the code and see what was on TV. It sounds like an archaic technology today but it was pretty cool back in the day, and then we got into the collaboration space in about 2012 when we released our first collaboration app, and then we've been focused on collaboration ever since.
Where's the company based?
Andrew Gould: North Canton, Ohio, about an hour south of Cleveland but we have a diversified team present in a lot of states all around the country, but all the within the United States.
Is the majority of your business in the US?
Andrew Gould: Yes. That's where mainly our outbound sales are focused on. But, like I said, we have a really big following actually in Australia. A lot of ditto customers there, and we are working on expanding into Europe this year and into next year to really go after that. There's a lot more regulation and requirements, and apps have to work certain ways and those sorts of things that we want to make sure that we're compliant and respectful to those things and come into that market appropriately, but it's a big focus for us because we think the same needs exist there as they do everywhere else.
Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of US and Canadian companies think they can just make the jump over, and then they get asked about things like GDPR and they're looking at the other person, “What?”
Andrew Gould: Yeah, or even just common things like in France, everything has to be localized into the French language.
If you have one string in your application that's in English, they typically won't purchase. They value that. So we want to be respectful to those things, and they're not hard things for us to comply with. It just requires us to pay somebody who knows French to translate a list of strings, and then we can sell into those markets as well.
Are you selling direct, or do you have channel partners?
Andrew Gould: Mainly direct. We have some channel partners that we started with right before the pandemic, and so we've seen a lot of that market move around, and so some of the channel partners that we originally partnered were more business-focused and the world has changed for business where people just aren't going to the office as much anymore, and those channel partners just didn't make sense.
So we're actually working through a sort of reset of that channel partner program to be more education-focused with the channel partners. But we have some really great channel partners in the US that we work with, whether they're distributors or they're resellers, whether they're just purchasing on behalf of the school and passing that through, or taking our solution and bundling it up with, “Hey, here's the screen you need and here's the speakers and the WiFi and everything,” and including us as a full technology rollout. We like to work with both of those.
If people want to know more, where do they find you online?
Andrew Gould: Our website is goditto.com. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial there. You can set up as many screens as you want, and play with digital signage as much as you want for 30 days, and then, as I said, it starts at $150 per receiver for a single license, and then we have volume pricing above 10 and it scale scales down from there.
Great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Andrew Gould: Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Jason Ault, Coffman Media
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Jason Ault was working in the traditional sign business back in the late 2000s when a customer contract came along that required a digital sign. He had an IT background, so he stuck up his hand and took it on.
He caught the bug, so to speak, and has been in digital signage ever since - putting together an initial team that launched in 2010 as Coffman Media. The Columbus, Ohio-based solutions provider has found a niche in the middle of buying market - not the little guys who can't offer much scale, and not the Fortune 500s that are going to opt for a national integrator, major software firm or even a giant consulting firm.
Coffman is particularly active providing a solution, plan and services in workplaces and in regional and mid-sized QSRs, notably coffee chains.
Jason and I chat on this podcast about its services, how the marketplace and needs have evolved, the gulf that still exists between conventional and digital sign companies, and the steady need for educating end-users.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Jason, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a bit about Coffman Media and your role there?
Jason Ault: Absolutely. Coffman Media is a digital signage integration firm that we started almost 14 years ago and I am the co-founder and chief operating officer.
You guys are in the Columbus, Ohio area and then down in Jacksonville as well?
Jason Ault: That's correct. We just opened the Jacksonville office just over a year ago. But servicing customers all across the US, Canada, and Mexico.
How did you get into it?
Jason Ault: Back in 2008, I was with a traditional sign company, and we were doing a big mall redevelopment project, and some of that scope called for digital signage and back then, my background was computer information, so we decided to say yes to that part of the scope as well. Took it on, partnered with CoolSign way back then before Haivision acquired it and really caught a bug for the industry, started formulating a team that we wanted to put together, and launched the shingle of Coffman Media in February of 2013.
It’s interesting, that the traditional printing industry seems like this is something that they have to go towards and evolve into, and while we've seen some of it, it still seems like an industry that's not really made the jump or evolved into it.
Jason Ault: I absolutely agree, and we see the same thing as well. Just knowing that industry, from my previous life and also working with a lot of traditional sign companies, it is a struggle for them to get into because it does require some computer skills and some networking skills. Obviously, they may have some content chops and metal fabrication chops, but they still need that networking and computer element.
Is that something that you guys help out on?
Jason Ault: Absolutely, everything from traditional sign companies to managed service providers, because they don’t know the signage side, even they don’t know the IT side, architects, really anyone trying to get into digital signage side, we can help them in pre-sales support, demos from CMS partners that we have, training up their clients, passing it off, supporting their clients, really however far they want us to go into the weeds with them, we can help them out.
So you start all the way at the ideation stage with some customers and can take them all the way through managed services?
Jason Ault: Absolutely. It depends on where they want to jump off and take over. We can come in under their banner; we can come in as partners with our logo. This depends on how they want to present us as a partner to the end customer.
It's interesting because the digital signage market, particularly the software companies tends to present their products as being very easy to use, and very intuitive. They spend a lot of time explaining use cases and everything else but still seems to be a big leap for traditional companies who don’t think about this stuff sometimes. Why is that?
Jason Ault: At the surface level, we are right in some aspects, it is easy to use but as digital signage use is evolving, content is getting dynamic. People want to integrate into data that's living out on the web somewhere or integrating into a point of sale or a plethora of other things that you can plug into. That's where things get lost and they need someone to come in and help tie all those things together.
I refer to companies such as yours as solutions providers as opposed to integrators, which sounds like an arms and legs hang and bang situation. Is that a term that fits?
Jason Ault: Yeah, at the end of the day, we are a solution provider. We live on both sides of the world, but at the end of the day, we're always starting with the end in mind, working backward, and figuring out what solution fits that customer's needs. We're not just one CMS partner shop. We're not just one hardware shop. It really is what fits customers' needs the best.
And so you don't have your own software, you don't have proprietary hardware or anything else, so you're able to just look at a job and figure out, okay, based on what Mr. Customer's tell us, here's what we'd recommend.
Jason Ault: Exactly. We've got three core CMS partners that we've formulated over the years with Signage Live being our longest tenure at 13 years running, and then hardware runs the gambit to whatever that platform supports, and then we pick from that bucket.
So, why would you have three software partners?
Jason Ault: This depends on the customer. Sometimes a need is going to lean towards their benefit more. So if we need a native POS integration, we can look to engage Spectrio. If we need a lot of data binding, we can look at Wallboard, but our largest partner is really Signage Live because they approach it from an API-first headless perspective so we can do a lot of unique things with them and we developed really great projects over the years, so that's the standpoint but again the need is justifying the partner that we bring to the table for that total solution.
That's interesting. I obviously have a relationship with Spectrio and know their product very well because of the ownership position. But the Signage Live component when Jason Cremins, the CEO of Signage Live, told me three years ago now, that he was going down the path of headless CMS, it was early days for that, and I had to ask him to tell me what that is and he did, and I thought I could see the marketplace moving towards this thing just because of the flexibility that it presents. Is that what you found?
Jason Ault: It is, and then it correlates to what came out and the Invictus reports last year or this year, I can't remember which one it was, where it's talking about the new wave of architecture that's gonna have to come down the pike for CMSs partners and that's really where I think Signage Live was a little bit ahead of the curve and had already gone down that path of headless API first and how they were going to market three years ago.
Yeah, I think Stefan from Invictus describes it as the old style is very monolithic, and the new style is composable, where you can come at it from different angles and inject content and make things happen. Plus, you can use your own tools.
Jason Ault: Exactly.
Have you found over 14 years that customer needs have evolved?
Jason Ault: A hundred percent. I'd say 30% of our business this year will be Gen 2, and Gen 3 digital signage partner relationships for us. And it's not because they were unhappy necessarily with their partner, but the infrastructure or solution that they had in place for however many years, it'd be no longer able to suit their needs.
Everything from being able to ingest outside content in unique ways, supporting new hardware that has security measures being able to pass all these, security requirements now. So everything is secure from the customer's standpoint. Those kinds of things are changing quite rapidly.
Yeah, and you're sitting up above this.
I'm very curious because you have your software partner, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time looking at everything that's out there. I'm curious, if you find that a lot of software companies are stuck in their lane and don't have the mechanism to expand and make what they have more open.
Jason Ault: Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. Whether it comes down to how it's built or just where they're in the market and they can't really move past it. They do have their niche and that's just where they stay. That's where I think we have three great tools in our tool belt that can handle pretty much anything thrown at us, from a unique perspective one of mail digital signage to something that's experiential.
I talk to companies a lot about the importance of identifying the marketplace understanding, what you do, and what you're particularly good at versus general offers.
As a solutions provider, have you started to focus on particular vertical markets, or is it somewhat generalized?
Jason Ault: We're starting to focus really in the last 12 months, and that's really between corporate communication and quick service restaurants. We had some really great wins in each of those sectors and found our identity in those, but that's still not to say that we won't serve other opportunities that come to our direction either through partners or just by knocking on the door.
Those are two incredibly competitive markets to go after. How do you set yourself apart?
Jason Ault: It’s a great question. In a way, it’s hyper-competitive. So, we are not necessarily fishing for the whales or maybe not even the tunas, but in that mid-market space, someone with 100 locations, or maybe they're just coming up to that three-digit all the way to approaching the four-digit mark, we really found a nice little lane where we can help them out from setting up what a total solution should look like, rolling it out and being that consultative arm for them, vverything from clearance bars through headsets to digital signage, really every piece and stack that could be around that whole ecosystem, and we're bringing it together as one package. That's where we're setting ourselves apart from and then serving that kind of middle market.
Yeah, I suspect when you talk about the whale accounts in QSR and even in Fortune 500 companies for workplace communication, the large ones are not as price-sensitive. They're somewhat conditioned to working with big consulting companies and just large service providers versus, as you described, the regional ice cream chain or whatever where those kinds of companies come in to see them. They're looking at them like, you want two extra zeros from us, and that isn't going to happen.
Jason Ault: Exactly. A lot of the time, those mid-market franchise orders are struggling with the balance of how do I either roll this into the total package for new stores or they want us to deal with the franchisees directly, and a lot of times, that can be very cumbersome for an organization, but we take that on, and yes, it comes with our own licks, shut doors and we don’t get paid, or we are served bankruptcy papers but we’ve been able to make some wins at it.
We are hyper-focused within the QSRs side, and we found a home with coffee chains, I don’t know how they fell in, but it just started to snowball.
I think it's one of those cases where they don't quite understand what they're asking for and why they need it, but if they can see an example of another chain that they compete with or are familiar with, they can see, okay, this is what they did so yeah, we want that too.
Jason Ault: It's kind of a way of Keeping up with the Joneses’ aspect, and that's where we're able to show them, here's the package that we do, obviously skewed for their particular organization, but helping them along the way, getting them familiar with understanding what they're asking for and then making sure that the value is perceived from the dollar they are spending.
The pandemic and the lockdown compelled QSR, in particular, to start looking more at this because maybe they had to do drive-through, which they didn't do in the past, and they had to do self-service kiosks because staffing became an issue.
Jason Ault: It did, and it didn't. We actually had a couple of partners that reverted away from digital because they were now just doing takeout as more on the piece of the side where they were having dine-in. They just realized that it's not going to change. They're doing a lot more just from the mobile pickup delivery, that kind of aspect. But then, on the other flip side of more traditional quick-service, absolutely, really force them into thinking how we can work better in the current market?
And then that's just propelling it forward three years later.
I still see pretty substantial QSR chains out there that have issues with what's on the display and that they're not integrated fully or properly with their restaurant management system. So they're doing things like putting stickers over the top of items that aren't available or wrestling with them, do I stroke something out on the screen, or do I make it disappear?
Are those things pretty elemental?
Jason Ault: It is, and it is a struggle, and seems to me, the larger the organization is, the less process there is in order to ensure that screens are operated in the correct fashion. We see it all the time, whether it's a drive through which I'm personally going through or one we're trying to win the business up. You can set things in motion, and one of them starts with integration and giving some autonomy for people to fix the screen. That way, your corporation does not necessarily have to be the big brother that’s managing everything.
There are roadblocks to put in place to stop those things from happening. Physical tape is a little bit harder unless we shock somebody when they touch it, but there are ways to put those stops in place.
When you're dealing with the small regional to mid-size chains, is it more challenging technically because maybe they're not standardized on restaurant management systems, point of sale systems, that sort of thing?
Jason Ault: It's a little challenging. One thing that we try to do is bring in partners if that is the case. Talking with point-of-sale companies, they don't necessarily go that route, but at least we can bring in some people to help in that scenario. We do like to at least have them unified on point of sale, so we're doing only some kinds of integrations, but it is a struggle for sure.
Even a chain of a hundred stores we're currently working with, they've got two or three points of sales because some people are still on legacy contracts and things like that, and we just have to work with those as they pop up.
Do you have to spend a lot of time educating franchise owners that this is why you want to do this, because they really don't wanna drop $15,000 on a drive-through display?
Jason Ault: Hundred percent. Pretty much every partner who a customer, whom we are aligned with, at their annual conventions talking, teaching, and explaining the value, because we just had one that was doing dual lane drive-through, and that obviously doubled the cost. They went static rather than digital. They just didn't see the extra value of spending the 50 grand to do all of that. So, it still needs to improve the current partners that we have today.
I'm curious about the workplace side where you're seeing traction. Like how is it being used?
Jason Ault: That's a great question. We do a lot of manufacturing right on the plant floor. Keeping those folks up to speed on what's going on, and then we're also doing a lot of just traditional workplace communication, between multi-sites and multi-silos within the organization just to generalize workplace communication. Still, manufacturing has had a pretty big uptick. Everything from screens down at the machine level to doing some video walls on the plant floor that everyone can see with some workplace KPIs and things like that to get some real-time information to the floor folks.
Yeah, that's always struck me as more useful in many respects than white-collar environments like offices because there are typically ways to communicate to people all the way down to the level of a manager walking out and talking to somebody, but when you're in a desk-less environment, and you've got a whole bunch of workers who maybe don't even have English as a first language, how do you reach these people? How do you tell people what's going on? How do you motivate them? All those things.
So it's encouraging to see that now, really starting to get some traction.
Jason Ault: Yeah, absolutely, and we're also seeing a couple of the real estate players that are in the commercial side, taking a look at putting in digital signage as part of these packages to make it an entire scene for someone coming into renting the warehouse for the manufacturing business.
So, it is just part of their infrastructure?
Jason Ault: Exactly. So it’s, “Hey, this is why you should choose me over the competitor's space. We have this great infrastructure”, and then when that tenant leaves, they can wipe it all clean and have it ready for the next person.
Do you have to future-proof those sorts of things? Because if there are tenants and they sign a five-year lease, and somebody else comes in, are the screens still in the right place, or maybe a five-year window is enough, and you don't worry about that?
Jason Ault: I don't know if we can have the right data for that. We've only been doing it for about two and a half years in that space. We're keeping it at a five-year warranty window for those particular devices going in once a year, doing some maintenance, doing some checks on those particular locations. But time will tell as the next two-and-a-half-year cycle comes up on what we have our hands on.
I'm curious about very elemental digital signage in office environments.
I've got another press release today from a CMS company that's integrated with a video streaming platform. This one's with Zoom, but I've seen at least three companies integrating with Microsoft Teams. The idea is that you can use the video conferencing collaboration displays in meeting rooms as digital signage screensavers. But it strikes me as interesting, but awfully elemental, and what does that really accomplish?
Do you fight with that at all?
Jason Ault: We don't necessarily fight with that.
We have some CMS partners that can do that with the Mersive solstice pods, with the Barco click shares, and turn it into some digital signage when that is not in use for the huddle rooms or the conference rooms. But it's not been a huge adoption, at least from our book of clients.
Yeah, it just hits me, and some of it, I suspect, is probably pretty good, particularly those that started with a full-throated digital signage, CMS. But some of the particular ones that the companies like, maybe Mersive, I have yet to see their stuff, but I assume it's pretty basic. I wonder if it's if the end user customers look at it and go, that's all we need.
Jason Ault: In those situations, even when we're doing the ones with Barco click share and putting signage live on those devices, when it's not in use for its screen sharing capability, they have the full-fledged option to treat it as a traditional screen.
But, sometimes, these are in huddle rooms with a door that may not be open. I wouldn't put, “Hey, there's a fire alarm going on”, because someone may not be in there. So, in our opinion, an odd industry because those rooms were not in use. Are they ever seen? It really depends on the client. We have a client, Washington Prime Group, here in Columbus, Ohio, that has glass conference rooms and huddle rooms, and it makes sense for them because everyone can see as you walk through, and it’s above the privacy shelf.
Yeah, I was curious about an announcement by Mersive. They were going into a whole bunch of WeWork co-working locations, and I thought what they were doing was interesting because it's probably quite elemental, but their whole business rationale is they've got sensors that recognize that somebody's coming into the room, and when that happens, the screen goes on and says, hey, you need to book this, or have you booked this?
If not, it needs to be booked; get the hell out. It didn’t say that part, but it's all about addressing operating concerns just in the same way that meeting room displayed when those started coming out about 6-7 years ago, addressed a pain point as well.
Jason Ault: Absolutely. I think tying it into a sensor could definitely alleviate that concern.
It also gives you analytics on how much it actually is being used.
Jason Ault: Exactly.
Let's talk a little bit about AI. It's on everybody's minds these days. Have you looked at that as something that can help support your customers and support your business, or is it something you're just kind of watching?
Jason Ault: We're playing with it and watching it. It has not made it to assisting our customers at this point, that something is coming down to the pipe with Signage Live and some of their offerings, where we can do some AI-generated things. But probably the first thing that's going to help our customers is an AI driven chat bot for our support team, to take the load off of them and then see if we can drill down some response and some resolve times.
So somebody comes in and if they can get a question answered just by going through the chatbot prompts and delivering a solution or at least some information to them without having to wait for 5-10 minutes for one of your support people, that helps?
Jason Ault: Exactly. So that's probably the first thing that we're playing with and, of course, just like everyone, we're playing with it from a marketing and writing perspective. But just still watching it on how we can best utilize it by putting it into production for customer sake.
Yeah, my son is heavily into AI to the point where he is doing consulting for some people on what tools to use and everything else, and I've got him doing some work for me, and I've looked at things, and the image generation is interesting, but it's still very weird and surreal in certain respects, and on the writing side, it's great for people who can't write to save their lives, but for people like me, I've been in journalism for 40 years, it's like this stuff is so elemental and it can crank something out in 30 seconds, but it's not very good.
Jason Ault: It's definitely still a jumping-off point, but it's gotta have someone of skillset to reread that and fix those mistakes or add in professional tone or the writing tone of the organization.
We've talked about headless and AI, obviously. Are there hardware sides of technology that you're watching and thinking it is going to be a big deal going forward?
Jason Ault: We've pretty much set in our lane from a hardware perspective. Of course, we watch Direct view of the market that's evolving there. But, we're really just watching the products of our current partners, the big three screen manufacturers, and seeing the products that they are rolling out, coming off the line with, that we can put into the marketplace, but shiny balls and things like that, not really.
I try to keep my blinders on so no one gets confused or takes us too far down a rabbit hole. So we try to just keep main hardware partners, and main software partners and run the race.
To me, the thing that's going to be interesting is when micro LED gets to a level and maybe complementary technologies or very similar technologies that you start to see, non-traditional display services, whether that's architectural glass or even countertops, that you can start to see content arrive on and be crisp and visible and everything else.
Jason Ault: Yeah, I definitely think that can go a long way with micro LED and the cost being affordable at scale for sure. We are getting more architectural requests, flying things on the ceilings, and whatnot. So we’re watching in that regard just to see how we can help those architect partners that we talked about earlier on in our chats, fulfill some of their needs, that they design it.
When you bump into new customers or potential customers and they ask you, alright what's a good reference account? What's something I could go check out? What do you tell them that you’ve done?
Jason Ault: Yeah. We take a look at obviously, who they are, and if they're talking about quick service, we’re pointing them in the line of Biggby Coffee or an up-and-coming chain, Crimson Cup Coffee. If we're talking about retail and malls, we’ll take a look at malls for Washington Prime Group, and their 120 malls across the country.
When it comes to Directview LED, we've got a couple of convention centers in Columbus and Texas, and then some adjoining hotels that have some direct view installations. If they're looking at cameras, we can tell them to jump into a number of hundred different areas across the country to take a look at. So we're not short on pointing people in the right direction, that's for sure.
Okay, if people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online?
Jason Ault: They can find us online at coffmanmedia.com or on LinkedIn with our Coffman Media company page.
And where's the Coffman coming from?
Jason Ault: So, we weren't really creative 13 years ago. So there was a founding family in Dublin, Ohio, the Coffman family, and we decided to make it a regional name play.
Fair enough. Is the Coffman family still involved?
Jason Ault: No, they were never involved. We just decided to name it after them; they probably don't even know it. Everyone asks, is there a Mr. Coffman who started it? No, there's not. Sorry, it's a boring story.
I know, but you can blame it on him. “Coffman did that, but he's gone.”
Jason Ault: Good point!
Alright, Jason, thank you.
Jason Ault: Alright, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.
Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
David Title, Bravo Media
Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
Tuesday Aug 29, 2023
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.
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
Tobias Lang, Lang AG
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Germany's Lang AG is a family-owned and run business that has developed through the years into one of the larger and more influential players in the pro AV market - operating as both a supplier for rentals and staging market, as well as a distributor for systems integrators.
The company is run by Tobias Lang, who based on a couple of chats, clearly has both passion and deep knowledge of the sector, business demands and both the state and opportunity of emerging display technologies.
We had a 30 minute-plus conversation that flew by, getting into a bunch of things - including the potential for a projection systems, which these days don't get anywhere near the attention of LED displays.
We also spend a lot of time talking about LED, and how he thinks that technology isn't necessarily supplanting LCD. From his perspective, he thinks LCD and LED technologies are actually merging. Have a listen and he'll explain.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Tobias, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your company is all about, what it does, and its background?
Tobias Lang: Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Lang AG is a video-only company, which is doing only B2B, which means we cover both verticals, which are rental and staging and system integration.
We supply mostly the European rental and staging market with big projectors, LED screens, cameras, converters, whatever you need in video, and as a distributor, we supply both rental companies and system integrators with the staff of the manufacturers we work with such as Epson, Panasonic, several LED manufacturers to supply the modern technology to them in a good way to consult them, which is fitting to each other.
What amount of your business would you describe as being involved in digital signage?
Tobias Lang: First of all, if you look at the turnover of Lang AG, we do have companies in Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and Germany, which is the biggest. Germany did more than 80 million last year, and 60% of this is done by sales. If you look at digital signage, which is part of sales, this is a significant number, maybe 15 to 20% of our business.
The business itself is in the orbit of Cologne, that area?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, we are spotted in the western part of Germany. We have everything in Germany in one warehouse, as we have in Zurich, Switzerland, Barcelona, Spain, and London, UK because it's very important for our customers to have the opportunity of a one-stop video strategy.
How long has the company been around?
Tobias Lang: We are now 45 years old. My father, when my brother was born, said, “Hey, I have three kids now. I should start something serious.” He founded a company in 1978 without any other ideas because he loved stuff like projection at this time. With the evolution of technology, we ended up being where we are today.
Were you groomed to run the company one day or were you doing other things and decided to go into the family business?
Tobias Lang: I worked for the company as a child which is typical for a family business, then I tried to step away a bit. I studied mathematics. I founded a software company. I did some interesting things.
This stuff is still existing and I still have my chairs, but at one point, I decided that it was a great opportunity to join the family business Lang AG and to be honest, this was maybe one of the best decisions in my life. I love what I'm doing.
That always helps, doesn't it?
Tobias Lang: It does, yeah.
Is there a particular market where you're seeing a lot of activity right now and is it evolving?
Tobias Lang: Over the last two years, this immersive art experience vertical projection was said to be dead or going down five years ago, ten years ago, and what we were able to see over the last months is that projection is growing, and we enjoy this because we love projection and this is based on all these immersive experience setups which are done worldwide mostly based on art, but we believe other verticals can follow.
So these are effectively entertainment venues?
Tobias Lang: So far, yes. But we believe that corporations will use similar setups for brand experience and stuff like that.
I've been to at least a couple of those venues, they work because they're darkened, they're purpose-built and you can control the lighting and everything else.
When you get into a corporate environment, that becomes more challenging but is the technology catching up in terms of laser light brightness, the projection engines getting smaller and detached, the projection head being away from the rest of the equipment, and so on?
Tobias Lang: This is a challenge for sure, but if you look at most installations, most of the projectors are around 10,000 lumens, and you could use brighter projectors, and there are opportunities from the technology side to set up even brighter projectors than we have today. The brightest projector at the moment for the event market or the integration market is 50,000 lumen. You could easily go above.
It's a question about the demand, how much it will rise. But, I believe we will see this too because if you look at the Pavillion of Dubai Expo, 2/3 of these pavilions used projection over LED because of the flexibility of the technology. LED is a strong technology and a strong growing technology, but there will always be room for projection because of its flexibility. For example, the setup time of a projector, don't underestimate that.
Yeah. It used to be for projection mapping and edge blending and everything else. That was like a lot of work and a lot of mathematics and everything else, and now you can do it in software quite quickly from what I understand.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's fantastic. That's true.
Yeah, makes a huge difference. The thing I like about projection is the way it can just arrive and be unexpected versus if it's fixed hard physical displays, you know that there's something there in most cases with the exception of places like the Comcast Tower, but the projection, you can have a wall that all of a sudden is a digital canvas.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, and our understanding of the word, “screen” will change.
Mapping is a good example, we use buildings as screens. Decades ago, we had a television at home and this was the screen for us, and yeah, we see changes happening and we see different dimensions of screens and in this flexible world, we will use projectors more. But in our world, we'll be LED, and we'll be covered with some kind of display, but where we don't have a display, we could add a projection screen to add some value.
Is the partner reseller market and as well as the end user market getting more sophisticated, do they understand this technology more or is part of the role of your company doing education and holding their hand?
Tobias Lang: I think it is both. This is always about technology that has different layers. First, you have to train the experts. You have to give an understanding of the possibilities, and then you need to set up a discussion about opportunities for creative people, and then demands rise, and there's some latency in this process as you could feel from the immersive art experience and the change to other verticals, and I believe that they're by nature and you can't change it.
From what I saw on your website, you have a lot of technical people on board. People who can pull apart devices and get down to the board level with them and everything else. Is that a bit unusual?
Tobias Lang: I wouldn't say this is unusual. What may be is unusual that we have technical staff who can decide every single day what they want to do, because of some service and stuff like this, it's necessary sometimes, but we drive an R&D team, which is absolutely free to make a choice of what they believe is important for us tomorrow.
The market expects us to give feedback on future technology and therefore we have to look deep with our partners into product planning and technology, and this is what we love, and I think that's within our organization, a great job opportunity if you join one of those teams.
So when you say you're doing R&D, you're not coming up with your own products, I assume, or am I getting that wrong?
Tobias Lang: No, we are not a manufacturer, but we have to set up solutions sometimes. So what we try to do is, we add value to a product. For example, in the US market, most people know us as the cage company, as we did all the projector frames. They almost thought for a while, this is our business.
What we did, in reality, is that we looked for a solution for our projectors to use them in rental, and we added a mechanical solution on top. For other products, we add batteries as a solution to run wireless. Now, we added some drone business because we believe if you're strong in mappings and you supply media servers and high-brightness projectors to the markets, you should cover the pixels in the sky in the future too.
It also means you're future-proof.
Tobias Lang: Future-proof is a hard word. Let's say we are interested in the future, and how it will go.
Yeah, I guess you can never be totally sure because it moves so fast.
Tobias Lang: That's true.
I would assume that when you're doing all this value-added engineering work, it's in part that in order to service a customer and address a project, you can't wait on the marketplace for the suppliers to just develop something and put it on their roadmap to serve your needs.
Sometimes, you must do it yourself to make it all happen.
Tobias Lang: You have to bring together the information of the need of the market on the one hand and the possibility of, what's on the technical side thinkable on the other hand. So we have to bridge between our customers and the manufacturers, and it depends on the demand or the project.
To be honest, in the first project, you understand the need, but the solution is not available yet. But you learn from it to bring it back to the discussion of product planning, and future roadmap, and then you can return with the right solution for the future because if there is a need in AV for a solution, this will hit you a second, a third time and so on.
Are you in front of end-user customers at all, or your team, or is that something that you stay at arm's length?
Tobias Lang: We try, and I believe we are mostly invisible. Most of the end customers in the European market have no clue that we exist. If our customers rent material from us, it's just a gray case without any brand of Lang AG.
I assume that your business partners prefer it that way, they want to own the customer?
Tobias Lang: Yeah. We always say we are behind, we let the show to our customers and I think those who like this come back to us and we understand this as one of our values.
When we were talking ahead of turning the recording on, you were talking about one of the things that your firm does is you work hard to try to forecast what will be possible and what matters and what the need is of the marketplace. That has to be challenging just because of the way technology shifts, and also, there are so many different factors as to what the marketplace wants including, the war in Ukraine and supply chains and everything else that has happened in the last couple of years.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, around 10 or 15 years ago, it was much easier to drive a mid-size family business.
But today, with the experience of a pandemic, of such a war influencing the supply chains, you have to make sure that you have an understanding of the global world and the effects which are happening for your industry. So we try to be in shape around this. For the actual situations, we handle this quite well. It is easier if you always love to ask yourself what's new, and what's next, because, then you are flexible and agile enough to change fast.
Some of the trends that I've been hearing a lot of discussion about are moving manufacturing out of China into other countries, having storage warehouses, different methodologies for shipping, and everything else.
Has that been critical with the weather the last two, or three years?
Tobias Lang: I wouldn't say critical, but it is part of the game. This is mostly a discussion around LEDs, and in the end, you have to understand that even if you produce an LED panel in Europe, there will still be parts that will be supplied from Asia.
So it's only bringing the challenge to different classes regarding customs rules. It is a bit about politics because it depends on what the European Union will change in the rules of customs, I think there is a similar story in the US.
When I was at the Munich Digital Signage Summit Europe, one of the areas that was discussed quite a bit was green signage and sustainability. Is that factoring into how you do business?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, a lot, and this is rising fast, and I believe there's no stopping it. So it will continue to rise.
In every single supply chain, you will have to report what you do regarding sustainability. You will have to explain yourself in the future much more intensively, much more often how you face this challenge. As a company, it's very important that you have to accept these circumstances and then you should work on it.
Energy management and conservation and cutting energy costs were something that was around prior to the Ukraine War and everything that kind of bubbled out that, but has that really heightened in the last year and a half?
Tobias Lang: Yes, there is a different pace of this change. I'll give you an example.
Last September, there was a new rule by the European Union that all signage displays had to be turned off in Germany between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, and most LED screens were never built to be turned off, so they just used a black image to be turned off. But in reality, they were still running.
So this was a challenge, no one was prepared for and I think it's sustainable and good that we now have the discussion of how to manufacture an LED screen, which is easy, honestly speaking, that you can turn off every day.
Yeah, I didn't even know that until I was at the Munich thing, because you just assume it's a display, there's an on-and-off. Why is it difficult for them to be turned off and then turned back on gracefully?
Tobias Lang: Honestly, in most installations, those screens were done modular, which is no surprise because it's cheaper in transport, and then you set up the screen, and you do some kind of dressing, and not all screens understand the dressing once you turn the screen on.
The result is if you turn the screens off, you can turn it on again. You need to have an LED Technician too, because the dressing is no longer working. These are just simple things, but this is a different way of thinking because, in the past, people were consulted to let the screen runs.
And are there workarounds? Is this all being addressed?
Tobias Lang: Yes, there are some workarounds out there. There's a lot ongoing and I believe this story will be done in 12 to 18 months completely.
It is a learning curve, and it also shows the strengths of our industry that we can adapt fast. We can do a lot regarding sustainability because we can save energy quickly if we focus on the right questions. In an absolute way of thinking, we are maybe not the greenest industry, but in relation from year to year, we improved so much that we can be proud as an industry of what we are doing.
Is it a hardware fix that puts an intermediary device, or is it a software fix, or is it like the new generation of Nova Star controllers and so on that will get around that?
Tobias Lang: So, in the first step, it is a hardware fix, what is done now, and in the second step, it will be mostly a software fix.
One of the things that I read in another article that was attributed to you was, and we were talking ahead of this discussion, you were saying how LED and LCD will merge, and I was thinking it kind of is because LCDs are using LEDs as their backlighting and so on, but you're talking about something different here, right?
Tobias Lang: First of all, I have to mention that it is tremendous what is happening in 2023 in the LED market. When I went to ISE, I was surprised at how many manufacturers talked about micro LEDs…
And some of it actually was true micro LED.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's true. But before this year's ISE, it looked like all the manufacturers of high-resolution LEDs were going to chip-on-board technology, and then the semiconductors offered a micro LED package, so a package again with where you could do pick and place like with SMDs to produce an LED panel, and a lot of companies looked into this and announced that where they will have a product in future based on this technology. And I wondered, okay. Is this even before COB has started to come to the top the end of COB because there is a superior technology?
This is still an open question. I can't answer it by today. But it shows how interesting it is, and the comment about LED and LCD merging is based on the fact that now nearly every former LCD manufacturer, like the Chinese BOE, is joining the LED race because everyone is accepting that there will be a lot of replacement from the LED or former LCD installations and based on this challenge, a lot of LCD manufacturers ask their health how to use the stuff they did in the past, and they found out that if they use the transistor film, they have an LCD, they could supply active matrix solutions based on LED as the video source. So driving every single pixel by a transistor to get a value as a product that is superior to what we know.
So I believe we will see screens that are more flexible, and more transparent than we used to, and this is incredibly interesting because it will change our understanding of the word display and screen to have just one dimension in a 4:3 or 16:9 screen. We have to start to think completely differently, and the funny thing is that the concept of active matrix and passive matrix, I don't know, maybe 30 years old or whatever, was there as long as I am in the industry, but it was always too expensive to drive every single pixel and there were no advantages, but now it seems like an active matrix became reachable in a price range, and there are supplies added values because you get such light and flexible products and for example, the hype of the transparent LED from Muxwave we saw at the last shows was one of the rising stars, gives us a first look in the first understanding of what could be the future, what could be possible and I’m pretty sure we will see many more products based on this technology.
Not everyone, to be honest, agrees that this is the way to go. There are some manufacturers which believe passive matrix is still the way to go, but there are also a lot of manufacturers which believe in active matrix. It is very interesting to follow this discussion and to see every single move of the different manufacturers, and this is for example, for me, a strong argument why it is wrong as a market player just to visit one show a year. That's the reason why you have to show ISE and InfoComm, Display Week because the different levels of information you get at the different shows by the different timing is helping me so much to face these questions.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this. When you're talking about TFT, does that limit the dimensions and shape of the displays to how LCD is made right now in terms of having mother glass, and the largest display you're going to get is 105 inches, or does that not really in play here?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, I'm not an expert, to be honest, on LCD factories. What is the limitation of the size? Is it the glass? Is this the Tft? Is it a combination? But for sure, this will have an influence on active matrix products.
For example, at Muxwave, it's about the drivers, the number of pixels, you can reach, it’s not about the transistors. So this question will be answered by yes/maybe if you have really high-resolution products, and maybe by no, if you have lower-resolution products.
Because you do a lot of work in the rental market, equipment is going to be put up and torn down repeatedly. You have to think a lot about durability, right?
Tobias Lang: Yes, that's true, and redundancy. This is one of the main challenges. If we face AV over IP, which will come into our market for sure, and we believe based on XMTP and IPMX but it is a change, and people in the event, want to be sure that everything is working out because if you look at a modern event what kind of amount of setup timing those professional players have left, it's quite tight, and they need to be sure that everything is working and therefore, we have to understand that our role is to make their work as easy as possible.
Having chip-on-board and things with hardened or more durable surfaces and having lightweight, grid-based systems, even down to something like the Muxwave product, which is super thin and would go up and down pretty easily, that stuff, I assume, is pretty attractive?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's one of the arguments we believe you will see those solutions in rental and staging too because there are advantages in rental and staging regarding transport cost, which is also a question which is regarding sustainability, and then it is an advantage quite often, in setup timing.
There will be a mix, and this is somehow in our life so incredible that you can always learn from one vertical to the other, so sometimes technology, which is done for integration, will be helpful in event and staging and vice versa.
Last question. I'm curious if there's a project that you've seen in the last year or so, digital signage or pro AV in some way where you thought, okay, that's really good, that's where this is all going.
Tobias Lang: As you can imagine, I was involved in several projects, and I don't want to mention any particular out of this, but I can tell you I'm really looking forward to coming to Vegas to see the fair by myself in real life because I did some running when they were setting it up while different shows in the morning and I always pass by, and when I saw the first images on social media, I was excited and this is for sure a big thing, and like I think everyone in the industry, I would love to see it in real life.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that in December when I go to Digital Signage Experience. I've been watching it for a while now and actually trying to do a podcast with them, and maybe one day they'll say, yes.
Tobias Lang: I will for sure listen to this podcast.
Yes. It's the company that's the LED suppliers, the same one that put the LEDs on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Montreal Company. Alright. Tobias, thank you very much for spending time with me.
Tobias Lang: Much appreciated, Dave. Thank you for having the interest, and I enjoyed every single second.
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Digital Signage Yearbook 2023
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Wednesday Jul 26, 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.
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Shane Vega, Userful
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Using existing network infrastructure has long been talked up as an efficient way to manage and deliver digital signage solutions in large companies, but the concept has been clouded by concerns - like the cost of additional AV hardware and the impact of all that video on the company network.
But we now live in a world where companies support countless video conferencing sessions with piles of users, with little or no latency. Other technologies have also caught up, and computing just keeps getting more powerful.
Which is why I was interested in chatting with Shane Vega, VP of Marketing for the Silicon Valley software firm Userful, about his company's AV over IP solutions. The company has its roots in Calgary, Alberta and still does a lot of the R&D work there.
Userful first showed up in digital signage circles talking about a different way, using software and endpoints, to drive video walls. But in the last few years it has been much more focused on a broader IP-driven solution that tends to start with control rooms and operations centers, but can also drive things like meeting room displays and digital signage around corporate campuses.
There's been a lot of discussion about AV needs converging with IT interests, but from Vega's perspective, that convergence is already firmly in place.
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TRANSCRIPT
Shane, thank you for joining me. Where are you today?
Shane Vega: I am in sunny Tampa, Florida, where although it's not all that sunny today, we've got some rain, but that's per the norm now.
Now, Userful is in Silicon Valley, but a lot of the developers are in Calgary, right?
Shane Vega: Yeah, that's correct. All of our R&D, engineering team, and the like, they're all up in Calgary, Canada.
So you're missing the Calgary Stampede this week?
Shane Vega: I am missing the Stampede.
But you know what, I believe they deserve a bit of some good time because they spend the majority of the time avoiding the minus 30-degree weather.
Yeah, I spent a number of years in Calgary, and it's an interesting weather city.
Shane Vega: Yeah. You know it's bad when they've developed an entire infrastructure of walkways between buildings to avoid having to go outside.
Yeah, just like Minneapolis.
Shane Vega: Exactly.
All right, so we had a quick chat in the LG booth at Infocomm, and you explained what Userful was up to with its Infinity platform and AV over IP and AV as a Service and so on, and I've seen that. I will wholeheartedly admit I don't totally get it, but how you explained it to me was very interesting, and I thought this would be useful for a lot of people to understand the infrastructure and distribution side of digital signage.
We spend so much time talking about the content and business strategy and all those sorts of things, but behind-the-scenes stuff is awfully important, and maybe we could start out by just explaining what Userful is and does and where you came from because when Userful first came out, it was presented to me as video wall software, and I had a hell of a time wrapping my brain around what it was all about. But I know you guys have evolved quite a bit.
Shane Vega: Yeah. I appreciate that, Dave. To answer your question, Userful has grown exponentially in the last 5+ years. John Marshall, our CEO came on board about 7 years or so ago. My timing might be a little bit off, and when he came into the organization, we were a perpetual software company, so we weren't software as a service, we weren't selling subscriptions. We were selling perpetual software…
You'd buy a license and then get that supported?
Shane Vega: Yeah, you'd buy a license then we support it for the duration of however long you wanted to use it, and the license for the software was pretty siloed, right? It was, “Hey, you can buy this operations center license.” Where, to your point, we were just managing content on a video wall.
And it was mostly control rooms, right?
Shane Vega: Mostly control rooms, almost exclusively for a time, and then we evolved into the digital signage world, and it was cloud-based digital signage exclusively. So what most folks are familiar with is hosting up in AWS, giving you some access to dynamic tools for creating templates and the like.
During Infocom, what we've launched and from the time that I just mentioned until about, maybe two and a half years ago or three years ago, we've pivoted the company from perpetual to subscription-based software as a service, and that's who Userful is. We are a software company, and we've been a software company tailored to the needs of the AV industry.
Most currently, we've just released our newest platform, and that's really been the biggest evolution, which is moving away from application-specific deployments into more of a platform approach for AV over IP and that is really the biggest breakthrough development that we've had here, because in the older version of our software, we were a monolithic code base. Again, we were just selling either the operation center software or we were selling some digital signage. Everything was monolithic. It was difficult for our engineering team to manage updates, firmware, bug fixes, and the like.
We've now moved to a distributed code base that has given us exceptional flexibility with how we develop our software for the various use cases and applications in the AV industry. So if you think about what you've seen in the conversations you and I have had, essentially, and you hit the nail right on the head, this isn't just about fancy software managing content on a video wall. Can we do that? Of course, we've got feature sets for various different use cases, but there's also the infrastructure piece, and this was my “aha moment” through a different lens at Infocomm.
AV over IP has matured through the years from IP addressable matrix switchers where everything was still very much centralized into IP addressable nodes, encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers, and all the different AV manufacturers out there have now standardized on this proprietary hardware version of AV over IP, and I started to ask myself the question: what is their value proposition in doing that?
And I overheard quite a few folks during this past Infocomm talk about the value of this distributed architecture: enabling flexibility, scalability, augmenting workflows, the total cost of ownership being lower, and I sat there a little bit baffled because these are all the same things that we talk about at Userful and so it really opened up an area where I feel like we do need to evangelize a little bit more about how Userful do AV over IP differently, and that we don't necessitate all of the hardware infrastructure. We truly are a software platform, but because of the IT protocols that currently exist, that's how we developed our software.
So when you think about Userful, I've actually positioned us a little bit more as an IT solution than an AV solution, even though our entire solution is built around the AV industry and its needs. The reason I say that is because we're literally a server, non-proprietary, and an endpoint, and that endpoint is software, so our uClient application.
In between the two is network infrastructure. There are no end encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers, and the list goes on. Because we are able to transmit content and aggregate content, meaning we can pull in sources of visual information and audio information into a data library or data store that we manage on our server and distribute that information to any destination or any screen and we do that all with IP protocols.
The same IP protocols, by the way, and this is how I usually get people to have the “aha moment.” If we were having this over a Teams meeting, Dave, or a Zoom meeting, we would be transmitting video two ways. In many cases, multiple participants from multiple regions of the world share two-way audio and video. We would be able to share content from our local computers into that meeting, and nobody would have to go out and buy a proprietary encoder and decoder to make that happen. So using that same infrastructure or those IT protocols that are currently at work, IP protocols like WebRTC for instance, we're able to build a solution that leverages those same advancements for the purposes of AV over IP.
It’s a bit of a mouthful, but that's what we're doing.
So you wouldn't have been able to do some of that 10-15 years ago because the network infrastructure is a lot of larger corporations hadn't really caught up with that, so you would flood a network if you were using a lot of video and so on, but things have changed.
Shane Vega: Things have changed substantially, and I would even say it's been not even 10-15 years ago, just 5-10 years ago, and the reason I say that is because there are the laws of engineering and physics like Butter's Law, Kryder’s Law, Moore's Law, which talks about how rapidly the advancements of, let's say, fiber optic networks, which are doubling every nine months, the amount of bandwidth that you can get between the fiber optic cable or the amount of processing speed that you can get out of a CPU and how fast these advancements are happening.
What we're doing and the way that we're doing it is taxing the CPU of that server. It's also taxing the GPU of that server, the graphics card because those are the two major components that we use for our solution. If you think about just two years ago, Dave, our servers that we were deploying in the field were 8 cores of processors. Right now, I have a server that we've certified that's 192 cores of processors, so we're able to do exceptionally and exceedingly more on a single server, which is why we've actually built our solution to be a data center solution by and large, where you take a big beefy server, you put it in your data center, and you're virtualizing all of the traditional hardware that you would need, and you're managing a wide range of AV endpoints, whether it's digital signage, meeting rooms, operations centers, or what have you.
Is there a baseline for what you need in terms of the network infrastructure?
I'm definitely not an IT Architect, but do you need a CAT6E, or can you do this over Wifi, I don't know, and I suspect a lot of people don’t know.
Shane Vega: Yeah, so it's a good question. So again, because we're optimizing for IT protocols, we're able to do a lot, right? From the screen to the switch, we're just really looking for that one-gigabit uplink, which is standard. Most folks are going to have that. From the server to the source to the server and all that infrastructure pulling into the server, we're looking for the 10 gigabit uplink.
So there are some requirements for the network, but nothing that is outside the realms of standard network topology. The real intricacies or the real areas where we get into some deeper discussions are when they have multiple networks that we have to traverse. When you start getting into DOD environments where things have to be air-gapped and there's no internet connectivity and when networks start to get a little bit more complex, that's where we have to begin to get a little bit more intentional about how we design it.
Now that said, we haven't yet met a deployment that we couldn't meet the network requirements for, even though some of those were those complex ones.
There were two things that particularly interested me.
The first was, as you laid out earlier, that you don't need all these encoders and other bits of hardware to layer into a network to make this happen. So you're cutting out conceivably a lot of capital costs and a lot of potential fail points, and I guess the other thing that intrigues me, and you can talk about that next is or after.
The first question would be the idea that you can use this for multiple aspects. I suspect there are control room data dashboards, and software platforms out there, but one of the things you talked about at Infocomm is that you can cascade this out to do all kinds of different things from operation centers to experience centers off of the same platform.
Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly, Dave, and to answer the first question, you hit the nail on the head with one of my areas of confusion when I was at Infocomm, and I heard people talking about the low total cost of ownership, and they were tying it to these encoders and decoders.
We don't require those things. So when I think about the total cost of ownership, I think about the hard work upfront costs that you don't need to have and the additional BTU output from all of that hardware that you would normally need, that's no longer going to be there, which is going to drive your HVAC costs, right? You don't have all the power consumption. So for green initiatives and companies who are looking to do things, and this is a big one moving forward, folks want to be more green, and get green initiatives going like lower carbon emissions, lowering power consumption by not having all that hardware is yet another total cost of ownership benefit for Userful.
Again, our encoding happens at the one server that we require in that Nvidia graphics card. The decoding is done by a piece of software we developed called the uClient application. Now, where that uClient application resides, we give you tons amount of flexibility. We have integrated it into certain endpoints like Web OS or Tizen or Android. And that gives us the flexibility to be able to load that client application in various different environments and use cases, depending on the display type if it's an LCD, if it's a direct view LED, and how we manage that.
In some cases, we do have a small appliance that you might need at the edge, and that would be one additional piece of hardware per display, depending on the display type, and that's an Android box that we load our uClient application onto if the display doesn't have the ability to integrate with our software.
So if it's a smart display that already has a system on a chip on it, conceivably you don't need that Android box?
Shane Vega: Correct. So now what you're left with, as I said, is just a server with software at the edge, and network infrastructure in between.
So ongoing maintenance costs are substantially lower. Initial hardware costs are lower. Your total cost of ownership around all the things I mentioned earlier is going to be lower. Therefore, your refresh costs are going to be lower. Because with hardware, every three to five years, in some cases five to seven years, you're having to do a hardware refresh. It's always tied to CapEx because it's usually proprietary. They have to budget for CapEx renewals of all this hardware.
Because of Userful's deployment model, we can take on an OPEX model for those folks who would benefit from that because your hardware refresh can be built into your standard IT refreshes because you own the hardware. In many cases, as many as we can possibly, push for, we don't provide the server, we want the end user to provide the server, and that way, it gets built into your traditional OPEX refresh, and that way, the only recurring cost is the software.
To your next question about what we spoke about and the benefits of the platform. This is where our software really begins to shine, right? Because our platform is accessible through a web browser, so no proprietary software needs to be downloaded for a user to access it. You access our software through a traditional HTML5 web browser.
Once you access the software through a web browser, the first thing you're going to notice is we have six applications that any user can take advantage of. In most cases, folks aren't trying to eat the elephant hole, right? They'll have a use case like digital signage, or they'll have a use case like meeting rooms or experiential centers or what have you, and that's one of the reasons why we are licensing the server. We're licensing the CPU cores and the number of graphics cards that you need on that server so that if you have a smaller use case, your out-of-pocket costs are gonna be lower because you need a smaller server. But when you log in for the first time, you're gonna see, “Oh, I got this for digital signage, but I didn't know I could run my meeting room here.” or, “I didn't realize that I can do these artistic video walls,” or “I didn't realize I can incorporate these data dashboards from Power BI or Tableau as a native source and share those to any display that Userful is managing.”
The value is seen almost immediately, and so what we do is try to help people understand the peripheral or parallel use cases. So I use digital signage quite a bit, and I gave you this analogy regarding airports at Infocomm, Dave, where at least half a dozen times in the last six to eight months, I've had conversations with various airports, and most of them are pulling us in because they have an operation center. Airport operations center, or security operations center, or what have you, and they'll say, “Hey, we want the Userful software to run the content on these displays and video walls in the operation center,” and when we have these discovery calls, I'll typically ask, “Hey, have you guys thought about the advantages of using our platform to help you with the signage?” And I'm usually shot down rather immediately, and most folks know Airports are convoluted in the way that they deploy their technology. They got various different groups. They're typically siloed, but specifically the airport operations centers, I'll just say, “Hey, look, I get that, but let me just throw this use case out there and see if it lands and hits you as showing value.”
You're in an airport operations center. Wouldn't you want to be able to manage the entire network of screens that are currently being used to show baggage, arrivals, departures, signage, and all your wayfinding screens? Would it not be valuable to be able to manage those as part of your airport operations, also, I've noticed in many cases, they'll incorporate security into their AOC. Some of them have independent security operations centers, but in either event, I would tell them. What happens if you have an incident at the airport? Wouldn't you want to be able to take over those screens from the command center that's responsible for monitoring and sending strategic messages to people, depending on what the situation is? If there's a fire, “evacuate.” If god forbids, there's an active shooter, “take shelter in place,” and be able to send strategic messages to various screens all from within your operation center? Well, you can't currently do that because you've got multiple systems driving all of these different AV endpoints.
If you had a single platform, it doesn't just give you the ability to scale your deployment, it gives you the ability to scale your workflow and become more flexible to augment those workflows where I can send strategic messages to screens, I can manage arrivals and baggage from my AOC, if that's such a thing that I need. In addition, we could help you with your meeting rooms. You can walk into a meeting room, and I can help you cast some content in a meeting room and have an impromptu meeting on a drop of a dime, as just a few use cases of what our platform can do.
Sometimes, when you have these platforms that say they can do, in your case, at least six different things, there can be compromises. In other words, “Yeah, we can do all these things. That's just none of them are particularly deep, or maybe one of them is deep, and the other ones are so so.”
Do you get that question at all?
Shane Vega: Ironically, no. We don't get that question. But it's a question most people should be asking David, and I'll tell you that when that does come up, and it's only come up a handful of times, I'm always very candid about what we can't do as well as what we can do. And there is truth in the fact that we are software as a service, and so there are certain applications that still have roadmap features, candidly, that we're going to continue to augment and build them out.
If you could probably imagine the top three or four of our use cases would be: operations centers, digital signage, meeting rooms, and data dashboards. We do those very well. With experiential environments, we manage those artistic video walls very well. Now when you talk about experiential environments, there are some things that some folks might want to get involved with, but we might have to have some deeper conversations, right?
And that really is around interactivity. Do you want multi-touch video walls, like in a museum for kids or something like that? Where we have some roadmap items to help ensure that multi-touch is what people would expect, where you don't want to have the lag, you don't want to have any of those issues when people are trying to have that fun experience as a child or what have you.
So there are certain features that are still roadmap items, but what I will bookend that with is, before coming over to Userful, I worked with one of the larger AV firms globally, and while I worked there, part of my interaction with customers was, “Man, I wish I could do more of these things with a single solution, I have to farm it out to so many folks.”
But more than that, I would have feature requests for the stuff that was out there, and it was always in one ear, out the other. I don't care which manufacturer it was. If I went to some of these larger manufacturers and I said, hey, you really would benefit if you did this or this. It just didn't go anywhere, and then I had a similar conversation with the Userful back in about 2018 at a trade show, I said, look, your software is good, but it really needs these four or five things to really be a competitor in the space that you're looking to deploy, which at the time it was operation centers.
I'd say if it was six months, it was a long time. So within six months, I got a call from the then VP of Sales who said, “Hey, I want to have a meeting with you, Shane. We've incorporated all of your requests into our software,” and that really pivoted my approach to looking at users as, alright, these guys are the future of AV and, little FYI, we actually got that award at Infocomm, the Future of AV award.
But the reason for that was, look, if we're going to be software as a service, then we have to prioritize feature requests from our customers above our own market research or our own gut check, and so that's part of my role here at Userful as VP of Marketing is that I'm also over Product Marketing, which is over the roadmap, and so I get involved in customer calls quite a bit, and I'll hear some of these features that to your initial question is, “Hey, how do you go deeper with these applications?” I look for that feedback, and then I get to go back to the roadmap and go, “Hey, we need to prioritize this, this, and this feature. Push out the other features to the next release. Let's get these done because it's revenue dependent. We've got customers who would value this. Let’s get it done!”
We take that very seriously here at Userful, and we're at four releases a year, so you'll never have to wait all that long.
So you referenced Airports. I'm curious, in the context of third-party software development, if there's a software company that works in the Airport realm but isn't doing digital signage or some of the things you do, but they want to visualize information on displays, is there an API or something that they could develop to work with Userful or does it have to be Userful development to add that capability on?
Shane Vega: We have an entire program around API. So we do have our own API, currently, it's A REST API, so we can receive tons of different messages and calls to trigger certain reactions within our software.
But additionally, that's got its own roadmap in and of itself. So we have our software application roadmap, and then we have our API roadmap where we're going to be developing even deeper integrations and capabilities including, but not limited to, even wanting to create possible easy configuration tools for customers who can use our API to do whatever they want, onsite.
Are control rooms and operations centers the gateway for the initial point of contact, the thing that gets people interested, and then other things cascade out of that?
Shane Vega: That has been our experience. We call that our land. So we're land and expand through our platform. Let's find the use case. Let's land where it makes sense, and then let's show the power of our expansion, and just because of how the company has evolved, operation centers have been kind of the tip of our spear, and it makes sense because operation centers will use two or three of our applications out of the gate, right?
They'll use the operation center software, they'll use meeting rooms for war rooms or situation rooms. They'll also use our trends for dashboards and Power BI integrations, depending on what type of operation center it is, so they usually get value from several of our use cases and applications out of the gate. And if it's a large enough organization and we're typically targeting LDOs (large distributed organizations), they'll have multiple operations centers, which gives us multiple points of connection and interaction and engagement to open up opportunities to talk about the meeting rooms beyond your war room and situation room, or some operation centers are fishbowls, where they want to bring folks in their data center and they just want to use it as a showpiece to show their customers how well they manage their data, and so they might have welcome screens outside, and we'll let them know, “Hey, we can manage those welcome screens for you as well,” and that evolves into a larger digital signage strategy, corporate communications, so on and so forth.
These large organizations, do they have separate AV and IT departments, or are they pretty much hiving into IT now?
Shane Vega: So more and more, IT is taking over, but what's happening is it used to be that they have AV specialists on staff, and by and large, it was for the meeting rooms, and in some cases, the digital signage where they had AV technicians or AV specialists on-site, and those were the guys were the gatekeepers to decide what technology gets deployed.
Yeah, and get everything working before the meeting starts somehow.
Shane Vega: Exactly. “Who's got HDMI? Who's got DVI?”
So to that point, people keep talking about the convergence of AV and IT, and I don't know why. That convergence happened years ago. People are now starting to realize that because of that convergence, the IT organization or the IT departments within these larger organizations are going to be the ones holding the budget and are going to be the ones responsible for managing any AV resources on the network.
And so, we have intentionally built our product to cater to those IT stakeholders in the organization. When you say things like, “Hey, you can centrally monitor the entire platform from a web browser,” they really get that right. When you say, “We're an IT solution, we're not an AV solution, which means we're not going to put all this IP addressable hardware on your network,” a lot of the walls come down from their security concerns. You then begin to tell them that, look, you can augment your roles-based access control, and integrate with LDAP. Plus, we give you tools that are IT specific to help you monitor things like, what is the impact on my network? What is my current CPU utilization, or what's my current GPU utilization on the server that we're licensing? We give them all of those tools built into our software. So it's not just AV end-user tools that we're giving. We're also giving those IT tools that help the IT stakeholders manage deployments because we recognize these are going to be larger in scale. They're going to be responsible for a lot. Let's make it easy for them.
When you talk about AV as a service, it's a term I've heard for a while, but you guys go at it quite a bit differently from what you're saying.
Shane Vega: Yeah, we do, and Dave, I struggle with that, because we were flirting with the term AV as a service, and we started to use it quite a bit. But I know, coming from the integration world, that AV as a service historically meant we're going to just finance this stuff, right? We're going to get a leasing program, and we're going to build in the hardware, the software, the services, whatever we can into a monthly payment that makes it nice and easy for you guys.
We approach it differently by saying, we are software as a service that's for the AV industry. Therefore, we are AV as a service, meaning, we don't have all that hardware that you have to purchase. You're truly able to deploy all of these AV use cases and manage an entire host of AV applications from within our platform. And we are a software that you pay for based on subscription, typically three-year plans.
That's what we mean when we say AV as a service. It's exactly that. It's a software as a service, which is which is the actual term, which is software as a service for the AV world.
This strikes me as something that probably has a learning curve, as every software platform does, but it is almost something you kind of have to ease your way into?
Shane Vega: Believe it or not, not really, and I think that would be more pertinent if somebody was wanting to say, “Hey, I want to use your entire platform right now.” But as I said earlier, most folks are saying, “Hey, I want this operation center,” and they're familiar with Operation Center softwares. They know what they want. They know they want to be able to build custom layouts. They want to manage big, beautiful video walls. They want to be able to interact with sources with soft KVM functionalities so that they're not just visualizing the sources but they can engage with them because they've got tools, right? They got video management tools, and they've got access control, what have you, and so that software that we're providing isn't going to look and feel a whole lot different than a lot of the other softwares they're used to using.
Now, we do it differently. So the real benefit, rewinding all over to the beginning of this conversation, is, yes, we're giving you all these software applications and features, but it's the infrastructure that really differentiates us.
Along with removing different hardware components from this kind of a network, you're also removing potentially different software applications that you'd also need because you've got this stack of different things you can do?
Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly.
To that point, Dave, when I showed this at Infocomm, when I gave my demos there, typically when you deploy an AV solution, let's call it digital signage, that's the background that you're most familiar with.
In digital signage, let's say, you use it for corporate communications; you'll have screens all over the office. In some cases, they'll want to be able to integrate that digital signage into their meeting rooms as well, and when the screens are in standby mode, they want to be able to have some of those corporate communications as part of the digital signage strategy, managing those meeting rooms. But when you go into the meeting room, they'll typically need some type of infrastructure to support those meetings and local collaboration. Usually, it's a network of AV infrastructure, HDMI cables, or what have you, go into some form of a matrix switch that's going to be some type of tablet controller that can give you the ability to manage what laptop is being viewed on what screen.
With Userful, because the software does so much, the screens that we manage are not tied to any one specific application, and that's really the beauty of it. So I can walk into a room where they're showing corporate communication. I can sit down, open my laptop, and immediately start a meeting by screencasting whatever's on my laptop onto the screen in that room without connecting a single AV cable. I could then open up my operations center software on that same screen and turn it into an impromptu war room or situation room where I'm pulling in multiple sources and building out customized layouts, and navigating through a crisis. So there are a lot of things that we can do, and it's not dependent on the screen, and, to your point, we've reduced not just the hardware need but the software as well.
All right, Shane, that was super interesting. I know much more about this space than I did half an hour ago.
Shane Vega: It's been great talking to you, Dave. I appreciate it.
Monday Jul 03, 2023
Jim Nista On Code Painting
Monday Jul 03, 2023
Monday Jul 03, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When a big LED video wall gets populated with fresh creative, the creatives and the people operating a display are likely going to have a conversation about the size of the finished file and how to move it – because there’s a good chance the rendered file is huge, and not something that can attach in an email.
So I was intrigued as hell when a creative guy told me the video wall creative he’d produced for a project could fit on an old-school floppy disk … because it was really just some lines of code.
A lot of people in the digital signage ecosystem will know Jim Nista. He started and ran the LA creative technology shop Insteo, before it was acquired by Almo. Nista worked for his new masters for a while, but eventually went off on his own, and is now spinning up a new boutique agency that’s doing creative for visual projects.
One of the things he’s been actively working on is what he calls Code Painting – a big visual that gradually builds in front of viewers and then self-destructs, replaced by a new visual that again starts to build. You set the file and visual instructions, and then forget it, as it will just run and run but always be a bit - or a lot – different.
It’s all done in programming instructions, and in the case of his current efforts, is focused on the familiar visuals of flowers.
Nista’s work was one of three used for the Sixteen:Nine Mixer at InfoComm last month. Having had a couple of explainers of what was going on, and the approach, I figured a podcast was the best way to help the industry understand what he’s figured out, and what he’s delivering to clients.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Hey Jim, can you explain what code painting is?
Jim Nista: Yeah, it's a fun new concept for me. I know that other people are doing some of the same types of things, but really, I have been trying to make a painting through either JavaScript or other coding techniques. I started with a more simple approach, and the goal truly was to create something that you're watching a painting come to life, and my own brief to myself was this needs to look good at every stage of the process. Sometimes a time-lapse at the beginning is. what are we looking at here? And so it's been a fun process for me to figure out a way to make something, not just paint itself through code, but to be interesting to look at through the entire process, however long it takes, but 30 seconds to a minute is what I'm usually trying to come towards.
But it is truly just code. There are no images, videos, AI, machine learning, or anything else. It's just a scripted process of creating a unique painting while you watch.
We were sitting in Orlando, chatting about this and you were describing it to me, and I was thinking, boy, this is a little bit over my head, but it sounded like it starts with almost like an armature. You start with some curves, and it just builds from there?
Jim Nista: Yeah. It starts from a very primitive drawing. It is almost like a child's drawing because some of the early pieces, and certainly some of the pieces that I showed down in Orlando, are flowers because those are shapes that are very recognizable to our eyes.
We can spot a flower-type shape almost as well as we can determine a human face style shape. I don't know why, and I don't know the evolutionary reasons behind it, but I realized that this is a pattern that we can determine very easily so behind the scenes, one of the very first things that this code does is to generate out some curves and if you think about the shape of a curve, if you flip that shape, it makes a petal or a leaf shape. So if you make a simple curve and then flip it, you end up with a leaf shape or a petal shape, and if you take that and rotate it around in a certain way and put a dot in the center, our eyes say “flower,” and we're really good at it, right?
It probably has something to do with our ability to find food and all the other things that we do as humans. But it becomes a shape that is very recognizable to us, and so once I have these very primitive drawn shapes stored in memory, then the real code takes over, which is the work that I spent so much time on over the last year and a half trying to make realistic-looking paint strokes come out of these primitive drawings that are stored in memory, and that's been really the fun part of the project is to invent a way to create something that comes to life that way, but is truly just based on the most primitive, basic line drawings you could possibly imagine. So there's some color encoded in that primitive. There are some rough shapes encoded in that primitive, but really it's just very simple and then works from there to create a painting while you watch.
We demoed this on a very large canvas down in Orlando, a 26-foot-tall LED video wall, 155 feet wide in terms of a curve and you had little vignettes, a number of these, I shouldn't say little, but they were substantially sized, maybe 15 feet tall or something like that, but you had a number of them and essentially, something would just build on this as you went and eventually show itself as a flower and evolve from there.
How long do these things take to build, and when they're finished building, is that what stays on screen, or does it erases off and you start over?
Jim Nista: The big idea that I started with for this project and just going back one step is this really came from before the pandemic when I started trying to learn oil painting again. I had done it in college and art classes and things like that, and it was always a fun passion. But I was struggling because when I was learning oil painting, especially during the pandemic-that was my hobby-I kept making paintings that were almost too realistic and I challenged myself. I was like, I know how to code too, so why can't I code a paint stroke that can teach me how to be more loose? And this is where the genesis of this came from, and from there, I let this take on a life of its own, but along the process, I decided I don't want this to look as organic as it could.
The overall idea is that it creates a piece as you're watching it and then destroys it and creates a new one, and then destroys that and creates a new one, and the idea came out of so many video walls, and we've all done them where you end up with a five-minute loop of stock footage, and there's a lot of fatigue that you can imagine from employees who have to visit, watch this screen every single day to, guests and visitors having to see the same content over and over again and just the boring factor of yeah, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this video while now we're gonna spend a thousand dollars on content. There are so many projects that are like that, and so I was thinking, how can I put together something that is eternal content, or at least, doesn't need to be changed as often?
And that was the genesis behind this. Let it create a piece, let it destroy it, let it make a new one, let it destroy that, and just eternally create work that hopefully carries some unique nature to it, and that's part of what this code carries, it will not just change the colors throughout the day and do dramatic colors at sunrise and sunset and things like that, but it also changes its colors and I even call it mood. It changes its mood throughout the year, so for running this on a video wall, it would be never the same image. There would be a lot of similarities from day to day. There would be a lot of similarities if you looked at something in one November versus next November, you'd see a lot of similarities, of course. But that content would constantly evolve and change throughout the day, the month, and the seasons, and with the idea that you just can truly set this and forget about it, walk away and let this run on a video wall indefinitely and truly never see the same thing twice.
What's the timeline?
I imagine there are all kinds of variables and parameters you can set, but typically, is it the sort of thing that builds over the space of four hours or four minutes?
Jim Nista: I've been playing around with it and I love the idea of letting these things run even longer. But right now I've found, at least from people watching some of the early samples and some of the places that I've installed it, that shorter time durations are better, so about a minute to create a piece and letting it linger for a little while after it's created and then destroying it, and that really does seem to be the sweet spot.
Now everything is just code. So if somebody said, I want it to run and build for four hours, I can certainly do that, but I was funny as I've been building this because it's code I can just run it in a web browser, that means I can run it on my phone, and so I've been able to annoy friends but demo this out in front of a lot of people as I've been working on it, and I noticed very early on that the slower pieces tended to have people looking away as opposed to looking at it, so capturing a performance of creating this piece within a minute and refining it and almost getting the rough sketch done sooner rather than later, really that's how it started to feel like it was creating a performance that people would wanna watch, and I think it can capture people's attention while they're transiting through space, which is a lot of these sorts of corporate AV installations take place. Nobody is expected to just stand there and look at it for a really long time. So it's tuned into that.
But I do know that even running it in my own space, I have a projector here and I can run it on a big wall from time to time just to see it, that sometimes when it is more ambient, letting it build for several minutes is a better approach. But in the public space, I think about always seeing, and when somebody first walks into this space, I don't know what point of the build, of the painting it's gonna be at, it's just continual, and so the goal is to just have it always look good, and that's been a very difficult goal to achieve because you think about something at the very beginning of it drawing, it might be very abstract, and it's hard for people to understand.
When you say, it builds, and then it destroys itself. What does that look like when it's in destruction mode, so to speak?
Jim Nista: I had to make the brushes move a lot faster during that mode so that it does attract attention like something's being wiped out. But I also found that leaving a lot, not completely erasing the canvas, leaving a lot of the underlying or previous painting adds a lot of character as well, and so it roughly washes over with larger brushes and lighter brushes, but it will leave pieces of the previous painting there, and that's a nice approach.
Now there's another version of this that was more prevalent in Orlando that we ran there, which is more of a continual mode where rather than creating an image behind the scenes, it's creating a 3D image and using that instead and so now that can constantly rotate or unfold or evolve, and so that's an alternative version. So in that one, the destruction is almost immediately where it is changing from, let's say, creating an orange flower to now evolving into creating a purple flower. That transition is a lot less noticeable than some of the other versions of this that I'm running, which are creating one painting, building that painting, and then destroying it.
So there are a few different ways that I've envisioned this, and one is truly continuous, but evolving where rather than Building and painting and destroying, it's constantly painting, and what it's painting is constantly changing, and so it's a different approach and that process requires a little bit more horsepower. So I've built one of these that I know, from having worked at digital signage, we don't necessarily always have the fastest media players in the world, and so one of these, I've tuned is low cost and even with previous generation media players, we're getting some really fast new media players that have GPUs built into them, so that's really going to be wonderful to take advantage of. But I built this before those were really available to me, and some of the versions of this are really designed for a sort of solid-state media player, like BrightSign players or SpinetiX players, that kind of thing, right?
Where I've been focused on turning this around, they're great HTML engines, they don't have a lot of memory, and they don't have a lot of horsepower, but how can we do generative art on that type of hardware, which is so prevalent around the industry?
So this doesn't need to be on a big-ass media server.
Jim Nista: There's a version that does, and that's the version that I was running in Orlando because of course we had a lot of horsepower there and a bigger screen too, to take advantage of. But yeah, there's a version of this that's just pure JavaScript and I've tested it all over the place, including on a 15-year-old laptop, and it runs fine there.
So I've written for a number of years now about visualized data, and that's evolved into the terminology of generative visuals and generative AI. But you skip past this really quickly when you're explaining things that this isn't AI. This is its own thing, right?
Jim Nista: Yeah, I could have used some machine learning techniques for this in terms of creating the underlying primitive image. But rather than doing that, given that I'm dealing with somewhat simple shapes like flowers and landscapes and hills and trees and things like that, code can easily create things like trees and landscapes and those types of things. So it didn't make sense for me to train this in a machine learning model to build those primitives for me, and certainly, machine learning wouldn't help with the process of coming up with the painting itself, but the idea of connecting this to live data or sensors in space is really where this is headed.
I've had other projects that are more interactive or immersive, especially involving the Microsoft Kinect from the Xbox Days before it evolved into this commercial tool toy. So now some of the new work around this is, reading what's happening in space. So if somebody is standing in front of this and they're wearing red, the flowers will be red, and so those are some of the pieces that are coming out within this because yeah, it's generative. I can pull weather data, I can pull any sort of information and add it to the mix of what I'm currently doing.
Oddly, some of the early versions of this were intended and requested to be offline, completely isolated from the internet, and run forever, and so really the only data that those have is the clock. They just know the time and the date, and that's the only data that they can use. So everything has been pre-programmed in and it's just following its script forever, but there's so much randomness to it has a tendency to never repeat.
So one of the things that were interesting about walking around the exhibit hall at Infocomm recently was seeing how a lot of the big display guys, particularly the LED guys, were using generative art on the displays instead of just like the stock videos and so on, which was what happened for a whole bunch of years.
It is the sort of thing that Refik Anadol pioneered; there may be another artist as well, but that's the one that most people would know. Is that the sort of thing you could conceivably do with this as well, or is it just a different track?
Jim Nista: No, a lot of the work that he's doing, and I don't mean to trivialize it because when I see some of the work that he's doing, he's pulling in these massive data sets, right? But a lot of the work itself is running through software that I use as well, like TouchDesigner, and a lot of the same type of effects are happening. What he's built, and a lot of people are copying, unfortunately for him, but what he's built is in some respects, a two-part process. He's pulling all of this data together and then from there, using his own code to render it, and that a lot of that is done in software, like TouchDesigner, Unity, Unreal Engine, those types of applications is where a lot of this happens. But yeah, I think that one challenge that we're facing is that an artist like him, his style is identifiable, but as I was walking around the shift floor, I'm seeing essentially what are either ripoffs, direct ripoffs of his work, or artists just copying it or inspired by his work.
At the end of the day, and again, I don't mean to trivialize what he's doing, but there are effects built into these software applications that sort of mimick his style. He was the first guy to come up with it and use those tricks and techniques and everything else. But a lot of people can just follow along a 30-minute YouTube tutorial and mimic a lot of the work that is coming from him and then some of these other generative artists as well. So there is danger in that, working this way becomes somewhat easy if your style becomes popular to mimic it, and it's sad to see that so many companies are either hiring somebody to copy this artist's style or just outright taking the work directly from other videos that he's published online.
But it's unfortunate. It happens. It's nicer to see though because most of the time what we see at these is somebody running movie trailers or worse, Big Buck Bunny or those blender foundation free videos, and those are very well produced, but they're now 15 years old, and it's like blenders have gotten better in the last 15 years, and so it's nice to see a little bit more creativity around the show floor, but at the end of it, it's not creative because a lot of it's just, “Hey, look at this popular artist. Let's take his work.” And there's a fine line with that. I certainly would love to have some of my demos made available, but, at the same point, if we start seeing it over and over again or people are copying it, it's a nice form of flattery, but it's also dangerous form of flattery as well.
One thing that you mentioned when you were finalizing this stuff for this big video wall was you said that the actual code package scripting or however you wanna describe it, and you'll do a better job than me obviously, was so light that you could have loaded this on a couple of floppy disc, which for the youngsters out there, look it up, and you'll see what a floppy disc is.
Jim Nista: It's the icon that we use when we save things on our regular software. Not that anybody has seen one in a while.
That canvas we were working on for the Orlando project is 18,000 by 3,000 pixels, so a lot of real estate, and of course, this was rendered out, we've given the nature of the project and everything, but if that had been delivered generatively, it's just shader code. That project was built using a concept called GLSL shaders, and it's code, it's a weird code language. It borrows a lot from many different types of scripting languages, but it's for creating visuals like that through code and the files that created those flowers, the individual code for some of those was 9 kilobytes. Just because it's just a little script running and doing all this creative. But what's funny in there is that along the way, as I was initially building some of these projects, I would go into graphics software like Adobe Illustrator for example. I'd go into that graphic software and I'd hand draw what I thought a paintbrush should look like.
And so now I've got this little chunk, not really code, but a vector graphic of what a paintbrush should look like, and over time, all of those little things that I did, I took them out and said, no, I need to code what a paintbrush looks like. I can't rely on having drawn something in advance and so all of these asset files initially part of this just to save a step or move faster were removed and just replaced with code. So there's just one file that builds these experiences that just has to be launched in and played back. Some of those are HTML and run in a web browser. Some of them are not HTML and would need a GPU to render out properly. But yeah, they're very small files that run.
Obviously if it's running in a web browser, the digital sign's just going to be playing its HTML content and the file that is uploaded to, for example, BrightSign players can go a few kilobytes. It's a fun different process versus hundreds of gigabytes of files and or these large dataset files that we see from some of these artists where they're saying, “I built this dataset analyzer that goes through a million photos of this city to create this art.” And I'm looking at it going, that's cool, I created some random noise channels to get my data to generate my randomness rather than having to go through millions of photos.
It's certainly a different approach and makes for fun stories as far as not having to deliver all of these massive files. I've had some surprises along the way. “I don't think you sent me everything.” “Yes, I did.” Just launch it on the BrightSign player and see what it does.
So operationally, there are implications it seems, in terms of data transmission times, and bandwidth consumption, although that's not as big an issue as it used to be, and local storage, things like that. Are there other kinds of operating implications or advantages of going down this path?
Jim Nista: Yeah, I think the biggest advantage is just being able to promise a client that the content's not going to get stale, right?
You can set it and truly forget it.
Jim Nista: Yeah, and that provides a big advantage to it. There are some other challenges to this, and so certainly some of the projects that I've done where we, after a while, realized that that particular circumstance and that particular hardware are not really conducive to running generative, and in those cases, I've rendered eight-hour-long movies, I just let my computer do the generative work and record it, and then upload a big, long movie. So that defeats the purpose and the idea of having to send a nine-kilobyte file, now all of a sudden, it's turned into a big, long movie. But for the most part, no, there's really not too much to consider with this, especially on the simpler version of this code, which certainly is not as dramatic as what we're seeing in museums, in some of the early days of some of the generative artists that are starting to get really well noticed.
But I'm also thinking in terms of the real-world applications of this, we have a lot of low-cost, low-power media players out there in the world that are well suited towards this and can handle a project like this without overheating or anything else like that. So that was a big driving factor for me that I know a lot of other artists wouldn't really even think to put limitations on themselves like that. They would just think, I don't care about the technology and then suddenly create a project that requires multiple of the latest, greatest expensive GPUs on a Windows device, which is nothing wrong with Windows, as we all know, it's not the biggest friend in digital signage. It's a noisy operating system, and it wants to make its presence known, and what we're looking for most of the time is all of that stuff to be in the background as far as possible.
Is this something that you came up with or was it technology that existed and some people were using and you've just adopted it and done your own thing with it?
Jim Nista: I think in terms of the work that I'm doing with GLSL shaders, and the more modern GPU process, I'm coming into a workflow that other people have been pioneering, and so I'm just getting more than my feet wet with that, but it really is newer.
But on the other side, building generative art on, essentially, think about some of the last-generation BrightSign players, we're talking about devices that were designed in 2015-2016. So seven years old and already intended for a solid state and not necessarily have any GPUs. That idea to create generative art on some of these older devices, is new, and I have not seen anybody building content that way. I don't know why you would, right? If you start on a project like this and you don't create limitations for yourself, your are going to want to have the best GPU, you're going to want the best system to run it on. You're going to aim for the highest caliber, and here I am going, no way, I got to aim for these devices that are out of date and not necessarily have the fastest horsepower, but I know I can count on them and I know I can rely on them and I know that they're going to do what part of this project's goal was for me, which is to run indefinitely, right? To be able to create something like this.
I think another idea that's always popped into my head, and just as an odd way, is if you go to a contemporary art museum or gallery and you see audiovisual art fairly often, it's a big part of it, and I was at one a couple of years ago, I went to one of those big art shows where they have the galleries come and I bought the tickets and I decided I wanted to go see this like the Art Basel but Frieze is the one that I went to, and I noticed a lot of the AV was very poorly running. So they're trying to sell us a million-dollar art project and there's a BrightSign player on the floor with cables, and the AV guys frame-shooting it and know it just isn't right. I know that device. I know what it's capable of. I know it could pull this off.
So a lot of that was what happens when somebody invests in one of these pieces or wants a work of art in their space. Now they have to keep it running, and they have to have an AV tech constantly going out there and patching it up and fixing it and keeping it going and all the other things and it really started to make sense as you look at it older AV art installations. There are a lot of AV artists from the 80s and 90s who used CRT devices, right? How do these museums keep that stuff running? And so it was also just a practical idea for me, having an understanding of the AV industry to think as an artist doing this work, I have to prepare for that. Who knows if anything I do will ever have longevity or maybe nobody will even look at it. But, it was an idea from the beginning. I want to help solve these things. I've been that guy on the floor fixing the BrightSign player and I don't wanna be, I don't wanna create that problem for somebody else.
So it was an idea just about born out of seeing how a lot of this audiovisual art becomes a technical nightmare, and how can I do something that is, from the beginning, avoiding those technical challenges. I've done projects until the pandemic like I had BrightSign players that had been on and running for 10 years for some projects and, if I can count on a device to just run that way, that makes this creative all the more impactful, at least easier to operate into the future, and just a fun little goal of myself to say, how can I challenge this to do something that attracts people that is interesting to look at, but then also is capable of running on much, much older devices.
So is this a product?
You've had a design agency in the past that you sold to Almo, then you went off on your own, doing your own thing, and you're spinning up an agency again. But is this something that if I could ring you tomorrow and say, yeah, I want five for five different venues, I could buy it, or how does that work?
Jim Nista: Yeah, that's part of the idea for me I wanted to do something as a creative project, but I also wanted to find a commercial space for it too, right? It's no fun just to build something and then walk away from it, and knowing and having a background in the commercial AV space, it it's designed for that, especially the more modern version that is a little bit more active. Both of them are really designed for the commercial AV space, and yeah, I've been working already with some architectural firms. I think that they're the ones that are going to get this right away. But then also there are some AV companies that are really specialists in building video walls in corporate residential spaces, right? And I think the residential spaces are going to be a big upcoming space for this, and also I think this is another factor around this type of work that it lends itself to is most larger cities in North America, have a percentage of a project's budget that has to go to art, and I've noticed more and more a lot of l led walls getting put in to satisfy that piece of the art budget, and so if I can productize this around some of the commercial AV companies that I know are getting those projects, right? They can say, oh, we spent all this money on art, but they're putting in an LED wall. You know exactly what the next step is. They're going to put the stock video on it and call it art, and so if we can have something readily available, somewhat off the shelf, and I say somewhat because I don't know too many clients who are going to just want this exactly as is.
This is custom creative. Everyone's gonna want a little bit of customization to it, and I always have known that in any of the template-type projects that I've done is that there's a piece of this that has to be still within the client's control. They feel that they drove some of the creativity, and they wanted certain colors or whatever, and I've left that as part of this. But yes it really truly is intended for this commercial AV space as a somewhat off-the-shelf product that you can just pick up and install into this as the primary visuals on an LED wall.
Some of the work that's been done by these generative artists, it's amazing and everything else, but there are six-figure projects. I don't want to put you on the spot, but can you give any sense of how this fits? Or people listening to this going, that would be amazing, but I don't have half a million dollars to buy this original creative.
Jim Nista: A lot of that comes with the name, and once you get to be a well-known and a well-identifiable artist suddenly, the prices go up. I'm not there yet, and you know a lot of projects have a tendency to fit into that magic sweet spot of the 10k budget, right? The $10,000 content budget. They're spending $250,000 on the LED and the installation and the content is still in the afterthought realm, and that's really the other idea that I've had around this.
What's very common, but when I'll get a phone call, we have an LED wall that's being built. This is the type of content, only sometimes clients are asking for generative. They come back, and they're looking for some sort of animated visuals, motion graphics, or edited video loops, and it typically comes in as a budget of around $10,000 for getting that content pulled together, and that's what I was aiming for with this is that it would fall into that sweet spot. Somebody’s looking for more or more customization, certainly, that's possible, and that would impact the price, but to just prep this and get it ready to go for your average installation is intended to be easy and also not half a million dollars, right?
At least not yet!
Jim Nista: No, and even then, if you reach that stage as an artist, there's another fun factor that comes along with it is now you have gallery exclusivity and all kinds of other things, and while it's fun, those big tickets are being shared amongst a lot of different greedy hands, and so you see something that sells for half a million dollars, the artist might have gotten 20% of that and as sad as that is, there's a lot of hands that get into those pies. So at least for now, by focusing this around a space that I know better, I don't necessarily know that gallery space so well, but I know the commercial AV space a lot better, and focusing on that, just makes a lot more sense to me.
I do interact with commercial art brokers, and that's been happening now for about the last six months or so, but, again, that space is different from the commercial art gallery space, which is very interesting.
I bet. So if people want to know more about this, how can they find you?
Jim Nista: My website is getting redone. I'm in the process of making it prettier, and I still need to put this work on there, because I have put very little on there, so this is all new for me as I'm getting this up this summer.
But yeah, it's nista.co, and I'll be enhancing that over the next couple of weeks to be showing some more of the work that I'm doing. I have a few projects that are wrapping up all around the same time, so I should get those wrapped up, get some photographers out to those locations, and then get this content on my website. If you look at it today, it could be showing off some of the generative work.
Okay. Thank you. That was terrific. I now understand it better, although I'm not ready to sit down and try to do it myself.
Jim Nista: No, it's fine. I appreciate this and the opportunity to talk a lot more. I'm having a blast with it. I can't wait to see what else is out there as I get more involved with this work.
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Francesco Ziliani, SpinetiX
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The Swiss technology firm SpinetiX has evolved its go-to-market approach through the years - positioning itself much more as a software solutions firm than as a manufacturer of very nice media layout boxes ... that also came with software.
The company has end-point devices that have been operating flawlessly for years, but to grow and meet demands, it had to look at what it wanted to be and what it wanted to do.
Now, founder and longtime CEO Francesco Ziliani is talking in terms of SpinetiX being a SAAS software company, and happily showing how carefully selected partners - like Taiwan's iBase - are also now making hardware that works with the platform.
I met with Francesco down in Orlando, where the company had a stand at InfoComm and was also doing off-site meetings and demos with partners. We get into a lot of things, including where he's seeing a lot of market growth. As is the case more broadly, workplace communications is a big growth driver.
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TRANSCRIPT
We started out by my asking him about company priorities right now ...
Francesco Ziliani: Look, this year, the priority is to remind people that we are still hardware because we believe hardware is important, but software as a service is really what I believe is the right strategy, the right vision for us, and to make this model SaaS for an indirect sales channel work, because if you think about most of SaaS, they are a direct business. Microsoft and Adobe sell direct; we do not.
We have two levels, distributors and resellers. So to make this model work, you need active partners. So you don't need only an opportunist or someone who once has an opportunity and starts selling SpinetiX. You really need someone who says, I share the same vision. I like the product, and I keep learning it so I can bring more over time, and it's through that AV channel; only some are ready for this step. Many people like box-moving types of business, right? I buy something, I add the margin, I install and resell. So everything I can do to inspire resellers to ask themselves, is SaaS for digital signage, for my customers, and for me, interesting? Am I ready to explore it seriously? That's something there that can help SpinetiX.
Yeah, the company has, in certain respects, pivoted, not really, but when I think about SpinetiX, I think about these gorgeous little boxes that are ultra-reliable, and you get the software with it, and now you are talking much more as a software company that has its own purpose-built boxes, and as you were telling me before we turned the microphone on, getting partners.
Francesco Ziliani: Yes. Our tagline is: We do everything except scrapes because it's true. We have the hardware. Now, we use partners to manufacture, but we co-design. We have the operating system, the DSOS, and the rendering engine all integrated, and that's also quite unique because, let's take BrightSign, for example, they have their operating system, but they allow others to install the rendering engine, and now you have two people responsible. BrightSign is upgrading the operative system, the CMS might not follow up or vice versa. The CMS needs to do something, and BrightSign is not there yet.
In our work, that cannot happen. It's like Apple. We control everything. So every update is tested and comes with everything you need. That's why the reliability is so high. So that's also an advantage. Now this is still there. It's available on GP 400. Now we can also install the same DSOS on an SDM module. Sharp NEC is a partner now that we signed, and we are going to have a Sharp NEC display in the booth with the SDM. So that's integrated.
What’s an SDM?
Francesco Ziliani: Smart device module. So SDM and IBASE have the same philosophy. So now I'm not forced to manufacture myself. I can ask someone, you are good at manufacturing, you manufacture and install my operating system on it. So we work together. The operating system is very reliable, we cut everything useless for digital signage, so very compact, and then rendering engine with all the APIs, and so we basically make all these players like a zombie for SpinetiX., and as a zombie, they can talk with IO.
They're zombies because it's a defined, tightly contained operating system.
Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely. You cannot install any program on it. You cannot change it. Everything is locked. Yeah, and that is for security. You cannot jump on it and say, okay, now I install a program or install something else. This thing comes natively compatible with ARYA CMS. Aria is a highway of data to players. But when we work with banks, the player is within the bank's network. We talk to ARYA through http to know what to display and to get the instructions. But once the instructions are on the player, it locally talks with sensors, databases, and whatever services. So it's fully secure. Even if I cut the internet, the player has the capacity to get data around him autonomously on the local network.
So it's not streaming video; it's really like a CMS as an application. Easy to use, made for the end user, no training needed. That's the value of it, and every time you need to do something more complex, our partners use Elementi, which is our offering tool. They create the widget, customize it, and have a button to upload on the right ARYA account. With the button, ARYA has an additional asset, which can do whatever it has been designed for. So connecting to an SMTP or doing whatever. Now this set in ARYA is like a video, it's like an image, so it's a programmable element, so the end user cannot look inside. It's just there, but he can put it in a layout in a very simple way. So you understand that we make the end user autonomous with a tool that always remains simple, and we give our partners a tool that makes them able to program whatever they want, and now this is a combo. So we integrated this, so when you create a project with Elementi for using widgets, you know that you need to have an ARYA widget.
When you create a more complex project with Elementi, you need streaming—that system type of license in Element. We have the planning system in ARYA, so we simplify this combo with integration, and we can offer the right tool to the right audience.
So if I'm an end user and I'm interested in this, I'm getting an IBASE box, and it's going to be connected and managed via ARYA. Is Elementi opt-in, or is it fundamental too?
Francesco Ziliani: It's an option. So let's see the path. You buy an IBASE, it comes with our operating system, and it comes with everything you need to connect on ARYA. The first step is ARYA Discovery which is free of charge. You can have one screen, you can have 1000 screens. You create your account, you pair your players, and your screens on your account and you can start publishing images and videos, and that's all free. You don't spend anything on the cloud right now. At a certain point, you get stuck because you need more users or more storage, or more functionalities, that’s when you need to upgrade to ARYA Enterprise.
ARYA Enterprise is an indirect channel. So you need a SpinetiX partner. You need someone who knows how to set it up, and how to help you discover more. So you contact a partner and the partner comes to you and asks, “What do you want to do?” And if your needs are basic, you just upgrade to ARYA Enterprise by paying an annual fee. The partner will call you at the end of each year saying, “Is everything fine, do you need more?” Then let's say you need more, because you now understand that you are responsible for spending two hours per day updating images and all these images are already in your database, so you would like this to be automatic. So your ARYA Enterprise is now upgraded to ARYA Enterprise Widget and in the widget, you are compatible with Elementi widget projects. So it means that your supplier, your SpinetiX partner is designing for you with Elementi, which is the right tool, programs you, whatever you like, and once he has created that content shows you say, “Hey, is that what you want?” “Yes.” And with one click, it's in your account, and now as an end user, you can use that widget, and decide to show it in the lobby or in a certain location, with a certain background, with a clock or a countdown, whatever you like. But you are autonomous because that thing has been designed for you.
And like this, we value the services of our partner who is fully autonomous with Elementi. They don't need us. But we also protect the end customer, who can still ask them to do the job because they don't need to understand what's behind, and before, when we only had Elementi, it was not like this. We had Elementi, which was a complex product in the hands of an end user. So some end users love it. But most of the end user we're saying it's too complex.
Yeah, I don't have time to learn this!
Francesco Ziliani: “I don't have the time, and I'm using it perhaps with my intern and the guy is not trained, so he's making mistakes and he is gonna leave.”
So ARYA is simple for that type of user, still we are not limiting the experience. Now what I want to fight is leveraging down. I want to leverage up, so that's why I am calling partners to say, “You cannot just sell ARYA Discovery for free or just our enterprise for an annual fee for basic features, you need to upsell your services, customize it.” Because if you don't do that, then the hundreds of CMS that will beat us one day. So instead, if I'm able to create this local relationship with the supplier, and the end user. Instead of being in a relationship, I supply once and I go away, I'm a partner with you, so I'm with you with the evolution of your needs, then I'm making my customers loyal, and that's the secret of SaaS, because every year you add something and we double every year the number of new things but if we lose the previous one, then it's like having a bucket that is leaking. So you add water but it's not growing. And I want to remove leaks, and to remove leaks, you need to create this loyalty, this relationship
We're sitting in at InfoComm and historically the integration companies that come to InfoComm are looking for products and they're thinking about margin and how many of these can we move and everything else and, historically at least, it’s been a bit of a struggle to get a lot of these companies to understand, you also should be in service. There's recurring revenue in that. With shrinking margins and everything else, this is something you need to do.
Is it hard to find those companies that understand that or that a lot of them are waking up to it?
Francesco Ziliani: There are many that are ready to do this, but it's true. AV is not IT yet. They are blending, converging, there are good things in both communities. But I think the opportunity AV has is great because they have the relationship with the end customer already, because they are selling services of support. So it's just a click in their mind, in their mindset, to say, “Hey, now, I'm not selling you a box, I'm selling you a service. I'm with you supporting, training, inspiring you”, and of course I understand that perhaps they tried solutions that were not reliable yet, or not delivering on their promises and it's true that if you are not protected on that side, you are in trouble, because you don't have actions to take. So you want a solution which is reliable, secure, and you want to build your services there, on top of that type of solution.
But we see people that are, I'm not saying afraid, but they have an attitude of, let's see what's for me, and probably start one project after the other. I'm going to give an example of a company in Switzerland who started four years ago with ARYA with a few units at the beginning, few customers, they start calling existing customers they have, proposing the new model, and now it's a small company, but they already have more than a $100,000 in record revenue and now if you think like this, a hundred thousand means that you can have a part-time employee developing more, and the hardware is very reliable, so the end customer does not have reason to stop. The product is evolving, so you don't have reasons to look for competition and they’re running in parking lots, they’re running in schools, fulfilling different types of needs, and the solution works very well. They’re very happy, and I'm using them as an example to say, “Hey, you can start, even if you're a small company, there are local opportunities to you that might start with just one screen the first year, and then double, and then upgrading to more powerful plans and the solution is open, you can upgrade, you are not forced to stay three years, five years, every year. You can choose. So yeah I think it's a modern app approach to digital signage.
When I think about SpinetiX, historically, I think of these beautiful little boxes and the stories I hear about how they're still in the field 10 years later, 12 years later, and so on. So reliability, durability is a big thing.
I'm sure that's still the case, but it’s not what you lead with anymore, right?
Francesco Ziliani: We want to do more. But by doing more, we are not forgetting where we are coming from and so the hardware remains reliable, the know-how is in the team. But I think, yeah, we would like to scale up a bit more.
And is that the driver behind, like you've always manufactured or contract manufactured, or designed your own boxes, but now you're adding hardware partners, more partners. Is that just for scale?
Francesco Ziliani: Scale is one reason. The second reason is that we live in a complex world where supply chain manufacturing, finding chips are a challenge for everyone.
We learned many things in the past three years.
Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, and despite the fact that we had a very good relationship, so we have been able to go through difficult times, I realize we are not in the position to guarantee right availability for whatever type of project. So we need to have Plans B, C, and all the work we have done on the Intel platform opens us to a lot of opportunities, and then if you think about it, we have a product we are launching, which has four outputs. So that's ideal for video walls. Four outputs, perfectly synchronized. You just plug in, you use it as a single screen from ARYA or from Elementi easily.
So you could blend an 8k LED wall?
Francesco Ziliani: More. It's four times 4k. So you could have 2x2 8k video walls if you want, or 1x4, or even just 1x2 and we can already do this with the synchronization feature of our players. That you only have one device, so it's more convenient in terms of price. One license, one device. What is the volume behind? I don't know. It may be a hundred units, a thousand units. If I'm manufacturing that device, I put myself in a niche of a niche. And there are people that are good at doing that. That may use the same product for other applications. So why not collaborate with them, helping them learn why we need POE in digital signage, right? Or why we are asking them for a higher capacity battery. So there are specificities in terms of synchronization, security that are of our industry, but I can share that with this supplier, and, at the end, we come with a product which they manufacture for us to fit the needs of our industry, from our perspective, of course.
Now this, I think, it's the best we can do for our customers, offering them more options and not being limited on the investments that we can do ourselves.
Are you challenged at all to service the - I don't wanna say lower end of the market, but small to medium businesses, the kinds of end users who are maybe using an Amazon Fire Stick or a cheap Android player or something like that - can you even compete with that or is that not who you're after?
Francesco Ziliani: No, today, that's not our target, and we understand that there are customers that have really big constraints in terms of cost or budget. But we are really focused on long-term relationships with our partners. So we want devices and hardware and software that we can master. I don't want to find myself in a situation where I'm asking you one question and I don't know how to answer. Of course our support is best, but we cannot guarantee a result every time, but we want to have tools that we control.
Now Intel Ecosystem has devices, which in terms of budget are much more accessible than our HMP 400, which is, inducer design made for wide range temperature, supporting POE. So we have been able to offer that flexibility to some of our projects. What I'm satisfied with is often the customer is challenging us on price, then I offer them the alternative, which is budget compatible, but they still buy the HMP at the end, because they realize that CapEx is important, but operating costs are also there, and if you have a product that is designed to live two, three years, it will fail statistically on that period, and customers are smart. They know where their money needs to go. If they have a long-term vision, they will buy more reliable devices. It's better for them.
Has the end user profile changed much through the years? Are you seeing new vertical markets and new kinds of customers showing up?
Francesco Ziliani: Yes, corporate and education are booming for us. We also see a lot of requests in manufacturing environments, and plants where basically you have a production line that uses screens to motivate the people working on the lines with videos.
Shows KPIs, dashboards, etc.
Francesco Ziliani: Not only that, motivational videos are triggered by the KPIs they measure. So you don't have a sterile gauge or red-green level, right? You really have someone that is based on, is it Friday? Is it at the end of your turn, to understand the KPIs and give you the message that is relevant for you where you are.
I think digital signage is a narrow term for us sometimes. I hope you can visit our new building in Switzerland. We have this corporate building where we rent spaces to different companies, and we have a lot of digital signage there from the parking lot to the roof. We really see the impact that digital signage has in a corporate environment to inspire people, to inform them about services, about what's going on where, before going home at five o'clock, six o'clock, we display the map of the traffic, so you can make a decision, should I take a drink before going with colleagues or is it the right time to leave? We have the timetables of trains, and buses appearing at the right time. Little things that make the user of the building achieve an easier life. That is growing a lot. We sell a lot to military campuses like Fort Knox in the US and place like that.
Yeah, I was about to ask about security. If you're doing Fort Knox, and you mentioned before I turned on the microphone that you're also doing NASA, so obviously, you're pretty solid on security.
Francesco Ziliani: Yes. I think our team really designed products with security in mind, and that's a game changer, and it's challenging. Still, I think it's important because you put a lot of information, you put your credibility on the screens, on your network of screens. If someone is able to bypass your security, then you risk a lot in terms of image or terms of trouble, or continuity of service. It's really the customers we have that consider the investment as business critical, so security is definitely important, and then, GDPR in Europe is important, so everything related to how you protect your personal information and we have corporations that are asking us, what are the logs that we can access to know who has used the data, if the data remains in the cloud or not, where is it a store? Is it in Europe, in Germany, or in the US? So that means a lot of infrastructure work, a lot of tools that are only sometimes seen by the end customer if they're not interested, but a large corporation, know what they need. SSO (single sign-on) as well, these are all tools that facilitate a lot of the deployments and acceptance of our solution.
You're European-based, have you seen shifts in terms of where the business is?
I've heard from some companies who've said Europe is going along okay, but the real growth is in North America. is that what you're experiencing as well?
Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, North America, I think we are just scratching the surface of opportunity. So today, we are, more or less, half in terms of our business. But I see a huge potential in the US. That's why we have invested in a team of three people. Before, we didn't have anyone. We only had distributors, but now we have three local people, and Europe is doing well. They are indeed asking themselves a lot of questions about the impact of power use for digital signage. But at the same time, they realize that. The benefits are there as well, right? So you need to inform people. You need to keep this communication channel open, and of course, it has a cost, but if you do it right, the benefits are higher. So I think we passed that period where everyone was saying, switch off because we need to save.
I advocate if you use this tool to do the right communication, then the investments are worth, it because the impact is big, and in the end, you can change bad habits. I'm 16 years into digital signage, and I'm a believer in the benefits of digital signage for many, many sectors.
What you're talking about on the factory floors, I think the same thing could apply in healthcare environments as well, where there are just so many ways that you could be communicating with people, and these are people who either don't because of their job or don't have time because of how busy they are to sit down and read stuff, they're going to see stuff when they're zipping down a hallway or along a corridor, and if there's a screen there that's going to motivate them or inform them or tell them, “There's a gas leak, go that way, get out!” That has incredibly valuable.
Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely, and it's true that hospitality in the large sense, whether in a hospital or a restaurant, in a hotel chain, or a campus, it's all about delivering relevant information, and our product, our solution, is made to automate. Of course, you need someone to know what to do, but the technology is there. And you can really take into account all the parameters. You can add artificial intelligence. You can imagine a world of possibilities, but it needs to be simple, and I remember we made an audit some time ago, and we were asking our customers what they think about Elementi, our software, and half of the customers said, it's the easiest software that we have been using, and the other half was saying it's the hardest software we have been using, and that is because basically, we were providing one tool to two audiences.
So simplicity is a relative concept. If you understand your audience, you are able to provide the right tool, then you are delivering a simple tool to them, but you cannot make something like programming simple for everyone. It's a lot of investment.
I think having the capability with the solution to really segment the stakeholders and address their needs, that’s at the end, our innovation is that we are bringing with this integration with ARYA, and that's what I believe is going to be the future for our industry and many other people will contribute with dedicated software for specific verticals like business management, building management, right? You have dedicated software for restaurants, and all this is going to be simple for the right audience, and our job is to collect the data from this software, to make it simple to animate the network of screens so that the information is delivered in a relevant way.
All right. Thank
Francesco Ziliani: You're welcome.
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Chris Grosso, Intersection
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The out of home media company Intersection is probably best known as the operator of that network of smart cities display totems - called LinkNYC - on the sidewalks of Manhattan and New York City's boroughs. But the company has a much bigger footprint around the United States - mainly mass transport systems, but also the flashy Hudson Yards mixed-use development in New York, and United Airlines.
I had a good chat with Chris Grosso, who took over as CEO a couple of years ago, but had already been with the company for a few years, having come over from the broadcast and digital world.
We got into several things - like the state of the DOOH industry and the evolving needs and demands of the municipal governments who become business partners for Intersection. Smart cities needs, for example, are shifting.
We also get into Intersection's recently announced addition of AI-driven ad and content targeting, with the idea of making what's on screens not just relevant to the city, but all the way down to neighbourhoods and streets.
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TRANSCRIPT
Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Intersection Is all about?
Chris Grosso: Sure, and thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here, Dave and I very much enjoy reading your publication and the newsletter, and the email all the time. I’m Chris Grosso, the CEO of Intersection. We are a leading out-of-home advertising company in the USA focused on major US cities. We really are differentiated from the other out-of-home companies in three ways. One is typically we put in consumer amenities in center cities, most notably things like the LinkNYC program in New York, so Wifi kiosks across the city of New York. We do customer information and advertising systems for places like Chicago Transit Authority and SEPTA Transit Authority in Philadelphia.
And we do bus shelters in many US cities as well. So very much driven by bringing consumer amenities and partnerships with cities and transit authorities. The second biggest differentiator for us, which is most relevant to this conversation, is our focus on content and programming. We like to put useful content on our digital screens, and we wanna put entertaining content on our digital screens, and that could be anything from what time your train is coming to what the weather might be to art or fun facts. We want to program these screens just as you program any other screen in order to make them entertaining and engaging for consumers.
And the last piece of our business we pride ourselves on is selling data-driven advertising. We like to be very focused on the data that helps our advertisers understand who they're reaching when they advertise with us, as well as what happens after the release.
So the idea of consumer amenity that I gather that the smart city-ish kiosk that you're putting on the street and other things like that, that’s a more modern version of the amenities, to use your term, that outdoor companies have been doing for a whole bunch of time with bus shelters, right?
Chris Grosso: For sure, and we're also in the bus shelter business as well. We do some stuff with Bikeshare, and I think it's a long tradition in out-of-home advertising to bring the amenity to allow us to get access to the public right of way to put the advertising in, and this is very valuable for a city transit authority because they're getting something that they don't have to put up the cash for. So it's a real value-creating event both for the communities as well as the advertisers.
Is it the price of entry now for particularly larger urban geographies like New York and so on, where if you want to play, you're going to have to provide infrastructure as well? Can't you just put in display totems?
Chris Grosso: I think it really depends on the municipality and the deal structure. In some cases, companies have to put up the capital and bring the amenity and bring the service into the community, and that can both be the infrastructure, but increasingly also the software and the services that you can bring. But there are also some cases where, you know, particularly with the Infrastructure Financing Act, that the city or municipality might want to put up the capital for the infrastructure themselves, in which case we'll partner with them to create the revenue stream as well as overlay the data and the software to really get the most out of the infrastructure.
In all cases, I think that it's important is being able to have these digital screens up, having software to put the right content in the right app at the right time a big is an important part of the equation and a big differentiator for us.
Does that happen much where you have municipalities that are making a capital investment?
Chris Grosso: It depends on the deal, but yes, and there's a couple of different ways you do that sometimes the municipality puts up some of the capital themselves. In other cases, in many of these deals, we recoup the capital through the revenues. So we might if we put up the money and then recoup it out of the payments to the city.
So there are many different ways you can do a deal.
Chris Grosso: There are many different ways you can do a deal. There are a handful of companies, of which we are really good at this and have built a strong team that knows how to work with cities, work with transport authorities, and create value, both for us and also for the cities.
I think one big differentiator for Intersection is we are a mission-driven company, and we are very focused on making cities better through our products.
You came out of Broadcast & Online, which is very much a digital entity, and now you're running a company that has to do a lot of infrastructure and has to do these sorts of capital-intensive deals. Was that a big adjustment?
Chris Grosso: It's a different business. There are a lot of similarities between being in the digital media space and the Intersection space. But certainly, in the last few years, I've learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about trenching and conduit and coin fiber and a lot of construction.
I like to say I was in consulting, and then I was in media and software. So this is the first job I actually had, physical things to deal with, and it's an interesting and exciting part of the job, and it's a real differentiator for us at Intersection. Because we have people who are very good at digital media, but we also have people who are very good at working with cities. And we've got an extraordinary team of folks who really understand how to deploy and operate these things in physical space, and that goes for even the guys who are out, cleaning and posting. We've got a really great team of professionals and field operations who really understand work in physical space, and part of what makes our business both fun also gives us a leg up is we're good at these different disciplines.
You also, I assume, had to learn a lot about politics and about city bylaws.
Chris Grosso: We've got people who very much understand that world for sure.
Which is a bit of a labyrinth.
Chris Grosso: One could say that.
You have to deal with them, so you're being careful. I can understand that.
Chris Grosso: I think the level of talent in these city governments is really impressive and we benefited at Intersection when we started, we were put together by a historic business Titan, which was an out-of-home advertising company, and then Control Group, which was a digital innovation company, we put together to create Intersection in 2016, right before I started.
But we had the benefit of Dan Doctoroff being our chairman, who helped put the deal together and was an alumnus of the Bloomberg administration. We've benefited from some folks who come out of that world, who really understand that and did a great job in government and then can help us understand how to do stuff with the government in a way that creates value for the population and citizens, and people who live in the cities for sure, but also, creates economic value for our business.
When the whole Smart Cities thing bubbled up with LinkNYC and other initiatives like that, there was a lot of noise around it. This seemed to be the way that digital at home was going, that anything that was going into big municipalities was going to have to be a smart city initiative in some way. Has that really played out?
Because I don't hear as much and/or read as much noise about all that now, and I know that we can maybe get into this a little bit of the LinkNYC has had its revenue struggles through the years. I don't know where we're at with that now, but it doesn't seem like smart cities have the same kind of energy around them that maybe they did in the mid-2010s.
Chris Grosso: I think the definition of what a smart city is has evolved, and I think the parts of the smart city that are important people might not have thought of as smart cities but are huge trends in the changing nature of cities. You really saw that during the pandemic.
So what I mean by that is if you look at the evolution of mobility in a city, which wasn't the classic under the rubric of Smart Cities. Still, you think about how people get around cities now versus how they did 10 years ago with Bikeshare with Rideshare, with changes to how the transit authorities function, all of that is a much smarter way to run a city than several years ago and requires data and requires real-time information. So I think a lot of the ethos around the smart cities just got absorbed in how cities are operating, and particularly a lot of that got accelerated during the pandemic.
One of the biggest areas of smart cities is what do you do with parking? And that's outside of our world, but if you think about the pandemic that happened. It really made people reimagine what you do with street-level parking in cities because all cities, particularly New York and others in the United States, suddenly put restaurants on the restaurants due to the need for giving these restaurants the ability to run their business without indoor dining, and that reimagined the whole way people do parking. Is that a classic smart city type of initiative? I don't know, but it totally reimagined how the street works, and I think if you walked down the street on the Upper West Side today versus what you saw in 2019, it's a completely different experience with the bike share and the outdoor dining and other things of that nature.
So, are there still demands among municipalities to have these smart city kiosks/totems that are multipurpose devices that they're advertising totems? Obviously, there's an interactive thing, maybe there's WiFi built-in and sensors and so on.
Is that still being deployed and asked for?
Chris Grosso: I think the form factors are changing, and I think the needs are changing in the cities, and I think that there are a lot of fundamentals that cities need. So it may not be a totem, but cities need bus shelters, and now it's not just a bus shelter, it's a mobility hub.
Cities need advanced wayfinding to manage this multimodal transportation system that's coming out of the pandemic. Cities have always needed it, and I think we all underestimate going to smart cities. Still, we realize now that cities need the ability to broadcast content, localized content at street level. Whether it be what time my train is coming, emergency messaging, or just education around when the community board meeting is, that has a ton of value. So I think the original premise of Smart Cities is let's take an iPhone and put it at street level. I don't think that's turned into the right answer, but I do think there are applications and amenities in the right of way that are required that cities want and are ready to ask and get deployed.
And I do think you'll continue to see these kinds of initiatives. It just may not be in the form factor of totems. It may be a bus shelter because, you know what, you can put WiFi in a small shell in a bus shelter, and by the way, the bus shelter provides shade, and that's really important in certain municipalities, shelter from the rain, and that's important. So I think smart cities have evolved into what are the real needs of the people who live in the cities where before it was, “Hey, we've got a cool thing. Let us give you this.” and even if you look at the Link, the core propositions of Link like free WiFi and phone calling for sure are hugely used and hugely important. But what we also recognize is Link as a megaphone to broadcast real-time information to the city of New York is also hugely valuable and something that the community has been able to leverage effectively. Most recently, we played a big role in the we love New York campaign where, you know, if you put content on Link, we can reach, I think, 90%+ of New Yorkers a hundred times a month.
That’S a massive megaphone that can be valuable to advertisers, but it also can be valuable To the city. If there are schools that get shut down for a snowstorm, flip the switch and tell everyone the schools are shut down due to the snowstorm, that's a big value for a city. Is that a classic 2015 Smart Cities thing? I don't know, but it's a huge value. If you are a parent, figuring out whether your kid's going to go to school or not the next day.
So where is Link at in terms of rollout and viability?
There've been a number of stories through the years about revenue challenges and pace of rollout, and so on, but I haven't really seen anything for a year or more. So I'm curious where it's at, and as you said, it has its value, and people like it and everything else, but is it still the way forward? Would you continue to deploy this?
Chris Grosso: Yes, so during the pandemic, working with our partners ZenFi, we actually have a new form factor for a next-generation Link, which we call Link 5G, which has many of the original features of Link, like the free WiFi and the tablet to make phone calls, but it's taller, and it allows for multi-tenant small cells, to support New York City's 5G rollout. We are in the process of working through deploying those now with our partners ZenFi, who run Fiber and telecommunications.
So this would, this is a nice little partnership for you because they'd be able to share the infrastructure cost, I assume.
Chris Grosso: Exactly, and also they have the expertise in telecommunications. We are in the media content advertising space. We really understand media content and advertising software. But we're not telecom companies. ZenFi is a world-class telecom company. They understand fiber, they understand dealing with carriers and that kind of thing. So it is a good partnership. They've been great partners for us.
Your company recently announced, and you've been talking about localized content, that you're doing localization of content using AI. It strikes me as, great, this is something that absolutely should be done but it was also very reminiscent of stuff that was done, as much as 20 years ago when they would call it hyper-local.
But hyper-local was very difficult to achieve and very difficult to plan at that time, and it seemed more like an aspiration than something that was possible to do it in a way without a whole bunch of work. I assume that's changed hugely because of databases, APIs, and also AI.
Chris Grosso: Yeah, so we've always done localization, and given our screens are often deep in neighborhoods, it's a very effective way of doing stuff.
We've always done it, though, with structured databases, right? Weather: give me the weather in a zip code, right? Transit: give me what's going on at the closest train station when the trains are coming. Top 10 lists of the best songs in this neighborhood, but it's all very much tied around structured data, and rules engine and APIs, and we're very good at that.
We have a whole suite of dynamic advertising products. We've got a great product, for instance, that you're a retailer, you put the ad up for the retail and then a map at the bottom to tell you how to get to the closest retail location and that's highly localized, but it's all based on structured data—the big difference now what AI is that it allows you to do things with much more unstructured depth and much more visual creativity, which we're very excited about testing and rolling out. So, for instance, if you have an ad for an alcohol brand, how do you put that alcohol brand in context for a neighborhood? Maybe you show what's the relevant drink for this block, and the AI can figure out that this is the block that Edgar Allen Po lived on, so it'll be Edgar Allen Po’s drink. Trying to do that manually would be impossible. But you can do that using these AI engines and then on the visual side as well, which is very exciting. Maybe there's a mascot or character of a brand, and let's actually put that brand in context in the neighborhood and dressed up as someone from the neighborhood. You can do that kind of thing with these AI engines that if you were rying to do this yourself, you may not figure out the creative idea, and could never have the army of people who take to build all that creative. So that's why we're very excited about using these tools to do localization for unstructured data, and yeah, more creative types of ideas than the classic, “Hey, here's the top 10 songs being played in this neighborhood.”
It expands a lot of possibilities. But how do you do the gatekeeping on it? Because, as many people have described, AI can sometimes have these “hallucinations” and come up with a strange list that maybe isn't the top 10 songs in that neighborhood.
Chris Grosso: Yeah, for sure. One way you do it is to control the prompts and make sure you're being smart about how you're doing the prompting.
The second is: We still would envision having a layer of humans looking at all the creative before it goes on the screen to catch stuff that just doesn't make sense. Over time that problem might go away, but you still want some level of quality control, but it's very different to have creative designers take a look at a hundred pictures over the course of an hour and just check everything to make sure it looks good as opposed to trying to create all those mocks literally. It's a huge difference, and so I think, at least to start, we're going to have some level of human quality control in this for sure. But I still think the ability to use these tools to be able to do things you never could do before because you just didn't have the army pf people and it would not be cost-effective to work is really what we’re moving towards.
In the old days, my understanding of digital out-of-home was a media planner would develop the plan, and the media company would execute it based on the insertion orders for that plan. When you're getting into hyper-local AI-driven targeting and original content by the street, who's doing that plan?
Chris Grosso: I think it's often in partnership with the advertiser or the agency, right? There may be cases where the agency has a really good idea of what they want to do. There may be cases where the agency says, help us think this through, and we've always provided creative services to our clients whenever they needed it. So this is not far afield from what we do already.
When I mentioned some of these dynamic advertising, oftentimes, we build them on behalf of advertisers and our agencies as part of our partnership. So we envision it in the same way.
David:] I gather that programmatic is on the rise. The usage level is up. The last number I saw was like 15% of digital out-of-home ads are now booked out of programmatic platforms. Is there a bridge between programmatic and this AI-driven hyper-local stuff, or do they have to operate independently because it's just how it works?
Chris Grosso: I think to start, you have to build out these campaigns, and these campaigns will be more high-touch than your classic programmatic campaigns. So I think to start, these really have to be directlt sold because a lot of this is around the creative idea and creative concept, and there needs to be back and forth with clients to really get this right.
As opposed to programmatic, which is really about scale and tonnage and efficiency, and we spend a lot of time on programmatic as well, for sure. We launched a Place Exchange, which is an out-of-home ,SSP and we actually spun that business out because they did a lot of work with us, but they were doing work with all the other publishers, too, so it made sense to be an independent company.
We have very deep integrations with Place Exchange and several other SSPs. So we're very focused on programmatic and do view it as a growth driver. But I do think the creative side has to be much more, and I really think long term the way the business goes - I used to work for Tim Armstrong at AOL who used to call it the concept of the barbell - and I think you're going to see continued growth of programmatic, and then the direct sales really going to be about driving solutions for advertisers that are highly strategic and deep partnerships with advertisers. It could be something like the AI program, or it could be like other things we do, for instance, where we have advertisers sponsor train stations or whole train lines for multi-year deals where we work together to rename a station or a train line.
In New York City, the Bet MGM renamed the line that goes out to the Meadowlands, and we do this in other places as well. So I do think you're going to see the direct sale be much more solution-driven and working very tightly with the advertisers and the agencies to build these really cool things, whether it be AI or long-term sponsorships or big programs and then on, on the flip side, you'll see the programmatic businesses continue to scale as well.
Has the characteristics of venues and the type of venue partners evolved over the years, like the old Titan was about transit and street furniture, but you have other companies that are very active in airports and other mass transport hubs.
Is that evolving for you as well, or are you very much about kind of street-level advertising?
Chris Grosso: We're about cities and the the key thing is street level advertising in cities is really really important for us, and a big area of focus transit remains a big area of focus as well.
And then we've done a little bit in airports and airlines. We've also done work with some of the next-generation multi-use developments like Hudson Yards, where we put in the wayfinding directory system and the advertising system, and that's a great business for us. But our criteria for whether or not we want to partner with someone really comes down to being able to do something value creating in big cities, top 25 cities in the US. That's what we're good at. That's how we're differentiated and sure, the types of partners that we work with will continue to evolve just as the audiences are evolving.
If you think about the transit business, the transit business includes street furniture. It includes signage outside train stations, it includes buses, and it includes the train stations themselves. I think during the pandemic, what we found is the vast majority of our revenue, and where all the growth was is on the outside of the train station, the outside of the bus stations, everything that's at street level. And that offset the fact that the train stations themselves have fewer people, but there are still tons of people outside the train stations, and that's where we put a lot of our emphasis on the ad side.
Has the business recovered from the Covid era?
Chris Grosso: Yes. It looks different given our revenue mix, but we're largely back to pre Covid revenue levels. The bus exterior business and the street furniture business are well above. The train station part of the business is still somewhat below because the ridership is just not there. Then we're continuing to look at new types of inventory, whether it be multiuse destinations, as I said, like Hudson Yards, airlines and new forms of street furniture. For instance, we've got a great ad campaign on the bike share in some cities.
Do you have to look at municipal opportunities differently now? Because of the way Covid changed things and the urban downtown areas not being as heavily populated with office workers as they were in the past. It's different in New York or something, but let's say in Cincinnati or Minneapolis, or something where not as many people are coming into the urban area.
Chris Grosso: Yeah, we do the exact same methodology when we assess the deals that we look at, which always starts with where the audience is, and we've got folks who are really good at looking at GIS and traffic patterns and people patterns to understand the scale of the audience on all the different assets we might either deploy or take over the ad sales for.
That mechanism, we do exactly the same mechanism that we did in 2018-2019, we do today. What comes out of those models is a little bit different, for sure. But what's great about a lot of our business is we typically cover the entire city, not just the central business district.
And a good example of this would be in New York, the LinkNYC. If you look at the impressions, both ad impressions generated by the LinkNYC network before and after the pandemic on a network level, they're pretty close. However, the Links in Midtown Manhattan, where people are going to work three days a week are lower, however the Links on, say, the Upper West Side or in Brooklyn are actually higher because of things like outdoor dining and people working from home.
So the people are all there. They just moved around different places, and so the methodology we use, which is understanding where the audience is, works fine, we look at everything the same way. But what comes out of those models is different based on how cities evolve.
I talk a lot to people in Europe, and they have asked me where are things at in terms of what they call Green Signage and are there North American digital signage and digital out-of-home network operators that are concerned and doing something about energy costs. Is it something that comes up with you, or is it something you're trying to address?
Chris Grosso: We are definitely looking at sustainability to the extent it's part of our assessment for screens on how much power they use, and then we are also looking at how to make these networks more sustainable. Ways you do that. So, for instance, one is, we do static bus shelters, but they still need a backlight, and we will use solar panels on those shelters, which has the benefit of both being greener friendly, but also just cheaper because you don't have to pull power to the shelters. Regarding digital signs like LinkNYC, we've looked for opportunities to source electricity from green sources and that's been something we've done successfully.
But then also we look at our footprint on how we take care of our infrastructure. So we've started to test, for instance, electric vehicles in one of our markets. All the trucks that we use are electric right now. Running that as a pilot it's gone very well. The guys love the EV trucks to the point where we had a couple of EVs and a couple of gas guys just fighting over who got to use the EVs. So instead of being a half-EV, half-gas pilot, we put everything on EVs in that market because everyone's fighting over to drive the EVs.
Are you being banged on at all by municipal authorities or by public interest groups saying, you need to do something to reduce energy waste. These displays on the sidewalk are not mission-critical.
Just like Europe, where they were saying you need to turn these off for certain periods of time, they don't need to be running 24/7 anymore. Is that something you have to worry about, or are you hearing about?
Chris Grosso: I think municipalities want you to be sustainable, but I think we would argue our signs are mission-critical and should be up 24/7. But no, no one's asked us to do anything otherwise, but if you think about the importance of real-time information, if you're looking at when my bus is coming, or the weather and the sign's not on, that's a problem.
We like to think, and we would insist all of our signs are actually pretty mission-critical. Now that being said, there are things you can do around how much power you use and dim the signs at night, and that kind of thing to reduce the energy load and optimize that, and everyone consents to do that. And then again, to the extent we can source power from green sources, we do that as well.
Last question. What can we expect to see out of Intersection in the next year? You made that announcement recently about generative AI. What's next?
Chris Grosso: So I think we're very focused on product innovation around serving, meeting our customers on the needs that they want.
So I think you will continue to see more innovation around ad formats. You're also going to start to continue to see more innovation around measurement and attribution and our ability to help people, help advertisers understand who's seeing their ads and what they do after their ads and that's a huge focus for us and a big area of investment. I think you’ll hear a lot about it, and then, we're always looking at new partnerships and new deployments, and we've got some stuff cooking right now that we're hoping to be able to talk about towards the back half of the year as part of our continued expansion.
All right. Chris, thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Chris Grosso: Thank you, David. I appreciate it.
Wednesday May 31, 2023
Jeff Hastings, BrightSign
Wednesday May 31, 2023
Wednesday May 31, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
If you are going to the big InfoComm pro AV trade show, coming up very soon in Orlando, you'll undoubtedly see a very busy BrightSign stand, and a crowd around CEO Jeff Hastings.
I've spoken with Hastings a couple of times now for this podcast, but it had been a while ... and I wanted to catch up and get his perspective on the state of the industry, as well as find out what's new with his company and its little purple boxes.
The Silicon Valley company is pretty much its own category in terms of media players - as I hear and read about solutions providers weighing decisions on whether to use PCs, smart displays, set-top boxes ... or Brightsign boxes. The company now ships about 1,200 units a day - based on its reputation for having a range of durable, reliable devices that hit different price points and meet needs from simple to sophisticated and powerful.
In this chat, we get into the state of the digital signage market (It's growing across segments, but not at 2022's pace), how the characteristics of end-user buyers has changed, and the role of AI in BrightSign's business, and more broadly, for the industry.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mr. Hastings, good to chat once again. We've done a couple of podcasts, but you're a big shooter in this industry. I need to talk to you regularly.
Jeff Hastings: I don't know if you can call me a big shooter, but I'm definitely hooked on the world and live it seven days a week, but it's good to check in with you, Dave.
I'm just sucking up. I'm not sure why, but I am.
So where is the industry these days? I'm just curious because when I talk to people, they will uniformly say everything is awesome. While you can say that too, you're different in that you're supplying stuff to all kinds of different companies, so maybe you get a better sense of what's really happening out there.
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, I think one of the things that we do that's a little bit different is that BrightSign is really a horizontal platform, as I call it, so we work in pretty much every vertical market that has a display that's used. So we see from the broad market what's going on.
Last year was a great year of growth for us with over 20% growth. This year has honestly started off to be a little bit slow, and I think most people are reporting that. It's definitely been a little bit slow at the start of the year. I think a lot of things are going on with the interest rates and people being a little bit cautious about the recession, but overall, the industry is still growing. It's not growing as fast as I think most people predicted after last year. But it's a very solid market. We see more and more what people call digital transformations, I'm not a super fan of that word, but essentially it means people are putting in more digital signage and retail continues to be a great segment. People investing in retail to create better experiences after the whole pandemic of people wanting to get back out and people see the investment in that kind of real-world experience paying off.
Yeah, I guess you could call it phygital. Another term that I would be happy if I never saw again.
Why do you think retail's growing? Is it just simply that they understand the whole experiential thing and that you have to do more in a store?
Jeff Hastings: I think a few points. First, the whole idea that we're going to buy everything online and just stay in our house, I think most people realize, yeah, there's a lot of things that work that way, and I can just have it delivered. But the reality is we are social animals. We want to interact with people, and just being stuck in our house is not what we like to do, and I think most people are now seeing that with the results of the pandemic that, being stuck in your house is we’re not built for that. It's almost akin to being in jail. A lot of people comment on that.
So getting out is important for us as humans and having that social experiment and getting out and shopping and actually being in retail, part of it is actually physically buying the goods, but a lot of it is social. People just wanna be out in the environment. So now that you take that as a fact that people wanna be out in the environment, if you create a place where it's exciting to be in, and there are other people that are there, guess what? More people's gonna come to your establishment. So we really believe that's the fundamental basis of why people are investing in retail. That's the main reason.
If you look at a secondary reason. A lot of the big retailers, their businesses boomed. During the pandemic, a lot of people talked about how online boomed, but actually, a lot of the bigger retailers boomed and they got a lot of new customers. I think you look at folks like Walmart, lots of people come into the stores, but during the pandemic, they had a dramatic increase of people coming into their stores. As we start going back to the normal world, folks like Walmart wanna make sure that they keep those people coming to their stores. Back during the pandemic, maybe they were the only stores that were able to be open so they got new customers, and now what they wanna do is create an environment where they keep those new customers. So I think there's a lot of that going on of stepping up their game. Before it was just about price. “Okay, we'll just go there cuz it's got the best price.” Now people are like, “Hey, I wanna go there and I wanna enjoy my experience.” So that is playing into this investment in digital science and kind of digital experiences in retail.
Are you getting a sense from all the companies that work with you, that they're starting to open up new verticals? I've wondered when healthcare was finally gonna start happening.
Jeff Hastings: Oh all the verticals are growing. I don't know of any verticals that are not growing right now. They're all growing and some of them are growing faster. I think ironically, which I wouldn't have predicted, the corporate sector is actually growing very rapidly right now. I think people are coming back to the office, maybe not a hundred percent, but they are investing in it the same way that retail is investing in the experience. People are realizing that an office is no longer a place where they have to come work, much like in retail, where you have to go there to buy a product, but you want to get people in that environment for the social aspect of it and the collaboration aspect and if you create a nicer environment, more people come to work. So there's a lot of investment in that going on also.
And how does that manifest itself, like what are they doing? Big-ass video walls in the lobby or is it more kind of the operational side of it?
Jeff Hastings: It's literally all aspects of it. One, they create an impressive environment. So lots of LEDs, and lots of video walls going into these places to create a more exciting environment versus just a bunch of cubes. Secondly, more communications which are just kind of standard displays, ways of communicating with employees and more, I don't like the word infotainment, but infotainment, where they've got interesting things, are displayed to communicate with employees, but it's also a bit fun. These are things of just celebrating employees. We see a lot of that going on and kind of recognize the employees' communication about what's going on in the company.
This whole idea of an intranet I think most people realize that, guess what, when they have an intranet, no one actually goes to that website. So that was a great experiment. I think a lot of money on intranet sites which ended up being a massive failure, so the ability to communicate with employees is very important, and what they're finding is, guess what, if there's a display up there, and it's interesting, people will look at it and now you're getting across a message, and that could be whether it's a benefits program or you name it, you're able to communicate with employees and engage with them in a way, especially with the younger crowd, that the younger crowd doesn't want something kinda forced on them. They want to be able to kinda opt into it and the displays actually allow them to kind of opt-in in this passive fashion.
Has the buyer profile changed at all? We were chatting at some trade show or other, and you were saying how your guys are spending a lot more time talking to IT people than perhaps they did in the past.
Jeff Hastings: It's very much changed. I would say when I look back 10 years ago, maybe 10% of the deals that we did involved the IT group. I would say today, any large deal, the IT group is involved with, and this has to do with understanding how they're gonna maintain them because it's now moved from whoever was wanting to “buy” the digital signage, whether it's the marketing group or the HR group, that they're quickly realizing that the IT group is gonna own these things in terms of making sure that they're working every day, not putting the content on them.
So the IT group is now very much involved in that because they know they're gonna own them, so understanding what the cost of maintaining them is gonna be. And then secondly, security is just an enormous thing today. I mean pretty much every large deployment we do we go through large amounts of security reviews. The great thing for us is that it is kind of the backbone of our product is security, and we've built our own proprietary OS. We have put in the ability that the security is super high. Our devices are used on navy ships on the most secure network in the world. So it's a thing that actually benefits us, but just the interaction with the IT involvement, any large deployment goes through literally months of security review and if you can't pass that, it doesn't matter what the other organization from a content perspective wants to have, it'll never make it.
When you're dealing with IT and IS people, when you say it's our own proprietary operating system, does that present a problem or are you able to say it's derivative of Linux or whatever, and it's fine?
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, so at first, a decade ago, we would say that, and it would just make the hair stand up on their back rise up. But now what they've realized is there are a lot of these devices really classified as IoT devices, and they now understand how they fit into the environment, and it's not oh my God, we can't maintain it unless it's a Windows device. It's interesting that they now are able to classify these devices as kind of IoT devices with proprietary operating systems and understand how to run them. It's also that the larger corporations have now figured out how to understand the cost of a classic kind of PC. Not that's what everyone uses them, but they now really understand that and most of the companies are now, they use a number of around $300 as the cost to just have a PC in the work environment. They now understand what a cost basis really is for maintaining these and for us, they're giving much lower numbers in terms of being able to have one of these on the network.
And a lot of it has to do with the ability of these devices, if you're using Windows or Mac, these things are constantly updated, and each time those operating systems get updated, there's a percent of things that fail, and those are support costs. With our device, we don't do that, so it actually saves them a lot of money operationally at the same time, keeping the security level high.
So what happens when you do have a firmware update?
Jeff Hastings: So on our system, the first thing you can do is you can test those, and most of our customers do actually test those to make sure that they're not going to get a failure with their system. That's very different from something that gets shoved down the pipe automatically to maintain your security level. So by doing that, it's a very controlled rollout, and typically it's a very rare exception on our platform that something has to go out because a security fix came out immediately. A lot of it is just because of how our operating system is first cryptographically signed, and secondly, that people can't put random applications on our platform.
Those two things raised a security bar really high so that when you need an operating system update, a firmware update, you can be controlled about it, you can test it and roll it out, and that really is where a lot of the savings comes in, because most of these operating system updates, it's not that the actual operating system is causing problems, it's the whole ecosystem of applications that people use.
And one of those applications breaks, and guess what, they get hundreds of calls coming in to fix it. Each one of those has to be fixed and dealt with, and that's where kind of the burden of cost really comes up, and if you think about digital signage, 99% of those new features in the operating system are never, ever used in digital signage. In fact, most of them are actually being defeated. People don't want them. You don't want a desktop in digital signage.
Yeah. Is digital signage with the people you're dealing with now or your business partners are dealing with now, are they seeing it as a mission-critical application now?
Jeff Hastings: It's definitely moving towards that. I wouldn't say it's completely there. Some of them are mission-critical. We have folks in the F1 world that use our devices and I will tell you, they view our devices as mission-critical. The Navy uses our devices. They view them as very mission-critical.
Some of the marketing folks, maybe they don't view them as mission critical. They view them as very valuable, and anytime there's downtime, it's important to them. I'd say it's moved from a place where people would be like, oh, displays always go down, and they don't worry about it either.
Hey, those things should be working all the time, and that plays to our advantage.
Ten years ago when the first system-on-chip displays came out from Sony and Samsung and then LG and on, they weren't very powerful, they didn't do a hell of a lot. They could do the basics. They could show a menu, that sort of thing, but they've been around for a decade now. They're pretty powerful. I hear people saying they're pretty darn good.
Do these smart commercial displays now present a challenge that perhaps they did in the past? And are you looking at embedded solutions? I know you already do that with Bluefin, and you did a little bit with NEC Sharp back in the day.
Jeff Hastings: Yeah. So, the way I look at these is the range of devices that can create this experience. You can look at a $35 raspberry pie that's going to do a bunch of powerful things. So the whole content side of it, I really focus less on that. We have a whole range of players from simple to very complex with the new XC product, and it's interesting to look at the content, but what we see more and more from our customers is the ability to maintain these and control these because the long term cost is really what comes into play.
So it's becoming less and less about. “Oh, can this play this piece of content?” Because that's being more and more commoditized over time, and what we're seeing is, as we talked about, like the IT organization, the ability to maintain these, the sustainability. There's a lot in sustainability, what's the power consumption, what's the lifetime of a display? And one of the things that we actually see, which is a vulnerability in the built-in displays, is that their storage is fixed. It's soldered down on the motherboard, flash memory is a consumable, and it has a limited lifespan. So that's one of the things we're seeing with our players, you can replace that media with a display that has it soldered down. Once that memory wears out, which it does, then you have to throw away the whole display.
So that means that all of a sudden you're taking, instead of a tiny little SD card that weighs a few grams, now you're going to throw away a whole display that's going to go to a landfill. So we push a lot on sustainability. Clearly, in North America, it's a little bit behind Europe, but in Europe, that is a big deal of sustainability.
The bottom line is that the built-in definitely has some advantages. The operational ability to deploy it is simpler, but it's not the panacea. There are still lots of things out there. The manageability of it, the ability to update and control things remotely, and the ability to change the SD card when it wears out are very important. And I love to make jokes about that. If I bought a car that I couldn't change the tires when they wore out, I'd be really bummed to have to throw away my car because I can't replace the tires, and that's the same thing with flash memory. It's the same thing as a tire. It's going to wear out. You'd hate to throw away your car.
So with the Bluefin, I know they have a range of displays now, and they're not just little shelf-edge ones. They go up to, I think, 40-inch plus or something. In those cases, when you've got an embedded display that's got a BrightSign inside, is it swappable or upgradeable?
Jeff Hastings: Yes. So there are a few things about those displays.
So the first is that it uses the same architecture. So we'll use an SD card as the storage mechanism so that you can do that. Secondly, it's actually slotted. You can open up that display and can actually replace the player.
So it's like the Sharp NEC ones going back Five years or something?
Jeff Hastings: Exactly, and so we standardized on a different kind of connector to really make the form factor very small. So both the media is replaceable, and the player is replaceable. We've even had some customers already do that, upgrading their platform from an earlier one to their next-gen, and they're all backward compatible, so they'll fit into the same slot, and you get the newer performance.
So yeah, we see that, as a market there's a class of customers that want to see more and more people, and at every show, if you stop by, we have more and more people who are doing the BrightSign built-in, and you'll see that trend continue. You'll see it continue as more and more people realize that's a really good solution. The platform, the ecosystem, the upgradeability, and the remote management are really important, and they want to add that to their displays.
And it's a little thing, but the simple fact that if you can put up a display in an hour instead of 90 minutes or something if you're doing a big rollout, it adds up.
Jeff Hastings: It does add up, and like I said there's the upfront and then the ongoing. So yeah, there are absolutely benefits to it, but you have to make sure that you don't end up with a car that you can't change the tires on.
What about Apple TVs? There are three or four companies, at least CMS software companies, who heavily market Apple TV as their solution.
Is that not a concern, but do you see it as real competition or almost like a novelty?
Jeff Hastings: I see it mostly as a novelty. It's on the border of a consumer kind of operating system. It's a little bit different. But still, you're dealing with many of the same things.
You're fighting the platform. Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire, they're essentially all very similar. They're built for consumers. They're not built for commercial use, and what that means is that you're kind of fighting the platform. I routinely see people using the Roku TCL TVs, and they have their little digital signage application, and then when it reboots, it comes back to the home screen, and people are trying to beat that.
So if you look at large-scale deployments, that's where you get into this manageability and controllability, and those things are not optimized for that. It's not like I'm saying it, they're worthless. It's just in large deployments, it's difficult to deal with the little idiosyncratic consumer devices.
It's interesting when you talk about Roku because I don't think that many people know that BrightSign is, in effect, a spin-out of Roku, right?
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the BrightSign business was originally part of Roku, and in 2009, we spun out for them, and actually the core operating system is still very similar between the platforms, although we've taken it in the digital signage direction and added a lot of features and capabilities in digital signage and obviously the Roku guys have taken in their direction of streaming. But yeah, at the core of it, yeah, that's where the technology came from.
Is there still any kind of sharing of ideas or anything between the companies, or are they very much different tracks and you share DNA but that's about it?
Jeff Hastings: It's really that we share DNA and that's about it. I'm still on the board of Roku, so I actively participate in their business, but yeah, there's no official sharing. But yeah, with me being on the board, we get kind of informal sharing.
Yeah, I mean, you're sitting there actively listening and they say, we're developing this, and you're thinking, “Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe I could apply that.”
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, and the same thing goes in the other direction. Some of the stuff that we work on is pretty interesting, as we do a lot of out-of-home advertising. Their model is built on a big advertising model in-home. So there are definitely things we share that also.
You have high-end players that can go up to 8k. Are there customers using 8k or are they just buying those boxes with the idea of, okay, we're future-proofed?
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the way I think about those players: 8k is a feature. It's not the only thing that you can buy those for.
Most of the people are not using 8k, and honestly, it's just a marketing thing because very few people actually use 8k. Most people buy them for the power of the experience. So very high-end experiences that people would've classically used PCs, for now, can get our device with the reliability of our operating system and maintainability, yet the power of a PC. So that's kind of what we see most people buy 8k for. The applications that we're seeing right now are kind in two sectors. One is people with consumer manufacturers of consumer TVs that wanna create an 8k experience that has all this interactive and all the great features they use. They're using our products and that, and then LEDs. So LEDs are probably the biggest area where we've seen the 8k as a single output. Those are very interesting cases because as the density of LEDs has come out and, folks like Nova Star now have 8k sending units, we can now plug in ak and instead of having multiple boxes of content rolling in, they can just have one big 8k pallet that they can split out to anywhere they want on the screen. That's a big market.
Then the last segment that we see AK being used in is having content that spans over video walls. So if you think about a four-screen, 4k LED wall, right? 8k is perfect for that, and with the hiring unit, it's got four HDMI outputs. So you can just plug four TVs and adjust the bezel compensation, and now you've dramatically simplified having a video wall. So those are the areas we see people using our XC product which does 8k.
I can't open an email list or go to any kind of technology site without seeing a couple of stories or a couple of pitches about AI.
How do you see AI fitting within what you guys do?
Jeff Hastings: o first, AI is super interesting, and especially with ChatGPT coming out, I think there are a lot of areas that you're going to see AI, at least in our world. So I see it as one, on the internal side, so helping our developers become more efficient. When you're writing software, there's a lot of what I would call mundane writing software that is done, whereas now, that can be automated. Actually, there's GitHub CoPilot that generates a lot of software inside Visual Studio for doing simple things.
Then using ChatGPT to do some of the basic frameworks that work really well. So those are tools that I can see, and maybe on the support side, being able to use AI to get a much better quality first-level support request. So I see those things as on the operational side of the business.
And then, when I look at the digital signage side, what are things that are going to be changing the world on the outside of digital signage? I think the biggest one that I see is content generation. I don't know if you've played with any of the tools on content generation. Let's be real. Many people need just kind of simple videos and imagery, and with these new content tools, you can tell it what you want. I was playing with one the other day and said, “Hey, I want an image with a hamburger in a retro look”, and it generates an image for me. If you think about what that would've cost to have a graphic designer, do that., I think the package I've paid for, it's 10 bucks a month. That one image would've probably cost a few hundred dollars for a graphic artist to do. So I think the content side is coming up there, and then the last part, which we're working on a little bit, it's still early, is for our integrators to be able to describe the experience they want and create a presentation out of it.
So that is one that I think is, it's the same way that you think about, giving our programmers and our software engineers a big head start, I think this is going to be the next step. So an integrator, instead of having to say, how do I use which tool to create this? They basically put this into an AI and say, here's what I want it to do, and it gives me the experience back. And at the simplest level, it's already working, which is, for doing some simple presentations, not that it's an enormous amount of work, it's just the learning curve. We've got it working where you can just tell it for a simple presentation, it'll put it together for you. So I think, and we're just at the early stages of AI, so I think it's going to have, over time, a profound impact on basically making digital signage easier and lower cost to do a lot of things.
Yeah, I've been saying to people that, yeah, the generative AI stuff is cool, and the ability to generate images from prompts, as you were describing, is really interesting. But I think where this is really going to get used is behind the scenes for things like you were saying with coding, generating marketing materials, doing smarter monitoring, all that stuff that an end-user customer may never see, but is going to, as you say, make doing this business easier.
Jeff Hastings: When you just look at it, all of these things lower the barrier to entry to having a deployment, which is just good for our industry, and I think the AI tools are just at the early stage of creating these experiences and content that just lowers the cost of doing it. So all of them are exciting for us.
So you're going to be at Infocom, which by the time this runs will be imminent. It already is, but what are you going to be showing? I know you've got new players, new Series 5 players.
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, we'll have the whole lineup of Series 5 players. They've been dribbling out since the end of the year. So yeah, we'll show the new XT5 for the first time in our booth, which will complete our whole Series 5 lineup. So all of them will be on display.
We'll have more of the, as we talked about, BrightSign built-in displays in different form factors. Some interesting ones will be there. If anyone's out there, stop by our booth, the new XT product will be out there, and it will be exciting, and more of these built-in displays will be there. That kind of plays in that segment of the market.
What's your booth number?
Jeff Hastings: I don't know our booth number.
I knew you wouldn't, but I had to ask.
Jeff Hastings: Those things are not on the top of my list. We're in the digital signage section, and you'll see the power of purple being out there.
Just look for the crowd?
Jeff Hastings: Exactly.
All right. Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Hastings: Dave, thanks so much, and good chatting with you.
Wednesday May 17, 2023
Mark Coxon, AVI-SPL’s Experience Technology Group
Wednesday May 17, 2023
Wednesday May 17, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
AVI-SPL is one of the largest pro AV integrators on the planet, but for the longest time, if I was asked if I knew anyone at that company specifically on the digital signage file, I'd say "Nope."
As far as I knew, and the same for a lot of people involved in digital signage, AVI-SPL was much more focused on traditional pro AV work like unified communications and control rooms. While AVI-SPL delivered some digital signage projects, it wasn't a real focus. But that started to change a few years ago when the Tampa-based company spun up a new business unit called the Experience Technology Group, or XTG. Now it has some 30 people working on projects driven by the impact of visuals, and directly involving other architects, designers and creative shops.
Now, that's 30 people in a company that has 3,700 other staff, but the group works with some 300 customer-facing sales people, and gets pulled in to opportunities and projects when clients start expressing interests or needs that are about more than just function, like whiteboards and conferencing systems.
I had a great, very thoughtful talk with Mark Coxon, an industry veteran who joined the company about a year ago and is one of XTG's business development directors. We get into both the science and emotional sides of experiential projects, and how these kinds of projects work when they're guided by ideas and desired outcomes, and not just the Wow Factor of big screens.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mark, what is your role at AVI-SPL?
Mark Coxon: I am a business development director in our XTG division, which is our Experience Technology Group, so what I do is work with our regional account managers as well as our partner ecosystem to identify opportunities to build amazing experiences.
So your regional people would come across an opportunity, let's say, it's a corporate workplace that says, “We want to put a big ass LED display in our lobby. We don't know what to do or what to put on or anything else. What do we do?” And your regional person might have a kind of deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction and call you or somebody on your team and say, okay, I need help here.
Mark Coxon: Yeah. So a lot of our opportunities do arise within the regions themselves, right? Because AVI-SPL is a huge corporation. We have, I think, 300+ sellers out in the marketplace, across the world, talking to clients, managing accounts where they might do a lot more of the typical AV that you see out in the space: conference rooms and auditoriums, et cetera, and they'll come across customers saying, “Oh, I think we want to add a wow factor to this lobby” or “We're thinking about building an experience center to show off some of the new innovation that we came out with this year.” And so they'll engage our group, which is an overlay to the whole company, and bring us in, and we can really start to give, I guess, some form to that process and make sure they get what they want at the end of it.
So you have a BizDev role, but it sounds like there's a fair amount of sales, engineering, and front-end consulting involved in it.
Mark Coxon: Yeah, it’s funny. AVI-SPL isn't really known in the market for experiential work, but we've done a lot of it. We've done a lot of it in pockets over the years for these customers, but it was never really organized under a division, and so that's why XTG exists. We've organized this portfolio of work in this division and assigned it to a team of people. We have about 30 people on our team now that overlay the country, and that team consists of people like me, business development directors, and we come from different backgrounds, some come from fabrication, some come from the consulting world, some like me come from all over the place within the industry from an integration perspective, and then we also have technologists on the team whose job is really exactly what you said to be those people who are thinking about the art of the possible.
“All right, this customer's asked for this outcome. They have these people coming to their building. They want them to feel this. They want this actionable insight out of the space.” And they're the ones who actually come up with the ideas on what kind of technology could we use to execute this and if we were to pull this off, what would it take for us to do that? And then they start to come up with rough sketches of what the technology would be to execute on that outcome.
Yeah, it's interesting. Through the years, I've been asked who do you know over at AVI-SPL and I'll say nobody from the context of digital signage, and the company's been known as a very large company, and it’s very active. But doing more, if this is the right term, traditional AV work in the corporate workplace, that sort of thing, and as you said, pockets of activity in digital signage, but nothing organized.
So was it recognized within the company that we need to aggregate this and put ourselves forward as being directly in this as opposed to people discovering that, oh, you do that too?
Mark Coxon: Correct. XTG's definitely a targeted branding effort at consolidating this work and this expertise we have in things like executive briefing centers, museums, welcome centers, visitors centers, hall of fame experiences, et cetera, that we've done over the years for enterprise, higher-ed, and really creating some emphasis around that type of work that we do, for sure.
Is there some cross-pollination happening when you do that? What I mean is, if you do some sort of immersive, experiential environment for a corporate workplace. Do they then two years later say, oh, by the way, we need new video conferencing capabilities or new meeting room signs, that sort of thing. Do you do that?
Also, vice versa where you're already in there doing collaboration work, and they say, we want to do something in our lobby with Wow Factory. Can you do that?
Mark Coxon: Yeah, obviously, we see both of those happen. Places where we're brought in maybe to do some specialty work, and of course, the other work at that point seems like more low-hanging fruit because it's work that we excel at already and have a huge portfolio of as far as auditoriums, meeting spaces, et cetera, and then, yeah, like you said, vice versa. We're coming in, and we're doing a lot of work, and you walk through this amazing lobby where people are going to come in their first experience before they come there to meet.
So let's say somebody's bringing a customer into their building, and they're going to pitch a multimillion dollar sale with this customer that they have. How are they defining what that experience is gonna be within the building and just asking that question sometimes, who's doing this space? This looks like a customer-facing, marketing-driven space, and a lot of times they don't know that we do that work, and yeah, we stumble upon it that way as well.
Do you guys go into prospective customers or existing customers pitching the idea of experiential spaces, or are you really operating off of their interest and initiative when they're saying we're interested in this?
I suspect it would be hard to pitch somebody saying, “You should have a big-ass LED video wall in your lobby.”
Mark Coxon: Yeah. I call that technology in search of an application, and that's definitely not what we do. There's a great quote by Cedric Price, who was a mid-century architect, that says, “Technology is the answer, but what's the question?” And that's really what my job is within the team, and the business development team's job is (we have a few business development managers), but our job is really what are you trying to accomplish in this space? What business outcomes are you trying to achieve when you're looking at building this space?
We're in this weird mode, right? Where a lot of companies are re-evaluating what it means to have an office in general, what it means to have physical space, whether that be retail, we just saw Bed, Bath & Beyond looking at closing up and citing online competition as one of the reasons, so what does it mean to have place-based retail today? And if we are going to build a space, what should it be? And really starting at that level. So I try to start with that level with people all the time, even in the enterprise.
The question isn't what do we do with the lease that we have or this space that we have? That's part, but that's the bridge. The real question is, if I had nothing, what would I build? And that's really the end goal of what you should be moving towards, and so many times we really start breaking down the problem of: what are the impacts that you hope to make by having a physical office or a physical retail location? And then how do we move backward from that into how does that now affect what we design into space, including the technology that will go into there?
It's really reversing that. If we go in and just start telling people how cool it is to have an LED wall in their lobby, we're selling from the wrong perspective. But if somebody says, you know what, when people come in here, they come in here, and they sit, and they go into their phone. So they're waiting for a meeting. They come and sit in our lobby. They start looking at their phone, and suddenly they're stuck in their email. They're thinking about the seven things they have to do when they get back to the office, and they're already moving past our meeting. We want to create something that actually creates some anticipation, some foreshadowing that tilts them into the anticipation of the meeting they're about to have and not pull them out of our space and back into their workday. How do we accomplish that?
And those types of conversations are much, much more fun to have and that could result at the end in having a 400-inch video while in the lobby, or it could result in maybe taking physical objects that the company's made if they're an aerospace company taking some of the innovations they have like rocket nozzles and things, and putting them on a shelf and letting people pick them up and play with them. And as they do, content launches, ambiently, around the room as they interface with these objects or whatever that happens to be. But really starting with who is here, why are they here? What are they interested in, and how do we engage them more? So that when they leave, they remember being here, and they actually take the actions we want them to take. So it's a much different approach than screens first, right?
Yeah. As you might expect, I get bombarded with emails and pitches and everything else every day talking about different projects and capabilities of companies, and I see the words experience and immersive overused and abused quite a bit, and I'm curious how you define immersive and how experience is defined because I get a sense that there's this idea that experiential and immersive means that, you have to have a video wall that's got gesture recognition and you're going to wave your arms in front of it, and all these things are going to happen, or they're synchronized lighting, or God knows what.
But from my point of view, there are times when an experience is just something that tells you if you're confused about which way to go, things like that, something that just makes the space better.
Mark Coxon: A hundred percent. So it's funny that you mentioned that because although I'm on an experience team, I'm a big fan of the calm movement. How are we decreasing the technology we use for mundane tasks or throughout the day to create these analog, tactile, calm moments. I agree that the best definition of experience I've heard, and one I tried to adhere to was by Brian Solis. He used to be at Salesforce, I think he's now at Service Now, but he's written a lot of books on the experience economy.
And he said, an experience is an emotional reaction to a moment in time, and as you said, that doesn't have to be an overwhelming jaw-dropping experience. It could be a relief like you said, that now I know where to go, or it could be a silent pause that allows you to reflect. I think there are a lot of ways that you can create an experience for a company.
For me, immersive just means that it's drawing the person in. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing. Are there ways to do that? Yeah. I've given, and I'm going to give a course this year at Infocom on creating the new connection center. I've given some talks before on utilizing biology to give a deeper connection to your message. So things like engaging peripheral vision work because more of your brain turns on when your fight or flight response is activated when your peripheral vision is being activated. And so are there ways that we can use, potentially waves of light to focus people inward on a screen or on a position in a room. Are there ways to draw people through space to a place where we want them to dwell? How do we create experiences where we don't, I guess, create congestion, right? Like putting a screen in the middle of a hallway, it could be a good idea as long as you're not encouraging people to stand there for 15 minutes, as long as the dwell time there is 15-20 seconds, et cetera.
So I think experience is also just how people interact with the space themselves, and immersion is a combination of all of those things. So engaging more senses always creates more memory, but that doesn't have to be an active participation either. I think the things that are often overlooked in experience are opportunities to create, if it's a movement of air, if it's gentle waves, if it's mechanical movement in a ceiling, if it's an ambient soundscape that fills the space instead of white noise, all of these things can lend to experience, but they're nothing that somebody stops and focuses on. They're things that happen in the background that enhance what's going on, without the person experiencing it really focusing on it, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I'm listening to that, and I'm wondering how the people on the other side of the table are responding to that. I suspect some of them are leaning forward and very interested, and other ones are going, that sounds expensive!
Mark Coxon: You do get that. You can definitely get that, and I think that's why the co-design process is so important and not coming in with an idea of what you want to sell. Like earlier, you talked about me coming in and telling somebody why this experience is going to be important for them. Again, that's me pushing something upstream that I've got an idea about.
I always say my best tool in a meeting is a blank piece of paper. Because if I sit down and really listen to what people do in this space, what they're trying to accomplish, all of those things, I'll pick up little notes. I had a customer the other day who, the architect, had put together a mood board of what this space wanted to feel and look like. They built a lot of these common spaces that they're talking about in architecture, We and Us spaces is what they're calling them where they're building these cafes with a lot of biophilia and wood and stone, and all of these things, and they're like we want to do sound masking in here, and you're like, okay, that's great. So obviously, you want to keep the sound from moving back and forth, but what you've really created here is almost an urban park or a community park type feel in this space so instead of just flooding this with white noise or paint noise, why not create a nature scape or something like that'll also keep the noise transfer down but really reinforce this idea that you're outside in this natural environment as opposed to the hush of a quiet office or the hush of a pink noise or white noise air chiller or something that a lot of times you put in a office space where maybe you're trying to focus on deep work and not on connection, right?
So it's just really listening to those things. When you start to identify those, when people start to, I guess self align with certain ideas as you're walking through what the different pieces are, they're more invested in that. Then when you come into that space where the cost comes, they really then weigh that against the impact as opposed to comparing it to what four speakers playing white noise would cost in the space.
Is it like that book about a village in terms of these kinds of projects where it's super important to have the architect involved, the engineers involved, all the different players who collaborate on a finished project as opposed to just the AV team coming in and executing this part of it?
Mark Coxon: A thousand percent. So many times, when we are brought in, what we end up doing and what I do with clients when they ask for an experience like this is one of the first things we want to do is almost a gap in overlaps kind of analysis with them. There is an ecosystem of partners that is necessary to create an experience. You're going to have somebody that's creating custom content. You may have two or three companies creating custom content. You may have to have a company specializing in video and live-action, live actors, et cetera, maybe somebody specializing in creating interactive user interfaces for touchscreens and all of those things. So you have these content creators. You do typically have somebody as an architect in this space that's obviously defining what the space looks like. Many times you have an experiential design firm doing the story, right? What's the strategy, what's the story? How are we walking people through this space? That's working with the marketing team in the company. Then you have custom fabricators building all this set work that the audiovisual goes into to create the look and feel that everybody has drawn down on the paper.
So it does take a village, and many times that's part of what we do, is we educate what it is that players are involved in a successful experience. Who are the stakeholders that you have involved with now? Do we need to get more stakeholders involved? Many times it might come through IT because they see it as a technology buying exercise and you really find out that marketing and the C-suite and human resources need to be involved because this is a system that's meant to reconnect the employees of the company to the mission of what they're doing every single day in space. And now all of a sudden that becomes a much higher strategy-level conversation on how it's executed, and so it does take a village and it takes a great ecosystem of partners. I know that word's overused too. I've used it twice.
But it takes this great array of partners, which is one of our core strengths is that we have a partnership manager that works specifically on making sure that we have a broad array of partners that we can introduce into these projects with our customers to make sure that none of these gaps are left untouched and that the experience we deliver at the end is not just a piece of technology installed on a wall because the technology itself, you don't get the value out of it when it's installed in the building, you extract the value out of the system. The ROI comes from the use of the system over time to drive the outcomes that you were looking for and thinking of this as a construction project where I delivered the 400-inch LED screen, so we're done, and the customer got what they paid for, they haven't actually extracted any value out of that piece of equipment yet. It's a depreciating asset until they play something on it that gets them the result that they want.
So we really try to focus on that instead of just our one part, and our, as I said earlier, we have our team. Our team, from a business development perspective, we walk through those things. Our technologists design the technology, but we also, when we take on a project, we have a program manager. And they're involved from the beginning, they listen to the intent, and just like in the programming phase of architecture, when you talk about what is the intent of the space and what are the ways that we're going to actually make some design decisions to facilitate that, the program manager really carries that spirit of the job and make sure that those partner handoffs, et cetera, are all going well and that everybody's involved in delivering the final result and so we built a process by which we deliver that, and we believe in it, so yeah, it does take a village for sure.
What is the breadth of services?
I'm thinking of one company much smaller than AVI-SPL, but they can do the full experience including metal fabrication and creative design, all that. So they can pretty much go from inception to delivery out of the same shop as opposed to using partners, but for a large company with a whole bunch of partners in play, how much do you want to own and how much do you want to cross-pollinate and work together on things?
Mark Coxon: We've doubled down on partnership when it comes to that. Our core strength is delivering technology. That's why our business was built, and that's what we do best, so we focus on the design and implementation of those technology systems, and for the other pieces, we partner. So you know, w don't build a lot of content. We do have a division called Video Link that does some content for video production for meetings, et cetera.
But are we going to create computer animations for how our power plant works? No. We're going to bring in a partner that knows how to do that every day to do that. Are we going to define for the company what their story should be based on their seven customer personas? No, we're going to work with their marketing department, and if they need some help really coming up with a storyline, we're going to bring in one of our branding and creative strategy partners to help with that because that's what their core skill set is.
So we try to focus on what our operational excellence is, and that is delivering technology systems. But from the standpoint of the way that we approach the sales group, we're not engaging in a process that's designed to sell a particular technology. So it's the difference between focusing on what we're really good at and letting the cart dry the horse. I love the Maslow quote, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We try not to approach this, well, we need to sell 600 extra square meters of LED this quarter so this customer will get a video wall. That's not the way that we approach this.
We don't approach this from a technology-centric lens, but we know where we play well and what we deliver value in the market with, and that's the technology portion.
I wrote recently about a company that was, maybe not pivoting, but evolving into doing AV as a service, with the argument being that a lot of end-user customers would rather just have the whole project done as an operating line item as opposed to all the upfront costs of capital, and they don't want to worry about recurring support and all that. They'd just rather pay a number and let somebody else do it. Is that something that comes up and that you offer?
Mark Coxon: Yeah, it comes up all the time. I think customers are always looking for ways to understand how much of this you want to own from a content update perspective, from how you manage refreshes, from even how you buy a system, as you said. Is it an operational cost, or is it a capital expenditure? Is it a construction project, or is it an ongoing cost month over month?
One place that we see this very specifically right now is we're doing some virtual production and XR opportunities for clients, especially in the corporate space where they're wanting to elevate their all-hands meetings or their product launches or any of those types of things. They're often already buying those services in an operational cost format where. They're going out and renting a studio, or they're hiring a production company to come in and do these meetings for them. So they don't want to take on a capital expenditure. They want that to continue to be an operational cost. So yeah, through things like creating a plan for leasing equipment by having a breadth of services onsite, like we have onsite managed services where we can embed an AVI-SPL employee in one of our businesses to run a center per se, or to run a virtual production studio for the customer so that they just come in, the stakeholders come in, they talk about the product they want to talk about, and somebody's running all the front house, back house doing the streaming out to the other participants, et cetera.
Yeah, we offer all of that, and that's one of the great things about working with somebody like us is because we do have such a large footprint, we do have such a presence, we have 4,000 employees across the world, and we have onsite managed services available. We have the ability to buy things on the customer's behalf and lease them, et cetera. That's one of the great advantages of someone with a big footprint like us is we have the ability to do those things.
What are the reference projects that you bring up? So you're sitting in a meeting, and they say, “What have you guys done? Impress me!”
What do you come back with?
Mark Coxon: Yeah. There are always a few that we show. The Museum of the Future in Dubai is an amazing project that we did, and people were like, you guys did that project? I'm like, yeah, we did that project and delivered it through our Dubai office, which is an amazing office. That team is, hands down, an awesome team. But we show projects like that because that's a space where people pretty much ride an elevator, like a space capsule, up into a space station and then come back to Earth in a future state, and the museum architecturally is beautiful, it's an oval with a hole in the middle of it. You even wonder how it suspends itself, as well as just all the different things that are in there. There's a touch interface where a half globe, a half spear actually swells up out of a flat table, and you can use it to articulate the earth. Who's ever seen an interface like that before?
So obviously, there were some great creative partners involved in the content and in that fabrication. But that's obviously a showcase project that we talk about a lot, and then we have visitor centers and executive briefing centers. A lot of our executive briefing centers are very impressive, Honeywell and Charlotte is a beautiful center with everything from transparent LED to kiosks to volumetric displays with physical artifacts to a full four-wall cave immersion room with a touch interface in the middle to navigate through 3D environments.
And so we show a lot of those pieces. We try to show projects that have, I guess, a variety of execution styles because not everything needs to be a touchscreen. It's to show someone that you could have 3D printed objects on a table, and as you pick up those objects, the video changes, and as you articulate that object, you can actually affect different parts of the video to launch. Those kinds of things are really cool and just show people that it doesn't just have to be a touch screen on a wall. We're not looking to put a big black rectangle on the finish you spent six months working on with the architect. We're going to make sure that's integrated into the space in the proper way.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of subtlety and just little things like present sensors that cost a few bucks to incorporate into a design. But you walk within a certain range, and it changes what's on a screen, and “Oh, how'd that happen?” It's great, but it's not fancy, you're not issuing a press release about it.
Mark Coxon: Yeah. We've been working on some projects where they're talking about using real-time location services as people walk through the building. So they get badged in, or they get a card, and that card has a profile that maybe they've entered in, and as they walk through the space, the experience is personalized slightly to them, based on their profile or using things like data generated art. Humans are great at pattern recognition, and so if you're putting audio/visual in a space that people work in every day, or people go into the office every day with these screens are in the background, you don't want them to be counting down 15 seconds to read and then 32 seconds until the screen goes blue with white text and then: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, cue the video of the kid running through the park.
That almost becomes like water torture at some point, right? It's just the constant dripping of this repetitive content that goes on in the background. So how do we use things like occupancy sensors, and time of day weather outside, all of which create effects on these screens that are more ambient in times that they're not being actively used for customer communication or employee communication?
A lot of those things are really cool. So what you said, that subtlety, and really thinking of just the different moments. These are canvases that we can use for multiple things. Sometimes they need to be quiet and soothing for people to do their work. Other times they need to be loud and inspiring to get somebody's attention and be able to design something that does that and know who to partner with on the backend from a hardware perspective for something like a content management system that can be on a schedule or can use sensor-based inputs to trigger different modes is really important.
Are you sensing or seeing any kind of a shift in the marketplace in terms of rising interest in a particular thing?
I know you mentioned experience centers, but those have been around for a while, that's an area where I get a sense because of the pandemic and everything, they're elevating in importance because you don't have as many people in the offices.
Mark Coxon: Yeah, I think experience centers are becoming more and more prominent. Companies are seeing if they can bring their customers in and create a memorable, relevant experience around their value story, that pays dividends for them.
I think we're seeing more and more interest, as I said, in virtual and extended reality, virtual production, and extended reality stages for elevating corporate communications. Suppose every single one of your communications goes out in 16 squares on a VTC call. How do you punctuate those meetings so that the important ones are elevated and look different, feel different, and actually engage people differently? We're seeing more and more of that.
I will say, honestly, the big push is this: The challenge of physical space in a world that becomes more and more online, we have to get away from the idea of just utility because utility is going to be provided more conveniently, virtually. I can easily join a meeting from my kitchen table. I can easily buy a pair of pants on Amazon. So if we're just looking for the utility of work or the utility of shopping or whatever that place is built to do, if we're focusing on utility, we're always going to lose to the online experience because it's more convenient and the utility is the same. So we really have to focus on the personal experience.
Gensler did an experience index on public space a few years back, pre-pandemic, but people are in multiple modes when they go shopping, right? People are in the task-based mode of finding something to buy, but they're also in a mode of exploration. They're in a mode of connection. They're in a mode of aspiration. Who do I want to be? What do I want to be? I want to be inspired. They're looking for cultural connection. There are all these other motivations at play, and it's the same when people come to interact in an office, when they join their team, when they go to a movie theater versus watching something on Netflix. There's a reason the movie theaters haven't died. It feels different to watch a movie in a movie theater, not just because of the scale of the screen or the audio, but because it feels different being in a room, having a shared experience with other people, hearing their reaction to something, hearing when they go silent, when they laugh and when they cheer.
Those are things that we can really build an experience around, and I always say technology has advanced to a space where technology is usually not the limiting factor, so technology's no longer a huge challenge, space isn't a huge challenge, to design a space or to be able to build a space that facilitates these things. So really, now we are in the challenge of getting somebody back to the office, getting somebody in a mall, it is a human-centric problem. That's a human-centric exercise, and if we don't start with experience design that addresses the human motivation of why they would go somewhere, and we just address the utility of how big a store need to be and how big a screen need to be for somebody to read the text? We're never going to solve a human-based problem on why space is relevant, and so I think companies and customers are starting to see this more and more if we can start talking about: what is the human experience, and then how do we use space and technology to facilitate that? It's just a different way to solve the problem.
We have to flip the model in its head. We can't start with a square building, add technology, and then hope people come and use it in the way that we designed it. That's not experience design.
All right, Mark, thank you very much—very interesting chat.
Mark Coxon: Hey, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Brett Crossley, FanConnect
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are a lot of screens at sports and entertainment venues, and when it's possible to buy a 4K TV the size of a bus for a few hundred bucks, team owners and venue operators are having to work harder than ever to compel people to get off their sofas and come to games.
Whether it is college football or pro basketball, there's a big emphasis on maximizing the game-day experience for ticket-buyers, while also optimizing the investment sponsors have made in being at the venue and part of everything going on.
A Charlotte, North Carolina company called FanConnect is very specifically in the business of providing and supporting a platform and services that drive the game-day show, and the information on most or all of the flat screens around a stadium or arena.
FanConnect does in-venue TV programming that enhances live game broadcast feeds with things like real-time stats and sponsor messaging, and it also does IPTV for the suites and loge areas, as well as digital signage around the concourses and at concessions.
That last component is something most or all venues want and need, but the digital signage capabilities also track back to the roots of the company. I had a chat with Brett Crossley, FanConnect's VP of Product.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brett, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what FanConnect does?
Brett Crossley: So what we do is we work with the corporate partnership teams in sports venues, so in college and professional sports and we work with the partnership marketing, the sponsorship team if you think about it that way to put something on the TV screens. I'm talking about our primary product, so our biggest product is FanConnect TV. We make other things, but that's probably the biggest thing we have. It's also our biggest footprint, and what that does is it makes a private TV network for use in the venue that plays on all of the TVs that are in the venue that would've been showing just the live game feed. This feed was being produced for probably the video board in most cases. We turn that into something that fans are gonna want to look at because it's good looking and that fully integrates what the sponsors and what the corporate partners need into that experience.
So that's the main product that we supply, and then I'd say that all the related products are similar, right? They're all designed to operate inside of a large sports venue, inside of a stadium or an arena, and they work with TVs or video technology of some kind inside of that venue.
Do you get any pushback at all from venues saying why wouldn't I just use the broadcast feed that's already coming in that I've already been using on the TVs?
Brett Crossley: No, I don't think we don't face that pushback, and the main reason is if you think about our primary customer is a corporate partnership team. On the college side, that would be somebody that's a Rights holder, like a Leader field, a Playfly, a JMI, typically that's who that is. On the professional side, it's a group that's titled something like Corporate Partnerships for the Chicago White Sox, and prior to us getting there, they either didn't have any way to include their corporate partners in the TVs or what they had just wasn't working for what they wanted to do.
And so yeah, I don't think we faced any pushback there from people saying why not just use the existing feed? I think the other part of it is too tough, in our opinion, when we are done, it looks a lot better and it provides a better fan experience than before we got there. And I know we're on a podcast so you can't see this, but if people go to our website or if they look us up on LinkedIn. we're FanConnect.TV so that's our domain name. But if they look at what we do, it's designed to mirror a lot of what you would see with a professionally produced broadcast. So imagine somebody's in a truck and they're using tools from Ross and Grass Valley, et cetera, and they're building something to make it look broadcast quality, we're doing something similar. We just do it in software and without having people do it in real-time.
I assume one of the drivers here for the corporate sponsor people is they're looking for as many ways as possible to give their corporate sponsors some love and avoid any minefields of a TV broadcast, if, let's say, I don't know, Chrysler is the sponsor at a stadium or a sponsor at the venue, they don't want a Ford ad on TV or a Toyota.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what they're trying to do is they want to create something that works for a partner, and I will say, because we probably lead the world in this and I know that sounds like blowing our own horn here, but as far as companies that are really invested in understanding how corporate partnerships work and the needs of the teams that work with them, I think we probably do more of that than anybody.
I'm not talking about just the pure technology people doing an L bar, creating something that kinda adds to the video. But the other part of what we do is education about the best use of that technology to actually do what it's supposed to do, and so oftentimes prior to us getting there, if they did have something like, think just like an L bar, going back to Cisco Stadium Vision days. If they had something, there wasn't a lot of thought put into it, and in most cases, the experience wasn't great. It really looked like what it was, which is you just shrunk the amount of video space available to show the game and you put an ad wrap around it, and you're showing kinda nothing but a wall of ads, and if you see what our product looks like, if you saw it in the NFL, you're gonna see passing statistics and rushing statistics, and we're gonna interleave in photos from the team's official Twitter feed when those are appropriate, and just pulling in a lot of stats and engaging content and then embedding that with the sponsor assets in a way that looks really natural and not like we just put a wall of ads up there.
I've certainly heard through the years of very large technology companies like Cisco buying their way into these sorts of venues, and in order to do that, you have to use their technology. Are we past that where the venues realize, yeah, that was great, we got that for free, or very little money, but it didn't actually work for us?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say that is still something that is evolving. So if you look at the landscape today, certainly you've got teams that have invested in one IPTV system or another, right? So Cisco was one of the first of those. There are plenty of other technologies that do that, and that's something that we make as full IPTV as well. But if you look at the people that do it, I think that in most cases they certainly would show in their marketing something that looks like an L bar and they're all going to say words on their website like make more money from sponsors. But in terms of actually doing that, it's an exercise left to the reader, and so you see teams that have had some of those newer technologies and have had them for years, and we know because we talk to everybody that we work with and people that we don't, you'll see people that have had it for multiple years that have not gotten that to where it does something close to what we do, not even just a basic version of it.
So the content's hard. I think you probably know that as well as anybody, right? In the digital signage industry, content's also hard. But it's especially hard on the side where we play because you have a lot of things that you have to do well to make it look like what we're trying to make it look like. We want the scoreboard embedded in the same way it would be on the broadcast TV feed. We want the live clock that's coming, it's the same thing that's tied to the scoreboard controller that's in the stadium. We want to be able to show out-of-town scores. We want to highlight when something significant has happened in those out-of-town scores that lead to changes. We want to show sort of detailed stats, like in major league baseball, hit and pitch data, and so tying all of those things together and making it work well is not something that's easy, and so I would say that currently the positioning by. Most of the vendors that make something like IPTV is yeah, you can just use our stuff and go build something to your liking. In reality, we certainly work in a number of places where the vendor that is there would much rather that experience be them than be something created by us.
I'm curious about how deep you have to stitch your way into the operations of the venue and of the sports franchise, whether it's football, baseball, hockey, or whatever the case, you have to work with the scoreboard systems, like the statistical analysis systems, the people are doing things like reading how fast that fastball came in and all that sort of stuff. Is that a lot easier to do now than it was even five years ago?
Brett Crossley: I would say that parts of it are easier, but there are new technologies that come out and then essentially new APIs that you're having to deal with on the regular. It was much harder for us when we first started. So we started doing this way back in like, 2010, and I can share this now because it's just been so long, and it doesn't matter, but we really bluffed our way into it, and at the beginning, it was like, yeah we want to make something work here, can you work with our scoreboard controller? Yeah, sure. What is that? What brand?
And it was difficult, right? I think that when you think about the vendors that are in sports venues, a lot of them do not want to play well with others, right? Think about the people that made the scoreboard controller, and the people that made the stats, and I feel like there's another barrier to entry there, which is that the professional sports side, all have pretty tightly codified APIs that distribute all of their data. But if you haven't already got a team that's your customer, you won't get access to that data, and so it's not if you came up with a product idea, you can just build it, and they will come. You have to have something in the door to be invited to use the data. I think for us, it certainly got easier over time because as we saw one of every type of scoreboard controller, we would just chalk that up and write it down. We're like, oh, okay, they've got Dactronics, they have an OES, or whatever the thing was, and then we would figure out how to work with it. You can imagine some APIs represent abstraction for that so that t no matter which one of the controllers we're working with or which stats API, we can kind of create something more unified and easier to manage.
Sports entertainment venues are turning into experiential venues in many ways. Are you now having to also work with almost like show control systems?
Brett Crossley: So that's interesting. We do, in some cases, work with control systems, but interestingly enough, more of that is done during a live sports game for example, if you think about working with the production crew, they might have a Ross tool that is designed to trigger things on the video board, on the ribbon boards, et cetera and we can make it to work on the TVs that we operate on are one more thing that can be tied into those control systems and so imagine, somebody's just hit the third home run of the game, and so they want to put a special message up, they can send that message, and it'll activate all of the things at once. It's kind of a TV takeover, video board, and ribbon board. So that's where we see that.
On the sort of mixed-use venue side, I think that the requirements in general on the TVs are a little, and when I talk about the TVs, the bulk of the TVs, I'm not breaking it down to the very specific ones that are doing a job that looks much more like digital signage, right? Like concessions, menu boards, and sort of those things. But if you think about it, the bulk of the TVs that would've had the game on in that venue during a concert is probably still showing the concert feed. They might be doing a simple wrap, and the wrap is just giving some day-of-event information instead. So it's a little bit simpler just because nobody has a big vested interest in doing something special for a one-off like a concert.
You mentioned digital signage. You also have that as part of your kind of product suite, right?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, sure. We originally were a digital signage company, so if you went way back when we started doing what we did originally in college sports and then eventually in professional sports as well, FanConnect was a wholly owned subsidiary of 10 Foot Wave, which was a digital signage company and was split off in 2018 as part of the acquisition of 10 Foot Wave by Spectrio and so our roots were in that space, to begin with anyway. It's natural that as we split off and just focus on sports venues we wanted to be able to handle all of the small screens, you can think about them that way that are inside of a stadium, and so that includes the TVs that are showing the game, TVs that do the equivalent digital signage which is just informational, et cetera, as well as the concession, menu board, those types of things, and then the other kind of interesting one is like what we do at Ohio State, which is we make a tablet that's used in the lodge area. And so it's purpose-built, it does, IPTV, so it does videos so you can watch them out of town game or whatever that you're interested in. But it also has a bunch of functionality used by the kind of premium seat holders at Ohio State. So if they need to call an attendant, if they're trying to figure out the pricing of the mixed drinks or whatever, they can look that up what to do and all of that, look at rosters and team data, et cetera, on that purpose-built tablet.
So there's one at every seat?
Brett Crossley: There's one at every table, is the way that it works. So if you think about a lodge area, it’s a hybrid, right? So it's assigned seats in grouped sections as opposed to just you're in these five seats, so you've got a shared table for every three people or something like that.
So there'd be a lot of client entertainment happening?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, there's a lot of entertainment, and then those people paid a lot of money for those seats wherever they are. I mean sports venues are expensive, and so just trying to create a premium offering for those people is something that a lot of teams are working on.
Is there a lot of pressure to do more and more from one company in a sports and entertainment venue?
I talk a lot about the importance of a company being known as the guys who do this kind of work, and I wonder if you were just going into sports and entertainment venues, purely doing the concession digital signage, are you pressured also to be doing IPTV in the suites and elsewhere on the concourses and all that sort of thing? Or are the venues pretty much okay with you doing this piece of it, we'll have these other five companies do these other things?
Brett Crossley: I think that really like every industry that matures, the buyers in this case, the technology side of the stadium, they would rather have a smaller number of vendors to deal with than a larger number, and so as a practical concern, I think you're right, which is the way we think about it, we need to be able to do all of the things you would want to be able to do on anything that looks like a TV inside of a venue. That's part of what we have to be able to offer because, again, you are correct that people would rather have a single vendor, a single interface, et cetera, to deal with.
One place where I think that does break down a little differently is the content side because that’s just so complex on its own, and so we certainly have people that are leveraging us for the experience on the screens and all of that, who already have another vendor in as the IPTV solution who may have somebody different for menu boards, et cetera. And the one thing that they truly can't get anywhere else would be something similar to what we do with the content that's created on TV.
So you might have an IPTV service of some kind, and they're quite good at video networking, but they don't know much about the presentation side of it?
Brett Crossley: To be fair, I'm not going to say that they can't make something that's pretty, I think that you'll see, and I think it's been true of digital signage forever, which people will show you really pretty screens and, use that, whatever's on that screen as a substitute for, here's what you're going to have to do to get that to work. And the example I always give is, you look up at a concession stand or a digital menu board, and you can't really tell what you're looking at, is it just a static image? Is it an image over just an animation background? Or is it truly being rendered dynamically tied back to a point of sale? It's hard to tell.
So I think that at least on the content side, it becomes something where you would rather have something that works than be given a toolkit, especially when it comes time to actually build anything that's as close to as complex as what we do. You could build it, but you'd be spending a long time. It took us a long time to build what we have, right? And so if you just sat somebody down and you gave them a pile of tools, building that is going to take a lot of effort, and you're gonna have to hire people to do it and it's not like you get to build it once, you have to continue maintaining it and working on it, changing it out and adding to it over time. I think it's just difficult.
What's the business arrangement that you would have with a typical venue? Where do you start and stop?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, so our contractual arrangement most of the time is with, like I said, the corporate partnership side, right? If you think about whoever is in charge of making money from corporate partners or sponsors, that's usually who our contractual arrangement is with, and then a side part of that and really it happens in every deal that we're in and every stadium that we're in prior to the deal being signed, they bring in technology and those guys grill us and ask us, how are you gonna work with our system, and how do you do this? And we pull up diagrams because we've seen a lot of that before. And we're like, yeah, this is what we would do to work with you guys.
Once that's all done, we are working closely with the technical team to just make sure that everything is still operational. But then our business arrangements are with the corporate partnership side and we are paid kind of the way you think about it, just like anybody else, right? We get paid for things we build and put on the screen, and we don't have weird arrangements, I don’t know if you remember those guys like Arena Media Network, et cetera. There were multiple companies that would try to do that. We'll give it to you for free and we will keep some percentage of the inventory. In some cases, it was more like, we'll give it to you for free, we'll pay you to take it, and we'll keep part of the inventory.
We don't do anything weird like that. We're more of a direct business relationship with whoever is the equivalent of the rights holder and then they are the ones that are bringing the corporate partners.
Yeah. The whole build it, and they will come to things where we're putting screens in the washrooms and everywhere else, hoping that they could sell media time around it, there's been a legacy of failure there.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, and you still see it, and not to pick on people, right? But the classic one for me was the urinal TV, where you mount these TVs, individual screens up, I like to think that what we do is the opposite of that. What we want to do is to make something that we're a corporate partner, and when they see it on the screen, they are like, wow, that looks great.
We're active on LinkedIn, and my favorite thing is when somebody that works for the sponsor takes a picture of the TV screen, and they are on it, and it's the game-winner. You've just won the big game, and then their stuff's up, and they take that picture, and they throw that out on their LinkedIn. They like what they see there and the company they're keeping. As I said, if you just look at our product, it really does look good. In addition to kinda all the things that make fans want to be on it and the technology side, and I'm not saying that we wouldn't build something to work in urinals if a team wanted us to build that, but we certainly wouldn't go out of our way to do it without somebody really asking for it.
Yeah. If somebody's in trouble, they become the field maintenance guy for that. Do you do the deployment, hardware sourcing, or anything, or are you strictly on the software and automation?
Brett Crossley: We work on the hardware side as much as we need to, or as little as we have to.
We're not in the business of making players. We're not like a Brightsign. We try to remain pretty hardware neutral. We have preferences, of course, I think anybody who's been in this industry does. But if you think about the FanConnect TV product itself, it's a hybrid cloud solution, right? So there is a server installed on the premises. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. The server is responsible for compositing, pulling everything together, and building out what is going to really be a show and that's how that's going to work.
The rest of the hardware for FanConnect TV would be the video distribution system, so we work with whatever is there. In many cases, we were replacing, let's say, you had your stadium, you had Channel 10.2 digital, or if you're using IPTV, it's an IP stream, and you've got kind of a symbol for it. We're often just replacing that. That's the first thing that we are doing at most places. Now there are places where we're doing more sophisticated things, where you can imagine, if you're in the suites at American Airline Center, every channel, no matter which channels you are tuned into, would still be wrapped in kind of an L bar wrap so that's an example of something that's different and does require a device behind every TV. But in most cases, pretty straightforward, we're tied into the existing distribution system, pushing that out, and as I said, we try to remain relatively hardware neutral. Our server is, of course, just one U rack-mounted server that's hardened and does what it's supposed to do. But we can work with various kinds of player technologies regarding digital signage, our IPTV solutions, the things we do in suites, et cetera.
Yeah, I would imagine you're seeing a lot of smart displays in suites now.
Brett Crossley: It's starting to happen. It's expensive to replace everything in a stadium, and you’d think replacing TVs would be something that would be something done more actively than it is. Still, right now, I think what are people wait until there's either a big renovation or they're just going to build another stadium, and so they're waiting on one of those two things to go in and do the big upgrade on the TVs. But yeah, smart TVs, things with a system-on-a-chip capability are certainly starting to move out there, and I’m starting to run into them. And venues would like you to use them if you can, right? They would rather just have a smaller number of things to break and manage. If you can avoid putting a box behind every TV, then that would be better.
Does it make any business difference to you guys in terms of whether you're working with Major League Baseball, which is gonna have 80+ home games a year, versus football that might have six or seven home games?
I just wonder about some of these massive venues that really don't get used very often. Are they more reticent to invest in technology?
Brett Crossley: I don't think that's the case. I think that what you'll find is, if you take an NFL stadium or a big college stadium, right? That would get you closer to your six or seven games. The fact that there are so few games means that the games that you have are extremely important and really in their minds, they want to make sure that nothing is going to go wrong. Whoever's in charge of the technology side, just wants to make sure that it's going to work. That's their number one concern.
The corporate partnership people, again they care the way that I put it, and this is true of really anything in sponsorship, not just us, but if you're a baseball team, if something goes wrong and you don't do the activation for that corporate partner that you were supposed to do, you have a lot of other games to make that up to them and comp them. If something goes wrong at a football game and you mess up what you've committed to a corporate partner, then you're in a different position because that game represented a significant percentage of what you were trying to do for them for the season.
I don't think we've ever faced any pushback because of the number of games. It's more on the technology side. They just want to make sure that it's rock solid, and we've been doing this long enough, we can point to that, and we can go, we've done so many games, we can't get an accurate count of them. We've tried, but it's thousands upon thousands of live games that we've produced at this point and so I think it's really a trust issue probably more than anything else.
Is it a challenge for something like an arena that may have an NHL team, an NBA team, a WNBA team, and they all have different sponsors, and they may change from night to night?
Brett Crossley: So we do support those. If you think about a complex example of that, it would be Capital One Arena in DC, where we were working with the Washington Wizards, The capitals and also Georgetown is in that same venue, and so you've got, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and then concerts, things like that, and the way that we operate the way we operate FanConnect TV is a little different from the rest of the digital signage. So today, we operate that as a managed service for them, and so they tell us what they are trying to do, what they want to do, and then we just help fulfill it and actually make it all work on the screens.
The needs for the different sponsors are really a byproduct of who is running corporate partnership at the venue and for the teams as far as if they need something different. So we do something similar at Acrisure Stadium, right? We work with the Pit Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers, and there are two totally different corporate partnership teams. In some cases, it is the same team, whatever way they want us to work, we will work with that.
Tell me about the company. You're privately held?
Brett Crossley: We are privately held. We're not VC-backed. We have investors, and then many of us that are there are also investors, and we were as close to profitable as we want to be, right? And so if we're not profitable at any particular time, it's because we are intentionally spending more money. It's not because we have not yet achieved some measure of success.
Has all the weirdness of the last three years affected your industry or your business at all? I mean obviously, when nobody was going to games, that was a bit of a challenge, but it’s back.
Brett Crossley: Absolutely. Looking back on it, it was very difficult. I think when Covid hit, a bunch of people we worked with just shrugged to put their hands up and it was not good. One thing that was nice about that was we'd been working on kind of a full ground-up replacement of our core technology, and we went ahead and did that, and now we've seen that through to where we finalized that, right? So it's the third generation of this technology.
And we had the luxury of being able just to take our time, building it from scratch, knowing everything that we'd learned over this time, and so in some ways, I'd say that maybe was a little bit of a blessing, although it didn't seem like it at the time, watching the P&L statements for that time. But yeah, I'd say it was crazy for everybody.
Yeah, I've heard that story a few times. It's interesting when they say we didn't plan on this, but suddenly we have time to tear up the platform and start over, or do v3.
Brett Crossley: That work had already been started, right? And technology moves forward, right? And then we'd been looking at a number of things that we wanted to be able to do better in a kind of fully integrated way, and so the timing was good. We'd already started working on that effort. It's a lot of work, right? Replatforming is a significant amount of work.
What it allowed us to do, though, was to take our time and get everything right. There was no rush to try to get something in because the season was getting ready to start. So I'd say we've found some benefit. The one side note, though is things are bigger than they were pre-Covid in terms of what we do in live sports, in terms of attendance, in terms of the interest that we're getting, in terms of the way people view what they want to do inside of a stadium. I'd say that things are better now than they were pre-Covid.
I live in Canada, and I don't live anywhere near Toronto, but the Blue Jays just had their opener, and they did a huge refresh of a lot of the technology in that building, and one of the drivers said they have to up the game day experience. That's what people expect if they're going to be spending $14 on a beer and $80 on a ticket, that sort of thing.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, that's right, and it's not wrong when people say that sports venues are not competing with other sports venues. They're competing with the big-screen TV that's in your house, right? So putting something in front of the fans that is very impressive is really important, and we fit in well with that. During the off-season, when I say off-season, I'm really thinking of kinda the fall sports off-season, because we are running some games throughout the entire year, but when we had a chance, we went back and did a redesign of sort of the core of FanConnect TV, and we worked with graphic designers that have done work with Fox Sports, FX1, et cetera, to come up with something that was really polished and professional and look broadcast quality, because, that's what people wanna see, right? Especially when we come in, and we're like, we've got something that's better for your TVs, and they're like, okay, prove that, and that's what we ended up with.
I think one thing that's neat about our design is unlike an ESPN or somebody like that who has to essentially be neutral, right? Our broadcast is definitely themed for the home team, right? If you saw this at the University of Georgia, it is nice, and it's red and black, and it is bulldog television, and if you saw the same thing at the Chicago White Sox, it definitely looks like the White Sox, right? It's not trying to be neutral.
All right, Brett, thank you very much for spending the time with me.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it.
Wednesday Apr 12, 2023
Wes Nicol, Videri
Wednesday Apr 12, 2023
Wednesday Apr 12, 2023
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.
Wednesday Mar 22, 2023
Ney Corsino, Nanolumens
Wednesday Mar 22, 2023
Wednesday Mar 22, 2023
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.
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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.