Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Jay Leedy, Sony

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

Sony has been around digital signage for pretty much as long as the industry, but in all my time around this sector I haven't had a particularly strong sense that the company was really serious about digital signage. Until the last year or so.

First, the company attracted Rich Ventura over from NEC, and Ventura is as well-known, knowledgeable and hyper-connected as they come in this business.

A few months later, Jay Leedy left the huge AV integrator Diversified to join Sony, and while he's maybe not quite as connected as Rich, he's still really well known in this sector, and knows his stuff. Locked down for months like most of us, Leedy's spent his first year with Sony building up relationships with the ecosystem and raising awareness that Sony really, truly is in the digital signage business in a serious way.

In our chat, we cover a bunch of things - most notably Sony's own approach to so-called smart displays. While Samsung and LG have proprietary operating systems for their smart screens, and their main competitors use Android, Sony uses Android TV. We get into what that means, in terms of benefits like power and features, and a small number of quirks that owe to its being, at its core, a consumer product.

Leedy's gig, in part, is making the developer system aware that Sony has a "pro mode" for Android TV, and how digital signage software companies that already support Android can add support for Android TV quickly and easily.

We also get into where Leedy is seeing marketplace demand right now, and where the industry is going in terms of emerging technologies.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Leedy, thanks for joining me. You have, in the past year or so, gone from one company to another. What are you doing at Sony? 

Jay Leedy: Hey, Dave. Good to talk to you as well. So when I left Diversified, I had been doing a lot of work in business development for strategic partners, and also working with a lot of the offices globally, driving digital signage solutions through local relationships.

Similar work, as when I moved to Sony. I'm part of an organization that is really part of their factory planning and product roadmap team called HES or Home Entertainment & Sound, which is a funny name for an organization in my focus, which is really exclusively B2B, but it sheds a little light on our strategy and how we're developing our Bravia product, with a lot of efficiencies in manufacturing and kind of common components from our consumer line, we poured it into a discrete line of Bravia products. 

So I do a lot of partnership development, really taking cues from our professional sales organization that Richard Ventura leads, and based on their feedback and voice of customer insights, leverage that into developing solutions or effecting changes to our hardware components that are made to better serve the B2B market, and in cases where we have gaps in capability, build-out partnership ecosystems to serve that. So my focus immediately, since I came on, which has been about eight months, has really been around digital signage and building out a broad partner ecosystem to serve that market.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because I spoke with Richard when he came over to Sony and talked a little bit about his plans and everything else, and I think it's fair to say that Sony in the past decade or so, hasn't been all that present, maybe by design or just circumstance or marketing, I don't know, in the digital signage sector, but I would say in the past year or so, it seems much more a part of it and not might owe to people like you and Rich and others who are known in the ecosystem and have those deep contacts and everything else. 

Has it been work to get the digital signage ecosystem, understanding that, “Hey, Sony is a player on the B2B side, and we are interested in talking to you and we do have products that are very digital signage appropriate”? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey, and I'll be honest when I saw Sony at the very last DSE, the same year that LG had decided not to attend. It was a bit of a head-scratcher for me too, I was still at Diversified at the time and had not worked with Sony at all in my capacity there but certainly, with Rich Ventura joining and my coming on, roughly six months after he joined, there's been a distinct focus and an investment at the headquarters level to go after this market seriously. 

We've had a Pro Bravia line of products since 2018, but to your earlier point, we have been relatively Invisible to the market so a number of the folks that I reached out to after I joined Sony on the SI and reseller side, comments were, “Where have you guys been? You've got a great brand. You've got great quality. Everybody knows Sony.” But for whatever reason, we had chosen not to really go aggressively after the B2B market and for a number of years, we were really solely focused on consumers.

But as you know, there's a huge opportunity in B2B, and coming on and engaging with partners, helping them understand our current strategy, which is really around an Android TV-based system on a chip, that's been surprisingly and enthusiastically met with a lot of optimism and support in the digital signage partnership community. So I think that's largely because it's not proprietary [latform that needs to be developed there, they can use existing development talent that is already familiar with developing for Android and work with us without having to develop a new skill set or onboard new resources.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because everybody thinks about Samsung as the company that really introduced the idea of “smart signage” with their system on chip displays, going back to 2013 or something. But I pretty strongly believed that Sony actually had a smart TV and a smart digital signage product before Samsung by a year or so, but it was, as we were just talking about not all that heavily marketed and there wasn't a lot of awareness around it, but Sony has been at this for quite some time.

Jay Leedy: We did have a line that I just learned about actually proceeding with our 2018 launch of Pro Bravia that was more of an ODM approach. So because of that, we didn't control the entire solution stack. Now that we do you have that level of control and a strong partnership with Google and the Android team, that combined with inherent components that we've always built into our devices with respect to image processing and high-quality screen components, that's really helped us accelerate, I think.

A lot of it, to your point, is really about getting the word out and talking with our reseller and SI community, as well as the consultant community to help them understand that this is a real line, we're committed, and we're not dipping our toes into proverbial water. Like this is something that we have deep investment in and commitment at the highest levels of the organization to go after. 

You talked about how easy it is to develop for Android since you don't have to have a proprietary operating system, but is there a clear distinction between Android and Android TV, in terms of development? 

Like I've heard some software companies say, “Yeah, the Sony product is great, but it's Android TV. It's not Android as we know it. So it's different. We have to develop differently. There are limitations on what we can do and everything else.” How accurate is that? 

Jay Leedy: It's somewhat accurate. I'd say there are some trade-offs. There are some differences between Android TV and Android, specifically that Android TV was designed for watching TV so some of the capabilities like portrait view, for example, are not native in the application.

There's ways to work around that. There are currently some cash limitations on a per-app basis that we're working to address with Google as well, and there's also I think the impression that our Pro Bravia line is more of a consumer or prosumer approach, and to some degree, that's, I think informed by a lack of understanding that we have developed and enabled what we call “Pro mode” which turns off certain UI UX functionality, menus and exposes IP control and other capabilities that would be expected in a commercial line of product. So engineers that are unfamiliar with that may rightly or wrongly draw the conclusion that we're not built for commercial use.

We are in fact, and because of Android, we can expose IP capabilities that are already native to the solution, the device just has to be configured in a specific way in order to take advantage of that. We've also very quickly, to the credit of our software development team in the San Diego offices at Sony, in partnership with Tokyo have developed a device policy control application that enables deeper system level access and that has been a product of my working directly with that team and them better understanding what the requirements of the market or what the desires of partners are, and what is ultimately going to be really critical in helping us meet the market needs. 

So if I'm understanding that correctly, you may have developers from different companies going, yeah Android TV is just not going to be good enough, but if you can get them on a demo and get a sales engineer explaining what you can do, that changes their minds. 

Jay Leedy: It does, and I think what's important to a growing number of end customers and subsequently the managed service providers and SI that serve them is a need to be able to specify devices that can predictably plug into their existing device management and network topology infrastructure because MDM has grown so rapidly with bring your own device strategies and the need to manage disparate device types. The familiarity with Android has increased rapidly especially, where only three four years ago, Android was really looked at as something that posed potential risk to network administrators. 

Now they only embrace it, because they have the tools and familiarity with those tools as to how to effectively manage devices and also mitigate risk on their networks.

And I think with the new Sony Bravia lines that are out, I was reading an email the other day, I think it's like Android 10, right? 

Jay Leedy: That's right, yep, and with any of the devices that we release with Android TV, we're obligated to support up to three major updates. Ss Google releases new versions of Android, we would be compatible for three major releases so the Android 10 devices that are hitting the market now will be able to support up to Android 13, for example, which I think is really helpful in helping the developer community understand the extent to which we support their efforts as well. 

I think it was the guys over in the Czech Republic, SignageOS guys, who did a review of different smart displays and they took a look at the Sony and said, it was really good in terms of video handling and everything else, because it was a later version of Android versus some of the other ones. Is that something you're hearing? 

Jay Leedy: It is. Yeah, in fact, a couple of our partners, who've done initial assessments using benchmarking criteria and content mix and playlists that they use to benchmark all the various players that they evaluate, and in some cases they're even scorecarding and publicly publishing those results, and our performance based on those assessments has been consistent with purpose-built devices like an Intel NUC or a Mac Mini versus some of the others in the market that don't perform nearly as strongly. So I think that's partly because of the processing power that we have, our dedicated video processors as well. And, also having powerful connectivity handling and, some of the other components that really make these strong performing devices. 

So is there a “but” that comes up still? You know, “These are great, but they don't do this or they don't do that.” 

Jay Leedy: Yeah. We have a couple of limitations. One is that per app cache is currently at a max threshold of 2GB, which for many of the applications does not present a challenge, but when you get into scenarios where you're trying to cache locally assets that are fairly large, that can create a challenge. There's a limitation with native rotation, that when putting it into portrait mode, as we touched on earlier, it natively doesn't support that, but in most of the applications that we're testing, we have an answer for that with HTML and CSS workflows that don’t present any concern and we're actively working to resolve those issues and take that feedback and insight that we get from our partners and our resellers and customers.

And that's really my job is to carry those into our planning and roadmap afterwards. 

Yeah, so much of digital signage now is built up around web-based technologies that in the same way that you can have a responsive webpage that'll go into portrait for a smartphone, I assume the same thing is happening here, right? 

Jay Leedy: That's right. The trend, in general, is towards progressive web apps versus native applications, and better understanding that and helping our development team understand how we can address and create a kind of a fertile platform to be able to accommodate those strategies.

It is part of our focus as well, and that's really why we built this large ecosystem to get as much feedback as we can so that we can remain relevant and proactively drive into the market with the right tools for the community. 

So when I looked at Sony in recent years, if I would go to their booth at something like ISC and ask them about digital signage, they would look around and try to find somebody who knew about it and they drag somebody over and they may, or maybe not know much, and if they did, they would point me in a couple of directions to something called TEOS, which is what I gather is more of an office management collaboration toolset, and then there was some CMS software partnership with a company who I wasn't terribly familiar with so I would walk away from those little drive-by meetings and think, “okay, they're not really active in this”, but that's changed if you're talking to 40-60 different software companies you're trying to build something up? 

Jay Leedy: That's right, yeah, and the change is also in helping our professional sales organization and the product management and sales engineers better understand digital signage as a whole, but also the nuances and specialized differentiation between the different partners.

You're right, we did have limited expertise internally prior to Rich and myself coming on digital signage. We had made some inroads and I think had a strategy that entailed reselling digital signage software. That is really not our focus now. We really want to, at the end of the day, remove obstacles to specification and be able to plug into existing estates seamlessly with NSOC that has already pre-qualified as compatible or in the event that, we uncover an opportunity that doesn't have that compatibility or inherent that we have a process and a program to move quickly and ensure that performance evaluation can take place, both by putting a display in our partner's hands and putting their product in our software engineers hands and doing parallel testing and having a feedback loop that’s ongoing. 

So what are you hearing from the various companies out there? 

And God knows there are many of them that have been developing two different system-on-chip displays for several years now, and I say “they” in a global fashion and I understand, some haven't done that, but many have, where are they going and what are they doing? 

Jay Leedy: You mean in terms of…? 

The development, do you see a shift to smart displays from PCs, and do you see a different direction in terms of how they're developing? Cause I get a sense that the smart companies are understanding that they've got to stop just being this kind of island of activity where it just like digital science, you've got to be integrated. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, you're right about that. I think generally there was a desire by the digital signage software community to consolidate their development resources as much as possible. So not maintaining expertise on a wide range of platforms is desirable. There's also been a shift away from any Chrome OS support and that the logical kind of migration is to support Android, so we're seeing that. 

We're also seeing, in general, a trend towards, using a SOC where possible versus a purpose-built device, both in terms of reducing the cost of hardware, as well as points of failure. But yet you're always going to have scenarios where there is a dedicated playback device may be required, higher-resolution or video walls, but more and more we're seeing a desire to specify and be able to run multiple applications on a single device that in many cases Bravia is built to be able to handle, and that goes beyond digital signage, it edges into typical AV installations and all the device control and integrated solutions in that market as well. 

So there's enough processing power on these two to handle to basically multitask or multithread? 

Jay Leedy: That's right. 

With the different software companies, are you getting any sense that they're coming or they're looking for an alternative to what they've been doing in the past, because some of the big guys, the Samsungs, and LGs of the world, in particular, have started introducing their own software platforms or CMS software?

Jay Leedy: Yeah, I'd say that's correct. There's a desire certainly by the leading software partners to align with manufacturers that are competing with their business, and that's the same with the systems integrators and managed service providers where we don't have a device monitoring network operations kind of service offering.

In some cases, there are manufacturers that have built up those practices and that creates a threat to the highest growth rate part of that industry sector, and it would make logical sense to align with the manufacturer that's staying in their lane, so to speak, and let them grow the business that is most attractive for them to realize returns on.

But the flip side of that argument is that if you are going with a company that has proprietary smart displays and its own CMS, it's kind of a matched set, so to speak, and therefore it simplifies the lives of the integrators. You just know that their displays and the software are already baked in and validated for it so that makes it simple for me. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, I can see that. But I think flexibility is a big part of the need in the market. We're seeing that kind of confirmed with a number of touchpoints through the industry where especially when you're approaching a customer that has a fairly mature strategy and maybe legacy devices that are across a wide global estate that are not all going to be deemed end of life at the same time, they need to be able to have more interoperability and flexibility and also be able to capitalize on trends as they occur, and as relationships evolve and shift over the life of those things 

Does activity and interest in the signage sector differ from what it did 15-16 months ago?

Jay Leedy: That's a great question. I think I just read your Workplaces Reworked white paper yesterday, which was really well done by the way.

And you slept well last night, right? (Laughter) 

Jay Leedy: I did. We are seeing an increased interest in unified communication and hybrid working environments, or I think accelerating the need for physical spaces to be able to have more heads-up displays for situational awareness, all that stuff is driving that.

And I think there are also opportunities because of the way that these spaces are being organized differently to place communication tools where they previously didn't exist, as well as in the cases of huddle rooms and conference room spaces, there's a number of clients that are interested in activating both screens and using them as communication tools more passively when that environment is not being used for its primary purpose. That definitely has been a trend that we've seen, and I would expect to continue to grow. 

Setting workplace aside, are there verticals that seem to be emerging and other ones that are, you would maybe coach a solutions provider or software company to stay away from for now or not bother with? 

Jay Leedy: I think enterprise, education, healthcare, they all seem to be on a more of a growth trajectory. Obviously, QSR, especially for the drive-throughs, has gone through a major transformation, and there's not any in particular that I think I would steer anybody away from, honestly, we've seen investments that have been pretty significant in transportation as the operators of those hubs, in airports and train stations, have taken advantage of the less traffic. Being able to put labor to drive installation and overhauling those environments at a fraction of the cost, because they don't have to work overnight. They can work during the day. 

So there's not anyone in particular that I would say, I would steer away from necessarily where, as far as Sonny's line of product currently, we don't have an outdoor display. That's something that we may choose to bring to market in the future. But as far as working with Sony specifically, obviously, outdoor displays is not something that we would chase but there certainly seems to be plenty of momentum there. 

Yeah, I was walking through ISE a year and a half ago, and one of the things that stuck in my head was, “Dear God, there are a lot of companies selling outdoor kiosks,” and that was in Europe. So imagine North America and Asia and add all that up and holy smokes. 

So there's nobody sitting around going, “if only somebody would come out with an outdoor ready display for my use.” 

Jay Leedy: That's right, yeah. There seems to be plenty of options out there, but plenty of opportunities too as a result. 

Where do you see the digital signage software and technology going in terms of new developments and overarching trends?

Jay Leedy: Like I mentioned earlier with progressive web apps and a trend towards consolidating developer resources on really focusing on a single platform versus having to support a range of them is certainly a trend in broader integration as well. We're seeing that with companies like Mersive and Crestron, who are able to support digital signage playback in traditional AV applications, and I think beyond that, there are more comprehensive strategies evolving in corporate communications and using a range of different screen types from mobile phones to desktop to traditional digital signage as channels to communicate and meet the need of where the audience wants to receive that information in any shape or form across the entire chain.

So when you're working with the 40-50 companies that you're speaking with, what are they asking and why should they be involved with you? 

Jay Leedy: Mainly they're asking whether their existing native Android application can run on our device or whether they have to develop something unique and more often than not the answer is that their APK can be sideloaded onto our device and very little modification to their code is required. 

So a small job versus a six months job? 

Jay Leedy: Exactly, yeah. So that's really attractive, just to have another arrow in the quiver, so to speak and I think they're also looking for more ways to market.

The enthusiasm that we've gotten in general when they learned that Sony is leaning in and getting more serious about the B2B side of the business and digital signage in particular, they're super excited about it because, like many of us, myself included, some of the first electronics that we had relationships with as we were teenagers and young adults were Sony products, and the idea of working with a brand that has so much recognition in the market for quality, as well as so much innovation in various sectors of our business, including our interactive entertainment division and then this PlayStation product that just can't even stay on the shelves that we get a little bit of a Halo effect from that when approaching these various partners there, they're really excited about working with us. 

Yeah I'd be curious about that. When you come to a Sony display if you're looking at it versus some of the other manufacturers out there, I don't know, I'm thinking maybe you're not going to win a deal based on your price versus some other commodity product but if the buying decision is hanging around, at least in part on visual quality, then you're in the hunt. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's a great point. In terms of color accuracy and acuity and things that are really important to brand marketers, we're absolutely in the hunt, if not first consideration, and I think that also translates to total cost ownership calculations, and some of the kind of quality benchmarks that we hit that are reflected in our warranties. 

The industry experts that have worked with us for a long time and as well as are familiar with a number of other manufacturers gravitate towards us because they know they can, more or less, set it and forget it. They're not going to incur costs that they may have to pass on to their customers for field remediation and things that may have been problematic for them previously. So yeah, that seems to really resonate as well. 

All right, Jay, thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Jay Leedy: Absolutely. Dave, great to talk to you again, and I'm glad everything's going well for you.

 

 

Transforming QSR Drive-Thru Roundtable

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

QSR has always been an interesting and very active sector for digital signage, with chain restaurant operators being early adopters of the technology for menu displays.

But the pandemic has shifted digital screens from being a better, more cost-efficient way to manage menus to being mission-critical to many operations - particularly when in-store ordering and dining was shut down in many places and the only way to do business was in the drive-thru lane.

Global Display Solutions (GDS), which makes outdoor displays for situations like drive-thrus, had an online panel session recently that explored the digital transformation of QSR. I was asked to moderate - a job made easy because I had really great panelists.

Along with Robert Heise of GDS, I chatted with Jackie Walker of Publicis Sapient, Dana Stotts of Arc Worldwide and Jeff Hastings, the super-smart CEO of BrightSign.

There was no presentation to sit through first, so what you have with the audio version of the session is about 60 minutes of insights on what's happening with digital signage in QSR. In short - lots! 

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Neil Longuet-Higgins, The LED Studio

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

I was scrolling my way through my Linkedin feed recently when I stumbled across a post from a guy who said he was the inventor of the much-debated term digital signage, with a bio photo that showed him wielding a bottle of champagne that was about the size of a golf bag.

Clearly, I needed to speak with this guy.

So Neil Longuet-Higgins and I got on a podcast call the other day to talk about his claim to coining the term digital signage. Turns out he kind of adapted it from someone outside the industry, who was looking at a video wall, and didn't know what to call it.

He's been around pro AV and digital signage for some 30 years, so we talk about the early days and challenges. We also get more broadly into what he does - running sales for a company west of London called The LED Studio.

That company specs, designs, manufactures, rolls out and manages large format LED displays, including a new microLED video wall product that competes with the big boys of the display business.

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TRANSCRIPT

All right, Neil, thank you for joining me. We've not met, but I was intrigued by what I saw on your LinkedIn bio that I stumbled across. It said you're the guy who invented the term or coined the term, “digital signage.” So it was your fault? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I'd like to think so. Some people might disagree. It was many years ago when I was running a video wall company in the UK and everybody used Barco monitors and electronic projection cubes, but no one was using them to advertise anything, and we ended up putting some small Barco monitor walls in 20 or 30 shopping centers in the UK, and we just called them video walls. There was no mystery to them. But then one day I had a phone call from a security guard who said, “Your digital sign is broken.” I said, what are you talking about? I think you've got the wrong number. He said, “No, your digital sign”, and I thought he was talking about neon or something, and then he went, “No, the one with all the pictures on it,” and I suddenly went oh, with the video screen? He said, yeah, and I actually thought about that after he'd made the call, I thought, “hmm, digital sign!”

So we started to promote it as Digital signage for advertising and the name stuck internally, and then some of the people, the suppliers would start to use it, and it just picked up from then, and I forgot about it for such a long time, and then eventually it came around and people would ask for digital signage, and so yeah, so a few people back in the day, remember it. 

It's interesting because it's a term that has been debated, really since it started to gain any kind of common usage and people would say, “That's not the best thing, puts it in a narrow box. It should be called dynamic digital signage, or it should be place-based media or on-premise.” Just all these different things. I've forgotten all the different terminology that was being suggested. 

Do you think it really matters as somebody who's been around it this long?  

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I don't think it does, to be honest, but it does great when people use something I'm not familiar with, or they seem to dream a new thing up just for the sake of it.

The classic buzzword at the moment is direct view LED. All LEDs have been direct view from the very first one. You don't look at it far from a mirror or anything, and I think LG coined the phrase initially to differentiate internally between their LCD screens that were backlit by LED. But it seems to be something that's picked on now. I prefer the phrase TruLED but it's like different countries and regions have different ideas. 

People will call an ordinary LED screen, a “video wall” when technically it's not. But people know what you mean. As long as people understand what you're talking about, that's fine. 

Why do you prefer TruLED? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I just think “direct view” describes nothing. It would be like saying your television at home is a direct view television.

Yeah, don't sneak up on it from the side. 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, it'll spot you these days and it'll already be recording you. That's probably for sure. 

Yeah. It's interesting because LG would be one of those companies that caused the problem to begin with by marketing LED TVs when there were LCDs, but they had LED backlight arrays.

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, and I think we always try to call something new, with micro LED and mini LED. People will come up with different names for stuff to try and make it unique to them, and that's what the marketing of all products is about, to try and make something unique and get the buzzword out there.

How long have you been around “video walls” and digital signs generally? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: In the late 80s, early 90s, I was with a video company called Pro-Quip, and that ended up being one of the largest video wall companies in the world and through the 90s and got very big, and at the end of that company, we were looking at the beginning of the LED. 

What I like about being in the business so long is seeing some of the people who initially worked with me as junior technicians and things, they're now senior people within the industry and also some of the designers and people I worked with, are now stalwarts of the industry and they've designed a lot of LED screens and things like that.

So the video wall network that you're putting in shopping malls that were for advertising?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yes, it was. It was called center network television, and it was a great idea, but the costs of it and the reliability, it was too far ahead of its time because we were recording things initially on a Phillips laser disc which was very expensive, about 1500 pounds back then to get a single disk, and then we moved onto the Sony CRV desks but they suffer from all the dust the bad environment of shopping centers and things, and even the original CLT Barco screen technology, you used to have to stick your hand in the back initially to color balance it. It was dangerous stuff!

And I'm glad the technology has moved on, but I think if we would've been able to have flat screens that were memory sticks back then. I think it would have really taken off, but it was the cost of doing it was hard. 

So compared to today to do the same physical footprint of a video wall in that kind of environment, if you were doing it now, would it cost less than it did at that time or would it be a parity?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: It would cost less now, and one of the things was changing content. You could only afford to have a new laserdisc pressed once a month, and then you had to go around and physically change that content, and now we just take for granted that you'll just upload it via the cloud too, via whatever CMS system and that was just not even thought of back then. 

And you had to cross your fingers that the laserdisc player was going to last, right? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, they were forever falling over. 

They would last what, like 3000 hours, maybe? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: If we were very very lucky. 

Oh Lord. So you would have a tech out there, like every three months or something switching out a box?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, I mean, you would try and be a little bit proactive on things and, remove them and clean them and et cetera. But the housings that were made were fairly basic, and whereas they had vents for keeping the monitors cool, all the rubbish would get sucked in there, and yeah, laserdisc was never going to be a format for long-term use.

So if you're thinking back to the late 90s, what were the technologies that you were praying would come along that would make your life easier? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I think when it came to the conversion of someone's advert to put on to any format, we always wanted a digital video player and it did happen in that time, and I remember thinking, “I don't really understand this,” cause there's not a disc spinning around or videotape running along with, where's the image coming from? But it was early hard drives done by, I think it was Digital Video Systemswho developed one of the early ones. And, that was the first big step to moving forward. 

And then I guess the next one would be well, really internet, but just high-speed connectivity so you could actually send a file out instead of driving it over?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Absolutely. That's key as it is with all systems these days. You've got to have that network around you or that internet and with that, the world is your oyster really. 

So you're now with a UK company called LED Studio running their sales?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: That's correct. LED Studio, we're celebrating our 10th year at the moment. It's one of the world's best-kept secrets. We are based in Swindon, we have a very large facility there and we have our own brand of LED screens called VOD Visual, and a lot of our business is OEM for other brand names, we do white labels for a lot of the UK integrators. But we are starting to promote ourselves as a proper brand because our technology is quite far advanced than many other people.

We've just introduced quite a few new products that are groundbreaking in the industry and people are suddenly going, “Oh, we should've been watching these guys. We are trying to catch up.”

It's a challenging industry to be in because there are so many companies selling roughly the same thing. How do you cut through all that? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: It's your product that speaks really. In the LED industry, everybody has over the last few years, self-declared themselves as experts. We actually have experts so the owner of our company is an expert. He designs the screens and we look at things in a different way. We try to keep LED simple. We try to keep it economical, and we just don't like to complicate things, whereas if you were to touch Samsung's The Wall screen, for example, you'll feel it's very hot. You won't burn your hand on that, but it makes you think it shouldn't be like that. So we've designed screens that run very cold. They have heat sinks to take the heat away from the LED and that gives you a better life span. It gives you much better color stability, and we just think there are obvious things that people are missing, but there are so many screens churned out of small Chinese factories.

Shenzhen back in the day was half a dozen companies and now it's a big town or city with thousands of manufacturers. They take no prisoners, they copy everything, and it's good in some ways, because technology moves on, but it means that every time you bring out something new, you only have a certain period with it while it is new.

Yeah, that's a challenge in that I would think in a lot of countries when you see a brand like LED Studio, it would be reasonable to assume that these guys are a reseller of some white-labeled product out of Shenzhen, they're just getting contracts manufactured, but it's really a happy sunshine 8:8:8 LED or whatever, as opposed to something that was originally designed.

But you're saying, you guys do the engineering, design to your specifications, and then get it to contract manufactured overseas somewhere?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: We have our own factory and everything is designed in the UK. We're just about to be awarded “Made in the UK” status. Obviously, the factories have to be in China because that's where the supply chain is.

But once things are made there, like the first part of the assembly, PCBs and things are done, all screens come to the UK for final testing and assembly. So by doing that, and normally in non-COVID times, our CEO spends two weeks of the month in China overseeing quality control and manufacturing, and that's been very difficult at the moment, but looking to get back out there very soon, hopefully. 

I've been to China, I've been to Shenzhen. There's a huge range of manufacturers from Intel-level cleanroom kinds of facilities to open window facilities. I remember one place where there were ducks walking outside and there were no controls at all. There's dust flying around the whole bit. So it must be difficult to try to do this without going there and keeping an eye on things.

Neil Longuet-Higgins: We often have some of the staff from China over in the UK, and so there's normally a kind of a fairly good fluid exchange of people, and that's where we win on things like that. Also, a lot of our businesses OEM. So those people will check us out very thoroughly, and we won't get the work if we were another one of those little companies. 

You have to compete with big multinational brands like Samsung and LG, all the way to very specific LED brands like Leyard, Unilumin, and those kinds of guys. How do you compete with them when they have the marketing muscle that you can only really dream about? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I think that's the difficult thing. Samsung and LG, have absolutely millions of marketing and advertising spend, and it's all too easy with a certain project for them to step in and say, we'll give you some advertising and whatever, and that can bring their price down effectively.

So you know, you can't compete with that, but we compete with the fact that we believe we have a better product. It's a lot nicer, more economical, and has newer technology in it, and that's where we win. When people come to see us, they are quite amazed, and they see the passion that's in the company for LED screens.

Is the buying audience more mature? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I think it's still pretty split. There is the kind of high-powered buyers that people would like to be talking to, but it's a massive market. Over the years I've had receptionists, who've been tasked with finding that company digital solution for the next five years, and what will starts as a telephone call from someone who knows nothing about it, can end up someone's spending millions. 

So you can never discount anything there. The verticals in this business are everywhere. There are the sports, the retails, et cetera, and there's always someone you've never heard of who could spend a lot of money with you.

When LED really started to get some traction in the pro AV marketplace, I would say it was maybe four or five years ago when you started to see fine pitch products come along then and everything was marketed around the pixel pitch. That was it. It was how you distinguish products, and it seems to have moved on from there, and buyers are more discerning and they're looking at contrast levels and energy efficiency and all kinds of things. 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, energy efficiency is probably one of the most important things at the moment. We have a billboard that we've designed called, The Fusion. It's the most economical outdoor screen on the market. 

Whereas in the UK, a typical 48 sheet, that's six meters by three, would cost about 8k-10k pounds a year to actually run just on the electricity. The way our screens work now, that's down to about 2k-3k pounds. So it's a 70% saving by designing a better screen. 

And I suspect that's not widely known, is it? People think since it’s an LED so, therefore, it's automatically an energy miser, but they forget that there are thousands or millions of these little lights. 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, absolutely, and just going back to what I said earlier there, the older type of screens had lots of fans, were very uneconomical. They got very hot, lots of screens still run very hot. They're not efficient and it's down to getting the LEDs themselves to work as cool as possible, and that gives you quality and life. 

We offer a warranty of up to 7 years on some of our products. You don't get that if you buy a cheap screen out of China. 

And a cheap screen out of China might look good on the trade show floor at ISC because they've spent two days color balancing and optimizing the thing, but it's not going to last that way, is it? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: No, definitely not. We walked around ISC and we had our screens on quite a few stands there, and they're normally set up pretty well but it's a minefield out there between a screen being built, and let's just say an AV company in the UK importing that and installing it, they normally won't have the correct equipment to color balance and things like that. But if you buy a good quality screen, we can't say the name of the company, we're putting some screens all over the world at the moment, and they're coming straight from our factory and they're going straight into retail units. They just work. They don't need color balancing. They don't need lots of setups. It's plug-and-play. We try and make it simple. So a stand builder can just put a screen in.

I've made the observation the last several months. I see LED as now being a mainstream product, whereas I think it was a niche going back, a couple of years and further back than that, but it seems when you start to see it in pubs and on the sides of fairly nondescript buildings and things like that, it's entered the mainstream. It's no longer something that's worthy of a press release when somebody puts one up. 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah. You see them everywhere. Some people think there's too much signage. I certainly don't agree with that. But yeah, they are becoming mainstream, but we are looking at a stage where a TruLED screen will be in your home in five years. 

Samsung and LG announced that they were pulling back from the LCD market because the technology was moving on in pixel pitch and that in LED and it won't be that long before your 55-inch screen in your living room is TruLED. I mean we've just made a 55-inch cabinet, which is the largest cabinet you can buy to replace the LCD video wall.

So there's variable pixel pitch and depending on your budget, whether you're retail or a control room where you need really high resolution or whatever, it's something that is lightweight, cheaper to run and it lasts twice as long as LCD. You know if an LCD goes wrong, you tend to throw it away. That's not very green. 

But the problem at least for now is, it's probably also wickedly expensive, right? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, absolutely. At the fine pixel pitch of, 0.7 or 0.4 or what have you, it's crazy money. But that's true of everything. It's a bit like when they said about computer memory to half in price and doubles in size every year, and it's a similar sort of scenario with LED. 

I assume you're talking about micro-LED and less so about mini-LED. Do you see the market moving to micro? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yes, it does. We've recently introduced the vivid micro-LED and that's proving really popular with high-end installs for both home and the office.

People have always been chasing resolution, and although everybody wants their screen to be 4K, most people don't run any 4K content on it. But yeah that's the future. Mico-LED will get bigger and bigger. 

And at what point does it become something that doesn't give people heart attacks when they see the price?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I think realistically four to five years, we'll see that price come down. There will always be cheaper alternatives, and even now you get some people who will buy a TV that costs them 20k in the house, others are quite satisfied with something that's 200 pounds. So there will always be two different markets, but they will start to merge definitely over the next few years. 

Do you see much demand coming for - I don't want to say alternative - but maybe unconventional LED platforms like LED on glass, on film, mesh displays, that sort of thing?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Yeah, there are a few different things that are in the pipeline. We already have things like the mesh and the transparent screens and things like that, and some of those are on glass and some are on a more kind of structural format, but I think there's always something new that will pop up when someone has an idea. 

I don't know where the future will be. I think whatever format we end up with eventually. Receive cards and sending cards will disappear and things will merge and as it becomes a consumer product, that's I think when we'll get some big changes. 

I realize we're in a nutty time with COVID and everything, but I'm curious where you're seeing demand and where you expect demand to come as life normalizes?

Neil Longuet-Higgins: I think in the traditional market. Sports will always be a big thing. We've got the virtual studio and in filming, that's getting very popular now and there are big studios in construction around the world, and they're all wanting the next big thing. We're trying to develop that at the moment and hopefully by the end of this year, we will have a new product in that marketplace that will again, change the face of it. 

But until all these things really get going, I mean retail's a classic example where there's no money there at the moment. The high street is pretty dead, not many people can afford to put LED in their whole estate, but quite a few people would do it in their premiere stores and things like that. So there's still a big market there, as we're seeing with more people working away from the office or smaller offices, they're having more meeting rooms with better quality video links and screens to go with that. So that market is coming up. e

Even as LCD gradually fades away, that will be replaced with other markets. Digital menu boards or things like that at the moment, it's only an LCD market, but that will change as well. 

You've been running a LinkedIn messaging campaign coordinated with London Digital Signage Week, which I think is next week where you're saying, I think somewhat cheekily that we'll pick you up in a giant Texas-sized, Stretch Limousine, and show you around some of London's best LED installations. Is that a serious attempt? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Not really showing the stuff in London, we're based outside of London in Swindon, but we are in a couple of months opening a London showroom in Paddington, but at the moment, trying to get people who are not really traveling a lot from London to Swindon since it has become harder.

So I've put the offer out there that we will send a call for you or pick you up, take you back. You can have some refreshments on the way, and we're hoping that we'll take people out of the smoke and into the fields. 

And for those who don't live in the UK, where the heck is Swindon? 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: It's West of London, about an hour. So it's not far. 

So you could take a train out there, but if somebody wants to take you in a nice higher car, even better! 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Absolutely. 

All right, Neil, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Brilliant. It's been really good to chat, Dave.

 

ACE Roundtable: Personalization In DOOH And Digital Signage

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

As vaccination rates climb and we can seriously look at getting back to some normals in our daily lives, there's a lot of discussion happening around what consumers will expect, and accept, in terms of personalized digital marketing.

Things like appointment-based shopping and personalization grew more prevalent because of lockdowns and necessary pivots by brands, and consumers are now somewhat conditioned to services that are more tuned to their needs. 

But at the same time, there are still lots of concerns about things like being tracked in some way by technologies.

We talked about all this on a recent roundtable panel organized by Advocates for Connected Experiences, an umbrella organization that involves numerous industry associations and bodies that touch on advertising, retail, marketing and design.

I moderated the session, and noted how great it was that the gender balance was completely off, with one guy and a bunch of super-smart women.

My panelists included:

• Kim Sarubbi, who chairs ACE
• Debbie Haus, Retail Touchpoints
• Kym Frank, Geopath
• Cybelle Jones, SEGD
• Beth Warren, CRI
• Laura Davis-Taylor, InReality
• Stephanie Gutnik, Verizon Media

This is a special edition of the podcast.

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Sam's Club, with Wovenmedia

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

One of the larger digital signage networks in North American retail has been quietly building upon in Sam's Clubs, the big box warehouse club stores that Walmart runs in competition with Costco.

There are 25,000 or so screens in the stores and the aggregate audience that sees those screens is somewhere between 25 and 30 million people, per month.

The network started with TV walls - with one media playout box pumping a signal to as many as 40 TVs. So that gets the numbers up. But Sams's Club has been adding more screens in the auto service area, at the customer service counter and in food services. It is even testing digital floor projections.

The network exists to boost the shopper experience and support brands that have product in these stores. The operating model is much more about generating ad revenues that cover the operating costs of the network than it is about a new revenue stream for Sam's and Walmart.

Digital signage veteran Mike Hiatt runs the team that operates the in-store media network, and he has a great perspective on what's been done and what to do now. He was with Walmart years and years ago when PRN had CRT TVs hanging from ceilings, in the retail giant's first iteration of in-store digital signage.

Susie Opare-Abetia runs Wovenmedia, the San Francisco digital signage content and solutions company that has been running and growing the Sam's network since 2014.

I had a good chat recently with Susie and Mike about how the network operates, how it's growing and what they have collectively learned about running a big screen network in a cavernous big box store.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thanks for joining me, Mike, I think most people will know what Sam's Club is, but could you give me the Cliffs Notes twenty-five words or less explanation for the people in other parts of the world who don't know? 

Mike Hiatt: Sure. Sam's Club is a member retail organization, similar to Costco, and we're part of the Walmart family of retailers.

So it's a membership-based club big-box membership club? 

Mike Hiatt: Yeah, if you've been to Costco, you're very familiar with Sam's Club. We've been competing with them for quite a number of years and there's a lot of subtle differences between the two, but they're both basically member-oriented clubs and member clubs create a unique perspective for retailers and we can talk more about that later if you're interested. 

And you run the media group, Sam's Media group, right? 

Mike Hiatt: I don't run the whole group. The entire group is all monetization, all the monetization tactics for Sam's Club that will include online, mobile as well as in-club. I handle in-club.

So basically in-store media. 

Mike Hiatt: Correct.  

All right, and Susie, your company is providing the software and the content solution and basically the overall solution for a rather large network, right? 

Susie Opare-Abetia: That's correct. So we've been working with Sam's now since 2014 when we did office deployment and so they used our platform, which consisted of all software suites plus a content library to manage all of the screens in the clubs. 

And what's the scale of this network? 

Susie Opare-Abetia: It's actually pretty ginormous, you know, roughly about 20,000 screens across the chain, which is about 590 clubs. So you've got about, just North of 40 screens in each club, and that's in the electronics department, and currently in the term battery department. 

So it's like a typical big box going back many years where they have a TV wall full of different flat-panel TVs, all driven by this one or maybe a handful of media players all pretty much playing the same content and you've also got stuff in the battery and tire area, and now you're expanding in other parts of the store? 

Susie Opare-Abetia: Yeah, that's correct. So like you said, the TV wall and electronics, and that's essentially powered by BrightSign meaning the plans connected to a series of amplifiers and then we've got two screens in the tire and battery, ceiling mounted just above the tire and battery services desk, and then we just finished deploying a pilot in 55 clubs. That's super exciting. I'm showing Mike will talk more about it, but that's basically adding screens in the cafe. Six large 75-inch displays in a cafe, displays in membership, and then floor projection technology in the aisle basically. 

And I'm jumping ahead of myself here, but I'm curious about what the floor projections will solve a lot about. 

Mike Hiatt: It's an exciting opportunity for us in terms of looking at it, we've been running one-off tests for quite a while, just looking at technology and how we could maximize the floor and use it, ‘cause it's really just a Greenfield space, right? And Woven came to us with some technology that got me really interested, which was laser projection versus the LCD. 

I had been looking at LCD optical technology, from these projectors for years, and went on to the Path to Purchase Institute and DSC and you'd always see the different projection technologies and I never was interested because I know I couldn't roll it and roll it to the scale that we needed it because I didn't want to have to get people up on ladders every year or less changing out halogen light bulbs, and it just was never practical for us to even consider it.

But then when Woven came back to us and said, “Hey, we've got this new technology we found that some of these new providers, or, some of these providers are now developing, which is the laser technology with no moving parts.” I got really interested, and so we started working that internally at Sam's Club, and we were able to put together this idea, which was, we could throw messages onto the floor and basically not have to compete with product facings and all the other stuff that you had to deal with when I was at Walmart having to deal with monitors on the shelves. You don't have to compete with the merchants, and it's great because your sightline is right there on the floor anyway. So it's not like you don't have to look up 20 feet in the air.

Is it purely for advertising or a kind of in-store promotion? 

Mike Hiatt: We’re using it for both? One is we're putting in some projectors to promote our scan and go product, which is a great mobile product. If you haven't ever used it and if you're a member of Sam's, you should really sign up for that because scan and go is fantastic.

Basically, you can scan your own items when you're in the isles, and then you basically check out by just swiping your credit card that's already in the mobile app, and then you can skip the line, and so we created this fast lane just as mainly a way to promote the idea of scan and go. So we have dedicated a special lane in some of our clubs with the pilot test. There's a lane now, and then above the lane are two projectors that are just showing these really cool arrows using the projectors that kind of show your way out of the club, and it's just a fun way to promote the idea that you really should be using scan and go and skip the line altogether.

And of course, during COVID, this has been a really popular trend. You're not having to deal with going through the checkout line. You just scan yourself out, and you take off. So we are using it for that, and then we've got projectors that we're testing and still in testing mode. But testing that from a monetization standpoint, where we put supplier advertising or advertising products, all endemic on the floor inside what we call the race track or that main thoroughfare of traffic as people move around the club near the product. We want to have it obviously near the product where most displays are. 

You mentioned monetization. I'm curious what the business model is, if you're using in-store promotions, you're doing endemic advertising for brands that sell in the store, and then maybe some third-party advertising. 

You've got potentially a pretty big audience. Is the idea of the screen network for incremental revenues for the company, or is it a cost-recovery model first, and if you make some revenue beyond that, even better? 

Mike Hiatt: That's a great question. It really acts as a way for us to put technology in the club to help the members experience.

Being a member club, club members think of us as a country club for retail. We take care of our members. We want our members to feel valued and we want them to have a good experience when they're in our clubs, even probably more so than say a particular retailer or grocery chain would, and it's because they pay money every year to participate.

And so as they come in, we want to make sure that the technology is helping them, and so as a part of that, the monetization piece, at least when it comes to the in-club area, we want to promote products that they're interested in, and of course, the suppliers want to do that as well. And of course, we want to charge them for that, and that allows us to do the cost recovery. 

We're not focused on maximizing advertising revenue per se. That's not our main objective, even though if it happens, that's great, but that's not why we do it, and that's not the main focus, and so we're really not interested in non-endemic. Sam's Club has traditionally been, we've been focused on endemic advertising only, just because we're not trying to create a media network that spans beyond that.

Okay. So if I am a third-party brand, there'd be no reason why I would ever sell on Sam's Club, you're not really interested in their advertising? 

Mike Hiatt: Not really. There are some opportunities we're talking about, some other tests that we're looking to do, but they're mainly out in the parking lot or out where the fuel screens are, the fuel pumps, but not inside the club.

Susie, how often does content change on the network? 

Susie Opare-Abetia: So that's a really good question and it really depends on the channel. So for example, in tires and batteries, it's going to be changing less frequently, and you have the, like you said, seasonal promotions and specials depending on holidays and that kind of stuff, and then you have the menu board, if you will, of services, which is pretty fixed.

In electronics, it’s quite different. The monetization strategy really drives the frequency of updates if you will. In some cases, content’s getting changed on a weekly basis, in some cases, it's, a couple of times a week and in some cases, it's less frequent if it's more like an evergreen sort of seasonal content. But in general, the idea is just to try and keep the programming as fresh as possible in that department. So that, if a member is shopping with Sam, maybe a couple of times a week, they get to see a little bit of variety in that loop. 

Yeah, I would imagine that there's a lot of thinking that has to go around the programming model because of that frequency and also because of sightlines, and I'm really curious to hear from both of you about TV walls and having a generic feed that goes across 40 different TVs and a whole bunch of different manufacturers and do they get fussy or are there any issues around what's on those screens, so that makes one look better than the other or whatever?

Susie Opare-Abetia: That's a really good question. I can talk to the tech piece, basically, what we're doing now with this, we're pretty much wrapped up with a third-generation platform in electronics. So we're delivering everything from delivering HDR, so the highest quality but then the tech is able to downscale that signal so that it was even for a very sort of low-end HD set. So the way the system works, it's pretty much agnostic to what you're feeding it. So we feed it the highest quality and the better sets get a better quality signal. 

But in terms of the actual content, yes it's the same across all the TVs and maybe Mike can talk about how the different manufacturers get their share of time on the network. 

Mike Hiatt: The short answer to your question is yes, they do get fussy. 

I can tell you a lot of stories, but obviously, if you think about it, if you're a TV manufacturer, you want just to talk about your TVs all the time and so there is that fight there. But we believe strongly, the company as a whole believes strongly in a unified vision for the network where we have this one image that's running all the time. So we liked that idea of synchrony and pulling that together that Susie had talked about from a strategic standpoint because we feel like the club looks better versus the more chaotic version where you would have your own thing. 

However, we do make accommodations for top-of-the-line models that they want to show off and get excited about, get people excited about what you'll see, like one-off kind of kiosks set apart from the TV wall and Samsung showing their Samsung content, LG is showing there content and Vizio and so on. So there is some of that there, but the majority of the screens are all playing the same thing, and then as part of our agreement with them is that we are there to support them as suppliers, and so we make sure that their content that they want to run is also part of the programming mix for the TV wall.

So as part of the relationship we have with them as strategic partners, we want to make sure that they're able to promote their TVs, even though there'll be Samsung content on an LG TV and vice versa, we have no problem with that because we want members to be able to compare and contrast TVs anyway and the only way to really do that very well is to be able to look at them, play in the same content. 

Yeah. I could just imagine the conversations standing with a Samsung rep when it's an ad running on an LG TV or vice versa. 

Mike Hiatt: Yes. (Laughter)

Sam's club is a pretty big footprint place with, I don't know, 40-50 foot ceilings and so on and a lot going on. How do you think in terms of sightlines and choices around content and how big a display has to be to suit the environment and the dynamics?

Mike Hiatt: It is a big space. It's really funny, I've always worried “Oh wow, these TV screens are just getting too big”, and when you're seeing them, like down next to you they look gigantic and then you stick them up on a wall and they're like, wait for a second, that's way too small. 

So we live in that world quite a bit at Sam's when it comes to those kinds of things with sightlines. But I will say that the technology is getting there where it's affordable to bring in the big enough screens that we're starting to bridge that gap of where historically the screens were just a little too small and trying to roll that out across thousands of locations, the numbers really add up, and but I think we've turned that corner over the last few years where we can afford those 75-inch screens, which are more than fine when it is, in most situations, what we're trying to do, and in fact, in some cases, we're having to re-sculpt how they fit on the wall because we just don't have that much room to put these big screens. There's only so much real estate on the wall, so that's good. 

That's all been good, and so I feel like we're getting to a happy place if you will, between the size of the screen and the size of the box, if you will.

So you've got 25,000 screens. What's the monthly audience, the aggregate audience?

Mike Hiatt: The audience that comes in is about 25 to 30 million per month that come into the club, and those numbers, COVID is really messed with us a little bit because we've had these giant groups of people come in, and then we've had some real swales like it's really hard to look at comparables over the past year.

And also our curbside pickup has gone way up too. So people that used to come into the club, a lot of them, because they don't want to be in the club due to COVID or other reasons that they're getting, we have a club pickup set up where now we just roll it out to their car, and they buy it online.

Yeah, I suspect there's a whole bunch of businesses that are going to have an asterisk beside 2020 and 2021 in any kind of timelines or story of their business, just saying this happens. So like the anomaly is explainable. 

Mike Hiatt: Yes. Even though I know that our merchants are really struggling because, if you're the person responsible for toilet paper, for example, you had a great March 2020.

There's no way that your March 2021 is going to compete with it, so it's going to be interesting for all of us, as we try to create new baselines and understand, how we're truly growing 

And because you do a card read every time somebody buys something, you know how many people are in the store, right? Or at least how many members, and if you extrapolate that, it's 1.2 people per card or something that you that's how you get to your 25,000?

Mike Hiatt: Yeah. We've also done viewership studies and we're doing some new technologies where we're able to track that more accurately. As far as the individual people that are in the club, you're right, we do have the ticket counts, but depending there are some variables there, you'd have to try to, like you say, model and extrapolate 1.2, for example, And and we do and can do that, but we're actually looking at some other ways to track it more regularly because typically our insights team, they like to keep some of that data close to the vest and not even share it internally.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question and I'll try it anyway. 

Is there any data around the kind of cause and effect, if you put an endemic. Advertising piece up for let's say organic olive oil from Italy or whatever. Can you then look at the selling rates of that olive oil when it's promoted on the screens versus those times when it’s not promoted on the screen and say, okay, it bumped it by 10% or whatever?

Mike Hiatt: Yes, we can do that. We haven't done that as much, mainly because of just the issues that we have with resources. It takes quite a bit of work actually to do those types of reporting, and we spend most of that time on the online side of the business with our resources to do that. So there's been sales in the club, mostly as an awareness-building channel, and that you're reaching members in the club, at that zero moments of purchase.

And that's the kind of way we promote it more than trying to attach it exactly to the point that they had an opportunity to see this spot and then they went and bought the product.

It’s more like new on shelves? 

Mike Hiatt: Yeah, exactly. The floor graphics pieces, I think are going to change that formula a bit over time as we learn and figure out exactly what we're looking to do with the floor graphics program. But I can see that be in a place where we would actually create custom reporting based on sales lift or what we call return on ad spends, or ROAS, for the floor graphics because it's very direct or that product is local close to those screens, whereas you remember, in Sam's club, the TV wall, for example, is way up at the front. So as you walk in, you see them but you're not exposed to those messages when you're back there in the freezer, buying frozen chicken. 

So there's a real 50-yard disconnect between the media and the chicken. So trying to connect that dot gets very circumspect, even if you are able to figure out that this individual walked by the TV wall when the frozen chicken ad was running, which is hard enough, and then trying to figure out when they actually made it back to the chicken, pick it up and put it in their cart and then made it around to actually purchase it.

Those are some details that are hard to get your finger on conclusively. 

So if I’m a CPG brand, and I'm launching a new, I don't know, body lotion in a giant bottle, that's going to be deeper into the store. Is it hard to sell them into screen participation or they understand through explanation and maybe intuitively that this is better than people just stumbling across my product, it's better if I make them aware that this is available?

Mike Hiatt: Yeah, I think especially when you're launching a new product, we've seen a lot of success that way, where you think about that you're investing in the new product line, you're putting it in a Sam's Club and we don't have nearly the number of SKUs that say a Walmart has, but the SKUs that we do have, do very well from a sales velocity standpoint. And so yeah, a lot of them say, “Wow, okay. So I've got a new SKU inside of Sam's Club. It's a new three-pack,” that kind of thing where it's its own SKU. It's nothing that you can't buy this anywhere else really, and so as you walk in, you want to be able to impact them as best as you can.

We do a lot of that where you'll be driving that new product purchase and it's that zero moments where they're in the club, they're in the buying mode, it's not so much immediate as interruptive, and whether you're trying to read something on the internet or watch a TV show or something like that, we're interrupting you with an ad message. There are no interruptions inside of the Sam's Club because you're actually shopping. That's what you are doing. That is the editorial and the editorial and advertising, it's one and the same if you look at it that way. 

Susie, is Woven media building all of the ads, or are you building the content that's running in between the advertising and the advertising is coming in from agencies or perhaps from Sam's?

Susie Opare-Abetia: So it's essentially Mike's team that works with the suppliers as well as the internal merchandising teams and marketing to produce that content that's advertising or promotional, and then basically what happens is all of the content gets uploaded to our servers and then Mike's programming team is able to essentially combine the ad content, the commercial content with our third-party content, which is a mix of premium content across multiple categories, like sports entertainment, etc.

So that you end up with this really engaging experience that is skillfully crafted so that it's not just ads all the time. You're basically engaging the member, you're driving TV sales, and you're also promoting Sam’s Club and as we discussed, other products in other departments o in the electronics department. 

Did the experience over the last seven years of working on this network reshape some assumptions around what you think people want to see when they're shopping in a Sam's Club versus what they really want to see?

Susie Opare-Abetia: Yeah, so Mike's team actually has done a really good job with some of the studies that they've done to determine what content categories really make sense. For example, we know that, believe it or not, food is a really compelling category and as is obviously sports and movie trailers, video games. So there's definitely been, over the period, more learning about what content captivates which audience and the audience: is it male, is it female, etc. 

Mike Hiatt: Yeah, it really is fascinating. The male/female breakdown, where the males spend a lot more time watching the TV wall in particular. But they also represent a much smaller percentage of the actual members, regular shoppers in the club. So you want to take care of both audiences. But it is fascinating to see and then, of course, one group wants to see sports and skiing and all the different fun stuff, and then the female side is more about travel and food like Susie was saying.

Mike, you have an interesting history, so to speak, in terms of in-store media, in that, you had a first go-around working with Walmart on its in-store digital media network, and then went off and did your own thing, I believe, and then now you're back with Walmart but through Sam's. 

Is there a clear distinction between the way things were done, let's say 10-15 years ago when you were involved with Walmart, and now? 

Mike Hiatt: Oh yeah. When I first got there and inherited the system, we had CRT TV's, like 50 feet up in the air… (Laughter)

This is the old PRN network, right?

Mike Hiatt: Yeah, the old PRN network and we wanted to evolve that, and that was a really fun project for me to get into, and I never had any digital signage experience before that. I had been basically a VP over media direct operations for an ad agency in Salt Lake City and had worked in high tech, like previous to that. But I had some different ideas and some thinking about what we wanted to do and had a good relationship with PRN and we organized a kind of a next-generation network, and we were using satellites at the time. We don't do that anymore. 

There's been a lot of fundamental changes that have allowed us to create a better experience and be better at our digital signage experience in the store environment. 

So yeah, I don't know what you want me to talk about. I could go in any number of directions. What would you be interested in learning more about? 

I’m curious about what you've learned and obviously, it's a lot easier to do now in many respects, and as you say, the sightlines and the display technologies are a lot more visible and compelling than TVs hanging from ceilings.

Mike Hiatt: One of the best things that I've found, and what I learned in my Walmart experience, which was really reassuring to me in this space, is that when done correctly, digital display or retail media actually works, it actually drives purchase. It actually makes the promise hole of what we always try to do in the advertising space, which is influence the purchase, and again, it has to be done correctly, and we were doing that with those endcap screens that we had in the club or in the store on the endcaps, and we definitively over and over again with an early solid methodology were able to show incremental sales lift from those positions and the better the content experience, the more proactive the content was, it was a definite art to design the content that would run on those screens. 

But as we got better and better at that, we saw tremendous gains over our control claw, our controls stores for that product. That's the really encouraging thing is that when done correctly, it absolutely works and if you can get the media source very close to the product. A huge piece of that is making sure that something is working and it's not trying to do too much, so many digital signage deployments are trying to do too much and it makes it too chaotic and you just need to be focused and simple.

So we learned a lot of things doing that whole process that allowed us to actually create a successful network and we're implementing those things today at Sam's Club and the, but the cool thing is over with the last 14 years, has been that we're finally starting to work better across the silos, if you will, because in a large retail organization, you think about any kind of deployment, like what we were doing at Walmart, you have to transcend operations, merchandising, marketing, and IT, and to get all four of those groups together when they all have different EDPs that they report into can be really difficult, and it's been historically a struggle, not only with my experience at Walmart and Sam's, but I think any big retailer. ‘cause when I went off and did my own thing, I was working with other retailers and they were dealing with similar problems, but it's a lot of that trying to get organized across those silos, it makes it very difficult to actually have a successful implementation a a lot of times. 

What compelled you to go work again for a big company as opposed to yourself? 

Mike Hiatt: It's funny. I left and did my own thing and was really enjoying it and was traveling the world and doing exciting stuff and working for a variety of retailers and technology companies, and one of those was Walmart, and so I was going back to help them and work on them, like beyond what I had done when I was there full time, and then also part of that was Sam's Club, which they wanted to redesign their network, and so I got involved in that, and then part of that was better understanding monetization and how we wanted to sell, and so we had a sales team handling the in club stuff and a different sales team handling the online, and so I made the decision, working with my people at Sam's Club, we decided we wanted to combine those two, and so by doing that, and then we reworked the technology side and that's when we brought Woven media in and they weren't selling, they weren't a sales facing organization with suppliers.

And Triad was and Triad was handling the online piece, let's have them handle the in-store piece or the in-club piece, and that started to work really well. I went off to do other things as a consultant and at the time, Roger Berdusco, who was our CEO at Triad reached out to me and convinced me to close my business and come work for him full time. So that's what I did, and yeah, came over and worked for Triad and basically running all the in-club or in-store and retail media-related stuff, while 90% of the rest of the company was focused on the online world, and we did that for several years and then, of course, one thing led to another and Triad ended up being bought by Sam's Club and they brought us all over, and so we were part of WPP and because it’s a long story, I won't get into all the private equity firms and the details associated with that. But at the time that we were, WPP and Sam's Club decided they wanted to bring it in-house, but they didn't want to try to build it from scratch.

They wanted to leverage our expertise, our people and our technology stack, and so we figured out how to put that package set up together and we moved over to Sam's, and so I’m back at the mothership, so to speak. 

Yeah, so you just woke up one day and realized, “Oh, I'm here again?” (Laughter)

Mike Hiatt: Yes.

Susie Opare-Abetia: Thank you! (Laughter)

So Susie and Mike, what are people going to see over the next year or so at Sam's Club that's going to be added to the network? 

Susie Opare-Abetia: Basically if you walk into Sam's club, and I said there are 55 deployed already, but basically over the next couple of years, we're rolling these new channels out across the chain. So we're doing 270 this year, and then next year we're going to finish out the rest. So if you go into Sam's Club, you'll see the cafe area, on both walls of the cafe, you’ll see three 75-inch screens, three of them facing the club and three of them facing into the cafe area, and those a mix of menu boards, as well as sizzle, big wide freezies, and hot dogs and what not to attract people into the cafe.

So a really nice mix of programming, synchronized in some cases across those three screens, and that's essentially replacing the paper signs that you see today in the club. So you'll see those in cafes. You'll also see, as Mike mentioned, the flow graphics projection in the scan and go aisle, and you'll see 75-inch screens in the member services areas. So this is where members go and find out more about travel services or financial services, or, do stuff with the membership, and that already is shown to have really moved the needle in terms of the member experience, the ratings. The screens are driving the ratings of that experience which is great.

And then you'll see, in some small number of clubs, you'll see the racetrack projectors that Mike mentioned in the aisle. Sam’s Club is still testing those and figuring out when they want to roll those out. 

All right. This was super interesting. I appreciate you guys spending some time with me.

Susie Opare-Abetia: Thank you, Dave, this has been great.

Mike Hiatt: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun.

 

Renaud Lafrance, Stingray

Montreal's Stingray has built up a global business providing curated music channels for consumers on their cable systems and through streaming, and also for retail through in-store radio systems. But the company also has a fast-growing Business division that's focused both on shopper experiences, using digital display, and on shopper behaviours and interests.

Stingray has been most active in Canada, and particularly Quebec, but it is making moves to expand in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

I caught up with Renaud Lafrance, the Chief Revenue Officer for Stingray Business, to get a sense of how his group operates, the product offer and the state of the retail market as we start to come out of this awful pandemic. 

We get into a bunch of things, including how retailer needs have evolved in the past year, and the value of analytics. We also talk about a big sports retailer's flagship, filled with digital, in suburban Montreal.

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

Renaud, thanks for joining me. Let's start by giving you background on what Stingray is all about. I spoke with Pierre from your company about three years ago, but it's certainly time to do an update. 

Renaud Lafrance: Yes, David. First of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. I've read a lot of great things about it.

Let me give you a very brief summary of the Stingray organization: Stingray was founded in 2007. We're a publicly listed company as of 2015, and essentially, we're a business leader in the music and visual media in the world. There are essentially three business units of Stingray: 

#1, Genesis is what we call our broadcast plus streaming app business. This is where you see many cable operators around the world, but let's say in the US operators such as Comcast, in Canada Rogers, and such where you have audio channels. And throughout the years, without many acquisitions, we've added other channels, other solutions, such as Quello, which is the Netflix of concerts and karaoke, we have the largest licensed karaoke catalog in the world, and we have different platforms for the karaoke, not just cable operators, but in the world of OTT (over the top) platforms such as Amazon, they're distributors of our content and Roku, Samsung TV+, which are using our audio and visual channels. Different products like NatureScape is one of them. If you ever have a Samsung TV or an LG, both are partners of ours. This is loaded directly into the smart TVs. So this broadcast/streaming app business is one of our units. 

The second unit is Radio. We have a hundred radio stations, like old-style broadcasting. The third business unit is the discussion today. The one which I take care of is Stingray Business, which is all about in-store media solutions regarding music and digital signage and experience as well as insights. 

You're a Montreal company and I think you got your start on the digital side by acquiring another Montreal company called Groupe VIVA. Is that pretty accurate? 

Renaud Lafrance: Yeah. So since 2007, our Stingray Group Inc, we've done 48 acquisitions into different divisions, but in the distinguished business division, our first foray into digital signage was in 2015. Before that, we had acquired other commercial background music companies, but the digital signage, digital experience portion of the in-store media world started in 2015.

And yes, it was a local Canadian company called Groupe VIVA and then we also acquired another digital signage company called Novara Media out of Toronto, and we also acquired a company in Europe, in Benelux, which had a mix of commercial background music and digital signage, a company called DJ-Matic, and where we have a presence in the Netherlands in both Belgium, and we also acquired last year during the pandemic, our Mexican affiliate Basha, which has many large enterprise brand clients with digital signage rolled out in Mexico. 

So is that kind of a strategy for the executive to grow through, at least in part through acquisition?

Renaud Lafrance: Absolutely. Stingray’s strategy is a growth twofold into user acquisition and also a big push in organic growth as well. The combination of the two. 

So your streaming music business is global on the digital media side, the quasi digital signage side, is that primarily North American and more so than anything so far in Canada?

Renaud Lafrance: So just to give you a little context, we have around 125,000 locations. With one of our solutions or both or more than two in retail locations. So music, signage, business intelligence (what I would call insights) so we have a global footprint. So our strategy was really to become a global player and really take on global enterprise clients.

We have to have a footprint and not just the footprint, feet on the street with a full staff taking care of support, taking care of project management, taking care of curation, taking care of all the integration necessary for both signage and music, commercial music install. So this is why we have an office in Sydney, Australia for the APAC region, with a full team over there. We have the European team, the Mexican team, USA, Canada, and all our different offices have the signage capabilities, embedded with the commercial music to give a full in-store media solution package for our retail, brick and mortar clients in the different verticals that we operate.

But is it fair to say that a lot of your business to date has been in Canada and you're now expanding? 

Renaud Lafrance: When we acquired the company in Europe, they had a certain percentage of revenue coming from signage. Mexico is, I would say 80% digital signage, but it's fair to say that like notable large clients like we have banks in Mexico with a full digital signage rollout, the largest pharmacy chain in Mexico also under digital signage and but of course, still the bulk now is Canada, but very quickly moving on to American brands as well as global enterprise brands for digital signage, as we speak. 

And you did some sort of, I think it was a partnership more than anything else, with a US company called Space Factory, going back two, three months, yeah?

Renaud Lafrance: So the thing with Space Factory is that we started with the partnership with them, they're a veteran crew, a collective in the in-store media world. They'd been operating in the past 30 years in various different businesses that are well-known such as play networks and others. And we just combined our efforts to really launch our conquest of the American market.

As of Jan 1st, we exited our relationship with our partnership with Mood Media, where initially we were exclusive for Canada for commercial music and they were for the US. Now, this is over and one of the reasons why we partnered with Space is to accelerate our penetration in the American market with seasoned veterans. And again, we're always looking at tuck-in acquisitions and major acquisitions in the American market to further consolidate and further grow our in-store media business as well as we built and we're continuing to build a full organic sales team in the US and going after enterprise brands always.

So, I'm an end-user, I'm a large retailer in the US and I'm interested in what Stingray’s Space Factory has to offer. What all is it that you guys do? Do you start right at the consulting idea stage and take it all the way through to ongoing management? Or are there a start point and an endpoint?

Renaud Lafrance: I think with our unique blend of solutions, not just on the business side, but also on the consumer broadcast side, we have a lot of assets and we have a unique position, a combination that we can bring to the marketplace. I'll take Insights as an example.

As we bundle these, the media, music, technology, digital signage experience, Insights. Also, for instance, I'll give you a little more background on the Insights portion. We acquired a company last year called Chatter Research, and they've developed a very clever way to get feedback from retail clients, thus giving very sought-after information on customers. The way this is done in the retail world these days in the past years, often you go and shop or even shop online. You'll sometimes get a request to fill out a survey, go online, fill out a survey. What chatter has done through a proprietary AI engine is really a clever easy way to interact with clients to talk about their experience. We call it a conversation. 

So if you're a purchase or an operator, with a QR code enabled through signage or through different media placements in a retail operation, you have a conversation with an AI text-based on your smartphone. Thus you're answering and the AI will look at 1200 inflection points. So instead of asking you questions, eight or nine questions. It's an open conversation. And then the AI captures this data and there's a dashboard with which retail management can really consult every second of the day, if they want real-time feedback coming in, classifying it and seeing what people really want or what's missing.

So this intelligence is I think, now a vital part of our whole in-store media solution offering and it also makes it another value add and something very distinctive as to bring to the business world. 

Yeah. It sounds like a chatbot, except instead of it being for virtual stores, it’s for bricks-and-mortar stores.

Renaud Lafrance: Yeah, but it's more than a chatbot because it was really built for the whole retail marketplace and there's also a version online for a lot of our retailers that have e-commerce, especially these days in the pandemic. So it's not a chatbot, it's really focused on getting feedback from clients and really capturing all of that and building a dashboard, establishing the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and executives can have deep insight that they would never get with simple eight-question feedback. 

This is very different, it seems from a lot of the retail analytics that has been marketed in the last three or four years.

I think I went to a show a couple of years ago, and the trade show floor was filled with companies selling AI-based, computer-vision based retail analytic, and I've not seen a lot of take-up of that stuff, so going out this way with an opt-in app basically seems very different. 

Renaud Lafrance: It's very different. We've also had our different digital experiences with digital signage solutions using AI with facial recognition and so on, just establish with our clients what's working, what's not working with content, and so on, but this is really smart, simple, and conversational. And there's no app, by the way. It's just, you just look at the QR code, or you can just text the number and you start the conversation via text. 

This has been an interesting 12 months, to say the least, and a difficult time for a lot of retailers unless they sell groceries or they're a big box or they sell liquor.

I'm curious: how the last year has been in terms of what retail needs are, what retail interests are in digital experiences in-store, has it gone quiet on you, or is there still a lot of interest or even perhaps more interest than there was in the past because things are so different now?

Renaud Lafrance: I will give you an answer based on geography because, in all our different countries where we have our retail clients, we have a different mix. For instance, in North America, we were lucky to have a lot of essential business clients, such as supermarkets, drug stores, banks who always stayed open. In other geographies, we have sometimes more of a mix of restaurants, cafes, hospitality, and so on. And whether it's Europe or Canada, the USA, or Mexico, a lot of them were shut down, and are still shut down.

But overall, we were very lucky to have enterprise brand clients and a good concentration in the essentials, and even the QSR clients, kept operating with a drive-thru, curbside pickup. 

The second part of the answer to your question is yes, we are seeing the demand for new things. Signage whether it's signage that will be at the entrance of the store, look at store counts, people counts, like the whole messaging for COVID. Another thing that's happened along the way is on the audio side, the music side, because we have thousands of locations where we can broadcast messages, we've been broadcasting a lot of COVID messaging for our retail clients. Less visual but more audio, so you absolutely reach everyone that's in the store. So COVID messaging, health and safety, whether it's for the employees or for the general consumer walking in the store, that‘s been very popular, and even using our insights solution Chatter, we're getting a lot of new information from clients stating what they need, what they want, what they're looking for and what they'd like to see within the retail experience, the customer experience regarding visual content regarding less touch. 

Are there still budgets out there? There are retailers who are prepared to spend or are they on hold?

Renaud Lafrance: Funny thing is a lot of retailers, and again, if you look at the focus on large global brands, whether to engage with a current vendor and they want to switch because some people in some companies in the industry have been affected, I’m talking about some of the competition, might not have as healthy a balance sheet.

And, it's very interesting to see the number of our fees and then the number of large deals that are currently in negotiation with major iconic brands around the globe that we are currently involved in. So regardless of, let's say 2000-3000 store global chain, won’t name a specific brand, but they are affected in different countries, but they are still looking at modernizing, looking at digital experience within the store, the customer experience. 

We've been saying for many years that maybe the retail footprint will be reduced but the experience will be augmented. So the short answer, David, is that surprisingly does a lot of activity right now. 

That's good. I'm also curious, there's been a lot of things written and a lot of speculation on things like panel discussions and so on about how retail has changed and how selling is moved to the parking lot, to the curbside that there's a big demand for personalization, that there'll be appointment-based shopping and a lot of the way that we do shopping in places other than big-box grocery stores and so on, will change as a result of all this. Are you seeing that at all? 

Renaud Lafrance: I then we are seeing, and if you look at different verticals, I'll use the example of QSR, for instance, with certain QSR, forward-thinking brands, the proliferation of drive-thru, some drive-throughs are now two lanes, three lanes.

As we just mentioned, using a mobile app to pre-order delivery at specific spots within the curbside pickup. You're seeing multiple channels now open up and even in the discussion with someone autonomous cars delivering food, and we were involved with a signage portion within the car and also the feedback insights portion within that a delivery service that will be launched later by a major QSR brand. 

You also mentioned some fully-automated stores coming online. You’ve seen Amazon Grocery, and closer to us, Circle K is also looking at the convenience store automation lab. We've also done a great new concept with a Canadian-based QSR chain called Recipe Unlimited, which holds around 1300 locations spread out over nine brands and they developed a new concept where all their brands can be served with one kitchen, and you pre-order, or you just walk in like a giant vending machine and there's no sit-down, you just pick up in your cubicle, the meal you ordered and you go home with it, but you have access to all the brands within one kitchen instead of going to different restaurants, obviously. 

I'm using the QSR example, and then we could go on to different verticals, we've seen ghost kitchens happening. We've seen many different innovations coming up right now that we want to assist partners with these clients in helping them bring, in the QSR business, as I've stated before, they're also looking at experience: what can we do to have a unique experience? So more investment’s going towards experience and made into new experiences, into new delivery methods instead of a proliferation of a greater number of locations to serve their client base. 

One of your colleagues, Martez sent me a video that showed a new store that you guys have worked on in suburban Montreal and out in Broussard that is a sporting goods store and you guys have done quite a bit of sporting goods stores. Can you tell me about this Sports Expert store and what the thinking was behind it? Because it's pretty ambitious and big. 

Renaud Lafrance: This unique store, I think the square footage is around 65,000 and the owner-operator has currently 10 sporting goods stores under this banner, called Sports Experts, pretty much Dick's Sporting Goods in the US and yeah, we've been partnering with them for a number of years and the specific owner really believed in revamping to create more experiences and made a lot of multimillion-dollar investments within his stores, and specifically this large one where we supported them with unique solutions: LED interactivity, obviously our commercial background music embedded with a special playlist made for them, Chatter’s in there also, and it's really become like a flagship store, iconic store and the ROI is clear. Even if it was a substantial investment for the total store, the total footprint of the store. After it's been open now for a year and a half, sales are better than expected based on the considerable investment you made in that store, not just with our solutions, but with everything put together.

Sporting Goods is an interesting one. There's a rival Canadian chain that has opened a lot of big flagship stores as well and they've been to a point of amusement for me because they seem to want to throw everything, including the kitchen sink into the stores, in terms of visual razzle-dazzle, like there's gesture, there's interactive, there's everything, and I've walked through there and thought, and a lot of times, “I'm not sure why they did this.” 

Are the Sporting Goods retailers getting a little more sophisticated in terms of what they do and why they want to do it and getting past the, just a pure visual excitement thing? 

Renaud Lafrance: I think so. I don't know if you want to mention the banner or not? 

(Laughter) Go right ahead if you want, or I can... Starts with Sport. 

Renaud Lafrance: Oh, yeah. Okay. I'll use the example of the Sports Experts one where you have a refrigeration area as if you were in the Arctic, and you enter and you try some coats on and so it's not just digital experiences and it's unique. 

So that's an example of what's making it different and unique, or you enter an area where there's rain so that you can test the rain gear and the permeability of different coats. And I guess if you look back in the eighties and nineties, the mall was at the centerpiece of social activity for a lot of teenagers and adults. Now we're seeing entertainment come into retail. We're seeing experience. As you were talking about the store near the greater metropolitan area of Montreal on the South shore, they are in an open outside mall. And you're seeing all these developments around entertainment in these openings, again, the pandemic and last year have stopped some of the development, but we all foresee this to continue on the experiential side melting retail, hospitality, entertainment, all in one. 

Yeah. I've been out that way. I don't think the store was open at that point, but certainly, there are some great restaurants right in that immediate area. You've got some premium retailers there, it's not your average shopping mall.

Renaud Lafrance: No, and there are other real estate developments coming up across North America where you'll have concerts, like major hotels set up within the retail shopping area. They become destinations in themselves, maybe a precursor that is the West Edmonton Mall, but we see more and more of this and experiences are becoming very important.

Yeah. It can't be just a destination to go shopping because you can go shopping on your phone or on your desktop. 

Renaud Lafrance: Exactly and I think, with our global footprint, we are very well positioned to really partner with these brands to bring these experiences.

So when you have the first meeting with a chain retailer, it doesn't really matter what they sell, just a chain retailer, and you have that first conversation, what do you ask them? 

Renaud Lafrance: I think we have to understand the brand and what is their story, and what they want to create as a client business experience.

So I think the first part always is really understanding the brand and what the brand means to their client base. That is the first and foremost thing, and then after that, you get into the solution aspect, but that is the key item to really capture and I think a lot of people are skipping that part. And this is where you can come up with enduring solutions, instead of coming up with a lot of hardware where you've seen this many times where things were not well thought out and there is no content, there is no value, but there is some signage, there is some experience, but little value because the content was not really well thought, was a second thought to the whole hardware networking logistical piece of the digital signage operation.

And I think David you've been using examples of sometimes office tower lobbies where you've seen great content. I think the lobby, seating area of Netflix, you're immersed in some of their other shows, in their series. That’s using the complete power of the digital experience and creativity and really do something different. 

Yeah, then you get the flip side where there's an office lobby and they put in a giant LED wall and they don't really seem to know why they did it and they just go out and find some 4K footage and run it on there. I can remember one in Miami that I saw and it was showing scenes from the Miami waterfront and the Miami waterfront was across the street from the buildings, I was like ”if I want to see that I'll go outside.” (Laughter) 

Renaud Lafrance: Exactly, David. If you understand the brand, you understand the story, you can create a unique business experience for the client and I guess content and the way you draw the whole experience out is crucial.

All right, Renaud, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I really appreciate it.

Renaud Lafrance: Welcome, David. It's always a pleasure and good luck with your podcast. I think you have a great tool for our digital signage industry. 

Thank you. 

Travis Peterson, Snap Install

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

Companies that specialize in deploying digital signage networks don't always get the kind of respect they deserve in this industry. 

They can get called "hang and bang" guys, when in reality the job is complicated as hell. Getting digital signage networks properly installed and running across hundreds or even thousands of locations involves a LOT of project management and coordination, and a lot of vetting and training to ensure the techs who show up know the work, what to do and how to behave.

Travis Peterson started Snap Install about 10 years ago, having learned his installation chops working in home AV systems. Those can be fun jobs - putting slick audio and video systems in the homes of stinkin' rich people - but to scale an installation business, you need high volume commercial work.

Based in Minneapolis, Snap Install now has a big core staff and hundreds of trusted contractors around the US and Canada, who take on high volume digital signage deployments in venues like restaurants, retail and health care.

We had a great chat about the challenges he always faces, and the bigger ones presented in the past year. We also get into where Snap starts and stops, and why his team does the stuff they're good at, and leaves things they probably could do to their partners.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: Travis, thanks for joining me. Can you tell me, because maybe not everybody knows what Snap Install is all about? 

Travis Peterson: Yeah, thanks for having me, Dave. Snap Install. we're a nationwide service provider. We're located out of Maple Grove, Minnesota. For those of you not familiar with Minnesota, it started in the twin cities area, and we are a nationwide service provider of skilled labor. So in other words, we're brokers of services. 

We have 54 employees at our corporate office and then 700+ contractors across the country that worked for us directly. Businesses and manufacturers hire Snap to provide installation service solutions really from coast to coast, so our job is: we represent our clients in a professional manner and follow up on the design scope of work to get the job done. Now that job could be a thousand plus site rollout across the country or one service call in a rural area. 

David: Are you focused just on digital signage or is it one of many things that you do?

Travis Peterson: Digital signage is the primary focus and represents the majority of our business. But we also have two other verticals that are defined. One is the healthcare industry and then another one is the relocation of executives across the country, their residential homes actually.

David: Oh, really? Interesting. So what do you do with that? 

Travis Peterson:  It's actually one of the main reasons the company got started. I was fresh out of college. In my second job, I was working for a company back just over 10 years ago and that company had a similar business model, but it was B2C compared to our business model B2B, and back then you go to Amazon, you could throw a TV in your cart and you could have added installation to it. The company I was working for, we would send the technician out to the home. 

And I started a B2B platform there and worked with some relocation companies, and executives moving across, they got expensive equipment. We would dismount their equipment, movers pack it up, ship to the new house and then we'd reinstall it. As that company as much as I loved working there and really got my first taste of a small business, it's where I became addicted to the small business platform. I realized that as it became unethical, I had two choices. One: go to sell insurance like my dad and possibly golf, probably a lot more and have a lot more freedom and residual income coming in or start a business. And I decided to start a business and I went to one of our biggest clients at the time, as that business was falling apart and said, “Hey, if I started a company, would you follow me and be my first customer?”

And he said, absolutely. We had a good working relationship. He knew that the company wasn't doing well and he asked me two questions. I'm 26 years old at this time. And he said, “Do you have any money, Travis?” And I think I might've had about $5,000 to my name and I said no, and he said, “do you have a business plan?”

In my head, I was saying, what the hell is a business plan? I said, no. He said hop on a plane and fly out to Philly, let's talk. Did that and we put together Snap Install and the focus was primarily three things? We call them our three pillars. Our people, what I'm most proud of is our culture. Our partners, which are all of our customers, and then our technicians across the country.

And with that focus on those three pillars, we've really over the last, it'll be 10 years here in September. We've seen success. And as I was stating the primary focus, the reason we started was the relocation and that's what his business, his other business does is they help relocate executives and we do that AV work for them. So as we succeeded with that, we branched off over the last 10 years into the healthcare facilities, into the digital signage world. 

David: Yeah, I would imagine when you looked at digital signage and thought, “okay, the  one and two gig things with the executives is interesting, but if we want to scale, we've got to find something that offers scale and signage does that.”

Travis Peterson: You nailed it. The onesie twosies are great, but when you get the thousand site rollouts, that's really our bread and butter and it's really where the company grew. 

David: When companies describe themselves as service providers, I always push back on them and say, where do you start and where do you stop? What's the range of services and what's the stuff you don't do? 

Travis Peterson: I think that's a great question and I think that question is just as important as what you do. One thing we are not is we don't provide system consulting or design. We don't provide any hardware or software and we also don't run a knocking system for system monitoring.

Plenty of other companies do all that stuff and we don't, and we're also the type of service provider that some others aren't out there. We know when to say no. We know when to say that either when our partner isn't going to set us up for success or when it's just not in our specialty. Think high-level integrations.

We have boots on the ground across the country. We have high-level technicians and we also just have warm bodies that sometimes just need to show up and swap out an HDMI or turn off a PC player to get a backup and running and all those skill sets. We aren't the type of company that's going to say, “Yes, we can do that.” We make sure that we can define it and follow through on the scope of work and then get the deliverables back to our customer and represent them in a professional manner as well. 

David: There are some of your competitors who seem to be focused on specific areas. I don't rattle them off cause you don't need to know that or listeners don't need to know that, but maybe they are heavy on C-stores or maybe they're heavy on QSR. Do you have a vertical that you tend to focus on or is it more just what do you need to do and let's talk? 

Travis Peterson: So our goal is to provide solutions to our partners and we're a vendor-neutral company.

We have partners ranging from that focus on healthcare, that focus on QSR, that focus on kiosks, and what we try to do is really embed ourselves with our partners and make sure that we understand what their goals are and that we can deliver on the scope of work. So when we say “our focus”, we're in all of those.

But our focus isn't on a specific vertical within digital signage. Our focus is on our partners and making sure that we can deliver on their needs and they range in so many different ways. If you asked me where the majority of our work comes in the digital signage, I'd say it'd be through healthcare and QSRs 

David: Healthcare would be interesting right now. I'm guessing you haven't done a lot in the last 10 months? 

Travis Peterson: For some, yes. And for some, no. It's changed, COVID has changed the way we've had to do business and as many people listening can probably attest to. For one, on the healthcare side is the clinics. What we've seen a big increase in is them utilizing digital signage more to educate their customers: A, for social distancing, maybe. B, for not having to while they're sitting in the waiting room, it's limited usage in the waiting room or whatnot. They're utilizing a lot of those things then all the way back to the doctor's office. Putting signs up in the office. So while they're waiting for the doctor, it's there too. So for some customers, you're absolutely right.

We've seen a huge decline and then other businesses actually boomed since Q2. 

David: Okay. So yeah, you wouldn't be going into primary care facilities like a hospital or something like that, but tons of clinics are still seeing patients and they need to communicate with? 

Travis Peterson: Yeah, and now we have some of our customers, they're even working on medical carts that offer the vaccine that we're helping integrate and deploy at hospitals too.

David: How would that work? 

Travis Peterson: So the card is designed in different ways to ensure that it holds the vaccine and then it monitors, without getting into too many details, it's providing care for the customers as they come through with minimal contact, for the actual nurses or practitioners to the clients.

David: Now you said that you don't have a knock, you don't do recurring managed services and things like that. Is that a headcount choice or complication choice, or is it that you don't want to compete with your partner? 

Travis Peterson: More the latter. As being vendor-neutral, it's also very important that we aren't competing with our customers as well.

We are about 98% labor and that 2% falls into on-site materials that we sometimes are forced to provide. But some of the recurring services that we have started dabbling into that have worked well for both our partners and ourselves is preventative maintenance type work, we call them health checks.

You go out and you do a thousand site rollouts. That equipment needs to continue to function and function properly. And us providing maintenance on that regularly, where we show up just to check it and provide the right deliverables back to our customers. So they have that peace of mind as they charge their customers to ensure it's actually working is good too and a lot of companies are being audited on that type of stuff too lately. So we can help them be proactive on that and make sure we get ahead of the game instead of them having to pay maybe for a 90 minute response time when they call us and it's a fire truck having a roar out there as quick as possible to get a PC back up and running.

We've seen some value in that. And also with COVID, a lot of systems are collecting dust over the last nine months and those systems are going to need to be powered back on and up and running here soon. And we've seen a majority of our partners already proactively planning to get us out there and get those up and running.

So it really depends on the retail store or the location, allowing us to come in and do that. But we've seen a big uptick in that as of late. 

David: When you describe partners, would they most typically be like CMS software companies or are they manufacturers as well? 

Travis Peterson: A wide variety of all of them, some resellers as well. 

David: And so for a reseller or a kind of a local solutions provider, if they get a big gig, they just know that they couldn't possibly do a four-state rollout or a nationwide rollout?

Travis Peterson: Exactly. Or sometimes they might just want boots on the ground. It might be an integrator, and they're trying to do a very large project in a state that they aren't located in, and they're going to fly out one specialist, but then they want eight of our techs to show up and run wires, mount screens, check and actions and they're the guide on-site, where they direct other people around. 

David: Digital signage is one of those things that goes from very simple stuff, like you could get a gig in a workplace where you're putting in meeting room displays or video conferencing displays, that kind of thing, but it can go all the way to the other end where you have a 300 foot LED video canopy.

Do you cover the whole waterfront or is there a sweet spot for what you do? 

Travis Peterson: That's a great question. And it ties back to my point of us being willing and able to say no when we need to. If we can generate a scope of work that can be consistent from coast to coast, that's where we succeed.

And that scope of work needs to be done from any tech across the country. And as you can imagine, when you're dealing with 700 plus technicians, their skill sets have a wide variety of range. So some of those high-end projects, we absolutely do those. Sometimes it's only in specific Metro areas. We work with our partners, but getting back to figuring out what the partner needs and the systems they're trying to put together and have assembled, that's where we come back working with them and say, we can do this, or unfortunately we aren't the right partner for this, but if you can send your people out to do this portion, we're happy to do the mounting and other things along those lines to make sure that we're meeting each other's needs.

But it does tie back to that say no when you need to say no, because, in our industry, it's funny, you think you'd be in a good spot as a business when your competitors don't do a good job. But unfortunately for us, it's completely the opposite. There have been some companies, service providers throughout the years in this industry that have really put a bad name on the nationwide service provider.

And that doesn't help us. That actually hurts us when our partners, as we're trying to sell to them, they already lost that trust as a small business. For me, every client we get, we have to work so hard to get it. So it's so important to keep those. And from their perspective, when you hire a nationwide service provider and they worked so hard to sell that deal, and then their nationwide service provider screws it up, it's going to be a pretty hard sell for us to get that trust back from them and tell them that we're different than what they've already experienced.

David: How important is aftercare because, in the olden times when I used to travel, I would go through airports and mass transit, terminals, and all that sort of thing. And I would see video walls and they were badly in native calibration and had been left way too long. But I get a sense that in a lot of cases you have customers who, or somebody has the customers who put these things in, and then they forget about them or they're there, but they don't worry about the colors drifting and all that sort of stuff. 

Travis Peterson: It happens all the time. I've even been in airports where we've performed installations, say at a quick-service restaurant, I've actually gone back there and fixed some cable management ‘cause I walked by and was like, “God, we've done that.” But when you're at a retail store or anything, you have so many employees going around and things get touched, cable management falls because someone was messing with stuff and the calibrations off, cause it's been two years. So you nailed it on the head.

It's a service we provide and we feel the ROI is there, but some people don't budget for it. And when they don't budget for it, it's hard to justify adding that cost because it isn't always cheap either. But the value is there and there's nothing worse from my perspective when you walk into a restaurant and three screens are working, one's off, or the cable management hanging, and I know I'm going to be biased and nitpicky when I see something small or maybe the average consumer might not be. But that value is there from our end.

David: Even my local bank, outside of Halifax, I go in there, there's almost always one of the screens out and I've got to a point where I know the manager and I'll walk in and go, “that one's out again”, and we've actually gone behind the counter and monkeyed around to try to get things going again, even though he doesn't know who the service provider is, I know who it is, but I'm not going to call them or anything else.

But like you say, you get nitpicky and you want to see it working properly. 

Travis Peterson: Yeah. If you ever know it's Snap, you better call me Dave. Cause we'll get on and fix it. 

David: You're probably not allowed in Canada right now. 

Travis Peterson: It's true. We do have technicians in major Metro areas though.

David: Oh, there you go. Aren't there tougher environments than other ones to do, like what are the hardest venues to do installs in? 

Travis Peterson: Pre COVID or post-COVID? (Laughter)

David: Let's talk both.

Travis Peterson: Pre COVID, I think airports always take the cake. It's just, you gotta go through more security. You got a lot of people walking around there for it all the time. Also overnight work, after hours. So we are structured in-house at our corporate office, we have full-time nighttime employees that are doing the project management because we have enough work where we do a lot of overnight work, but that's where it's tough. So we have different tiers of our technicians. We have primaries, tier one, tier two, tier three. And our primaries, they're our bread and butter guys.

They're from across the country. They live in a brief Snap Install. When we have nighttime work and we need to utilize them for that, then during the daytime, which is still a high priority of work, we gotta bring in the other crews and make sure that they're up to speed with handling that higher workload that was there for the primaries that are covering the nighttime or vice versa. So it's a challenge for us logistically in making sure no matter when the work comes across or where it is, we're providing that high level of service that we promised to our customers. But as far as physical locations, I would always, I think put airports at the top, but we do a lot of work in airports because when you walk through airports, there's a lot of screens everywhere. There's a lot of business to be had. 

David: So I've written about this, that it's a bit of a blessing in disguise. If there's anything good that comes out of COVID and there's not very much at all is that a lot of projects that would normally have to be done overnight and normally done if they're done through the day with a whole bunch of hoarding and a whole bunch of disruption, those venues are mothballed right now and you can go in and start and stop a project, just work in the daytime for a week and you're done without ever having to be there at midnight. 

Travis Peterson: It has been the one blessing that COVID has provided us is fewer consumers walking around and more daytime work. But the other problem that comes with that is a lot of people just cut their budgets immediately and said no more technology, digital signage spending.

I always see not a lot of our partners take some hits there too. So as great as it is, we would take pre-COVID any day over post-COVID in regards to the number of projects that were being awarded. But a challenge for COVID too is with us is I had to take my network team and I actually add two people to it. And our network team is really the team that drives the compliance and relationships with our contractor’s and it became a full-time job for two employees just to manage the different state regulations, county regulations for our techs because we felt the need for communication needed to be at an all-time high for our network. But also we felt the need to educate them and make sure they were aware really from Q2 all the way to now, is we were trying to stay ahead of the game and let the technicians know that safety is number one and what their state was regulated on, what they could and couldn't do and make sure in some cases we were considered, I'm missing the word right now, but a needed service, where if a cop pulled some of our techs over, which was happening, we had a sheet that could provide them that they were essential workers, and it was needed. And we were providing that documentation because we were essential workers, we were in healthcare. We were doing the type of work that the States checked off and said, “You're good to go.” 

So that became a full-time job and that became a challenge. And we were seeing us spending resources and money on things we never had to in the past and it was good. And as much as COVID has hurt many across the country and many businesses, I look at it as a blessing in disguise.

In one way, if you look back a year from now, the Q1 of 2020, Snap was firing on all cylinders. We were chasing our tail in many ways and then COVID hit and it really slowed our business down, about 70% for a little bit. But it allowed me to take a step back and work with my leadership team and take one step back to take two steps forward.

And we didn't let anyone go due to COVID. But now, since then we've brought on 14 new hires and our complete company is restructured in a way that we're built for growth. And I strongly believe that if that never happened, I wouldn't be in the spot where I'm at as growing through some of those challenges.

And then also our company. I think we'd still be chasing our tails in a lot of ways, instead of being prepared for what's ahead now which we feel 2021 in digital signage is going to come back and it's going to come back roaring and we're excited about it. 

David: Your business is one that relies heavily on human factors. You've got your 60 or so full-time employees, but I think you said 700 contractors or something like that. That's a lot of personalities scattered across the country and you have to stay on top of them all. You have to rely on them showing up, and then you've got by extension, and I remember this from my own time being VP Ops of a company and running another company that you could have the install techs there, but you're still on the phone yelling at an electrician who was supposed to be there at 11 and it was 12:30 and so how do you get past all that and have you learned a way to do it?

Travis Peterson: Lots of gray hairs and probably die at a young age. (Laughter)

No, you know what, our whole business is built of relationships and we don't have a product that flies off the walls that we can box up and ship out to our customers. Our product is technicians, it's humans and humans make mistakes. I make mistakes every day.

And that's okay. One thing with our customers, it's a sales pitch. We don't lie to our prospects. We tell them, “Hey, there's going to be days that you don't like us, cause we're going to mess up,” and that's okay because what we can promise you is every time we mess up, we're going to do the right thing. And we're going to figure out a solution to have you have a happy customer. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't days I wanted to pull my hair out. One of the most frustrating parts about this business model is our 50+ employees in-house, we could work our asses off, check every box, make sure everything's perfect, and that technician who we've maybe never physically met that we're sending out to a site failed us, and sometimes that's on us because we don't do our checks and balances, but sometimes it might just because he or she's having a bad day. So things we do to prevent that is: in the last five years, we've completely invested into our network team that builds the relationships, holds our tech compliant, insurance all the county, whatever it may be.

And then also we have reviews with them and they know how they're graded. So our technology and other investment, we've made every tech out in the field has an app on their phone. It's the Snap app and that's where they do all their work. It's where they accept their jobs, where we can see when they're completed with the job, all the deliverables come through, but then they also know their rating on a job and some businesses out there have some prospects or even clients to this day, they ask us, “Hey, your competitors say they have W2 technicians across the country, you guys have subs, why are they better or why are you better than them?” And I dunno if it's about who's better or not, but I'm a strong believer that the contractor model if used appropriately and is accountable, is stronger than the W2 model in some ways.

And I tie that all back to competition with the W2 employee. They might get complacent. They might not care as much. They might call in sick or do something elsewhere with subcontractors, you actually have that competition level and if you're transparent with them and show them that other people in their areas are knocking on the door, looking for that work, it doesn't mean that we make them compete with each other and hold it there to their throat every day. We actually are all about building relationships. Long-term, we don't just throw it out to a marketplace and cross our fingers. Our techs work directly with us and we build those loyal relationships. But that competition aspect is, you scratch our back, we'll scratch yours. But at the same time, I need you to keep up that accountability because I hold myself accountable and I expect you to hold yourself accountable. As we're paying you for this work. 

David: There are some, I'm aware of at least two matchmaker services out there, that kind of dating services for AV techs. You put in a need and different techs in that region can respond to it and bid on the deal. Are they competition or is that really a onesy twosy thing that you don't tend to play in very often? 

Travis Peterson: Onesy twosy thing that we don't play in at all. Our value add, some of our technicians, they work for our competitors as well. And we're okay with that. We're transparent and saying, that's fine as long as when you're doing our work, you're putting our work first and actually it's a two-way street. A lot of them come back and say, gosh, we wish you had this work because you treat us way better because you pay us quicker because you do this, and this.

And with the onesy twosy company is that is our value add is really the project management feature we offer in house with those 50 plus employees. If you call Snap as a client of ours, you're calling the same person and they know exactly what job that you're talking about. They can connect you with the right person. They can provide the tier one or tier two support service they need to, and that pays dividends for our customers because there's nothing worse than getting a call from your customer saying, “Hey, the TV just fell,” or “Hey, this didn't happen” instead of a call from us being proactive and saying, “Hey, this happened. If you want to reach out to your customer, that's fine but here's what we're doing about it to make it right and here's how we're going to make sure your customer has a smile on their face at the end” 

David: Are the jobs getting more complicated because you now have a lot of direct view LED and a whole range of new products. In many cases, the cabinets have different shapes. The mounting systems are different. There's very little in the way of universal standards or anything else. So you go into a job and the techs have to crack the manual and everything. All of a sudden, look at the back and go, okay, this is yet a new wrinkle that we haven't seen before.

Travis Peterson: They're definitely getting more complicated and a real man read manuals is what we tell our kids.

There are lots of techs out there that will say, “I got this, I don't need to look at a manual as anyone that's an expert in their field.” But it's become clear as the complications get thrown, our way is we have to make sure the documentation is there. We have to make sure the expectations are the same from what we think our customers expect to what they actually expect of us and lay that out and in our technology having checkpoints. So as a technician goes through the job, that person has to actually check off the things they're doing to ensure that we're following it step by step. Because if you do the wild west, so you just say, hang it up there and let's just hope it's right.

That's not going to work. There are steps you have to follow and we work with our partners to make sure that it's laid out and very clear so that it can be followed with a scope of work.

David: Last question: is there a piece of advice that you provide to your partners and if you're exposed directly to your end-user customers, you try to get across to them to smooth out the job?

Travis Peterson: Yes. Some of them let us be more involved than others, but for us, it's communication and getting us involved as quickly as possible. Not to give advice and tell you what's right or wrong, but we've seen a lot of things. We've been in business for almost 10 years now. It's not our first rodeo. We do this all day, every day. And what some customers might not realize is checking those boxes and having the checks and balances prior to deployment is so important. And in the end, it saves them a lot of money and we don't do it to rattle their cage and cause more issues. We do it to make sure we're being proactive before that deployment starts so they can save money in the end and we can avoid fewer trips.

David: Do you have to try to convince them of the value of a preliminary site survey? 

Travis Peterson: I think it depends on the stage of the relationship we're out with our customers for those the ones that we've been working with for a long time, they see the value, maybe they didn't at first and then we had to sell it to them and show them why now they know it's there, but it is something that can be challenging at times where that customer doesn't want to pay that small fee for the survey upfront and we allow them not to, but in the end, they paid triple what it would've cost because if they avoided a couple of things that they could have covered. 

David: Yeah. They think it's a cash grab until I find out actually, no, we should have done it.

Travis Peterson: Exactly and it's definitely not a cash grab for us. It's more of a break-even to cover our asses on some other things going forward. 

David: All right, Travis, I appreciate you taking some time with me. 

Travis Peterson: I appreciate that. 

David: Thank you.

 

ACE Roundtable: The Tech That Worked In 2020, And Going Forward

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

Just before Christmas, I moderated an Advocates for Connected Experiences roundtable that tossed around thoughts on what technologies were used to get us all through 2020, focusing on what really worked, and will continue to work into 2021.

It was a video discussion on Zoom, but it translates nicely to audio. I had technical issues with the planned podcast for this week, but this is a worthwhile, albeit last-minute stand-in.

The first voice you hear is Kim Sarubbi, one of the founders of Advocates of Connected Experiences, or ACE.

Also on the discussion, Joe' Lloyd from AVIXA, Kym Frank from Geopath, Beth Warren from CRI and the DSF, Cybelle Jones from SEGD, Bryan Meszaros from OpenEye Global, Asif Kahn from the Location-Based Marketing Association, and myself.

This podcast is produced with the kind, ongoing support of ScreenFeed, the digital signage content store. Get awesome-looking, engaging and automated subscription content for your screens.

 

Stephan Odörfer, 4tiitoo

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

While we all have learned, and mostly remembered, to wash or sanitize our hands after we touch surfaces, the ongoing pandemic has undoubtedly made a lot of people antsy about touching any surfaces unless they really, really need to.

Self-service screens are one of those surfaces that makes at least some people jumpy, and things like voice-based ordering or throwing screen controls to the customer's smartphone have come up as alternatives.

Now 4tiitoo, a German company that mainly does eye tracking for workplace environments, is touting a solution that would enable doing things like ordering a burger at a restaurant chain to be contactless.

A built-in sensor on the kiosk would track and respond to what a customer sees on the screen, all the way from a welcome message and through to order confirmation.

This is not stuff out of a sci-fi movie, but a riff on existing technology that takes endless mouse work out of repetitive office jobs and allows workers with greasy or occupied hands to navigate and update a screen just by looking at it.

Stephan Odörfer, one of the founders of 4tiitoo, walked me through the thinking, and how it all works.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

David: All right, Stephan, can you give me a rundown on what your company is all about and what your technology does broadly? 

Stephan Odorfer: Sure. So at 4tiitoo, what we're doing is all about natural interaction, using your gaze, first of all, but in some use cases also combining speech and gestures. So basically combined, I would say natural interactions that humans can do. So what we're mainly doing nowadays is we are controlling standard workplaces, from accounting to support centers to engineering, and largely replacing the 50 year mouse, so that means, while you're having your hands on the keyboard, you start typing and when you want to select a different input field, for example, in your SAP environment, you just look at this field, which you're doing anyway, and you continue typing because our software understands what you want to do and basically predicts the intention and proactively helps you in your daily tasks.

So this is what we are usually doing for several years. Now, what we have been doing lately is hands-free or completely touchless interaction in kiosk situations, or in dedicated restaurant situations where you use your gaze, as you do today, you browse through the menu, an automatic disc will roll a list while you're reading it and our system understands that you are currently in reading mode and obviously what do you want to do at the end of a page? You want to continue scrolling it? So the system automatically scrolls for your reading speed and what it also does is obviously if you want to select a salad or a burger, you just look at these items, and then we developed a special way to basically trigger these elements, because it's not about just looking at them and boom, it happens. That's not good. So it's rather a way to basically first select something and then trigger something just with your gaze.

So this is in a nutshell what we're doing. 

David: The restaurant applications for self-service ordering and so on, was that something that was already an ask from operators prior to COVID or is it because of the pandemic that this is now something that's being put together? 

Stephan Odorfer: It was clearly connected with the pandemic, the topic of people being afraid of touching surfaces or the need in restaurants to continuously make sure that these surfaces are clean. We have seen this in manufacturing environments. We have seen this for a long time already so we have productive solutions for people on the shop floor, having gloves, et.c.controlling their shop flow terminals just with their case, so that they can continue doing their actual job with their hands. 

Now going into the restaurant business, it's quite similar because it's a clear interface, you have a bunch of options that you can touch or click on and now basically look at, and it's not a complex interface. So what people are doing there usually is pretty similar and due to the COVID-19 situation, people were looking at solutions for not having to touch things, on the one hand, and what we could offer with this technology is not only replacing this need to touch something but it's also using our gaze technology, we also see what people are interested in and based on this information, we can predict what the user wants to have, in this case, what he's looking for and then in this case, can propose recommendations for based on his current view, his gaze history, not based on the history of other people, but on his very history. And, therefore we can not only make his experience more personal, more individual, but also create a potential for upselling and cross-selling, from the store.

David: So you're using machine learning or some kind of computer vision to do that? 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. So it’s a local based technology because privacy is an important topic for us. So it's not being transmitted in the cloud, everything that we do here in this personalization runs on the local system and what it basically does, it understands where you're looking at and what you're not looking at, which is very important.

So this is an area where we have already filed several patents because one of the most important things is obviously at work is what you look at and how you look at things, but what is also very interesting is what you're not looking at, because in your peripheral view, our autopilot works. So, the autopilot in our brain basically works if I say two plus two, in our brains, it just makes sense. But if I say 42 times 17, there are not that many brains where the solution comes up. So we need to focus on that and do the math, but the automatic part in our brain that is basically getting, selecting what should be put in or focus. So in this area, when I'm scrolling, for example, let's say scrolling through a menu in a restaurant that has different pizzas. For example, what I'm doing is, I'm basically quickly running through a page and I'm scanning things like we do if we do a Google search, for example, what is reading each word and if it makes sense, if our autopilot says, “Hey, this could be an interesting result,” only then we put our focus on it and then we read it and then we decide, and we basically understand what you already get rid of in your autopilot, because this is very important to create a better funnel and to create better results in less time. 

David: Okay. So when the original, maybe not the original, but the most familiar gesture sensors out there, the Kinect sensors that came out maybe 10 years ago, there were attempts at that time to use gestures as an interactive interface for screens and the objection I always had and observed, was that there was a big learning curve for people to figure out how to use this, and I would imagine in something like a restaurant environment, where a lot of the goal is to speed up transactions, speed up decision-making and everything else, how do you get past something where you're walking up to a screen for the first time and it's an unfamiliar interface?

Stephan Odorfer: That's a very important question. You're absolutely right. The older folks out there probably remember the Minority Report scene with Tom Cruise, where he's doing all these fancy moves and controls the computer with that. Well, think of this as if you would do this next too. The learning curve you were mentioning, it's also a topic of how long you want to do this until this is more a sports event than an operation off of a screen, right? Your eyes are constantly moving anyway. So before you touch something, before you gesture, or just pointing at something or click a mouse or whatever, your eyes are always already at this point that you want to address. And that's the magic of eye tracking. 

So the question is how do we make sure that, in our standard environment, there’s a steep learning curve that people get familiar very fast with this technology and on the other hand, in a kiosk mode, people get that it's a robust environment, it's a robust operation. It's completely a hundred percent sure operation in terms of that the user knows what's going to happen and what to expect, etc. because this is necessary that people would accept it. And what we came up with is a way to confirm things and rethink from basically his gaze information so that we can predict what he wants to do and why we have done this is because this is something that we are focusing on, so the company itself is seven years old, but, my partner and myself, the founding partners, we are focusing on this technology now for almost 10 years. And we came up with, if I remember the first days and the first month and years, it looked pretty different, in terms of how we control computers today.

So let me explain with an example. If you look at things, a button for example, what it usually does today, it has a so-called dwell time, which basically means time taken between you looking at a button and it triggering within a specific time of say two seconds or whatever. So as always, it's taken too long for a nice interaction and it's too short and therefore too many false positives, if you speed it up. So what we came up with is basically a way that you select within a split second, you select something, you can basically think of in a Windows environment, you can select on the desktop if you click an icon, if you click it once; you select it, if you click it twice to double click, then you trigger it. But you can also look at once, select it and then press return, that's basically the same. So you select it and then you trigger it. And that's the same, what we are doing. So you look at a burger and you select it, right? If you want to trigger this and put this in the cart, for example, then every time you select something, a button pops up that basically triggers the selection and to put it into the cart or whatever happens, forced by this button. So it's always a two step system and that's robust enough, but if you know how to deal with the system, you can do it super fast because our eyes are controlled by the fastest muscles in our body.

So no matter if you are looking from the lower left part to the upper right part, you can do this in a split-second while if you would need to move your hand, that would take much longer. 

David: And if you want to select something, are you blinking or doing something like that to confirm?

Stephan Odorfer: Yes, this would be a possibility to blink, but blinking is also controlled by the autopilot in our brain. So nobody is actively blinking except for these specific situations where you blink an eye to show somebody that you're winking, so that's a specific action, but if you would need to blink to every time that feels awkward, it is possible to control the interfaces with blinking and eye tracking is something that is here for many years for decades, in time. And where it came from is from psychological studies, from marketing studies. We all know these heat maps, search results, et cetera, where it also came from is that it's possible for impaired people to control a computer. So that's the great way and the only way for many people to take part in this world, that is the internet and communication, etc. And if they can only use their eye muscles, because everything else is not possible anymore. Then this is a great way,but there are other ways, better ways to trigger things which are not blinking.

Another opportunity would come up, maybe in your mind would be nodding, but anything like these blinking and nodding has too many false positives. So that's why we came up with this other solution. 

David: So walk me through this, if there's a hamburger chain and you have a self-service ordering kiosk and you're using your technology, I walk up to this thing, what is it telling me right away? 

Is there a message that says you can navigate this whole thing just using your gaze? 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. It would not be that it's only possible, right? So you should always have a fall back option in this case, this would be touch, right? Because you don't want to force people in a direction you want to offer them a better way or different way in the first place.

And after they experienced it in a better way. So it would be introduced to folks as, “Hey, you can touch me, but you can also just look at me and I will understand what you want to do.” And, based on this very first approach, the system basically understands, “Hey, there's a new customer approaching me”, so the system understands that somebody is looking at the system and it can welcome the customer. And based on this, if it's a new customer who is not familiar with this technology at all, then it's very simple, either he can take a short tour in the situation, which is , I would say something like 5-10 seconds long, basically just to understand what it is and I see great potential in terms of viral marketing here, because, just think about somebody controlling the device just with his gaze, and  his buddy is filming this and putting this on YouTube showing how innovative this solution is basically, right? So he understands, okay, this is how I can do it. And then for example, if he goes through the list of burgers in this case, he doesn't need to learn anything. That system understands that this guy is reading and it scrolls automatically as a biometric. So there's no need to understand something. The only thing you need to understand is basically that you look at a button and you see a little shine around this burger, for example. So that must integrate into the user interface and the corporate identity of the brand, obviously and it gives a little shine so that means it's selected. And then this button pops up and since this is the first time for a user this button popped up, obviously the user will have a look at this button, so that's the way we say, “next time, you're going to look at this pattern. You're going to select this burger to put in the cart, understood? And then you just look at the button.”

And then you've got to go because you don't need to learn anything else. You just know that it's a system that scrolls automatically for me, and you understood this because you experienced this and if I'm looking at a button, okay, this other button pops up and once I'm looking at this button, I trigger it. If I'm not looking at this button, it's vanishing right away after a split second. 

David: So if I decide, I want the cheeseburger with bacon, a prompt will come up and if I look at it, it will confirm that I want that and put it into my “shopping cart”? 

Stephan Odorfer: For example, we have different buttons in such an interface, for example, the amount, so I want to have two burgers or three burgers, what is the difference if you use gaze control instead of touch control or something. Nowadays our eyes are our sensors, they sense information and put it into our brain. What we are doing, it's not only sensing, we are also making our eyes the actors, so they are acting actively.

So for example, if you think about driving in the car and you have both your hands on the steering wheel and  you want to change the radio station. If you're familiar with the car, you know, without having your eyes looking at the center cockpit, where you need to put your hands to turn up the volume or to change the station, right? Because you just know where your hands need to go, but if you need to look at this element, for example, you see +++, you would need to create the information within your peripheral view. If you look at +, you need to create the number that you're currently at, right next to the interface because you need to understand that you are at 3+ and you can now stop looking at +++ because it goes up gradually. Similarly, if you say how many burgers do you want, then you just look at one of our five buttons, one, two, three, four, five, because that way the restaurants know what amount of burgers or salads or whatever people are usually having. So, you don't need to choose 28 salads or something. 

David: So you go through that whole ordering process and then you would use more conventional payment systems like credit cards, or maybe even a phone scanner, NFC tap or something like that. Is there a point because you're already using a camera and you're looking at the retina or the iris of the viewer, could you make payments off the biometrics of that person's unique eye characteristics?

Stephan Odorfer: It’s theoretically possible, yes. And, if you look at many Asian countries, it's already the standard, right? It's not something sophisticated, that's already something that they do on a daily basis. 

David: But they don’t have GDPR there. 

Stephan Odorfer: True. Absolutely true, and that's exactly why I said it's theoretically possible. Biometrical identification, for example, this eye tracker that we are using can also be used to log into your Windows system, using the Windows Hello technology and what it basically does is it's not sending the data anywhere, it’s basically the same if you use your iPhone or your Android phone, that you use the same infrared based camera technology to identify that it's you, but it's only asking, is it you or not? You don't need to have the connection to a database. That's the main difference here.

As I said, it's theoretically possible, but this is not that's neither a focus of ours, nor it is something that is necessary in this case, because what you can actually do is you use a QR code to pay, that's one thing, use a touchless credit card or debit card to pay, so there are many ways of contactless paying in a way. What it furthermore does and I pointed this out a little bit earlier, already. So while you are browsing this, and looking through the menu, basically, what we understand is what are you interested in? Because we know that such an eye tracker collects data at about 90 Hertz, so 90 times a second. We understand where you're looking at and this information can be used to basically understand using this autopilot information, what you're interested in and what not. So in this case, for example, we can say right before the checkout, “Hey, you were thinking about taking this ice cream dessert.”

So why not offer it again at the checkout, but as we know what kind of ice cream you looked at and thought about and based on this case pattern, we understand that you really thought about this, so it's not historical information, it's personal.

And therefore you have a much better conversion rate of having upselling and making the cart size larger. 

David: If I'm a kiosk manufacturer and this intrigues me, I have QSR or other retail clients who might be interested in this, what are the hardware implications for this? Do you need to add a separate PC that just does that processing? Is there a separate, specific camera that you need? Those sorts of things? 

Stephan Odorfer: So an eye tracker consists of three different parts. One thing is the infrared lighting, so that's LEDs like you also have in your iPhone and Android phones today, you have a camera, a solution that is basically the same here. There's a special infrared camera and you have an ASIC, so it's a dedicated chip on board on the eye-tracker itself that does all the math, because through the USB port that is connected, only X, Y coordinates and X, Y set coordinates of your eyes are transmitted. So there's no camera image transmitted or saved at all. Everything is calculated in memory and just not saved at all. Also in terms of privacy, this is a standard equipment that can be easily built into the hinge of a notebook. So it's really small sothe volume you need to put into your existing kiosk solutions is really tiny.

And they're the only thing that is necessary. It needs to be put below the screen so that you can easily track the whole screen range with this. 

David: Okay, so you don't need a separate PC running an Intel or that sort of thing to make all this happen. It can just happen off of a pretty simple hardware setup? 

Stephan Odorfer: While you can do that, it depends on the use case that you want to do. For example, if you want to do the prediction, intention prediction parts that I was referring to, and this is something that is not produced on the eye-tracker itself, that is something that runs in the software on local hardware and therefore you should have an up to date device. This could be an Intel processor because the Intel processes have a dedicated deep learning algorithm embedded that we can use, and therefore much lower CPU consumption needed because it's already built in. So the commands are built into the hardware itself. 

David: So if you had a touchscreen kiosk, you could have both functions like all those stuff that the touchscreen kiosk normally doe, could run on there and your technology could run in parallel. You don't need two separate devices to do all that as long as you've got enough hardware. 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes. 

David: Okay. There was a big fuss recently up here in Canada, where I live, about a shopping mall using cameras. And even though it was anonymous video analytics, it was misinterpreted and there was all kinds of upset about it, even though there's really no reason to be. There's nothing, no privacy invasion happening there.

How do you get past that with customers who worry about it and with the general public? Because even though what you're saying is, it's only the eye coordinates, people are going to see cameras and go, “Oh my God, my invasion, or my privacy is being invaded here!” 

Stephan Odorfer: It is absolutely important. So first of all, it uses a camera, but it's a sensor. So it means that the camera images are not saved anywhere. So that's the first thing. Then in terms of our company, we are based in Munich in Germany and Germany has a very strict privacy law. So even in specific areas, there's this even going further than GDPR requests and for the company itself and for me and my partners, this is a very important topic, because we want to make our vision. 

And our mission is to make computers understand us humans and not us humans to understand how our computers operated. This has been for many years that we had to learn how things work. It's now time that computers understand and predict how they can serve us because that's their duty. So in this way, we need to have a better understanding of how we can serve and therefore we need data. If you don't have data, and say if you want to learn swimming in a pool without water, it's not possible. So you need the data. Therefore we have that.

We have certificates of Germany Privacy, that's nothing familiar outside of Germany, probably, but it's a DECRA, it's called a data audit which makes sure how we handle data, how we process data, how we delete data and how we, anonymize and pseudonymized data and aggregate data. So to really make sure that the data we use, has nothing that can be transferred to any individual. That's very important because I don't want a big company to understand what I'm interested in.

The model that we follow for data privacy is basically, something is on one side of the wall, so that's the local part and then there's a part on the other side of the wall. To make this more plausible, think that you're searching for a result and you need to access data online, because this is something that we also do. If you need to load more information, for example, they are doing an e-commerce search and you're loading more information, more t-shirts that you're looking for. So our way is that we ask for a hundred new results and locally, we only use 10 of them. So the guys can put a hundred results in the system, but they don't know which ten of these hundred are we using and needing. So that's basically how you can get around that somebody else is building a model about the person you are serving.

So that's one thing and thinking about these kiosk solutions where all the data i, on the device anyway, and as nothing is transmitted to a server, to do the local optimization or the local personalization, there's no problem in terms of privacy. Furthermore after the session is done and somebody else appears, then we start from scratch basically in terms of the data and personalization.. 

David: Last question. Is this all what we've been talking about conceptually, or are you in the field with self-service kiosks that are doing all of this? 

Stephan Odorfer: So for now, three- four years, what we are doing is we are equipping large enterprises for their standard places, right?

So that's efficiency in ergonomics and benefits. The same goes for the shop floor, so we have productive environments running in a hands-free touchless interaction, not collecting a burger, but just confirming a step in your assembly process, for example. So that's what we're doing through the pandemic.

We have seen this request from hardware, software and solution providers on the one hand, but also from the customer's side since they are looking for other ways to solve their problems. So this is something that I'm pretty sure we're gonna equip, in a few weeks, for example, a completely touchless QR system of a large company that offers their guests to understand more about the company and understand how to get around, sort of a compass, for example, completely touchless, and that's pretty much the same because you have somebody approaching a terminal, the system says, “Hello!”, when it comes to you and you use it for 1-3 minutes, and then you move on.So that's very similar And, so I'm looking forward to seeing this in kiosk environments. 

David: So the interest is absolutely there, but we're still in fairly early stages of seeing this out in the marketplace. Yes. 

Stephan Odorfer: Yes.

David: Okay. Very nice to speak with you. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Stephan Odorfer: Absolutely. Thank you for the invitation. 

AVIXA Digital Signage Power Hour – October 2020 Roundtable On QSR & Drive-Thru

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

The QSR industry has been dramatically impacted by COVID-19, and some operators have fared much better than others for the simple reason that they had drive-thru lanes.

If the business relied on walk-in and dine-in traffic, they were in trouble. But if they had drive-thru lanes with pre-sell and menu displays, they tended to make out OK. What might have been 70% of their business went up past 90%.

Last week I moderated a roundtable panel on digital signage and the QSR business, chatting for  almost an hour with top people from companies active in the space - both vendors and end-users.

The Digital Signage Power Hour was hosted by AVIXA and sponsored by STRATACACHE. I led a discussion with Dan Williams from Stratacache, who worked with McDonald's on its massive digital deployment, Sara Grofscik of Samsung, who runs the QSR business there, Dave Petricig of PingHD, and Todd Hoffman, the digital lead for Krispy Kreme, and the subject of a recent 16:9 podcast.

The session starts with me rattling through some observations, and then we dive in.

AVIXA's Marcella Walsh can be heard at the back-end, answering some listener questions.

You can also watch the webinar online here ...

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

No transcript on this one. Too many competing voices!

Joe King, Philips

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

Philips has really come on in recent years in the digital signage ecosystem, taking on more and more presence at trade shows and releasing smart display products that my industry contacts have consistently said great things about.

You probably have a consumer product like a shaver or electric toothbrush made by Philips, and assume that the commercial display products come out of that Dutch company. They do … and don’t, and I get into that in a chat with Joe King, a Senior Director with the company, who drives North American sales.

Joe and I talk about where its smart display lineup is at, and its use of Android. We also talk about its own CMS software, which he stresses is NOT intended to compete with commercial software products. It’s meant to service the very basic needs of small businesses.

We talk about market conditions, and how the professional display company has kind of skated through all of this COVID mess … because the desktop monitor side of the business has exploded with Work From Home demands.

We explore the company’s camera-driven access control offer for retail, and who’s buying direct view LED these days.

And finally, we get into what to look for from Philips in the next 12-18 months.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Joe King, thanks for joining me. We've met in the past. I know Phillips well, and I think generally a lot of people know Phillips. One of the things that sometimes when I'm introduced to Phillips people, they kind of explained to me the background of the display side of the company. They may have Phillips toothbrushes on all kinds of things at home, but Phillips’s professional display is, as I understand it, the trading name for some other large companies. 

Joe: Yeah. Dave, thank you. Good to be with you by the way, and thank you for having me. Yeah, so we operate as Phillips. We operate under a license from Phillips. We're actually a global company called TPV. It's based out of Taiwan and we operate with a commercial license globally for digital signage, as well as a professional TV. So signage TV, hotel TV, we operate that pretty much around the world.

There are a couple of little pockets that are exceptions, but for the most part, we operate that around the world. So we have the power of TPV behind it and the manufacturing power of TPV behind it, which we're quite happy about. I think most of the industry probably doesn't know the name, but we're the world's largest manufacturer of desktop monitors. We're the world's third-largest manufacturer of televisions. And we like having THEM behind us because it gives us a lot of product development power, and also a lot of manufacturing power when we need it. So, happy you bring that up and thank you for the question. really 

There are some big companies in Taiwan. I've been there two or three times. I was there about a year ago. And, man, I was off to see AUO, but we went right by the TSMC, they're the biggest semiconductor maker in the world and this place was the size of a Ford plant. 

Joe: Yeah. It's nice having that manufacturing power behind us.

Where do you guys sit in terms of market share in North America and in Europe as well? I think in terms of Samsung and LG being top of the pile in North America, but you guys have really come on in the last two or three years. 

Joe: We have and even with COVID, Dave, we've been able to increase our share a little bit. So I think it depends on the day of the week, we are #4-#5. We tend to swap back and forth with another brand there at that level. But certainly, we don't have the market power of a Samsung or even an LG, but, as you say, we're growing certainly in North America and North America is a focus for us now.

We're the number three digital signage player in Europe. Again, behind the two large brands that you mentioned, but there's a real focus with us on North America because we feel like we're now getting our act together, so to speak. We've improved the product line. We've put world-class service in place, something that I think we can differentiate ourselves with, but yeah, we see North America as a real focal point for us. 

You joined or the company joined, what many of the display manufacturers have done in terms of adding systems-on-chip displays to their lineup? And one of the things that I've I've known about Philips is that a lot of the software companies that kind of try the different smart display platforms out there have tended to say that the Phillips’ one is really good, it's very modern Android, powerful, runs like a top and everything else. 

How much of your product line is built around a system-on-chip now? Like the commercial display product line. 

Joe: A lot. In terms of just sheer models, if we were just looking at a percentage of the models, we're probably getting close to 75%. We'll try to offer a model that doesn't have it if we're just trying to hit a price point. But for the most part, especially as you get into the higher ends of the line, almost everything has an Android operating system in it, and we see the business going that way.

I'm a firm believer and I've been in the hardware business, a long long time. I'll age myself if I say how long, but I really do think that software is going to be the driver of this business going forward, and I think that our Android platform, as you say, it performs very well. We see it in large deployments, where it's accessible. It is an open platform, which we like, and we certainly see our business heading that way. 

Something that you hear from the software companies, as well as integrators and end-users that they like that it's open. And, you know, some of the other guys have their own proprietary operating system working with it, whereas I've heard others say we really like that we can work on just Android and do what we need to do without learning or tweaking something. 

Joe: Right. Well, there's a level of consistency, I guess, would probably be the best way to say that. But yes, we get that feedback a lot and I think one of the things that we've done that might be a little different is we tend to try to stabilize On an Android version. So if we see something that we like, that's very stable, you know, we had Android 4.4.4 in the market for quite a long time. And even though there were a lot of updated versions, we kept saying to the marketplace, “This is stable, why do you want to even think about upgrading firmware and trying to mess things up?”

So we tend to draw a line in the sand, if you will, that a particular Android version and we've been very consistent in that. And I think our software partners like that approach actually. 

And where are you now? I think you're at 7. 

Joe: We actually have some displays with 8. We have two different, I think it's 7.1 in the marketplace as well as an 8 today.

Are there any objections still from end users saying, well, you know, it's a system-on-chip? What if something happens with the panel? I gotta replace the whole panel or it's not as powerful enough or anything like that. 

Joe: Certainly I think we tend to get those questions. I think we've proven with some of the demonstrations and stuff that we've done that certainly, the platform is powerful enough.

I think honestly, Dave, the way to answer that is that we've put a service organization in place that we think is second to none in the industry. So if somebody does need a fast replacement, we have the ability to do that. We offer people a 24-hour turnaround. We certainly understand that if it's a menu board in a quick-serve restaurant and it goes out, it can't be their black for a very long time at all.

So we certainly offer the marketplace, those opportunities for quick replacement and that's one of the reasons we do it. We have a very reliable product. I would put it up against anybody else in the industry, which is why we talk about that quick turnaround service, because we know we're not going to need it very much. 

Have you ever run into a smart display where the smarts have died and the panel had to be pulled down? Cause I ask this question a lot and I've never heard anybody say that's actually happened. 

Joe: No, I haven't. And it's a good question. I think again, we try to separate those two. So, the Android operating system is separate, literally a separate board, if you will, from the display itself so those aren't tied together. Now certainly, if a display goes black, it's going to go black regardless, but I haven't seen them tied together that way and it may be just because of the design of our product. 

Right, but I mean that the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that gets someone out there around system-on-chip displays is if there is a problem with the CPU, which you know, is a separate component from the display components and so on, you can't just open a trap door and snap on out and pop a new one. You got to take the whole thing down. But I've never actually heard anybody say this has happened. 

Joe: I haven't either. I haven't seen it. You could always make the argument, you know, indifference to my friends at BrightSign that you could see the same thing with a player and I think we just like this approach. We think the improved service or the improved performance of the Android operating system is worth the investment. And we don't see a risk. We really don't, and as I said, I think some of the installations we have would certainly support that.

What happens on the install side itself? I have heard some solutions providers say that field servicing drops like a boulder because we don't have all these connectors. 

Joe: Yeah. I think you're right. I think, you know, even from our standpoint, we offer our software partners the opportunity for us to preload the software, you know, we have a high touch warehouse facility where we can do that and make the installation process even easier.

So I think that's one of the things that we offer that may be unique to a system-on-chip product. I will oversimplify, it's not as easy as just hanging it and going, but it certainly can make the installation much easier to do with some of the pre-loading capability that we have.

And from what I've heard is because there aren't any HDMI cables and other cables associated with them, there's nothing to wiggle loose and, cause a truck roll. 

Joe: Yeah, well, I'll share it with you. We review service metrics every month and we know that on average, about 65% of the calls we get into our call center are exactly that, it's what I would call operator error. So, things like the cable has come loose, a power cord has come loose and typically we see, it'll be a little higher, some months, a little lower some months, but typically about 65% of the calls we get, we resolve over the phone and it is cable related. And so I think that's just another argument for having a totally contained system.

Yeah. Remove the points of failure. 

Joe: You got it. Exactly. 

So what is CMND, I assume it’s an acronym for Command? 

Joe: Exactly. So it is our “create and maintain” product, so it is a product that we let people create their own content. And I will say to everybody, we do it at a very elementary level. We don't pretend to be able to do some of the things that some of the other software companies out there can do. This is a way for, if you're an individual restaurant owner, and you own a deli and you want to put something up on a screen, this is a way to make PowerPoint and get it onto a screen fairly easily. It's a way for a school, as an example, if they need to broadcast an emergency message, this is an easy way to have that happen, and then it also gives you controls. 

So it can, again, I'll use those schools as an example if there's an emergency message that needed to be broadcast, it can be done from a central location and get to every product. We also utilize it, just like some of the other manufacturers, in very large installations. You can turn them all on with a button click, you can turn them all off with a button click. So just creating software and being able to control the systems as well. And, that's why we call it Command. 

So you're not trying to sell against your software partners or anything?

Joe: No way, as I said, we don't pretend to be that good. We're not in the software business. We're a hardware company, but as I said earlier, I think the software is the key going forward. So we want to make our product as seamless as it possibly can be for our software partners.

We're not trying to take their place. 

What I've seen with some of the display guys is a move to create a kind of foundational software that's a device management and control as you describe it that you could then port a web application onto, and maybe if you've got a special purpose thing where you really don't need all of the bells and whistles and capabilities of the CMS, you can just use command or CMND as the kind of the baseline platform.

Is that accurate? 

Joe: Yeah, I think that's a fair portrayal. As I said, it’s meant to be kind of elementary. And, look, there are people out there that do the software side really really well. And even the control functionality they do, better than we do. So, this is meant to be a very basic product.

You know, the great thing about it is, it's free. We don't charge for it. That's a little bit different than some of our competitors. But again, we're not charging for it because it is a very basic system. 

And these are end-users, buyers who are otherwise just not gonna get a CMS anyways unless they get something free or one of the freemium ones out there? 

Joe: Exactly. 

So, I think two or three years ago, I went to a lot of trade shows. That's more accurately say I used to go to a lot of trade shows and I can recall, let's say about three years ago, going to ISE and seeing a direct-view LED in the Phillips booth for the first time. 

So you guys have gotten into that. How do you differentiate your product in a very crowded field? 

Joe: Yeah, great question. The last time you and I actually spoke to each other and recorded anything was Infocom a year ago about LED and so, of course, COVID has impacted it. We have sold some units, I'm happy to say, and some of them are going on now, but I think that the big differentiator for us, as I talked a year ago, is kits. So we tend to put LED together and a pre-configured kit, you know, we've been very successful with video walls doing the same thing, so it comes together with the display, it comes together with a mouse and it comes together with all the processing equipment you need, the cables. And so we tend to believe in these kits and that's where our success has been in North America. A similar thing in Europe, we've seen, people are going to want custom screens and we'll certainly give them the opportunity to do that. But for us, the success really is those kits. I think the first three installations where you've done or in the process of doing in the US have all been kits versus custom.

I've heard that a lot and the prevailing opinion seems to be that you have specialty LED companies who understand everything about very large installations, big canvases, weird shapes, and everything else, but you've got this whole big second tier of integrators and solutions writers who don't work with LED very often and they don't necessarily understand it or get it, and don't have the cycles to just become experts on this, so a kit is something they can wrap their heads around. 

Joe: Yeah, I think so. And I think that where we're looking at selling this and where we've been successful is mostly in the corporate market. and also some of the consumer markets. We have a couple of partners that are really quite strong in the consumer market and some of these LED kits that we have worked really well are home theaters and that's where we've had some of our success. 

And on the corporate side, is it primarily conference rooms and control rooms, that kind of thing? 

Joe: Not conference rooms, more lobbies. In fact, the first installation we did was a corporate lobby, even in COVID, it's still something that proceeded and was installed. So, yeah, we are seeing more lobbies than conference rooms. 

Yeah. More broadly with digital signage in general, what are those vertical markets that seem to be working right now, even amidst all of this nuttiness? 

Joe: I think we've all been really surprised. I think we all expected that retail would get impacted and retail has been impacted, but I think we've all certainly been surprised at how well, certainly quick-serve restaurants, pizza, you know, the brick and mortar, home improvement, you know, large chain stores have done.

We're seeing a lot of activity in drug stores as an example. So it's really surprised me how well that retail itself has maintained. Certainly, we've seen a huge increase in education. I think a lot of those early dollars went to Chromebooks and laptops and everything else for students, but we're really seeing now an increase in some of the displays that are used for education, as kids do end up back in the classroom. 

Well, you know, all those places have a lot of change going on and, it's not, “This is what we're doing for the next three months, It can change in an hour.” 

Joe: Yeah, exactly, and I think we've seen some of that and certainly if you look at corporate as an example, I think in the US there's really a tendency to step back, about going back to work if you will, where I think in some other parts of the world, we've seen people go back to work a little more quickly.

Certainly, we've seen that in Europe. We've seen people go back into offices a little more quickly, you know, just a personal observation, I think we need to do that here. I think people need to get back into some kind of a normal routine and I think the office can be part of that. And I certainly hope that we're doing that as we get into 2021.

Yeah, I do wonder about this whole shift to work from home, how that will play out. I think it works very well for some people. I've been doing it forever, so I'm used to it, but I think there's a whole bunch of people who do their best work when they're in a collaborative environment and they can share.

Joe: Yeah. I'll share just a quick side note, I mean, I'm like you. I've worked from home for forever, I have a great setup. I can do it, but there are people in my group who, once we made the announcement that we would open the office back up, they couldn't wait to get back there, you know, social distancing and everything else that we planned for.

They still just felt that they were more productive in the office. And we have some that aren't and that's perfectly fine. We've given them that opportunity, but to your point, some of those people, whether they be supply chain-related or product development related, who just feel like they're a whole lot more productive in the office where they have the tools they need and I think a lot of companies are going to see that same thing. 

I certainly think that technology is going to have to help there and hopefully, digital signage can be part of that, whether it's collaborative displays, being able to Zoom effectively if you will but I think technology can help there. And I think that's part of why we're seeing corporate, maybe not as respond as quickly, is because they're still trying to figure that out. 

Going back to retail, Philips introduced something called “People Count” like two-three months ago or maybe more. Can you explain what that is? 

Joe: Sure. So it's a product that we in collaboration with a camera manufacturer, and then there's some software that we actually developed that works with our Android product. But it's basically a way to count people as they come into a retail establishment and then it's up to that retail establishment to tell the system how many people it can allow. So it counts them going in and it counts them going out so that if you can only have a hundred people in your store at one time, it will literally put the red light up, and tell people to wait and that it's not safe to enter yet. And then when somebody does exit, it'll give them a green light, and depending on how large that display is, it gives them a chance to tell people, a mask is required. You can't come in without a mask. It gives them a chance to tell them some of the things they're doing to keep their area clean.

And so it was very well received. I think it's been more well-received in Europe. I think in the US it's been almost on a state by state basis, as to how locked down those States still are. Certainly in California, it's been a very effective product. You know, in some other parts of the country, it's been really effective.

And then frankly, and honestly we've seen some areas of the country that just say, well, we're not going to worry about monitoring people coming. To be honest, it's been kind of hit and miss depending on where you are in the country. 

Yeah, I think I have heard it more broadly that in Europe, the idea of retail access controls as more demand and more take-up because there are pretty stiff fines associated with having too many people in the store. And I guess city bylaw enforcement officers in different jurisdictions who are pretty happy to write tickets on that. Cause they're incentive based on what they do, whereas as you say, it's state by state in the US. 

I live in a part of Canada where we've seen very few cases, but I've seen none of this stuff and it's still, teenagers acting as bouncers, you know, to get into a home Depot or something like that. So I think it kind of depends on where you are. 

Joe: Exactly. Where I live locally and I live in Tennessee, when it first started, there were people standing in front of the grocery store chain.

I go to counting people as they went in and counting people as they went out and they're all using walkie talkies, and now there's none of that going on, you know? And so I think they've just made a corporate decision that we don't need to spend that money, to try to monitor who's coming in and out whether they have a mask on or not.

And where again, I think there are some areas of the country where they're really still trying to do that and that's where we've seen success with that product. 

Have you had to work with some of these resellers and buyers who say, “guys, this isn't a product just for the moment. You can sweat this asset post-COVID”, presumably there is a post-COVID, have you had to do that? 

Joe: It's been one of the selling points we've had to make to everybody that's purchased it. I think that's been the capital outlay. We had one large retailer that bought it for right at a hundred locations and one of their biggest questions was what do I do with it when I no longer have to count people? And so I think that was where we came back and said to them, well, here's what you can do with it. We put them in touch with another software partner. Thankfully, this particular client is a digital signage user anyway, but I think that we've had that question from almost everybody: what do I do after, and is this investment that I'm making now going to be something I can recoup even down the line? And so, yeah, we've linked them up with software companies to try to maximize that.

I think there's a little bit of gateway drug stuff going on there where this is something that can get a retailer or another kind of a business that takes a lot of public foot traffic in, and get them understanding what you can do with digital signage and kind of migrate out from there.

You could imagine once you start using cameras and sensors and things like that, you can start to understand how the store works and where people go and how that changes by time of day, all that stuff. 

Joe: Right. Exactly. 

So there's a lot of talk in the cheap seats where I spent a lot of my time, that LCD is a product that's going to go away and we're all going to shift to direct-view LED and to micro-LED. Is that something that Phillips largely sees is happening or is there always a role for LCD because I kind of think there is when I really think about it. 

Joe: I think we've been talking about the demise of LCD for years, right? And I just don't see it. I think there are two totally different products, and I think that there's always going to be an application for LCDs. 

Do I think that eventually some of the video wall applications that we do today with LCD will end up being direct-view LED? I think, yeah, that's a possibility, but I still think even as fast as the cost is coming down, I still think there's going to be an opportunity. There are just things that we can do with LCD that you struggle to do with direct-view LED and a lot of that is just based on the economics and how much money people have to spend. 

You know, Dave, I don't see a school system putting in direct-view LEDs, at least before I end up retiring. I think that's a number of years away before that becomes a cost-effective solution for them and that's where some of the large screen stuff that we have and our competitors have, you know, really works in some of those verticals. You know, will you see it in transportation more quickly? Probably. When you're looking at what belt is my luggage on, does that turn into direct-view? Yeah, I think that probably is some of the first things that will happen to replace a traditional video wall. But yeah, I don't see it being that quick. 

Yeah. I mean, the minute you get into utilizing what's possible with a 4K display, uou just can't do that even on a micro-LED display, you know, to have fine characters and fine detail and all that. It's just not the same thing.

Joe: Well, and you also just look at the content. I think a lot of it is content dependable, you know?

So if you look at moving video, I think it lends itself to either format. But if you're looking at static content, think about a menu board in a quick-serve restaurant, I don't think that that is really going to be a direct-view LED Canada for the foreseeable future, just because I think it works just fine on LCD and it's much more affordable. 

So the last question: in this weird world that we live in, I wonder how this has had an impact on things like roadmaps and product releases and all that. What should we be expecting to see from Phillips over the next 12 to 18 months? 

Joe: Yeah. I guess we're fortunate because Dave, we are part of a large global company that is kind of diversified if you will. Our desktop monitor business has been off the charts as you can imagine. And I think in a lot of ways that's enabled it to support some of the development and some of the things we're doing in digital signage where some of the other companies may have had to look at scaling back a little bit.

So we're proceeding. We're going to produce in the fourth quarter of this year. Sometimes people look at us and say, what the heck are you doing? But we're going to introduce collaborative displays for corporate offices. We're going to introduce touch displays for education that are upgraded with some great systems behind them. We're going to introduce professional signage TV. We see that as an expanding market for us and others. It's basically a very cost-effective digital signage product that also has a TV tuner in it. So it's really made for use in a corporate environment. You know, we talked about conference rooms earlier. This is a really perfect product for that conference room, because it is a TV which also has Chromecast built into it. It gives you that seamless connectivity. And then it also gives you that CMND software, and the ability to control. If you've got multiple screens in a facility, it gives you a chance to control that as well, but it really is a cost-effective product. And we liked the fact, I think the big differentiator there is Chromecast and the ability to connect things, similarly, our education product will give you the ability to connect up 64 devices to it. So if you're a teacher and you have students with Chromebooks, Think about the ability to have, one of your students throw something up on the display instead of the teacher always having to control that and being the one doing that. So we like the flexibility that it gives us. 

That would terrify me if I taught a bunch of 17-year-old boys. (Laughter)

Joe: Yeah, it probably would, but, to get back to the premise of your question to your question. I was on a call this morning and we were talking about 2022 and we're in full planning mode. We were firm believers going in and my Marketing Manager would back me up on this, that we haven't really slowed down because we feel like if you start cutting and slashing, it's going to be a little more difficult to respond and maintain. Thank goodness, we haven't had to furlough anybody.

We haven't laid anybody off. We've maintained everybody, even in a market that we all know is down. And I think part of that will give us success, whether it's Q1 or Q2, whenever we see ourselves coming out of this. I think that puts us in a position and our company's a firm believer in this, that it puts us in a position where we can have more success coming out of this.

All right. That was terrific. I enjoyed our chat. 

Joe: Yeah, David's good to talk to you again. 

Todd Hoffman, Krispy Kreme

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

The iconic doughnut chain Krispy Kreme has something of a cult status, with people flocking to their stores to get a fresh, warm, melt-in-your-mouth yeast doughnut.

There are Krispy Kreme stands and small shops, but a real Krispy Kreme store - the kind that gets people lining up - has the whole production line in view of customers, and shows the glazed doughnuts coming out of the fryer. It is experiential in its own way.

But the chain, based in North Carolina, wanted to really amplify the brand and experience for its new flagship store in New York, in Times Square. It opened recently, and it may be the most ambitious, experience-driven QSR operation on the planet.

There are giant LED visuals outside, 'cuz its Time Square. But inside, there are stacked video walls for branding and promotion, digital menu displays, interactive tables, and a scheduled projection-mapping show called Doughnut Theater.

I spoke with Todd Hoffman, the digital lead on the 4,500 square foot flagship store.

TRANSCRIPT

Todd. Thanks for joining me. Your company, Krispy Kreme recently launched something in New York City in Times Square. Can you tell me what that experience is all about and why it happened? 

Todd Hoffman: Sure. It's an opportunity for an iconic brand to make a big statement out there, Times Square is kind of a crossroads of the world, with a great place to plant a flag, I guess we're in 32 countries with about 1400 shops and and it was time to put a big stick in the ground and say something major for the brand.

We do plan a big rollout starting in 2021, and also we're coming to New York in a big way. So times square just made sense. 

New York is the home of the, not the home, but there's a lot of Dunkin donuts there and a few Tim Hortons. Krispy Kreme wasn't really present in the market? 

Todd Hoffman: We had a shop in Penn station and years ago we had more shops, but we decided strategically that this was where we wanted to expand. And, this year we rolled out four shops, even before Time Square. We've got a couple more coming at the end of the year and then entering into Dwayne Reed, the world to expand our reach even further.

This one in Times Square, it's the whole nine yards where you're doing all the production right there and people can walk in and see what's going on in the whole theater piece of it? 

Todd Hoffman: Absolutely. It’s 4,500 square feet. So it's a big shop for us. We make donuts 24/7. So that's why you have a hot light that's always on top of the roof. 

And these are not regular donuts. These are the “melt in your mouth” ones? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, we call them OGs (Original Glazed) but they're yeast doughnuts that take an hour to make from beginning to end, and we have a machine that can do 270 dozens an hour.

So this location is filled with technology, inside and out. You see this big LED screen as you're approaching it. Of course, it's one of the gazillion LED screens in Times Square, but it walked through everything that was done and the thinking behind it? 

Todd Hoffman: Sure. Sight lines were huge. We're at 48th & Broadway, and the goal is to be seen from 40th street all the way up to 55th. That's where we have the world's largest hotline on the roof, 15 feet, about 8,000 pounds that will be lit and truly you can see it from an even longer distance. We're using lights that are typically used on airport runways so that's one of the big pieces. We have a wraparound billboard, that's 110x35 feet. And then under that we have a ribbon of LED screens where basically you can see donuts just like they're on their conveyor, scrolling, and we could also put any kind of other messaging.

Trying to hit it hard from a distance. Everything we did, we wanted to stand out of the crowd, everybody wants to stand up the crowd, But, I think, I think we did, especially with something as simple as our big red hotline, just rotating slowly. With the pandemic that became somewhat of a beacon of hope and optimism. I mean, who doesn't like donuts? 

And even the opening of shops throughout the year, while other people might've been closing shops, and contracting, we've gone full speed ahead. 

And I believe this store was originally going to open earlier in the year, but then, New York kind of went into lockdown and that delayed it a little bit?

Todd Hoffman: It did, but, mid-July, you know, we're right in Times Square with 10% of its normal traffic, the decision was made that it was important for us internally, and we felt in New York externally to stay on track and so we opened in September. And, by the time we opened, let's say Times Square was back 30 to 40% of its average traffic, but we still hit our records anyway. Word got out. 

So when you say records, do you mean that in terms of record sales, foot traffic? 

Todd Hoffman: Both. For the opening day, we hit records and then for the opening week, also records. We opened on Tuesday always and then by Saturday, the word had gotten out to the suburbs into New Jersey and we had a big day on Tuesday, but even bigger days on Saturday and then Sunday.

And you kinda need sales records there because the cost of rent in a Times Square area is a couple of bucks? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. 

Not like being out in the suburbs. 

Todd Hoffman: No, and you know, profit is always an incentive, but making a big statement in Times Square that becomes our marker, that we've returned to New York.

We are in Harlem, where in the Bronx. We're down in the Financial district and we're going to open up shops in Brooklyn and the upper West side. 

If you're in Brooklyn, Williamsburg, you’ll have to be artisanal. (Laughter)

Todd Hoffman: Well, we stick to our roots. We did introduce our first, let's say $10 donut, but a big Apple donut, which is our nod to New York, comes in a beautiful box with candy Apple coating. And, it's a donut that we were taking a big risk on, but we've sold hundreds and hundreds on days. You know big risk, beautiful products but it seems to have resonated with locals. We thought tourists would buy it, but there are no tourists.

So locals seem to gravitate. 

Yeah, they take it with them. And while, I guess they're not traveling either and nobody is? 

At some point that'll all change I'm sure. So outside, the big LED displays it's as much a branding statement as it is something that's going to generate foot traffic.

Obviously people are being attracted and when they walk inside, what do they see? 

Todd Hoffman: That's where all of our, I want to say razzle dazzle is, but that's where we've really turned up the heat with digital experiences and in the pandemic where you're not so able to have a full house, or give out samples, or really have the energy that a room full of people have, digital served an even greater purpose.

When you walk in, we've got two video columns facing opposite directions. So you start to see one that's a 53-55 inch screen stacked on each other. So you can see from the door, the pathway leads right to our donut theater, where we make the donuts march down the line. So the pathway was right to the donuts and that's where we took the concept of donut theater and Bravo media, the team, to them, it was obvious that we were on Broadway, we should put out a Broadway show. Initially we were just gonna do some corporate information on the back wall and simple projection, but David really challenged us and we've got four projectors plus a camera that helps us track individual donuts as they march down the line, and that's all, spectacular visuals for people to get their appetite. But, every 12 minutes, we have a show that's about 35 seconds long from the five shows that Bravo created.

And this is on the white tile, subway tile wall beyond the Conveyor that the donuts are moving along, right? And the workers are on the other side of that? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, we didn't want it to take people's mind away from the donuts, which is why we only show it every 12 minutes and have these very short, spectacular shows, no words. It's really just spectacular entertainment and it has brought lots of energy to the room, to the point where there's a button in the back where you can advance these shows and when we feel a low energy in the room, boom, they kinda fire up one of the “Takeover” and it's projection on the back wall. They mapped to each individual tile, things that I didn't think somebody could do and then based on mapping to the tiles, all the different shows, you feel like, the tiles are coming off, the wall or sprinkles are coming down out of this ceiling, and then, there's another projector that projects onto our Donut glazed waterfall. And normally in our shops, it's about three inches tall here, it's three feet and, just to bring the focus on the original glaze, and then there's one that happens serendipitously where we've got sprinkles on the back wall and it looks beautiful and then one day the team members just started to poke at the sprinkles as they were exploding on the back wall and it looks like they're playing a video game with their hands, and when that takeover comes on, the donut maker stop what they're doing, they turn around and they start popping up a wall.

That has become a really spectacular show that says a lot about, I think the brand, cause we were loose enough to let it go, crazy enough to put all this stuff into our donut theater and then, let our team members, start to really interact with it. 

Is that part of the team member job description that you're required to do this when this particular show comes on or did that just organically happen? 

Todd Hoffman: It organically happened, but now we do require you do it. If you fear the first tone, then, somebody might come off the floor and one of the donut makers in uniform, and they love it and it's as if they're competing, how many sprinkles you're gonna explode in the course of 35 seconds? 

It’s a break in what they're normally doing. 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. So that's our lead in, and when we first designed the shop, and being Times Square and being Krispy Kreme, we expected hour long lines, but the pandemic has changed that where we're only at our 25% capacity.

So we have this donut theater that people can see what their appetite, and then at the end of it, they're facing that digital column that kinda shows images of donuts, dozens of donuts, coffee, lattes, trying to help them think about what they're about to order before they hit any one of our five display cases and that's what they're there for. That's where the fun starts, figuring out how to fill the box with your favorite donuts. 

You run all the digital for Krispy Kreme, right? 

Todd Hoffman: I'm the digital lead. My day job is menu boards. That's what I signed up for. And then, what made it the best job in America was being able to do Times Square in the past nine months. Yep. 

When the ideation process was happening for this Times Square store and started floating concepts like the donut theater, I assume you had to sell that up to your managers and the executive team.

Did they go, “Hell yeah!” or did they look at your cross eyed, “You want to do what?” 

Todd Hoffman: I thought when we decided not to put messaging on the back wall, executive leadership would see it as a missed opportunity. But our COO, who really is the one who let Bravo do their stuff, which was a pretty amazing match. When he showed it to the executive team, our Head of operations, our president, they just loved it. 

Krispy Kreme as a whole, it's a very low key brand. We let our product say everything that it needs to say. We don't have an ad budget, we change up the donuts a lot, but it's really word of mouth. So we don't brag and this was a way for us to be on brand, and just entertain and make it a happy place. Where I thought it was crazy, cause I'm new to the brand, I grew up in the Northeast and really was only introduced to it when I started with Krispy Kreme. 

They were true to form, and it went over, I'd say very well across the executive team and they let go and we got to execute it.

Are digital menu boards standard to a Krispy Kreme store? 

Todd Hoffman: They are being introduced in every new store and we're testing in remodels. So eventually all the remodels will have them. The delicate balance is, we don't want people to see technology. The name of the game is, they see what they need to see, they get the information they want. We've met their appetite with some animation, but we really don't want them to feel like they're looking at TV screens, so we've stepped delicately. 

I'd say we have 15 shops that now have digital menu boards and next year we'll do a big expansion, but Times Square was a deviation. It was a project and an aspiration, all its own. 

You talked about rollout. Is this a concept that's going to go elsewhere, like the Times Square donut theatre thing? 

Todd Hoffman: It may, but there may be one other location in the US where we go all in the way we did in New York. You might guess where that is. There are other places where we have a strong presence, England, Australia, Mexico, that may merit this kind of flagship shop. 

Yeah, you could do Lester square if you ever went to Dubai, Tokyo, places like that. I would imagine, you're not saying it, but referencing Las Vegas would be the one that would make the most sense.

Todd Hoffman: Further South, maybe it's Disney territory or such. We’ll see. (Laughter)

The only one I've seen in Las Vegas was in, the one which looks like a castle and all that. 

Todd Hoffman: I think we have a presence out there, but now it's where tourists from around the world congregate, and I was there to have fun family oriented. 

So with your standard, digital menu boards, have you had any sense of what they do? Do they make a difference operationally or in terms of sales or is it just a more efficient way of doing things? 

Todd Hoffman: I'd say the pandemic screwed this up because we can't really comp stores.

We've been opening new shops so that we can comp from the year before. And then the few remodels we did, we only had a couple of months to look at, but we are definitely thinking that it's driving drinks, grabbing beverage attachment, and the goal is maybe a higher average check or more dozens.

But we believe in the concept that it is having impact, and the drive through as well. So definitely, our belief that it's worth the investment is growing, but maybe we need more months and we need more comping to confirm that.

You sent me a list of all the various components involved and there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of people involved. How did all this get pulled together? Cause I'm looking at it like a dozen vendors or something like that? 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. You know, it started with our design team working with an architect, who are the best of the best. They set the stage and put a lot of this activity in there, not knowing how to do it. I don't think they have much experience doing it, but they could envision what could be done with the digital columns or projecting and the donut theater.

They helped us take our icons and then the icons within an iconic brand, the hotline, the donut box, the waterfall, the donut line and build on them to the point where the whole place seemed to be a theater. So they set the stage. Then we had a major creative shop come in, partnered with a technology lead, which was Electro Sonic and they took the first stab at how we fill it in, with kind of interactive tables and projection during the theater and where the menu boards might go and digital columns, but then we took it and we just dished it out to specialists in each area. 

We used Stata Cash for menu boards. I don't think any other company could have done what we did with these menu boards or any other platform. We've got three layers of imagery that's on there. We've got an animation scrolling animation in the middle board. There's three boards together. We've got your basic, DOS connected menu board items. And then every 30 seconds we have these takeovers that wash across the three screens and it took hours and days for us to, I think we pushed their platform, we pushed the media players that we were using. We pushed their creativity, but, in time we were able to kinda get what we wanted because visually it seems simple, but executionally, it was a really big challenge.

So, kudos to those guys for sticking in there and giving us the vision that we wanted with the menu boards. 

And Strata Cash at least would drive through with some of their clients, they're doing things like AI driven, suggestive selling and menu optimization. Are you guys looking at that or doing it? 

Todd Hoffman: We will be. They are our shop of record, so that's the platform we're going forward with. You know, a lot based on how they presented, we looked at nine different options for menu boards this year, Strata Cash came out on top, partly due to our aspirations with drive-thru. We think we can make more money through drive-thru or have a greater impact digitally through drive-thru.

Then we can go inside the shop. So their expertise in that area and ability to personalize. Everybody had some angle on personalized when they're pitching us, reading license plates, geo-fencing, what have you, but, I'd say Strata Cash their work from McDonald's and others, gives the comfort level that they were the ones to go with for the long haul.

So we've probably done a few shops with them, including Times Square. 

I suspect there's a few vendors who come in and say, “yeah, we can do all that”, but when you push them on it, that has to do with whether they've actually ever done it, it's a different story. 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, there are some great outfits out there. The surprise to me, I don't know if you stay on a screen on a radio call, it's one of the few times where I thought the best of class was going to be out of our budget. And then when we looked at it, they were right there. So they were affordable and impressive, and continue to impress, but this isn't an ad for Strata Cash.

Yeah, they've done well. The idea of this store, obviously I haven't been there in six or seven months. I wonder about the sensory overload element of it. You've got audio, you've got the theater, you've got the LED displays. You've got all this stuff going on. Is there a balance you have to achieve so that it doesn't become overpowering to people when they walk in there?

Or do you just see and know, “That’s okay, I'm going into an attraction.” 

Todd Hoffman: It sounds like you were listening in on our meetings because of some of our great concerns leading up to opening. We had to get the sound levelled for background music and then, with the donut theater, the light, there's a light show and sound had to rise, but it couldn't rise so far that people couldn't talk so there's a lot of nuances, a lot of, I'd say over the next month, we're going to be doing some fine tuning, but I'm happy to say when we opened, we were pretty close to, in our mind perfect on the balance, bu, getting team member input, getting guests input is critical.

So when we're fine tuned in 30 days, we'll be able to do our best to make it work, but I don't think there's a feeling that we're over the top, yeah. 

Well, you are in Times Square, where everything else is. (Laughter)

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, there's a lot of leeway and so the only place we shouted was outside, that's where it's fair game.

And if you do shout, you know, you don't get heard. So we've tried to whisper with things like the hotline, going back in time, it looks like it's been there since the 1950s, even though we just fired it up last Tuesday, 

What's been the response of people coming in? 

Todd Hoffman: I have been there for the last 10 days and I would stop people in Times Square when I saw them sitting at a table, enjoying the donuts and they say they've been waiting for Krispy Kreme to arrive. We got a thousand pieces of media before we even opened, billions of impressions, so there was a lot of buildup, and a lot of anticipation and everybody I talked to, which are several dozens, seemed to be happy with what they saw.

Well, if they've ever had a Krispy Kreme donut, of course they're happy.

Todd Hoffman: Yeah. And it all comes down to this silly little, original glazed donut that's still warm in your hands. Once you've had one, you can't forget it. 

So before we returned to New York, you could get them in Penn station, but they weren't as fresh as they are when we're making them in a shop. 

They'd been shipped in from somewhere else. It's just different when it comes off that line. 

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, and they're always made fresh daily, but when it's in the fryer and then through the glaze only seconds ago, it's quite a treat.  

Technology is being applied in some retail environments to manage access control and capacity control.

I'm guessing you didn't have to really do that because you were already in a situation where you needed to have bouncers or some mechanism to limit how many people are in the store at a given time? 

Todd Hoffman: There are adjustments we did make for the pandemic. We have virtual queuing so you can make reservations in advance, and again, we didn't know how chaotic the lines would be going up Broadway and down 40th street. And that has helped a lot with the flow.

Mobile order pickup, that's been huge. We have a window on the street, a take-out window or and that's where you pick up your mobile order, and more than double of what we do in an average shop in terms of percentages are done through mobile order. And I'd say that's how we were able to hit our records. We can only have a certain amount of traffic inside the shop. Then when we have this walk up window, we're selling OGs and coffee, but also, picking those delivering mobile loaders, so that was a great add to what we've done. And line queuing inside, there's a lot of subtle technologies that we have used to do line management and we'll continue to optimize. 

Is there dispatch and recognition on that? Like Order #1-5 or Customer #1-5, you can come in now. 

Is that just done by text messaging or are you doing anything on screens?

Todd Hoffman: Yeah, it is. There's push messaging that'll tell you where you are in line and then tell you're third in line and then tell you how long until you need to be at the front door. 

The virtual queuing is definitely a work in progress. The company we went with hadn't done anything quite so complex or customized. I'd say the team that worked on that, which wasn't me, has done a great job of making it work to our needs. That has helped people in line who have been waiting for minutes, if not hours, there doesn't seem to be this issue of somebody walking up right to the door who had a reservation.

And we opened on a Tuesday but our reservations were booked till Saturday. That gives a hint that we were in for a pretty busy week. 

Wow. So last question. Engagement and experience are terms that get tossed around a lot and kind of lose their value in certain respects. How do you define “experience” when it comes to this place?

Todd Hoffman: So much of what our marketing team does - they almost police us - to make sure we're on brand. So we had to be on brand, color wise and with messaging, and yet we wanted to really push the envelope and make a huge statement and have people feel like they were coming to a flagship shop, especially anticipating international travelers who are our lifelong fans when they know there's a Krispy Kreme in Times Square, just like there's an M&M store or what have you, they're going to want to go and our experience, not just buying donuts, like getting to the donut cake and being in the room has to feel like you've arrived somewhere. 

And, I think we have. Our general contractor had a great line in that he doesn't think there'll be another shop like this for a few years, that has put so much into it, that has tried so hard to please its fans, its customers as we have and we've got pretty three racks worth of technology. Technologically wise, he had not handled anything that was this complex, but also, in the front of house with customers, he just felt like there was so much to see and do while you're in the shop, and he's done a lot of stores in Times Square, but he said we had hit it out of the park. So anecdotally, with just from word of mouth or reactions, we think we've done it. 

All right, Todd, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I appreciate it. 

 

ACE Roundtable: Making Connected Experiences Work Now, And Post-COVID

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

Advocates for Connected Experiences is an umbrella organization created several months ago, that pulls together the people and shared interests of a variety of organizations that deliver experiences to guests.

That can be in places like retail, in museums, commercial properties or theme parks.

The short form for the group is ACE, and it was pulled together and somewhat driven by the Digital Signage Federation - notably past and present board members like Kim Sarubbi, Beth Warren and Laura Davis-Taylor.

One of the early efforts from ACE has been a monthly series of online discussions about important topics, that pull together top people from member organizations. The most recent one was about connected experiences now and post-COVID, as we all all hope there is soon a post-COVID.

I was the moderator for the discussion, and this is the audio track, which is roughly one hour.

The panelists included folks from Shop!, SEGD, Geopath, the DSF, the Location-Based Marketing Association, Blue Telescope, The Experiential Designers and Producers Association, Retail Touchpoints and AVIXA.

There's a lot of voices and you won't always know who is saying what, but the content is worth any confusion you might experience.

TRANSCRIPT - skipping this episode ... too many voices to sort out who said what. Anything particularly brilliant was not me.

Nancy Radermecher, JohnRyan

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

Ask a digital signage provider about its target markets, and a hell of a lot of them will list banks among them. But only a small handful of companies are solely focused on the financial services sector, and the best known and most enduring of those is JohnRyan.

The Minneapolis-based company has been providing branch merchandising and messaging services to the banking sector, globally, for decades. It's also one of a few companies who can credibly says it was doing digital signage before the technology had a name that stuck.

I chatted recently with JohnRyan's President, Nancy Radermecher, who has been at the company for more than 20 years.

We spoke about JohnRyan's roots, but also about what's going on today. Bankers have long been in the midst of what they call digital transformation, but the pandemic has turned five-year plans into five month executions.

We talk about the evolution of retail banking, and how digital signage and interactive digital apply. We also speak about what kind of content really does work in banks, and why.

Nancy has a passion for data-driven content, and nerdy stuff like integrating systems. We dig into where she thinks platforms for business, like digital signage, are going.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, Nancy. I know JohnRyan pretty well. I'm thinking about a number of people maybe don't. So if they don't, can you give the elevator pitch about what JohnRyan is all about? And, we can also get into maybe how things have changed through the years. 

Nancy: Sure. We are historically a retail marketing agency, meaning that our clients are end-users, operating financial retail establishments, and we take a sort of strategic and all-encompassing approach to retail marketing. And within that portfolio, is digital signage. So over the years, digital has become a far more important and central product for us because people have moved a lot of their offline retail experiences into the digital world. And it's from that perspective that we entered the digital signage market. 

Yeah, it seems to me, I can remember that the first thing I knew about JohnRyan is that you had a legacy business where you were doing things like handling the compliance of all those brochures that would be in sleeves and bank branches and so on because somebody had to manage that otherwise the same stuff would be sitting in there for years. 

Nancy: Sometimes that even happens to digital signage, but yeah, you're absolutely right. And when we started in digital signage, it was because we were in the United Kingdom and passed a window of a building society and there they had a stand. On the bottom of that stand was a giant video desk, and then above it, there was a screen and they were making use of a firmware technology where you could actually superimpose changing text on top of a video background supplied by this video desk, which in its day was absolutely remarkable.

And so we thought, goodness, is there something to this multimedia approach to what we do today? And we began the exploration based on that. And in fact, one of the people involved in that project is still with the company today, the original building society project. So it was, oh my god, the early mid-nineties, I can tell you that the word digital signage didn't exist.

So we kept trying to find ways to explain what we thought this could be to one another before there was the terminology that you can apply to it.

I think we're all still struggling to explain what digital signage is to people. 

Nancy: Yeah. Fair enough. 

It's improved, but is the focus entirely on retail banking, or do you service any other sectors?

Nancy: Opportunistically we've stepped outside of retail banking. The company initially was focused on chain retail, conventional retail. We moved into retail banking quite early on and pretty much stayed there to this day. 

And is it just the big whale account banks in North America, or are you working globally and working with banks of all sizes?

Nancy: Yeah, we do tend to work with larger banks. The mega global ones are particularly attractive to us, of course, but we work with banks, say super regionals versus community banks. And we've worked in many different countries and still do today. 

Yeah. You used to have an office in, is it Spain?

Nancy: Yeah, we have a presence in Spain, but the, European offices are in London. 

And when you focus just on retail banking or primarily focused on retail banking, is that advantageous? I strongly believe that's the case that if you're going to be talking to very large companies, you sure as hell better know their business, but I see all kinds of companies who will go in and talk to anybody who is willing to take a meeting with them. And, I've been in some of these meetings and thought you guys don't know crap about this industry. 

Nancy: Yeah. I think there are probably two reasons why domain expertise is important in Banking. One is, I guess the obvious reason and the one you just referred to that, it's a good thing to understand something about the client's business situation, business challenges, business opportunities so that you can help them in relevant ways, but banking, I think imposes a second criterion, which is a very particular approach to security, as you can imagine in it and we would all hope to be the case. 

Why? (Laughter)

Nancy: Yeah, exactly. What on earth do they have that requires security? (Laughter)

So it has implications as to how the system is engineered and it has implications about how data moves and there's a high demand also for flexibility in engineering, which maybe you wouldn't expect, but banks may differ in how they approach their security regime. 

We've over the years had to be careful not to be too prescriptive, in how data is transferred, what kind of media player hardware is used because they have very specific ideas about that. So I think financial services is one where you actually really do need to understand the industry to thrive in it.

When you're in these kinds of meetings, is it more the case may be with a retailer, pure retailer, you're talking about what the system will do for you and with the banks you are talking about, what you can stop the system from doing or preventing it from happening? 

Nancy: Yeah, that's right. That's a very good point 

The other thing that's interesting, and what you just said is, I think, as an industry, I'm always surprised a little bit about how much of the literature that's published by digital signage companies, possibly even us, focus on the benefits of digital signage and the sort of basic understanding. And I feel like banking, probably like a lot of other verticals, really understands that, they know why somebody would do digital signage and the conversation is no longer at that level, “why would this benefit you?” No. 

Yeah, my eyes roll up into the back of my head when I go on a software company's site and see a little Chestnut of what is digital signage.

Oh God. 2020 guys. (Laughter)

Nancy: Yeah, exactly. And I think, the questions about business case ROI, I think those have all been answered for the industry. 

We were talking earlier about digital transformation and how COVID-19 has forced a very rapid acceleration of digital transformation plans. You were talking in terms of going from three to five-year digital transformation plans to things that had to happen in a matter of months or even weeks instead 

Nancy: Yeah. It's interesting, and I was just looking at some more industry literature yesterday, in the banking industry, they've all been pretty clear on the shape of things to come in terms of increasing levels of digital adoption on the part of bank consumers. And with that has come, a general understanding that as time goes on, the number of branches will decline, the nature of the activities that take place in those branches will move from the transaction on cash-based activity toward consulting activity.

And by and large, that was something the industry really wanted to see happen because it changes their cost dynamics quite dynamically for the good. So what's happened now is that there's been a really rapid acceleration of what everybody knew was gonna happen anyway. And in a certain way, that’s kind of welcome news for the industry in the sense of accelerating something that was desired. 

On the other hand at this level of speed, I think it's given people a lot of challenges in the very near term. 

So what's transforming in a retail bank? 

Nancy: Strategically, what's transforming is when and why customers are going to want a physical location. So, as I said a moment ago, it's really going to be far more of an advice and guidance proposition than a transactional proposition. But in the near term, what's transforming is the manner in which that advice and guidance proposition is delivered. So when your lobbies are not open and all the time, when people don't have free access, that's creating all sorts of logistical complexities about how do you let people in the branch, how do you manage appointment traffic? Nobody envisioned that they would have to answer all these questions all of a sudden in one big hurry, that has an impact on digital signage, of course, because it provides an opportunity to actually use digital signage to convey to customers new policies.

Obviously, there are opportunities to manage, customer check-in, and flow using digital tools. The screen's gonna be an important part of conveying where you stand in the queue and what's going out in the branch. In some senses, this is making digital signage a more integral part of a successful branch operation, which is good.

It's more than just a communications tool. And there were other examples of that. I think increasingly people are going to embed digital experiences in the onboarding process. We've all seen these bankers clickety clacking away on their computer terminals when we're opening an account.

Some banks now turn that screen toward the customer when they're clickety clacking. But I think hopefully it will be a full-on multimedia onboarding experience, so seminars and financial wellness or all sorts of things that are going to happen, as the branch becomes more of a center for health and guidance than a teller-counter.

Yeah, I go to a particular bank and it's just a suburban location, so there's not a lot of razzle-dazzle there, but it does have digital signage and it's the same bank I've been banking with for 30 plus years or whatever. So I don't see a lot of other ones, but there seems to be a standard feature set that I noticed there and in other banks in general, where there are displays behind the counter and there are displays in the seating area and maybe there's a display over the ATM bank, but it is generally just being branch marketing, “We're wonderful. We have this new thing. Here's the weather”, blah, blah, blah. And it's not terribly compelling and when I've seen banks of the future, in North America and, particularly in places like Dubai, I've seen things like virtual tellers and remote Financial service advisors, where they go into a little pod and you can discuss with somebody who's on the other side of the city or country.

And those things have been very “branch of the future” sort of things that I've never seen adopted, but I'm getting a sense from what you're saying, that the novelty of that will become much more an operational thing out of necessity. 

Nancy: Yeah, I think that's right. There are a lot of things in what you just said that interests me. To your first comment about the placement of screens inside a bank, you're absolutely right. Where you would typically see them as the areas you describe but what's happening now as banks are moving more toward almost a lounge conception of the branch where the bankers are now untethered from their desktops, and maybe can help you with that with an iPad and in a roving fashion, it really diffuses the problem of where to place your digital media, because now suddenly everybody is milling around in a kind of uncontrolled environment, and there are obvious focal points, dwell areas, sightlines, like there always were in the past, which is a challenge.

But then, on the level of the content and just compelling experiences, one of the things that we've learned over the years through mentors, many different experiments and trials and tests is that it's really important when you're thinking about innovative change to a bank branch that you don't lose sight of the fact that the consumer is seeking utility above all else.

So do you have a really cool idea of a touch screen? And I think we've all seen many of these in branches of the future. It might be cool from the perspective of the multimedia designer who gets to create it and win an award for it. But it's a real challenge to get banking consumers to decide what they want to prolong a visit to their local bank branch in order to interact with content that most people intuitively believe is available to them at home.

Anyway, it's tough to reign in the impulse to, I don't know, saddle a bank branch with all sorts of “cause you can” stuff without thinking long and hard about what customer utility is being imparted. So the example you gave of the video conferences is a perfect example of a high utility, high-value digital investment in a bank branch. And there are all sorts of reasons why doing something like that is valuable to both customers and to the bank versus some of the multimedia poster children that we've had. 

Yeah. Let's do something to connect and gesture and all that and embarrass the hell out of people. 

Nancy: Although you had on your podcast just this week, I think an article about one that made sense, but it kind of proves the point I guess.

Yeah, probably a $2 million popup event by IBM, and that's what everybody's going to do, but it was good. (Laughter)

What is the content based on all those years of experience that customers do want in a branch?

Nancy: This is interesting and actually this is my favorite topic, really. So one thing we've learned, and this will come as no surprise to you or to anybody, is that Financial services advertising on its own is not that commercial for people. And there's a very good reason to use sort of general interest communications in a bank branch as a way to get people used to view the screens at all.

So you mentioned the weather before. Our testing and results in time and time again, whether it comes up as the thing that people remember most and want the most. And it also happens to be very easy to deliver us as so if you can mix and match general interest information with bank information or place bank information in a more general interest context, and, an example that might be. If there's something happening in the mortgage market, tying your mortgage messaging to something that consumers are generally aware of and concerned about is a good thing. We've also seen some kind of interesting results that would suggest that if the ratio of bank messaging is a little bit lower than you might initially think you want, the recall of those messages goes up. And I think that's because there's more sustained viewership of the general interest information. People’s attention is more fixed and focused and for that reason, the bank messaging that crops up intermittent get more attention and more recall, which is really interesting. 

In my exposure to banks, I've certainly got a sense that they're very excited. The bank market is excited about being able to have some continuity between online and broadcast and other mediums and push that same campaign into the branches.

But you're saying that at that point, they're in the branch and they don't need to be sold and drawn into the branch cause you got them. 

Nancy: Yeah, and it can reinforce the value of your brand by providing helpful tips. There's a huge demand for financial wellness information right now, not just because of recent events, which has accelerated it, but also because a lot of younger consumers actually don't know much about money management and want to, so that kind of helpful guidance information is also something people like to see. Another thing that people really want, believe or not, is to see pictures or names of people who actually work in the branch. That is always a highly recalled type of messaging. 

Just casting back to something you just said about content creation for other mediums. I think where this is all headed in terms of digital signage, content production in banking is toward, more and more repurposing assets that were created for other digital channels and bringing those repurposed assets together and to constantly updating, constantly iterating news and information streams.

It’s less of a purposeful agency endeavor where somebody's building a 60s mp4 and more of rethinking it more as a large-format webstream, something like that. I don't know exactly the right metaphor. And I think banks will find that they don't have to spend a lot of money on content production to have a lot of really good locally relevant information on screens in their branches. 

That sounds to me back to the work I did with a very large bank. And, I sat at a meeting where we're talking about content with the agency and I became persona non grata, the devil, the antichrist by suggesting just that what was the point of a 60s spot in a window display that was going to cost a hell of a lot of money when you could be repurposing all kinds of other media assets and automating the content. And that did not go over well with the agency because that was their cash cow. 

Nancy: Exactly. It is interesting because, and I was thinking about this earlier this week that this is one of those rare instances, where to do it better, is also a way to do it cheaper. It's not like you're giving up anything, you're gaining something when you start thinking about digital signage content in a more disaggregated way, just snippets of bursts of information using static assets even that you have. And, our clients have huge repositories of assets and tips and all of these things are available aplenty inside of banks’ asset management databases. And mixing and matching these things creates a really low-cost way to build content, but also superior content, which is just such a great thing. 

Yeah. I assume that bank marketers are pretty savvy and understand this whole concept of Omnichannel and more so than let's say, “regular retailers” or all kinds of other potential clients in that, they have these digital asset management systems and everything else, and they understand automated and dynamic content based on data assets? 

Nancy: I think they do in all of their online applications, but it seems to me that they are generally puzzled by why they can't somehow better leverage their online assets to digital screens. And I suppose that's because maybe we in the industry have not rapidly embraced that model or educated the market to the model that actually, no, it is a logical thought to think that those other assets can be repurposed to digital signage. But you don't see a lot of it happening, right?

So maybe the digital signage industry too has been a little bit in the paradigm of the agency that wasn't so happy with you creating longer-form content, purpose-built for this media versus looking at an alternative way of doing it.

Yeah, you get the sense that even regionally sizes and certainly national and international banks, they are in the thrall of probably multiple agencies and it's in their express interest to control the thinking really, and certainly the budgets of these bank marketers. There's no incentive for them to say, “Hey, you don't need to do all this really expensive stuff. Just do it this way, and we'll surrender to that $5 million.” 

Nancy: Exactly. But I'll tell you what. I think with declining levels of traffic and branches and the general stressors that banks are facing now, in terms of justifying marketing investment at the point of sale, that's going to prompt a change. 

One of the things that gets batted around a lot these days is the whole idea of “interactive” in a bank setting and other retail settings. Is it safe to touch things and all that... 

You know, banks have ATMs, there's just no way around. You can't do voice control, or at least I don't think you can, or I wouldn't want to use that. So you go into a bank, you're already conditioned that, “Yeah. I'm going to use a touch screen and I'll whip up my notes advisor and everything will be fine”. Is there antsiness at all around introducing more interactivity to reduce the one-to-one contact with staffers? 

Nancy: For sure. I'm hearing a lot of focus on touchless experiences, and so trying to figure out how to clone interfaces to people's personal devices or bypass the need for them, that's a huge issue the industry is trying to address because, as you mentioned earlier, video tellers, video conferences, these things are really important to the branch of the future because they become the only kind of financially viable way to deliver certain services to certain branches in the network. So they're essential to the value proposition and will only become more essential. 

So yes, I think there's a lot of work being done and a lot of time being spent on how to make those interfaces appealing and acceptable to people in some of the ways I described. I think on the level of our business, digital signage, thinking back on the concept of utility touchscreens roles for marketing purposes has been very difficult to implement successfully. You've probably seen Microsoft, like those surface tables in bank branches, they came in and then they went away, interactive kiosks came in and then they went away. We've done a lot of things with touch through bank windows, we've done QR codes, we've done scannable brochures, that launch interactive experiences, printing brochures on demand, and all of them face the same challenge that they require a customer to prolong their visit in the bank branch and they're not delivering really clear apparent utilities. So it is just at the level of the basics. The tougher problem with all that, I think, is not just managing people's concerns about hygiene today but just the use of it at all. 

Yeah. It's not as private as going on a touchscreen to look up some health issues, but, if you're going to be doing loans, calculators, mortgage calculators, and things like that on a screen then other people can see.

I don't know if it bothered me all that much, but I'm sure a whole bunch of other people would be very concerned about anybody seeing that. 

Nancy: It's not just that, but you're also likely having in your hand a device that does exactly the same thing, So you can use your phone to do these things when and where you want to do that versus standing at a kiosk, so it's an interesting challenge. 

In terms of banks. you’re focused on retail banking, but there's a whole bunch of bank office space and giant office towers full of banking people and even with work from home, that's not going to totally change, those office towers are not going to clear out.

Have you guys done much work in terms of the back-of-house digital signage for banks? 

Nancy: Yeah, that is actually how we got our start. Our first network was a 900 branch training network within the UK, delivered by satellite because that's all there was, daily kind of huddle and corporate communications. So we've done a lot of that, more focused on the branch and then the corporate headquarters. But the technology as that you would know well drives one versus the other is exactly the same. 

Is it hard to crack the larger opportunity on the back of the house side? 

Nancy: I think it didn't use to be. We got our start prior to things like the internet and email and podcasts and websites. All of those become really viable corporate communications vehicles for the sort of information that we were imparting through our digital networks. So the case needs to be made that multimedia delivery of some of these messages is a superior form for those messages than plowing through an intranet.

And I think that the case can be made, but given all the other things that banks have to contend with in their overall digital transformation, I don't think that's going to make the top of the heap. 

I know that you've spent a lot of time thinking about where all of this goes and you have the benefit, so to speak of working in an already demanding vertical where the security demands are a lot higher. Where do you see things going or do things like PCs and media players and all that will start to go away? 

Nancy: Yeah, definitely there's a move afoot in the world around us toward, edge solutions, and there's no reason to think that digital signage wouldn't be an edge compute solution. What we hear from corporate customers a lot is that they're very frustrated by the proliferation of point solutions in their branches. They'll have a solution for digital signage, they’ll have a solution for POS, solution for managing appointments and on.

And each of these solutions is vertically integrated. It contains a monitoring component. There's a service plan that they have to have with somebody for it. And this kind of really adds up a lot of complexity. So this future of bringing these disparate point solutions together in a sort of commonly managed edge environment, I think is very real and the sort of streamlining that clients that we deal with would really like to see.

So I think those of us who provide digital signage solutions should be hunkering down and really focusing on our software and imagining that it might be deployed in a manner like that in the future. 

So this is a couple of steps beyond the recent and prevalent question of, “Do you have an API?”

Nancy: Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. 

A few months ago now, I think, you guys were acquired by AU Optronics out of Taiwan, a company that had already acquired ComQi, which does digital signage. How is that going? 

I know the AUO people and they're from Taiwan, so they're super nice and super smart and all that, I assume this was a good event for you guys. 

Nancy: Yeah. It's interesting because we remain a very entrepreneurial, agile company as JohnRyan. We're operated pretty much autonomously from the other units in the group. So from a day to day experience, it's actually just the same.

But on top of that is something very nice, which is a huge resource for engineering and the number of patents. I think they have 29,000 patents. There's a lot of people that can answer tough questions within that company. Access and understanding of the really detailed aspects of display technology both now and in the future.

I mean, it’s really a great thing to have that sort of resource available to us and obviously an incredibly strong financial group as well. So that opens up opportunities for subscription-based deals with clients and all manner of things. So it's been going well.

Yeah, there have been instances in the past of hardware companies, display companies, buying software companies, and you just go, “Oh boy, this is just going to meander into nothing.” And that's what happens. But, I've certainly got the sense from Stu Armstrong, who is now overworking with you guys, came from ComQi.

The ComQi experience was just that. They have certainly mentored them and had their back and everything else, but left them alone to do what they needed to do. 

Nancy: Yeah. And I think the interesting part of that might be that in some of these acquisitions by hardware companies buying digital signage companies, they might be viewing those digital signage companies as routes to market for their hardware.

In this case, I think it's almost the reverse where AUO was interested in closer to the customer, more solutions-oriented businesses in order to provide feedback to it about where it is going. And so that's a great role for us to play. We're obviously interacting with people every day on the level of their business challenges and we have good and meaningful insight, I think for them.

So it's a two-way traffic and AUO supplies some display panels, but they're also a supplier to the other manufacturers who produce digital signage displays and other displays. And so there is no agenda that our goal is to sell AUO products in particular only when they get the solution.

Right, but it does give the opportunity. If you're looking at a bank deal that's 1100 branches and 10,000 screens or whatever. You don't necessarily have to buy from a consumer or commercial brand, you can go directly to a manufacturer and cut some of that cost out, which is going to be attractive.

Nancy: Yeah, affordability is really going to be a very big factor for our business going forward. It's going to be interesting to see how people reformulate their offers and streamline them. We talked about content earlier. I think there's going to be a lot of interest in that sort of content approach. Now, when there really isn't the luxury to do it any other way, and that's going to affect every aspect of our business. We've been spending a lot of time over the summer looking and kind of reinventing digital signage. There's some stuff that we're going to be putting out in the weeks months to come, but not taking anything as a given, right? Let's look at the hardware. Let's look at the connectivity. Let's look at how content is created. Let's look at how maintenance is done and just across the board, trying to emerge from all that with a really streamlined, focused approach. 

All right. that was great. Thank you for spending some time with me.

Nancy: Well, it was nice to catch up. Thanks.

 

Bobby Marhamat, Raydiant

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

A seemingly oversaturated ecosystem has not stopped more and more companies from entering the digital signage market with their own software solutions.

I get lots of email pitches from companies, and admittedly, I do a mental sort, with a bucket for no-hopers, and a different one for those I find interesting in some way. Raydiant is a VC-funded start-up in Silicon Valley that's interesting to me for a few reasons.

Their CEO came from the executive team of Revel Systems, one of the upstarts that has changed the look of point of sale systems in small retail. Think of iPads, card taps and digital signatures instead of those big,  old-school POS machines that ate counters.

I was also intrigued by the company's partnerships, which go off the normal, well-traveled path, and instead feature integrations with companies that do things like restaurant menu management, KPI data screens and video conferencing.

I also thought these guys are doing a better marketing and messaging job than a lot of software companies, who are often just re-telling versions of the same old stories. The industry and its customers don't need another "What is Digital Signage?" page.

Raydiant produces a lot of content, including podcasts that are more than just the sales guy talking to the product manager.

Bobby Marhamat, who joined Raydiant about a year ago, joined me for a good chat.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

So Bobby, thanks for joining me. I know very little about Raydiant and I gather it's a reasonably new company in the digital signage ecosystem. Could you give me the background on the company? 

And it would be really helpful to explain what sets you guys apart from the many other companies who are doing digital signage software.

Bobby: Absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me. Just to give you a quick glimpse into what Raydiant is and what we're up to. I've been personally a part of the company for the last year, leading the company, prior to this. The company has been around for about two and a half years and in the last year, we've really done a couple of different things. 

One is, really we did a rebrand from the name Mira to Raydiant, and a part of that also is that although we're digital signage platform and advancing the digital signage side, we noticed that the companies that we work with want something a lot bigger, and that is really creating, phenomenal experiences in brick and mortar locations. So for the last year, we've been focused kind of talking to these customers and figuring out what that means and how we can create experiences on our platform. 

And the part that's really, I'd say, relevant to the brick and mortar operator and what we've started to build is tying in these different things that happen in different locations. So whether you're a retailer or restauranteur. And maybe as a restauranteur, you want your point of sale system to talk to your digital signage, you want certain music to play at a certain hour, you want certain promos to be on the screens. We basically enable all of that and then put all of that together to really create a phenomenal experience for your customer and what that does, of course in turn is, it creates more loyalty with your customers. It increases your revenue. And you're able to use that to be able to create this experience that people will remember as they leave your location. So in a nutshell, that's what we do. 

Okay. How would you describe the breadth of the solutions and product offer?

Bobby: I'd say, we have eighteen different industries that we work in right now but we're really focused on the six or seven industries that most of our customers sit in. We're a very customer-centric company and of those six or seven industries, we really try to bring in best of breed solutions that tie into our platform and what our customers demand and what they want in their locations.

It’s primarily contact management software? 

Bobby: Primarily, but tied into other things, like music, videos, all these other elements in the store.

And a lot of companies are saying, “We can do soup to nuts for you. We can do front end consulting. We can take you all the way through to deployment, ongoing management, and so on.”

Would you describe yourself as turnkey or are you more focused on the software and the experiential side? 

Bobby: Our goal is to be a turnkey through software, right? To be as turnkey as possible. And actually, I was trying to explain this to my six year old the other day. The same way he gets iPhones now, so my whole thing was the same way that you receive your iPhone, you can download five or six or ten apps and create that personal experience on your phone. We'd like to think of ourselves as the same. You unwrap our hardware, you tie it into your TV, and you can look at the different solutions that you can tie together on our platform, to be able to create that experience that you're looking for.

So very turnkey, but using software to make it very simple. So SMB customers can configure things out, tie things in quickly. Cause, they're focused on a lot of other things in their business. So creating that enterprise experience that you can create in larger stores and making it simple enough for an SMB customer to be able to deploy. 

When the company started, was the mission and charter the same as it is now, or has it pivoted?

Bobby: No, it's expanded. From the time that we started, it was to create one very easy to use digital signage platform, simple to deploy in a few minutes so you can go on your way to put messaging on a screen and that's it transformed into.

And since we've been listening to our customers, that's transformed into how do you take that a step farther? And you take that a step farther by what we call creating an experience platform. And that's why we're focused on that.  

I would assume that your customers have also told you that, “Guys, we must have been visited by 30 companies selling software that's easy to use, friendly, all those sorts of things.” So I suspect when you came into the business, you looked at it and looked at the competition and said to yourself, we need to do a better job of differentiating ourselves. 

Bobby: Absolutely. One of the things that’s really interesting is that when the company started, a lot of people asked me when I got involved, whether I think it was good and what did I think that we have to do differently to be able to listen to our customers? 

And the part that I think we did really well is we built a very strong product and had great support. We have the highest NPS. If you look at the G2Crowd and Capterra, as far as product standpoint goes in the cloud in the cloud segment.

But the thing that was missing or the thing that we needed to transform the company into is more of listening to what our customers’ needs are as far as being able to differentiate themselves, comparable to their competition. And that's a lot of what inspired us to transform our platform to be able to create a lot of stuff for them. 

Bouncing around your website, It looks like a lot of the focus, particularly in terms of your marketing and case studies, and “thought leadership” is around retail. Has that always been the case or is that because you as the CEO come out of retail in your past life with a point of sale system?

Bobby: No, our largest base of customers are in the retail segment. Our second largest set is in the restaurant segment. And with that, we're trying to make sure we give them the tools to be able to thrive. And, I'd say third and fourth industries for us are our banking and real estate, and we're trying to also focus on those as well, but you're right to note that because our largest customers and segment of customers are really retail and restaurants, our content and what we've been able to provide in a lot of our marketing has been centered on that.

Because you came from a point of sale, from Revel Systems. Did you have, what you would consider, a better sense of how retailers operate and what they really need versus what software developers think retailers need? 

Bobby: Absolutely. You know, a lot of people ask me, you got out of the brick and mortar with, basically exiting the Revel business, so why'd you get back into it? And I really fundamentally love the brick and mortar world. I love restaurants and retail for better or worse. I know right now we're going through tough times across the board for those segments. But, if we can be helpful in creating solutions, that's what makes me happy and content. And that's a large portion of what got me back into making sure that I stay within the industry and can continue to be helpful. 

Those two industries in particular are distressed right now. I wouldn't say they all are, but you would imagine a hell of a lot of them are because of the pandemic and lockdown capacity controls and everything else.

How do you sell into them right now when they're just trying to hang on by their fingernails?

Bobby: Yeah, so the beginning of when we went into the pandemic, a large portion of what we tried to do was that we tried to help these segments figure out what to do with their digital signage, to be able to continue to attract customers, educate customers, and basically put in use cases that help them use their digital signage to continue on and carry on with their business.

I'd say, fast forward to now where these businesses have been going through the pandemic for a few months, how we really capture and talk to them is we really look at the use cases that can be relevant to them. These days, to give an example, we have an outdoor package that helps restaurateurs really put menus on the screen, put messaging on a screen, tie it into a mobile phone so that people can get the menu, and be able to order at table and stuff like that. So we're really focused on what solutions we can push out there to be helpful to our customers and this pandemic has been tough for us, tough for them in the sense of that we had to pivot in our marketing and our messaging and how we go to market to be able to help them, and that's been hard for us as well. 

I have found since COVID-19 really broke out that a number of companies have introduced very specific technologies that they have packaged up as solutions to the problem facing retail and small business in general. And, I've sat on a number of podcasts and Zoom calls and everything else and presentation. My concern about these things are that they are just things in a lot of ways. There's a thermal screener, there are hybrid screens and hand sanitizers, hand sanitizing dispenser, and so on. 

And I just wonder if the retail market is really interested in buying a “thing” or do they want to talk to somebody who can provide a solution and maybe the solution is something that already exists, just like software and a screen that's as you say, putting the menu up on a screen so that you don't have to print menus or you don't have to wipe down plastic menus and assure people that they're wiped down. 

Bobby: Yeah, we were actually just talking about this in the morning with one of our customers and they were asking us, what technologies do they buy during this time to piece together the curbside stuff and all the other stuff that they're dealing with. 

And what we start with always is we tell them to start from the beginning. Who is your customer? What are you trying to do? What's the long term strategy? Putting all that together. Then we either come out with, here are the solutions that you want to tie in, whether they're with Raydiant or other solutions that you can tie into Raydiant, or, honestly, in some cases, we're not going to be the right fit for you for the next six months or a year as you rebuild and do that. And then we can be helpful at that point. 

So we take a more consultative approach and help figure out, who's your customer, what are you actually trying to achieve? And then piece together technology. Because one of the biggest things that we always say is, just turning on technology to turn on technology and tying in different technology pieces together where you' don't have a strategy, you don't know who you're actually trying to attract what your customer is. With those fundamentals you're not doing yourself or your business any good. 

You mentioned earlier the value of having integration with other applications, again, coming out of point of sale and kind of with Revel, they turned the whole idea of point of sale on its head by going from big iron, big bulky machines to using iPads and things like that.

And, part of the answer I suspect with Revel was, we are were in a world now where we can easily integrate with different systems and inventory management systems and everything else. 

It’s the same sort of thing applied here. If you're going to be relevant in the B2B market for retail and restaurants and so on, you need to be able to easily tie in with other systems.

Bobby: Yeah. A big part of the strategy at Revel was, point of sale is the central nervous system of a location, but what happens outside of that is all these other dispersed technologies that you're trying to use and trying to manage. And so a large portion of our success there is, listening to our customers and them saying, “Hey, I'm using these five solutions in my store, none of which talk to each other, but I'm using them to try to get 1% out of each of them so I can advance my business.” 

And part of our success was tying those together and really making that a cohesive system for them, whether it was tying in like a loyalty partner, gift card partner, and all that good stuff into one platform that talks to each other. 

Part of our success at Raydiant is very similar in the sense that, right now, when you walk into a location, whether you walk into a location or whether you want to walk into a location, that experience from the beginning is important and how those things talk to each other is important. As an example, there are lots of cases wherein the restaurant world, in particular, I run out of something on my POS and a simple thing of that not transferring over to the digital signage board, where that item gets listed off the menu and it's still on the digital signage board and customers come up and ask me about that. That's a simple thing, right? 

But tying those two things together, it makes it a lot better of an experience. I can push out promos a lot easier. I can do things a lot easier when these things are talking to each other. And so that's a large part of what we've seen our customers have success with.

You're working with some things like a menu system to simplify that process. Was it a case of those companies coming to you? I'm thinking of Trabon Menu Net, did they come to you or did you see this as a need to integrate with that sort of thing?

Bobby: I can tell you it was mutual. A large portion of our larger customers were using the Trabon system and in using the Trabon system, there were also adopting Raydiant. And, we came together as two companies and said, oh, we have this many mutual customers and to give you a little bit of a glimpse of what Trabon does, Trabon is the largest print manufacturer of menus in the US for enterprise customers. And, they're in mid-market and SMB as well, but they really focus on enterprise at a high level. And the biggest part of that is now, as we may make any sort of, menu changes or we make any sort of planogram changes, or we make any sort of print, design changes, we can push that out on digital signage and it could be better for our customers, better for the environment, better for all that. So we came together and created this combined solution. 

You still have to compliment that with their solution. You still have to compliment print with digital but it's more cost-effective for their customers. It's a better experience for their end-users and ties in together really well. 

You have since then, or maybe concurrently integrated with a number of other, different kinds of systems. I've written in the past about postering my wall and done a podcast with them, so it's content templates, but you're now integrated with like Blue Jeans for video conferencing and a company called Hoopla, can you tell me about that? 

Bobby: Absolutely. So Hoopla is actually very interesting. We have a new virtual room product that we just launched about a month ago and that virtual room product ties in videoconferencing content and services on top of that. And when I say services, it's music and other services that are tied in into one platform. And one of the biggest asks from our customers was, “Hey, we have the video conferencing, we have the whiteboarding, we have the content all in one place. What's missing is if I could go and put KPIs for my sales team on the screen as well as I'm having that video conference, or if I could go put company KPIs on the bottom of the screen for all my team to know”, and especially relevant during these days of the pandemic where people are working from home, it's been very relevant.

So tying that in together. So we went out to search and realized that Hoopla is the best of breed product out in the space. And so in having a talk with their management team decided that the two companies come together and what's happened out of that also has been a lot of other use cases that have come from that. We are working on tying in other solutions for the office environment, which only happened because we went into the pandemic. Otherwise, our focus has always been kind of brick and mortar, but what we created for the brick and mortar side has been very relevant to the office side, and integration with Hoopla completely sets that productivity tool. 

So what's the primary thrust behind virtual rooms? 

Bobby: So what happened initially though, I'll start from the beginning is initially we had brick and mortar operators come to us and say, “Hey, listen, I own a hardware store, and in the middle of my lumber aisle, I want to put a virtual agent type setup where customer can walk up and hit a button and they can interact with someone sitting in my corner office that knows all about lumber, and can basically be the expert there because I can’t have a lumber expert at every store. 

So, given that, that's what initially sparked our virtual room product. Being able to go on and have on-demand video tied into the content. So if I say, “Hey, go to aisle six and get that lumber.” I can also put some specifics about that lumber on the screen as well as I'm interacting with that customer, and I can also tie in a QR code on the bottom of that if they want to, scan that and learn more about that lumber or purchase on their phone or whatever the case may be. 

So that was the initial, I want to call it “burst” of our virtual room product. Again, what's transformed into these days of, going into COVID and the pandemic has been offices saying, “Hey, my team is not remote and I want to mimic that same, in-office experience, even though we can't be in the office.” 

So our virtual room product is a perpetual video product that's always on. And with that, we've created an office product tied into Hoopla where you can be in different rooms and interact with different people as if you're in the office. You can get content pushed back and forth. You can double click on someone and go have a personal meeting and then come back into the main room as if you're in the office and all that tied in together to productivity and motivation, stats and KPIs that Hoopla provides on top of that.

So at that point, you're starting to compete with the Zoom companies of the world that have quasi digital signage products as well, right? 

Bobby: Zoom is actually a partner. We haven't put this on the site, so you're hearing this first, but we started with Blue Jeans and Zoom is now a partner as well.

So no, we're not trying to be a video conferencing player by any means. We're actually trying to embed video conferencing into our product and I know zoom also has a very light digital signage product. But the virtual room product essentially works completely different where you have content on the screen and you can basically slice up the screen in different zones. So, content on the screen together with video conferencing. I can do news flashes and push out information to my team, talk about happy hours if I wanted to. So putting that all together is basically your productive tool for the remote world. 

And your platform is built around something called a Screen Ray, which by the looks of it is a Linux-based PC stick, is that right? 

Bobby: You're correct. Yep. Absolutely. 

Those things have been around for a number of years. I've always been intrigued by them. I know a few companies that use them, but I've always worried that they're kind of cheap and dirty and will last and everything else, but I've seen enough companies using them that they seem to be happy with them. 

How much of a journey was it to come across something that you guys could put out there and say, okay, this is the mothership and this is what we're going to use?

Bobby: Yeah, our hardware is only the enabler to our software really and yet a good number of companies use the Intel sticks. We're actually in the works of creating our own proprietary sticks that still use Intel’s processing and all that good stuff, but it's more proprietary so we can control a little bit more of it. We can have that built-in and all that good stuff. We are envisioning and we are in the build mode of getting that out to the market. But, the Intel Sticks have been very reliable, and a lot of what our secret sauce happens in the cloud, in our software. So the hardware is really the enabler and it's been very consistent for our customers.

Now for companies such as yours, I would say broadly, those who are chasing retail in particular, small to medium business retail, and other similar kinds of businesses that get public foot traffic, they tend to be SaaS companies that are at a certain price to an end, it’s sometimes referred to as the race to the bottom or commodity pricing.

I looked at your pricing and it's not like that at all. If anything, it's up. I would say it's on the high side. And I'm curious about that, how that resonates with people. And my gut tells me it's probably not a problem. 

Bobby: It's not a problem for the customers that really truly believe in building experiences in their location. If you simply want to put a picture on a screen or put a flyer on the screen or whatever the case is, there's a lot of solutions out there that you can go get that are gonna be cheaper than ours. But we want to work with customers to create experiences and our platform for creating that experience is actually relatively very affordable, but our focus is really those customers that understand that experiences are paramount to having longevity in retail and restaurants and all the brick and mortar type industries. 

One of the other things that struck me in banging around the site was you have a lot of content on there. A lot of self-generated content. You have your own podcasts, a presentation. I listened briefly to one of them, so you're spending the money on content and effective marketing, is that just how it works when you're out in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, that it's part of that DNA that's what you do? 

Bobby: I think it's a part of the DNA of what I believe in, which is being very helpful to your customers and I think that'll payback and help us grow as a company, and so a large portion of what we do is exactly what you said. And even during the pandemic days, we took more of a focus on that, accelerated a lot of the content we pushed out there, accelerated a lot of the interviews that we're doing for the podcast. to be able to give relevant information back to our customers. We think that's going to pay dividends back. 

How do you get known? 

Bobby: That's tough, right? It's tough especially because we rebranded again about a year ago, but a large portion of our business, at this point at least, I would say is through referrals. So us pushing out the content, us pushing gaps, and being helpful in the space has paid dividends in the sense that we're getting customers to come to us. We're getting customers to buy from us. We're getting customers to talk to other customers about it. 

And that is one of those things that day in and day out, we're focused on continuing to do, to be able to build more of that brand because there's of course legacy providers in the space that are well-known brand names. You know, no one gets fired by bringing on a well-known legacy provider but what you don't get is you don't get the innovation. You don't get things working as fast as we do. And so we're really focused on building the brand focused on what our customers want.

I'm curious, about a year ago when you were looking at joining the company, I suspect you would have either not known very much about digital signage or maybe you did, but did you look at the marketplace and wonder, okay, this is awfully crowded. There's a lot of people saying essentially the same thing, do I want to get involved in this? 

I always wonder how much of a struggle it is for startups to cut through. 

Bobby: Yeah, that's a great question. So a year ago, to answer your question, I did not know almost anything about digital signage. I was very new to the industry. But as I looked at the industry, you're right, there are a lot of companies providing digital signage solutions, but as you think deeper, taking my experience from the Revel days and hearing what I heard with restaurants and retail specifically, and doing a good amount of research.

And I actually, before I even, took the role here, I did speak to 50 customers that are using digital signage. Not all were Raydiant customers, but all across the board. And then talking to them, I heard the same common theme: there are solutions out there, but there is no one solution that brings everything together into one experience.

And that's when the “aha!” moment went off in my head and I thought, if we can create this really phenomenal experience and do it at a very low cost and be able to help these brick and mortar operators, basically create the same shine that they can do online. You know, you can go online and create websites and social and all that good stuff, why can't we create the same thing in store? And so that's what intrigued me with joining the company. 

How much coaching do you have to do to your customers? Because there are lots of people who make investments in technology, and then, it just kinda sits there. And I've been involved in this for a long time and I don't know how many retail environments I've walked into and looked at the screen and I thought, “oh dear God, why did they bother?” And yes, you have all these templates from PosterMyWall, and access to other content, but do they use it? And how do you get them to use it?

Bobby: That's a great question as well. You know, on the backend, we can see how often these screens are being updated and it’s not like all businesses don't have to always update screens, but we can see that and our customer success team actually takes this up very seriously in the sense of reaching out and saying, “Hey, can I help you create maybe a summer special?” or whatever the case may be depending on the business.

So that's one of the areas that we do focus a lot of our time on. We do have integration with PosterMyWall, which is great. They have 150,000+ templates, a lot of templates to choose from, but the content is the hardest part of digital signage. And that's the part that either you have a full department doing it, or you have one or two people focused on it or to your point, you never get to it and you just have that one thing that you put up there when you first started the business and you're never updating. 

So we make it our problem to be able to, again, reach out and make sure that they always update content if they want to and make it very relevant to the messaging they want to push out to their customers.

You're in the land of venture capitalists, and I know that you're VC funded. You had a 7 million round last fall. Is it easier because you're out there to tap into VC funding or is it actually harder because there's a lot of competition? 

Bobby: It's a lot harder. And digital signage is not sexy to investors.

We are fortunate in that what we're creating is an experience platform. We are attracting investors that we typically wouldn't if we were just focused on a digital signage segment if that was our only kind of focus area. So it is harder in the Valley, especially because there are so many pitches going on with so many companies, like you said, in the digital signage space, particularly, but with what we're doing, we're actually in the next few months are going to go talk to new investors about our next round of funding. And I think they're going to be impressed with what's happened to the business and continue to grow. 

With COVID-19 being a bit of a wildcard in terms of how long this is going to last, and certainly creating a lot of trepidation for business operators, where do you think you're at in six months to a year?

Bobby: I could tell you, just very candidly, pre-pandemic, we were growing at 200% to our numbers. During the pandemic, we’re right on par witH 100-110% to our numbers. So we slowed down for sure, but we have not gotten to a place where we think that Anything is detrimental to our business. We continue to work with our customers, continue to provide value there, and kind of taking it day by day, to be very honest with you, as things change where we're trying to be very helpful. 

Yeah. I've certainly heard from a number of software companies, if they operate on a software as a surface basis, they've had N number of small businesses, small restaurants, and so on and saying, “Hey guys, we're not open. We need to trim back our costs. Anyway we just skip paying our subscription until we actually need it?”

How have you handled that?

Bobby: Yeah, there's been a percentage of our business that's gone through that, especially in areas where they're completely closed or continue to be closed or opened back up and then got closed again. So I'd say some percentage of our business has paused but at a high level, there are other ways to use this where signage should be very helpful. Like in your windows signage is one way, outdoor signage is another, so there are multiple ways depending on the business to be able to still provide a lot of value with digital signage and we help our customers to fire that out. If they are at a place where they need to pause, we, of course, allow them to do that.

Okay. All right. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. Just one final question. If people want to know more, where do they go online? 

Bobby: Oh, sure. they can come to raydiant.com. And I always say this and people say, why are you giving out your email? But you know, if anyone ever wants to contact me, I’m at bobby@raydiant.com, and I’m always happy to provide any information that I can.

Okay, great. Thanks again.

Advocates For Connected Experiences: Industry Panel - Re-opening For Business

This is a special version of the 16:9 podcast - the audio from a recent online call put on by the new Advocates For Connected Experiences, focused on the challenges of getting people back to work, and what that means for connected experiences and technology.

The chat, done on a Zoom video call, features senior folks from several organizations, talking about what's changed, what's going on now, and how technologies are being applied. I was the moderator.

On the call, you'll hear from:
- Kim Sarubbi, ACE
- Joe' Lloyd, AVIXA
- Trent Oliver, Themed Entertainment Association
- Debbie Hauss, Retail Touchpoints
- Cybelle Jones, SEGD
- Bryan Meszaros, SEGD
- Kym Frank, Geopath
- David Drain, ICX Association
- Beth Warren from CRI

I didn't have time to buff this up with the audio leveled, etc, etc, so you may have to monkey with your volume controls. But it is a good chat that's well worth a listen. 

Warning - it is 60 minutes or so, but you can always listen to half and come back to it later.

 

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Rick Mills, Creative Realities, Inc (CRI)

Creative Realities is a solutions provider heavily focused on retail, an industry that has been pretty much shuttered in the United States and everywhere other than Sweden because of COVID-19.

These are rough times for store operators for the people who run them, the people who work in them, and the industries that support retail, like digital signage.

While CRI's CEO Rick Mills agrees it's a dark period, he also has a lot of optimism - particularly for the retailers who have the fundamentals to be around when doors are allowed open again, and for service providers who have the tools and know-how to help address what will be new norms.

Mills and I chatted last week about what CRI is doing, as well as about new pandemic-focused tools like thermal sensing screens that his company has started marketing. We spoke, as well, about his company's outlook, including thoughts of acquiring one or several of the companies who are competitors right now, but might not come out of this situation in one piece.

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Florian Rotberg, Stefan Schieger - Invidis Consulting

Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker of Munich's Invidis Consulting have been active in the digital signage market since 2006, mainly focused on Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Their work spans everything from straight-up consulting for vendors and end-users to organizing and running industry conferences in Europe and globally.

That puts them in steady touch with a lot of people, and gives them a solid perspective on what's going on and what's changing.

One of the things Invidis has been doing in presentations is a regular look at the impacts and implications on vertical markets of COVID-19, and what that means for digital signage companies.

We talk about that in this new podcast, as well as dig into some suddenly red-hot marketplace requirements like sidewalk displays and access control technologies. 

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Remi Del Mar, Epson

For a bunch of years, projection seemed like one of these digital signage technologies that had seen its day.

But that's changed in the last two or three years, and if you follow the industry and go to trade shows, you're seeing more projection product and applications.

The big reason is lasers, which last way, way longer than the lamps that were used for many years in projectors.

The big projection guys like Christie, Barco and NEC have a range of suitcase-sized products that get used for big budget events, but another company more historically known for office products has made a strong and interesting expansion into digital signage and visual experiences.

Epson has a variety of projectors that can be applied to signage jobs, but the one that has got most of the attention lately is the LightScene. It looks entirely different from boxy projectors - instead looking very much like the spotlights you see hanging from track systems in shops and galleries. It changes the whole idea of projection in key markets like retail and museums.

I spoke with Remi Del Mar, the LA-based product manager who runs Epson's LightScene team.

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Chris Riegel, STRATACACHE (2020)

These are some of the oddest, craziest, scariest moments many of us have ever experienced.

If you're sick, you'll hopefully recover quickly.

But the global economy is now very much under the weather, so to speak, and it is not at all clear when it will get better. Businesses are shuttered and many won't open again, or if they do, they'll probably come back in a different way.

The digital signage and digital out of home sectors are hit just like everything else, and this virus is going to take out companies the way it is indiscriminately taking out 100s and 1,000s of people.

I wanted to spend some of  the next few episodes talking to smart industry people about what they're hearing and seeing, as well as what they're doing.

First up is Chris Riegel, who runs what is now the STRATACACHE Group of Companies. We've spoken in the past, but I wanted to speak with Chris because he's very smart, well-travelled and connected, and always has an ear to the ground.

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