Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

IV Dickson, SageNet

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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Matt Schmitt, Reflect

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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Daniel Griffin, Userful

 Like a lot of people in the digital signage industry, I tend to think about video walls in terms of the display hardware, and what's running on those big beautiful screens. I know precious little about what's happening behind the wall to ensure it all looks good. 

Userful has been making waves for a few years now by offering a software-driven product that drives visuals accurately to screens, and allows for the sort of flexibility and instant switches that are needed in scenarios like control rooms.

While traditional video wall systems can tend to have a lot of often expensive hardware and software to control the screen and send pixels where they need to be, Userful has been marketing products that are now cloud-based and require minimal hardware.

I spoke with Daniel Griffin, the company's VP of Marketing and a company long-timer. We talked about how Userful came about and about a business that's still known for video walls, but is finding its way into other aspects of visual communications around workplaces because of its AV over networks capabilities.

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Paul Peng, AUO

 I was in Taiwan recently for a trade show called Touch Taiwan, and managed to grab 20 minutes with Paul Peng, the Chairman and CEO of display manufacturing giant AU Optronics.

AUO is based in Taiwan, with its main office about an hour south of Taipei in the manufacturing city of Hsinchu. The company has about 42,000 employees globally, including a digital signage business unit that came with the acquisition of the CMS software company ComQi.

AUO makes LCD displays primarily, with a production line that can do glass sizes from Gen 3.5 to 8.5. The bigger the size, the bigger the display.

At one of the two biggest stands at Touch Taiwan, AUO was showing the wide range of display options, from stretch LCDs for retail and transport applications to super-premium 8K displays.

We grabbed some chairs at the back of the AUO stand for the chat, and while Peng does most of the talking, ComQi CEO Ifti Ifhar also gets in on the discussion. The audio quality is a little iffy, just because of where we were ...

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Garry Wicka, LG

LG has gone very big on OLED displays in recent years - making the super-thin, flexible and generally gorgeous displays the centerpiece of the company's marketing efforts at trade shows.

They bend, they curve, they hang like wallpaper and for some of them, they're see-through.

I had a chance to grab a very busy Garry Wicka, the VP of Marketing for LG's US business, to chat about where OLED is at, and how it is being used. We also get into some of the perceived technical issues with the organic displays.

Wicka also walked me through what LG is doing with direct view LED, microLED (which is still an R&D thing for the company), transparent LED film and smart displays.

We also talk about where the company is seeing strength right now in the marketplace.

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Marshall Thompson, Signet

Workplace communications have developed into a very active, very big vertical for a lot of companies across the digital signage ecosystem - but most of their activity has involved screens positioned around the white collar and, increasingly, blue collar workspaces.

For most companies, workplaces is A vertical. For Signet, it is THE vertical, and the Silicon valley-based company has built up a tidy business being laser-focused on workplaces and particularly on the briefing and experience centers of Fortune 5000 companies.

These are the high-touch, big visual impact designated areas that companies build to entertain, inform and hopefully close major customers - using everything from big video walls to interactive displays.

I spoke with Marshal Thompson, who runs client solutions for the company. We get into what Signet does and how it found its way into corporate communications, the thinking and impact of these briefing centers, and how workplace communications is so important to attracting and keeping talent in hyper-competitive places like Silicon Valley.

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Jeff Hastings, BrightSign (2019)

I've done a podcast interview with Jeff Hastings in the past, but there's a lot going on with BrightSign and it was time for a catch-up with the CEO.

BrightSign will ship about 300,000 little purple digital signage players this year, at a clip of something like 1,200 units a day. The players have become their own hardware category - as in, "Are you planning to use PCs, smart displays or BrightSign boxes?"

In our chat, we talk about why BrightSign devices have so much traction in the marketplace, and why so many software and solutions companies are signing on now as integrated partners.

We get into the thinking behind a service called BSN Cloud that is now coming out of beta testing and into wider release.

And we talk broadly about what CIOs and IT managers need to think about when they start looking at large, scaled digital signage networks. The IT guys I used to refer to as the Dr. No crowd are now very much on board with using special purpose devices that just work, and don't bring the headaches of full PCs and their operating systems.

 

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Dan Baker, AVI Systems

 If you are on the solutions side of the digital signage business, you have likely, at some point, had to open up and look over an RFP document from an end-user, quietly praying it won't be too onerous and/or stupid.

A lot of digital signage RFPs still - in 2019 - lead with technology, going on and on and on about specs and requirements, and only making a passing reference to content. Which is nutty, because the screens have only nominal value and impact if the content on them isn't timely, relevant and at least kinda sorta visually interesting.

Dan Baker handles the sales engineering for digital signage at AVI Systems, a big Minneapolis-area integrator. He's seen those kinds of RFPs, and knows through experience there's a better way.

He contacted me, offering to talk about his take, and his company's take, on a methodical process that, at minimum, gets end-users thinking about objectives and the content needed to meet them. Some companies are mandated to do RFPs - it's just how their procurement department rolls - but in a perfect world, end-users are usually better skipping RFPs and working with people who know digital signage.

The right advisors can help them get to the content and technology model that will actually deliver on objectives, and keep them from spending big on tech they need, while largely forgetting what will go on the screens.

 

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Jay Leedy, Diversified

There are a handful of big AV systems integrators in North America genuinely active in digital signage, but I'm feeling pretty comfy saying New Jersey-based Diversified is the most active, experienced and directly knowledgeable about this industry.

The company has built and then managed many of the larger networks out there, including most of the big US banks that the average person could name. While some of the other big AV/IT guys have some dedicated resources, Diversified has a whole and big group pretty much doing nothing but digital signage and digital out of home work. The company also put the time and money into hiring a series of subject matter experts on digital signage - one of them being Jay Leedy, who is now Director of Business Development for what many people in the industry know as Diversified's Digital Media Group, or DMG.

Jay's based down in Atlanta but works with people and companies across the country. In this talk, we get into what DMG is all about, how they plug into this sector, and how they tend to work with clients and partners.

We also talk Adobe - a company more active in signage than many of us probably think - and Google, and the adoption rates out there for smart signage.

 

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Michael Provenzano, Vistar Media

Programmatic media buying and selling for the digital out of home marketplace has been going on for many years now, and grown a lot more sophisticated, and a lot more used.

Just as the digital OOH business has matured and expanded in the last few years, so have some of the key players - notably New York City-based Vistar Media, which has been at it now for eight years and is seeing crazy-good growth these days.

 I spoke with co-founder Michael Provenzano about the online roots of his business, and how he took much of the same approach into a medium and supporting tech business that was, at the start, kind of all over the place.

 We had a great chat talking about what Vistar does, why it built its own CMS, the role these days of data, and whether programmatic is the answer for media-based digital signage networks, or maybe just PART of the answer.

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Tom Milner, Service And Support

Much of the focus in this industry is on the hardware and software used to put digital signage networks together, and increasingly, mercifully, on content and creative.

Not that much attention gets paid to the service side of the business - installing screens and fixing devices when things go wrong. Even less attention is paid to keeping the hardware clean.

That's what Tom Milner, and his UK-based company Service and Support, are all about, and have been for 10 years. Milner has built up his install and service business in the UK and Ireland, and more recently, built a book of business in North America for something called Pristine Screen, a service company specifically in the business of keeping screens clean, inside and out.

In this talk, we get into the roots of his business, how it has grown, and the decision to get into a spinoff business that's all about keeping screens pristine.

 

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Joe' Lloyd, NanoLumens

I sometimes get white papers and research that a vendor hopes I report on or talk about, and then decide against it because the information is hopelessly skewed in favor of that vendor.

It's a bit like those recipe pamphlets that suggest you don't just add a cup of this, it has to be specifically the vendor's "this."

That's not the case with an interesting total cost of ownership report that looks at the perceptions and attributes of LED vs LCD video walls. The report was put together by the Atlanta LED manufacturer NanoLumens, but you'd barely know Nano made the big effort to put this together.

It's an interesting read, and a free download - albeit with the understanding the company wants to capture who all is grabbing it.

I spoke with Joe' Lloyd, NanoLumens' Global VP of Marketing and Business Development, who put the survey together and got it out the door. We get into the why of the survey, and what turned up in results from more than 400 respondents.

 

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Mike Kilian, Mvix, On Workplace Communications

Just about anyone involved on the sales or management side of digital signage these days knows that workplace communications has pretty quickly grown into one of the most active and interesting verticals.

With QSRs, the other hot vertical, you're doing menus and digital promo posters. In the workplace, all kinds of interesting things are possible, and can make a difference.

In this podcast, I spend some time with Mike Kilian of the DC-based CMS and solutions company Mvix. I've done a podcast in the past with Mike, but based on chatting with him at Infocomm, we decided to do a new one talking about the opportunities and challenges of digital signage in everything from offices to factory floors.

It would seem like the rise of big data and IoT sensors would open up a lot of possibilities to visualize data and automate content. But in this conversation, you'll learn it's not that easy to do when IT people are worried about security, and the machines and sensors that could spit out useful data have few standards or common formats.

If you are a business communicator, this is a useful listen.

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Artem Risukhin, Kitcast

If you go to any industry trade shows and follow social media activity around them, you'll no doubt have noticed A LOT of tweeting by a company called Kitcast.

They've done a very effective job of using social media to create both buzz and booth traffic, and Kitcast staffers were back at it recently at the Digital Signage Summit in Germany.

I've had a few quick chats with the company at the shows, but wanted to know more about a platform and service that at first glance seems like yet another cloud CMS.

There are a few interesting distinctions. First, while the company is based in San Francisco, its roots are in Ukraine. Second, and the big thing, its service is heavily focused on using Apple TV set-top boxes as the media player, and doing so at the enterprise level.

I spoke with Artim Risukhin about the roots of Kitcast and how it fits in the digital signage marketplace.

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JJ Parker, Tightrope Media Systems

Tightrope Media Systems is one of the oldest companies in the digital signage ecosystem, with roots tracing back to 1997 in Minneapolis.

Co-founder J.J. Parker bought a stack of books and taught himself coding to come up with what was then called a video bulletin board system for local schools. They managed to sell a license, and another, and another, and Tightrope turned into a real company with employees.

More than two decades later, Tightrope is still at it, and doing well, with some 40 employees and a digital signage product called Carousel that's focused on two key markets - education and workplaces. 

An interesting note is that Carousel works on Apple TVs. It's not one of those cases where a developer got something to work, and not much more. The platform is integrated with enterprise-grade management platform called JAMF, and Apple's education sales team actually buddy-calls with Carousel.

Parker kindly took a half-hour away from a working vacation in Madrid with his family to walk me through the roots of Tightrope and where things now sit.

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Ian Dallimore, Lamar

In the out of home space, Lamar Advertising is huge. The Baton Rouge-based media company is in 160 metro areas in the US, and has more than 3,300 roadside digital billboards.

The company is steadily adding more digital, notably in environments like airports. Lamar just lit up an impressive and expensive network inside the baggage area at the domestic terminal of Las Vegas's airport.

Ian Dallimore heads digital for Lamar - a gig that has him working with out of home specialists, brands and the vendors who feed into the technology ecosystem.

We get into a bunch of things in this chat - including data-driven advertising, programmatic and what people should know when they dip their toes into digital out of home.

 

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Burr Smith, Broadsign

I'm kinda breaking my own podcast rule here by interviewing someone for a second time, but Burr Smith has been a busy guy lately - buying companies and fighting patent trolls.

I spoke with the CEO and owner of Broadsign a couple of years ago, but it was more than time for an update chat given recent events.

Broadsign recently acquired Ayuda Media Systems, which at least some in the industry would see as a competitor. Then it bought another company in Montreal, called Campsite, that's a programmatic ad exchange.

This happened in the wake of a long, expensive but ultimately successful legal battle with a Swedish company that would generally be referred to as a patent troll. While most companies took the path of least resistance and paid "go away" money, Smith fought.

In this podcast, we get into the back-story of the recent acquisitions, and then have a chat about Smith going toe to toe with T-Rex.

 

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Ronnie Lee, Holocryptics

When DSE was on a few weeks ago in Las Vegas, I wandered down to the other end of the convention center to get a glimpse of the legendarily crazy Nightclub and Bar Show - where endless booths pour free drink samples.

I wanted to see how nuts it really was, but I was also on a mission to see the set-up of a Vegas start-up called Holocryptics, which is building a service around hologram-like virtual DJs that any nightclub or bar can rent by the hour.

Holocryptics provides to operators a packaged kit that includes a built-in media server, projector and mesh direct-projection surface. The DJs are custom videotaped in a studio, and high-end audio recorded, to produce files that look, on a transparent screen, like the bobbing and juking knob-twirlers are really there.

It could cost $1,000s to get a seasoned DJ to do a set at a club. With this set-up, there's a pretty reasonable one-time CAPEX hit, and then a DJ set costs less than $30. And it can get launched and controlled off a smartphone app.

I spoke with founder Ronnie Lee about the roots of his company, how things work, why holograms and how this could - in theory - be applied to all kinds of things, like political whistle-stops and distance learning.

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Fab Stanghieri, Cineplex Digital Media

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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Dan Hagen, 10net

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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