Gregg Zinn, SmarterSign

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

Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day.

I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter.

New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators.

Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators.

In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts.

It's a really interesting chat ...

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TRANSCRIPT

Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing? 

Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better. 

I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control.

And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards. 

I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life. 

So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm? 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the software piece of it, because these business operators are using a new tool, even business operators who have been doing it for 15 years, it's still relatively new to them. So being able to provide that layer of service and support underneath them, and when I say service and support, I'm not just saying, here's how to use our software. I'm talking about how to use this tool for your business. Here are the business opportunities for you. Here are the things that you can do with these tools. I think it's really important, and, for me, as part of the business, it's been a big focus, and I try to influence the software development to accommodate as much of that as possible and make it as intuitive as possible. But a lot of it is just working with business operators, so the service piece of it is really important. 

Where's the company based? 

Gregg Zinn: Our headquarters is in New York and I am based in Chicago. I moved to Chicago, just short of eight years ago. My wife's family is from Chicago. I was living in Chelsea in Manhattan, and my young sons are getting to school age and New York City is very challenging for raising children. We were living in 700 square feet in Chelsea and the truth is, it was fantastic. I love New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. But my wife's family is from the Chicagoland area, the suburbs of Chicago, and we decided to pick up and move here, and now instead of looking at concrete and windows, I'm looking at a lake. 

Yeah, it's good to have that relief valve as well, the in-laws and extended family where you can say, “hey, we need to do this, can you guys take the kids?” Plus they see more of their family. 

Gregg Zinn: It's incredible. We do Sunday dinners and I love having the family around and it's great for me, it's great for my boys and now they're getting on in their teen years and doing all that stuff and it's great to see them grow up in this environment.

I got in touch because I noticed on LinkedIn you posted a piece about Menu Board Mastery and I clicked through and had to look at it and I thought, oh, this is interesting because as somebody's been around digital signage as long as you, maybe not quite a few, mid 90s, I only got in late 90s, but nonetheless, we've both been around it a long time.

I know that menu boards can be done badly, but I tend to think they're done badly when they're eye charts and there's way too much stuff on there, or quite simply, they're just not working. But your Menu Board Mastery pieces take a look at the science of it and of layout and the thinking and everything else. So I thought that would make a great conversation to get into, first of all why you felt it useful to put this together and then get into some of the key tenets of it. 

Gregg Zinn: Really the thing is, I've had so many conversations with business operators, at all levels, and that could be from single location operators to multinational operators and all of them seem to struggle with putting a strategic foundation underneath the concept of what they're gonna display, and even this many years into it, many of them just see digital as a more efficient way to get their print menu up on the screen, and even when they were doing their print menu, I don't really believe that they were tapping into some of the core ideas of using this as an incredible marketing tool. 

When I look at digital menus, I think a digital menu should be your perfect salesperson. If you could have that person talking to that customer and guiding them through consuming from your restaurant in a way that is ideal for you, and ideal for them, having it be the perfect salesperson. I think that's really important, and a lot of businesses have struggled to do that. So I took a look at this, and I thought, what if I put a series together that takes very interesting, proven, scientific complex ideas and makes them highly practical? And this has really been a core philosophy for me since I was a teenager. 

When I first read BF Skinner's Beyond Friedman Dignity and David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, I became fascinated with how people interact with information and how behavior is impacted by communications, and those various tools and many boards are no different. So I thought about giving people some very practical ideas. I want to make this industry better, like ever since we started SmarterSign, I don't want to just have a great business in the industry. I want this industry to be important. I want this industry to really impact businesses and be indispensable as part of the complete operation for every business. Obviously that helps my business. But it also energizes me. It engages me. 

Another key piece of my philosophy has always been moving people from theory to practice as quickly and easily as possible. Nobody ever said theory makes perfect. Practice makes perfect and helps people move to practice practical ideas and I use the phrase, “Is this practical?” all the time. You can have all of these great ideas and all of these visions for what can be, and you can sit there and ruminate, but really, when it comes down to it, where the rubber meets the road is where value is created, and can you put this into practice was the vision behind this series.

The first article that you put out was about visual attention. When you talk about visual attention, what do you mean? Apart from the obvious. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and it's funny because there are some very obvious things, but there also are some well-studied scientific understandings about how people's eyes move in the interpretation of information and I think in the article, we point out two very well-known, established patterns of how people interact with information. 

There is the F-pattern of how your eyes scan information, and that is typically for menus or information that is very text rich, and your eyes go across the top and then they go down to the middle and then across a little bit more, and then they go down to the left hand side and understanding the way that people's eyes are gonna be moving across your information helps you prioritize where you put your information that's important to your business, and I want to talk about what information is important to your business because getting to businesses do not really know how to take advantage of this tool. I think this is a really important piece of it, and I am going to be writing an article about this, and it's been a big focus as well. 

But let me continue on with the other way that people interpret information, and that is The Golden Triangle, and it starts in the middle, moves to the upper right, moves to the left, and these two visual patterns have been proven time and time again with eye trackers and studies to see how people interpret visual information in front of them. The Golden Triangle is very helpful for highly visual menus, and really the key spot in that menu is that upper right hand corner. If you can put your really high value items in that upper right hand corner, you are going to see a change in your outcomes, for the better.

It's such an interesting thing, and this is part of getting back to why the series is here. I want to be able to provide tidbits of information like that to help businesses change their outcome, and obviously for the better. 

Is this something you discovered or you've known because you've had that interest for a very long time in it? I'm curious if you started working with QSRs and restaurant chains and advocated doing this, and then did the reading and found out, oh, there's actually a science behind this. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's really a mixture of both because I had studied these concepts, and they were very interesting to me, all the way back in the 90s. They were very interesting ideas to me. Even before that, managing behavior was always interesting to me. But as I started to work in the practical environment of working with businesses, I was able to apply those ideas and see how they impacted. So I was able to grow a clear understanding of how these ideas very specifically relate to these types of business problems.

So it has been a full circle since I was interested in it, I was able to apply it, and now I'm able to move and help businesses perfect it. 

So one of the things you get into is positioning, like what should go where and how you wanna have prime positions for your high margin items and signature items, that sort of thing.

I've not thought about that at all. I've just thought that companies just laid things out the way they laid out their print menus and didn't really think too much about that stuff, or maybe they don't. 

Gregg Zinn: Many of them don't think about it and actually very early on, working with businesses, 2006-2007, I had come up with this idea called The Prominence Pyramid. The idea behind The Prominence Pyramid was to help businesses identify. What are the most important menu items on your menu? And most businesses couldn't identify it. I was really surprised to walk into the c-suites of large organizations and ask them very simple questions about what are the most important items on their menu and they were not able to answer that. 

But we would guide businesses through this process of putting items on a pyramid, say at the top of the pyramid. These are the most important items for you, and they're the most important for top line revenue. They're the most important for margin, they're the most important in terms of branding and customer experience, and those are the items that should have prominence within your visual space because they're the ones that are gonna help push your business forward.

There are so many moving parts to this as we're moving forward, and as AI has become part of the mix of tools, it's a very exciting time for me because I feel like we can use these tools to help give insights very quickly to businesses using real data using, using these known scientific ideas to help them get these ideas in front of them, and then once you know that, once you know what should be presented in these prominent areas in the visual space, then you could do things like change the sizing, change the coloring, add boxes around them, animate those sections, put little tags, customer favorites. 

Actually, we have a customer who just did this who just did this. He wanted to promote this one item, so we put a tag that said “Customer favorite” and sales immediately increased on this item. So we know that these tools can help change business outcomes. It's just a matter of helping businesses get there. And I think this series is gonna help people get there in bite-sized movements. 

So when you talk about things like prime positions, that's in your F-pattern or Golden Triangle, there's certain positions that are gonna be optimal. That's where the eye goes naturally? 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that these are actually things, but they've proven, studied, scientifically that this is the way eyes move to interpret information. 

So some of the other variables, and you've already mentioned it, are things like white space and borders around stuff, contrast, the font size. 

To me, being a knucklehead and not really spending a lot of time talking about QSRs, I just see ones where I can't read this, and my eyesight's assisted, but when I've had my glasses on, it's 2020, and I still struggle to read it. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it drives me crazy and I don't know if you have seen this, but I can send you a link to it. I had done a series called the Digital Menu Board Scorecard, and it was an evaluation of menu boards in the wild, not necessarily SmarterSign customers. But menu boards that we had seen, we'd take pictures of them, and we'd break down what are they were doing well, what are they doing poorly and we give them a score on a number of characteristics like branding, layout, organization, and actually, it's funny, just last week I was in the airport and I saw a menu from a pretty big QSR, and I just thought: Who made this menu? This is just terrible. 

I won't mention their name because I don’t want to get in trouble. 

When you did the scorecard, were you handing out as many “A”s? 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there were some As, there were few, very few, but every once in a while we'd come across a menu board where the business had a really good balanced sense of brand presentation, strategic organization, overall design, effectiveness of the menu to get people to order. That's actually one of the key things when you look at menus. Outside of getting their attention, it is how quickly can you get somebody through the process of making a decision and this is particularly true for digital drive-through, has been a real focus and we've seen some really interesting things done in that realm.

For example, having the menu change at 8:00 PM to be a more limited menu on the drive-through, so that it changes the operations from a kitchen point of view, but also gets people through the line quicker. 

One of the questions I wanted to ask was, is the thinking and the layouts and everything else different between the screens over the counter, the screens in a self-service ordering kiosk, and then the screens in the drive-through?

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, absolutely, and if you look at our customers who are doing interior menu boards and exterior menu boards, the layouts, the structures, the approach to the menus are different. It's just different. It's a different mind frame. It's almost a different form factor in many cases because a lot of times the drive through's gonna be portrait, and many times the interior board's gonna be landscape. 

But the whole business mission is really different, and taking advantage of what each of those environments do better. We don't do any touchscreen ordering. I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of it. I'm old school. So when I go into a sandwich shop, I want to talk to the person who is going to be able to take down my details of what I want, and I want to be able to say them and have them articulate that to the kitchen. Personally, I find it very difficult to do the touchscreen ordering and get that right and have the same level of customer experience.  AI is gonna change that because AI is going to somehow offer voice to AI ordering, which will take some of that UI cloudiness out of the mix.

You mentioned AI. I'm curious about computer vision and the idea that, I've heard this said, I don't know what it is really being done in-store. I've heard about it in drive-throughs, but dynamically adjusting menus based on the profile of the people who are approaching the counter.

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there's a few things that we've been working with in terms of studying, how this can be done in an effective way. It's a highly strategic concept and, as I mentioned earlier, businesses are really just struggling to translate their static menu to a digital menu in a very strategic way, but we're pushing this forward, and there are other technologies. 

There's license plate reader technology for drive-throughs where the same car is coming through, and you could tie it to their past consumption and we're gonna get there, and I think with AI, we're gonna get there much quicker and I'm super happy about that. Because I have been sitting in the running blocks waiting for the gun to go off and I'm excited about what AI means to accelerate some of this progress. 

When you started, almost 20 years ago now, APIs were known but they weren't widely available and I suspect it was very difficult to talk to a restaurant about actually jacking into their restaurant management systems in any way, but we're now in a very different world, and that's all possible. 

Is it being done? And how do you best leverage that other than the very simple stuff like price changes in the store system, you want to automatically change on the screen?

Gregg Zinn: Right now the two primary mechanisms that are interacting, that operating data with the marketing data on menu boards, are price changes. So having the POS system be the source of that price, that's your operating data, and that operating data points should be filtered through to your menu boards. You shouldn't have to manage it in two pieces. 

The second piece is inventory. We work with a lot of customers who run out of individual products, and that creates frustration for the customer, and it creates frustration for the person taking the order. So having the ability to show that something's currently sold out, is something that we're seeing being used. Again, this comes down to: Can so much more be done? Yeah, so much more can be done. 

But getting over that, what should be done, as opposed to what can be done. It's also part of my core philosophy is, a lot of things can be done, but only some things should be done. So we've stayed away from novelty. We've stayed away from a lot of the things that people are saying, whoa, what about this? What about that? We try to keep it as practical as possible. But we're gonna see a big shift. I don't know if you know the company Palantir. I love Palantir as a company. I love what their vision for using AI is. People ask me questions about it all the time because I'm in technology. People ask me about AI people who are late, not in the technology industry, and late people, and I always point to Palantir as somebody who is an applied AI company. They're using the data to determine what should be done as opposed to what could be done and I think they're doing a really great job of it. They're really leaders in that space. Now, they're not menu boards, but I do follow what they're doing because I think that they're very innovative in terms of how they're looking at the connection between data operations, real world and practical application.

In my years doing consulting, I've done quite a bit with some big companies, but the only QSR I worked with was a coffee chain and when I went in to start working with them, they talked about a bunch of things and I asked them about menu boards and takeovers, which I had seen in some of their stores where all of the menus went away and they had a tiled piece of creative, pedaling a particular promoted product and they said that they did some interview intercepts with customers and pretty uniformly the customer said, stop screwing around, just show me the damn menu, and I've since been in a number of restaurants where I had to wait for the menu items that came up because they were promoting something or other on the screen for 5-10 seconds and it irritated the living hell out of me.

Is it something you advocate? Just get to the point; don't try to be fancy here. Forget the video, just show me the items and pricing. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, intuitively for me, that customer response is obvious. They're trying to interact with a piece of data to place an order, and then all of a sudden it's gone and they're waiting. They have no idea how long it's gonna be before it comes back, and then they've gotta go find their spot on the menu again. So intuitively for me, we have always guided people against it. We've had customers asked to do it. Of course, our platform can do it. But it is not a good idea.

Now, that being said, with digital menu boards and you've seen them in QSRs, there's a lot of visual space, so you can use a portion of that visual space to do those kinds of marketing techniques. One of the really interesting things that we had seen, so we did an observational study of a food court, working with a customer who had a restaurant, a pizza restaurant, and a food court. We did an observational study, and we saw that nobody looked up at the menu when they came over to the counter to order. They didn't care about the pricing, they didn't care about anything. They never looked up. But the menu boards were not being used properly to get people over to their restaurant as a choice.

So what we recommended was: these really aren't digital menu boards in so much as they're digital billboards, and you need to use these as a “come eat pizza” sign, as opposed to thinking of it as a digital menu board. So we used some of the visual space as a “come eat pizza”, and we were able to draw some of that audience thinking maybe they'd go get Chinese food or Chipotle or another option over to them. So that's another way where you can impact outcomes by using the visual space as opposed to just menu boards. 

What do you do with restaurants? I think about one up here, Tim Horton's here in Canada that started out doing coffee and donuts and pastries and now does endless kinds of food items, and they've got a menu list that's far longer than it was when the chain first started. 

What do you do when you have customers who have like 40 SKUs and you've only got so much real estate on a screen? 

Gregg Zinn: It's a big challenge, and it's a funny thing because, when I look at operations like that, I've never run a restaurant, but when I think of the ideal process to get customers through and order your food, I think of a business like In and Out Burger. They've got a very specific menu. People come there for those items. They love those items. 

We have a lot of customers who have these extensive menus. I don't love it from an operations point of view, but from a presentation of the menu point of view, it's a matter of just being very organized in how you present that information so that you are able to get that broad menu into somebody's eyes, get them to where they want to order. If they want something that's savory as opposed to something sweet, get their eyes to that. 

A good example of that is Dairy Queen has a pretty extensive menu, and they've got food and ice creams and just being able to segment that out. So on their drive-throughs, for example, we do a number of franchisees for Dairy Queen. On their drive-throughs, they've got one complete panel, that's just their sweet treats. They've got a middle panel that is promotion, key promotional items, LTOs and things like that, and then they have a right screen that is their savory items, their burgers and sandwiches and hot dogs and things. 

The post that you have up right now about this Mastery series has to do with price anchors. That's not a term I know much about. What do you mean by that? 

Gregg Zinn: It's another behavioral technique where you can establish a baseline in a customer's mind by putting an item that you don't really expect anybody to consume, but what it does is it creates a mental baseline of price expectation, so that you can have them pay a premium price for that second level item, without feeling like this is too expensive. So it really is a decoy. It’s like look over here, this item is $30, but here's a really good value item at $22.

It's so interesting to me because particularly in the past five years, pricing's gotten outta control, and, for so many reasons. Supply chain issues, obviously going back to 2020 with Covid but pricing has gotten crazy, and my favorite burger place in New York City, actually where I got engaged, when I got engaged, the burger was, yeah, I'm a huge burger guy, but it was my second date with my wife. We went there, and we're both burger people, and that's where I proposed ultimately. 

You got engaged on our second date? 

Gregg Zinn: Oh, no, we went on our second date to this burger place. Seven years later, we got engaged, but in that same spot, but the burger was like $6 at that point, and now it's like 18. 

Oh, for God's sake. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and even the QSRs I go into sometimes, and I just think, who could afford $60 for a family of four?  It just doesn't seem like an affordable approach and I will tell you that from a pricing strategy point of view, all of the QSRs are recognizing this, and they're trying to adapt.

We're already out of time, but I wanted to ask one more question, just around when you're going into a new customer and you start talking about what we've just discussed, kind of the science and the thinking behind it, are minds a little bit blown because they're wanting to do digital menu boards because it's a pain in the ass to change the print ones, and they haven't thought much beyond that?

Gregg Zinn: We take it slow. It's been over 20 years and we’ve learned you can't just go in gangbusters and put all of these ideas in their heads about what's possible because it'll just confuse the situation. So we go slow with our customers. We meet them where they are.

Fix the first obvious problem, and then you can go from there.

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and I've said it a number of times in this call if it's not practical, it can't be done. 

All right. This was great. If people wanna find out more about SmarterSign and read these articles, they can find 'em on smartersign.com. 

Gregg Zinn: They can, yeah. All the articles are there.

In the resource section, right?

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and we've got a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel, of course, posting on other social channels like LinkedIn. But yeah, the primary source would be on smartersign.com. 

Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you and re-meeting you again.