Episodes
Wednesday Mar 11, 2020
Tina Williams, Greater Toronto Airports Authority
Wednesday Mar 11, 2020
Wednesday Mar 11, 2020
Airports are very different places from when I started my working life, and technology has done a lot to not only change travel experiences, but also help monetize what are, often, very busy public places.
The Greater Toronto Airports Authority runs that city's Pearson Airport. It is the busiest airport in Canada, with some 50 million passengers going through the two terminals each year.
Tina Williams runs the media and partnerships programs at Pearson, which is increasingly using technology for everything from fixed, standardized ad positions to very customized, elaborate brand activations that mix mediums. In one case, an automaker's brand messaging starts with projection mapping and video walls in the parking garage and extends all the way to a micro showroom across from the airport's busiest gate.
I've known Tina for a bunch of years, extending back to when she did similar work at Canada's busiest shopping mall. We spoke last week at an airport that, at times, has felt like a second home for me.
We grabbed a room at an Air Canada lounge, which is why it's got a bit of an echo.
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Wednesday Nov 20, 2019
Stephen Gottlich, Gable
Wednesday Nov 20, 2019
Wednesday Nov 20, 2019
I have heard some people in this industry starting to describe what they do as visual solutions, as opposed to digital signage. I'm not sure that really fits in all cases, but it certainly does for Gable, a Baltimore-area company that's been doing analog signs of all kinds for four decades. About 10 years ago, Gable added digital display solutions.
They work with all kinds of end-users - heavily with retail, but also in other verticals - on visual solutions that cover the full spectrum of options. That might mean a contract that involves a big direct view LED display for a venue, but also the meat and potatoes printed and crafted material that just helps visitors find their way around a venue.
I spoke with Stephen Gottlich, Gable's Senior Vice President of Innovation and Strategy, about what the company is up to, and what the marketplace is looking for and doing.
We also get into what he sees happening more broadly in the marketplace, and what he's seen in numerous technology trips to China.
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Wednesday Nov 13, 2019
Daniel Black, Glass-Media
Wednesday Nov 13, 2019
Wednesday Nov 13, 2019
Projection on window film is one of those things that I thought had come and gone from digital signage, with too many technical challenges to make the idea really workable.
But projection is having a comeback, and arguably the company doing the most with it for retail and campaign-based marketing is a scrappy little startup in Dallas, called Glass-Media.
I chatted with Daniel Black, who co-founded the company roughly five years ago and is its CEO. The big differences between the first wave of projection in signage, and now, are better technology and smarter vendors.
The film is better. The projectors are brighter. Specialty lenses mean the set-up takes less space. And the big one - laser projectors are supplanting older-style projectors that steadily needed expensive bulbs replaced, and weren't engineered for commercial applications.
The other factor is guys like Black selling this as a solution, with measurables for retailers and brands, as opposed to a technical thing with short term Wow Factor.
If you've been curious about the state of projection in signage, this is a worthwhile listen.
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Wednesday Nov 06, 2019
Trey Courtney, Mood Media
Wednesday Nov 06, 2019
Wednesday Nov 06, 2019
There's a decent chance that when you walk into a retailer in a developed country, and you hear music or some sort of in-store audio playing, that's Mood Media.
The company is in more than half a million subscriber locations in a 100-plus countries delivering in-store media solutions. While that started with music, it was natural as digital signage technology matured to add on visual messaging.
Now the company has launched something called Mood Harmony, a new platform that grew out of a signage CMS and offers a single user experience to do sound, visuals, social media and even scent marketing off of one platform.
I had a great chat with Trey Courtney, the Global Chief Product Officer for Mood Media, to get the back-story on the company, why it developed Harmony, and how retailers are defining and using technology designed to deliver on customer experience.
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Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
2019 DSF Coffee And Controversy
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
Wednesday Oct 30, 2019
A couple of weeks back I was in New York for the annual Digital Signage Federation Coffee and Controversy event, which I moderated.
I was able to grab audio last year and post as a podcast, and this year we managed the same. The audio is OK, at best, but you should be able to hear just fine.
Your big challenge will be discerning who is saying what, because the session was me and five great panelists, all with terrific insights and experience.
The topic was privacy and proof, as it relates to tech being used for retail and advertising insights. The speakers were:
- Dylan Gilbert, Policy Fellow at DC-based PublicKnowledge
- Laura Davis-Taylor, the Co-Founder of Atlanta's HighStreet Collective & LivingRetailLab
- Kym Frank, President of New York-based Geopath
- Amy Avery, Chief Intelligence Officer at New York agency Droga5
- Jeremy Bergstein, CEO of New York agency The Science Project
By all accounts it was a great session that could have gone another hour or more. The DSF is working on video clips, as well, which will be available to its membership.
Please note it is double the length of a "normal" 16:9 podcast.
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Wednesday Oct 16, 2019
IV Dickson, SageNet
Wednesday Oct 16, 2019
Wednesday Oct 16, 2019
It's now really common that businesses of all sizes and types who decide to deploy some sort of digital signage network look to a solutions provider who will not only help put it in, but help the client go from the idea stage all the way through to ongoing operations.
Effectively, they're outsourcing the whole shooting match to people who know what they're doing. That helps companies stay focused on what they're good at.
Tulsa-based SageNet has been doing outsourced IT work for 20 years, and about two years ago saw enough shaking among its core customers - and had enough requests for help - to branch into digital signage and make it part of a very rich suite of services.
The company brought on IV Dickson, who has been around the signage business forever, to help build out the signage business and function as a subject matter expert in a company that was more conditioned to selling IT network services.
It's worked out, and the company is now mining a lot of new opportunities in verticals like c-stores and QSR.
I had a great chat with IV about SageNet and SageView, what is described as a one-stop shop for everything signage.
We also talk opera. Yeah, opera.
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Wednesday Oct 09, 2019
Matt Schmitt, Reflect
Wednesday Oct 09, 2019
Wednesday Oct 09, 2019
Reflect is one of the longest running companies in the digital signage sector - operating out of Dallas since 2001. The company built up its CMS software business largely in retail, but in early 2017 did something of a pivot into ad scheduling and targeting.
I wondered, when I first got walked through what's called Ad Logic, why Reflect was going in that direction, given the addressable market seemed a little limited and companies like Broadsign had a serious head-start on competitors.
Turns out that Reflect was responding to client needs for something that was kinda sorta digital OOH, but was less about agency-driven media scheduling and more about retail and place-based networks that wanted to monetize their screens with endemic advertising. So in a medical office network, they wanted to schedule and runs ads for, say, big pharma and medical device brands.
I spoke with Reflect's president and co-founder Matt Schmitt about his company's journey, and how Reflect has evolved from a software shop to one offering everything from strategy to creative work and media sales.
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Wednesday May 22, 2019
Fab Stanghieri, Cineplex Digital Media
Wednesday May 22, 2019
Wednesday May 22, 2019
Canadians all know Cineplex as the dominant movie theater chain in that country, and the Toronto-based company has also been expanding its reach, in recent years, into other related lines of business.
Cineplex now has entertainment-centric restaurant-bars, is bringing Top Golf into Canada, sells out of home media and runs a thriving digital media group that's doing most aspects of digital signage for major enterprise customers in Canada and beyond those borders.
Fab Stanghieri was a senior real estate guy with Cineplex, charged with building and managing the company's movie house portfolio. He had digital media added to his responsibilities a few years ago, and while it was unfamiliar territory at first, he's embraced digital to a degree that it is now his primary focus in the company.
I was passing through Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and Fab kindly took some time to show me around new office space, which is set up to help ideate, deliver and manage digital signage solutions for Cineplex clients.
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Wednesday May 15, 2019
Dan Hagen, 10net
Wednesday May 15, 2019
Wednesday May 15, 2019
Dan Hagen is a relatively young guy, and a bit of an Energizer Bunny. I know of him as the 10net guy from Vancouver, but I was surprised to learn in a conversation that he has been involved in digital signage since before it was called digital signage.
He was a funding founder of Mercury Online Solutions, which in the late 90s and early 2000s was a big player in this business. That company sold to 3M, and as way too often happens, things went south quickly when a plucky little company gets absorbed into a monster of a company.
Hagen did a few things but eventually found his way to 10net, which is a solutions provider that does most of its work in Vancouver, BC, but is now trying to establish itself south of the border in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
In our chat, we get into how 10net does things, the kinds of projects it works on, and our shared point off view that sum of the most effective digital signage jobs out there are, at first glance, kinda boring looking.
There's not a lot of sizzle in things like backroom screens for safety messaging on ferries, but they make a real difference.
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Wednesday Feb 20, 2019
Alberto Cáceres, Trison
Wednesday Feb 20, 2019
Wednesday Feb 20, 2019
Being in Amsterdam for ISE recently offered a chance to meet up and talk to some people who are squarely focused on business on the other side of the Atlantic.
I knew Trison was a major player in digital signage solutions in its home country of Spain, but I didn't realize the company had a far greater reach than that. In 2018, Trison was in the middle of 2,500 digital signage and related jobs, in 76 countries.
The company started 20 years ago doing audio solutions, in northwest Spain, and has grown into the major solutions provider for retail digital signage in Europe and beyond. A Coruna is home base, but Trison has offices in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Shanghai, Mexico City and elsewhere.
I spoke with CEO Alberto Cáceres outside the ISE press room.
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Wednesday Jan 30, 2019
David Bailey, Aitrak
Wednesday Jan 30, 2019
Wednesday Jan 30, 2019
It doesn't matter how slick your software is, or how beautiful and robust a display may be, if the content on a digital sign doesn't attract attention and hold it, at least for a bit.
So tools that help track and analyze how people view advertising, packaging and other marketing messages can be incredibly valuable. But they can also be clunky, expensive and slow.
A startup called Aitrak is trying to change that - using artificial intelligence and computer vision to do predictive modeling on how people will consume specific pieces of campaign creative - where they'll look, what they'll notice first, and how long they'll look.
Eye-track = Aitrak, by the way.
Creatives and media planners can use Aitrak's tools, or send the material to Aitrak to develop the model and insights.
Right now, the first iteration is built around static out of home street furniture posters and other non-motion creative. But Aitrak is working on the same sort of tool for motion digital assets and creative. That would allow media network owners, agencies and brands to pre-select the best combinations of creative for a location in a matter of minutes, and cut their costs dramatic ally.
I spoke with UK-based CEO David Bailey about a cloud-based service he says gives creatives superpowers.
Wednesday Jan 23, 2019
NRF 2019 Round-Up: Interviews on ESLs, HTML5, Interactive Lightboxes And Avatars
Wednesday Jan 23, 2019
Wednesday Jan 23, 2019
This is a special edition of the podcast which I am pretty much whacking together myself, in the wake of running around the NRF show last week in New York.
I had my handy little Tascam recorder with me, so I grabbed some quick interviews with several companies I bumped into, with the idea of stitching them together in a round-up. These are not the biggest companies. Not necessarily the hottest stuff on the show floor. But they caught my eye, or in the case of the first interview, reflect my thinking that I wanted to know more.
Normally I get interviews properly smoothed out by my sound engineer guy, but with four interviews and intro and so on, it was a big ask on short notice. So here I am, fiddling around with Audacity audio software. So this will be a bit rougher than normal, but the content is solid.
One of the things I noticed on the NRF show floor was how there were way more electronic shelf labels than I have seen in the past, which is why I stopped to chat with Rob Crane, the head of global sales for the ESL company Altierre.
I bumped into Tomer Mann, from 22 Miles, outside the Intel booth. He was doing stand-up demos of his company's long-running wayfinding platform. That's well established, but I was interested in what the company was doing in retail, using HTML.
Inside that Intel booth, I chatted with a Spanish company, called Kendu, that comes out of retail graphics and has introduced a hybrid print and signage solution that uses LED animations behind a lightbox frame of print graphics, and also uses gesture for interactivity.
Finally, I was wandering around the Innovation Lab - which is a lot of new companies, but also companies who can't afford a full booth. I noticed people hanging around a floor display, and reacting to the screen. A company that's partially Toronto, partially Berlin, has an avatar chatbot thing that uses AI to drive interactivity. TwentyBN's avatar seems a little gimmicky, but done well it would be useful in spaces where there's a set of predictable questions.
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Wednesday Jan 09, 2019
Angela Vanderburg, Q Division
Wednesday Jan 09, 2019
Wednesday Jan 09, 2019
This week we look at how the financial services industry is using digital signage in branches, and more to the point, what works and why.
Angela Vanderburg is the Digital Practice Lead for Consumer Banking and Retail Financial Services for Q Division, the retail-focused digital strategy consultancy that was launched by STRATACACHE. She's a shameless digital signage nerd who endlessly studies how the technology is used and the content choices that were made on networks, all the way down to locations.
We're talking because Vanderburg guided a pair of very significant research exercises in Europe and North America that got insights and data from consumers, and from decision-makers at banks.
In this episode, you'll hear about what the research revealed, why stuff like weather reports actually work well for banks, and how things that I maybe think are gimmicks are, in fact, worthwhile.
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Wednesday Nov 14, 2018
Beth Warren, Creative Realities
Wednesday Nov 14, 2018
Wednesday Nov 14, 2018
Beth Warren of Creative Realities - or CRI for short - came recommended as a speaker for the DSF's recent Coffee and Controversy event in New York.
We'd never met, and while in New York, I seized the opportunity to meet up with her after the event to talk a lot about digital signage in retail - from her longtime lens as the Senior VP of Experience Planning at CRI.
She comes out of the agency world, so she approaches signage in retail from a different perspective and set of learned experiences and observations. We go fairly deep in our chat into what experience actually means - and what genuinely works in retail, versus some of the trickery and gadgets that get touted as delivering "engagement."
We also get a little into what CRI does, and the many twists and turns of its recent history. The company has evolved, and now positions itself very much as a solutions provider that can take retailers from the need and idea through to lighting up the visuals and measuring the impact.
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Wednesday Nov 07, 2018
2018 DSF Coffee and Controversy, in NYC
Wednesday Nov 07, 2018
Wednesday Nov 07, 2018
I was in New York last week for the Digital Signage Federation's annual Coffee and Controversy breakfast event - a panel discussion that each year brings together some of the most influential leaders in the digital signage industry.
I'm on the DSF board and my fellow board members drafted me to run the panel - with Chris Riegel of STRATACACHE, Jeff Hastings of Brightsign and Beth Warren of Creative Realities.
There's only so much controversy you can whip up around digital signage, but I tried ... and if anyone in this industry was going to stir up some shit, it was Chris. He didn't disappoint, nor did Jeff or Beth.
The women who ran the AV for the event very kindly generated an audio recording for me. This is about twice the length of a normal 16:9 podcast, but if you didn't have the chance, time or budget to get to New York last week, you can have a listen to what was said.
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Wednesday Oct 31, 2018
Rich Ventura, NEC Display, on ALP
Wednesday Oct 31, 2018
Wednesday Oct 31, 2018
NEC Display has been fairly quietly involved in analytics for a long time now, but it just got very serious and noisy about that capability, with the launch of something called ALP - which is short for Analytics Learning Platform.
It's a retail intelligence program that uses cameras and other sensors, AI, big data, cloud computing and network appliances to give retailers a better sense of what's going on in their stores.
Tied to digital signage, a retail intelligence platform can optimize messaging based on who's in there, how long they're in there, and the historical patterns of what those people tend to buy. The gold for retail operators is understanding conversion ratios - the what really happened stuff when messages were pushed.
There is no shortage of retail intelligence platforms out there, but none that I know of built from the ground up with signage as a core element. I spoke with NEC's Rich Ventura, who drove the project, to talk about ALP's roots, how people in the signage ecosystem plug in, and how it all fits.
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Wednesday Oct 17, 2018
Matt Downey, Freshwater Digital
Wednesday Oct 17, 2018
Wednesday Oct 17, 2018
Matt Downey's time in digital signage traces way, way back to the days when Premier Retail Networks was, by far, the big dog in putting screen networks in retail environments.
His time with PRN - working with clients like Walmart - eventually led him into working directly for one of his big grocer clients. Not long after that, he took a leap and started his own company. I'd say it was a big leap, but he started out with a whale client - his current employer.
Many years later, Freshwater Digital is a well established digital signage solutions provider, with double-digit growth every year and a client list that's rich in big companies that's not only local to Grand Rapids, Michigan, but also includes organizations that are much further afield.
Matt and I get into the roots of Freshwater, and lessons learned. We also go pretty deep into a new area he's going after in a big way - e-paper tags and shelf labels.
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Wednesday Oct 03, 2018
Peter Livesey, Esprit Digital
Wednesday Oct 03, 2018
Wednesday Oct 03, 2018
Anyone with technical chops who uses a subway system to get around would understand that those are seriously challenging environments to put in sensitive display technology - and the UK display technology company Esprit Digital effectively got its start in digital signage doing just that.
If you have been in the signage market for a few years, or if you have used the subway systems in big cities like London, you'll know about the synchronized digital posters in many of the escalator sections. The most well-known are those in the London Underground, which were put in by Esprit many years ago and are still working.
The company, based north of London, has built out its business from everything it learned about heat and airborne grime and ruggedization, and has since developed products for shopping mall concourses, sidewalk ad posters and all kinds of other challenging scenarios.
I spoke with CEO Peter Livesey about the roots of the company, which go back to really low-rez LED signs for retail, and how the company has gone full-circle and added fine pitch indoor and outdoor LED screens to its product line.
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Wednesday Sep 26, 2018
Mark Bennett, MicroGigantic
Wednesday Sep 26, 2018
Wednesday Sep 26, 2018
In an industry that has, for years, had people endlessly blabbering away about how Content Is King - my God that's clever! - it's amazing to me how I can count the number of pure-play digital signage creative shops on one hand.
MicroGigantic is one of those rare shops - a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based boutique agency that does visual storytelling for brands - whether that's retail or corporate.
The company's roots are with one of the biggest brands in the Twin Cities - the mass merchandising retailer Target. Mark Bennett managed the Media Production group at Target - and a big part of that was feeding the many screens sprinkled around the huge stores.
It was a great gig, Bennett says, but he got the seven-year itch to go out on his own, and started MicroGigantic knowing there wasn't a lot of competition for what he wanted to do.
His team does retail, but the real growth these days is for work in areas like corporate - with companies looking to make visual statements about what they do, and what they're about.
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Tuesday Sep 18, 2018
Hongwei Liu, Mappedin
Tuesday Sep 18, 2018
Tuesday Sep 18, 2018
Wayfinding is one of those core technologies that make consumer lives better and easier - helping people locate where they want and need to go in places like shopping malls, airports, health care facilities and higher ed campuses.
There are numerous software companies that include wayfinding capabilities in their platforms, but only a handful that have been laser-focused just on delivering that solution. One of the most successful ones is Mappedin.
The company started as a sideline for some students at the University of Waterloo, which most observers would call the top computing school in Canada. Hongwei Liu and his buddies thought they could solve a problem for students finding their way around the sprawling Waterloo campus, and then at a local mall and a casino a couple of hours up the highway.
There was enough there for Liu to quit school in his second year. Just a few years later, he's running a company with 60 employees, some big outside investors, and clients across North America and globally.
I spoke with Liu about Mappedin's roots, what works and doesn't, and how the big moment came when serious research showed good wayfinding can mean millions of dollars in incremental sales for shopping malls and their tenants.
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