Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Randy Guy, Bluefin

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

Much of the attention in digital signage goes to big-dollar projects that feature huge screens and flashy content, but there's a good business and a lot of trade happening with much smaller displays that just help explain and sell stuff.

Bluefin International kind of fell into digital signage in the mid-2000s, and it has turned into a full-time business. The companies that were buying corporate-branded digital picture frames from Bluefin started asking for more functionality, to make the screens interactive in settings like retail. Now the Atlanta company has a wide range of sizes and types of flat panel displays that brands are using to influence consumers right at merchandising positions.

I had a great chat with Randy Guy, Bluefin's owner, about how he found his way into digital signage, and how his company operates - straddling a main office in Georgia with a manufacturing plant he owns and runs in Shenzhen, China.

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TRANSCRIPT

Randy, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me about Bluefin’s roots and the core focus of the company? 

Randy Guy: Sure. Dave, that's a kind of a tricky question, but we started 21 years ago selling USB flash drives out of China. Everything we tried was a challenge, and eventually in 2004, people wanted us to customize the flash drives and put people's logos on them. That got us in the promotional products business. We invested in some facility over there to do customization. 

In 2007, 2008, we started selling a lot of digital picture frames. The pharma companies, the big guys were giving away to doctors and everybody digital picture frames, and people started wanting us to customize those picture frames by adding touch, push button, motion sensors, things like that. So we developed our own ad player in 2008 based on our own proprietary platform, and we engineered and designed it and held all the mechanicals ourselves, and that kind of got us in the LCD market. So we started making custom LCDs in 2011 for some large global brands and then when Brightsign introduced their all-in-one chip back in 2016, they came to us and we were able to put that in an all-in-one fixture, and that kinda got us into the digital signage market. 

So it was a tricky way to get into the digital signage market, but that's the truth, and that's how we got here. It's 21 years later. We have owned a facility in China since 2012, where we do all our engineering design and manufacturing. We still have our promotional product business. It's thriving and focuses on consumer electronics, think anything from earbuds to USB chargers, anything that you would buy in an electronic store, we still put people's logos on.

So our background is customization. Our background is giving the people exactly what they want, and we've just transitioned that to digital signage and LCD manufacturing, that's probably one of our core strengths and they all see the businesses you get exactly what you want from Bluefin. You have a challenge or you have a specific need for an LCD, we can customize the fixture or the LCD to meet exactly what you're looking for. 

That's interesting. I suspect with a lot of companies in this space, if you said, “Yeah, I really liked that, but I need it in blue”, there's just going to get pushback saying no, can't do that.

Randy Guy: Absolutely. In fact, one of our largest roll-outs was in white. We went to a large furniture manufacturer, a global retail brand, and they insisted on white touchscreens, white housings. So color is not a problem on our end. We've offered them in blue, red, and white has been since our largest rollout where they insisted on that color.

Yeah. If you're a conventional manufacturer, this just wouldn't be in your wheelhouse at all but you've got that experience. 

Randy Guy: Absolutely. To be honest with you, we don't really compete with the traditional guys. We're niche, and we're so focused on customization and larger projects where people really need something customized and they want to hold those mechanicals for 5 to 10 years, that's why they come to us. It's because they know we deliver a product today, five years from now, they can get the exact same product from us, the same customization, same everything. We keep that SKU constant for those guys throughout the life of their project. 

This may be a difficult question because “typical” is probably all over the place, but what would be a typical kind of environment that you would be in with your screens?

Randy Guy: Our background has been the point of purchase market, working with retailers and the retail fixture manufacturers, coming up with solutions. There's not a retailer out there that doesn't have our screens working. So really when they come to us with a challenge and they say, I've got this much space, or I need this particular mounting pattern, or I need this particular setup from a touchscreen perspective, and we want to specific void of space, I think that's probably our biggest value add and then making it all come together, giving them exactly what they want. 

We offer around 30 screen sizes between the standard 16:9, and then also the stretch-bar LCD category, and then we custom cut sizes as well, so there's really not a size we can't handle and we can't provide. We do focus on the smaller sizes because once you get into the bigger glass, we really lose our cost advantages from the big guys cutting so much 43 and 55 inch glass. But we still do that. Our customers are very specific about needing a specific mechanical design or something customized. Those guys, the big guys, don't want to mess with a thousand custom 43 inch monitors, but that’s right up our alley.

Yeah, they want to do a hundred thousand. 

Randy Guy: Exactly. 

So a lot of this would be like end cap displays, merchandising displays, like in something like a Best Buy where there's an audio product or a home automation product, and there'll be a screen there that's an explainer screen. Is that pretty typical? 

Randy Guy: Absolutely. That's the perfect application. We have a lot of units in these different retailers. The touch screens become really important when it's a higher end category and the product might be complicated or it needs more explanation, or the customer might have more questions or wants to dig in deeper on other items like accessories and how the product works. That's where touchscreen interactivity really comes into play in the retail market because you can drive home your message, and the customer can explore the product on the screen versus we still sell a lot of just looping videos, your Best Buy basic 10” screen that just loops a video, it gives you a basic idea of what the product does, and it shows them some pictures and videos of the product and real life applications. But the touch screens are really where it gets deeper and you can really enhance the customer experience with information. 

And a lot of times they're smaller just simply because the retailer doesn't want to surrender stocking space and merchandising space so they want to integrate it there, but it can't be a big ass display because then they can't put products there, right? 

Randy Guy: Exactly. The small form factors are ideal for the point of purchase because you are competing for the physical space on the shelf itself or on the display. They want to stack it full of products, it can be speakers or earbuds or Bluetooth headsets so they want to have plenty of room on there for the product. So smaller is better in that sense. 

But now the digital signage world is finding a lot of applications for small form factors. They're thinking, this might be a great opportunity to engage in a customer here or different spots throughout different buildings, whether it be corporate or hospitality. VisualSign just started to come around, I think, with the small form factors, we're seeing a lot of opportunity, especially with the customization we can do. They can have something really unique to grab people's attention. 

Yeah. I've been in digital signage for a long time and have been paying attention to it for at least 21 years. I would say the first wave of digital signage in retail, if you set aside those companies that put screens in and want to sell ads on them, and they’ll put them in for free. If it's the retailers paying for it, the first wave seemed to be large screens hanging from the ceiling on the walls and everything else.

That didn't really work, and the next wave seems to be maybe big LED feature walls, but just one of them and then small screens, right at the point of purchase. 

Randy Guy: Absolutely. We're seeing a transition from path to purchase where a lot of consumer packaged goods brands advertise on billboards and commercials. They want to be where you're buying the product. They want to be where the product is, and then a lot of times you're not going to hang a 55 inch by a candy aisle or by a potato chip aisle. You're going to need a smaller form factor to grab the customer's attention and drive them to your product.

But the brands are starting to see a lot more value in being at the point of purchase versus the path to purchase. So we were excited about that kind of transition and how to forge that customer experience because the brands have the money to spend, and if they want to be front and center where the product is purchased, that's a great opportunity for our industry. 

When I was dealing with packaged goods companies like 12-15 years ago, and their brand marketers were asking about doing digital display in the store, right at the fixture, they liked it, but they said the unit cost was too much, didn't want to spend it and they only needed it for six months or maybe even three months. Could they rent it? 

How has that changed or are those CPG brands now willing to spend the money? 

Randy Guy: They are willing to spend the money, and I think that not only on the brands, but the retailers and the store owners themselves are seeing opportunities to share that screen space and get value added as well.

A perfect example would be the CPG might get 75% of the screen for 75% of the time, and the store owner would get, or the store chain would get, or the retail chain would get the other 25% of the time and they can share that screen, but the screens have come down in cost. We have a solution called Daisy chain where you can put multiple screens on one player. So that helps drive this cost down and you only have one endpoint to maintain. So we feel like that's a really good solution that we're pitching to a lot of people. We're starting to roll out in volume to different retailers with that solution, but basically you can run, say a 24” stretch, you can run 12 of those displays off of a 4k box. So that helps drop the costs down and it helps them repurpose the product and they have a lot more screens for a lot less. 

I suspect your a technical guys, particularly those who've been with you for a while, have been on a bit of a journey because I was interested in digital picture frames just as you were going in the late two thousands and thinking, maybe these things are digital signgage, they're low cost or integrated and everything else, but the technology, the underlying hardware in a lot of cases I suspect was more than a little flaky, but how hard was it to find reliable goods or is that why you just set up your own manufacturing?

Randy Guy: It was a challenge going from some of the higher end industrial grade monitors, a seven inch monitor might have been $400 and a digital picture frame was $40. While the fixture gas and the retail markets are great, we love this $40 solution, but it doesn't have the functionality or the industrial grade qualities of this $400 a unit. So that was our challenge. 

How do we beef up our digital picture frame to make it into an ad player, and that's when we researched the chip sets and designed a platform around that, and we took control of the mechanicals and put it in metal housings and those types of things. So we industrialized digital picture frames is really what we did and how we got started in a very crude sense of product development. We took a really low cost plastic housing, a digital picture frame, and we put it in a metal housing, beefed up the chip sets, gave it more functionality, we added touch and push-button capabilities and motion sensors and those types of things. That's how we got started in 2008 with our first ad player. 

So you're kind of remanufacturing them? 

Randy Guy: Actually redesigning them, and believe it or not, we're still selling picture frames. We're still selling that plastic low end picture frame with people's logos on it. It's kinda made a comeback in the last couple of years. 

Yeah, I was walking around a Best Buy recently and saw a company song that I thought, oh, this was like a flashback for me. I felt like I was back in 2008, like you say, the demand is there. 

Randy Guy: Absolutely, especially on the 10” size. Once the screen get down to lower costs, people can get more bang for their buck and there's been some really good companies that have come out with solutions that integrate with your phone and have apps. I can be out fishing with my kids or in a football game and I can take a picture and I can download it directly to my mother's 13 or 15 inch I bought her that’s sitting on the mantle, and so she gets real time pictures of us at the beach or wherever we are. 

So they've come a long way from the original where you had to put everything onto an SD card and plug it in and then take it out and update the pictures and everything. So some of the applications now with picture frames are really cool. 

When you started to redesign these picture frames, is it at that point that you started working with BrightSign or was that kind of further down the road?

Randy Guy: That was further down the road. We were out selling our ad player and we had a global brand that wanted us to make custom monitors for them, and then we got introduced to BrightSign that way,  so we optimized our monitors for BrightSign’s box and then when they came to market with their own all in one chip, we were the first ones to integrate it and bring it to market, and that their platform took it to a whole nother level from functionality and connectivity. 

And they've brought all the programming you can do to all the touch screens and interactivity, so that just elevated it to another level from where we had developed. 

I'd assume that kind of removes some of the R&D headaches and challenges that you're facing because they have that figured out and you just got to snap that board in?

Randy Guy: Absolutely, especially on the content creation side and the interactivity. We used to do layer touchscreens where it was quite the challenge to program and everything else, and they've got all that canned in the package and it's very simple. Everybody's familiar with it. That makes it a lot easier technically for sure. 

Does it add a layer of comfort as well when you're working with resellers and integrators that you can say it's BrightSign under the hood and they feel better? 

Randy Guy: Oh, absolutely. They are an award-winning platform and software and their support and the reliability and the products themselves. People love them, so absolutely, it provides a layer of comfort. 

They've done a nice job. It's at a level now when I talk to people, they're saying we're thinking about PCs, or maybe we're going to use smart displays or maybe we'll use BrightSign boxes. So it's at a level now where it seems to be its own category.

Randy Guy: Absolutely. They've done a great job and their products are exceptional. Between the support they provide and the product quality and reliability, it's definitely a bonus to integrate their products into our stuff and the digital signage world and their retail and point of purchase world really resonates with our solutions.

I guess there’s not really an installed base, but from the numbers of products out there, what would be the percentage of them that are connected versus just working off of a memory card? 

Randy Guy: I would say probably 75% are working off a memory card. There might be more than that that's connected, but how often people update content is never as often as they want to or they think they're going to when they roll out an application. 

So if it's just working off a memory card, it's not connected. If there's a problem, something locks up or whatever, does anybody know, or you're completely at the mercy of the local store manager?

Randy Guy: If you're not connected to the internet, then you're not going to have visibility for that time. The beauty of our products is that if there's any kind of power issue or for any reason, the unit reboots, it fully auto starts, it doesn't require any interaction. 

They're designed not to go down, to be honest with you. That’s the beauty of our platform is to know the OS and things like that you're going to have challenges with. As far as locking up and having to reboot or something like that, we just don't have those challenges in our platforms. 

So the bigger challenge in a lot of respects is just all the stuff that you can buy off Alibaba that says it's a looping ad display or whatever and those are, I'm sure out in retail as well, and those who go down, maybe they don't have the routines to come back. So somebody would look at that and go, this sort of stuff doesn't work, I don't want to buy this.

Randy Guy: Absolutely. If there's any opportunity for the unit so you don't have to choose a menu or do something to start the device, that's a challenge. Retailers lose power all the time. A lot of stores shut down power at night. So no one has the stomach anymore to have those touchscreens, and if you rely on the store manager or the local staff to keep your signage running, you're in trouble.

So it has to be plug and play and it has to be autostart, and it has to correct itself if there are any power issues or anything like that, it has to take care of those challenges on its own. You can't rely on any human help at the store. 

Are there any limitations as to what you can do, like it'll only run standard definition video or anything like that?

Randy Guy: No limitations. Any kind of crazy resolutions that the screen manufacturers come up with, we find a way to integrate them in our displays and make that available to the content guys. I'd say the stretch bar LCD is a challenge. Well, content is always a challenge because there's content creation and getting it updated and getting it approved by all the different parts of whether it be brands or manufacturers that have to approve the content. But when you start changing the resolutions from standard 16:9 or standard 1080p, then that's when they start having real delays and challenges and that can mess up a project. It's more on the content creation side than it is us being able to deliver the content on the screen. 

Are you seeing demand? I did a podcast recently with another company, Instorescreen, and they do inline shelf edge displays that are like ribbon displays and that sort of thing. Are you getting the ask for that sort of thing? 

Randy Guy: We absolutely participate in that market. I think it's going to be a challenge long-term though. I think you can overwhelm the customer at some point. You can have too much video. You can have too much color. In fact, we've had displays where people are trying to take the color out and they're making it more monochrome looking almost on a regular display.

So I think that there's a place for those solutions. I think it's going to be more higher end, higher dollar valued products. I can't imagine that we're going to see shampoo or toothpaste full of LCD screens, telling you what the price is on every one of those shelves that are trying to sell those, but I can see where a higher end item, for example, home audio, $200-$300 items. I can see where you can use stretch displays for something like that to not only educate the customer, but there's more to it, like specs and technical information to give on something like that, and then the dollar value supports the spend on the digital signage. I just can't imagine a shampoo or a toothpaste driving in a value to warrant having a digital signage solution. So that's my take on it. 

I think it's going to be very targeted for certain categories, maybe new products or something like that, but I don't see a future where every shelf in the grocery stores has a screen on it. That's just me personally. I just don't see it.

I always liken it to a kaleidoscope effect, and years ago, working with a company that was going to put screens in like flat panel displays with ads on them on casino floors, and they engaged me to walk around the casino with them and ask where they should put them on. I said not in here, period, because there's too damn much going on there. They're just going to get lost in all the other razzle-dazzles that's there, put them in the entryways, put them in the common areas, it's the same thing. If every shelf edge has motion media going, that is just, like you say, it's overwhelming. 

Randy Guy: Absolutely. Humans can be overstimulated, they'll just tune it all out. I think that you'll lose the effectiveness of it.While I think there's a more targeted market for shelf edge, I don't think it's going to be a hundred percent off the shelves or an opportunity in my mind. 

Is it easier now to go into stores because 20 years ago there was no power in the floor, very little power at the merchandising areas, in the shelf gondolas or any of that stuff so you had to do drops of power cords and this and that, all kinds of hacks to get power to the screens. Is it better now? 

Randy Guy: Absolutely. In the places where digital signage and point of purchase kiosks are located, the retail owners are finding a way to get power to those locations. They see that it's a necessity. We used to end caps in some of the largest home improvement stores and things like that and they didn't have power, but now they're seeing the benefit that they need to get power there. 

Another benefit of a lot of our products is that you can use power over ethernet, which makes it low voltage. So you don't have to do a power drop with a certified electrician and worry about code and pulling permits, and things like that, and you can move the product around a whole lot easier with a network cable than you can trying to find a power outlet. So power over ethernet solved a lot of those issues for people that were hesitant to run a power drop but it's pretty easy to run a network cable. 

Do you see much business outside of retail? 

Randy Guy: Oh, we do. Like I said, the digital signage world in general is starting to warm up, especially the interactive touchscreens. The start of the pandemic was a scare for us because of all the noise around touch screens and surfaces and transmitting COVID, but that went away. Thank goodness. That was going to be a real challenge for the market if that hadn't changed, so that put a scare in us big time. 

One of the biggest applications we're seeing uses for our small form factor of touchscreens is people are able to control larger screens, almost using our screens as a remote control. So you get the bang for the buck, you can have interactivity, you have a robust solution. You can go through a lot of different content, but it's being thrown up on a bigger screen where you get a bigger experience and then you can engage people that aren't actually touching the interactive part, so you can engage people all around the store or the lobby or wherever since they can see what's going on. So we think that's a pretty cool solution and almost a cheaper way to put interactivity on a large screen TV is by having a control box. That's a lot lower cost. 

You don't want to have a 65 inch touchscreen. You can, but it's going to be really super expensive, and people are, other than wayfinding, a lot of people aren't comfortable walking up huge screens and start banging on it and touching on it, there's a hesitation in that sense and when you're so close to a big screen, you can't really take in all the content anyway. So we love solutions where we use our small screens to drive larger screens, we think that has a lot of legs. 

Yeah, and with LED video walls, with some exceptions, for the most part, you really don't want people walking up to that LED wall and touching it in any way.

Randy Guy: Exactly. Touchscreens have always had a little hesitancy from the public, but they're getting used to them with the tablets and iPads and those types of devices, they're getting used to coming up and touching smaller screens, but you're right. You don't want them touching the bigger screens and people were a little bit leery of doing that anyway.

You recently added an open operating system for an all-in-one display that has ARM processors and can run on like Linux and Android. So it shifts or provides an alternative to BrightSign. Why did that come about? 

Randy Guy: Just supply chain issues. We can’t have enough options in the world right now. We have some specific clients who are using those platforms. At the end of the day, we're a contract manufacturer. That's our customization angle is that we want to make whatever product you need. So it was twofold. One, the product supply issues, and anything could happen in this world from a supply chain standpoint, it was what we've all figured out. And number two, customers really want that solution. A lot of people are already using that solution. We felt that we were missing some market share and some opportunities there. We wanted to be able to offer any platform they want to use and pretty much be a one-stop shop.

So if you had a screen network that was using a lot of Android driven boxes or Android smart displays, they didn't want to add this into the network, running something that’s different. They would prefer that this be Android too? 

Randy Guy: Absolutely. So if they've already spent the time and money to develop an Android app and they're supporting it then they want as many devices as they can get on that platform. So they don't have to support multiple platforms. So we were getting shut out of a lot of opportunities,where  they insisted on something running Android. They loved our product, but they had to have Android. So that was a challenge. 

And as we talked about before, their only other option probably would be to go on Alibaba and then cross their fingers, right?

Randy Guy: Absolutely. Being a US-based company is a huge advantage over Alibaba and those types of companies of the world. Just from the standpoint, we support all our products in the U S. You've got credit terms. You've got RMA support and it's just a lot easier to handle projects and a lot more comfortable on the thrust side of things. So we see that as a huge benefit owning our own facility in China, we're cost competitive with anybody in the world. So we take that factor out. 

So the ability to have inventory and samples and can support projects, US-based you know, that gives us a big advantage. 

Yeah. You could have a contract manufacturer in Shenzhen, but if they're busy on something else, well, too bad.

Randy Guy: Absolutely, and then, those guys, they don't like to run a 100 units or 50 units or 75 units and then run 75 this week and you come back three weeks later and want 30 more, that doesn't go over. You don't stay in their graces very long, but customization and projects, that's been our business for 21 years.

Someone might order 500 pieces today and if they come back three weeks later, oh, shoot. I should've ordered some spares, I need it. That's what we do. That's not a challenge on our end. A lot of people resonate with that and they appreciate that. They get a flat pricing on stuff like that, and we're here to serve them and make sure that they get what they need. And if they need an extra 50 units for gosh sakes, we're not gonna penalize them or be mad that they need 50 more units because the quantity is low. We've got to see the bigger picture, the whole thing. 

In 2022, what more are we going to see out of Bluefin? 

Randy Guy: We've got a couple of surprises up our sleeve that we're designing on. There's a few segments of the market that that we think are underserved, that we're really eyeballing. One thing about being a small company is that we are small enough that we care about the customers and we listen to customers, but we're also big enough that we can take care of the customers and we're getting a lot of feedback from a couple of different channels in the market that they're having a heartburn with and they're struggling with, and being a small company, we can pivot and try to meet some of those needs of the customers where they're having issues. So we're excited about a couple of initiatives that we've got, hopefully gonna roll out here in the first half of this year.

Hopefully prior to InfoComm, and so we've got a few things coming out. We'd love to get back on here and talk to you about as we move along. 

All right. So if people want to know more work and how can they find you online?

Randy Guy: We are TheBluefin.com.

The only other thing I have on here I wanna make sure we cover, our supply chain issues are resolving quickly, so we're offering more products to hedge against future supply chain issues. Logistics is still a challenge, but our lead times are back down in our normal four to five week range now. Getting the product to the United States is different. Air freight is reliable, but it's really expensive right now, ship freight is not reliable and it's still expensive. So it's a double edged sword there, but from a production capability, we're getting back into business, we are ready to roll. From that standpoint, we are seeing the pandemic kind of fade away on the supply chain side from component issues. 

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

Randy Guy: Oh, absolutely. I appreciate you having me on, I look forward to coming back soon with some more exciting news.

Jason Cremins, Signagelive 2022

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

One of the terms the digital signage community is going to start seeing more often is headless CMS - the idea of getting away from the walled garden nature of many to most digital signage platforms and instead offering something that is open and flexible.

Most software platforms out there are still variations on walled gardens, but I've been hearing from a few companies that have re-architected their code and platforms to be some version of headless. One of the early adopters - very predictably - is Signagelive, a UK CMS software firm that has a knack for staying very current with technology advances, and for developing a platform that is very open and malleable ... but also secure.

CEO Jason Cremins was one of the first poor souls nutty enough to come on this podcast, and I was surprised to sort out that it had been almost six years since we had that first chat. I was very happy to catch up with him, and dig into what headless CMS is all about, who's using it, and why.

We also get into another interesting thing the company has developed - secure dashboards, a stable, secure and easy way to get visualized data on digital signage screens.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jason, thank you for joining me. We've spoken in the past. We've spoken many times actually, but for a podcast, I looked it up and saw, it was like six years ago. So you're one of the first victims. 

Jason Cremins: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I can't believe it's been six years since we had that conversation.

I wanted to talk to you to catch up in a lot of ways around Signagelive, but I was particularly interested because for the last year or so, I'd say you've been talking up a concept that is just nibbling at the edges of Digital signage consciousness, if you want to put it in that way. People are just starting to understand this idea of headless CMS, and also talk a little bit about another product of yours, secure dashboards because they're two concepts that I'd say are not terribly well known within the digital signage industry yet, but will be.

Jason Cremins: Yeah, thanks for that. The whole concept of headless for us has come about really through the need from the channel partners that we have and the customers that we have and at its core, what it really allows us to do is expose absolutely everything that you can do with Signagelive as a platform and in terms of the management and the control of players through a series of API APIs and those API APIs then allow third party organizations to build solutions around the core signage like capabilities. 

So this is a lot more than that old concept of white labeling a CMS platform, so you don't really know who the vendor is, but you're still using it the way it was written and the UX is there and everything else. These are the tools, and then you can write it and use it the way you want, right? 

Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely. It's code level control really. We are the engine underneath the hood, we’re the delivery platform. I suppose in the same way that organizations are building solutions on top of AWS for web apps, we're looking to achieve a similar proposition for our partners who want to build custom solutions on top of signagelive for a whole range of applications, and I think one of the key things is digital signage is just one of those, the outputs can be many varied. 

So why would they want to do that? My understanding is you've got organizations that produce content for a whole bunch of end points, not just digital signage endpoints, just a whole variety of them, and they don't want to have to back out of what they use, the tools they use for all those things, and then log into digital signage to do that one little piece of it and then back out and do the other stuff. Is that a fair assessment? 

Jason Cremins: I think it is.

It depends on who the customer is, so where the need needs being driven from. So if it’s a specialist, digital signage reseller who is providing a full managed service for their customers, then it may well be that they want to present a portal or a user experience that is unified across maybe different tools they're providing that customer, different management tools.

We've got one partner, for example, who has got some really good connections into the Google Chrome management device environment, and the APIs that Google provides and they want that to be wrapped up with the CMS capabilities, and so therefore they're using Signagelive for that component. So yeah, certainly from a point of view the integrator is very much about presenting a unified solution, their own custom user journey effectively and workflows for that, for their customers, and then what we're finding for end-users, it's very much about those community developers and organizations, where they've got existing business logic and workflow in place, and they want to avoid having to replicate those tasks. So how can we just move digital signage and publishing of data and receiving information about the device and the status into the existing tools that we all use within the business? 

So what would that look like in something like, let's say an interactive agency, that's doing a pile of work for a big corporate client?

Jason Cremins: Yeah, what it would look like for them is that they would typically work with us. We'd set up a development environment. We've got obviously extensive documentation and examples of what could be achieved. We would assist them in terms of setting up example code and just really working through, I suppose the story, what is the problem we're trying to solve? That's what we'll try to do in businesses is how they're trying to solve a problem for a particular customer, and then what we would do then is point them in the right direction of the various APIs that we have. 

So if it's, for example, the ability to either hard trigger or soft trigger content, we've got APIs that allow you to do that. If it's the ability to take data and ingest that and have that display within HTML5 content again, we've got APIs that allow you to do that too. So we've got a range of entry points around the core platform APIs and SDKs, and it would allow us to work with that agency really, to build a solution for their customers.

So would they then have to build a brand new interface to deal with all out or could it be layered into what they're already using? 

Jason Cremins: Totally laid in. So it is what they're already using. If they're using modern web technologies, typically they have API capabilities or certainly they've got accessibility or capability within their teams to be able to build out those user interfaces. Obviously in recent years, with the way the web technologies have moved, there's been very much a separation between the visual experience and what's being delivered on the front end to using portals and UI/UX is whether it be, across mobile, across the whole range and the actual business logic and the doing behind the scenes, database distribution and media management, et cetera.

So yeah, very much they can build it however they want, as long as they adhere to the APIs that we have in place. 

Is there a degree of transparency? So let's say you have a reseller or an integrator that you're working with and they have a big corporate client of some kind, a retailer, QSR, whatever it may be. Do they know that it's Signagelive under the hood or are you completely big behind the curtains?

Jason Cremins: We’re completely behind the curtains. From our point of view, everything is transparent. For example, the customer would be looking into their portal so therefore we are the code downstream of any actions that they're taking on that portal, there's no reference to Signagelive.

The way that licenses are procured and added to devices, the way those devices are presented is all again, completely transparent, and the partner can decide what that's called, how that looks, without any reference to Signagelive, and then when you're on the device end the pages such as activation codes or notices of expiring or those other things are completely customizable as well and programmable by the partner.

So yeah, from our point of view our role there with those organizations that we're working with is to provide them the support, and provide them the tools and extend the API as they require and allow them to go and build their book of business around that code. 

Does this require a different kind of support for your reseller ecosystem, in terms of, if it's your own product and it's visibly Signagelive that you're working with and you make a new version release or whatever you push it out and everybody knows about it. 

With this you have a tool set and then you have an integrator with its own toolset or its front end that it's written on top of. So do you have to say we've changed this about our API or whatever that you need to deal with? 

Jason Cremins: Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think that starts from the outset, because the minute we've done the initial discovery and the qualification that there is genuine interest, and also they've got the capabilities within their organization to undertake the type of integration that would be required with our APIs, then the commercial team completely steps out of the way, the regular end user and channel support team steps aside, and those partners are provided direct access to the development team. 

So it's very much a developer to developer conversation around utilizing the tools and the various code samples and all the other bits that are required and that's a completely separate Slack environment that those guys can work on together, and have that kind of trust, and build up that relationship to build the solutions without with us commercial and regular support team getting involved. 

What took you down this path? Headless CMS is a broader concept in Web 3 or whatever you want to call it, but did you see this as a trend that you wanted to get on top of or were you being asked about it? 

Jason Cremins: A bit of both, I would say. I think one of the things that we were looking to do was re-engineer our own platform and it made sense that we became the first consumer of our own APIs. So I think there was a conscious decision to do that and that journey probably started 3+ years ago, and every line of code we've written, the sense has been API first. So we've crafted and come up with the API architecture and then decided, we're going to build on top of that in terms of the user experience within Signagelive. 

So I think that was one of the key things, but then also we were getting a lot of requirements for integration with say business workflows and tools that people were already using beyond just shuffling content from a third party platform down to a screen, and then also extending that capability into local environments. We've got an APIs that allows us to, to trigger either immediately or soft trigger, IE, do this next, and then we've built out another API, which we call real-time events, which runs across the different devices we support that allow us to extend that further through code to interact with non-web technology. So things like serial devices, lighting controls, all these other things that are required, when you get down into a physical presence, you want to build an experience that’s beyond just sending web requests. 

So yeah, it's been a combination of both and that's been both end-users that have approached us and we've had conversations around their needs and also then the partners and integration organizations that we're working with who are building out these experiences based on what the customer wants to achieve. 

And this isn't just conceptual at this point, you have clients who are using it in this way now, right? 

Jason Cremins: Yeah. From our point of view, the commercial model is really the thing that determines where the split is, so we traditionally sold licenses and then subsequently services and plans, and they've gone through the traditional channel model, whether it be distribution, resellers, 

This is more of a consumption model. So it's an ability for at the first level of the ability to activate licenses as required and deactivate those as required. That's been a big key element of all that we've done, and then further on with as we'll get onto other products, it's true consumption is about the actual amount of usage that you need from the platform. 

So are there companies and projects that you can talk about that are actively using a headless CMS model?

Jason Cremins: Yeah, we can. One of the organizations that we're working with and they're actually included in the white paper that's on our website is Entwined who are down in Australia, and we've been working with Entwined now for the last two and a half years as they start to build out their digital signage strategy, and they were disillusioned with the challenges they had trying to work across multiple different CMS platforms to meet the needs of different customers in different sectors. So we work very closely with them to become their engine for their success. 

I think one of the big attractions is that we've got this very wide support for different player technology into the 30+ different platforms that we support in different variants, and they wanted that. They didn't want to be restricted by a single CMS’s support for a certain hardware tech, or a certain operating system. So we work with Entwined to build that out and we've got some significant wins together, but we will allow them to make those announcements as they come along.

So in that case, there is mostly a managed service model for them? 

Jason Cremins: From their point of view, it is absolutely a managed service model. We support them as a technical team and to ensure they've got everything they need, and from their perspective, they are providing a fully managed proposition for their customers. So they are direct to their customers providing a full installation, maintenance, content services, marketing strategy, everything that's required to deliver a successful solution. 

Yeah, that's interesting because I was saying to somebody the other day that one of the trends I see happening is you have “solutions providers”, “integrators” companies that normally just do installations and so on, adding more service capabilities because there's more recurring revenue there and it would be mightily challenging if you are at the mercy of the software companies to get a particular piece of functionality or whatever added to their roadmap, and then, you wait for it to actually come together and so on, and then you've got to, as you said, support all these things versus having a lot more control over what you can do and narrowing it down to one provider. But I guess there's still the challenge that even with that, they're still waiting a little bit on functionality to be delivered at year end, right? 

Jason Cremins: Yeah, occasionally. I think most of the time, what we're seeing is there's an opportunity to bring in other adjacent technologies. So with Entwined and with other partners we're working with, for example, Audience Analytics, we've got certain partners and work that we've done in that space, but if I got a particular partner they're working with, and there's absolutely no reason why they can't combine what we're doing in terms of providing proof of play and accountability in terms of what the player is doing with a media playback, and then combining that in parallel with other information, and then delivering that as a complete set of data and set of insights for individual customers.

So I think it's about really understanding what the need is. If it's not core to what we're doing as an organization, if it doesn't benefit the wider community of companies that we have. Bear in mind a lot of the APIs that we do develop at their core are for enterprise customers and so if we see things the other way round as well, is that it's exciting for our API headless customers when we can say actually, for example, we've built out out granule user permissions model which has now got over 150 different flags you can turn on and off per user, and by the way, we've got a new hierarchy of infrastructure coming along and we just launched 2FA for security. 

So they benefit from all of those because all of those are available through the APIs, and a lot of that is then listening to the same customers they're approaching with a complete solution that maybe we're having conversations with other territories where they're overtly using Signagelive as a platform.

Do you see headless as being a pretty significant part of your business and will you always balance the Signagelive familiar UX that some companies are going to use Or a lot of them are just going to headless? 

Jason Cremins: I think there's definitely a trend towards more integrated solutions. People talk about user experience platforms. I heard that kind of thing mentioned and talked about by others and I suppose it is about that, and it's really whether we build something that. I don't want us to be a constraint for our partner or for our customers. So we will take our product and develop it where we feel it needs to go and where the mass market requires Signagelive to go. 

But I think what we're finding with the headless proposition is that it does allow that kind of wider thought process and say, a partner or someone looking to create their own brand in the space or integrate with their own backend digital asset management platform or workflow systems, they can decide what features they want to present to the customer, and some of those will be from Signagelive, and others will be from other third party web apps that they're talking to.

You only have to look at the way things like Zapier have blown up over the years in terms of connecting A to B to C to create a solution and we want to be part of that. We integrate with low-code and no-code platforms, for example, which basically takes the development and the ability to build applications, not just from a curly bracket low-level coders, but it puts that into community code, as they always say about low code, “if you are capable of driving a spreadsheet and creating macros, then you could build a low code application for your business”, and we want to be talking to those community developers within organizations as well, who go, “Do you know what? That's great, but I'd like to do something slightly different or I need to make sure it shows not just this, but that as well from our other systems we have.” And we want to make sure we're part of that solution. 

One of the reasons I find this so interesting is It gets away from the whole idea or notion of a walled garden, which it still seems like a lot of digital signage software companies operate within in that they're not really paying attention to what the larger, particularly web centric development world is doing.

Jason Cremins: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think you can't win on features alone. It's a fool's errand. If you look at any organization that's making money in digital signage today, 90% of the features are going to be tick boxed yes certainly when it comes to an RFP. We can all argue that we do things better or have you, so there's got to be reasons why you're successful, and I know you've covered it and your podcasts and your writing, Dave, that you either go super niche in a particular sector and use case, or you provide a true platform that is pliable and capable and can bend and flex to the needs of the kind of solutions that we're not even thinking of. These are organizations that have got particular problems we haven't even heard of yet. 

So we don't want to be measured or contained by our thoughts on what we think the world needs. We want the ability to go, Hey, we can do this bit. We've got these APIs and capabilities. By all means if you want us to extend those, that's exactly where we want to be spending our time. The experience you want to build in terms of logging in and what you want that to do on the screen at the far end. 

The other area I've talked about, I guess there's a bunch of things I've not heard about through the years, but it is data-driven content. And this is something that there were a handful of companies going back to the mid 2000s, like the Omnivexes and Scribers, when that was around, that were doing that sort of thing, and then it grew more common and everybody was saying, yeah, sure, we've got APIs. We can tie into data tables and stuff like that. 

But the data sync services and secure dashboards that you're doing you're saying this is different this is its own approach?

Jason Cremins: Yeah. I think we are trying to solve the same problem in a different way, in a more scalable and robust way. I think that's the way of looking at it. 

I've got admiration for those that have gone before us, in that sense, in terms of trying to solve the challenge of getting data from backend systems up into a screen in an automated, scalable and updatable way. 

What we’ve come up with is a solution whereby from the backend, we have secure dashboards that you can log into any web app, whether that be a Google-based app or Microsoft, any of the Microsoft suite through to people like Grow.com who we use for our own power BI and in business intelligence dashboards and login once, login smartly, as we call it, because the system will actually, determine how it needs to log in and what it needs to press. It does all that in the back end for you, and then from that, you can determine what you want to capture and where you want that to go. What we're effectively doing at that point is whether it be an individual metric on a dashboard, whether it be the full dashboard itself whatever the determined frequency needs to be. We're securely capturing that data as a JPEG and there's a real conscious reason why we've done that as a JPEG, because we want to make sure it can play back on any player that we support, not be restricted to the latest, greatest, web browser capable player that can run super fast, HTML5, because that's so restricted. And then deliver that content security to screens. 

So we've seen a big need for that. I think one of the things we wanted to avoid was a reliance on having to do this through creating a macro with a Chrome extension that you have to run through that sequence in a browser to capture the dashboard and then it saves it back to the server and it says, don't worry, I've got that. I'll do that again. We want it to do this centrally and do it once. So if something changes, you can go in, make a single change and all your dashboards will then be republished to the screen. 

We've also with that solution and working through the initial B2 customers that we've got, realized one of the key aspects is what happens when things go wrong. So we've built a complete debugger there. So it actually walks you through every single stage that we're doing, the macros that it's running in the back to say we've got this, we've now pressed this button. We've cleared that popup that came up, don't worry right now, we've prepped the metric. “Is this what it looks like? Yep. That's what I'm going to send to the screen.” So you can script that as you need to go and capture the data. 

So we have tremendous response from organizations looking to get that data out of their backend systems and their web apps and the security gets that in front of their users on screens in the various departments. Big application, obviously with the deskless workers in particular and getting data around. We're working with one big logistics organization at the moment who have got updates in terms of the status for goods in and goods out, buried in a proprietary system and they want the dispatch base across a hundred locations. And so we can show them how that works. They set it up once. The way it goes and that's it, and it will just keep publishing that, and obviously, you can still be dispersed, you can still multi-zone it, and you can run it with other content as required but it's very much a Trojan horse for a lot of organizations because it's the one thing that's been particularly tricky. And theyI don't want to get into having to, while I can get that data out into a data table and then I've got to ingest it, then I have got to map that into some form of layout in a third party CMS, before I can then get it onto the screen. They want to do this in its native form, in the dashboards and the tables that they are using in their web app every single day.

If it's a JPEG, that's going to limit you in terms of the frequency of updates, at least a little bit, or you're going to have a bandwidth issue as well, but I'm assuming there aren't really that many applications out there that need true real time, something that’s changing every second or whatever, if it's production status or whatever, every minute, or even every five minutes is probably fine, I assume? 

Jason Cremins: Absolutely. Yeah, and that's what we're finding, and we are asking that question and there are solutions to real-time, but it just isn't this technology. It's not built for this, and real time is more a case of building those custom HTML5 widgets and connecting to a data point somewhere and having that is also refresh. And, we have those too, we have those bespoke instances where people need that level of update, as it happens, push updates. But for the vast majority, as you quite rightly said, it's more a case of, I need to know what the stats are today within the last hour. I need to know what's happened in the last five minutes. So we more than cope with that at scale using the secure dashboards platform. 

I'm curious when you talk about sekless workers and production floors, and so on. I thought this is still a somewhat untapped opportunity for the digital signage market  to get mission critical information out to people who don't have desktop monitors that they're staring out all day or don't have emails or anything else. How do you keep them informed? And it seems that this is particularly a good way to do it. 

Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely, and I think one of the things that we're excited by is the number of applications we've never heard of before that people are testing. We've got on our website 30-40 applications that we test and we just keep continuing adding to a Sheet that we update pretty much every day with new applications we've got.

We were working with a big mining organization who used some platform I'd never heard of before. They tested it, they got it working and they went, let's use it, and they went on to deploy that to all the locations where they're drilling and mining and show the performance statistics there. So that's the thing that's exciting because we built this in an open, agnostic way. We're not saying that we've got a particular integration for Power BI or we've got a particular integration for Salesforce or Tableau or all the other leading ones. We've built it in a way that will accommodate all of those, and if it works for all of those, it will work for any others as well. 

Can you get into some of the more exotic platforms like an SAP ERP platform, that kind of thing??

Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely. It really comes down to user access, so how are people currently accessing that data?

So if you were logging into that platform through username, password authentication, single sign on, for example, and you can navigate from your browser to that content that you want to display and it can be full screen. It can be just a zone on the screen that you want to capture an X/Y set of coordinates, then it will work. If you can do it from your browser, we can do it from the backend and set that up. So yeah, it's very doable. 

I think the other aspect of this is the actual, as you mentioned, data sync services that are built on top of secure dashboards, these are built on top of which is the underlying platform. There will be other modules alongside that. We will be looking at certain instances where it actually makes sense to have dedicated apps for maybe SAP, maybe there's some additional functionality that we need to get out of Salesforce, right? We'll just build a custom integration with Salesforce at that point.

Or as we're finding with others, there's just a custom dataset there. Do we need an agent somewhere on a server that's grabbing the data that brings it back through the same machine that we've built and pushes it, whether it be in a graphic or into an HTML5  page but uses this data sync services platform to achieve that in a very secure way.

I assume when this gets raised with corporate clients, they're very concerned about the security implications. How do you deal with that? 

Jason Cremins: Yeah, absolutely. Security is at the core from our point of view. So we're completely transparent in terms of how the platform has been built. We're open to inspection. We've been running quarterly penetration tests on our whole platform since 2015, and we make those available under NDA to prospective customers and existing customers, and in addition to that, we obviously achieved ISO 27,001 last year. We're extending that out across the world as well.

We take data and data security to the highest level and we want to make sure we're open and honest with our customers in terms of what we're doing with our data, how we're encrypting their data, and we're open for that to be fully tested. There's not been an instance and we've got some pretty significant organizations across a range of sectors. where, we've passed their security tests with flying colors, and in many cases they're saying, you're taking security to a level that we're or even doing ourselves, because we're not exposed, we haven't yet got there. You're dealing with things from a variety of different angles that we just don't currently have in our business. So it does give them the confidence that we've got those angles covered. 

Let's wrap this up on a broader topic that doesn't require the same technical acumen. I'm just curious, how are things going? How is the business hopefully coming out of COVID?

Jason Cremins: Good! 

I think like everyone, it was May 2021, when we saw the early signs of what was happening with COVID. There was a bit of a good kind of stop and take a breath moment for everyone to think, right? Where's this going to leave us as it was, we had a very strong year. We did right by our customers. We made sure that those that were struggling, we paused all of their payments. sp if they were on monthly billing with us, we said, just come back when you can, and that's bounced back tremendously for those that we were able to support, if it was organizations that had bought term licenses, multi-year licenses, et cetera, we made sure we extended those licenses as long as it was viable for both parties to ensure that they could shut those down and not lose that licensed usage is such, so when they come back online, we’re not asking them to renew, and that's been fantastic, and I think that we're able to grow, we added five people to the head count at the back end of last year and seeing some of those announcements probably coming through on LinkedIn.

We've done goog, we grew again last year, and I think the cool thing is we’re very much focused on the two strategies, one of which is going very much into the upper mid-market and enterprise customers, and as I mentioned earlier, in terms of the functionality that we were developing in the core platform itself, but then equally is very much this approach towards headless and whilst there's other organizations that provide really good solutions for agnostic device support and building your CMS on top of those platforms, we go to the next stage. We're actually giving you a full headless CMS and device support platform, and I think that's one of the key areas that we're looking to grow. So if organizations are either entering the market and once to get into digital signage with their own brand solution, we want to be there for them to have that conversation.

Yeah, that's interesting. What you just finished saying, it's so important to think about the infrastructure and the real tools, as opposed to the pretty UX and the capability to support, protect our piece of functionality. Who cares if everybody does it?

Jason Cremins: Yeah, exactly. And then also the pedigree of it, we've got customers that have been with us for decades literally now, and we've been at this for a long time, since ‘97 from my point of view. So we're a long way in, but we only feel as though this aspect of the market is opening up now. 

The days of fighting out on the UX features and capabilities and hoping you'd tick the boxes of that particular customer wants it, I'm not saying it's gone, but it's certainly going or being caught up by organization going, how do I code my own solution on top of your APIs? 

Yeah, and if you're going to mid to high level enterprise work, the whole race to the bottom price fight goes away, right?

Jason Cremins: A hundred percent, and this is why we've seen a massive push with regards to people moving on to plans. It just makes sense. It was always licenses and then networks, and then adding maybe training to a network or to a customer, and then you start adding additional modules and active directory and secure sign on and all those things, and for many reasons, those organizations don't want to buy in piecemeal ways. It's a big lift for them to actually get a PO through their organization. So they just want to say, look, I know what I want to achieve. I know roughly how many players I'm going to put online in the next six months. So you can give me some flexibility there, but can I just at least have all the bits in place to get this up and running, keep all the departments happy, keep IT happy and that I don't have to go back to procurement every month when you turn around and say, oh, you need this additional module? 

So the move towards the plan structure has been a real positive for us for those mid-market enterprise customers where they expect that. 

Jason, great to catch up with you.

Jason Cremins: You're welcome. Thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you again, Dave.

John Marshall, Userful

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

There has been lots of talk – particularly on the pro AV side of digital signage – about how traditional corporate AV and IT roles and needs are converging.

And there’s been a lot of discussion, as well, about the pros and cons of shifting from more conventional ways of moving content around screen networks – with dedicated hardware and cabling – to using the networking infrastructure of an end-user customer.

I had an interesting chat with John Marshall, the CEO of Calgary-based Userful, going back two or three years ago at ISE, when he was relatively new to the company. He talked at length, and in detail that was at times way the hell over my head, about the shift he expected to see with digital signage going to AV over IP solutions.

That’s now happening in a big way, he says, accelerated in part by technology advances, but also because of all the upheaval of the past couple of years – when video streamed meetings went from something done here and there to constant.

We spoke last week about where using networks to move informational content around is at, how it works and why you should care, and about a new partnership his company has developed with display giant LG.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

John, thank you for joining me. You're in Calgary today, right? But you kind of cycle between the Calgary and San Francisco area? 

John Marshall: Back and forth every two weeks. But yes, I'm in Calgary today. 

How has that worked out in the last couple of years with travel restrictions and everything? 

John Marshall: It's been an interesting challenge because I've had an opportunity to see different cities, different cultures, different reactions to the pandemic. And I've seen a lot of differences, but I'd say the overall trends, whether it be relating to work from home, return to work, accessibility for certain businesses and the likes, it's fairly similar. 

We're talking because your company recently announced, and I'm going to read this because that's easier, “an end-to-end software-defined AV over IP solution that combines Userful’s visual networking platform and LG’s Web OS signage platform to optimize display network for control rooms, digital signage networks, corporate signage and video walls.” 

That's a mouthful. I was saying before I hit the start button that I'm not that strong on AV over IP and I had to read the press release about four times before I started to get a grasp of it. What does all this mean in practical terms and why should people in the digital signage industry who would be listening to this, why should they care? 

John Marshall: I got my career started in Silicon valley at 3Com Corporation, then launched another company that was foundational in building broadband and the mindset of the IT industry, the mindset of the networking world is being able to access multiple nodes, being able to access a range of devices across the network. 

So this concept of network-based solutions is very powerful. It means I can get to almost anything anywhere, anytime. And when you shift over into the AV world, the traditional mindset is around quality of video. If we really look at making sure we're going to deliver the very best quality video for advertising or for monitoring the safety of a situation through cameras and the likes. You're always optimizing for quality and you don't want to bring into play the interference that comes with a network: latency, security risks, and the like, but more and more as we move towards wanting to see more and more information, combinations of video and data from multiple sources around a company, around the globe, as we're trying to do more with it, making sure it's networked is valuable. You get access to more information. You can do more with more information. So you're willing to make some trade-offs on quality to get more information from different sources and I think that's where the AV industry is headed today. We're looking at multi-source delivery of content to multiple displays and that just demands a network model.

Are some of the issues that were kind of barriers to adoption like concerns around latency and the buffering icon on the screen, or blocky/pixelated videos, has that largely been solved? 

John Marshall: I'd say that's being solved, and part of the issue is we're moving from an AV world that's quality focused to a networked world that's AV over IP, you have to address those things. 

Just like you described, how latency affects the availability of the video. That's the swirling circle, right? Saying it's buffering, or I'm trying to deliver a single vide  to many displays distributed around the globe. How do I do that without taking on massive costs of wide area network charges, right? Like the broadband delivery or the MPLS delivery of content by employees, or how do I chop it up so I can present it on a single video wall that's composed of many TVs or many displays or multiple DV LED screens that are backed by multiple controllers and how do I lace all that together? 

And transformatting that is challenging. It's very challenging, especially when a network is involved. So I think we're on our way and I think this really is the year where we start to see that migration. 

Is that because technology has improved to a degree that it's possible, like networking technology, or is it as much to do with an understanding of what's possible?

John Marshall: I think it's a combination, right? I think that we've started seeing the  interest, the demand for seeing multiple sources of data on screens. A good example, if I'm in a control room environment, I want to see a combination of security video feeds, I want to see production video feeds, but I also want to see that side-by-side with data, IOT fed data. I want to see AI, showing me the correlation between video productivity, factory floor production, and information about supply chains. I want to see it all on a single screen. And that's my control room environment. 

If I move over to look at advertising or marketing, I want to see social media feeds in parallel with advertisement or video footage promoting a product. All of it goes hand in hand. And I think that's what the consumers are becoming more accustomed to through consumer channels. 

I can gather a lot more information today through my computer, through my mobile phone than I can through my business-fed video stream or my business channels. So I really think we just have to keep moving at the pace of consumer desire for video, audio, data-fed content. 

You're describing stuff that can be done right now, but I assume what you're saying is the way it's done right now may involve a whole bunch of different software components, a bunch of APIs, and a whole bunch potentially of hardware components to pull it all together, and you're saying with a AV over IP, a lot of that can be stripped out of it and made more efficient, is that accurate? 

John Marshall: I think what I'm saying is that we've found ways in the past when we had a segregated AV department of a company to do it, according to the standards defined by the national association of broadcasters, that drive the highest quality video. But that really was more of a point to point driven solution. I've got one source device for one screen. 

Also that video content was so voluminous. How do I move it across a data network that's only operating at 10 megabits per second? It's hard, real hard. We're now at a place where the encoding technologies have progressed. Data networks are now operating at greater than 10 gigabits per second. We've got communication networks that are flourishing both on the local area network and the wide area networks so distribution between facilities is more viable. We've got much more storage capacity, so we can load more video, digital video onto our networks and the compute, the availability of computers for CPU or GPU has progressed. Moore's laws have taken us further. 

So if we look at the combination of all of those things, we're now at an inflection point where all of them align and are matching up with that demand for more data, more video, more audio, all in parallel, and the stars are aligning.

So  in a typical corporate environment, how would this play out, if they were using the Userful solution, let's say with the LG Web OS for digital signage? 

John Marshall: The first thing is that LG and Userful sat down and looked at which environment we need to standardize around and the first decision that was made was if we're moving video onto IP or data networks, we really need to be focused on the standards, the protocols of the IT world.

And so prioritizing those codecs, prioritizing those streaming protocols. For example, our RTSP, real-time streaming protocol ensures that we provide for quality while making sure that we're latency sensitive on those data networks and using those standards of the IT world makes the IT world comfortable bringing AV onto their network more so than ever before and I think that's the core of what we've done, is we’ve focused on its standards. 

So what would that mean then? If I was, let's say, a financial services company and I came to Userful and LG and say, I want to do this: 

I want to have KPI dashboards in all of my sales and customer contact areas. I want to be able to pull in a bunch of data from different business systems within the organization. What can you do versus what my AV solutions people are suggesting, which is as you said earlier, a point to point solution? 

John Marshall: They're going to initially say, if I start from the point to point solution that I have to segregate that and isolate that solution on my network, and the IT department automatically doesn't want to do that because more and more we're consolidating in the data center or we're consolidating in the cloud, so they don't want to have all these islands all over the corporation where they have to send IT staff out to manage that island. 

So if I can now centralize that infrastructure, if I can centralize in the data center, it makes for a much easier solution. But the concern or the risk that they have is, I've now got all that AV traffic flowing back and forth across my corporate network, what's that going to do to the rest of my data network? How does that adversely affect that? 

So what we see today is that they'll typically still start icing, they'll create that island, but then they'll see how they can start to pull portions of it back into the data center or how they can manage it from the data center remotely, even though it's still an island. And that's what our AV over IP architecture provides. It's a platform, a software defined solution that allows for remote manageability from ITs central on that island that's remote, using all of those network management protocols, having security and policy, enterprise policy in place like role-based access control, security provisions that they're familiar with that keeps it secure across the network, and then as they grow more and more familiar and comfortable with that island, they can pull it fully back to the data and/or then start deploying more and more from the data center. 

That's the trajectory we're seeing already today at least at Userful. We've seen that from the last 10 customers that we've deployed at.

In doing that sort of thing, are you stripping out hardware components and therefore lower in capital costs? Or are you having to also upgrade the networking components to handle that, with all the 4k video files that are now streaming? 

John Marshall: I'd say yes to both of those. So the three anchors there are: first, we come from a world where you're putting a PC behind a display that can decode the encoded video that was sent from the given source, whether that's a full fledged PC, or whether that's a thin client. We also have options like zero clients out there today. All of these different technologies are basically available for decode. But what you don't have is you don't have the manageability. You don't have the security profile that you would ideally like. So what we've done is we've come in and created a software based solution that allows for you to load basically a soft client that can be loaded onto the display that allows for it to replace that hardware that traditionally sat behind that display.

So you remove hardware there, you lower carbon footprint, you lower energy consumption. It's much more beneficial, but the other side of it is that you increase manageability, Because now you're actually directly managing the endpoint. You're managing the display and you're not having to manage both a device that's behind the display and then try over just that HDMI connection over that CEC link. You're not trying to manage the display with the older HTMI technologies and CEC technologies that we had from the AV world. You have more of the network management tools that the IT world's familiar with. 

So you're putting the software client on the smart display, the LG Web OS system on chip device that's embedded in the display, right?

John Marshall: Correct and we've done this very successfully with all of the digital signage displays from LG. We've done this with all of the video wall displays from LG. We've done those with all of the DV LED solutions from LG and it runs beautifully, but to get there, we had to actually work with LG, to do some redesign and some upgrades to their media engine within that system, within the Web OS displays and ensure that then on top of that, that media engine, it could support our RTSP and then support our application in kind. So it did take some rewiring for a networked latency oriented AV world that's running over IP and that's a challenge. 

So if I'm an end-user and say, “Hey, I'm interested in this. We have a network already in place, but we're using Samsung smart displays that are running Tyzen or we're using Sony or Phillips or Sharp or whatever that's running Android, can we do it?” 

What do you tell them? 

John Marshall: We say absolutely yes. So Userful already developed our soft client for Web OS and deployed that with LG successfully. We've already developed it for Tyzen, for Android, for Linux. We have a client for each. 

So what's the distinction then between what you're doing with LG versus some of the other guys, because the press that came out, you said that some of the other guys were a bit behind. They failed at some of the things that needed to be done. 

John Marshall: I'd say it's one thing for Userful to go develop a soft client that can be loaded onto a display. We can deliver content to that display regardless of manufacturer, regardless of the OS, however, if you want to make sure that you're providing for a real-time streaming protocol, that protocol has to go right into the heart of that smart display and manage it's media engine, it's pipeline. 

And not everyone has been able to successfully integrate RTSP and so therefore they're not going to be as latency sensitive as say, an LG Web OS display that can provide for gaming quality latency, less than 50 milliseconds of latency. That's impressive across a corporate network. So if you want to get to that level, you really need to collaborate and look at those IT protocols in a new way. 

So it's a distinction between, “we can do it” and “we can do it better”? 

John Marshall: Correct. And I would say that also applies to security.

If you want to put certain security standards in place that will make the IT industry comfortable, you have to do that not just in the app. You just can't load an app onto the display. You have to actually look for AV, how that flows through the rest of the system. 

You mentioned earlier that AV is its own department in some larger corporations or historically has been and IT is obviously its own department. There's been lots of talk for the last five, really 10 years about AV and IT converging. 

Is that actually happening now and are AV departments IN larger companies going away and becoming just part of IT?

John Marshall: We, at Userful, see that happening faster and faster. I think the pandemic has helped facilitate that, right? There's a whole sector called unified communications and we all are zooming or Microsoft Teaming, or whatever it is. We're using AV for core business meetings and communications. We can't get away from it anymore.

And so when you're using unified communications, that is AV, you just happen to be using Web RTC as a protocol, right? But did Web RTC come out of the AV world, the national association of broadcasters? No. 

When we look towards other AV technologies, sharing content from our PC onto a screen in a huddle room, as we return to work. Huddle rooms, war rooms, collaboration areas that's becoming more and more AV driven, and that's something that the IT world's getting more familiar with and it's becoming core. So that's exactly where we see it headed as well. Making sure that we're adopting the right protocols to match those emerging standards for the post-pandemic business operations. 

Userful came into the digital signage ecosystem marketing a product that was all about video walls and a different approach to doing video walls, as opposed to very hardware focused. This was much more software defined but you've shifted, maybe into AV over IP as being your core focus. Is that accurate and why did that happen? 

John Marshall: It's absolutely accurate. I joined the company in 2018 and I arrived with that perspective. I'm a networking guy but not just a networking guy. The last several companies I was involved in were IOT companies and I saw, square on, more and more businesses, doing more and more with video but they weren't doing it just to see the videos, they were doing it with a business purpose in mind, for example, worker safety or analyzing employee performance, look at truckers in transportation industry, wanting to monitor even the eyelids of the transportation workers to make sure they were staying awake on long haul deliveries and making sure that they could correlate that video with data for safety. And as I saw more and more data accumulating and more and more use of video, I said, we're headed on a trajectory where video's gonna come right to the heart of business operations and I think that's what we're seeing. 

More and more startups I'm seeing out of Silicon valley are using video to analyze and create better performing business operations. And so what I started realizing was how are we going to take that data from companies like Palentier, create a dataset, create a rule set, create AI and guide us towards managed visual operations. Who's doing that? Who's working on that underlying platform that brings all the data, the video together? And I didn't see anyone. 

So it was a former board member of mine who said that they believed that just like the iPhone or Android phones would get larger and larger tools to be the size of an entire wall. And we'd be using walls like you see in the movies, right? Data dashboards, the assertion was that there would be an underlying business glue that operated off of video and there was an opportunity for some company to come forward and create that kind of platform.

They actually recommended that I take a look at this company, Userful based in Calgary, Canada because they had done a lot of the work to bring those AV protocols together with the IT protocols. So that was the story back in 2018. 

So you joined the company and had to look at things and said, this is a much more opportune market than staying purely focused just on video walls? 

John Marshall: That's absolutely right. What is the hardest problem to solve? Where do we start this AV over IP problem? And our initial thesis was that we start in control rooms because control rooms are where you're pulling in video feeds, you're pulling in data. You're trying to manage the network. You're trying to manage security. You start there and it's an aggregation point for multi-source and multi-display. So if you can solve the control room problem, the emerging modernized control room problem, then you'll be able to address any of the AV over IP challenges that a corporation might be able to face. Naturally, they're very concerned about the timeliness of what they're seeing, since it's real-time monitoring so choosing the right protocols mattered. 

So that's where we began and we focused on control rooms and then have evolved towards corporate signage, call centers, logistics centers for data metrics, dashboards, and are continuing to expand into meeting rooms and the like.

Yeah, I think it's been really interesting in the last two, three years that you've started to see pretty broad understanding that the control room environment, as you say, aggregates all this information, there's so many other environments all the way out to manufacturing floors and customer contact centers and so on, they all have a need for a dashboard of some kind, because it's the most opportune real-time way to communicate to the people working there.

John Marshall: I couldn't agree with you more. And I think the interesting thing for us, now if I shift back to the AV or the digital signage space, digital signage is more accustomed to single sourced, single output. But as we move more and more towards that operations mindset, we're looking at multi-source, so how do you do that without looking across a network? 

It gets a lot harder. So it's a whole mindset shift, right? Multi sources is a whole new paradigm. 

Is this a situation that obviously in some respects is disintermediating some of the hardware components that are on a traditional point to point digital signage network. What does it mean for those companies and those end-users who are using CMS software solutions, traditional digital signage monitoring, and management solutions. 

Are they also not necessarily needed in this model or they're something that plugs in? 

John Marshall: I looked at some fairly credible research recently, and I think that there's always going to be a need for traditional digital signage. That market's strong and growing and there'll still be demand for single source to single display application, but as we evolve more and more, I think that we see by, I think the data suggested by 2026-2027, a third, maybe more than a third of the market's really shifting towards a software defined approach and I think that's a pretty fast migration, especially when you're doing more and more multi-source, just a standard matrix switchers not going to get you there. You really need to look at network based solutions. So when you look at companies like Netgear, right? Let's talk about Netgear very quickly.

I think Netgear is quickly evolving, taking traditional IT networking, they're taking 10 gigabit switches and they're introducing an AV mindset into those switches by creating profiles, AV profiles that you can match up the right source device with the right display, without having to know all about AV standards. They're integrating the two in a solutions mindset that I don't see other networking or traditional networking companies doing. They're taking a very unique AV approach to network topologies. 

But I think as we move in that direction, Netgear is a really good example of a hardware based company that's adapting and bringing that software defined mindset into their hardware products. So I think that will happen. I also think there will be hardware companies that have traditionally just taken source material and coded it and put it out through a given interface, they're going to have a lot more to learn. And partnering with companies like Userful or Netgear would be advantageous for them. I just think now is the time to get on that train.

Did Cisco kinda miss the mark on this? 

They were in digital signage 10-12 years ago selling hardware devices and doing all that, you would think they would have been perfect for this sort of thing. 

John Marshall: I think Cisco's really far out in front of many. They have a firm grasp around the right protocols for video, they're strong with other technologies like multicast, they've got the full portfolio there, but I don't know if Cisco's quite yet seeing this migration of the AV segment of the market migrating on to corporate networks. And I don't know if they are watching or studying the evolution of the industry and the implications for corporate networks in the same way. But I think that they'll see that probably in the next year or two years. 

You mentioned the next year or two years. What might people more broadly see out of Userful going through 2022 and beyond? 

John Marshall: I think that one of the key growth opportunities for Userful is recognizing that moving to the data center for a private cloud or enabling AV from either private cloud or public cloud is an important move for the IT department and as AV moves from being an AV department nto IT, we have to be mindful that it is a much larger organization with different responsibilities. So there's an applications group within most IT departments that are responsible for application selection, then once an application is selected, there's an infrastructure operations group, and that's typically where we're seeing AV move because it's an infrastructure or operations play.

We're seeing that that's an area that needs consideration. The security department, the security team within an IT department has a say. So all of these different areas have high relevance, but what we're seeing is that as more and more sharing of resources become relevant and as AV becomes a shared resource, a multi-source, multi-display resource that will happen through I&O, infrastructure and operations.

And so we're recognizing the need to move from islands to data centers and we have several offerings for private cloud and public cloud that will be announced later in 2022, and that will help facilitate that move. 

All right, John, thank you so much for spending some time with me. I even understood some  of it.

John Marshall: Thank you for making the time to hear what we had to say. 

 

David Crumley, HUSH Studios

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

Experience is one of those soft, squishy terms that gets used a lot in the context of digital signage - using displays and content to attract, engage and leave a desired impression with the people who go through a designed space.

There are many projects that get described as visual experiences that aren't a lot more than screens on walls that are running stuff, but a Brooklyn company called HUSH Studios is absolutely in the business of designing and delivering visual experiences that can communicate the mission, values and products of big corporate clients.

HUSH has done interesting work in the corporate spaces of some of the biggest and most familiar brands in the United States and beyond. The company came on my radar after it pushed out a case study last year showing what was done at Uber's newly opened corporate campus in San Francisco. It's a digitally-driven space, but much more inventive than just a big fine pitch LED on a feature wall.

I had an interesting chat with David Crumley, the Austin, Texas-based Technology Director for HUSH. We get into the thinking and technology challenges of these kinds of projects, what works and why, and his life being the guy who has to make the big ideas into something that exists or can be made, that makes sense, fits a budget, and works reliably.

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TRANSCRIPT

David, thank you for joining me. What does HUSH do, and what's your role? 

David Crumley: Hush  is an experiential design firm based in Brooklyn. Our mission is to design experiences for the most dynamic organizations in the world. Our work is around the globe. Our goal is to seamlessly integrate architecture and digital technology to create custom experiences for the workplace, employees, guests and transform the built environment with technology. 

My role is the technical director and I focus on the kind of AV hardware and systems side of it and we have other technical directors that focus more on the software side. 

So you would go onsite, do site surveys and all that, at least in normal times, and basically work with the big thinkers who say, “we want to do this” and you say, okay, or sure we can do that?

David Crumley: Yeah, that's actually a great way of describing it, and how I often will talk with my team. We have an amazing creative team of art directors, architects that come up with amazing concepts, sketches or quick renders and then my job is to then look at that and figure out, okay, how do we make that? What technologies can we use? Hopefully it's something that exists already, so it's not building something from scratch, sometimes it is. 

And then working with a huge ecosystem of partners on the client side and the build side to bring it all to life.

So at least part of your time is spent understanding the emerging technologies and building relationships with different vendors to understand whether these guys will deliver or they're going to be a problem?

David Crumley: Exactly, right. We spent a lot of time working with LED manufacturers, lighting manufacturers, AV integrators, fabricators, physical computing partners all over the place to figure out, to know, and have a jumpstart on what products or options are out there. What will make the most sense to be permanently installed? Because our project has a lifespan of 10 plus years. So it's crucial to have those relationships in that knowledge of all the hardware and technologies out there. 

The company's key statement is: we mix content, space and technology to communicate an organization's mission, vision, and products.

I'm curious how you get to that, because there's a lot of corporate mission statements out there that somehow managed to be lofty and, in their words, but also empty. Like I'll look at their mission statement, I go, okay, what does that mean? 

David Crumley: Yeah, that's a good question and to be totally transparent, that is not my area of expertise. Thankfully, we have a huge team of strategists and creatives that spend a lot of time upfront working with the clients to distill that down, to figure out the essence of what we should be creating and what should be built and what the messaging should be to actually translate the company's brand and mission and identity in to these experiences that can easily turn into something where it becomes more complex or convoluted.

I think Hush  does a really great job of distilling that down and finding the essence of what needs to be communicated and doing it in an artful and thoughtful way, which is one of the main reasons I've worked with them so long and enjoy the work we do there. 

Do projects lead with digital or is it more a case of, it's just a common outcome because the technology makes sense? 

David Crumley: It's a bit of both. We do start with digital, that is our bread and butter. We are excellent at taking data and content and using that to create amazing visualizations and content and lighting animations, and what not with these projects, but we also do a lot of strictly analog work as well. So super graphics, like fabricated elements that go within the building itself. 

We have a few that have no digital components at all. It's just strictly analog type work. It really depends on the space, the client, the brief, bost of our projects do have digital aspects. 

Do the clients or potential clients come with a brief in mind? Do they have an idea that we want to do a huge video wall in our lobby or whatever or are they saying we want to communicate our mission, our brand, what should we do? 

David Crumley: It's a bit of both, honestly.

We prefer whenever it's the latter, because we have more of a blank page to work with and we can do those extensive strategy design concepts in phases and really figure out what makes sense for the client, their brand and for the space. But on the other side, we do get a lot of projects where the building is built, they have SPECT hardware, they have a big system, but they have nothing to go on it and so we come in to figure out what kind of content or what makes sense on it. So we do a bit of both of them as well. 

I would imagine the latter is maybe not problematic because it's work and it could still be interesting and all that, but to you you're confined to what you can do, right?

David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly. 

Your company's worked with a lot of very big global brands. Why do they come your way? 

David Crumley: That's a good question. I think they are drawn to the work we do that I kinda mentioned earlier where we will work closely with them to distill down what the message and what the concept is.

I think we do a great job of integrating media and content into the architecture, to where it's not just screens on walls or big video wall, like you said, and for the clients that want to have that tight integration between architecture, technology, content, storytelling, I think that's where we stand out and our body of work and luckily that gravitates with a lot of clients, and when they come to us, that's what they want and that's what we do well. And so we're typically set up for success in that regard. 

You mentioned storytelling. I found a lot of corporate lobby video walls and experiences or whatever, it's not so much storytelling, at least with the early ones, it has been more about just the wow factor! 

David Crumley: Yeah, that's very true, like big, bold, fast content, just trying to do that initial kind of wow moment, like you said. And another approach we do is like a slow burn where there is a wow moment in the scale and the architectural elements, but we're not showing all our cards or all the things that technology can do. It's a bit restrained, both in the content and the tech and it allows the content to be a longer enjoyable thing, especially for employees that come into a lobby every day where they don't see everything it can do the first time and it just becomes repetitive.

Yeah, it's interesting when you say slow burn, because I often talk about how the wow factor jobs tend to have a best before date or an expiry date where it just becomes this very expensive, big piece of wallpaper. So, yeah, strategy is super important for that. 

Let's talk about a project that got Hush  on my radar, the global headquarters for Uber in San Francisco.  Can you describe what was done there?

David Crumley: Yeah, so we were brought on very early. So it was one of those ideal situations that I mentioned, being a blank slate where the client knew they wanted to do something in their lobby for a new headquarters building built in San Francisco. It's a multi-building complex and there's one building called, MD2, that is the main entry point and it's an amazingly designed building that has this beautiful open lobby space and they knew they wanted to have some sort of interactive installation there. And we were brought in to do strategy and figure out what made sense.

We did a bunch of concepts, but then they would narrow down to two that we luckily had the time,  budget to actually build out and flesh out both of those concepts with full renders, motion tests, some initial drawings to really flesh them out and all the different content modes, presented our way up through the organization and got buy off on one of those concepts, which is called, The Stream and that was ultimately what was built and the concept behind that on a super high level was just translating Uber's activities into beams of light and motion that would be constantly flowing through the lobby and resolving in a kind of high resolution canvas at one end of the lobby that could be used as a means of providing storytelling, not traditional content, but it would at least be a have the resolution and surface area to provide, video content and a mix of motion graphics and whatnot.

So we worked on that project for, I think the design was about three years, design, construction fabrication, so it was a long-term project and we installed it last year and it officially launched this year, and components of it are being scaled to other Uber lobbies throughout the world that we are in the process of doing now.

I believe at one end, there's a fine pitch LED video wall, if you want to call it a conventional video wall that you might find in a lobby, but a lot of what was done was custom fabricated LED almost like light tubes and things,right?

David Crumley: Yeah. So you're exactly right on the LED wall. It's a fairly standard LED wall but it's about eight feet wide, about nine feet tall. And, above it, and throughout the lobby are these custom tubes. We worked with a fabricator called Machine Histories down in Los Angeles. And again, going back to the privilege and opportunity to have a long design process. And the time to prototype, we worked with them to create two prototypes of these LED tubes and they are utilizing the Martin DC strip, which Hush has used on quite a few projects. And I'm a huge fan of it because it has long cable runs for the power supplies and 16 bit color depth, 60 frames per second,. So I knew I wanted to use that to begin with, but we had a challenge in that we needed to have the tubes as thin as possible, like everything in our architecture team wants to do as thin and sleek as possible, but we also needed to have the content viewable as close to 360 degrees around the tube so we spent a lot of time figuring out the right diffusion, the right placement of the LED, figuring out cable management actually almost productizing the tubes where we worked with the fabricator to make a custom PCB connector from tube to tube, so all the tubes can be easily removed and replaced for maintenance.

But in the end, we ended up having over 2200 of the Martin 15 millimeter strips used in these tubes and there's an overhead component that's suspended from the ceiling that makes this a tube array above your head, as you walk in through the lobby. And that's I think just under 90 feet long and at its highest point, it goes up to 25 feet. 

The lobby has a single height area and then it opens up into a double or triple height space and the tube array actually bins up and goes up to the upper area over some suspended bridges. And then we also built a large wall behind the reception area using the same tubes that forms about a 22 foot high screen by 28 feet wide low-res with the same tubes, but it makes this huge statement that has a bit of transparency to see the stairs behind it in between the tubes and you can actually get behind the tubes and see the same content from both sides. 

I don't know the budget or anything else, but I assume that if Uber really wanted to have high-res tubes or just make the whole thing high-res, they would have the dollars to do that, but they've gone this way. Why was it done that way? They just liked the idea of keeping it low-res or is it more visually interesting that way?

David Crumley: There are a few criteria. One, the visual aspect since the architecture of the lobby has lots of slats and repeating linear elements that the tube array compliments really well.

To your point, the LEDs are premium LEDs from Martin, the tubes are custom fabricated, there's a lot of work. So certainly that money could have been put toward more traditional LED displays or high-res, but having that kind of art more integrated into the architectural design as well as something that just looks different and unique to the space, and we also had another criteria to keep in mind is that this lobby is an unconditioned space and we could not add any additional cooling. So we were trying to keep heat energy consumption to a minimum within the space, which the LED strips are great for.

= So it's an interesting overall discipline that Hush has in that there are creative shops who produce the material for big LED video walls and corporate lobbies and so on and there are vendors who could come into that space to say, yeah, we can put a 1.2 pixel pitch wall right along the whole breadth of the lobby here and there, nut in order to really pull this together, you've got to be creative, you've got to have technology sourcing, and you've got to have a whole bunch of engineers in the middle to pull all this together right?

David Crumley: Yeah, and that's one of the great things about Hush is that we have architects on staff. We have more traditional art directors and designers, motion graphics designers, myself as the hardware background, creative technologists that do custom software dev. So running this actual experience as a custom piece of software that our team built in open frameworks and actually multiple applications written but that does a mix of rendered motion graphics as well as real time content that uses a whole interactive system that I haven't even touched on.

So yeah, I feel like to do what we do, you have to have all these different kinds of departments and disciplines under one roof. 

Yeah, if you don't have that, can you really even be competitive in these kinds of jobs? 

David Crumley: Yeah, it's difficult, because if we didn't have this mix, we e could potentially do the initial concept and then that would then have to be bid out to another firm to build and then potentially another firm to do the software. It becomes costly, I would imagine the cost would then be probably double what it was. 

Yeah, and finger pointing!

David Crumley: Oh yeah, exactly. One throat to choke is a good and bad thing, but depending on whose throat it is. 

You referenced content, I'm curious, when you talk about being able to visualize Uber's activities, what's going on there, are you tapping into an API that has analytics that are showing how many drivers are on the road right now or whatever? 

David Crumley: We sourced data but there's no live data feeding it, which we do a mix of content for our projects. Sometimes it's the live API, sometimes it's an existing data set. And with this, we use existing info to build our content around. We do have some things, future content modes we're working on, that'll pull more live data.

But the real time component of this, the interactive mode that I mentioned, is using an array of nine depth cameras that are in that overhead array, and as guests walk under that array, you are disrupting the stream of information flowing above you in the tubes. So you can see ripples within the content, and then as you approach the high-res screen at the end of the lobby, once you reach a certain threshold, it reveals a curtain animation that reveals a more traditional video content on the high-res wall. So you can actually trigger that content.

I recognize that you're on the technical side of this, but I have to ask this anyways, experience is a really soft squishy kind of term. How does it get defined with these kinds of projects and how do you measure and know when you know something is working, that it is delivering an experience?

David Crumley: Oh, that is a great question. I'll take a beat to think about that. Because I'm very much on the technical side and not on the more feelings side of it, for lack of a better term. But I think I personally look into social media posts or seeing what people's reactions to the work we do and how photos are being shared and how they're connecting to it and we, as a company, do analytics in terms of number of guests, their engagement time,what videos they trigger, dwell time, all those things, which we turn into actual intellectual reports for our clients to determine that. 

But I think it's more the kind of personal anecdotes that I find appealing, just how they talk about it's this amazing experience they haven't seen before, or even this particular experience is viewable through the storefront windows and this building is across the street from the arena where the Golden State Warriors play, so it gets a lot of pedestrian traffic. So you see a lot of photos of other people talking about it as well. 

With the pandemic, we've had this shift of head offices being the Mecca, so to speak, and that's where you go. Too many companies have people working from home. I'm curious if that has changed the business, changed the way you have to approach corporate spaces and are companies scaling back, or are they seeing this stuff as even more important? 

David Crumley: I think it's the latter. We were worried at first, a couple of years ago when everything happened. But then as we talked with clients and saw briefs coming out and seeing articles and blog posts from industry thought leaders, we came to realize and also we agree with the stance that things like what we do and Uber’s lobby and other headquarters, I think helped make the office a more appealing place to visit, because it's to actually get employees there especially with content that is refreshed or ever-changing, or that's data-driven because it's something special to see and interact with. 

And so luckily, since the pandemic started, the work we've been doing hasn't slowed down and we're still seeing briefs and clients wanting to do these types of engaging experiences in their offices, public space. 

You mentioned content being refreshed, is that something that you have to really push on clients to understand that guys lighting this up is a great first step, but it's a first step you need to budget and think about what's on this display and what's in this experience for, as you said earlier, 5-10 years? 

David Crumley: Yeah, it's extremely important. I think anything we do, we prepare a content matrix and we'll propose evergreen content that can live throughout the life of experience and then also content that needs to be refreshed or changed or in the case of it being data-driven or built off on a data set, the frequency of that. So there's kind of incentive to keep it fresh, like you said, and for a lot of our projects, after we deploy, we'll build in a certain amount of time for content updates over the next year, two years. That's part of the scope so we can help make sure that happens because it is easy a lot of times for it to be up, everyone's happy and then forget about it. 

Even though we build our own content management system and adjust it to each project, and even though it's user-friendly to use and built to update, it's not always used by every client, obviously. So it's extremely important to do that and continue to update the content like you said.

What do you do in cases where you have a corporate client or potential client who already has a corporate digital signage network with standard flat panel screens in the sales area, maybe other areas as well and they're using already have a CMS of some kind that they use and they have a certain way of doing things and you're trying to plug into that, does it become problematic? 

David Crumley: It's tricky, I'm not going to lie. And we always get the requests like why can't you just use the CMS we have? And it's possible, it's not easy and by the time you factor in all the customization that's required, it’s typically more expensive than just using the custom CMS that we built and then editing it or adding features or modules to do everything that's needed. 

So we almost always will use our core CMS and in the scenario that you said that's come up recently and we're actually building a feature for our CSM so as you use it to create content that's real time and targeting our custom displays, it will actually render out that content in a video format. And so the company can use their existing digital signage system to use that video as well so the content can be shared across. 

So you would have a reverse API, so you could push stuff out to other systems?

David Crumley: Yeah, exactly.

Is there technology, let's say super fine micro LEDs or the LEDs you're starting to see embedded in architectural glass that you're waiting on it to mature and then use? 

David Crumley: Yeah, I feel like over the last two-three years, so many projects or clients or partners have recommended doing LED glass or the LED film that can be applied on glass and it's getting close. We haven't used it yet because it just hasn't been the right resolution or the right brightness or for a myriad of reasons. I am certainly excited by it, but I'm not quite there yet to be able to spec it. 

And even the OLED displays, we haven't really spec’d those yet for the same reason, for content burn-in and just how they work, but I think this year, I'm starting to feel more comfortable with those and we're starting to include those in some of our designs and proposals. 

And yeah, the micro LED, I'm extremely interested in. We had a project last year where I tried to use it, which didn't go super well because the product just didn't live up to expectations. But I think again in another year, I think we'll be close if they can get the kind of coating process down to be consistent across it. But I have not seen that yet. 

You're using a lot of LEDs. Do you have to worry about proximity to people? Are you encouraged by the increasing number of manufacturers who are doing these kinds of coated modules?

David Crumley: Yeah, I'm interested in the coating. That's what I was referring to, not being consistent across the panels yet to where we had a project where it had the coating, but then it almost looked like you painted a brick wall with different shades of paint.

Since we tie it so tightly into the architecture, we try to incorporate ways to naturally keep people away. So like for Uber, for example, we have a nice trim piece around and then the interactive spot for you to deal with it is 10 feet away and, it's a natural stopping point and so it's just using the human nature of not getting too close to a big, bright wall to help protect it. 

Do all the business systems now seem to be a lot more secure, but open through APIs. Are you able to get out a lot more data? 

David Crumley: Yes and no. It's still a little tricky in most regards to get truly live data from a lot of companies for exactly what you said for security, privacy reasons. And then just making sure that data format of the API doesn't change drastically, that's been a big challenge for us. So typically, we'll use live data, but it'll be in a way that can be formatted or have an intermediary step to then make sure it continues to work with our software app.

Through these last two years I would imagine the standard practice when you're working on a project like the Uber one that started well before the pandemic, you would go onsite, you'd be in San Francisco for two weeks or whatever, figuring all this out. 

Have various Hush people had to mostly do this remotely?

David Crumley: It was a mix. We started the design process before and then we did a few site visits before everything shut down. And then we luckily did the prototype review the year before, I guess it was 2019 that we did a lot of the prototype reviews, both in LA and our studio in New York with the client and then during construction, we were not on site until it was essentially installed or close to being installed. And we had a small team that went during the tube and hardware installation. So myself included, I was on site for a couple of weeks at, but it was still a very small team and limited, and we had to do multiple trips spread out over a long period of time, but it was close to normal, but it was still very hard and tricky and you never knew who was actually gonna be able to be on site because of COVID protocol and which team you're going to be working with. 

Last question, if you can even answer this, what is Hush working on that you're allowed to talk about?

David Crumley: That's a good question. I mentioned we're scaling the streamed experience that we did for Uber's headquarters to multiple locations and that's wrapping up now for the main locations and it doesn't have the tubes, it has various just direct view LED walls, but what's nice about that is they're each a little different because they're all tied into the architecture of the space. One is a fairly traditional, single flat wall, but another one has a mitered 90 degree corner and is a very long canvas, I think the resolution's a little less than 7,000 by 900 pixels, so ultra wide format. And then another one has a radius corner around the wall because that's how the architecture was. And it was nice on our end that we developed the software to smartly scale the content across all these different aspect ratios, sso that's deploying now. 

We have a few projects for some financial institutions that are launching now that one of those uses LED strips, this time from S&A, along with a direct view LED wall that is incorporated into these kinds of fins that does this kind of reflected light back on the wall behind it, which is really nice. Hopefully I will be able to talk about it more in another month or two. And then, we have some other things early in the concept phase, but probably not allowed to talk about any of that.

Yeah, I would imagine when you talk about account wins and all that, in certain respects, it’s a much bigger win when you also have the contract about being allowed to talk about it until it’s done.

David Crumley: Exactly. And that's, going back to the Uber project, it's nice that it's ground level, public accessible. So many of our projects are on the top floor that you have to get through security or be invited to see. So, we love the ones that are a little more public facing.

Yeah, me too. There's been a few times when, like the LAX airport with the international terminal with all the work Moment Factory did there, I wanted to see it, but I had to go through post security on a flight to Japan or something if I wanted to see it. So never have. 

David Crumley: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've been to LAX so many times. I've not been in the Bradley terminal to see it. And then one time I tried to get to it and had a long layover and tried to connect my terminal to it and it was an exercise in futility and I could never get there. 

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

David Crumley: It was my pleasure.

Jared Jones & Alisa Semyekhina, DBSI

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

There are a few companies in digital signage that have picked a vertical market, got into it, and stayed very much in that lane.

But I can't think of any other companies in the sector that operate like DBSI, a Phoenix-area company that provides and manages a full-featured digital signage solution for its retail banking  customers, but also designs and builds branches, among many things.

The company has been around for 20+ years and its customers range from small regional credit unions to whale accounts like Wells Fargo.

For the last eight years, DBSI has done a survey of banking customers that benchmarks the adoption rate, state and trends with respect to in-branch digital efforts. I've been through the deck and noted a lot of interesting insights about how on-screen messaging is being used, and how banking customers see the ROI.

I spoke with a couple of folks from DBSI - Jared Jones, a Digital Transformation Strategist, and Alisa Semyekhina, the Head of Digital Signage.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jared and Alisa, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DBS is all about, where you're located and what's the range of work that you do? 

Jared Jones: Yeah. So DBSI is located just outside of Phoenix, Arizona in Chandler. In short, our mission is really just to redefine the banking industry.

We found a very unique way to fuse together the design build aspect, the equipment aspect and of course, technology up to including to be a little bit more parts of this podcast, digital signage. 

Yeah, it's interesting, I assume DBSI the DB is designed to be built, and it's interesting that you do the actual design of bank branches and credit union branches and so on.

And that digital signage is not just a bolt on thing. It's like a big part of what you do, Right?

Jared Jones: Yeah, absolutely. All too often, what we're finding is our clients. Whenever you use the bolt-on approach you get a lot of finger pointing and the messaging is concise with the staff, the members and customers get a very choppy experience to where it's whenever you're able to house it all under one roof. It allows you to really take a very intentional and proactive approach to all the different elements of the bank branch process.

And this is what DBSI does. You're not also servicing the healthcare industry or hotels etc. Like banking is your vertical.

Jared Jones: Exactly. Exclusively we are vertically actually. And that's really one of our competitive advantages. Simply due to the fact, whenever you work with a local architect.

We found that the banking credit executives have to spend, I've seen it everywhere for a week to a month, really just educating them on the industry or maybe industry’s best practices, what their customers and members are really trying to achieve. How do you really try to guide the flow?

So by exclusively dealing in the banking industry, it allows us to develop our own best practices. That way we can almost take a driver's seat and really educate our clients on the industry, what it's really evolving into, how we can maybe stroke the footprint. We understand what a teller cash recyclers.

We understand how to move into MADEC too, to where we can lower that to you and things of that nature. So again, my us exclusively dealing in this industry and allows us to take the driver's seat. And really educating our clients rather than having to local educate a local architect. 

And I assume that with the banking industry, like many industries these days, really don't want to have a whole bunch of service providers doing one aspect of what they do. So if they can nail it down to, okay, you guys just figure this out for us and help us with it as opposed to let's put together a team of vendors and make this happen.

It's just cleaner this way. Right?

Jared Jones: So it's not really that single point of contact. And it just allows us to really take ownership over the entire project and allows us to ultimately own the project and allow us to deliver. 

So is it strictly in the United States? Are you in other countries doing work? 

Jared Jones: Presently, we were just in the United States.

We have either current or past projects in all 50. But we do not do it internationally. 

So, I live in Canada, I don't really know the banks down there other than ATM machines when I'm traveling. But if I were a U S resident, what institutions would I.. Are you guys active with who they might know and that you're allowed to talk about?

Jared Jones: Wells Fargo, we do a lot of business with a super regional down there in the south, Navy federal credit union, they utilize our technology. And I would say those are probably our big three. A lot of your listeners will understand the reality of what you do. 

So you have big whale clients like Wells Fargo, but you also do small or regional credit unions sort of thing.

Jared Jones: We've done business with, like I said, I went from Wells Fargo to and obviously they are in the trillions and asset size to where, we also deal with very local community credit unions 700 million assets. 

We're having this chat because you guys as I'm interested in speaking with you, anyways, but so you have a benchmark report that you put out that looks at the state of digital signage and the adoption rate of it.

How was that put together and how often have you done that? 

Jared Jones: Yeah. So we started doing the annual digital signage benchmark about seven or eight years ago now. And essentially what it is like I told you before, we tried to take that very intentional approach, very data centric, data driven into our process.

So with that, we really want to understand what the industry was saying and how they are leveraging it. Of course you don't allow us to better refine our best practices. But now we've actually grown to about, I think just over 400-430 respondents different banks and credit unions and allowing us to get an insight into how, or I guess if and how they're using digital signage in their branches and headquarters

So you are doing a survey of some kind?

Jared Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So it's an incentive-based survey. It's actually a unique approach we use because there are a couple of barriers, sometimes whatever they are accepting guests from different vendors. We actually offered a $10 gift certificate either to the executive filling out the survey.

Or we were going to donate that $10 in a charity of their choice. So it was fun. It allows us to give in their name cause I don't know how familiar you are, but that's actually one of my most passionate favorite parts rather than working with community banks and credit unions is their true commitments to their community.

So through this, obviously we get the data that we can share with the industry and then they get a continuation of their mission to do right by their community. 

Okay. So let's talk about what you found in the 2022 report. It's called off the charts. Were there any surprises?

Jared Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So a work surprise that I actually found was that only 6% of digital signage content was going to be utilized for onboarding to a little lower cost channel or either mobile platform. For whatever reason, this has been a hot topic item for probably the last 10-15 years.

We're making executives try to actually onboard their clients to a little bit lower cost channel. And I don't want to speak for other industries. I can only assume that being the same, but it is a lot cheaper for me to sign up for a different financial product, like a savings account or checking account, or maybe even a credit card.

Whatever I can offload it into a mobile channel. It allows them to take it from, I think it's just over maybe $3-$4 a transaction, all the way, I think maybe 20-25 cents. So that was probably my biggest surprise, but at least I think you end up more.

Alisa Semyekhina: Yes, definitely. I actually had a lot of surprises from the survey.

I would like to share study with content management like flex systems. So we noticed that the increase of actual expenditures for the software increased, but with that also increased the stress level. So I was actually interested to see the correlation between that. And one of the interesting facts was that our clients will, but then or just banks and credit unions marketing manager teams, they'll be looking for features and capabilities.

So again, just displaying content is not good enough for them. It's actually looking for a fast approach to deploy to all branch networks. And we're talking about not just one or two branches, we are talking about 300 plus branches. So how efficient you are with that? And the next part is about the IT side because again, if you're using, let's say flash drives, you are not going to be efficient. You need the whole team or facility teams, or IT teams to go to each branch and deploy content. And that's where, again, that disconnect is. So many different vendors teams are working on content or deploying content that you can not be on time with weather information, weather rates change, or anything like that.

And with that your branch team is left with no support from the marketing team. So that's where I found one of my biggest surprises. 

Yeah. I was interested in that, the big pinpoints. Within the banking industry with respect to digital signage was managing the content and creating content for it.

And also worrying about the side of it. I find it quite amazing that you still have vendor or primary end users who are using flash drives and don't have scalability or anything. Is that just a function of this version, one of what they were doing and that they learn the hard way that they should not have done, or are they just keeping with what they were doing originally and not even understanding that there's an easier way?

Alisa Semyekhina: I think your spot on Dave I think it was the conceptual phase for even proving that digital signage has a place in their branches.

And with studying, and that's like having the conversation with quite a few of our clients who are transitioning to a different solution. And as we are not only partnering with software companies, but also content creators. So with that, when we have conversations we are coming from different perspectives.

Again, what's the best solution for them? And of course, again, the ease of deployment, ease of creation, content, ease of updating content. And it's also on the goal. Now, everything has to happen on the goals. Yeah. When you update your content from your cell phone for example, or bring that experience, that's differentiating you from anyone else down the street?

So if I'm coming to a branch and they see my name on the screen welcoming me. Yeah. I would love to see that. But can software support. So I think it's proving the concept and then moving into a different level where, how do we do that? And that's where I think most financial institutions need help.

Is it a function of the financial institutions and the communicators within those companies, understanding that this is not a technology investment, as much as it's a communications investment, and you have to think content first and the technology is important, but it's the underlying stuff. 

Alisa Semyekhina: I think it's also an interesting point where both of them need to be going hand-in-hand.

It has to be a strategy of what technology as well as a strategy for content. And they believe Jared has some more thoughts on that. 

Jared Jones: Yeah. So to your point, yes, of course it is a technology investment, but it's also an experience investment. All too often, what we're seeing inside these branches and headquarters is a stale environment. Wherever you're actually gonna have to take that intentional approach behind your digital signage strategy, it allows you to have complete control over your end points with the right content and system.

Anywhere from as granular, as changing the hours that your content is going to display, whether you want it client facing or staff facing, or it's that very hyper customized content. What Alisa was just talking about, where either I can say, what am I walking or make your credit union say welcome Jared or something of that nature.

So really it's an experience investment is how I think about it. 

And do you have a sense I'm sure you do have, what's truly impactful content and messaging in the branch. Because when I go to my local branch, after I do this interview, I've got to go to the bank. I'm going to walk in there and it's going to have digital signage behind the counter showing me news headlines and the weather, and then some kind of generic messaging about the branch.

 And I'm just thinking they've made the investment, but they really haven't thought through the content because I just came from outside. I know what the weather is. And I don't need news headlines when I walk into a branch. 

Jared Jones: And really, that's where we start to differentiate ourselves as you're well aware and I've listened to several episodes.

I get your understanding of it, the placement of screens, and you have the quality of the screens, but really that's just one pillar. And really, I would almost say the second pillar is going to be this content development. It's not just saying, Hey, now we offer free checking or here's the local news headlines, or maybe the weather or something of that nature.

It's really about getting that hyper vocal content. One of the more rewarding things that I get about working with these community banks and credit unions, like I said, is their community involvement.

So whether it's setting up scholarships, whether it's going to be volunteering for habitat or community, whether it's going to be charitable donations, Whenever, each branch has its own, little fun mission.

It creates a little bit more sense of community. It allows a little friendly competition and ultimately it allows the communities to win. I don't want to speak for other industries but I think right now people are more concerned with the missions of the businesses that they do business with. So whether it's Tom shoes, whether it's going to be, I buy a pair and they donate a pair of Bomba socks.

Again, I bought a pair of hair. I want to feel good about where I'm spending my money, where I'm spending my time. So whenever these banks or credit unions can educate their client base saying, Hey, I just raised $52,000 or something. It makes me feel good. Hey, they're actually taking my money and they're investing it back for my community, which obviously I care much about. I really like that approach. 

I'm looking at some of the results of the survey and what gets shown on the screens more than anything else is promotions and branding, right? Is that the right approach or is that just what people are doing and you would move more towards community messaging?

Jared Jones: That is an approach. That's really where we're going to work with the marketing teams and really understand what their overall overarching business objectives are. Yes, of course, product education is one. Then we're going to actually move into that community involvement piece, then we're going to go to meet the team that way we build a sense of trust and a little bit of camaraderie that way I can understand who my Baker's going to be. 

So there were seven pillars and actually I want to pass it back over to Alisa to go into a little bit deeper dive from content creation on where would you like to focus for that embraced strategy? 

Alisa Semyekhina: Dave, you raised quite a great point about promotions. So many promotions, as traditionally speaking, have short legs, right? We are talking about just something very actionable. There is a headline, there is a copy and so in so many cases, it's not actually thought through based on the campaign-level because the campaign-level it's, again, we are connecting on an emotional level and we are connecting with our customers' members from the lifecycle approach, what's important to them, where they are right now, why they actually add the branch and how we can help them?

So we're moving from that transactional mindset into an advisory mindset and be able to speak to them and see where and what they're doing right now at the branch, how we can help them, how we can migrate them, let's say to mobile channels to again, be time efficient, give them time back because rather than coming to the branch and coming to the branch only for very specific reasons, like are we starting out something, are we at the stage where we're setting up our business or we're buying a new car and all those questions being answered, not something where we go and Google, which we can, but it will be that approach where you actually mean something and that’s personalization of experience. 

And you saw the report as well, one of the surprises I saw was that displaying rates were 46%, I believe and that's a high rate of displaying just the rate and you're competing with a cell phone. So if I see a rate on a screen, I want to know, am I getting the best of the best rate? But if I’m actually connecting with my members or customers on an emotional level. For example, if I had refinanced, if someone else got a fantastic experience and they shared that experience, I want to know what happened, I want to work with that person, because again, I want that experience as well. 

So I think a lot of marketing teams realize that, and they know that they probably just don't have time to implement that moving from a promotional side into the community side. 

Yeah, it sounds like if you, for cost and resource reasons, use commodity information like financial rates, that sort of thing, it's great in terms of the amount of time you have to allocate to this, but you're not resonating, you're not reaching your customers. You're not striking an emotional cord with them. You're just telling them stuff that they can get elsewhere.

Alisa Semyekhina: Absolutely.

Looking at some of the outcomes of the report, one of the things that I found interesting is that the perfect formula for doing content is a blend of in-house and agency work. So if you just do in house work, maybe you don't have the creative chops and the understanding of reaching people emotionally, if you just do agency work, it's going to take all your budget.

Alisa Semyekhina: That is very true, but we also work with teams of 1-3 marketing teams, and they have to actually not only spend time on digital signage, but on everything else, they're wearing so many hats. And they have ideas, the question is always time and priorities. 

We've been working with many small towns and we are amazed at how many great ideas they have and what we are actually doing is we're helping to streamline, help them to actually set the structure to content calendar, to again, content creation and helping them where they need us. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to do everything for them, because like you said, if you're outsourcing everything, then you lose that connection with the core of your institution. And if you are doing everything in house, you don't have time for everything. So with this, we're working as a partner with our clients to make sure there is that balance.

 And of course, sometimes you want to outsource something because it could be time consuming. So for example, we are talking about animations or drone videos or any other fun projects that you would like to bring into your space, whether it's headquarters or a branch, but again, you have to hire someone or you have to look for someone and that's where our expertise comes in. 

One of the other data points from this year’s report, I was struck by how built out the banking industry and credit union industry is. The great majority of them and particularly when you get to the larger institutions have digital signage, but I also get a sense that while there's a lot of digital signage activity out there, maybe a lot of it isn't done all that well yet. Is that a fair statement? 

Jared Jones: Yeah, it is. And that's what Alisa was talking about as far as we've had the pleasure of working with teams of all, consisting of one to probably two or three dozen, depending on the size of the institution. 

It's really interesting and it's really not just from an asset size of the bank or credit union, as far as their sophistication or their level of intentionality that they're able to put beyond their concept development because marketing teams tend to wear very many hats. So unfortunately they are constantly being pulled in all these different directions. So I guess in short, to answer your question, there's not really a rhyme or reason as far as the size of the team. It's more so just the priority list of the bank or credit union for the content development. 

Another point that was made is that the understanding of what to do inside the branch is pretty broad. Maybe some institutions could do it better, but the next big area to be looking at developing is outside the branch. How would that work? 

Jared Jones: Yeah. One of the things that we're actually trying to leverage in digital signage is really trying to take it from the interior approach to also increase its reach from the exterior and that of course means implementing it into the pillars of the drive-through to actually implement two-way video in the drive through lanes themselves.

And essentially what that is, is what we like to say is almost like a 24/7 sell element while the basic credit unions are traditionally only open for about eight to nine hours a day, whenever you have a strategy that's going to be going branch and exterior wise, it allows you to really gain potential clients that you could be having in that community and allows them to just draw recognition to the branch and invoke that feeling to get them to come in.

There's an argument to be made and I've heard this a few times that the pandemic and the need to restrict access into retail operations, including banks and so on has forced people who were maybe digitally hesitant to learn how to do online banking and mobile banking and so on and therefore the branches which were already started being narrow in terms of their audience are getting even narrower and forcing banks to rethink what a branch was all about and how it worked and so on. 

Is that happening and does that connect to how digital signage is being rethought in those branches? 

Jared Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Just internally here at DBSI, we've seen a drastic shift from the way our banking and credit union customers interact with their clients to where you actually see a drastic shift into the drive through and that's where we want to try to pivot. And say, hey, we need to get that homogenous feel from not only from your social media and interior. Now we actually need to start pushing this digital signage into your drive through and then actually we started looking inside, incoming into the exterior branch and the pillars.

So it's really not just a one trick pony, if you will. There's a very intentional approach to where we ensure that it's a proper placement where the clients really interact with it. 

If you had to define an ideal mid-sized non flagship branch indoors and out, what would be the mix of things that are there and what are you showing on those screens?

Alisa Semyekhina: I would say it's going to be a lobby screen and something behind the teller line. So it could be a single screen. It could be 2x2 video walls, but again, we're talking about non flagship branches. So usually you're going to see some two screens or maybe one screen depending on the footprint and the mix of content and that's where the strategy of content is coming into play, like what's the percentage of content to show behind the teller line and in the lobby area. So that's where the community involvement piece, business recognition and involvement in charitable events are coming into play. 

You already made that point about whether to use all kinds of information. We don't want to see that. We want to connect with our community, with our members and customers, and then provide them The advisory function and educational function behind the teller line, because that's where we see a lot of financial education and security content. Especially in the past two years, I saw the increase of that content over there. 

I would say from the interactive experience, tablets in medium-sized branches are going to be more prevalent than interactive kiosks. So you will see those more in the flagship branches. And again, allowing that mobility as well at the branch. 

And when it comes to interactive, what's the content mix? When people interact with touch screens, what are they using it for? Because I've been in branches where they had touch screens and then blinked away on them and thought I didn't really need to use this. I could have used my phone or I don't see the point of this. That's just like, “Hey, we've got a touch screen, please use it!” 

Alisa Semyekhina: You are so spot on, because again, there has to be a strategy for having interactive digital signage in your branch. Just placing the interactive screen on a tablet doesn't mean that it is magically going to be utilized and you'll also need to train your branch team to actually use that technology to their advantage.

And what we've seen when we are working with our clients is actually the information about getting them to understand that this is your tool to dive into the products and services onboarding tutorials. We actually create those and recommend our clients create those, quick 1 to 3 points with maybe even videos or static images on how to quickly onboard on whether it's mobile banking, IE statements, or anything like that. Because again, our clients have 60-70 products and services, you cannot remember all of them. So this is the tool that they are going to be using. So it's probably not specifically for customers and members, it's more for the branch. 

The last thing I wanted to get into was ROI. One of the questions in your survey was, why are financial institutions investing in digital signage? I was intrigued that one of the big reasons was modernizing the branch look and feel, but the biggest ROI thing that I came across which was encouraging, was it boosting sales.

Jared Jones: Yeah. I think going on three or four years that we’ve seen that we made this approach or assumption transitioning to ask on this question, because all too often, I feel like marketing teams are being asked, “what's the so what?” Is it just a matter of looking pretty as it, like you said, it says it is just about modernization.

As Alisa was just talking about, the average financial institution has anywhere from 50-70 products and sometimes even more. And also the play there is, depending on what publication you read, if it's going to be hovering around this two to three, as far as average financial products per household. If I consider you my primary financial institution, and really the main contributor is that just a lack of knowledge? So let's say I have a credit card at one credit union and then maybe a checking and savings account at another bank. And then now I'm going to actually have my brokerage account, and my insurance with each individual institution. So that's going to be four or five different FIs there. And that's simply because I didn't realize that the credit union or bank that I primarily go to deal with three-four miles away from my house has all those products and services.

So really what we just educate our clients and their customers is just gonna be centralized around product education and more importantly, product utilization, because it's not about just increasing your financial product. It's more so about helping your clients really guide them down that financial journey. 

All right. This was super interesting. The benchmarking report, how does one get that? Do you need to be a client?

Jared Jones: So we actually have it published on our website at dbsi-inc.com under our blog section. Of course, I'm sure our contact information is going to be listed in the podcast so please feel free to either reach out to either myself or Alisa, and we'd be more than happy to get you a copy.

Alright. I appreciate you guys taking some time with me and I hope you're enjoying the weather down in Chandler, which is way nicer than it is here. 

Jared Jones: Just a little bit, just a little bit. You'll get the last laugh in summertime though, I promise. 

That's correct. All right. Thanks again.

Dave Ianonne, First Arriving

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

I'm a big fan of digital signage companies that identify a niche and go after it with a lot of focus - in product development, sales and service delivery. A lot of companies are generalists who broadly do digital signage, which I think can be deadly ... because you're then competing mainly on price and UX.

That's why I really like a company called First Arriving, that is very specifically in the business of providing digital signage solutions to first responder departments and other local government agencies that have a lot of moving parts in their operations.

The Richmond, Virginia company started out doing marketing services, and kind of fell into adding on digital signage about five years ago. Now it's the main focus, and First Arriving's products and services are widely used by the people who run towards emergencies in the U.S. and Canada.

This is not just HR stuff on screens in the break and meeting rooms of fire halls and other venues. The company has scores of integrations with the other technology and information platforms that feed into first responder operations, creating visual dashboards that give crews steadily updated, on-point situational awareness to 911 emergencies.

I also like that these guys are not just selling into that vertical market. Many of the staffers at the company are former first responders, or still active as volunteers. I spoke with Dave Ianonne, who founded the company and was himself, for many years, a volunteer firefighter.

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TRANSCRIPT

Dave, thank you for joining me. Can you summarize what First Arriving does and offers? 

Dave Ianonne: First Arriving is a company that started as a marketing company, targeting public safety primarily, and a few other secondary markets, and then we moved into digital signage by chance back in 2018 with an acquisition and that is by far our fastest growing part of our company, and then we're building products off of that digital signage concept in the future. 

But essentially we're a marketing and technology company, now more of a technology company more focused on public safety, and rapidly expanding into local government as well.

Okay. So based on what I've seen on your website, the marketing stuff you were doing, websites and all that stuff was for first responders?

Dave Ianonne: We do a variety of things, websites, we manage a few different associations. We do recruitment videos for volunteer fire departments across the country, typically through federal funded grant programs, so a wide variety of typical things which an association management or marketing agency would do, and the websites tie the technology piece well as a SaaS based business. 

How did you get into this? 

Dave Ianonne: I was a firefighter and a journalist and I combined those two things when the internet started, to launch a website called firehouse.com, which was pre-Facebook back in the day, was the largest website for firefighters in America, and then we built some websites for law enforcement, EMS and security and other industries. 

So that's how I got started, and we built a very large social network for firefighters in the mid 2000s, and that kind of spun into starting to do services directly for agencies as opposed to being a media company. So we saw the writing on the wall with the media space specifically, especially large magazines and large websites when Facebook came along. So we started doing direct delivery of services to manufacturers, associations, and so forth. 

Interesting. So you've evolved as technology has evolved?

Dave Ianonne: Exactly. Yep, I couldn't tell you what digital signage was five years ago other than seeing it at McDonald's. 

I'm a big fan of what you do because I consult companies and write about them and I get a lot of material from software companies saying, here's our stuff and here’s what we do. I look at it and say, I'm sure their technology is fine, but it's a very general offer and they’re basically saying, they do digital signage and I always encourage companies to find a niche, and mine the hell out of it and be the guys in that niche. 

You guys are the poster child for that more than anybody else. If I was a first responder department of some kind, I would automatically go to you because this is what you do. This is what you know, it's not like one of the things you do. 

Dave Ianonne: We definitely feel like we've got public safety and local government as a real niche, and we're starting to get into other areas. We’re in a gold mine in Nevada, for example, we're in a Disneyworld's local government, so we have a variety of different tactics and markets to serve, but we're not trying to be a consumer focused WYSIWYG based digital signage platform. 

Our platform is the opposite of that, it's all custom. We give a lot of tools to our customers to update their content from very simple ways like Google Slides and Google Sheets to more advanced, direct messaging, broadcast alerts down to the individual dashboard itself, the individual digital signage itself all the way globally. So we're constantly unleashing tools to give people access, to manage their content, and we have a lot of content with over a hundred integrations that feeds in automatically. So a typical fire department might be using five or six or more different technology platforms and we're able to give them a quick dashboard view of the key metrics from all of those platforms in one dashboard. 

So you're pretty much staying in your lane, so to speak, and if a regional QSR came along and said, “Hey, could you do digital signage for us?” You'd probably be saying, “Yeah, maybe we could, but it's not our thing”?

Dave Ianonne: It depends on what their need is. But yeah we're trying to stay in our lane and really be focused on the B2B, local government, public safety space, and anything that kind of an offshoot of that. So there's security and construction safety, and a lot of different options that'll keep us busy for a long time. 

What's your installed footprint? 

Dave Ianonne: In terms of number of customers, I think we have almost 700 customers, about 3000 digital signage across the country and a couple in Canada as well. So the average customer has four or five dashboards in their station, offices, the chief's office and some in the field on tablets and desktops. So we do serve tablets and desktops as well. 

During the peak of early COVID, we gave our customers a free desktop license across the board to put in their emergency operations center so they could see what the fire departments were doing on the streets, pulling other dashboards from the local government that could all be viewed in one single place. So we probably rolled another 500-600 during the peak of COVID back in 2020 but as a courtesy, we didn't charge customers for that at all. 

I'm guessing at that number, there's still a lot of opportunity out there to sell this into, god knows how many volunteer fire departments and formalized fire departments are out there in North America alone?

Dave Ianonne: Yeah, there are 3000 fire departments. There are just as many police departments. There are some 80,000 local governments. So we're currently pacing for that number to double this year, and let it double again next year. 

We really didn't have a full-time marketing staff and sales staff until early last year, it was a bootstrap kind of operation. We acquired this on a shoestring budget from a furniture digital signage company that had built this as a pet project of one guy who now works for us. They built it and had some clients, they've had it for a couple of years actually. They weren't familiar with the public safety market, even though they had quite a few customers and we started reselling it and then, somehow three months later, I owned it. It was very rapid. I actually found this platform because I was looking for a digital signage company for my own fire department to just simply put photos of new members on a TV screen. That's how I found this platform, and then just business wise, we happened to acquire it a few months later.

So you've got an immense amount of potential growth you could see? 

Dave Ianonne: Oh yeah, for sure. We expect to be at 10,000 screens by the end of next year, and as you scale up into local government, we have quite a few local governments and the fire department might have 10, the police department might have 10, the entire local government might have 50 or 60 in parks, departments, courts, and a wide variety of different organizations and at the core of it, they’re all using this because all other platforms get ignored. Emails get ignored, texts get ignored. 

You come in for duty, you go to the TV screen and you know exactly what's going on, who's working, what events are today, what vehicles are in and out of service, what the weather is and it constantly gets updated. Chiefs can push out video messages or text messages to all the screens or to a single work site. So we try to give people access to as much information as it makes sense to digest without overwhelming them. 

So if I'm in a typical firehouse or EMS station or whatever those are called, what's the mix of things that you're going to see on a screen or sets of screens? 

Dave Ianonne: The core of it is scheduling, so who's on duty or who's coming in for duty, weather, live radar, we offer folks what events are coming up, what their response times are, so they do metrics against each other in terms of how quickly they get out the door and what their typical turnout times are. Quite a few departments have a live feed of their unit status so they can see other stations, are they on a call? Does that mean I'm more likely to get a call for instance, and then certainly when a call comes out, it pops up on the screen. It shows a map via a platform called Esri, which is a big maps and data player in local government. 

So it displays the running round and also hydrants nearby. So they get a quick glance of where they're going. It shows Google street view. So it gives them kind of a situational awareness of where they're going into or what the details are. So it's a wide variety. 

We have people use it for everything from, where they need to be event wise, to who owes what to the house fund, which is the daily meals that people do in a firehouse. So they track pretty much everything. They get very creative in how they use it for sure.

You talked about a hundred plus data integrations. Having those integrations would be absolutely essential because nobody's got time to just sit down and blink away at a browser or an update for this stuff, it's like when things are happening, they're happening, right?

Dave Ianonne: Exactly. It's real time. Some of our integrations are every couple seconds, especially when you get to the volume of calls and things like that. We take data just about any way you can possibly imagine from real-time API to nightly update it, CSV files. So if it's data, our general mantra is we can take it and do something with it.

There's a lot of investment and time to figure it all out, right? 

Dave Ianonne: Oh yeah. We have a fairly significant development team in-house as well as some South American developers that we have. So it's a constant, not just maintaining the integrations, but building new ones. We're constantly adding new integrations as we onboard new customers. They actually help with those relationships. 

We have a lot of customers who go to our integration partners and demand more of them to put up on our screen. So that's very helpful. 

Now, there would be other software companies that were feeding different functionality into these kinds of operations, are they ever contemplating while we could do digital signage too? Or do they do what you do and stay in your lane? 

Dave Ianonne: I'm sure that some of them could.

We have some dispatch platforms that we work with where their dashboard doesn't offer the same number of features we do, and when the call comes out, their dashboard takes over our dashboard while the call is dispatched. So we have some unique relationships with that. But certainly if there's ever going to be a competitor, it's going to be there's all kinds of scheduling platforms and things like that but our view is we're Switzerland. We want to take in everybody. 

So we have probably 25 different scheduling platforms, and if one of those scheduling platforms decided, “Hey, I want to do a dashboard”, they probably would not let the other 24 in. It gives us kind of an advantage at that point. So if the fire department is using that platform now, but moves to a different one in two years, they don't need to lose their dashboard.

You mentioned you're a firefighter, I believe you're a volunteer firefighter? 

Dave Ianonne: I was, yeah, I'm still involved administratively, but for the most part, I was active for about 25 years as a firefighter. 

Don't want to climb up ladders anymore? 

Dave Ianonne: No, in my youth, that was better. 

I find that interesting in that in most cases, I would say in digital signage, the companies are run and the technology sold by people who maybe know an industry, but are not from that industry, like they sell into retail, they sell into QSR or whatever, but they've never been an operator, and maybe they made fries when they were teenagers or something like that, but you expressly understand the space and I get a sense from your staffing profiles that you have any number of people who are either still active in first responder communities in some way, or definitely know it. 

Dave Ianonne: A lot of staff are, I am. My business partner is. On the marketing side, we have quite a few people who do that. Even on the technology side, we have a sales rep who's married to a firefighter. We have multiple SMEs who are firefighters. So being able to walk the talk is a big piece of that, and as we grow passing that education onto our new sales teams and marketing folks who don't come from that industry, because it is a very specific niche, so when the chief is talking to somebody, they want to know that person understands the fire service, and isn't just trying to sell them some random technology. They want to hear the use cases and understand how it's going to benefit them from a communications standpoint. 

And I'm going to assume the sales cycle is fairly long for some of these just simply because they're government?

Dave Ianonne: It's the government, but it's also individual fire departments. It's volunteer fire departments. 

I like to say we have the only SaaS based product that people can see, that's the big benefit of digital signage. We have customers who come and say, “Hey, I saw this other fire department. I don't need a demo. I need five of them”, and the sale is done, and certainly we have very large customers in Fort Worth, San Bernardino, California, where it might be a two year sales cycle because it's a significant capital expense, not just all the license fees and the hardware, but also they're going to buy the TVs, they have to get them set up, they have to get the infrastructure involved. So it's really all over the place. 

And there's RFPs and everything else in the larger ones too, right? 

Dave Ianonne: Some. We're able to sole source for a lot of reasons because in a lot of ways we have so many integrations and no one really has that number of integrations. So we're fortunate, at least for now, not to have a big competitor who can come in the door and say, “I can do A, B and F and X”, and that's what that department needs. So we sole source quite a bit. 

We are starting to see more and more RFPs, especially on the local government side, certainly that were involved, but I'd say RFPs are maybe 10-15%. 

And what's the breadth of the services that you offer in the context of digital signage and kind of related to it? 

Dave Ianonne: Digital signage is the big thing. So certainly the typical big screen TV, we deploy the equivalent of what shows up with a big screen TV to desktops and tablets. So we have a Chrome based platform that can deploy those devices, whether it's a PC, Mac, either way. 

We're starting to build some apps and some internet style products that feed the same information, but there is a different use case where you can navigate it more easily and get it pushed to phones and upload documents and do some things that are beyond just pushing information, but letting them access information directly. Because again, it's all the same challenges. 

“I want a single source of truth for all my information”, but the average firefighter does not need the 10,000 foot view. They just need to see what's in their face at that moment, so things like, “I need a document. I need to see what the weather is. I need to see who's showing up tomorrow.” 

So do you have a professional services kind of thing where you look at the systems that a department works with and match that up with the APIs that you already have and build a show so to speak for them? Or do you say, “Here are the tools, you go at it”?

Dave Ianonne: We build everything. So when it comes to the APIs and things like that's all on us. We don't really charge our customers for APIs, unless it's something that only they would only use. So if someone has an existing platform and they want to add new functionality that no other department is using, if we feel there's a use case for other departments, we just roll with it. 

So they might want to display scheduling or their turnout time data a different way or squeeze the integration partner for some new data points that we couldn't otherwise get, and we share that around and do a good job of getting that out there to all of our other customers. 

What about creating content, you do that?

Dave Ianonne: We don't really create content, certainly on the marketing side we do, but on the technology side, it's more about using their information. We certainly have tools and our expanding tools where we can push information at the zip code or state or national level, so national emergencies and written regional emergencies. That's something that we're rolling out soon in terms of us pushing content to them. 

What do you tell customers about what difference this will make for them, what this is going to do for them if they’re skeptical? 

Dave Ianonne: Streamlining will save them a whole rack load of time communicating. So people ignore emails, people ignore texts, or there's just too much information put at them through too many platforms when really they just need to know this little nugget and this little nugget from those two platforms. So really it's about just the mission critical information that they need to know right now to do their jobs without having to read a five page document, they missed an email. They were off for a week, so they missed a memo or they missed a meeting and they have no idea what's happening with the different equipment or what's the new standard operating procedure, especially during COVID, where things are changing almost all the time in terms of SOPs and procedures and all those types of things.

So that's our mantra and that's the challenge, whether it is local government or police or fire, the people who find us, everyone's challenges are exactly the same, people just aren't seeing that the critical information I need them to know, and in a lot of cases, people will put the top five things from a standard operating procedure in a simple Google Slide and put a QR code right on the screen that says, take this photo to download the rest of this document, but here's the things you must know, and it's right there in their face with a photo, with whatever graphic, et cetera. 

Is there any monetization of these screens in terms of just in the same way all these integration partners are selling stuff into firehouses, I assume there are specialty companies that make equipment and all the way up to vehicles, co they advertise on these networks? 

Dave Ianonne: No, and we don't really push that. Certainly we've had people inquire about that and manufacturing facilities have asked us about that, but I think we generally try to stay away from that because the departments are paying us to push their information to their folks, and it's not like someone's gonna stand there and watch a commercial, especially because the screens are in a bunk area or they're in the kitchen or they're in the day room where someone's already watching TV, so the noise would just be noise for lack of a better explanation. 

Yeah. I wonder though, and I don't know much of anything about fire departments and so on, but I assume a fire truck costs a couple of bucks and the manufacturers of those things could sponsor screens going into firewalls and everything if they wanted to? 

Dave Ianonne: Yep. We've explored that, especially with our integration partners for packaging it in there, essentially sponsoring it for them or just making it part of their existing relationship with them. But it's not something we've significantly focused on just yet. 

Where do you think you're at in terms of the breadth of services that you provide? Are you still scratching the surface or are you pretty much covering things off at this point? 

Dave Ianonne: No, I think we're still scratching the surface, especially as we talk about expanding the digital signage concept and information into other platforms like desktop and an app beyond what we're doing right now. 

Local government could be a market that's 10 times the scale for us and a whole new slate of integrations, and more importantly, how those inter agencies talk to each other. So pushing data from the fire department to the city council, so the city council office can show how many calls the fire department ran yesterday, how much overtime they used, those sorts of things.

So it's about pushing information and I think long term intaking the information and then splitting it up, and parsing it out as a data aggregation platform. 

Yeah. I'm just going to look outside my window and we've got a nor'easter that's coming through and there are trucks out there salting the roads and sanding, and then there'll be plowing and the whole nine yards and that's a whole other kind of first responders, but it's same kind of thing, right?

Dave Ianonne: Exactly. Where to plow, what roads need to be plowed. The dispatcher can get real time information via the AVL in the trucks, in terms of where their trucks are located. Some AVL platforms have that, some don't. So real-time status of what vehicles are broken down, what equipment is, etc. 

Do you have software companies as competitors or do you pretty much have the market on your own? 

Dave Ianonne: If you Google fire department digital signage or police digital signage, there are certainly regular digital signage companies that are more consumer based who have a page in their website targeting those markets. So they're certainly picking up business by chance and we find we've picked up probably a dozen customers in the last year who were using one of those standard digital signage platforms and just couldn't get the flexibility they wanted, whether it was integrations or data aggregation and so forth.

So they switched to us and left those companies because those companies aren't going to build the APIs or they'll have the API tools that a third party like the fire department could do, but most of these fire departments don't have the bandwidth to go build a custom API. Some certainly do, and they very well may, but not the vast majority.

Yeah. You could do a basic communications channel and, with HR messaging and staffing messaging and that sort of thing, but what you're describing, what you guys do is like several many notches above that. 

Dave Ianonne: Yeah. You'll get an IT guy at a guy or gal at a fire department who's really gung ho and says, “Hey, I can just build this myself.” But again, that's a very rare instance, and they get something super custom but not nearly at the same speed, where they want to add another platform. If that person leaves there, they're stuck. 

Yep. That's the age old story of digital signage. Somebody says, “I could do this, we don't have to spend money on it” and that'll get them started, but it's not sustainable.

Dave Ianonne: Yep, and we don't pitch ourselves as some high dollar platform. So they're not paying thousands of dollars per screen per year, despite that's the value they're getting. 

Our pricing is probably similar to most digital signage platforms and our customers are very likely to last a very long time and not switch between platforms and not leave us once they realize the value. The only handful of times that someone's left us, were customers from over five years, even before we acquired it, probably six or seven years where a chief changed and he just didn't like it for some reason, or they got it and they're not maximizing the use of it so they don't get the value, no matter how much we tell them all the different ways to use it and throw case studies at them and have all these departments singing our praises.

If they don't engage with the content and update it frequently, no matter if it's us or anybody else, they're not going to find it useful, 

When it comes to the volunteer departments, is it a challenge for them to find a budget? 

Dave Ianonne: No, we are at a pretty good price point. So the volunteer fire departments that have one or two stations, that's not really our main focus. We certainly have quite a few of them, but we're really going after the departments that want to have 5-7, they might have two or more stations so that's our real wheelhouse, and then we're starting to get into much larger agencies, like I said earlier, Fort Worth, Palm Beach County, San Bernardino county, we're in dozens of fire stations, hundreds of boards, just for that one county. 

All right. This is great. I'm a big fan of what you guys do. I love anybody who's got a really pure focus as opposed to, “We do digital signage. What do you need?” 

Dave Ianonne: I appreciate that. Like I said, five years ago, the only digital signage I knew was at McDonald's so if you hadn't told me five years ago, I probably would just would've laughed and been like, what? 

But then once we started getting into it and realized that the challenges we were solving for people and saving so much time in communication, I think we got really excited and this is our big area of focus and we've got a whole lot of investors who are interested in helping us accelerate the needle. 

Yeah, for sure. All right. Dave, thank you very much.

 

Anders Apelgren, Visual Art

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

So many companies in the digital signage ecosystem are all about the technology, still, so it's interesting to come across a tech company that functions as a turnkey provider, but leads with the creative aspect. It's even in the name - Visual Art.

The Swedish company started roughly 25 years ago, and has steadily expanded its footprint and operating base. It is now active in 32 countries, though northern Europe is still its busiest territory.

One of the interesting aspects - and I don't think I'ver seen this - is how it is owned, in part, by an out of home media company, UK-based Ocean Outdoor. Ocean bought the media wing on the business back in 2019.

But ad networks are not the main focus - with much of Visual Art's business in retail and QSR, through whale clients such as McDonalds.

I spoke at length with the CEO of Visual Art - Anders Apelgren.

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TRANSCRIPT

Andres, thank you for joining me. You're in Stockholm. Is that the main office for your company? 

Anders Apelgren: Yes, the whole company was founded in Stockholm. So Stockholm is still our biggest place. 

And where else are you located? 

Anders Apelgren: We have companies and offices in 8 countries. It's all in the Nordic countries, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and we’re also quite big in Germany and Spain. We also have a small company in the US. 

Okay. So is expanding beyond the Nordic region something that's happened recently or has that been evolving since you started? 

Anders Apelgren: We have two different business areas before, so we were in the nordic countries before, but we sold half the company two years ago. Now, we're expanding again, outside the Nordic countries, and to be honest, Sweden is quite a small country, so the market is so much bigger in other countries like the US and Germany. 

It's interesting with Sweden and the Nordics in general, it seems to be something of a hotbed for digital signage.

Anders Apelgren: Yeah, I think we are quite good at it in northern Sweden both in software, and also with the audience, since we understand technical things. So I think it's quite easy to sell to Swedish people and companies. So we are at the forefront, at least in mass deployment, maybe not in having these huge, big things like in Times Square, but I think most deployment of screens are in Swedish. 

That's interesting. Is that just a particular mindset? 

Anders Apelgren: No, but I think, on average, people see that they can earn money on the screens even by selling more or by selling commercial space on the screens and they are seeing opportunity with the price going down with screens, more and more companies are doing it.

Okay. So can you give me a rundown on what Visual Art does and the breadth of services?

Anders Apelgren: We are a one-stop shop so we can give the clients everything they want. But of course the big foundation we have is our tech part. So we have our own CMS and we also have our media player. The media players can work on any platform so that's a big strength we have, and we are selling that software to competitors as well as a white label product, that is the foundation of the company. 

But since many other companies don't have a one-stop shop partner, we can help them with content, strategies, sell hardware and do installation as well.

Yeah, that seems to be almost the default demand now of larger companies. They're basically saying that they want to stick to what they're good at, and they'd like to outsource all of this to a company that is good at that.

Anders Apelgren: Exactly. And that's why we are expanding to so many countries, because we need to be close to the customer otherwise we won’t get the business.

Did you start as an integrator or a solutions provider and then add software? Or did you start as a software company? 

Anders Apelgren: We started as a production company, so we have a very good background in creating content. 

Interesting. A lot of companies in the digital signage ecosystem have branding that is very much about their technology and that's how they market their technology, whereas your name and your go-to strategy seems to be about the visual side? 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely, if you don't have the correct content on the right screen location, it’s useless. You need to understand what’s the meaning of this screen and where you should place it. You can place the screens too high in the grocery store and nobody sees them. It means the whole thing is about understanding how to use the screen in the best way. 

And it is that easier to do now than when the company first started? 

Anders Apelgren: I think it's easier to do that thing in Sweden especially, and in the mature markets, but there are still a lot of RFPs out there who only focus on software and they don't really understand what most will have in the future because most of our clients today have a lot of integration. 

For example, the biggest grocery chain in Sweden is ICA and it is one of our clients. We have almost 95% of content automated, so it's done fully automatic. Nobody's creating the content. So you need to understand when you buy a software, what is your end goal with the solution? Not just buying the software. 

Yeah, really, and using those integrations. I also found it interesting that a couple of your offerings that maybe aren't a part of the norm of a typical digital signage provider is you have live data integrations for sales performance, for things like McDonald's and so on and instead of it being a dashboard that gets pushed to a large format screen. These are dashboards that are being pushed to iPhones and smartwatches, right? 

Anders Apelgren: That’s correct. We have McDonald's in perhaps over 20 countries. With the information it's not only sales, it's a lot of different information about the stores. So the store manager or cashier can see the sales in realtime.

Basically the demand for this was that they had quite bad systems. It's the same thing in many big companies. They're very slow. You have to go to five or six different places to get the data. So we collect all the data for them and push them down to their phone. So they have all the sales, all the stores on the phone in real time.

Was that a product that you developed because they asked you to develop it or did you develop it and put it in front of them? And they said, “yeah, we like it”?

Anders Apelgren: I mean it was in Sweden that they wanted to have a big screen, just a dashboard with the template of the company. But then when it gets all the data, we realized we can make a much better application of it. So then we created the phone and watch application, but the idea came from McDonalds in Sweden. 

Is there a lot of demand for these kinds of operational dashboards that would be on large format displays in the back office of a retailer or in logistics? 

Anders Apelgren: I think that time has passed. I think nowadays you have everything on your phone. So I think if you use big screens now, it’s probably to get the information to your staff more or less. So in your crew room, you might have some kind of big screen with information, but it's quite hard to reach the young people in a big company getting information.

So that's why I was wondering about that. So maybe not the sales KPIs and so on, but there would seem to be a lot of information in production areas that is the only way you're going to get this information in front of people is on a large screen because they're not going to have this dashboard app on their phone, or if they could have it, they probably wouldn't look at it?

Anders Apelgren: They wouldn't look at it. That's the problem. So you need to put it in their face more or less. 

Is it a lot easier these days to do these kinds of beta integrations? 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. Nowadays most companies have quite good backend systems, but still we have a lot of big companies who are facing a lot of legacy systems that are not that easy to work with, but it has gotten easier, absolutely. 

So what do you do with them? 

Anders Apelgren: For McDonal’s, from the beginning, we made a crawler application, so we logged in on a webpage and crawled all the sales figures from that system, because that was the only way to get the data. But today, of course we can get it through some kind of API. So it's moving in the right direction.

You have your own signage player, a CMS platform. When did you launch that? 

And I'm curious, given that the Nordics countries have numerous software firms that have their own CMS platforms as well. So why do it yourself when there is so much out there? 

Anders Apelgren: We launched the player in 2010, and back then, basically there was no really good platform at that time. A lot of screens were black, no one had control over the physical screen. They were considered lucky to have control over the media player. 

Of course they're getting better and better. But at the end of the day, this thing needs to be working every day and also needs to be able to do whatever the clients want to, and so far I haven't found any other software that can do everything that we can do with our software. So we’re quite proud of our software and we sell it now as a product to competitors. 

And you said, other companies can white label it? 

Anders Apelgren: Yes, exactly. So we’re selling it over, like we have a big distribution in Australia, for example.

Okay. And you also said you do your own media players? 

Anders Apelgren: No, not our own media players. We can run on all media players. We only use standard products like Samsung or LG, but we can run on Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and so on. 

Are you using a lot of smart displays? 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. If I look two years back, or three years back, I think 80% was like a Windows or Linux computer and 20% was system on chip. Today I think 95% of what we sell is system on chip and 5% is like a Windows computer. So the trend has shifted quite quickly to systems on chip. 

It's funny because I've been following the system on chip ecosystem for about nine years now, when it first came out and for the first many years, I spent the majority of those years there were nothing but detractors who were saying this is not the way to go, it's problematic. There's not enough power on and on, and it's just a bad thing to do, but obviously the market has shifted that way. 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. I think four years ago now when Tizen was launched, we tested it and there were so many problems with it.

So we acquired a big reseller in all the countries. We got like a person in Korea coming to Sweden. So we hired him to this desk for four weeks. He reported back all the problems we have, and after like three months, we had a stable product. So Samsung is very grateful to us that we helped them to make Tizen stable. 

I gather one of the big attractions of a system on chip is simply that you have this consolidated display unit with minimal cables and therefore minimal things that can work loose or be pulled loose or whatever at a remote location. So maintenance costs drop substantially? 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. Of course you can also make the installation look nicer if it wasn't to get tied into the wall or wherever you want to keep the screen. It's easy to install and there’s only one piece that can break down. 

Also, you have one supplier that would help with the solution. You have no Samsung or LG to blame. If it doesn't work, is it the media player or is it the screen? It's the screen because that’s everything that you have. 

Yeah, you don't have all the finger pointing. What is the primary vertical market that Visual Art goes after? Is it retail? 

Anders Apelgren: I think we are quite wide in that, but we are really strong in retail, but I would say fast food, gas stations, and that's just a coincidence.

It happens that we come to markets that are exploding, and if you look at gas stations in Sweden, they all now have this menu board, and coffee screens, most of them have windows screens. If it goes to Germany, almost no one has almost anything yet, but they're all asking for it right now. And then of course, you're in a good position. If you have done it in all the gas chains in Sweden, you have the knowledge. 

And they're using that to pull people into the store, I assume, and because they're now, maybe not making as much money selling tobacco products and things like that, but they've got food items?

Anders Apelgren: Exactly. They need to bring people into the store to buy some food items. 

And you also do QSR? 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. We have McDonald’s in all of the Nordics and Subway all over Europe/ 

Ah, okay. So you've got a pretty big footprint then? 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. We're very proud of them. Both those clients want to have a one-stop shop solution. They want to have at least somebody that can do content as well and also help them with both costing and segmentation. 

How hands-off is it? 

I did some work with a QSR chain here in North America, Tim Horton's going back a ways and I remember years ago asking them what they thought of the software they're using and they said, we have no idea. We've never seen it. We don't have a login or anything. They handed the whole nine yards to the solutions provider and said, you do this for us, and we'll have a, not these exact words, but we’ll have a weekly call or something and just review what's needed.

Anders Apelgren: I think it's a bit different, but many companies are still doing that. They just want it to work. So they tell us this is what should be on them and so on, and then they don't care about how it works as long as the screens are showing the right contents more or less. 

We have a lot of template based systems, so some clients do all this themselves. So they schedule everything themselves with templates.

Who would be your largest clients? 

Anders Apelgren: McDonald’s and ICA are the biggest clients we have.

Okay, and you are also doing some kind of flagship or signature and installations. I saw one, for example, for Audi and I've seen some large groceries where you've got entire facades of the store in LEDs?

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. Of course we help clients with flagship stores as well. It's very good for publicity and so on but to be honest, the big money is in volumes. So the flagship stores, we're happy to do them, but mainly those screens are quite expensive, and also don’t have good margins on them to be honest. We do them, but we want to have the whole chains to do the volumes, so screens rollouts and stuff since that’s where the money is for us.

Yeah, I guess you can do a big video wall for the front of a store and it's one software license. 

Anders Apelgren: Exactly! And the software and the support doesn’t give us recurring revenue.

What's been the lesson out of the last two years with the pandemic and retail being conflicted and in some cases closed and restricted and everything else? 

Anders Apelgren: That's a good question. I think some shifts have been to use the screens for other purposes. So for example, in Sweden, you're limited in how many people you can bring into the store, depending on the size of the store. So then they want to use the screen to say, “Sorry, you cannot enter right now. There's too many people in the store.”

Otherwise, I think the sad thing is that many retailers had a tough time surviving because people weren’t coming to the store, buying online and stuff.

So has that slowed the retail business on your side? 

Anders Apelgren: If you look at the trend for all of Europe, we have lost like 18 months of growth. So if you look at the curve of expanding signage in Europe, we lost at least 18 months in developing or rolling in Europe during the pandemic. So obviously it affected the sales. 

You mentioned that the idea of metering for store capacity, has been taken up by many companies in terms of, going beyond just a simple sign that says 200 people at a time are allowed in here, are you doing this sort of automated sensor driven things where it's looking at who's leaving and therefore allowing people to come in?

Anders Apelgren: They use cameras to count the people automatically, and then the counter can say, “Now there are 15 people in the store. You have to wait outside, please!”, and the screen goes red. 

So I've seen that talked up a lot. I haven't seen that many real world examples of it being done. You're saying that you've deployed that sort of thing?

Anders Apelgren: Yeah, we have done them together with some grocery chains, and they had all of the people counting systems so we just hooked their people counting system and then changed the content on the screen.

Oh, okay. So they were using it just for store analytics and they've adopted it for this as well?

Anders Apelgren: Exactly.

Interesting. Some of the other things that were floated in the past couple of years was the idea of touchless based interactions and things like infrared, temperature sensors, and screens with hand sanitizer dispensers below them and so on, and I've been hearing from people who didn't have any reasons to say one way or the other that they understand there's a lot of vendors who invested in the hardware and had a lot of trouble selling it. 

Anders Apelgren: Yeah, we have a lot of companies coming to sell them as well, but I agree it has been a problem, and as I see it now, the question is now why should you use touch screens in the future? You have your own device in your pocket, which you don't need to standardize. 

So what we have done for McDonald's as a pilot in the US is that you can go to the kiosk in the store, you take your phone and you scan the QR code on it, and then you could use your smartphone as a remote control to that screen. So you get the same image on the shelf, in your phone, and then you can touch the phone and then control the kiosk. So it works like a remote control to the kiosk. That's even better than deploying new hardware and touching something anyway. So there are different options to do that, I’d say.

Did that go beyond a demonstration? Is it used? 

Anders Apelgren: This was last spring in the US and it was really high up in McDonald's management team. So we demonstrated this for them. They tested it for a store a little bit, but then they forgot about it because think about how many kiosks you’d have at McDonald's and they aren’t cheap.

What's the process that you go through when you engage with a new client? Personally, if I'm sitting down in my days doing consulting, the first question out of my mouth would always be: Why am I here? Why do you want to do this? 

Anders Apelgren: We do the same thing, and most often we offer them to do a workshop with a strategy that will help them to take this forward and answer why they want to have the signage? What is the purpose of them? 

And if you look at many retailers in clothing, the main thing for them is to get people into the store. So the window screen is the most important and then, how can we attract people to the store? So you need to understand what your biggest issues are, what they want to achieve. So normally we do workshops and we build a strategy for the clients and then we start to ask, where should the screen be and what should be on them? 

And as you said because you're turnkey, you can help them with all that as well, including producing the content? 

Anders Apelgren: Exactly and during integrations, almost all the screens we install, we frame them so it fits into the interior as well. So not just putting a screen because it looks quite dull to have a screen only, it needs some kind of framing to make it melt into the interior. 

It used to be the case, and I'm curious if it still is that if you handed the creative side of digital signage projects off to an agency, it's not a medium that they understood and they generally didn't do a very good job with it.

Is that still the case that you're better off working with a company such as yours because you understand the dynamics and the sight lines and everything? 

Anders Apelgren: Yeah, I think so. They are getting better, absolutely, but they're not thinking in our way, like If you think you have the screen in the window, you cannot do very long content, just also thinking out how the audience is on this screen? If you look at the agency, they look at TVs and they don't really understand what will be the flow with people in front of this? 

So they need to learn a lot, but they're getting better, I would say. 

I read on your website that you now have a new product line. You're now also marketing LED displays, right? 

Anders Apelgren: That’s correct. We are importing them ourselves from China, and that's basically to get these big flagships. 

Also, the price is going down so much, especially for indoor LED screens that you can have in your window normally inside, and testing a lot of RFPs with price pressure on, we cannot have somebody in between to get the lowest purchase price to win those deals. 

So there's no end of options for LEDs. Why have your own? Why not just say we understand this stuff, we'll find you the best option. Is it a matter of control and understanding the supplier? 

Anders Apelgren: Normally, we avoid doing this. We have always used Samsung and LG before, but we cannot win the space if we have somebody in between, in the sales process, otherwise you will lose these big flagships that we talked about because we will price ourselves out of the picture. So that's why we're doing this.  

Is it difficult to find the right supplier? There are so many and the quality and particularly support can vary dramatically between them. 

Anders Apelgren: The supplier that we use, they’re quite stable now. We have used them before, even though we haven’t bought directly from them.

Is there technology on the software and the display hardware side that you guys are intrigued by or that you see potential for? 

Anders Apelgren: Not really sure what you are asking for to be honest. 

I think the big ones for me would be things like LED on different kinds of display surfaces, like on film or even embedded in glass. Some of the emerging tech... 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. We did an H&M store, this is supposed to be 10 years ago, and in this store, we had a big projector that displayed a huge screen on the window, and then we had infrared technology that could announce the audience floating outside the window. So we tested those kinds of things, but so far we haven't ever seen any kind of volume on those. It has been really fun doing some flagship store installations, but we still haven’t done any hige rollouts for things like these. 

What about analytics? You mentioned how you're tying into store analytics for access control and so on. Is that being widely used now within retail, the idea that you can understand how the store works and how people are looking at screens and so on?

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. First of all, we do a lot of research and even with new clients to understand what they do, but we also have all the things we show and load to put into a database, and then they can cross reference what we have been showing, like the sales of that item with the client to see what kind of images on the screen really drive the sales. 

How large is your company?

Anders Apelgren: We have around 100 employees. This year in 2022, our aim is to sell about $32 million. 

Okay, and what's going to be coming in the new year. Do you have big projects or new products that are coming out? 

Anders Apelgren: I think really the biggest thing is to market our very good software, even more in the world, to deploy it worldwide anywhere, and also to move into more countries. We’re quite aggressive about finding new countries. So I think we'll probably have at least four new countries this year. 

Now, will you do that through acquisition or just organically grow? 

Anders Apelgren: Organic is our main target. We can buy companies if we see anything good, but normally for us, we don't want to have some big company in this country, we mainly want just sales and a product leader. So most companies are too big to buy. I don't want to have really big foundations in every country. 

And are you privately held or venture backed? 

Anders Apelgren: 50% of the company is owned by employees in the company and the remaining 50% is owned by Ocean Outdoor out of the UK. 

Oh, okay. I did not know that. Interesting. So you have direct ties into digital out of home?

Anders Apelgren: We do, yeah.

And would they do media sales for you as well on certain projects?. 

Anders Apelgren: Absolutely. If you look at the ICA grocery stores in Sweden, we have all the screen installations and they are selling the advertising space. 

Oh, interesting. I don't think I've heard that with an integrator where they've had ownership through a media company. 

Anders Apelgren: It’s a good combination, I think.

Yeah. All right. It's been great chatting with you. Thank you very much. 

Anders Apelgren: Thank you very much.

Dennis Hickey, SNA Displays

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

I spoke recently with a consulting firm that was looking at the outdoor LED space, and trying to wrap its collective heads around who the LED leaders were in North America.

They rattled off a bunch of vendor names, but did not mention SNA Displays. I sorted them out, noting how the company was a significant player, and how they were a rare Chinese LED manufacturer that was doing a great job of building up a presence and business in the U.S. market.

SNA is interesting for a whole bunch of reasons. The name is short for Sansi North America, with the parent firm being back in Shanghai. But SNA seems to run very much as a U.S. company, with full offices and support systems over here, as well as marketing developed and managed on this side of the Pacific. The difference is not subtle, as I get a lot of marketing stuff from China-based vendors that just won't resonate over here and, probably, in Europe.

SNA is also interesting because it doesn't just manufacture and sell indoor and outdoor LED displays, it becomes a direct partner in jobs - helping finance projects that might otherwise remain just ideas.

I had a great chat with Dennis Hickey, who runs SNA and the related company that does financing, Infuse Digital.

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TRANSCRIPT

Dennis. Thank you for joining me. Where are you today? 

Dennis Hickey: I'm actually working from home in New Jersey, right outside of New York in Short Hills. 

Okay. Went to talk about a couple things today. First of all, could you tell me about Infuse Digital, which is the newer of the two companies that you run. I know they are related.

Dennis Hickey: Yes. Thank you. Infuse Digital came from the SNA Displays side as a company that wanted to hold hands for clients that were interested in LED products or digital products LCDs, kiosks, et cetera, and clients just didn't understand the process, and so where it came was from the fact that SNA displays was bidding multiple projects through multiple clients. It always seemed to be a price war, and if we didn't have intelligent digital consultants involved in the project, it usually just came down to price, and unfortunately, Based on the fact that we have 2,500 employees and 2.5 million square feet of manufacturing, our prices are usually tied, maybe some of the smaller folks.

So we decided that we wanted to hold hands with these clients, help these clients. We wanted to make sure the clients were getting the best product, the best solution that will have the maximum return on investment, and so we told the clients that essentially, we would be the investor, and we would put up the funds and the financing, and then we would hold their hands and do the at-home advertising and the sponsorship revenue that could be generated from these, not selling the advertising or the sponsorship ourselves, but utilizing some of our partnerships to bring them to the project.

So that was the spearhead to everything here. 

So that's pretty widely different from what most LED manufacturers do. 

Dennis Hickey: Yes, Obviously that's always been our case. We are probably number one in boutique products. Making the human head once and obviously our custom fabrication. 

For the major spectaculars on the SNA side. So we needed to think out of the box more, and thinking outside the box, we know there's clients and we know clients will Google this, or maybe see a post, maybe read an article and then want that product. But they have no idea what the cost is associated with that. They really need their hands held more.

And so that's where the concept of infused came from. 

So is the core part of it, the financing end or is it the whole turn key? We'll take this from start to finish?

Dennis Hickey: It is always going to involve some form of financial abilities. If you can provide your own finance, if you can build it yourself, you'll probably want to maximize the return on that particular investment.

But there are a lot of clients out there who take triple five in an American dream that are more inclined to know how to build this great mall and entertainment venue. We have a ski slope. We have a theme park. We don't really understand the digital environment and they came and they brought us on to handle that for the next 20 years.

We also gave them 40,000 square feet of digital product as a result, and then maximized the return on. According to that, they can make money through name sponsorships, or they can make money through at-home advertising with one of our partners. So they got everything at once. However, on the flip side, you could have a building in times square, that is one of the developers in times square has a property and they have plenty of money and they know what the at-home revenue is going to be generated.

And they're going to buy the product themselves. Those folks will come directly to SNA versus the other folks that want some assistance will come to our sister company infuse. 

Okay. So are you effectively providing a lease on the equipment? 

Dennis Hickey: Actually, what we're trying to do is we're actually providing the ownership of the equipment and actually a tenant of that asset.

So we own the assets. We advertise them and organize sponsorship for those assets. We maintain those assets for the life of the assets. If it's an LCD chaos, for instance we will replace those through the course of the 10, 15, 20 year contract we have. If it's an LED, it's obviously replaced probably in around 10 years to reinstall the latest and greatest. The other cool part is we know the industry, we know the industry in and out. So we're giving our clients the tightest resolution pitch the highest resolution displays because we want to keep them relevant because we're making money off of the advertising and sponsorship as a result.

So, if they're looking at a project and you're recommending piece X, because it's time square and they're going we only have a budget for P 10 or whatever. They don't have to compromise on that. They can use what's best if they're working with you? 

Dennis Hickey: Yeah, perfectly said, and yes you will see, for instance, we're finishing a project in times square.

This is 6.67 millimeter pitch, and that's probably going to be the latest and greatest. A lot of clients will have already put up their 10 millimeter and then look at their neighbor and say I wanted that. We're thinking ahead of that. Because again, we could do everything at cost.

So it does give us a slight advantage. Because we are the manufacturer of the product. So yes, that is essentially what it is. 

Are you in certain respects, disintermediating the integrators who would be doing installation, maybe doing some of the managed services or is there still a running partnership?

Dennis Hickey: Absolutely running partnership. We do have a preferred dealer program. We highly respect preferred dealers. We do not ever want to step on their toes and we never will. This is more of a developer standpoint where at high end development maybe not necessarily sports but venues right outside of sport.

Case and point, as I mentioned before, the American dream is right outside the MetLife stadium, and we're there and they were looking for a partner to take everything on. However, diversified as part of the American dream, and we built some of the products to diversify them. We did not step on their toes by any means.

Ours is purely advertising and sponsorship revenue elements that do not fall in there. 

So, when it comes to some of the turnkey things like managed services and so, is that something you're doing internally through infused or subbed out to the diversified companies like that?

Dennis Hickey: Actually we have our own in-house folks that do our own service on our own product. But so we do maintain our product on this particular project itself. But then we've always blended in those regards. When we do a diversified project, they still may need our systems division to assist with some of the stuff, because remember the products are the priority. We know the ins and outs and upside downs for them. So we work together in UNISON. 

How long has Infused been around?

Dennis Hickey: Infuse established in 2017. We actually started the company as a Sansi development group.

We changed the name to Infuse to be a little bit more distinctive. It pushed the envelope with everybody about what it is. It's time to infuse some more digital platforms into your landscape making it more relevant. It's great to do statistics and where statistics are permissible but sometimes digital will take it further.

And so that's where we infuse some digital in your platform. 

What's been the take up on it, or do you have a lot of your clients going down that path? 

Dennis Hickey: I'm sorry, can you repeat that? 

What's been the adoption rate for Infuse with the clients who you work with and who you target? Are most saying this is great, I want to do this? Or do a lot of the protector of the property developer saying, “No, we've got the money. Thanks.”?

Dennis Hickey: Actually, it works in twofold. Obviously we're getting direct leads for folks that have found us and are interested in doing business, but it actually comes from the fact that SNA may have a project that has been sitting in our possibility category for a while.

And the client goes, I'm going to put it off next year's budget and put it off the next quarter's budget, and they just can't make it financially meet, obviously with the pandemic that actually grew even bigger where clients were like I'm a little nervous now because tourism was down for a while.

We have the confidence that everything's coming back. So we asked the client, would he be interested if we took the role and it's taken some clients over the edge? Some clients are still excited about building it themselves and want to maximize the dollars for it. We made an offer in times square to somebody to do an infused deal.

And they said, no, they are comfortable doing it on their own and they will do it when the time is right. And we accepted but there are folks that are just like, what, I really want to build it. I really want to get started, and with the pandemic, you may be our only paying tenant.

And so we then took that role and took it over to the edge. 

So I guess this enforces even more of a business discipline on you guys as well. If somebody in Time Square says we want to put up a big spectacle, it's not that tough of a decision to make, but if somebody in, let's say downtown Omaha, Nebraska wants to put up a big spectacle, you've got to make some decisions around, okay, if we finance this, is the money there to make this feasible? 

Dennis Hickey: Perfectly said, and I'll give you an example of a Margaritaville in Orlando, which is right outside of Disney's animal kingdom. And Margaritaville came to us. They were on the fence about what direction they wanted to go.

And we talked about maybe we should invest in it. But we did a shared partnership investment where we both had skin in the game essentially to make the deal happen, and the person that puts the most skin in the game we'll get the most return on investment initially. But again it's the client's property, so in the end they will reap the firm benefit. But yeah, it works and it varies per location. It may be a situation where we can do an evaluation. We can say, Unfortunately, we love your concept. We love everything you do. It's not necessarily going to work for us here. But we'll make a form of investment in 10, 15, 20%, maybe 50%, or maybe we know when we can really make a stronghold against some other things and we'll take the a hundred percent investment path.

It will vary per project location. 

You're not in a position like some tech giants, like the Ciscos of the past who would pretty much buy a stadium deal just because they're going to get other things out of it? 

Dennis Hickey: Perfectly said too. Yeah, Cisco can be more business to business, but you could have other manufacturers that have consumer products and, by marketing their name by putting their name under they might get the attention of somebody that attended that sporting venue or that entertainment venue wants to buy a product at best that has the same name that doesn't really work for us. For what our standpoint is, we know what should generate revenue wise on those screens. Our partners in the at-home world will tell us, and we live by that. So because of that, we can say to the client what he could make. He could make X dollars per this. If he doesn't believe us, we'll put up the money and show him.

So we're not going to see naming rights on a NFL stadium anytime soon with SNA display stadium on it?

Dennis Hickey: No, but we just landed a major NFL stadium recently, I’ll tell you about it at another time. But no, you won't, it really doesn't do us any benefit. If you see SNA displays on a display, you’ll wonder, what do they make? And look us up when we have a fantastic website and think what does that have to do with me? I'm not putting a $5 million LED in my kitchen, so it's not really going to work. 

SNA is an interesting company in that it's a Chinese manufacturer, but this is the North American entity of it. So Sansi North America. Is that correct?

Dennis Hickey: That is correct. We have Shanghai Sansi Technologies and then Sansi North America. There has been a partnership for many years where we took control of Sansi North America, with all dynamic, digital displays, direct view. It dates back, I came from and lived in the sign world prior to joining a company based out of Plano, Texas, where Jason Helton, who works with us, worked out of, and he was buying from a company, Shanghai, Sansi.

We struck a deal with Shanghai Sansi to represent their product here in the United States to cover North America. However, we knew we landed some big name brands, which are international and we cover those as well, too. It's been a great long relationship with Shanghai Sansi.

We do a range of things prior to the pandemic, where we do factory acceptance tests, we take people to tour the factory. As I mentioned, the 2.5 million square feet of manufacturing that occurs there we show everybody in the ins and outs and show them around the Shanghai area and maybe other areas too to make a fun trip out of it.

So we've been doing it for a while. It's a great relationship and our exclusivity with Shanghai's Sansi is very strong.  

The larger Chinese LED manufacturers, the Leyards, the Yunalumens, and so on. They don't really have a distinct North American entity like a US office of, but you guys have made a very concerted effort to, I wouldn't say distance yourself from the parent company, but you are your own thing with your own marketing, website, everything else. You're not just piggybacking on what's coming from Shenzhen or Beijing or Shanghai. Why is that? 

Dennis Hickey: Great point, and thank you. The reason is there's a very distinctive marketing value between China and the United States, and in meeting Shanghai Sansi said that they know their expertise lives in the product manufacturing. They want to stay ahead of the curve and the product side.

And our team wants help to manage the process. So we have SNA pros that are certified licensed engineers and architects. So we want to manage the construction side of it. So we're giving everybody a turnkey. And we also want to have a US marketing presence. Us marketing is very different.

So you mentioned folks like the layers out there. They do a lot of interior decoration. You name some others. They do a lot of exterior work, and we do all, and we do all in the house. So we want to leave Shanghai, since he focused on the latest and greatest product, remember we were the first to the United States with a 1.2, five millimeter.

We did it first, at a stadium in Washington, DC. So we want them to maintain that. We have a good lane of workmanship together. They stay in their lane and focus on the product. We stay in our lane and focus on the marketing as well as the construction part to make sure that our clients have somewhere to call, we call it 24 hour service, right?

When we go to sleep, they're still working. So you get a 24 hour response continuously, and we created our own app to follow your projects from start to finish. Oh, so you can use the SNA app to know what's being manufactured and not just when it arrives in the United States, it's being manufactured day one.

See what's going on overseas while you started to work with us. So it's been a good process responsiveness and delivery and service. We know all the functionalities of the displays and we have a good team to stand behind it. To be an SNA pro you have to be certified in a category. So these are licensed engineers, licensed architects, or they have had an extensive amount of time working in the field, whether through service, et cetera, on a particular product, and they become certified as SNA pros. This is the quarter of our business. The SNA response time is what we call a no excuse response. So that's why we have the app. Follow your project on the SNA app from start to finish from day one.

And then throughout we want you to know how much inventory you have. We want you to know everything through that process when you do business with us, and it starts with our SNA pros. They know everything. So it's no excuse because they might be a licensed electrician or they might be an electrical engineer.

So they're going to get you the immediate answer, and we're going to tell you rapidly, you don't have to wait a few days to hear something from overseas. You can hear right away. 

And I assume that makes a big difference with the integrators and the specialty consultants and those kinds of folks out there, because you know what, one of the issues with some of the tier two manufacturers coming into China is they may have, what's pretty great product, but if there's a problem, the support is 12 hours away and it may or may not be in a language that both ends speak?

Dennis Hickey: Exactly! Perfectly said, and it all comes down to costs. Any downtime is down on return on investment and we keep on a media display. Exactly. But even if it's a lobby, and it's a back screen, you're giving information to potential folks coming to work every day. And if that screens down, it takes away from the look and the aesthetics of that big, expensive building that you just built. We can't have that excuse, and the good news is our diagnostic software is actually. It's free and it exists. Our app is free. You can follow your project, start to finish free.

So we want you to always know through transparency, the health of your display, and we always want you to have an immediate and absolute response. 

The profile of the buyer for indoor and outdoor LED seems to have evolved over the years. What really struck me was sometime last year you guys put out a case study and it was a sports bar with a fine pitch direct view LED over a portion of the bar across from Lambeau field in green bay. 

And I thought, this is one of these cases where there's clear evidence that LED is now a mainstream product. It's no longer this high end thing that only goes in very deep-pocketed venues.

Dennis Hickey: Perfectly said, obviously the market has evolved. In 1997, the blue Dyer was invented and made LEDs obviously way more expensive, but over time and over manufacturing, the costs have come down to a certain degree. It's still more expensive. But the cost of the LED coming down and then the fight over longevity, brightness, uniformity and seamlessness has really taken the lead to another level, which is why you have interests from major corporations that used to focus on purely LCDs.

They're in because they know this is the future and has really taken off. It's still more expensive. We like to say that, if you're going to put up three LCDs high, by three LCDs wide, you're probably better off doing LEDs. But until you get there, it's slightly more expensive. So you have to think long-term, forget the capital expenditure and that tends to work.

But we also know that Lambeau Field is going to be sold out. Where else can you go to have fun and watch the game? It's great sitting on your couch and watching the game. But, it's actually more fun with a group of people in a bar right outside the Lambeau stadium as I couldn't get tickets, but I got tickets outside of the stadium.

So that was definitely a fun project. 

And are you generally seeing the profile change, where it's not just these big, spectacular installations inside and out, but that you're getting things like this sports bar or was that more of an anomaly? 

Dennis Hickey: Absolutely. It's all coming to fruition.

You gotta thank God to Google and other search engines where you can see what our neighbors are doing. But it's definitely moving. You get a significant price brightness difference. You get a longevity difference. You get an operating difference as well as a bezel difference.

More purity of screens. It is and definitely will gravitate towards that. Like I said, those big companies see that I'm aligned. That's why they joined the competition. We've been doing Shanghai Sansi since 1993.

And they just started joining. So you can see the evolution of that. 

If you're looking at stuff coming out of CES this week, and just generally in display technology, there's all kinds of ongoing discussion and product launches around mini and micro LED. But is it more marketing noise or is it really where this stuff is going? Because I don't think you guys do that. You're still SMD based, right? 

Dennis Hickey: Yes. We're more SMD based, but we're always researching the latest and greatest. It's a rush for the latest and greatest. So in the exterior market, folks like to talk about how my brightness level is always a very extreme high number.

And we always joke about that and say, we can give it 10 times of that, but we killed the life expectancy of your display. So it is more of a marketing ploy of being different. First and foremost, you take something simple as a diode. Shanghai Sansi was getting six months advanced release on the diode to test it, to qualify it, to make a better product.

And Nichia might set the spec on what that product is and so on and so forth, and it's not just Nichia, I just use that loosely here. It could be anything, and so what we do is you follow the specs, but everybody wants to be more distinctive and Sansi North American, Shanghai Sansi, we don't necessarily need that market distinction. We want something a bit better delivering the product. Making sure the product is reliable. Being with the no excuse policy turnkey has answers to the questions like, who do I call, when I have an issue or question? How and when do I get a response? Will I get a response? I think it is a more distinguished group.

We'll get the new company to pop up and say, Mine's flexible or something like that. That works on 2% of the industry. We are going to focus on what the far majority need. And it  needs a qualified, reliable product with a reliable company, standing behind it, and that's really what it is.

With that technology though, the SMD stuff that you're primarily using, is it now matured or are there still advances that can be made, that if we could just get this or that, then we'd be at a Nirvana state? 

Dennis Hickey: I think it's just perfecting it and further perfecting it right.

To get it better, obviously it always lowers the cost. But I don't think there is anything more in line with that, and it's just my opinion. Jason Helton on our team probably has an even better answer to that question. But from my standpoint it is getting the most reliable, the best view, the best color uniformity, the best view angles, and starting to maximize those directions. That is really what it iS. We've been Guinea pigs before a new car came to the market. You might want to be a Guinea pig, however there are pros and cons to that. I like to take the road of what's established and what's developed.

And just to make sure it's perfect, and then, let the human, I do the rest. 

Is SNA doing anything with the transparent mesh LEDs that are starting to cloud entire buildings in China and things like window film?

Dennis Hickey: Yes. We have several. We have one in Shanghai, Sansi, they just shared it recently as well. We've had it, we call that product since 2009 through the media. So what's actually existed here in the United States for over 13 years, and it's evolved. 

It didn't look very good for a long time. 

Dennis Hickey: It definitely didn’t. Everything becomes a little bit thinner and a little bit more transparent. But we do have a product on it. Like I said, we can make anything. Keep in mind that Shanghai Sansi makes LED lighting products. The bridge between Macau and Hong Kong, all that lighting is Shanghai Sansi product. So we have the team to pretty much do anything that is designed and developed or in concept. It's just, there's not a lot of them. There's permit restrictions in some cases in some areas, but it exists and it's pretty easy to make. And like I said, we've had a version in 2009 and here we are, now 2022, it's definitely much different, but we've been doing it for many years.

What's going to be the big news for you guys this year?

Dennis Hickey: I actually think we're getting into sports, watch out! I think our entrance into sports changed the whole platform. We haven't really been in, we always joked we've been outside the bowl, but never in the bowl, and we're about to take a presence in a bowl.

Very distinctive team. Hopefully at some point we can announce it. But I think our competition knows what it is. So maybe they will announce it for us, but there's several more. So sports are big. I think infuse really helps our clients get over the hump like they want it but can't afford it or they want it but are unsure.

And I think that gets us over the hump as well, and I think SNA is doing what best they can do, continue to help the client from start to finish, being transparent and open. That's really our game. We stay within their budget. There are no change orders.

We finished the project on time which they wanted, there are no excuses, And I think with all of that, you're going to see some big dynamic things in Las Vegas of course in Times Square where we have a bulk of the market share there as well. You're going to see some big distinct things in some of the major cities.

Like we just recently did with AT&T in Dallas. You're going to see the same. 

Yeah, and that's a beautiful project there. One day I'll be able to travel again and see those things. 

Dennis Hickey: I think we can hopefully. I'm praying the latest and greatest with this pandemic is now an End-demic.

Like we all get by and if you're vaccinated, boostered and you probably have it. At some point, hopefully we can all move on and I think we are.

All right, Dennis. It’s been a pleasure to spend some time with you. Thank you. 

Dennis Hickey: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Brady Haag, Project Content

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

In the last two or three years, I've sensed a big shift in the understanding and execution of big LED displays - with way more focus on content than in the past. For a long time, most of these big jobs were so focused on the size and pitch of the screens they kind of forgot about what was really important - what was on the screens.

That's changed a lot with big dollar projects, but not so much - at all - with the 10s of 1,000s of smaller, lower resolution LED displays that are resting on pylons along roadsides or mounted on the sides of buildings. They're just straight marketing and messaging centers for everyone from auto dealers and grocers to churches and community theatres. In most of those cases, the sign operator is working with very basic play-out software and has little or no creative capabilities or resources.

So what's on those signs often doesn't look very good. Doesn't have an impact. And rarely gets changed.

That's why's Brady Haag started a little company in Wichita, Kansas that is expressly in the business of making the production of creative for these kinds of screens fast, easy and inexpensive. Project Content is a cloud platform populated with a ton of pre-designed templates that subscribers can easily use and output as finished files.

Templates are not at all new to digital signage, and a whole bunch of CMS software companies have template libraries. There's also third-party services that have these libraries. But those are for HD screens, what you'd maybe call everyday digital signage. The big difference here is how Project Content is solely focused on these low-res LED screens, with all the quirks and the special thinking and design needed to make them look good and have an impact.

TRANSCRIPT

Brady, thank you for joining me. Where are you today? 

Brady Haag: Hey, thanks for having me, Dave. We are located in Wichita, Kansas. So in the center of the US. 

The fly over country? 

Brady Haag: Exactly. We're actually the air capital of the world, but I don't know if we can even consider us that anymore with all the aircrafts leaving us.

So what is Project Content all about? 

Brady Haag: So Project Content is an effort by my team and I to elevate the outdoor EMC content game. I noticed when I joined the industry about seven years ago that there was a really big problem, especially with the EMC side of things, and I drove around the country with some colleagues and realized that 85%ish of the content wasn’t driving revenue, it was just sitting up there not producing anything and sign owners love the idea of having an EMC, but they don't think of all the work and all the thought and time that needs to go into that EMC that they purchased. 

I was on your site, and I know what EMC is, but can you explain that to other people? Because my community just calls them digital signs. 

Brady Haag: I actually like LED displays better than EMC but EMC is an electronic media center or message center. They're outdoor billboards or digital commercial boards that can promote marketing messages based on whatever the client wants to put up there, so driving down the highway, you can see that a lot of car dealerships have them and like to promote their car specials on the road. 

Yeah, so EMC is the same thing as a LED display. 

Okay. So you're less focused on internal digital signage and much more so on the kind of the roadside stuff and the LED stuff on pylons and so on?

Brady Haag: Exactly. We're working our way into the indoor digital space, but it's so oversaturated right now, and we're just trying to focus on a solution for the outdoors first. 

Yeah, as you mentioned, a lot of these are small businesses and they just have no idea about what to do for content or what it should look like or anything else, right?

Brady Haag: So we call it, in-house, the black box debacle because it came to me one day when I was giving a seminar at a place in Missouri. When these people buy the LED display, they're basically buying a black box and it's a highly technical black box and probably $30,000 plus, but it's a black box at the end of the day and it's only going to perform as good as the content that's on there. 

We did a quick estimate and we think that there's more than a hundred thousand EMCs or black box installations nationwide. And, they invest in these EMCs or LED displays for their marketing power and the ability for them to be able to inform people driving by and the reality is most of these aren't performing the way that they should. 

And a lot of these outdoor displays are quasi low resolution, what I would consider low resolution compared to LCDs and so on, and are meant to be seen from a distance? So do you have to design content with that in mind?

Brady Haag: Oh yeah. Coming from college, when I'm working in the LCD world and HD world, it's hard to dumb everything down. There's so many rules that go into LED display content that are way different, and actually on our website ProjectContent.com, we developed a best practices book, which we call the Project Content playbook. 

It's 50 pages long. We went really in depth discussing the best practices and how to get the best or the most out of your LED screen. Everything's gotta be blown up. Everything's gotta be bigger and the words gotta be less verbiage. 

Yeah, certainly when people ask me about digital signage content in general, I always tell them to think of billboards, you've got very short attention spans, it's a glance at the media. You've got to have just like a handful of words at the most, and a one key image if you even have an image. 

Brady Haag: Right, and that key image can't be detailed. It has to be zoomed in on what you're really trying to promote 'cause you gotta, depending on the traffic area, the most you're gonna get is probably 8 seconds worth of viewing and that's on the high side of things. 

Unless you get lucky and you're in an intersection with stop lights, but that's another thing that a lot of clients don't understand is, they'll try to put a 32s ad up there and people are only catching one slide of that ad and not understanding the full ad completely.

Yeah. This is not a medium for storytelling. 

Brady Haag: Yeah, exactly. 

So how does it work? How does the platform work?

Brady Haag: Yeah, so Project Content, we develop the software. It's totally cloud-based and we house over a thousand pre-made and editable templates, and these templates that we have are professionally designed by my team using the EMC content best practices that we've acquired over the years.

So one of the coolest things, when you get in there is that we have every type of collection that you can think of, and we're constantly adding more weekly. So this library that we have is ever-growing and we like to keep it fresh, like I said, every week. But when you come to our website, you go in there and you'll build out an actual sign profile, because as you may know, each LED sign has a different pixel matrix.

So let's say 210 pixels wide by 120 pixels tall, for example, that's probably our typical average sign that we deal with. You would put that into your sign profile and you can name it and you can have as many signs as you would like, and then you can go into our template editor and find the template that you like, and you can change the actual words and pictures and whatever it may be to better suit your needs. 

So if it's a hamburger restaurant that you own, and you're wanting to show a picture of your hamburger for 99 cents, I wish that was still the case. You can go in there and swap out a car if it’s a car dealership, and you can swap out that car with the hamburger picture and swap out the text for that is the price of the car to the price of the hamburger, and I know that's confusing, but it's all template based. 

Do you need any sort of skills other than the ability to use a mouse and type? 

Brady Haag: Nope. So we tried to keep it as simple as possible. We know that a lot of our clients are, they’re receptionists, they're not graphic designers at the end of the day. So we wanted to make it as simple as possible and the least time consuming as possible for them to come in there, develop their ad. All they have to do is think of the idea, and we even help with that with some of our templates, but they just think of the idea, they plug in the text in their picture and render it out.

So chances are, if they're doing that, they're already in charge of updating that electronic message center in some way. So they already have to know some other software, right? 

Brady Haag: Correct. Yes, but that being said, a lot of these manufacturers or sign shops sell an LED sign, the software that they give to the clients or the end user, it's for the lowest common denominator and usually out of date, clip art style graphics with the inability to create multi-layer engaging innovations. And they typically have a solid background color with text appearing and a different color on top, and that's as far as they get.

We took a poll across the country and we saw that about 95% of the market chooses to create the content themselves, even though a lot of them are not graphic designers at the end of the day. 

And then bad things happen!

Brady Haag: And then bad things happen, and there's two issues with that actually.

So issue number one is with the end user and the second issue is with the sign dealer or sign shop. So the end user, like I said, doesn't have the designer marketing experience to make that sign pop for them and get a return on their investment. Or even drive business inside at that time, they don't have the design capabilities and most of the time they just don't have time. It's another thing that's just thrown onto them, and so I can't tell you how many times I drive around town and I see the same message that's been there for two years and over time, you're just going to tune that out. I already know what that message is going to be. I don't need to look at it again. So you want to keep fresh, engaging content for them to always keep looking and keep your company top of mind. 

Is part of the problem with that if I'm some sort of business that doesn't do a lot of outbound marketing, is it a case of, they wouldn't even know who to ask to build them an ad? 

Brady Haag: That definitely could be the case, and that the bigger the company, the harder that is to happen. 

The smaller companies like these mom and pops shops, they have no idea who to ask and what to do with it, and they just go with whenever they see other signs doing, and a lot of the time it's not the right way to use it, and then that goes to the issue number two, with the sign dealers and sign shops. At the end of the day, if that product or that sign out there is underperforming and looking bad, it is going to reflect on them, even though it has nothing to do with what they do.

It could be the biggest and baddest sign in town, but if it has red monochrome text on it, it's not going to look great. It's an issue with the end users, right? That sign is a marketing tool for the sign shop, and if the sign looks better, they look better. 

Yeah, and if it's generating an impact for the customer then this is probably going to generate new business because customers’ competitors who are looking at it are going well, we need one of these now.

Brady Haag: Exactly! We have a Dennis down the street, actually they had purchased EMC and had a vertical pitch. So it was different and cool. So we had a reseller local sign shop in town that packages project content to the sign cell. So they automatically got us for a year and they used us as best as they could, as a result that sign shop has sold three more signs around that company. 

Yeah. I was going to ask if you had some sort of a reseller program, so even the manufacturers could bundle content creation capability with the hardware and software so it just says, we have this sorted out for you.

Brady Haag: Yeah. So we actually do. We rolled this out last year and so we call them our affiliate and reseller program or dealer program. And the affiliate program, at Project Content, we market directly to the dealers and end users. So the dealer has nothing to do with it, except they refer to the customer they have and ask us to help them out. And with that, they'll get a 10% residual income for the life of that relationship with the customer. 

On the other side, we have a reseller program, which is a little bit more in depth on the dealer side. We see this more used actually. They package it into their sign sales and just make that part of the number. So they do the selling and we give them a 25% discount off MSRP so they can up-sell it, and then if we keep them on as a client after their term expires, they get that 10% residual income as well. 

And you do custom creative as well, right?

Brady Haag: Correct. So on our upper tiers, we do offer custom services and we even offer complete sign management, and what I mean by that is we will actually go into the software, the scheduling platform and schedule everything for them, keep everything organized, do everything for them. All we need is an email.

We found that once we get some of our clients on here, they never want to go back. Because they don't want to touch the software or deal with that. They just want to pass it on. We handle it a little and male it look good. 

That must be a bitch though. Cause there if there are hundred different EMC vendors out there and they all have their own hack together, often Chinese software, you have to learn all those, right?

Brady Haag: Correct. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. But through that process, it actually was a good learning experience for me and my team. We got to see what we liked about different softwares, what we didn't like about other softwares and put it towards our platform and what we continue to build. It's been a good learning curve, but yes, it's definitely a bitch. 

Is the majority of what you do just static images, are you doing animations or are you going all the way to video? 

Brady Haag: We do complete animations as well as static imagery. So we know there's a lot of bylaws, with different counties that have hold times and that's one of the things we discovered the hard way once we got going. But yeah, so we can do static imagery or animations 

And through all this experience, did you get any sense of whether animation makes a difference for something with such a short attention time? 

Brady Haag: We haven't done any technical research, hardcore research on that. But I believe so. 

I actually teach a class out at a local community college here. It's called interactive digital signage, and in that class, we do a lot of research on different signage and how it can impact things, and in a small light poll in my classroom, we think that attention grabbing is way easier with animation and static imagery. 

You see something flashing in the corner of your eye, you're going to look up at that. With static imagery, you might just keep passing. 

So how does the platform work in terms of me being an end-user? Do I buy a license? Do I subscribe to something? Are there different tiers? 

Brady Haag: Yeah. We deliver three plans or three levels of service, depending on what the end user goal is with our EMC and how much content creation process they want. Our top tiers are going to be $300 a month, which is ultimate and that's going to be that full sign management piece that I talked about and the higher the tier, the more, what we call credits you get, and those credits are technically a custom content piece or a template piece. What that ultimate plan is, you get 10 custom downloads per month, and 10 template downloads per month. And then it goes down from there to our other tiers.

In one respect, that doesn't sound like very much. But when you think about the medium, that's probably more content changes than an awful lot of these sign orders for whatever do, right? 

Brady Haag: Correct. Yeah, and it really depends on the medium.

Car dealerships, they're rolling out a whole bunch and they use all ten every week. But, the mom and pop shops, like I mentioned, they're probably only gonna use two or three, and so they might be better for a smaller plan, and we don't recommend going above 10 anyways, because you want to pound that message home.

85% of the people that see your SIGN live within five miles of it. So you want to pound that message home as much as possible until next month. 

And what's been the response to those different tiers. Having been in this business for a very long time, $300 a month is nothing, but to an end user, particularly a new one, it probably seems like, “oh my God, 300 bucks, are you crazy?” Because they don't understand what all is involved. 

Brady Haag: So I will tell you our most popular plan is, I believe, is our ultimate plan and that the hard thing is to get them to understand that $300, like you said, is not a lot for the amount of things that you want. But once they realize, and they don't have to touch that sign, it's going to look good and do what they wanted to and how they pictured it in their head, they’re hooked 

So once we get them on, they tend to stick around. I think the most practical is our premium, where you get eight downloads from our templates and two custom pieces and that's for $125 a month and I feel like that sits well with most of our clients as well. 

We were talking ahead of hitting the start button, and I was telling you how I have a degree of experience in what you're doing from several years ago with something that's more video-driven, it was an After Effects plugin, and a service built around that, low cost ads or full motion ads. But I found the biggest challenge to getting the end-user community to take this up was education and getting their heads wrapped around the idea of templates. 

How have you found trying to raise awareness of this and understanding of it?

Brady Haag: Oh yeah, like you said it's very tough and, you're right, we do have to educate them and we don't only have to educate the end users, but we had a really hard time and focused on educating the sign dealers and sign shops themselves, and what they really need to know is that once you sell an LED display or an EMC, it's an ongoing relationship. It's not, “Here's your sign. See you later. Thank you for your business.” 

It's an ongoing relationship, and I just truly believe that once we get them educated on the importance of the content and they see the marketing ability for themselves, that is going to hit a home run for them. But yes, educating them is the tough part. We try to do things such as blogging on our websites. We do seminars and webinars throughout the year, and like I said, we have that playbook that educates, it's a 50 page playbook that can help educate end users and sign user. 

So are the sign shops your “channel”? 

Brady Haag: Yes. So we started off just going one-on-one with end users and we realized that was going to take forever. So we got in touch with some great partners and resellers of our product, and we found that the best way is with them as a reseller, and they just package it into their pricing and they don't have to touch anything else and the end-users are handled by us, and everything's golden. 

Through the years people who have experience with the traditional sign industry, the sign community have tended to say to me, and I've observed it myself that they don't generally believe this sign industry is ever going to wrap their heads around the digital portion of their industry and how it's going to somewhat transition to that, maybe not fully, but at least partly, have you seen that mindset change and more adoption now? Cause I get a sense that is happening. 

Brady Haag: Yeah, I do. I think with the technology getting better and the pitch is getting closer and closer together. Pretty soon, content is going to be as good as HD.

Now the thing with that though, there's still going to be those outdoor practices that you can't create the outdoor billboards the same way as you can for an indoor display. Because like we talked about at the beginning, the amount of words you can get and the amount of detail that you can actually show. But as far as the digital space, I think people are finally starting to take notice and I'm excited to see where it goes. 

Are there standards in terms of dimension? One of the cool things about LEDs is you're not constrained by 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio. You can do different shapes. You can do wide ribbons on and on, but does that create a problem for you? 

You mentioned earlier this idea or this process of creating, assigned profile. If you have an auto dealer group that has 20 signs and they're not all the same size, do they have to create multiple versions of the same spot or is it responsive or anything like that? 

Brady Haag: Yeah, so we have an Arby's franchise and they have multiple different sizes. So they would build each location out with their actual pixel matrix for each sign, and maybe they can name it whatever location it is. They can go in and edit one message and then export it and render it out to all the different sizes and it'll automatically adjust to those sizes. 

Yeah. So you're not having to create it and then back up and start over and do the same thing again for different resolution, right? 

Brady Haag: Yep. That's one of those things that we coded in there, and that's probably my favorite thing that we decided.

And how long would it take to produce an ad? I get the sense that if you knew what you're doing, it would take 90 seconds. 

Brady Haag: Yeah. 90 seconds pretty on the ball there. We usually say, give it 30 seconds to render and by render, I mean, it's gotta go through and create the actual video with your changes from that template and it'll spit it out to your downloads folder. So 90 seconds is probably a good time. 

And if you render it and you're creating a spot, and you want to prove it and make sure it looks okay, like, if you spelled correctly and so on is that one rendered output, as soon as you do that or the meter only goes on when you do a final render?

Brady Haag: So unfortunately, as of right now, how we have it, your final image is your final image and that's going to take your credit. However, what we have implemented is you can preview it as much as you want. We even send you an extra message right before, and we say, are you sure, have you checked the spelling, have you looked through this and as soon as you hit yes, it's going to take the credit. 

We still get quite a bit of clients that ignore that message and hit “Yes” and we'll refund them their credits and that's totally fine. But that's one thing that we're looking at improving this year with upcoming changes. 

Yeah, I guess some of the other things you could over time get into, like some of the agencies have and even third-party tools where you can start to do things like approvals and markups on spots and everything else saying, this would be great, but you use this image instead, all that sort of stuff. Are you looking at that down the road? 

Brady Haag: Exactly. Yeah, we are. So we've busted Project Content into three stages. Our first stage was to create our templates and make them editable and spit those images or videos out. The second stage, we're going to make this an actual scheduling platform, and that's what we're in the works of doing now. So not only can you create your template, but you can also schedule it, and it'll be mobile friendly, cloud-based, ready to go, and the third is going to be the AI side, and so what our end goal is, which I can't talk about too much, but it'll be artificial learning and artificial intelligence telling you what you talked about, “This would look better here, or, you ran the special at this time last year. Do you want to run that special today?” 

Yeah, it's interesting. I was just looking at a website yesterday for a company called Fixate, fixate.ai. I think they do AI based, machine learning based optimization of ads so they can predict where people are gonna look on an ad spot based on how it's laid out and everything else and then make recommendations about if you make this larger change, this color and so on is going to get a higher strike rate. 

Brady Haag: Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I definitely have to check that out. 

It’s expensive though. Getting AI engineers is expensive if you're in a flyover country, right?

Brady Haag: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Software, I've learned, is very expensive.

Everything's virtual these days. So where are you at in terms of your company and size? Is it bootstrapped? Are you a venture backed or anything like that? 

Brady Haag: So we're privately owned, and we have about eight employees, and a lot of them I've taken from my college classes, so I get a free little trial with them and so we're eight strong right now and we're continuing to grow, and last year we basically doubled. So I'm excited to see where we go this year.

Are you set up for scale? Like if all of a sudden, your business quadrupled, that'd be a good problem to have, but do you have the infrastructure to handle that kind of spike in that. 

Brady Haag: Yeah, I believe we do, and a lot of that has to do with the “help themselves” feature with those templates.

I think that's going to be what would help us drive that growth. Those templates are created. We don't have to do anything with them nowadays, clients go in there and do it all themselves. So as long as we keep knocking out more clients and keep bettering our software on the other side of things, then I think we'll be set and ready to go.

There are other companies out there that do similar stuff, but it tends to be a platform that didn't start as digital signage or as electronic message centers or whatever you want to call them. They started as a printed poster material for Instagram and Facebook and so on, and they've said, oh, by the way, we now support 16:9 landscapes and portraits, and you could do it that way, or are they competitors for you?

Brady Haag: We have not seen them as a competitor. We've learned a lot from them, but like you said, are more for social media or indoor signage. I think the one thing that differentiates us is, we specialize in those smaller pixel matrices. We know how the outdoor content game is different. We've done the research and we've been in it for seven years. So I think that's one thing that, like for instance, we mimic promo a lot. Promo is a great website. We love what they do, but a lot of their ads are not going to work for an outdoor digital display. They're going to be too detailed.

Yeah. I find what they do interesting. I've reached out to him a couple of times and they did not get back to me so they could have had a podcast too, if they'd be nice. 

All right. So if people want to find Project Content where do they go online? 

Brady Haag: So they'll go to www.projectcontent.com 

And do you have any kind of a setup to try us for 14 days or anything like that? 

Brady Haag: Yeah, we do have a free trial and it is for 14 days and you'll get access to our template editor. So you can go around and play around and get your hands dirty with it, and please let us know what you think and if there's any upgrades or changes that you'd like to see, we're all ears. 

All right, Brady. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Brady Haag: I appreciate it, Dave. Thank you.

Henrik Andersson, Instorescreen

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

Retail experts have long spoke about the so-called zero moment of truth - that time in bricks and mortar stores when shoppers are in the aisles and making the decision about which product they're going to pull off the shelf and put in their basket.

Getting digital signage into stores, with screens doing messaging when people are in a shopping mindset, has always been a big business driver. But putting screens right in the aisles has been a challenge for a few reasons - the main one being how conventional screens would eat up shelf space.

Display manufacturing has advanced to a level now that it's possible to put strips of high resolution LCDs right on the shelf edge without getting in the way - introducing color, motion and the possibility for things like dynamic pricing.

But the solution is not just the display. There has to be a whole system behind it, and that's where Instorescreen comes in. The Hong Kong-based company has a solution that actually meets the scaled needs of retailers and brands, so that you can do things like drive as many as 96 ribbon displays - with different content to each - off a single Lenovo PC.

I had a good chat with Henrik Andersson, the CEO of Instorescreen.

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TRANSCRIPT

Henrik, Thank you for joining me. We've spoken a few times in the past, but for those who are not familiar with Instorescreen, can you run through what your company does? What are you all about? 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah, So Instorescreen is a manufacturer of hardware, mostly monitors and technology for digital signage. We are 20 years old and today, an exclusive partner of Lenovo. 

It's a curious set up in that you're based in Florida, but you're Danish, I believe, and a lot of the company is over in Hong Kong, is that right? 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong, and I'm very close to Danish. I'm Swedish...

Ah okay, you're Nordic. 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So our headquarters is in Hong Kong. We have three manufacturing sites in China and yeah, that's what we are doing today. 

And is it privately held or are you publicly traded? 

Henrik Andersson: We are privately owned. 

One of the things that has struck me about what you do versu and what's historically happened in retail digital signage is, I would say the different waves of signage and retail have involved putting conventional flat panel displays all over stores, which was then followed by doing video walls instead hiving them all together, and the third wave seems to be now that the technology is there to try to put displays right in the aisles, right where consumers are making decisions, as opposed to just being part of the overall look and feel of a store.

Is that kind of why you went on it the way you did? 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So the story is that Instorescreen is created to be a supplier that works outside in, instead of inside out. If I explain that very quickly, we come from true OEM manufacturing and we have been listening to the customer to see how we can make the right product for the customer in the right location? That has been the key. 

Inside out is more like if the customer calls in and you show them what you have, and we didn't want to work that way. So what we have done is that we have created different solutions that are OEM based, but we have based them on a whole, like retail. So for retail, we have been looking to see how we can replace or how we can add screens and technology into the retail environment. Based on that, we created shelf edge displays. We worked through the biggest manufacturer of LCD screens, and we have been working very closely with them to create the right size, length and height.

When that's finished, we have a solution that could be on the shelf edge. It can be on the header and so on. The second step here is how are we going to drive them? What is the most intelligent way to drive them? And that's where it comes in with our solution, where we call it inDAISY, it's a data chain technology where we can utilize one 4K computer running up to 96 screens. Second generation that's coming next year, we'll also be able to push power through to the DAISY chain. So we will be able to push both power and data through one single cable. 

This is the partnership with Lenovo, and with the DAISY chaining, is it one signal to as many as 96 displays, or could it be addressable, like it could be 96 different signals?

Henrik Andersson: It’s 96 different signals. So each screen will get an ID, and based on that ID, you can have different content, so each screen would have different content. 

This wouldn't be 96 pieces of video, though, right? It would be images? 

Henrik Andersson: No, 96 pieces of video. 

  Wow. That would take a pretty serious graphics card.

Henrik Andersson: No, not really. Our data chain works as the way that you think about a canvas that's 4K and each ID is taking a spot from that canvas. So for example, if you have the header display that’s 1920x360, the first header takes location 0 to 1920 down to 360, that's ID #1, ID #2 starts besides that and takes from 1920 to 3840 and down to 360, and then the shelf chassis starts below and they are taking left-right, left-right, and then by utilizing the Lenovo computer, we could have four 4K outputs so we can get four times that resolution. 

So with retail in the many years that I've been involved in this space, one of the challenges has been trying to get displays right into where the merchandise is.

But the problem has always been that if you put a conventional flat panel display into that space, it's going to eat up merchandising space. It's gonna eat up the shelf space that you want for talking about the product. One of the big drivers here I assume is that this takes up space. That it's a way to not take away from that merchandising space and stockings space?

Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have been working very closely with the manufacturer of the gondolas to figure out how much space we can take without taking up on any merchandise. So we are taking up about one and a half inch to 1.7 inch in height, and then we are following the two foot three foot and four foot lengths.

And this is using LCDs? 

Henrik Andersson: That's LCD, yes. 

And I gather that the reason you're able to do this now is you can now natively manufacture LCDs at these sizes? 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we don't use any resize. When we started this project like eight years ago, we used a resize to test and see how we can get it to look and how it should work. 

Today, we are natively producing them. There are benefits of natively producing them. One of the biggest is that you get the same every time. So if you put like 10, 15 of these side by side, you want all of them to have the same backlight. You want all of them to have the same color, of those kinds of features.

And the biggest one is probably to get down in price. By utilizing a cut down like a 55 inch down to be making one shelf edge. That's a lot of waste doing that by using native screens. If the volume reaches X, we will be able to be very competitive. We are calculating, we should be able to go way below.

 A hundred bucks a foot. 

Yeah, because I remember when these thin ribbon LCDs first came out and I would see them at places like NRF, about six, seven years ago, the salespeople work in the boosts wouldn't even tell me a number in terms of price, because I gather it was ghastly, but that's changed.

Henrik Andersson: That's changed a lot. For example, we could have a two foot display today for around 200 bucks.  

And who is putting that in? Is it the brands or is it the retail owners? 

Henrik Andersson: It's both. It's both. It has been the latest 4-5 years. It's a lot of brands. It's getting more retailers, and today, it's mostly retailers on end caps.

And do they see this as part of their business model, their merchandising model that they'll sell end  caps and now it's digital.

Henrik Andersson: Yes, and that's information they see that they have, by just using packages, they cannot inform the customer of what the product is doing by utilizing video screens. Now they can inform me what's the benefit with this product and that product they can also do in different flavors.

They can tease you by looking at how good this is with their eyes and so on, and one of the key things everybody's talking about right now is dynamic pricing. You will be able to change the pricing very quickly. You're able to change products on the shelves. You will be able to Collect external data.

For example, if we say which employee has allergy medicine and so on, we can publish the pollen count onto the shelf fetch in real time.    

Are these replacements potentially for electronic shelf labels or are they kind of complimentary to them?   

Henrik Andersson: Today, it's a compliment. I can say that mostly due to the price, but as the price is still getting lower, I think they are direct competition to the ESLs, I think they are, because you have more dynamics on an LCD screen than you have on an ESL. 

With an ESL, you can do the price and maybe a barcode or something that's maybe two or three colors. That's about it, right? 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah, here you can have a full color spectrum. You can have movies, you can have touch screen functionality. There are so many things you can do. We can integrate the sensors so you can scan your membership and get your special price.

There's so many things that we are investigating right now. What's going to be next? 

And doing that is contingent at all on the kind of back office systems that our retailer has as to whether they have the data and everything to make that? 

Henrik Andersson: Here is where we work very closely with a lot of partners that build softwares.

So we worked with, for example, Microsoft, Oracle, all of them where they have the backend for the retailers, and then we were working with the digital signage companies, that’s how we can get data between those two systems. 

Is that a challenge at all in terms of working with the different digital signage, CMS options out there that they need to have a platform that can work with this high-end Lenovo box?

Henrik Andersson: No, it's not a super high end Lenovo box. It's a computer called P 340. That has an Nvidia board inside before 4K output. So a signage software will work with our solution and most of the times when we talked to a signage company, they found this complicated and it took them 15 minutes and said, oh, this is so easy.

So yes the Daisy chain and all of that kind of feature sounds very advanced, but we made all the technology on our board. So the digital signage company doesn't have to think. That technology, they just have to follow publish on our full 4K cameras.

I guess they would have to, depending on how their CMS works, maybe introduce some new resolutions that they didn't previously have, like 1920x360 or whatever you were describing?

Henrik Andersson: No, they publish 3840x2160 full 4K resolution, and then our data chain board based on the IDs are taking spots from those full 4K canvas. 

What about LEDs? I have seen some manufacturers at trade shows again, who were showing shelf edge strips that were based on fine pitch LED. Is that a consideration or not the right way to go on this? 

Henrik Andersson: The problem we have with the LEDs is the heat. We have been investigating working with LEDs because there are benefits where you can easily make new sizes. We have to make a tool and new tooling costs about $1.5 to $2 million to make a new size.

So if someone says, we don't want 3 feet, we want 3.2 feet. That's a very expensive thing. But in LEDs, it's doable. But we have power usage, it's almost 10 times more, and then we have the heat. So if we take a whole retail store and we put these LEDs out, it could be that you have to start getting more air conditioning units, basically.

I never thought of it that way. Certainly think of all those LEDs, even though we all think of LEDs as being incredibly energy efficient, if you're using thousands of them in a whole store, maybe millions of them, and that's just a lot of little lights to feed.

Henrik Andersson: They're made for outside. You could use them if you could spot the installations. I think they're fine. LCD is more energy efficient. 

The problem that I've seen with the LED versions is simply that to get the resolution, the granularity of the information down to a level that is legible like an ESL or an LCD is you're talking very fine pitch and it adds to the cost.

Henrik Andersson: You cannot do it. So if we look at our header display, for example, it's 1920x360 in resolution. That means we have 360 pixels in height. If you go to an LED, you're down to maybe 30- 40 pixels. 

And the net result of that is the visuals just don't look very good, vright?

Henrik Andersson: Yeah, I guess they will have a resolution of 150x30 or 150x40. Right now, our is 1920x360. 

So it looks like a 1994 desktop monitor?

Henrik Andersson:It depends. From a distance, and if you do the content right, it will look quite okay. But if you go down to price tags and QR codes, coupons, things like that, they will never work. And we can do that as well. We can publish coupons and everything to the shelf edge. 

So maybe down the road 3-5 years after micro LEDs mass manufacturing gets sorted and the yields are up and everything else, maybe that's an option, but certainly not right now?

Henrik Andersson: That's something we look into. We have really started looking at that, but it's way too early.  

What kind of research has been done to measure the impact of a planogram that's just conventional shelf labels and things like that, versus a portion of a planogram that has your digital shelf edge elements to it?

Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So what we have seen now is that it's a wow factor. That's one of the things. If you walk in the store and you’re making about 80% of your decisions in the store, and if you get a wow factor, you get something that triggers your brain, you will buy that product. On top of that, you have tools and gadgets, things that need to be explained.

It would be like powered rails. So we say vitamins, anything that needs to be explained, an energy drink, those kinds of fine benefits. I like telling you that by using this product we give you these benefits. We are seeing between 20% to about 300% based on product. 

Sustained or just like when it first goes up?

Henrik Andersson: It continues. We have some data from pharmaceuticals when they're explaining a product where we have 300-400% uplift, and we have also inside retail on produce and stuff like that. We have a huge growth. 

Are those brands the ones that have used other types of digital signage, like more conventional, flat panels around a store and maybe I assume it wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact, just because it wouldn't be as close to the product?

Henrik Andersson: That has been a thing. They have  advertised on digital signage screens in retail, but most of the time they are too far away from the product. So due to the impulse of buying.

The further away you are from the physical product, the less sales are you going to make. 

One of the things that you were telling is your solution in tandem with Lenovo, your partner, you're doing in-store analytics as well? 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah, we have a solution that we are introducing at the NRF which we call smart vision. It's a full analytics platform utilizing Lenovo servers and multiple cameras to collect data from the retail environment.

This is also applicable not only to retail we're doing even in transportation, education, fast food. It's about collecting data on how many people are happy walking in, or sad walking out, where they're walking. We can see the paths of walking.  We can see where most people are spending most time, and how long they are standing in front of that product. We can also trigger things. We can see for example, that there has been a spell of a drink in aisle six, and we need to call the janitor to get that clean up. We are also working on things to see if they are putting things in their pocket, or they're putting things in the cart. We can see if someone is acting violent or has a tendency, if something could happen. This is what we work on. We'd like machine learning together with Intel to figure out what kind of information we want. 

So you're using Intel's OpenVINO? 

Henrik Andersson: Yes, we are using OpenVINO as the base. 

Retail analytics using computer vision has been around for 15 years, maybe even longer. So that part is not new. What's distinct about what you do versus some of the more familiar ones that are already known in digital signage?

Henrik Andersson: It’s probably our dashboard, an easy way to get an overview and also the flexibility to pick the things you want. We are trying to do the same here as we do with the screen work outside in, instead of inside out, we don't tell the customers that this is the data that we think you should have. We are asking them what data do you want to make your business better.

Most of that is basically to combine multiple cameras, to get the whole view. Instead of having one camera inside of, by one header display by using this, we can see the moving paths in the store. We can see, for example, during X hours a day, we have this many visitors, but we only have this many cashiers open. Then they can move things around in the store to create something more streamlined.

You want green lines across the whole store. You don't want to, like some aisles are more visited and otherized. You want all of them to move like a typical Ikea. Where you want to go, you have to go with the whole store, even if you want to get the thing at the end of the story.

Yes, you do and it's not my favorite way to shop, but...

Henrik Andersson: That's the way to create impulses on the way to the thing that you're intended to buy. Look at the carts at Ikea. You buy so many things on the way to the exit that you'd never planned to buy. 

The reference case that I'm familiar with for your company, is a seat to table store down in south Florida? Is that still your biggest deployment for this, or, where have you put your screens in? 

Henrik Andersson: That’s the biggest single-store deployment. We are deploying in multiple stores, but often as a single end cap or category, and there will be a lot of announcements next year of full grocery stores that are getting this installed.

More than just an end cap, but if it takes you to tape, for an example, we have about 200 screens in that store, including shell fetches, header, square screens. So that is an Intel Lenovo and initial screen show, and everybody's welcome to come down and look at it.

So that's your living lab, or you can walk people through and go here's what's possible.

Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So that's where we test everything from the analytics to the screens to do dynamic pricings, everything is tested there and that's better than having it in our own office. 

Lenovo is one of those very large computing companies that has been on the edge of digital signage and some of these companies like HP and so on, they're in they're out. You don't really know what they do, but it sounds like Lenovo has made a concerted investment of capital and people into the space. 

Henrik Andersson: Yes, Lenovo has grown a lot in the OEM division. I think when I started working with Lenovo OEM, there were about five guys. Now they're up to 50-60.

And just working specifically with you or are they active in other areas as well?  

Henrik Andersson: Basically, it's the whole thing. If you're working outside in instead of inside out, trying to figure out solutions for each individual company. It could involve computers only or it could involve computers and monitors.

One of the things we did in 2020-21 was a full line of monitors with anti-microbial coding on them. So they are like killing viruses and bacterias. But one of the key things as well is that the whole chassis is aluminum. So it's 95% sustainable. 

And is that an ask that you get from retail now?

Henrik Andersson: Mostly Europe, because they don’t want anything that has plastic in them anymore.

That'll be a big change if it starts to happen here. 

Henrik Andersson: So if you go to a grocery store in Sweden, for example, you have to pay 50 cents for a plastic bag. That's what it cost. If you want to bring the groceries home, you have to pay 50 cents for the plastic bag.

Yeah. That's starting to happen here in Canada as well. And I'm constantly buying more bags cause I forgot to bring the ones I have in the car.

Henrik Andersson: Every Swedish guy  has a car full of such bags. 

What do you see happening in the next couple of years with the kind of work that you do? Do you imagine there are going to be other companies developing copycat solutions? For instance, I was in Taiwan when we still could travel about two and a half years ago, and I know that AUO, which is a huge LCD manufacturer, has a whole feature wall of odd shaped ribbon displays and things like that, so it seems like this would be accessible to more accompanies now. 

Henrik Andersson: Yeah. So AUO is one of our partners. So if we look at a couple of their sites that they have, we have been part of their engineering process. We are being part of developing the size, the functionality, the backlight, all those kinds of things.

So AUO is one we have HKC, we have BUE, we work with all of them. Will be the products similar to our products on the market. Yes, there will be. We are trying to be innovative. We are trying to make it easy. Most of our competitors are basically working as if each screen is an individual screen. They're using an Android board put in there and by using an Android board inside, you will be able to push one content to that screen. The problem you're going to face is if we put multiple screens up, for example, you have a limitation of how many units can be connected to a WiFi network.

You would have a limitation of power plugs. You need so many power plugs to have power to each display. Think about the digital signage licenses. Now, this is nothing but fun for the signage company, if you have 3000 screens in a store and each screen has a built in a hundred players, that 3000 licenses. And also about servicing them, it should be easier to take one away, put one back, you know what a computer is, you have something that needs to be updated in one location, not 3000 locations. 

So in other words, you could source something like what Instorescreen has off of Alibaba or wherever you want to go. But the simple question that you would ask or somebody smart would ask or somebody else who's smart would ask is will it scale? And it just doesn't, as you just described. 

Henrik Andersson: No it doesn't, and to get it with the, know what we are able to today to have very smart servicing options. We have longtime warranties.  We have technical people on 24x7 call. It's a disaster if a retail store shelf edge goes black. For example, we need to fix that very quickly and not call an Alibaba contact and you get a new screen in three weeks. 

Yeah. That doesn't work so well. All right. This was great. If people want to learn more about your company, where do they go online?

Henrik Andersson: They can contact Lenovo OEM or go to lenovo.com or they can go to instorescreen.com. 

All right. Perfect. Thanks for your time. 

Henrik Andersson: Thank you very much.

Toni Viñals, NSIGN.TV

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

The Spanish-based solutions provider and integrator Netipbox Technologies has been providing AV and IT-driven digital signage solutions in that region, and across southern Europe, for more than a decade. In recent years, the company has rounded out its offer by developing and marketing its own software solution.

That platform got to a level of maturity and customer acceptance that the company - which has a main office in Barcelona and satellites in Madrid and Miami - spun out the software as its own thing, called Nsign.tv.

The SaaS platform is focused mainly on retail applications, leverages IoT data, and was designed in a way that makes it easy for third-party functionality - things like queue management - to drop into the management and control software as applets, with minimal extra coding or fuss.

I had a chance to speak with CEO Toni Vinals about the roots of the company and product, and how it operates. We also go into what's happening in what seems like a very active digital signage scene in Spain, and get some tips on what to see and do for those people heading to Barcelona in February for ISE. Like me.

TRANSCRIPT

Toni, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what the distinction is between Nsign and Netipbox Technologies? 

Toni Viñals: Sure. Netipbox Technologies was a company I started 12 years ago in the digital signage industry, and we started delivering and doing projects for basically the retail and food industry, and then we jumped into the industry called digital signage where we didn't know anything about it, and we started developing projects with different softwares, different solutions and different technologies, and we also realized that our end users basically, marketing directors and operations directors didn't understand very well the technology that was behind the screens.

So we decided to start developing our own product based on the market and user needs, and three years ago, we decided to market the product and do a spinoff of Netipbox Technologies and with other people and with focus in terms of business, we developed a product called Nsign TV, which is already a product for a digital signage industry based on the market insights that we get from Netipbox. 

We are co-founders of two companies. One is Netipbox Technologies, which is based in Barcelona and is basically focusing on clients, end users and B2C customers based in South Europe and we have Nsign TV, which is a global product that we are deploying worldwide through partners in the digital signage industry. 

Okay. So would it be fair to say that Netipbox is more of a solutions provider versus Nsign, which is a SaaS software platform?

Toni Viñals: That’s a hundred percent correct but also Netipbox is an AV integrator too actually.

Okay, and from what you're describing, it sounds like you developed this software because what was available on the market wasn't really meeting the needs and wasn't friendly enough for the marketing directors you were dealing with, and so you developed this and then decided to make it its own product instead of just an in house solution?

Toni Viñals: That's correct. We realized based on our insights that in Spain, which is not a very digitized country in cooperation with other countries where digital signage is very insulated, that the approach to the market was a very AV or IT-first approach. You need the screen, then you need the digital media player, you need a CMS, and then you the operator runs the content, but the technology and the industry and the market were demanding. 

Digital signage is a solution that is based on content, based on communication. So it means that it has to be related with a marketing and communications department and the marketing and communications departments are very very dynamic, and a very real time communication division. So brands want to speak to the customers very fast. So we found that the solutions that we had at the moment weren't that fast and that flexible so we decided to really create technology, our own problem, based on that experience. 

Was one of the drivers behind it having a user experience and everything in Spanish and potentially even Catalan? What language do you offer the platform? 

Toni Viñals: We offer the platform in thirteen languages, and so we also have a tutorial, in academia, which is based in six languages. So I think we are one of the platforms that are using a lot of languages, but the usual experience is the same in Spain or in Belgium.

Our vision is that in physical spaces, they're going to be more and more screens in the next 10 years. Okay. The pandemic has just accelerated this need. The screens are being shown everyday more and more for not only communicating, but also for signs on for everything. But the thing is how you can control and how you go over these screens? Our experience is that the end users, not our partners, but the end user and the pain that they have is that how do I manage all the infrastructure around the AV technology for my department’s needs? And Nsign’s a solution that wants to cover this pain, and we want to really control any kind of screen and device that will be in a physical space, even if it's a menu board screen, a mobile, or also the PC screen, for instance. 

So when you talk on your website about omni-channel, that's what you're talking about?

Toni Viñals: Exactly and also a channel isolated to one message can be a display, your website and your Instagram can also can be displayed on your screen at point of sale. This is the only channel of communication that we think brands are rooting for. 

Are you hearing from any marketing directors that it was important to them, that they didn't want to have to use multiple platforms to communicate to multiple channels, they would be particularly happy if they could all do everything off of one? 

Toni Viñals: That's our thought, and that's what we think, and that's our vision of the market, and if you go, for instance, companies like Ikea, here in Spain, when they have one platform for all, they are increasing the use of AV technology or digital signage technology at their facilities. If they have to use different technologies for different proposals, that's going to be more difficult to scale that solution for a company. 

Yeah, that's interesting. So they're basically saying that we will do a lot more internal and customer-facing communications if we have tools that make that efficient, but if it's not efficient, we're not going to do it?

Toni Viñals: Exactly, because the IT department and technology departments are limited. They have a few guys selecting the global platforms for use in different areas and different business units. 

Is most of your business in Spain, or are you in South Europe? 

Toni Viñals: We are expanding very quickly and very fast. We now have business in more than 25 countries. We are also based in the States. We have an office in Miami that we opened one year before COVID and I'm traveling hopefully in two weeks again to really reconnect with our partners, but we are also in Mexico, France, UK, Poland, basically Europe, USA and others.

How are they finding your company just end-users? Are they just finding you off the internet? 

Toni Viñals: They find us through our partners. We have a lot of partners in each country and we have a partner program where we help them to market the opportunities that they have. So we help them because of our knowledge of the industry, in terms of developing business in digital signage and the AV market. So we are helping them just to target the opportunities that they have. Also, we are working with a lot of brands that are using Nsign and adapting it for communications at physical spaces, so that's an opportunity to ask also to open new markets. 

It's a pretty crowded market on the software side. There's an awful lot of software as a service solutions out there, and many to most of them market on the basis that they're easy to use, they're intuitive, they're flexible, data-driven, all these things. How do you differentiate yourself in that crowded market?

Toni Viñals: I agree that it’s a crowded market, but it's a very local crowded market. We differentiate in three things. One is the all-in-one platform, so we can really deploy and manage different screens, different kinds of displays over one platform and other one single media player. That's another feature that we have that’s very strong. We have a solution based on Android, we are able to run LED, video walls. We can create effects that I think no other players can do or at least not too much softwares can provide. The second one is interaction. We have a mobile with IOT and interact with these very one by one. When customers understand the power of using digital signage and interacting through IOT on the same platform, we just have a few competitors on this list, and finally the concept of applets, where the client or the partner can deploy micro applications inside Nsign that are very powerful in terms of creating big projects with low cost. That's very interesting and that's a big difference.

So how would that manifest itself? I was speaking to somebody the other day about this and the example they used were meeting room booking systems, and I guess another one would be queue management. Are those the sorts of things you’re talking about?

Toni Viñals: Yeah, queue management and meeting rooms or dynamic pricing in the food industry, these kinds of things are really in demand and of course we need a screen to deploy this content and the content has to be intelligent, content has to be smart, and the content has to be connected to other things apart from the CMS through an API and that's what an applet can really provide to the projects, and that's the differentiation in terms of if you compare us as a simple or single CMS software, which I agree with that there a lot and each country has the local hero, but they are not as much as platforms that work globally. 

So you could have functionality from a different kind of company, just for a simple example, a company that specializes in queue management, and their coders could develop an applet embed it inside of Nsign and mix together both solutions. Is there a lot of API work or it would pretty much just drop in and you map it to networks?

Toni Viñals: It's basically drag and drop, but also depending on the integration, we also have an API, but it means that it's very easy to connect one system with others, but at the end the user wants one screen with both solutions. That's what the user wants, and also in terms of code and in terms of management systems, you need to rely on one system.

What are some of the customers and projects that you're allowed to talk about? 

I always qualify that because you may have some very big ones who don't allow you to say that you work with them. 

Toni Viñals: Yeah, we work with a lot of brands and we want to be very transparent and very open. We think that technology has to be software as a service, technology has to be cloud, and at the end, our technology, and the digital signage industry has to move to a transparent technology, and that's what we are promoting, and we are working with companies like EA Sports, like Ikea, Dominos, etc. All these brands are adopting Nsign because of our approaches that we are a communication platform for the physical spaces. If they have an integrator or some of them has an integrator in each country, we can work with integrators but at the end, we are focusing on working on the idea that the digital science industry needs to be more sexy or attractive and more open to the end user. I didn't know that you understood what I'm trying to say, but that's our vision as a company.

So when you say more open to the end user, what do you mean by that? 

Toni Viñals: Just like companies use Slack for communication and HubSpot for marketing strategy, why not use Nsign for communication in physical spaces? That's the marketing position we want to take. 

It sounds like a fair amount of what you do is retail based. Have you seen in recent years an evolution at all in terms of how retailers want to use digital signage? 

I'm intrigued by how it seems to have gone away a lot from “digital posters” to much bigger feature walls, but there also seems to be more interest in interactive and there's more interest in behind the scenes, operational signage, just talking to staff more than customers. 

Toni Viñals: We are very focused in the retail and F&B industry, but also we are growing a lot in hospitality and supermarkets, and those are the markets that are really adopting and understanding how this technology can help to grow the business. 

In terms of cooperation, we also have realized that after COVID, a lot of companies are really looking for a solution to help them to communicate with employees and to talk to them, to engage them after COVID to promote the back to work campaign. That’s what we’re seeing.

You have an academy. What is that and what's its purpose? 

Toni Viñals: For us, we want this academy to be the center of learnings about what we have done in the last 10 years and to help people that don’t know anything about digital signage or about communication at the point of sale, it’s a place we want to start putting all the knowledge that we have to start creating this community of Nsigners, which is those people that our end-users’ clients that are marketers. 

People from IT, or AV or Designers, they really don't know the potential of digital signage, and that's the academy. We want to put all our knowledge there, and to be one of the most popular places to go to learn from the start.

Is the academy something that you only have access to if you're a customer already or can somebody just come in? 

Toni Viñals: You can just log into our platform, it's a free trial. Once you log in, you will have access to the academy. 

Is that important, the free trial aspect of it? I see that with a lot of companies where they seem to do that.

Toni Viñals: It's important for us to keep the customer or the user trust, and to deliver a good service. It's important because we know who is in our community and how we can help them to achieve their goals. So that's important.

On top of that, as we deploy the service through partners, when we get a lead, the service is delivered through a certified partner to the end user, and once we have a customer, we share the customer with our partners and together deliver the service that this project or the end user needs. So for us, it's important that it’s targeted and controlled. 

You mentioned your partner system, and you had said earlier that you could think of Netipbox as an AV integrator. How do you handle that conflict or is the work that you do purely in your local area and your partners in other countries wouldn't see the Netipbox side of the business as competition of what they do? 

Toni Viñals: In the beginning, they were afraid of course, cause we weren't here to explain that the market is huge and we are working with opportunities. If you are working with a client and you bring the client to the Nsign service, we don't steal the client or bring the client to another seller. So we are very strict and very focused on working with partners. Of course, this is in Spain, but this Spain isn’t the complete market. 

In other quantities, we work through partnerships. Each partnership has their own customers and we have to work on opportunities with them, and also we are targeting our marketing actions to attract the leads, depending on the specialization. There are partners that are really good in retail, partners that are really good in hospitality and so on, and depending on the end user, we usually work with one partner or different partners if we are bringing the lead. If not, we are very strict and very professional. 

I'm a big fan of companies like yours finding partners who are specialists in vertical markets instead of just being generalists.

Toni Viñals: I think it's very important, but the thing that you have to know and you have to understand at the beginning is that you can’t target the whole market.

Yeah, no kidding. You had said earlier that in the early days of your company, there wasn't a lot happening in Spain compared to maybe other parts of Europe and North America and so on. But I get a sense that Barcelona in particular, but Spain more broadly, there's a lot going on. You've got some pretty big integrators, and you've got a number of interesting creative shops, other software companies and so on. It seems like there's a lot happening these days.

Toni Viñals: I think that there is a lot happening because we have passionate professionals that really see this industry as a big opportunity to work with, and I agree that there are projects and solutions that we have deployed here in Spain that I didn’t see in the States or Canada or in Mexico or in northern Europe.

I think that we are pushing innovation in the industry, and Barcelona has a great potential to lead in terms of technology and integrators. 

You have a great benefit now in that if you want to put up a stand at Integrated Systems Europe, you no longer have to pack up a truck and drive up to Amsterdam, you can sleep at home at night. 

Toni Viñals: Exactly. We are just five minutes out via taxi from our offices. So I think that's a great opportunity for us, for the industry to really increase the business and influence that we have in the industry.

And you will have a stand at ISE? 

Toni Viñals: Yes, we will have a stand in the digital signage sector. This is the first time that we are exhibiting as Nsign TV, and also we have a joint venture with a Japanese monitor company, where they are going to have the Nsign solution embedded from scratch to their products. so we will also be at their booth, explaining the opportunities and the benefits of having Nsign as a solution.

So for people who are coming from other parts of Europe and in particular, for people coming over from North America and elsewhere, who've never been to Barcelona, but they are coming for ISE, is there a piece of advice or something that it's always useful for them to know before they get on a plane and head over?

Toni Viñals: If you have never been to Barcelona before, you will enjoy the city, because I think the weather is going to be better than Amsterdam hopefully, but you will have spectacular food, spectacular restaurants, and events that will be running in parallel from the ISE.

Also, if you like technology or digital signage, you will have the opportunity to see different projects. I think they really are unique. So yeah, there's a lot to visit in terms of leisure and business. 

I'm looking forward to coming over. I haven't been to Barlenoa so it’s a big deal for me, but I also haven't been on a plane in two years.

Toni Viñals: You couldn’t go to InfoComm? 

I could have, but there weren't enough compelling reasons to go. But ISE should be pretty normal, I certainly hope so. 

Toni Viñals: If you have the time, I’d really encourage you to come one week before to really enjoy the city and visit the industry that we have here because I think you’ll love it.

All right, Tony. Thank you so much for spending a half an hour with me. 

Niko Sagiadinos, SMILControl

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

Going back roughly a decade, there were a couple of digital signage vendors talking up and marketing their capabilities for a technology called SMIL. That's short for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, but you probably knew that. OK, probably not.

It's a bit like HTML, in that it is a programming language developed and supported by the same global entity that developed and continues to support and evolve HTML. If you don't know what HTML is, then this podcast edition is one you may want to pass on. It gets a little nerdy.

SMIL, going back 10 years, was being touted as a next big thing for signage, but that didn't happen. However, there are companies using SMIL for managing digital signage networks - particularly companies who have some technical chops in-house and want something that's flexible and in their control.

I stumbled recently on a little company in Hannover, Germany that has been squarely focused on SMIL. I had a good, albeit technical, chat with Niko Sagiadinos, one of the two partners in a firm called SmilControl. He walked me through what SMIL is all about, and the advantages he says the technology brings to digital signage.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Niko, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your company is all about and when it got started? 

Niko Sagiadinos: We started in 2011 with a content management system based on SMIL, and I was a developer years before and one day a friend of mine came up with the idea of 101 Signboard and told me that he desperately needs a content management system. So I had at that moment a content management system and I developed two models for this system, one to administer the playlist and one to administer the player, and so it began. I liked SMIL and the open nature of ideas at that time. I often used open source software and that's a concept I personally liked very much and so I stuck with SMIL and I saw that there were a lot of things possible with SMIL, and I liked it and I stayed with it. 

So there will be people listening who will already be going, what is he talking about?

What is SMIL? Over here, it’s sometimes called “smile.” I know it's an acronym for some sort of a language. Can you explain? 

Niko Sagiadinos: Yes. SMIL is an acronym for synchronized multimedia integration language. You can also call it the HTML for digital signage or multimedia presentations and SMIL makes it possible to create a multimedia presentation, interaction with time synchronization. That's where the first word synchronized comes from, and just like you can build websites with HTML, you can build presentations or digital signage presentations with SMIL. 

So I know that SMIL has been around for several years. I can remember a competitor of yours, SignageLive, talking about SMIL and working with ideas over in Taiwan, on their devices as well. They made a fair amount of noise about it, and then it just dropped off, and Jason and his team moved on to other stuff seemingly. What's the distinction between SMIL and HTML5? 

Niko Sagiadinos: SMIL is focused on presentations and the arrangement of media, while HTML is more focused on the arrangement of information and the implementation for the media, but SMIL can synchronize them. So you can position a media to play first, then second, then the third, then repeat, go to one and then continue. These are things which are not natively possible with HTML. You can do it with HTML, but you need to program with JavaScript, and that's easier to do with SMIL.

SMIL also has some orders to control how a presentation runs and the presentation is not the thing for HTML. With websites, you can do interactions with the website but you cannot synchronize media sequentially, parallelly, or what happens when a special time comes, for example, at 5 o'clock, a video has to run an, and then another playlist starts. There are a lot more complicated things focused on presentation which are better solved by SMIL.

So why has the digital signage industry migrated more to HTML5 and those kinds of web services and JavaScript as opposed to SMIL? 

Niko Sagiadinos: Now I have two theories. The first is it is easier for most to make a web design and it seems to be easier to make its own thing. This is one, it seems to be easier to make a website, but it has some disadvantages because it's a browser, you need a digital signage player. You can integrate a browser in a digital signage player, but you also need commands to administer this player and this is with the browser a little bit more complicated. 

The second thing is that every company wants to do his own thing. So you need to buy a software from company X and you need to buy a digital signage player software or hardware from company X, and this is what we call a window lock in. Every company wants to lock in their customers to use their product and so they have established this connection between an authoring system and the player system, and with SMIL, this connection can break up so you can use any player from any company or even my open source player, and you can write your own SMIL authoring software, if you like, and that's something companies don't want. They want to have it all together and sell a solution, and that's the reason, in my opinion, they stuck more on this product. 

In the early days, they tried to establish SMIL as low-cost signage also, but it was a mistake from my point of view, because SMIL can do much more than what they were focused on. They focused on the media player only and said, okay, this is only low cost signage, but you can run a SMIL software even under a mobile and computer, and this is a way to do more high cost signage for example, and there's another reason. Companies don't want to cannibalize their own product. For example, if you get a market leader and they have their own system, and now you come to SMIL, and they have a feature that has low cost signage, because if they said, okay, they can do the same things like our enterprise product with SMIL, they’ll lose money. 

So your company is SMIL Control. What do you offer? I know that recently you introduced a free software player as well that works with SMIL. 

Niko Sagiadinos: We started in 2012 officially with only a content management system and most of our customers used players from IAdea but some of our customers wanted to create their own player. They were not satisfied with the player from IAdea for various reasons, because there was no company, they wanted to have more control, maybe they got some cheaper devices from Asian manufacturers and so they started to write their own SMIL software and that caused some problems.

When three or four of our resellers started to write software, and put a lot of resources to develop this player, but they didn't focus on marketing and to make sales, and just focused on developing and in 2015-16, I decided, okay, we have now some success with our content management system, I tried to develop a player for those who want to create their own hardware. And the only target for me is to create an open source player, and this player is the Garlic Player, and now after five years, increasing companies are showing interest in this player to brand it under their name or to use it in their player and to make their own hardware around this player. That’s the goal.

To be clear, this is the software that plays out the media and there's a hardware player, which is not what we're talking about here? 

Niko Sagiadinos: At SMIL Control, our focus is only on software. You can take our software and use it as you want and this is the same with the  . The Garlic Player is a piece of software that you can use on a Windows PC, on a Linux PC or an Android device. You can even name it on Android as X Player, and you can sell it at X Player by making a service out of this, and that's the goal.

You can use our software, and the only consistent way to publish the software is to open source the player software so everybody can take part of it. 

I apologize, I'm not overly technical. I'm probably more technical than a lot of people, but I have my limits, sometimes severe. 

You were describing how IAdea, a great little company from Taiwan. I'm good friends with them, they had a SMIL based hardware player, and I think you mentioned that there are some other companies that also have SMIL based hardware players, but you're saying, your garlic player doesn't need to be on one of those devices, it could run on a Windows or Linux box, or even on an Android box and I think I read that it doesn't even need to be rooted, right? 

Niko Sagiadinos: You can use this on an Android together with a launcher, and the launcher is another software which works together with the player and the launcher does not need the device to be rooted.

I know this is a little tech focused discussion, but yes, at the end of the day, there's only software running on hardware. Even with IAdea and the other players, there's just software which is running on the hardware, and the goal is that if someone wants to offer his own hardware, they can use our software. 

So if I'm an end-user or a solutions provider, I'm listening to this and getting the explanations around the advantages of SMIL over HTML5 and so on. I'm wondering if they're listening and thinking, “This sounds interesting, but I don't know anything about that particular programming language and how much of a curve do I have to get up,” or is if I'm an end-user, is it invisible and you don't need to know anything about it? 

Niko Sagiadinos: This is a valid point. Our products are not for end users. They are for resellers who have a technical background and know what they have to do. For example, there are a lot of companies in Germany who want to offer digital signage products and have tech support, but they don't have knowledge in digital signage and have possibly two opportunities. 

The first opportunity is to build everything from scratch by themselves, or to get someone who sells them a complete package, a full service but if you are between that, you will have your own hardware maybe, and you want to use your own hardware, but you don't have the software for it. You have knowledge of hardware and PC, but you don't have the software and you need software. That's our customer. 

The end users will be totally overwhelmed because they will run into problems because of the technical nature because you have to know a lot of things, but a company which has a technical background, like a solutions provider for PCs or someone else that has this technical background, and so they can work together. 

And would there be a lot that they need to learn or would it be pretty straightforward if they're already working with web technologies?

Niko Sagiadinos: They won’t have much to learn because the software is from us, and the only thing they have to learn is how to control the software. Of course we can offer bandwidth with this. We can offer that you can take it and use it or maybe you can do more things. If you need your own CMS, and you want to use only the player, we can help you, and the two documentation for SMIL and everything is open so there is no need for NDAs and things like that and we'll make the things to learn much easier, so you can learn, but you can only start to use it and install it. 

So you could be trained on it. It's just like any other piece of software, you just might need some training? 

Niko Sagiadinos: Exactly. We are computer nerds and we can show them how to use this software,  how they can use these concepts.

So if this is for our solutions providers/resellers, that sort of thing, I gather something about what you're saying is this gives them the ability to control it, maybe put their own front-end skin on it so it looks like their product, and as you say, you're the nerds, you guys are just sitting in the background.

Niko Sagiadinos: It can be digital signage companies too, or companies who want to be digital signage companies, but they don't want to reinvent the wheel and they get used in other industries. 

We are something intermediate. You can take a full service provider, that's okay. But if you don't want this full service provider and you don't want to develop everything by yourself, you can use our products. So we are in the middle. 

Do you get pushback from companies who say, this sounds really interesting, but I don't know much about this language. I know I asked this already, but this makes me a little nervous in that it's unfamiliar to me. Why wouldn't I just go with something with one of the established products out there that's using more familiar technology? 

Niko Sagiadinos: Yes, of course, we get this feedback, but for me, it's a matter of time. There are customers for this because we get requests and these requests started coming in even a year before I started marketing. The last few years we got some big customers and we didn't even need to get out. So it was a secret. We had no real website and my partner and I know how to get customers and they have commissions for software, and so we started last year to make websites to do marketing.

And in this year, the requests began to increase from other companies, and we have started to work with companies in Eastern Europe, for example, who use the Garlic Player and even join the programming and the coding. 

To go back to your question, there are companies that say, okay, that's too complicated for us. We want to use some other things. But our goal is to get these companies who want to do these complicated things, because they see more effort to do this, then using something from someone else, which they can’t control.

And it sounds like what you're saying as well as it could be complicated to people who aren't around programming, don't do coding or anything like that, they are end-users or whatever it may be. If you are a technical company by nature and have software developers within your staffing, this is not complicated. It's just another way of going at it? 

Niko Sagiadinos: Yes. For example, with a room booking software. If you want to have room booking software, you can develop your own room booking software and implement it transparently in our system via a widget which is a bit technical, but you are able to control and make use of what you have written with our infrastructure.

So you can use a software like a media player, for example, and say, okay I will run a playlist from 10 to 3 o'clock, and from 3 o'clock, this room booking software will run on this or any other kind of software, and that's possible because we have these open technical features.

So is it a bit like the kind of emerging idea of headless CMSs?

Niko Sagiadinos: Yes, a little bit. You can compare it to a headless CMS a little bit. 

Because you're the control platform and distribution platform, but somebody could write a front end and use their existing room booking tools or whatever and it's going to flow through there?

Niko Sagiadinos: Exactly, and another thing to say is that we are at the beginning at the moment. We started to get open, to get published and to imagine the SMIL player, the garlic player which I have written in 2016, the first three years did not even get any interest, because we are a small company in Germany, but we try to make our infrastructure step by step and build a SMIL based ecosystem and this ecosystem will grow. 

At first, we had only the content management system. Now we have a player, a launcher, even the proxy, and this ecosystem grows and grows. The next step we have to do is to deliver more information on how to use SMIL?  There is a website from IAdea, but it hasn't been maintained for over six and seven years and so we have to do something to teach people. That's our goal. 

Not only we have to teach people how they can use these things for their businesses, and this is a way we have to go. At the moment, we can not give a solution for everything, but we are on a way and time by time we can offer more and more solutions, more and more information, and the product gets “round” so to say in German. 

I would imagine it's important to stress that this is not some little side project on GitHub or whatever. SMIL is something that was developed by the world wide web consortium, they are the same people who came up with HTML, right?

Niko Sagiadinos: Yes, and it is used in industry. The HD-DVD started with SMIL, the MMS also uses SMIL, a new eBook standard also uses SMIL. That's not something we developed with a few students. This is an industry standard. It’s no joke. It's global and I'm wondering why IAdea ten years ago didn't put more power to show the world that it's possible to make amazing playlists, produce amazing products with this language, and accept it as low-cost signage and went with that if you want to do real signage, you have to get other products and that's, for me, a reason why SMIL in the last 10 years did not get accepted.

And is this a standard that's standing still or is it evolving just in the same way that HTML is evolving? 

Niko Sagiadinos: It's now standing still, it's not evolving at the moment. It's stuck on SMIL 3.0, which is from 2008, but I've contacted the inventors of SMIL in the Netherlands, some professors and I contacted them because we need to evolve. There are some features that are missing in SMIL, and we tried to wake them up. 

The standard is okay, but since 2008, nothing has happened like HTML, but on the other side there are many things you can do. HTML evolves because a lot of things have to come in, for example, 50 years ago HTML was not able to play video without plug-ins and things changed a lot. Internet Explorer was a market leader for much too long and had blocked the evolution of HTML for years and now with other browsers, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, there's much more moving in the web browser markets.

And we are trying the same thing for SMIL. At the moment, it fulfills our needs more than we expected. My partner at first was skeptical too. But when I developed more and more features into the Garlic Player, he was stunned seeing what is possible and what only expensive digital signage systems are able to do, we can do with SMIL. So there is no reason to call it low cost signage. 

Okay. What are the business arguments around working with SMIL versus an HTML5 based platform or some other developed platforms. Are they going to be more reliable? Is it gonna be less expensive? Is it gonna last longer?

Niko Sagiadinos: Well, you are asking a developer a business question. (Laughter)

You gotta sell it down the stream. 

Niko Sagiadinos: Selling is more my partner’s job, but I will try. The interesting thing is that HTML is okay for what it has to do. SMIL is another part and the web browser is not a digital signage player so as we say in German, we are comparing an apple with a pear and those are two different things. You can do digital signage with HTML, but you can even ride a bicycle to Tokyo. That's possible too. 

I think SMIL is much more of a fit for the digital signage age than HTML. The business side is that with SMIL, you don’t have any dependencies and HTML won’t fulfill the needs of digital signage. 

Your company's based in Hanover, Germany, and it's privately held, I assume? You guys own it. You're not owned by a larger company or a venture capital company?

Niko Sagiadinos: We are a bootstrapped company, we started as two people and now we are a kind of German limited, GmbH, because we want to expand next year. 

How many people work for SMIL Control?

Niko Sagiadinos: At the moment, we are two people. My business partner and I so yes, we are a little company, but we also use external developer, and last time I started to work with Bulgarian developers and Greek developers, and because I'm a digital nomad, I'm commuting between Germany and Greece, because I like the weather in Greece much more and the food.

You don't like Hanover or Northern Germany in February?

Niko Sagiadinos: No, it's extremely cold and to be honest, November and December are the ugliest months because in Germany, everything is gray here and cold and Greece is so much better. 

If somebody wants to find out more about your company, where would they find you online now that you have a website?

Niko Sagiadinos: Yes, we have a website, smil-control.com. But the company name is Camel case.

All right, that was terrific. Thank you for spending some time with me and explaining what SMIL is all about. 

Niko Sagiadinos: Thank you for allowing me. I hope it was understandable. I know I was a little nervous and that's complicated because I'm not a salesman or a businessman. We are technically focused and I'm very stuck on this technical thing and I have grown up in 30 years of technology. So maybe for one or the other, it was a little bit hard. Sorry! 

Oh, that's okay. There's lots of technical people who will be intrigued by this and want to know more, so I'm sure it'll work out. Thanks again. 

Niko Sagiadinos: Thank you very much, Dave.

Saurabh Gupta, Ultraleap

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

If you have been in the industry for a while, you'll maybe remember all the excitement around using gesture technology to control screens. That was followed by the letdown of how crappy and feeble these gesture-driven touchless working examples turned out to be.

Like just about everything, the technology and the ideas have got a lot better, and there is a lot of renewed discussion about how camera sensors, AI and related technologies can change up how consumers both interact ... and transact.

Ultraleap is steadily developing a product that lets consumers interact with and experience digital displays using sensors and, when it makes sense, haptic feedback. The company was formed in 2019 when Ultrahaptics acquired Leap Motion, and the blended entity now operates out of both Silicon Valley and Bristol, England.

Leap Motion was known for a little USB device and a lot of code that could interpret hand gestures in front of a screen as commands, while Ultrahaptics used ultrasound to project tactile sensations directly onto a user's hands, so you could feel a response and control that isn't really there. Or something like that. It's complicated stuff.

I had an interesting chat with Saurabh Gupta, who is charged with developing and driving a product aimed at the digital OOH ad market, one of many Ultraleap is chasing. We got into a bunch of things - from how the tech works, to why brands and venues would opt for touchless, when touchscreens are so commonplace, as is hand sanitizer.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey, Saurabh, thank you for joining me. Let's get this out of the way. What is an Ultraleap and how did it come about? 

Saurabh Gupta: Hey, Dave, nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Ultraleap is a technology company and our mission is to deliver solutions that remove the boundaries between physical and digital worlds. We have two main technologies. We have a computer vision-based hand tracking and gesture recognition technology that we acquired and on the other side of the equation, we have made a haptic technology using ultrasound. The whole premise of how we came about was we started out as a haptics company and that's what our founder and CEO, Tom Carter, built when he was in college, and it was a breakthrough idea for us to be able to deliver the sense of touch in mid air using ultrasound was how we started, and to be able to project haptic sensations in mid-air, one of the key components of that was, you need to understand where the hands are in space and for that we were using computer vision technology by Leap Motion to track and locate user’s hands in space, and we had an opportunity to make an acquisition, and some of your listeners may already know about Leap Motion. Leap Motion has been a pioneer in gesture based hand tracking technology since 2010. They’ve got 10 plus years of pedigree in really refining gesture based hand tracking models. So we had an opportunity to purchase them and make an acquisition in 2019, we completed the acquisition and rebranded ourselves to Ultraleap.

So that's how we started. As stated in our mission, it's all about focusing on user experience for the use cases of how users are interacting with their environment, and that environment could be a sort of a 2D screen in certain applications, the application that we'll probably talk about today, but also other aspects of augmented reality and virtual reality, which are on the horizon and our emerging technologies that are gaining more ground. So that's the central approach. How can we enhance the interactivity that users have with a physical environment, through an input and an output technology offerings with gesture as input and haptics being the output? 

The whole gesture thing through the years has been kind of an interesting journey, so to speak. I can remember some of the early iterations of Microsoft Kinect gesture, sensors, and display companies and solutions providers doing demos showing, you can control a screen by waving your hand, lifting it up and down and this and that, and I thought this is not going to go anywhere. It's just too complicated. There's too much of a learning curve and everything else. 

Now, the idea as it's evolved and like all technology got a lot better is, it's more intuitive, but it's still something of a challenge, right? There's still a bit of a curve because we're now conditioned to touching screens.

Saurabh Gupta: Yeah, you're right. One of the key aspects here is that gesture has been around. There's been research that goes back to the early 90s, if not in the 80s, but computer vision technology in general has come a long way. The deep learning models that are powering our hand tracking technology today are a lot more sophisticated. They are more robust, they are more adaptable and they are able to train based on a lot of real world inputs. So what that really means is that since the computing power and the technology behind recognizing gestures has improved, a lot of that has manifested itself in a more approachable user experience, and I completely accept the fact that there is a gap and we've got 10 plus years of learned behavior of using a touchscreen. We use a touchscreen everyday, carry it in our pockets, but you also have to understand that when touch screens became prevelant, there was the type keyboard before that. 

So the point that I'm making here with this is that we are pushing the envelope on new technologies and a new paradigm of interactivity. Yes, there is a learning curve, but those are the things that we are actually actively solving for:

The gesture tracking technology should be so refined that it is inclusive and is able to perform in any environment, and I think we've made some really good steps towards that. You may have heard of our recent announcement of our latest hand tracking offering called Gemini. The fundamental thing with Gemini is that it's based on years and years of research and analysis on making the computer vision, deep learning models, that power that platform to be as robust, to be low latency, high yield in terms of productivity and really high initialization, which means as part of the user experience, when you walk up to an interface, you expect to use it right away. We know we can do that with touch screens, but if you put this technology complementary to an interface, what we are solving for at Ultraleap is: when somebody walks up to a screen and they put up their hand to start to interact, the computer vision technologies should instantly recognize that there's a person who is looking to interact. That's number one, and I think with Gemini, with the deep model work that we've done, we've made some good progress there. Number two, which is once the technology recognizes that a person wants to interact, now can we make it more intuitive for the person to be as or more productive than she would be with a touchscreen interface? And that's where I think we've made more progress. I will say that we need to make more progress there, but some of the things that we've done, Dave. We have a distance call to interact, which is a video tutorial attraction loop that serves as an education piece.

And I'll give you a stat. We ran a really large public pilot in the Pacific Northwest at an airport, and the use case there was immigration check-in, so people coming off the plane, before they go talk to a border security agent, some people to fill out their information on a kiosk. So we outfitted some kiosks with our gesture based technology and the rest were the controls, which were all touchscreen based and over multiple weeks we ran this study with active consumers who actually had very little to no prior experience using gestures and we did this AB test where we measured the gesture adoption rate on the kiosks without a call interact, before a call to interact and after a call to interact, and it increased the gesture adoption rate by 30%, which means that it certainly is helping people to understand how to use the interface.

The second stat that came from it, that at the end of the pilot, we were almost at 65% gesture adoption rate, which means almost more than 6 out of 10 people who use that interface used gesture as the dominant interface for input control, and the third piece of this was how long did it take for them to finish their session? We measured that using the gesture based interaction, the time was slightly higher than for the control group that was using a touchscreen, but it wasn't much, it was only 10% higher. Now one can look at that stat and say in a transactional setting where you know, it's going to take you 30 seconds to order a burger, adding an extra second can be a problem, but at the same time, those stats are encouraging for us to think about when we look at that as the baseline to improve from. 

So if I'm listening to this and I'm trying to wrap my head around what's going on here, this is not a gesture where you're standing 3 feet away from a screen and doing the Tom cruise Minority Report thing, where you're waving your arm and doing this and that is, can you describe it? Because you’re basically doing touch-like interactions and the ultrasonic jets or blasts of air or whatever are giving you the feedback to guide you, right? 

Saurabh Gupta: So we've got two avenues that we have going at this from. One is for the self service type offering, so you think of check-in kiosks or ordering kiosks at restaurants or even digital wayfinding, digital directories. We are solving for those primarily led at least in the first phase led by our gesture tracking technology. So gesture being the input modality, complimentary to touch.

So, what we do is we build a touch-free application, which is a ready to use application that is available today on Windows based media players or systems to convert existing touch screen-based user interfaces to gesture, but what we've done is we've made the transition a lot more intuitive and easier because what we've done is we've replicated and done a lot of research on this and replicated interaction methods or gestures you would call it. I hate to use gestures as a word, because it gets tagged with weird hand poses and things like that, people pinching and all of that. For us, it's all about how we can replicate the same usage that a typical average consumer will have when she interacts with a touch screen based interface.

So we came up with this an interaction method that we call Airpush which is basically, to explain it to your listeners, it's all about using your finger and moving towards an interactive element on screen. But what happens is the button gets pressed even before you approach them based on your forward motion or interaction. Now, the smart math behind all of this is that not only do we track motion, but we also track velocity, which means that for people who are aggressive in terms of their button pressing, which means they do short jabs, we can cater for those or people who are more careful in their approach as they move towards the screen, the system is adaptable to cater to all types of interaction types, and we track all the fingers so you can use multiple fingers too or different fingers as well. So these are some of the things that we've included in our application.

So that's one side. The second side is all about interactive advertising, immersion and that's where I think we use our haptic technology more, to engage and involve the user in the interactive experience that they're going to. So for self service and more transactional type use cases, we're using primarily our hand gesture technology. And for immersive experiential marketing, or even the digital out-of-home advertising type of use cases, we are leading without haptic based technology.  

And you're involved on the digita, out-of-home side, right? That's part of your charge? 

Saurabh Gupta: That's correct. So I lead Ultraleap’s out-of-home business. So in the out-of-home business, we have both self service retail, and digital out-of-home advertising businesses that we focus on.

David:. So how would that manifest itself in terms of, I am at a train station or I'm out somewhere and there's a digital out-of-home display and I go up and interact with it and you're saying it's a more robust and rich experience than just boinking away at a touchscreen. What's going on? What would be a good example of that?

Saurabh Gupta: So a good example of digital out of home activations is that we've partnered with CEN (Cinema Entertainment Network) where we've augmented some of their interactive in cinema displays that are being sold from a programmatic perspective. Now the interactive piece is still being worked into the programmatic side of things, but that's one example of an interactive experience in a place based setting.

The other example is experiential marketing activations that we've done with Skoda in retail malls and also an activation that we did with Lego for Westfield. So these are some of the experiences that we've launched and released with our haptics technology and on the self service side we've been working with a lot of providers in the space you may have heard of. 

Our recent pilot concluded with PepsiCo where we are bringing in or trialing gestures for their ordering kiosks for their food and beverage partners. So these are some of the things that are going on on both sides in the business.

David:. So for the Lego one or the Scoda one, what would a consumer experience? 

Saurabh Gupta: So these are all interactive experiences. So for Lego, it was about building a Lego together. So basically using our haptic technology which obviously contains gestures as the input, moving Lego blocks and making an object that was being displayed on a really large LED screen at one of the retail outlets and in London, so a user would walk up, they would use their hands in front of our haptic device to control the pieces on the screen and then join them together and make a Lego out of it and while they're doing that, they're getting the sensation of the tactile sensation of joining the pieces and that all adds up to a really immersive, engaging experience within a digital out of home setting. 

So you get the sensation that you're snapping Lego pieces together? 

Saurabh Gupta: Yeah, snapping pieces together, controlling so you get the agency of control, and it's one of those sensations that gives you a very high memorability factor.

I don't know whether you track the news. This was in 2019. We did actually a really extensive activation with Warner Brothers in LA, and what we did was at one of the cinemas down there for Warner Brothers’ three upcoming movies, Shazam, The Curse of La Llorona, and Detective Pikachu, we added interactive movie posters using haptics in the cinema lobby, and this would complement the digital poster network that was already existing at that location, and over the course of the activation, which was around six weeks long, we had almost 150,000 people that went through the cinema and we actually did in partnership with QBD, we did a lot of analytics around what the. performance was of an interactive movie poster experience within a digital out-of-home setting and got some really great stats. 

We measured a conversion rate between an interactive experience versus a static digital signage experience. The conversion rate was almost 2x, 33% increase in dwell time, like people were spending more time in front of an interactive sign versus a static sign. Attention span was significantly higher at 75%, 42% lift in brand favorability. So these are really interesting stats that gave us the confidence that haptic technology combined with gesture based interface has a lot of value in providing and delivering memorable experiences that people remember.

And that's the whole point with advertising, right? That's the whole point. You want to present experiences that provide a positive association of your branded message with your target consumer, and we feel that our technology allows that connection to be made 

One of the assumptions/expectations that happened when the pandemic broke out was that this was the end of touchscreens, nobody's ever going to want to touch the screen again, the interactivity was dead and I made a lot of those assumptions myself and turns out the opposite has happened. The touch screen manufacturers have had a couple of pretty good years and the idea is that with a touchscreen, you can wipe it down and clean your hands and do all that stuff. But you're at a far greater risk standing four feet away from somebody across a counter, ordering a burger or a ticket or whatever it may be. 

So when you're speaking with solutions providers, end user customers and so on are you getting the question of, “Why do I need to be touchless?”

Saurabh Gupta: Yeah, it's a fair point, Dave, and let me clarify that. Look, from our perspective, we are focusing on building the right technology and building the right solutions that elevate the user experience. Hygiene surely is part of that equation, but I accept your points that there are far greater risks for germ transmission than shared surfaces, I totally accept that, and yes, there is a TCO argument, the total cost of ownership argument that has to be made here also. 

The point that I will make here is that we fundamentally believe and being a scale-up organization that is focusing on new technology, we have to believe that we are pushing the technology envelope where what we are focusing on is elevating the user experience from what the current model provides. So yes, there will be some use cases where we are not a good fit, but contactless as a category or touchless as a category, maybe the pandemic catalyzed it, maybe it expedited things, but that category in itself is growing significantly. 

A couple of stats here, right? The contactless payment as a category itself, 88% of all retail transactions in 2020 were contactless, that's a pretty big number And assuming that retail is a $25 trillion dollar market. That's a huge chunk. 

But that’s about speed and convenience though, right?

Saurabh Gupta: Totally. But all I'm saying is contactless as a category is preferable from a user perspective. Now, gesture based interactivity as a part of that user flow, we fundamentally believe that gesture based interactivity plays a part in the overall user journey. So let me give you an example. 

Some of the retailers that we are talking to are thinking about new and interesting ways to remove levels of friction from a user's in-store experience. So there are multiple technologies that are being trialed at the moment. You may have heard of Amazon's just walk out stores as an example. You don't even have to take out your wallet and that is completely based on computer vision, as an example, but there are other retailers who are looking to use technology to better recognize who their loyal customers are. So think of how we used to all have loyalty cards for Costco or any other retailer. 

They're removing that friction to say, when you walk through the door, you've done your shopping and you’re at the payment powder, we can recognize who you are. And if we recognize who you are, we can give you an offer at the last mile, and in that scenario, they are integrating gestures as part of the completely contactless flow. This is where I think we are gaining some traction. There is a product that we are a part of that hasn't been announced yet. I can't go into details specifically on who it is and when it's going to be released. But we are part of a computer vision based fully automated checkout system that uses gesture as the last mile for confirmation and things of that nature. That's where we are gaining traction.

Overall point here is that we are focusing on really showcasing and delivering value on how you can do certain things in a more natural and intuitive way. So think of digital wayfinding at malls, right? You have these giant screens that are traditionally touchscreens, right? When you think of that experience, it has a lot of friction in it, because first of all, you can't use touch as effectively on a large screen because you can't swipe from left to right to turn a map as an example. We fundamentally believe that the product could be better with gesture. You can gesture to zoom in, zoom out, rotate a map, and find your direction to a store. Those kinds of things can be augmented. That experience can be augmented with adding just a capability as opposed to using a touchscreen based interface. So those are the high value use cases that we are focusing on. 

So it's not really a case where you're saying, you don't need to touch screen overlay anymore for whatever you're doing, Mr. Client, you just use this instead. It's tuned to a particular use case and an application scenario, as opposed to this is better than a touch overlay?

Saurabh Gupta: I think that is a mission that we are driving towards, which is, we know that there is potentially a usability gap between gesture in terms of its evolution than touchscreen. We are looking to bridge that gap and get to a point where we can show more productivity using gesture. 

And the point is that with our technology, and this is something that you referenced a second ago, you can turn any screen into a touchscreen. So you don't necessarily need a touchscreen and then you can convert it to gesture. You can convert any LCD screen to an interactive screen. So there is some deep argument there as well.

What's the kit, like what are you adding?

Saurabh Gupta: Just a camera and a USB cable, and some software.

And if you're using haptics feedback, how does that work?

Saurabh Gupta: So haptics is a commercially off the shelf product. So it's another accessory that gets added to the screen. However, that contains the camera in it so you don't need an additional camera. That also connects to external power and a USB back to the media player. 

So as long as you've got a USB on the media player, you're good, and right now your platform is Windows based. Do you have Android or Linux? 

Saurabh Gupta: Good question, Dave. So right now we are Windows based, but we know it's of strategic importance for us to enable support on additional platforms. So we are starting to do some work on that front. You'll hear some updates from us early next year on at least the hand tracking side of things being available on more platforms than just Windows. 

How does economics work? I suspect you get this question around, “All right. If I added a touch overlay to a display, it's going to cost me X. If I use this instead, it's going to cost me Y. 

Is it at that kind of parity or is one a lot more than the other? 

Saurabh Gupta: It depends on screen size, Dave, to be honest. So the higher in screen size you go, the wider the gap is. I would say that for a 21 or 23 inch screen and up, the economics are in our favor for a comparable system.

And are you constrained by size? I think of all the LED video walls that are now going into retail and public spaces and so on, and those aren't touch enabled. You really wouldn't want to do that, and in the great majority of cases with this, in theory, you could turn a potentially fragile, please don't touch surface like that into an interactive surface, but are you constrained to only doing things like a 55 inch canvas or something?

Saurabh Gupta: This will require a little bit of technical explanation. The Lego example that I talked about was targeted on, I would say a large outdoor LED screen. So the concept here is that if you want one-to-one interactivity. 

So what do I mean by one-to-one interactivity? One-to-one interactivity is that basically when in our interface, when the user approaches the screen, there is an onscreen cursor that shows up, and that on screen cursor is what is the control point for the user. Now one-to-one interactivity for us to achieve that where the cursor is at the same height or there's no parallax between where the finger is and where the cursor is, for that you have to be connected to or at the screen, and when you are connected to the screen, based on our current camera technology, we can control up to a 42 inch screen for one-to-one interactivity, but we've also been doing exams showing examples where if you connect the sensor to slightly in front of the display, then you can cover a wider area and we've been able to showcase examples of our technology being used on up to a 75 inch LCD screen in portrait mode. 

So then any larger than that, the scale gets a little wonky, right? Cause you've got a person standing in front of a very large display and it just starts to get a little weird.

Saurabh Gupta: Yeah. It's like putting a large TV in a small living room. So you need to be slightly further away because then it gets too overwhelming, and for that, we have worked with certain partners and they've done some really interesting work like this company called IDUM, they built a pedestal and so that pedestal encloses our tracking device, and that can be placed several feet from a large immersive canvas, like a LED wall, as an example, in a museum type activation, and people can walk by and then they can control the whole screen with that pedestal slightly further away from the screen.

So it's like a Crestron controller or something except for a big LED display! 

Saurabh Gupta: Exactly. It's like a trackpad in front of the screen, but slightly further away. 

Gotcha. All right. Time flew by, man. We're already deep into this. You were telling me before we hit record that your company will be at NRF and you may also have people wandering around IEC but if people want to know more about your company, they go to ultraleap.com? 

Saurabh Gupta: That's correct. Ultraleap.com, we have all the information there and David, it was great to talk to you and thank you for the opportunity. 

 

Blake Sabatinelli, Atmosphere TV

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

Screens in bars, restaurants and all kinds of venues have been part of the mix for decades, and there have been all kinds of different takes on what to put on those screens that not only entertains and occupies guests, but also has  tangible business impacts.

Straight-up digital signage solutions give venue operators the ability to fully manage what appears on the screens, but then those operators have to do the work to keep the system running and content fresh.

Boxes and software that squeeze a broadcast signal can allow operators to run in-house ads below and on the side of the screen from cable TV feeds, but the legal side of that can be more than a bit shaky.

Widely available high-speed internet and over-the-top streaming technology advances have opened up a new way to keep screens fresh and interesting, and a well-funded Austin, Texas spinout company called Atmosphere TV is going hard at the opportunity.

Launched in 2019, Atmosphere has more than 50 streaming content  channels that are in 14,000 venues and reach some 25 million sets of eyeballs monthly. There are curated channels full of cute pets and funny misadventures, but there's also a newsroom that produces carefully selected news that manages to straddle the increasingly polarized political divides of the U.S.

The particularly interesting kicker is that the service is free to users, with Atmosphere even sending operators free, pre-staged Apple TV boxes that just need to be plugged in and connected to broadband.

I had a great chat with Blake Sabatinelli, the company's Chief Operating Officer, about how things work and where Atmosphere is going.

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TRANSCRIPT

Blake. Thank you for joining me. What is Atmosphere TV all about? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Atmosphere at its core is a place-based television platform and we think at Atmosphere that we're here to help inform and inspire people who are watching our platform, and we do that through any one of our 54 channels that are on our platform, whether it's Atmosphere News, which we just launched or Chive TV, which is the the engine that built Atmosphere as a whole before we spun it out on its own. But we're everything from entertainment to information to digital signage and really just here to make sure that we're getting people to look up in the venues that they're sitting in, instead of staring down at their phone and engaging with the world around them. 

So the simpleton explanation would be that this is something you would use in place of putting TVs in a venue and putting CNN or Fox or whatever on and just letting that run? 

Blake Sabatinelli: A hundred percent. We look at our content in a whole different light that I think what you see in the traditional cable space, and if you go back to the genesis of our company, Leo and John, our founders were sitting in a bar, there was ESPN on mute, there was Judge Judy on mute and they were looking around and no one was really paying attention and they realized that no one was really programming television for out-of-home, and that audio is a huge consideration. 

In both places, if you go to a sports bar here in the states, you'll see a football game that's usually the primary audio or a baseball game or something, but there's also 15 other TVs in the venue, and all of them are running captions that are really small, that you can’t see from 30 feet away on content that's not engaging if you don't have the audio on, on content that honestly isn't engaging even if you have the audio on. And in some cases, especially if you're talking about the news, Fox News or CNN, MSNBC, that's angering half the audience there. So we're coming at television from a totally different perspective. 

We programmed it for eyes and not ears, which is not a native thing for anyone coming from television. You have to do both and ensure that it's something that everyone can lean into and enjoy and be engaged with.

You mentioned that you've launched a news product among the many channels you already have. When I look at Atmosphere TV, and I've been familiar with it for a while, it's primarily soft content, it's curated social media videos, and that sort of thing. News is a very different animal!

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, you're telling me. I spent 15 years in the news business before joining Atmosphere and ran a company called Newsy for seven years prior to this, and there's a whole different world from what traditionally is published on Atmosphere to what a news channel is. But if you really break it down, it's really not all that different.

On the entertainment side of our business, it's engaging short form videos, programmed in such a way that you want to lean in and really watch, and with news, we're really trying to take the same approach. Keep people informed about what's going on around them. Tell them the things that they need to know, do it all in an audio off capacity, which is a challenge out the gate and also sprinkle in some things that inspire and entertain them along the way, because it's a pretty dark world out there and news can be a dark platform.

So we feel like we can come at this a little bit differently. Get people to smile, get people to nod and understand what's happening and not feel bad after watching it at the same time. 

Is it a function in certain respects of the political polarization that's out there, particularly in the United States, where you have auto dealer showrooms, where they may have one TV and you get arguments breaking out about the fact that it's on CNN or it's on Fox, and as you said, 50% of the people are unhappy?

Blake Sabatinelli: I mean, look, I can tell you now that if you watch our network, there are no opinions. There's no commentary, there's only context and information, and that really does come to the point that you're making that the political environment here in the United States is challenging right now.

There's no way to make everyone happy. So our view on the way to make this work is to strip out all the things that make people angry and just report facts and just really hammer home the headlines and straight news. There's plenty that happens in Washington on a daily basis that's factual and incredibly important. There's plenty that happens in Washington DC, if you watch Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC on a daily basis, that's filler, that's conjecture and opinion that people for the most part really don't care about. 

So I would imagine with some of the other channels that you have, where it's cute pet videos or extreme sports or whatever it may be that, you've got content curators who are scanning YouTube and whatever for material. 

Is it different for the new side where you have a quasi news room? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, we do have a newsroom. So we actually hired Michael Grimes, the former head of social for NBC News to come in and join us and lead our newsroom, and we have a team of producers that sit just out in front of my office and are producing news on a 24/7 basis at this point. So yeah, while it's not our normal curation process, there's a news room out there and it's exciting to see and I like the buzz.

How do you gather this news? Do you get feeds from the Associated Press and so on, like everybody else? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, that's correct. So we actually partner with a number of down the middle, highly respectful of these organizations, like the Associated Press, AFP, Reuters, and others to ensure that we're aggregating and collecting the best news that's out there and packaging it in such a way that it can be enjoyed on our platform. 

So on the other hand with the softer content, how does that work? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. So we have a team of producers that work on each of our channels. Not all that different than what you mentioned that are out actively seeking out content on the most popular social platforms, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or Facebook and working with these content creators to license their content and get it on our platform to then produce it with a very specific formula that we generate for each channel and get it up on our platform when it’s ready to go. 

If you use material from YouTube or Facebook or TikTok or whatever it may be, are you talking to those platforms for the rights to that material or do you go right to the content creators? 

Blake Sabatinelli: We work directly with the content creators and we work with them in such a capacity that it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

Most of these content creators are really looking to extend their reach and ensure they're going to get as many eyeballs on them as a creator as possible to build up their businesses, and we ensure that all of our content creators get a significant amount of showcasing in each of the videos that we air there, so when people see something amazing happening on screen, they're able to look up and say, I want to go to Instagram and follow that guy. So we've built these relationships in such a way that we have an active ongoing discussion with the content creators and when something new pops up in their feed and they're sending it out, they're reaching out to us as well.

I guess chasing down certain material from somebody who's in the business or wants to be in the business of creating content that generates income for them that way, they're probably pretty easy to chase down. But on the other hand, you have the serendipitous stuff where somebody took a video of some weird weather event or whatever, I suspect it is probably a lot harder to get them? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, that can be challenging, but we also work with the licenses agencies that those folks work with most predominantly. So whether it's your Stringers or Jukin or others, so wildly large, and when I say large, the vast majority of our content comes from the creators themselves.

We also have to work with the licensing agencies as well to ensure that we're gathering all those amazing pieces and putting them in one place. 

So technically if I am a restaurant operator, bar operator, and I want to use Atmosphere’s one or two or many channels on it, how do I do that? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Great question!

You generally just give us a call. We have a box delivered to you. It's a self-install. We have everything set up for you. So you call us, we will send you a fully provisioned device. We have onboarding steps delivered with the box so you can plug in and get set up on the internet, and once you turn your TV and the box on, it's up and running. 

Everything is managed by us from a cloud capacity. So our IT team and our engineering teams push updates and manage the devices remotely, and if you ever have any issues, you can call our customer service team. They're there 24/7 to make sure that any issue that crops up is able to be taken care of immediately. 

So it's pretty much set it and forget it?

Blake Sabatinelli: That's right, and that's why we love the platform so much, and that's why our operators that use the platform love it so much. It's robust, it's highly engaging and it's easy to use. 

And this is an Apple TV bow?

Blake Sabatinelli: It's a provisioned Apple TV box, that's correct. 

If you had a smart TV, like a Samsung or an LG Smart TV that has apps and everything else, could you use that instead? 

Blake Sabatinelli: So we actually do everything through our own device. We found that our device is far more robust, easier to keep up and running and just decided to go that direction. 

Yeah, and the Apple TV boxes, they've got pretty good third-party device management and things like that. So you can remedy things, and as you said, push up new firmware and everything else. 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, a hundred percent. The entire Apple ecosystem is robust, and we've found a great deal of success in working with both third-party management platforms and on the Apple TV platform broadly. 

I'm thinking five-six years ago, this would have been a lot harder to do. Over the top streaming capabilities have progressed massively in that time space, right?

Blake Sabatinelli: A hundred percent. The proliferation of high-speed internet has been a key catalyst in the growth of the business. You couldn't necessarily deliver gigabytes upon gigabytes of information across a slow 128 kilobytes a second DSL line, that was challenging.

And the additional infrastructure that's been built along the way to support services like Netflix and Amazon, HBO Max, and others has really benefited our business as well.

There's a digital signage component, I guess you could call the whole thing related to digital signage as well, but there's the ability for the owner-operator of a venue that's using this to go in and add advertising, right?

Blake Sabatinelli: That's right. 

So we give our venue partners the opportunity to add a couple 30s spots every every couple ad breaks into the channel feeds itself. Everything that we hear back from our partners at this point is that it is a great tool for them to be able to advertise specials, upcoming events, you name it for their venue and it's just really helps complete that fortuitous circle of keeping butts in seats longer, bringing them back more frequently, spending more money, etc.

How do they do that? Is there an app or a desktop application? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Great question. We actually have a portal with a digital signage manager that allows you to either upload your own assets, or we have a tool that allows them to create their own assets on the fly within the ecosystem itself. So if you have an agency and you've been working with them, or you have a creative team and you work with them to create assets, that's great. But if you don't, you're at a small bar or a restaurant, or a dental office and you need to get something done. We have a tool in there to help you build this. 

With templates and things like that?

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, we have templates, both video and still, and a ton of options in there. 

Do you work at all with third party digital signage CMS software platforms or is it that either you're going down this path or you go down that path. You can't really merge the two? 

Blake Sabatinelli: So primarily we work within our own platform. So all of our tools are built custom for our device and custom for our platform as a whole. 

If there is an opportunity for us down the road to work with third-party software operators, whether that’s for queuing or for other signage options? A hundred percent, but right now we've been operating and developing all our own software. 

Do you get beyond the simple component of throwing ads every three minutes or whatever it may be and enable a venue operator to do things like, ”Hey, we're hiring!” or things like that that get into messaging as opposed to advertising?

Blake Sabatinelli: Whatever they want to run in those spots, it's up to them. We're not in the business of policing how businesses operate their own signage option. So if they're looking to post that they're hiring, which I know every restaurant in America is right now, then we would encourage them to use the tool to do that as well.

It’s a subscription, right? 

Blake Sabatinelli: So our platform as a whole is actually free. If you want to use the digital signage option, it's $50 a month. 

So you send them a free Apple TV box? 

Blake Sabatinelli: That's right. We send people a free Apple TV box and we ask very few questions of them. Our goal is to get people on board and running and streaming and getting people enjoying the content as fast as possible, and while it sounds too good to be true, it's not. 

We give you a free Apple TV box. We pay for that Apple TV box by providing advertising. So we're advertising a sport or business, it's a vast majority of our revenue stream, and we find it works for both us and for our partners. 

Okay. So there's a programming wheel and there’s interruptions in that programming wheel that are both for booked advertising, that your team or the Atmosphere team has sold or is through programmatic platforms of some kind, but if you want to do local on-premise venue specific advertising, that's an opportunity as well, and you pay $50 a month for that? 

Blake Sabatinelli: You hit the nail on the head there, and we end up offsetting some of those advertising slots that we normally would sell on a national or local capacity for the venue operators themselves.

What's your built-out footprint at this point? 

Blake Sabatinelli: We're over 15,000 venues right now, reaching I want to say 48 million unique visits on a monthly basis at this point.

Did some of that transfer over from Chive or is that starting from scratch a couple years ago?

Blake Sabatinelli: So some of that definitely transferred over from Chive. Chive was an incredible catalyst and test case for us to be able to understand product market fit and the dynamics of the marketplace. We have doubled our footprint over the last year and have seen tremendous growth post COVID.

Now if you look back at back in the Chive TV days, we were primarily focused on only bars and restaurants and bars and restaurants are still our bread and butter at this point, they make up 60% of our venue footprint but we've definitely diversified significantly and learned a lot post COVID too. 

Now there's any number of Software companies and solutions companies that sell into hospitality, sell into restaurants and bars and all those kinds of venues, as well as clinic waiting rooms and so on. They would sell a software solution that would enable the operators to go in and do all of their on-premise messaging and everything else but they would then have to subscribe to a third party content service, like a ScreenFeed, or one of those kinds of companies to provide the other content for the wheel. 

Is that something you sell against or are you finding people are saying, “You know what, I love the ScreenFeed material and everything else, but we just can't keep up with all this. We don't want to manage it. If we could just get something that just shows up, that would be better”? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. So there's a couple of constituencies that we sell against. 

Primarily for us as is against the pay television ecosystem. There's not a lot of great options that exist for waiting rooms or public spaces that exist in the pay TV ecosystem. Some of the contents are wonderful with the audio on, but when the audio is off, it's not, and there's also no signage options in there, which clearly is a challenge. There's also the folks that are endemic to the space, to your point, the operators that work with the waiting rooms, especially around point of care and we do hear a lot that people just really want to make sure that the perceived wait times are going down and they can provide signage options, and for us, making sure that our venue operators have higher net promoter scores that proceed wait times are lower in bars or in restaurants, that you're staying for longer is really the key. Beyond that, the additional messaging is a bonus. 

I'm going to assume that you guys have done the work to try to develop and highlight some of those metrics, right?

Blake Sabatinelli: That's a hundred percent correct. So we've worked with in-market to understand dwell time and other metrics within our restaurant venues, we work closely with our metrics partner Epicenter on how people are engaging and activating with our content, and then a number of case studies along the way to really drive down the funnel, the efficacy of the platform and everything. 

So what does happen? Does it increase dwell times if I'm ordering a second round of drinks or another plate of nachos or whatever? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Our last study showed that we had 16% longer dwell time in bars and restaurants and 18% higher return frequency amongst customers and a lot of our venue partners who shared back some of their net promoter scores have gone up based on our content being in place. 

So really there's no argument against it. If they're going to have flat panel displays, whether they're TVs or commercial displays in their venues anyways, and if they get the Apple TV box free, then you know, I would imagine it's hard to say no?

Blake Sabatinelli: Like I said, we've grown really fast the past 18 months post COVID and the business has been booming. So I agree with you. It's hard to say no. 

The biggest challenge that we have, and it's really about getting people to understand that this thing that they didn't know existed in a segment that really doesn't have anyone else playing in it. It exists and it's going to be beneficial to their business. Once they understand how this fits into their restaurant experience or their waiting experience, it's an easy close. 

So you mentioned how the growth happened in the past 18 months, I keep saying 18 months, it's probably like 20 months now.

Blake Sabatinelli: It's been a long time. I've lost count at this point. I think everybody has, as I'm sitting in my home office saying that. 

COVID was an interesting thing for our business. Look, I don't think anyone in the media space would say that things didn't go a little haywire in April of 2020 but it did also give us the opportunity to evaluate our business model, our distribution strategy, and to really think about how we could expand and pivot a little bit. So while bars and restaurants were closed, aftermarket auto and doctor's offices, dentists offices, and others still had people coming into them, especially outside of California and New York, so expanding our distribution strategy has allowed us to not only keep up and running through COVID, but to dramatically increase the velocity of our distribution as we've gone out of the initial wave of COVID and into the present day. 

Is there a type of a vertical category type of venue that seems to adapt it more so than others?

Blake Sabatinelli: I'll be honest with you. We've seen strong growth in that across a number of categories. So everything from traditional bars and restaurants to QSR, we've seen explosive growth in gyms, in aftermarket auto, in point of care. Moving now pretty aggressively into airports and other spaces. We've just seen strong, measured growth across every category and every segment that's been incredibly encouraging. 

When you onboard new clients or new venue clients, do you do any work to audit the type of audience that they may have and make recommendations about the channels that suit them best? Because I'm really curious whether a venue puts in a channel that’s about cute puppies or whatever, and the audience would be saying, “Why are you showing that?” Or “Why are you showing news? I don't want to see the news.” 

Blake Sabatinelli: There's plenty of venues that Chive TV works really well in, but in veterinarian offices, Paws TV plays better and so we make that recommendation. The same goes for news in airports in the doctor's weightings rooms. So we're incredibly thoughtful about how we present our content and where we think it should play, and our customer service and account management teams work closely with our venue partners to ensure that they know new options are available and that options they may not know about that may suit their venue better are available as well.

Do you try new content channel formats and try them out with test partners and sometimes just throw them out, cause that doesn't work? 

Blake Sabatinelli: We wouldn't be a tech driven platform if we weren't doing a significant amount of AB testing. Our product team and content teams were constantly working within new partners to do tests and learn to better understand product market fit of a channel or a new format and to better understand how we can continue to improve the product. It's a constant process and it's just part of operating in the ecosystem that we do. 

Have you learned things about length of material, like duration of material? 

Blake Sabatinelli: We actually have and there's a reason that if you look at the content on our platform, it's formatted the way that it is. People want to quickly move from one thing to an X and I think that's partly a by-product of this new world that we live in where short form, highly addictive, highly engaging video is the norm. You're used to looking down and getting that dopamine rush. So fitting that format onto a big screen is important for us.

And then just people are really looking for variety too. That's why we have custom playlist features that allow you to compile a number of different options into one because not everyone wants to see the same thing for a long period of time. So we try to keep the format moving, we try to keep the content moving. We try to keep it varied and engaged as much as we possibly can again, to reduce perceived wait times on one end or in some cases to ensure people are sticking around the same. I'm hoping I can get another round of people doing amazing things. 

How do you deal with portrait material, stuff shot in portrait mode?

Blake Sabatinelli: At this point pretty much everything is shot in a vertical format. So you get pretty used to working with curtains. We've done a good job of being able to cycle back and forth between the vertical and horizontal formats as effectively as possible, and I think people have gotten used to seeing video shot both vertically and horizontally.

Ten years ago, I remember you would shoot a video on a cell phone while working in the news business, you would be screaming in the control room. Why didn't they turn their camera sideways? In this instance, everyone's used to this, this is the new normal and it's really not that big of a concern. 

And I guess the advancements of camera sensor technology and smartphones has been good news for you guys as well. Like you say, 10 years ago, I remember I had a Blackberry about 10 years ago and that camera was dreadful. 

Blake Sabatinelli: 320x240 resolution and if you watch that on my little MacBook that's sitting in front of me right now, I believe the kids would say it looks like it was shot on a potato. 

Look, the advancements in camera technology have just really been a boon to businesses like ours. I have one of the crappier iPhones in my pocket and I think it's probably a higher resolution camera than the SLR that's sitting in my closet that I've never used. So it's been fantastic for us. 

Yeah, that's exactly right. I've got a mirrorless camera, nice SLR, and I never use it because it's just so much easier to whip out my phone, take a shot, and it's got like a 16 megapixel sensor and it looks great! 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. What a time to be alive that I don't have to carry a giant camera or a camera bag around with me anymore. So I'm not going to complain. 

You recently announced, I believe that you are expanding Atmosphere TV into Canada, right? 

Blake Sabatinelli: That's correct. We're actually moving aggressively there right now. 

When I look at your installation map, it throws me off a little bit. It looks like you already have a lot of points of presence in Canada, or is that just the way the map looks?

Blake Sabatinelli: So we do have some presence in Canada to start off with, but now we're making a concerted effort to actually come in and take as many shares as we possibly can in the marketplace. But early on we were testing, are we a hundred percent sure that the content is going to work just the same as it does in Canada? It does. Is our distribution and sales model gonna work exactly the same? It will. Is the ad sales model exactly the same? It is, and so at that point, we all sat down and made the decision to make a more concerted effort to move into Canada, to take more share and to really replicate the model that we have down here in the States.

Yeah, that would be the easy one. The harder one would be going South. 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. Look, our primary target out the gate is English speaking countries. We have Canada, Australia, New Zealand, there's plenty of others that'll be coming down the pipeline. But moving into second languages is definitely going to be a focus for us, especially as we start to understand what the economics look like in each market, how we can program in those markets in such a way that we do here in the United States and in Canada, and then we'll continue spreading in that direction. 

How big is the company at this point? 

Blake Sabatinelli: The headcount changes every single day. I think we're at 220 people. We've about tripled our head count since I joined in March, I think I was employee number 84. 

So there's 110 plus people who you've not met yet because you're working out of your bunker? 

Blake Sabatinelli: I go into the office four days a week and I am incredibly thankful that I'm able to go in and actually see people face to face and so we have a large contingency here in Austin, satellite offices now that are popping up in New York and LA, and Chicago is on the roadmap. While we're almost all here, there's a decent chunk of us that are external, and I've had the pleasure of meeting everyone in person.

How much of that would be Editorial versus Sales versus IT or Ops, I guess you'd call it? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Editorial’, probably a quarter of our company. IT and Operations, probably another quarter, and then the rest is spread across Distribution and Ad Sales and GNA, and other.

Has it been hard to manage all this largely virtual?

Blake Sabatinelli: So we've been back in the office since March at this point. There has been a significant amount of growth with all of us virtual. I'm not going to tell you that there hasn't been a growing pain or two and that it's all easy, and this is a cakewalk, Dave, but our team's incredible, our HR team, our finance folks, recruiters, everyone that works on our team to find, identify and bring and onboard new employees, they're wonderful and so it hasn't been as bad as I’d think as other experiences I've heard across the industry. 

My twenties and thirties were spent in newspaper newsrooms and I struggle to wrap my head around the idea that you would have a dispersed newsroom where you're only talking to each other by video meetings and Slack.

Blake Sabatinelli: We did it in April of 2020. The entirety of our Newsy at home and we spun up live operations in people's living rooms and it was absolutely bananas, and that was as difficult as you would imagine, and was ripe with challenges, but that team got it done too and made it look easy.

I think one thing that I've learned in this new COVID world is to truly expect the unexpected, and so long as you're comfortable with that, and so long as you know that something's going to blow up at some point in time and you're ready for it, then it's not that bad.

So what can we expect from Atmosphere TV in the next year, are you going to be launching more products? 

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. So I think you're going to see a pretty significant expansion in our content offering. We've had the opportunity over the last year to really understand product market fit, to do a significant amount of tests and learn, to gather the data that we need and really prepare ourselves to start running. I feel like we've been at a full sprint, but now it's time to move like Usain Bolt for the next couple of quarters. So a significant expansion in our content offering in the size and scale of our company and our distribution footprint. We have big plans ahead and I expect you'll be able to watch Atmosphere pretty much everywhere you go here soon. 

Are you still hiring people? 

Blake Sabatinelli: We are hiring like crazy and have plans to continue at a pace like we are now through the next two years. 

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

Blake Sabatinelli: It's my pleasure. Thanks for the time Dave.

Florian Rotberg, Invidis

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

The Munich-based digital signage consultancy invidis has been doing an annual yearbook publication for the past decade that is something of an industry bible for the European and Middle Eastern markets, and with each annual edition it gets a little more detailed and broader in its scope.

The company does a German version and another one in English to service the rest of the region. There are many, many industry reports out there purporting to have a real understanding and data about the digital signage industry, but most of those reports are expensive and frankly not worth the money. 

The invidis yearbook, in contrast, is rich in detail, and full of insights from people who know the business at an expert level.

And the best part, it's a free download - with the report bankrolled by sponsor advertisers.

I caught up with Florian Rotberg, one of the principals at invidis, to talk about this year's insights, and why the focal point for 2021 was on what they call green signage.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Florian. Thank you for joining me. You're just back from Dubai! 

Florian Rotberg: Thanks for having me. Yeah, it was very exciting in Dubai at Expo 2020, and we spent a few days there. It was still very hot, but it's fascinating to see how immersive signage can be in today's show.

Yeah. There's digital signage all through the Expo site, right?.

Florian Rotberg: It's fascinating. It’s LED with a lot of projections. During normal times, you don't see that much projection, but in this special country pavilion, there were 180 of them, it's fascinating to see. It's also great to see what works and what doesn't because some of the countries run out of money or never really had a good plan and you feel it immediately. So you enter the room and go, “oh, that's crap, I’m leaving,” and unfortunately, sometimes you have to wait two to three hours at some of the very popular pavilions. So then it's not a good experience, but in general, it's fascinating to see what's the coolest thing.

It's not only LED and projection, but it's also how that's really integrated in architecture and not only how it integrated into the room, but also a lot of mirrors. So one of my favorite things, and I've talked about it many times before, it's really how you combine signage, how you combine LED or projection with mirror. You can do fantastic things and you see some really cool pavilions. 

Yeah. There was a new observatory that just opened up in New York, overlooking Madison Avenue in Midtown and it's got a big LED wall, but it's also three levels of mirrored ceilings and floors and walls and everything else and reflects like crazy. I was trying to wrap my head around it, but it's that kind of thing where it becomes just an infinite space. 

Florian Rotberg: Exactly, and it feels immersive and it can create great experiences there, and we took 1400 photos and 70 hours of video, so we’ll put everything together in the next week we would publish it on Invidis Meets World on YouTube where you can watch it and we will show a lot of other stuff also obviously.

What is invidisXworld?

Florian Rotberg: So invidisXworld is something we started before the pandemic, and we decided because signage is so much about content, so much about the whole room, it's not only the digital canvas, but how people move in front of the screen and what a brand or the vendors really want to achieve. 

And so we decided, we have to travel. We have to go there. We have to talk with the people who designed it, and we have to just experience ourselves and then to tell the audience how it really feels. So we just hired the camera team, and we went off to Sweden and to Berlin which is still both in Europe, so it was easier to reach, and we spent a week there and talked with dozens of experts and visited museums. Some of the museums just opened for us because they were all closed because of a lockdown, and we went to Volvo, to H&M, to different places, to headquarters and talk with the guys who are responsible for that. It's a fascinating show and people like it and we get quite good feedback. 

So we're working in a visual medium, and you're actually using video? 

Florian Rotberg: Yes! 

How clever. 

Florian Rotberg: To be honest, I always thought photos are so cool, it's so easy, but unfortunately video is so much better, but it's very expensive. It's not just you spending a week somewhere, you have a whole camera team, and almost like a broadcast team, we have a video guy, sound guy, a producer, and you have to feed them and that is sometimes difficult. So you have to manage them almost like kids, but at the end of the day, you get some really good footage afterwards and it’s worth the trouble.

For people who haven't been to Dubai, as you say, it's fascinating. I find it extremely weird, but the degree of digital signage there, all these projects, and a lot of them are big budget projects, are they instructive or are they one-offs where you look at them and go, that's really cool, but, that's not something that's ever going to scale?

Florian Rotberg: It's changing. In the past, it was just about the “wow of the moment” and afterwards, they all forgot about it. Nobody cared about maintenance, and after a year it just looked horrible, because nobody invested in content and nobody cared about it, and to be honest, even till today, the majority of the digital touchpoints are still not really connected to any backend systems or so and there are various reasons for that.

One is when they open something and then they forget about it. People change jobs really fast. So even the person who is responsible for that leaves a job after a year or so, and so nobody has ownership anymore, and last but not least, these countries are relatively small, so reaching scale is very difficult, even for big chains, maybe maybe 40 stores or so getting scale is difficult. 

And they're interested in the “wow” and unfortunately not so much until four to five or seven year long contracts.

But you said it's changing? 

Florian Rotberg: Yep. It's changing, getting smarter, getting more connected. To be honest, the region is the most digitally advanced region with a very young population.

They have two-three mobile phones, and they're very open to all of this stuff. So it is changing, and we talked, while we were there, to one of the biggest telecommunication companies there, and we were at one of their flagship stores and they now have 170 stores and they have really good connections, and they really think in customer journeys. 

We also visited a smart hospital, which was really cool. You identify yourself when you enter the hospital with your ID card and then it takes a photo of you and then you walk through the hospital and it detects you and makes sure that you're in the right room, that the right person is there and everything. So very smart and they’re really starting to think about journeys and to improve processes. So at the smart hospital, the process before was three days with all the examinations until you got to stand for your visa renewal, and now it's down to 30 minutes, which is incredible, and this is only possible with digital.

So I wanted to chat for a number of reasons, but the principal one was the yearbook that Invidis puts out. Could you explain what that is and how it works? 

Florian Rotberg: Some people call it the Bible of the industry. I'm not sure if I would call it that, but yeah, it's an annual book we have been publishing for 11 year now and it's free to download on Invidis.com and it basically gives a yearly update about the latest trends. We have lots of rankings there, especially this year since it was quite interesting. You know, like the largest CMS providers worldwide, and which verticals are most important for digital signage, etc.

We just give an analysis of the market, what has happened and also an outlook on what trends are coming up and what to understand, and the main topic this year is Green Signage. I know many of your listeners are based in North America, but over here in Europe, it's a huge topic. During the pandemic, the interest in more sustainable solutions has improved dramatically, and so more and more brands are looking to also operate their signage networks more sustainably, and what's most interesting when we did all the research is that 80% of the carbon footprint of a digital signage project is during operations. So for five-six years, the whole thing is operating. It's not so much the production, it's not so much the shipping. Yes, it's still 10-20%, but 80%, that's the biggest lever, and so it's not only about buying a more sustainable, more conscious signage solution, but it's really about how to improve existing installations.

And there are so many things you can improve and you can reduce power consumption with the right content. Turning it off at night, it's so unfortunate that the majority of the signage runs 24/7 even if there are no people around. Kiosks systems, they all run 24.7. There's no reason if a kiosk system is somewhere on a factory floor and the floor is closed or in the evening, or at night, it's still running. In the beginning, especially with LEDs, obviously they consume a lot of power. So there are a lot of levers and ways to be more conscious and more sustainable. 

Do you think part of that is simply the early days of the legacy of digital signage software and hardware is that you were afraid to kind of power it down cause it would come back? 

Florian Rotberg: Exactly. Yeah, that's the main thing, at least that’s what the technical integrators always say. Some, especially on some more recent screens, turn off the sensors, the light sensors and everything because the marketing department wanted the red as close as possible to their official red and obviously that doesn't work if you change the brightness of the screen but things are changing really fast.

And what's most interesting now with the pandemic and about sustainability is that signage has become a CEO topic for the first time. In the past years, they never really cared about digital signage, but now they really have to report it to their shareholders: how they could improve operations, where they could reduce the carbon footprint and digital signage plays an important role.

Interesting. The yearbook is primarily focused on Europe and the Middle East, right?

Florian Rotberg: Yes. That's how we started. We started this in Germany and then we extended it and now it's more or less all over Europe and every year we add a few more countries. Last big thing was the Nordics, and currently we're working on France, Spain and UK, so next year, we will also have rankings for these countries, and yeah, especially in Europe most markets were quite national markets and now some bigger international players are really growing and Europe is seen as one market, and so it's important to have all of them and that includes the UK. 

Yeah, despite Brexit. Is what happens in Europe indicative of what is happening globally or is it its own thing? 

Florian Rotberg: The whole green stuff is probably the most advanced in Europe.

Yeah, you don’t hear about it in North America. Honestly, I've never heard anybody bring it up.

Florian Rotberg: Yeah, but over here, especially in the Nordics, it's very important, and just for example, electricity is 10 times more expensive in Germany compared to Korea, for example. Even the designers and the engineers who create new solutions, they're not aware of how important power consumption is and life is changing, and I think this whole climate debate we are currently having, I think it will become more important, not only in Europe, but also in the US. 

I know that Europe and the Middle East primarily, I've heard other people talk about the real action these days being in China and in India and I wonder how hard it must be, particularly with China, to try to wrap your arms around who the major players are, what activities are going on, any of those things?. 

Florian Rotberg: Yeah, China is a very difficult market. There's a lot of potential but it’s very difficult as an analyst, really, to look at the market and it's so different.

Interestingly enough, there are a few bigger digital signage integrators based in Europe and North America who also have offices in China and they’re pretty much doing this stuff for all the big luxury brands and so. So there's some European and then North American guys who really are trying to do stuff in Shanghai and the big cities, but the general market is just huge, and you probably talked to Chris Regal or so, because he's very successful in India and in China, but he's targeting more of the mid market and the European players, they're just looking at how to bring Italian and French brands to China.

And those European brands and other brands, would they rather bring familiar companies into the country to do that for them, as opposed to hiring local firms? 

Florian Rotberg: At the end of the day, that's the case, but that's also with North America, that's the success of the media to be honest. Media’s strength in Europe is that they represent America, the American customers here.

So what is happening in terms of the yearbook? Obviously we're hopefully coming out of a rather rough couple of years. I noticed in the report that the countries in Europe, at least that had a particularly rough time were France and the UK versus some of the other countries that were down, but not to the same level. Why did that happen?

Florian Rotberg: Because of the lockdown. We had different levels and different lengths of lockdown, and just looking at Australia, they had a three months lockdown. Now that obviously has a huge impact because the stores were closed, and even if it's a brand that’s willing to spend money and to upgrade the stores, they couldn't because technicians weren't allowed to enter the stores. 

I know, in past discussions around this, that Europe's an interesting market in that dominant players in many respects are dominant by country, as opposed to across the continent? 

Florian Rotberg: That has been the case, absolutely. But this is currently changing. So we have, we call them the Top 3, they are the three largest pure play digital signage integrators, and they've all been acquired more or less by private equity and now they're buying competitors in the big markets. All three of them really try to grow into a pan-European or international player. 

But in relative terms to the North American guys, AVI, SPL, Diversified and Stratacache, they're tiny, right?

Florian Rotberg: They are tiny. They hope to change that but they are very small. But to be honest if you look at AVI, SPL or even Diversified, they're not pure digital signage, they do a lot of Pro AV, IT stuff, so you should compare apples with apples, but still X times larger than the biggest in Europe.

AVI, SPL just announced, I think, it's called the Experience Technology Group. So they seem to be recognizing that they need to get more serious about signage and venue based displays.

Florian Rotberg: Oh, yeah, and I love what they do. They're really smart in creating this platform to manage different AV solutions and everything. So I think that it's a smart approach, and also now looking out to create more immersive experiences because if you have expertise there, you can really export it throughout the world. So that works quite well. 

But in Europe, we still have the problem of 25 different languages and really creating concepts, which you need to understand the culture and yes, there's a big difference between Sweden and Spain or Italy and Ireland also. So really to understand that, and that was a reason why there were large local players and still, if you look how these big three or at least three for European sizes and how they're growing, they all built up little local creative teams and sales teams in each countries because you need to have this local expertise, you need to speak the language of the client, and you need to understand what they really want to achieve. 

You've done a ranking of the Top 10 Global CMS software platforms, and I'm making some assumptions that there are some CMS platforms in China that you and I probably have never even heard of and that they are probably huge as well. But were you surprised by who showed up on this list? 

Florian Rotberg: Some surprises, yes. I mean there's a small asterisk next to it. So it's just the best of our knowledge, obviously. I'm sure there are many but one big problem is always Samsung. They never report anything, and it's really difficult. 

So the largest one is Stratacache. It's a little bit more than 3 million active licenses, and one of the surprises was that the top three players were Navori. I'm not sure if many of your listeners have heard about Navori. They're based in Switzerland.

They're pretty big in North America actually. 

Florian Rotberg: Yeah, not so much in Europe, funnily enough, even though they came out of Europe and yes, they have more than 1 million active subscribers. So that's quite cool, and then you see some more vertical ones who are growing through acquisitions a lot and socialists like BroadSign, it's great to see. We have followed BroadSign for more than 15 years now, and it's great to see how they have become the standard in the digital out-of-home industry. It’s quite impressive.

Yeah, they've risen to a level where they pretty much own that vertical and I always try to coach software companies that you really don't want to be a generalist. You want to have a focus on something and they probably more than anybody have done that in digital out-of-home. 

Florian Rotberg: Yeah, but the same with Four Winds etc., they all are specialists, or at least they are focusing more and more on certain verticals.

Yeah, Four Winds barely calls itself a digital signage company now. They're talking about the workplace and the same with Ops Space. 

Florian Rotberg: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think there was just an announcement in that space today. 

So what are you seeing in terms of trends in the industry? As you mentioned, the shift to, or the interest in green signage is one thing. What else are you seeing happening out there? 

Florian Rotberg: The biggest challenge currently across the world is to manage the supply chain shortage. Unfortunately, that won't go away in 2022. If you read the Financial Times, if you talk to all the people, you just read it every day and most people expect that to last at least until the end of next year.

And that's pretty bad news because the order books are as full as they were before. There's a lot of demand for signage at the end of the pandemic, and unfortunately 2022 will still be a difficult year. Secondly, we have a shortage of talents and whoever you talk to, I'm sure you also get calls about companies saying, we're desperately looking for a new manager and I get them every day and that's a huge issue and then shortage in diversity, shortages of women, of everything. It's still a very male dominated thing, and today InfoComm opened and I'm sure the majority of them are men, as always, and so we see these three shortages: supply chain, talent and diversity.

When I get asked to organize panels particularly with an organization like the AVIXA, which has diversity initiatives and everything else, they really encourage me to make sure that I'm finding women and people of color and so on, and I'm completely supportive of that, but it's hard.

Florian Rotberg: It is hard, yeah. It's not easy. I fully understand, but alsowhen you look more in the new work, in the hybrid world, it's all about hybrid and that's very challenging for everyone. It's easy to have everyone at home. It's easy to have everyone on location, but managing these hybrid workspaces is very difficult. How can you create meetings where everything feels included and often you communicate with eyes and with every single one that's very difficult to do when alf of the people are somewhere at home or so. So you need lots of creativity and innovative solutions to manage that. So that's also something which will definitely remain. 

And we're seeing gimmicks coming up there, like this idea of the metaverse and using quasi holograms, so that it feels like you're sitting across from a real person when it's not obviously, do you see any potential for that stuff?

Florian Rotberg: To be honest, it's a one way road because it's nice for the guys who are in the office, but for the guys who are sitting at home in front of this small screen, it doesn't help them at all, and you need to have both sides and you need to empower both sides, and so I think at the end of the day, it's difficult to solve and we haven't seen any solution.

I think the cool part is teleportation stuff, and last week in Dubai, there was also an IT show. It was just the biggest and it was unbelievable how full it was like before the pandemic, and they had these cool mirrors and everything. So it looked like somebody was in the room, when obviously he wasn't. And so it's great to see, but it doesn't help people at home, and so that still remains a challenge. 

And I wanted to go to that show. I've seen some videos of some booths from some companies, and it looked insane. 

Florian Rotberg: It was, and a lot of booth people were waiting an hour more. Can you imagine that? Just to enter the booth because it was so full, it was unbelievable. We all had to wear a mask, no question about it, but we waited more than an hour just to get in. So yeah, it was amazing, and we produced lots of videos and we will publish that in the next couple of days.

It's really cool stuff, especially in regards to retail technology, all the cool stuff, all the fancy things were robots and solar, but also AI and how it really works, and then some simpler solutions in all of these checkout carts and everything, and also these devices which measure you so you don't have to find the right size without using camera technology, because obviously that's something which most people don't like. And it's interesting to see what kind of solutions there are. Much of the stuff, it's really something where you're thinking, oh, it'd be great. If they would roll that out in the future, the majority of them are still in the prototype phase, but hopefully we will see lots of this coming up.

Your report coined a term, “Deep Signage” which I had not seen before, but I understand it and this idea of integrating back office systems with other business systems within a company. It sounds like that, particularly in Dubai, is really coming into play. 

Florian Rotberg: Yeah, we try to form this term, deep signage, because for us, it's important that you connect as much as possible, as long as digital is just a layout on something existing. It won't really offer the experiences everyone needs and the benefits. So you have to connect it to the back office, and especially when we talk about moving away from just digital signage CMS, all the way to a digital experience platform, then you need to mix everything and then really connect. So deep signage is something we believe is one step towards digital experience. 

Yeah, and how do you define digital experience platforms? 

Florian Rotberg: Oh, that's difficult. Yeah, when you download our book, we have a little picture there, and it's four stages. We start with a digital poster, which is the most simple one. Then we have digital signage, then we have a digital signage experience platform, and then the ultimate is digital experience platform, because there's a totally different approach to it, and when we talk about DXP, it’s not digital signage or mobile or online, which is in focus, but it's really the data, it's the experience which is in focus regardless on which channel you play it out, and it's really orchestration of all of the different channels and different stories and media platforms, and that's what digital experience platform is about.

But then many customers ask us who does it and who's good at it, and it's very difficult. There are only very few companies and most of them are totally vertically organized players like Zara,, I'm sure you know them, because they do everything, they own the factory, they own the warehouse, they own the shops, and they own the data and for them, it doesn't matter if you go into a store, try something out and decide to buy it online, because they own the whole value chain and this is one of the few companies who really are able to deliver a DXP and make the most of it, but more will come definitely. 

If you're a smaller company, is it something you can even contemplate at a different kind of scale?

Florian Rotberg: No, it's not worth it. I think you need to be very large, to be honest, and to really put up a DXP project, you probably need a few million just for setting it up. 

You mentioned private equity companies and some of the integrators in Europe, or are you seeing a lot of private equity activity?

Florian Rotberg: Yes, it’s unbelievable. So much money in the market. That's the reason that conservation is speeding up so fast, it's unbelievable. 

Why do you think that is right now? Is it distressed companies? 

Florian Rotberg: No. We were surprised not at all, but maybe that's also a European thing because the governments took care of that and so most of them kept their employees, which is a good thing now, because they didn't have to retrain new people so it's not about that. 

It's more about that the crisis wasn't really an economic crisis. It was more of a human crisis, and so most companies still have a lot of money, except if you are a Chinese real estate company, then maybe you don’t. But in general, they have a lot of money. The private equity companies, they're looking for new ways of spending it, and they all buy into the digitization of stationary retail. They fully understand that times have changed and you can only survive if you're fully digital, and so that's probably why they like it.

And then there are also some of the trends like we have the first valuation of more than a hundred million in Europe for an integrator, and this is one of the thresholds where, you know, private equity likes to come into the market. Zeta Display, they were almost at a hundred million valuation and it's not much compared to the top three in the US but for Europe, that's quite big, and that that made it really interesting for many others. 

You also, in the report, talk about changing roles of the different companies in the ecosystem and how there are dinosaurs, disruptors and discovers. What do you mean by that? 

Florian Rotberg: Ah, that's quite interesting, especially when you look at software companies, some of them are reinventing themselves, and in the past,, there was the value chain and there were clearly defined roles. There was an integrator, the integrator usually owns the lead with the customer and he chose certain software and certain hardware and that was it basically, and then you did some stuff in the back and, but I think Chris Regal was the first one, when he quit Scala, he said “oh, I'm sick of just having 3-5% of the project, I want to have more”, and so he decided to build around software this whole end to end solution.

And then other companies, software companies from Sweden and other parts of Europe, they're really also trying to change the way the value chain works. So they really want to be ISV+. So they want to do everything except hardware . Obviously the investors love that because that's every single sale which would have recurring revenue and nobody wants to touch hardware, and Chris Regal always tells us that you need to also to understand how to learn, to manage it. Otherwise the service you mentioned will be really expensive. So it's interesting to see if this ISV+ model will work out for them. 

So that sounds like the dinosaurs are those who refused to adjust and adapt, and the disruptors are those that are doing things differently?

Florian Rotberg: Yup. We have some smaller, more aggressive players coming into the market and also players like Spector, many people hadn't heard about them and now they have become really relevant 

And there are also companies that, in some cases, are very large companies that can come into the market from outside, like consulting companies like Deloitte and so on and disrupt things as well, right?

Florian Rotberg: Absolutely. On a different level, but yes, Accenture, Deloitte, all of these guys and they are really close to the big enterprise. So usually they do at least double digits, sometimes triple digit contracts with blue chip companies every year and they're trusted names. So it's an easy one for BMW, Adidas, Nike, or whatever to hire one of them and to ask them to create a new digital concept. Unfortunately, most of them don't know how digital signage works.

Yeah. So they always invent this great stuff. It looks fantastic on PowerPoint and everything, but then at the end of the day, they need to subcontract it to the signage contractor to solve the whole thing and make it work, and we have also seen the big four have failed as a digital signage company, and so it's interesting, but eventually they will buy some digital signage companies I think.

Or hire smart people, you know? Over here in North America, I think about Gensler and Publicis Sapient, and they have some super smart people working for them now who really get this space and get the technology and everything else. So they're getting there, but it's a very small percentage of people within very large companies.. 

Florian Rotberg: You mentioned Gensler, it's fascinating, and I'm sure we talked to the same people there and it's really fascinating how with new projects now, they make more money with digital stuff rather than the traditional architectural stuff. So that's fascinating. Not revenue wise, but from the bottom line, and that's interesting to see because if you do digital consulting, obviously your margin is higher than with your standard architectural work. So it's fascinating to see how architectural companies like this are really getting into the digital space and if you don't see it as just a layer really integrated, you need to plan it from day one. 

Last question: Is there a piece of technology or an emerging technology that gets you particularly excited? 

Florian Rotberg: We are both not the youngest anymore. We have seen many technologies come and go, and I know one thing that never works is 3D.

So we were a little bit surprised to see how 3D in this false perspective on this LED wall worked, but I still think it's a hype, to be honest. 

Analytics, sensors, and IOT will make a difference, no question about it. But it’s not one technology, it's more, I think a mindset of connecting everything and measuring everything and adapting to the audience in the milliseconds. I think that's something we're changing. It's probably a whole range of different technologies. 

Yeah, I'm of the same mindset. I tell people that the stuff that excites me would probably bore the pants off of them, and just in terms of its the operational stuff is being able to affect messaging based on what the data is telling you, and it may be really boring saying, go this way instead of that way, because that's too busy over there or whatever, but that's fabulous stuff and it makes a difference or whatever venue it is works. 

Florian Rotberg: Exactly. It's more the stuff under the hood, which really gets me excited and that's also where you can really improve processes where you can really add value, and so that's what we are mostly working on, and obviously customers want to pay for the glittery stuff on top of the rest. But no, but that's where we see the biggest changes happening in the future. 

So if people want to read the 2021 year book, how do they get it? 

Florian Rotberg: It's free to download at invidis.com and I think you also published an article, so you can also find it on your website a link to that, but it's free to download, it's 200 pages and not only this year's edition, but if you also want to read some auditions, please come to our website a and download it there.

And you're able to produce it for free because you get advertising sponsors to support it, right? 

Florian Rotberg: Yes, but it's still more work than we get from advertisements, I can tell you that

It was a pleasure catching up with you as always. 

Florian Rotberg: Thanks for having me. 

InfoComm 2021 Roundtable: Tortured Terminology, With Three Daves, A Kim And A Chris

A virtual roundtable panel run last week during the InfoComm trade show pulled three Daves, a Kim and a Chris together to talk about the use and abuse of technology terms in digital signage and pro AV.

Run as a version of the Digital Signage Federation's periodic Coffee and Controversy series, the panel included Kim Sarubbi of IoTecha, STRATACACHE CEO Chris Riegel, David Title of New York-based Bravo Media, and Portl founder David Nussbaum, who has a very cool transparent LCD product he calls a hologram mainly because he needs something short and digestible for what is a complicated offer.

We had a great, very frank discussion - there's no other way with these folks - about a variety of topics, from all those things on Linkedin that aren't holograms or aren't even real, to the challenges of marketing complicated technology.

This was a Zoom call, and the full video is available via AVIXA as part of a post-InfoComm conference package, but here's the audio version.

I have not done all the polish at the front and back, just so I could get this out as a bonus podcast. 

Sixteen:Nine podcasts have, forever, been gratefully sponsored by Screenfeed, the digital signage content store. Sixteen:Nine is an online publication and companion podcast produced up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is a product of Spectrio, a leading provider of customer engagement solutions ranging from digital signage, interactive kiosks, wifi marketing

John McCauley, Velocity

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

More and more traditional integrators and IT services companies are finding their way into the digital signage industry, but I can't recall seeing one of them getting seriously into the media side of business ... until now.

A well-established IT managed services company based near Toledo, Ohio - called Velocity - is not only providing technical services to digital out of home media companies, it's directly selling media.

The company describes its media solutions business unit as being an an end-to-end digital signage provider - doing hardware, software, installation, tech support, media sales and everything in between.

Velocity runs and owns digital screen networks in groceries, cinema lobbies and hotels, and is looking to grow its footprint.

I had an interesting chat with the company's Senior VP of Digital Media, John McCauley.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

John, thank you for joining me. I was intrigued when I heard and started reading about Velocity that here is a managed services company, a managed services provider that does a lot of IT work, but they have a media wing and I thought, oh, that's different. 

John McCauley: Yes it is, and I think we have a very enthusiastic CEO, Greg Kiley who has really taken to the place-based digital out-of-home media’s core component and how it stitches together with our overall managed services business, and I think we're starting to really see the benefits of it with the investments that we've made in both resources and just alliances through COVID. So it's exciting times. 

Okay. So let's back up a little bit. Can you tell me a little bit about what Velocity is all about,  where it's based, how large a company it is, those sorts of things? 

John McCauley: We're based in Holland, Ohio. It's near Toledo and the company started 15+years ago. Greg Kiley, the CEO, created a rollup of local, regional voice and data services. And from that you create some scale and you create some efficiencies for customers, allowing sort of one-stop shop across like multiple locations across multiple areas of the country, and that proved to be a very fruitful business, saving money of course, and really creating some stickiness between customers.

The managed services, the network services, what else can you do on that connection? That was like a birth of where other aspects of the company could grow, and sectors that we’d like to be in including retail and hospitality and entertainment. All those things started to really converge and the company had a lot of success probably for a good 15+ years and two years ago, more or less, we got into sort of the digital out-of-home business and always had connection to our customers and really in response to the customers thinking, what else can we do on the connection? 

Starting with merchandising signs, thinking about hotels and maybe retail, those locations would use those to promote offerings and then over time, we start to explore with our customers, can we turn this into a media opportunity, which obviously would provide revenue back to them, creating another revenue opportunity for the company. And I think the timing of that is all very serendipitous for us because digital out-of-home, and technology enabled selling are all converging, and that's a big part of the growth in digital out-of-home is this sort of the technology and the digitization of signs, and we find ourselves in a very interesting and exciting place right now.

Did you have end-user customers who were pushing Velocity on some sort of a cost-recovery model, saying, could we put in signs and make money back on these things or was this more something that Velocity came up with? 

John McCauley: I think a little more on our side and then the clients obviously are the beneficiaries of it. I think a company like us is thinking about all sorts of growth opportunities and also thinking about ways for more customers to come into the fold. We want to be able to provide as much stickiness as we can. So whether you would come in through our network services side of things and we bring digital signage solutions to you or someone comes in through the digital signage solutions and we're able to extend them network services.

The company is very focused on being deep and across the board with as many solutions as we can for our customers. 

So right now, if I'm looking at your website, you do call centers services, repair depot, onsite techs, back office support, project management, all the kind of traditional things that you would have out of IT managed services and telecom managed services.

I remember having a client in the auto sector that had a digital signage department and they described themselves as the land of misfit toys. They didn't really fit in with the rest of the company. Culturally, how does the media wing fit within a whole bunch of guys or people who are IT services people? 

John McCauley: I think we fit very nicely together. There's a lot of similarities within that. First and foremost, we're very customer centric, right? So I think when you start as being customer centric, whether you're providing an immediate solution for a customer or a sort of technology managed services solution, you end up in the right place aligned around that. There's also a lot of cross-pollination, whether you work with CMS systems, or digital signage sort of capabilities, you're working very closely with your IT group, and then also as you're supporting your customers, right?

We have a grocery network and a hospitality network and others, and the responsiveness, we all work well together, right? If a sign goes down, you're tapping into your managed services group, the call center is contacting us and it's very symbiotic, and I think the way the company has put these pieces together has worked well. I can definitely see in other places where they may be assembled versus orchestrated, you'd probably see a bit of a difference. 

So the media solutions business unit, if you want to call it that, what all is in that? 

John McCauley: So we have networks and hospitality, grocery. We have a relationship with cinemas and Cinema lobbies also within Redbox in video toppers on top of Redbox kiosks, and then through another group, as part of a media solution, we have a direct sales group that represents inventory within bars, transit centers, and convenience stores. 

So that mixture of that portfolio of media opportunities allows us to leverage a direct sales group that is working on just a representation basis to help bring into the fold of particular deals of other media that we own and operate, and similarly, if we go owned and operate, we can look to extend those opportunities within networks that we represent. I think within the digital out-of-home space, it's important to have that sort of portfolio approach, allows us to nurture some networks, develop other networks, and I think overall a lot is happening in the space and allows us to be nimble too. 

Did you start with direct sales or was that a kind of a lesson learned, that we can't really use a rep shop, we need to bring this in-house?

John McCauley: We have an affiliate approach. So I would say our channel strategy where we do use Programmatic, of course, everybody needs to connect to Programmatic. We have third-party relationships with people that may have endemic relationships, maybe particularly within grocery. ScreenVision Media represents some of our inventory and they are leveraging the on-screen advertising and people who want to get close to that customer and extend them outside the cinema. So that sort of has its own strategy, and then our direct group is really a traditional digital out-of-home group. So you can't forget that part of the stack of revenue coming in, and I think as we think about revenue and I know a lot of people in the digital out-of-home space think about this is where the layers of the cake are coming from. 

It may be in the beginning of the year when the media is not as heavy, like 15% of media might be spent in the first quarter, you might be a little more Programmatic oriented, right? As you get open exchange, not PMP, as you get to later in the year where maybe 40% of the media spend could be in Q4, you're probably going to be more PMP and maybe a little less open exchange. And so that mix of portfolios could also change by the sector, vertical that you're in. 

We consciously did that and I think bringing in the digital out-of-home was on the roadmap. It just took us as we started to make our acquisitions and some of the other affiliates came in, but they all have to work together. We're working very closely as a centralized resource, coordinating the efforts, because that's how you maximize the revenue. 

The grocery network you acquired, has that been the model for all the media properties you're in? 

John McCauley: That was something that we were interested in grocery and retail. That opportunity came our way and we definitely saw our chance to leverage our relationship with our affiliates, as well as combine that with some strategic things that were coming down the road, but many things we just built from scratch. At the hotel and hospitality network, I think there was a recent release that went out with G6. That's something that there is no network that begins, right? So we're deploying the signs and we're starting it from scratch, and I think you'll, over time, see even more from us where we're combining opportunities where there may be existing networks in place, but we can be the catalyst for more digitization and more growth.

So the G6 one, that's an operator of a series of Motel 6s, right?

John McCauley: Correct. Yes, and hotels are an interesting sort of vertical in the digital out-of-home, not quite landed with media buyers yet, but there's a tremendous amount of purchasing power that resides within hotel guests. Obviously if you stay at a hotel for longer periods of time, you're going to be spending more money in the local economy. But even if you were to go in and have a short-term stay right, more than likely, you're going to be spending some money in the economy. 

We also know from just the dwell time, as people are considering things, landing a message that may be more regional in nature, or maybe it's a specific product, that's yet another impression that's made on a customer or potential customer, as they're within the lobbies. There's a little bit of work to do within hospitality, but we're super bullish on that, particularly when you see that the spending ultimately at the end of the day, media agencies and advertisers are looking for what's that incremental media that I can bring to my campaign and media mix that can be the extra, what's going to help me close the loop? And I think when you're sitting in front of people who are away from home, you know they're going to be spending money. That's definitely an opportunity to influence purchase. 

I'm guessing and it's purely a guess, but given the history of digital out-of-home, a lot of the networks that kind of bubbled up were often by entrepreneurs who were bootstrapped and were going into places like Motel 6 owner group or whatever, and saying, we can do this for you, we can put these screens in and so on, and maybe in the early days they accepted that. But I think the experience was such that so many of those kinds of bootstrap companies went out of business, that a large well-established IT services firm is probably more readily welcomed in the office to talk about it. 

John McCauley: I think the key thing about it is, even if you can bootstrap the signage deployment, ultimately at the end of the day, it's going to be the service, right? With signs, always there's cane activity issues, something goes down the monitoring, the maintenance, right? The ability to help program through CMS systems and that ultimately is how you get across the finish line, and it's super difficult to do, I think if you're bootstrapping and we have the benefit of the resources of Velocity, to create an infrastructure that allows us to support these networks and obviously as we scale, we continue to look at sort of our resources, but we're very much on the radar screen of how we continue to provide that level of resourcing. 

So I'm an owner of numerous motor inns in the US Southwest or something like that, and I approach you guys, what all would you be able to do? Do you take it right from start to finish and aftercare or are there things that you still leave for others? 

John McCauley: Yeah, this would be end to end. Our way of choice of moving forward is design, I think sometimes that's often missed, what's the best place to deploy? What is the best signage to use? Getting them deployed and then ongoing monitoring of the deployment, and ultimately, depending on whether the customer wants it or not is bringing advertising. But whether you bring the advertising or not, there's a CMS system component and we find if we have everything from the beginning to the end, we can provide the highest level of service for the customer, and look, I don't think it's really lost on our customers who are in the hotel business. Sometimes we use the term digital concierge for the signage that we provide in the lobby because that's allowing the hotel to communicate.

These are the services that are available within the hotel. Sometimes it could be a restaurant, right? They are in there and it helps them drive money, sometimes it's a rewards program. ESA has something called the perks program, which allows their guests to download an app and get deals in the community. So that level of communication, we want to be able to provide that CMS component and then advertising is something, and I think generally speaking, when it's handled end to end in a one-stop shop, you're going to get the most from your primary customer, and you can bring the most service, and therefore the most benefit whether it's going to be efficiencies, savings, and obviously, revenue. 

I remember with telecoms companies going back 15 years or so, they started looking at digital signage and described it very much as you did a little bit earlier on, where it's a layered service thing where we're already providing the connectivity and the the boots on the ground, so to speak, to come in and repair things. So why not layer this on top of it? Just in the same way that we could maybe layer this building security or whatever.

John McCauley: I think layered services is a nice way to describe it, and I think when you're working with companies like Velocity where you're very customer focused and looking to help drive value, for your customer, these things come up and I do think that this digitization of signage and communication, while some people may feel like that's a lot to undertake, once you have it, you're taking the communication and you're changing it up, like on a much more frequent basis. 

If you think about movie theaters, and think about menu boards, that used to be that you put them into sort of a plug board, “Popcorn costs $2.50”. Nowadays, a lot of movie theaters have digital menu boards and those digital menu boards allow things to be like by movie, you can change what the offering is. Here's the pack you're going to be focusing on around the time of day and that has really proven to be a driver of an anchor mentality, and that I think is ultimately the proof of the pudding, and I think more people are coming around to that. Posters, things like that, where people would do analog, you can take the same image, send it across digitally, and that now can be customized and tweaked regionally by the market, targeted by time of day, and I think those benefits are becoming much more real to people now, and I think with COVID, in particular, people took the time to think about how digital and technology play a role in my company and I think we'll start to continue to see even more disease of analog opportunities and more exploration of where some signage could be put into venues to drive the revenue and create some efficiencies. 

Does it matter at all about focus? So if you're doing Motel 6 lobbies and groceries in New York state and cinema lobbies, those are pretty different kinds of environments. Does it matter in terms of sales and support that you get a little more focused on one particular vertical or a couple of others? 

John McCauley: I think from the support side of things, there's a lot more commonality to the back end of how you support those signs because of this connectivity coming in, and I would say that would not have been the case years ago. It would have been more difficult to try to manage multiple like sectors, because maybe the differentiation of signage, maybe the CMS system you're using, a lot of that stuff I think has gone away, making it easier to potentially manage like a variety of verticals, but in particular for the sales side of things, we like to think about our areas of focus proximity to retail and purchase.

So lots of times we're nestled within retail, right? You're in a grocery store, we have Redbox, you're there and then the ability to be close to purchase. So whether you're at a bar, you're obviously purchasing in the bar, but oftentimes and with your in hand and the ability to influence purchase, I think is a big deal in digital out-of-home and our network is set up in that way to be around that. We would think about retail and proximity to purchase as a really key component of our business. 

You mentioned CMS, is it a case where you're using a partner firm’s CMS or have you developed your own?

John McCauley: We have our own CMS system and as we've taken on networks, we've had to work with other CMS systems, but ultimately I think in looking at the ad ecosystem, right? If you start at the far left with a DSP slide into the SSP, right? Then you have an ad server, then the CMS and the connectivity to the sign, I think for the most part people who are in the business that we're in, they want to have the CMS connected to the sign, right? Because that's really how you're controlling the sign. You're working with a third party on the signage and having that creates a larger scale and more efficiency. But at the end of the day, a lot of the CMS systems work the same. 

We would obviously think ours is better because we were working to work on our signs and making sure they're doing what we want to do, but I think he needed to have flexibility. So at the end of the day if you want to be in the business, you have to have a wide lens and work hard to get people to consider your CMS system. 

Do you find with the end user customers who you work with and Target in particular that there's any sort of demand that no, we need to work with this particular CMS partner, we need to use this particular smart display or operating system, or are they pretty open? 

John McCauley: I think if you're inheriting something, there's already a bias, that, hey, we've used this and we're looking for a new operator, and I think there are companies that would come in and maybe operate that and certainly we consider everything. I think when things are starting anew then you have the opportunity to bring to bear the capabilities that the company may have around sourcing and designing signage that works as well as the CMS system.

I think you need to be competitive, right? So if someone likes a particular CMS system, you understand what those needs are, and you obviously are going to be upgrading your CMS system to have those. So yeah, you need to be definitely paying attention to the marketplace. I think like in anything, whether it's this business or any business, if you have blinders on, and are rigid and say, this is the way we do it, then ultimately you're going to miss out on opportunities, right? Because the marketplace is going to dictate the services and the capabilities that you need to have. 

Okay, so if I'm a digital place-based startup and I'm putting screens in, I'll make something up in ski resort lounges or something like that, don't think I'd do that one but anyways. 

If I was being smart, I’d determine pretty quickly that I don't know what I'm doing with technology and it would be great if I had a partner who did all that stuff for me, and I just focused on sales or even had sales done by somebody else, and I just run around and get the real estate agreements, is that something you'll do where you just kind of take everything on?

John McCauley: Absolutely. That's the type of thing we would put ourselves in position to do, and I think as you were indicating that sometimes we're seeing the customer saying, yes, I'll get the real estate because I have real estate, I want to convert some real estate, I want to better leverage my real estate, but ultimately we find that customers are trying to drive more revenue, right? Like in their existing business, how do they drive more revenue? I know you were using the ski resort, right? Can they get people to the lodge and buy more? Can they get them to do lessons? Ultimately the businesses are very focused on that. 

Bringing advertising in, that's obviously very complimentary, and we find that when you're bringing advertisers into venues, particularly on the mix of them, local and regional play well because it's sorta like the company you keep. If there's some advertising in there, people go, oh, look at that. They're advertising at the ski resort. I think that is also things that the venues like, they like to be immersed within either the community or things that their customers are feeling that are current.

You've grown a little bit in the media space through acquisition, is this an ongoing thing? Is Velocity looking for other networks that they may potentially acquire as well to build out their footprint? 

John McCauley: I think we will always have our eyes on where we can be strategically accretive, particularly around these verticals and sectors and being close to retail and purchase and if there are things that pop up, we're also actively looking. I would say that that's very much in the forefront. 

There’s a lot of digital out-of-home networks out there. Generally speaking, do you get a sense of how they're doing? There's obviously some large ones that are doing very well, but it's been a rough couple of years for just about everybody.

John McCauley: Yeah, I think heading into that quarter before COVID shut everything down, they were really coming off a record year, having a record quarter digital out-of-home, and then basically the world's shut down, and what we're seeing is that traffic is certainly back, people are out and about, depending on where you are in the country, it could be a little bit less but certainly people are feeling more comfortable being vaccinated, and what we're seeing is that a little bit of an over-indexing to transit and billboards. That's the safe play, right? People are out there driving. I think people are over-indexing there. 

In that middle sort of ground, like street furniture is almost back to where they need to be from the pre COVID levels, and then the place-based, essential markets, whether it's grocery stores and others, they certainly have had the traffic, and they're shown a little quicker recovery and then things that would be considered more discretionary, whether they be movie theaters or people could argue bars, whether that's discretionary or not, but they serve an essential part of the communities. All of those types of things are definitely starting to show the rebounding and heading towards the trajectory of getting back to pre COVID levels. 

But I think that's just the cadence of the way people have responded to it. They have to see that the traffic is steady and consistent, that we can weather the storms of having variance that really impacted the traffic, and then ultimately I think Q4 is a good time for it, right? Because at the end of the day, Q4 is when many companies, whether you're selling stuff, whether it be media or selling products, you need to get your impressions, you need to reach, you need to get impressions. You need to influence people who are in position to purchase. I think this quarter in particular will really start to provide the wind behind the sails heading into 2022. There was a DPAA conference last week which was really encouraging. It was well attended by 600 plus people in person at Chelsea Piers in New York. The energy was high, lots of clients there. Lots of things happening within the digital out-of-home, and I think there's a lot of optimism around place-based. 

And I think you told me in our pre-call that Velocity is a member of the DPAA? 

John McCauley: Yeah, we're members of the DPaA, and in my prior life, I was at the ScreenVision Media and I was on the board. So I'm very friendly and familiar with the leadership there, and I think they've done a very nice job. 

Between the DPAA and the OAAA representing the industry, evangelizing the industry, making sure it's staying top of mind with agencies and brands and CMOs, I think that's an important component and I think there's the retail networks whether it be Walmart doing Walmart Connect or Walgreens or CVS or our efforts at retail, I think they have a very high value, and I think people are really paying attention to the ability to influence customers with wallets out. 

I assume, right now, Velocity is its revenue and its focus is heavily in its traditional business of IT services managed services and so on, and that the media side of it is a fairly small percentage of the revenue. 

Is there a longer-term vision where Velocity starts to become more and more a media company?

John McCauley: We'd have to ask Greg and the leadership team about that, but I see a real enthusiasm for the media business and how the media business supports and can support other opportunities within the company, and so I think as a result of that, it’s strategic importance will continue to grow and so will the revenue but we definitely want to be in the business, whether we're powering networks, whether we're monetizing networks, there's a lot of connectivity that we like being around the space and it plays very well into sort of the overall company of network services and then layering on the media services.

All right. That was terrific. I appreciate you taking some time with me. 

Neil Emery, TrilbyTV

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

I am a huge believer in digital signage software and solutions companies that narrowly define their vertical market and then go after it, as opposed to the many companies out there that say, in effect, we do digital signage.

Those kind of general offers can be deadly, I think, when there is sooo much competition.

So I was intrigued by an email from TrilbyTV that talked about its focus on the education market in the UK, and even more intrigued by the marketing line that the platform and service was built by people who understand and work in education.

I had a chat with TrilbyTV co-founder Neil Emery about how the six-year-old company was founded based on years of working in UK schools doing Apple and Google training. They saw all the dead screens and bad programming in schools that they visited and concluded that they could deliver something better.

TRANSCRIPT

David: Neil, thank you for joining me from beautiful Devon. I was struck by the assertion on your website. That Trilby is the only digital signage platform built by people who understand and work in education. What do you mean by that? 

Neil Emery: So we were Apple trainers, Apple Education trainers for 12 years, we started back in the days when schools had lonely suites of iMacs that only the art teacher and the design teacher would allow sort of their students on. Everybody else looked in and thought, what are these computers? But for us, it wasn’t about Apple. It was about making sure everybody knew the power of things like the iLive Suite, things like iMovie and GarageBand. So that's where we started training with Apple and its resellers, sort of companies that sold Apple and then the iPad came out and it went completely bonkers for us as accredited trainers for Apple and we would work with lots of schools, especially those that were going one-to-one with iPad to make sure they had a vision and a plan. 

So we really understand what needs to be in place for technology to be successful, and that tends to be where schools and colleges fall down a little bit. They tend to rush in and buy technology, but they don't think about what needs to be in place to make it successful, and there's a lot that needs to be in place, and we were involved in some of the biggest one-to-one iPad projects in the UK, such as Harlow college, such as Portsmouth college. So we've got a real understanding, again, of what needs to be a place and that's very much how we present ourselves with digital signage as well. It's not just about sticking screens on walls. We work very hard with our customers, especially our groups of school customers, to make sure that they have a plan in place, to make sure that staff are signing up to that plan. So that there's some consistency across what they're uploading to their digital signage. So that's what we meant. We are very education focused and that tends to be very different from other companies that are out there. 

David: Yeah. There are any number of companies who have laid it down that education is one of their key verticals, but it's much more business driven and addressable market driven than, in most cases, any real experience with the education system.

Neil Emery: Yeah, the reason we started TrilbyTV is because when we were sitting in those school receptions waiting for a member of staff to come and grab us, we would look at a digital signage screen that was turned off, or if it wasn't turned off, it was showing content we felt that had little impact, and that's again, because they know they had no plan behind it. Someone had bolted some screens to a wall. Someone had bought into an over complicated solution that was meant for the commercial space and people had given up, and we were there to create really rich content on those iPods because that's what Apple is all about. Everyone can create, but there was no nice, simple mechanism for us to share those two screens around the school or college. And we felt signage was the perfect mechanism to share that content and evidence, the learning so that everybody could feel proud. 

But again, what was in place back then was not meant for education and the people behind didn't understand education to the degree that we felt we did, and that's how TrilbyTV was launched and developed.

David: So when did that happen? 

Neil Emery: Six years ago now. Yeah, we gave up everything we're doing with Apple and Google at the time. We'd just written Google's transformational planning workshop in the UK. That was mainly down to my co-director, Ben Stanley, who is extremely knowledgeable in the education space. His company, Trilby, that he used to run with his father, hence TrilbyTV. They'd been going 30 years of working in education. So again, huge amounts of experience, but TrilbyTV as a single product, six years we've been going now. 

David: So it was more of an evolution of what you were doing as opposed to, “Alright, we used to run a funeral parlor, and now we're doing this”?

Neil Emery: Yeah, kind of. We did lots of things. We did the training piece for Apple and that kept us very busy. We were presenting not just for Apple, but again for its resellers that sold Apple. We were doing direct training for apples all over the world, not just in education as well. We were doing video production. We were doing lots of stuff, and I think lots of people probably looked at us and thought it's great, but what do you do? 

So after sitting all those in all those perceptions for so long, we just knew that there was a product needed that was a bit more honest than what was out there in this space and that's really what made us jump into being brave and developing TrilbyTV into the platform that it is now. 

David: So it's one thing to have the subject matter expertise and the understanding and the business contacts within the education market. What do you do though on the software/platform side that makes it differentiated, that makes it finely tuned to the education system?

Neil Emery: The first one was ease of use. We spent lots of time training education staff, who were so nervous about technology, that even if you put a URL on the board and ask them to put it in their iPad, if they put it in wrong, they would present the iPad to you to put that in, because that's so far out of their comfort zones. And we'd see from those early apps, like ClassDojo, iMovie, Book Creator there was usually a plus icon you'd press that plus icon and pretty quickly something would happen so that a teacher or a member of staff would feel like they'd had a success, which means then they would move on to the next stage and that's absolutely how we've built TrilbyTV, to be so simple that there's no need for its departments to be micromanaging our platform or people. So that was the main one. 

Secondly, we've made it work across all platforms. So we didn't want to charge our customers for expensive boxes, which had happened in the past, I'm not saying wrongly, but that's where a lot of the solutions made their money, but we have player apps for iOS, TVOS, MacOS, Windows and Chrome. So some of our schools will use anything from a Fire Stick to an Apple TV, to a Microsoft Notebook. It doesn't matter, they can use whatever they've got to get going with us.

Unlimited screens. So we didn't want to charge them a per screen price. We wanted them to see the impact that signage can have and to be able to grow their estate without us charging them more. So we have an unlimited screen license which since then others have followed. We've certainly seen that in the market. Some of those who look at us and what we do have moved down that route as well. So it's definitely that same, that sets us out as a USP, and the last one probably is our content catalog, where we have a catalog of free of charge content that we make with exciting companies out there, like WWF or Botanica. So there would probably be the four main areas that we focus on. 

David: There's a lot of subscription content out there. There's companies like Screen Feed and See/Inspire, and so on. They focus on news, sports, weather, curated, user generated material, all that sort of thing. It sounds like you've gone down a completely different path. That's all about the sort of thing that you would expect to see in a school, and that both parents and educators would be receptive to? 

Neil Emery: Yeah we looked at the historical digital signage, and it was very much zones and ticker-tape and newsfeeds, and that doesn't do anything for education. Actually, news can be very biased. So that's the last thing children or visitors like to see in a school reception, and plus, that zonal content, it was confusing to the viewer. So, we wanted to make their content look fullscreen and beautiful, which it already is.

I still get people though, who still want a clock and ticker-tape even though there's a clock next door to the screen anyway.But yeah, we went down the route of thinking about what content, a couple of reasons really, what would inspire them to do more of their own good content, but what could we provide that has an education focus and keeps their screen up to date and interesting. So for example, the collaboration we did recently with Britannica, the encyclopedia that is sold, I’m sure people will be well aware of, if we did a “Country of the week” so if you download that to your TrilbyTV and add it to your screens, every week, it updates itself. You'll get a country of the week, capital city, population, and five revolving facts, and that's all done within a nice animation. 

It's a nice, useful area for you to have a look at. And if there's content in there that will help keep your screens up to date and inspire the viewers than perfect. It's all free of charge and you're more than welcome to use it. 

David: How does it work within schools, like what are they using the screens for and where are they putting them? 

Neil Emery: So a lot of signage, historically, I think went in with some of the new schools, the building schools for the future as brought in by the labor government. So a lot went into areas like receptions and the dinner halls and your staff rooms, and the student corridors. Again, the problem back then was that the platforms were very commercially driven. So again, it was your clock's logos, ticker tapes, and maybe you were allowed to mix in a few pictures as well, if you were lucky. 

What we do now with schools is so at the training session I had today, I had the head of HR, I had the reception lady and I had the repo graphics lady, and we started off by having some sticky notes and I got them to write where the screens were, then I got them to right underneath who the viewers were, where, and then from there we started to define what the content was. So we work really hard with our customers to make sure that they're putting in that simple plan so they understand screens, viewers and what content needs to be dried from that. But very much historically is the reception staff room, dinner hall, and student corridors, which is where the screens are. 

David: Do they do things like, “This for the lunch menu today or the lunch menu this week,” that sort of thing? It's an example that I've seen a number of times. 

Neil Emery: Yeah, absolutely, and the nice thing is nowadays with mechanisms like Google Slides, you can add Google Slides for a menu, and the staff and the dinner hall don't even know we exist because the Google Slides presentation is online. As soon as they change that, it automatically changes on the screens, which is great. 

But we also get them to think about don't just putting Google Slides or a menu up there, how about photos of the food? We all are engaged by food programs on TV now where we see the final product and we think, wow, I'd want to eat that. We say to our schools how about you get some of the students to take some nice photos of the food, or actually they're in food technology, let’s have a video of a lasagna being made and put some of that up on the screen. So we try to get them to think slightly differently than just putting a static menu on their screens. 

David: Do students get involved?

Neil Emery: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and again, that's where we came from. We remember the early days of accessing those screens, putting in the students' work there and seeing how proud they were when it was playing in reception. So there's something we push quite highly and especially an Apple distinguished school. So again, we're historic with Apple, so we have schools that have Apple distinguished status. They would have a group of digital students who would create content on a regular basis before uploading that to us where it's then moderated by someone above them staff-wise before it goes live. It's a great thing to be doing. 

David: It sounds like your platform is largely cloud-based and that you've got a kind of a web player that will work across different types of devices as you were describing. Is that accurate? 

Neil Emery: Yeah, so we are cloud based. We use Microsoft Azure for all our hosting. So that's what we use, and you can have web players as well, but we have pure apps available too. So you go to the Windows app store or the Play store or the Mac App store, and you download our player app and it does that. 

David: So it's a native player for the Apple TV and so on?

Neil Emery: Yeah. So you open it up and you get your regular code that pretty much everybody else does nowadays. 

David: And one of the things that can be a challenge in schools, because IT resources are pretty limited, is how do you manage the devices remotely? 

Neil Emery: We have a player dashboard within Trilby TV, so you can see all your players that are online. We're just bringing out some new player updates as well so you'll be able to set restarts and clear cache and adjust volume and all that sort of stuff. So it can all be very much managed remotely. 

David: I assume one of the benefits and advantages you have over companies who are also in the digital signage space and have software, but don't know the school systems and so on, is you understand how administration works, where budgets come from and budget cycles and all that sort of stuff, does that give you a leg up? 

Neil Emery: Yeah, I think so. In education not that we are anyway, but you're not going to get rich overnight. They take a long time to trust you.But once they're with you, they're with you for a long time. We're really close to our customers and we want to be close with our customers because we want to make sure that they're using it properly, but of course, all of that experience and all of that knowledge that we now have from those, from Ben's point of view, 30 years, and from my point of view, 15 years, yeah, of course, when we're talking to a potential customer, they understand pretty quickly we know what we're talking about. 

David: I watch the web analytics off of 16:9 and what people are reading and there's always a big thirst out there for open source or free or freemium platforms and there are certainly some tools out there that are free-ish and I'm curious for schools who are on limited budgets, do they go down the path of trying to use open source stuff and, or very low cost stuff, and then realize that we need some hand holding here, it would be great to have some support and they rethink their budgeting and who they should work with? 

Neil Emery: Everyone's different, right? And I think, with IT, that's the buying mechanism for digital signage and education over here. You're always going to get some IT  people who really enjoy coming up with their own stuff and open source.

David: You mean IT people are know-it-alls? (Laughter)

Neil Emery: I didn't say that. Wel, we have to be careful because they buy our product. They are just like that. It's not important, maybe it is a little bit that they know everything about this solution and no one else can get in there and find out because they wouldn't be able to. But actually when they ask themselves about the time it takes to keep an eye on it and monitor it and update it, then it's wasting that time, which is then where we win the battle of, “Neil, this is so easy to use. I can give ownership to others. I can set it up, but actually I can give ownership to others and let them get on with it,” which is what they want in the end. They don't want to be managing what is in essence, a marketing tool, because that's what digital signage is. It's a marketing tool. 

So yeah, budget wise, you might have a USB stick. You might have a laptop. Although that always makes me laugh because the laptop is budget and it'd be better off in the classroom, but that's just my thoughts. We're £1000 for unlimited screens, it's not a huge amount of money for a whole solution that runs your digital signage. But you're dead right. I think some will start off trying to come up with something themselves, but they soon find out that it's causing them a lot more pain than they want it to.

David: So when you say £1000 for an unlimited license that's per school, or is it a school system or how does that work? 

Neil Emery: No, that's our single per school costs. Some of our schools have up to 40 screens, which is where it becomes very financially viable for them. We do have a multi-site license as well. We have some of the big multi academy trusts using TrilbyTV now in the UK, they pay a cost at trust level, which then significantly reduces the per school costs. So under a multi-site license, it's only £500 per school rather than the £1000. 

David: So it's like an enterprise license as opposed to software as a service. You buy at one time, it's perpetual, and then do you pay for support or how does that work? 

Neil Emery: Oh, no. So it’s a yearly subscription which, again, everybody pretty much does that. 

David: Does the demand, and the use differ between what over in Canada, they would call public schools or private schools, but I know I get confused as hell because public schools are private schools in the UK and so on, are there needs and the way they use the system different? 

Neil Emery: Private schools here, obviously that's the schools that parents pay for children to be at school and often boarding. They have so much more resources, obviously, you've got teams of twelve people, whereas in a state school, you might have a team of two people sometimes if we're lucky. So because of that, I think independent private schools are able to shine those screens a lot more. So because of the resource, they're sharing much more rich content. They have time to create that content and make it look good on the screens. They have a strategy in place to do that a lot of the time, whereas your public schools, often because of the lack of resources, are struggling for ideas, but also for people to create the ideas and create the content.

For us, we would see the content being pretty much the same across the school sector. It would change a little bit for colleges and universities. It definitely changes for primary schools, which is, your lower age schools, whereas that's more about sharing and showcasing student work at that lower age group. But I think for us, it's about educating our schools and our colleges right across the board that this is an extension of their website. This is a great marketing tool and they need to be thinking about what content is shown on those screens. 

David: Are you doing much in colleges and universities? 

Neil Emery: Lots in colleges. So we do well in that space, not so much in universities because we'll be very honest about our product and we're not wayfinding them and we're not touch screens. We are just easy-to-upload full screen content, so not so much for universities. We've got a few, but we definitely do well in colleges.

David: Yeah, I guess once you get into the larger footprint, universities with campuses and everything else you need to get into directory systems and everything else that does get more complicated? 

Neil Emery: Yeah, again, we don't want to pretend what we're not, and won't be. So although we have a few colleges, we tend to be in specific places. We're not for bus time tables or things like that. Again, we’re for fullscreen content, marketing specific events to the students. 

David: How big is your company at this point? 

Neil Emery: We're still pretty small, so there's seven of us and we're heading towards eight next year. 

David: And you can do that sort of thing, particularly these days, you can be virtual and you can scale up and scale down as you need, right? 

Neil Emery: Absolutely. We're very lucky we're self-funded. We work extremely hard to make sure that we don't need to go down the route of investment and having a board of people telling us what to do. We want to keep that kind of closeness and that honesty of the company and grow organically. Of course we'd like to grow quicker. But we want to make sure our organic growth is honest towards our customers. So yeah, we're still small, but we've got aspirations to grow in the next five years that's for sure.

David: And what would be your install base, like how would you describe that? Are you in hundreds of schools, thousands of schools? 

Neil Emery: Yeah, we're in hundreds of schools. Currently we've got about 1300 screens live in UK education at the moment. 

David: As you said, you'd love to be able to grow that more.

Neil Emery: Yeah, absolutely. You know, me and Ben, when we were in Wales six years ago, thinking about where we should take the direction of the company. Because of what we'd seen in education we knew we could become the number one signage company for education because that's what we focus on.

You won't see a dropdown on our website and it says retail and restaurant and this and that and this and that cause that's not honest and that doesn't work for education. So for us, we want to become the number one digital signage platform made, and I always stick to my made, because that's important, made for education.

David: Yeah, it's something that I have coached endless numbers of people around is if you have a digital signage platform, do not go out into the marketplace as a generalist offer, because there are already too many of them. You need to find your niche. You need to find your tribe and say, we're the guys for this and it's what you are doing. 

Neil Emery: Yeah, I think that's very hard as well, because if you're a new company or again, you've had investment, you're going to have to go after every market. In the US it is probably different, you see people like Rise Vision, there is a huge market in the US than probably more so Canada. So education, you've probably got more options to grow quicker. Here in the UK, although we've still got 35,000 education establishments, it's a long sell. We've customers that can take anywhere up to three months, six months to purchase your product. So there's a lot of time investment in there. 

So, I think it's different potentially in places like the US as I said, where you're trying to mop up as much traffic as possible to grow your businesses as quickly as possible. 

David: I think I know the answer, but I'll ask, have you thought about coming to North America or you've got more than enough to grow in the UK for some time?

Neil Emery: Well, we do have US customers and we do business and education actually, but they tend to again come to us because they liked that easy solution and ease of use. We do have links in the US with distributors, like Exertis, who were distributed in the UK. We have relationships with people like Promethian and Smart knocked on the door a few times and asked us what we're up to, but it's a different setup in the US when it comes to education, and we're aware of that, and the language differ slightly so we're aware of that as well. 

So it's not our focus, but if someone comes along and says, you've got an easy to use platform, can we sign up and use you? We’re like, absolutely, you can! 

David: One thing that's been around for a long time with digital signage and education, particularly on the digital out of home advertising side, is the idea that these screens can pay for themselves if you would just allow advertising on them or at least have the screen sponsored by, I don't know, British Telecom or O2, or something like that, it has not been explored at all? Or is it, would that just be hard “No” from the education people? 

Neil Emery: There's definitely people who are doing it in the commercial space, and now platforms that allow you to, via an app, say I would like my pizza business advertised on there three times a week just directly billed. It's definitely a conversation we've had at directors meetings but it doesn't feel right to us. 

Education is education and if I speak to some of my close head teachers for them, it's about the children and nothing else. So they wouldn't want to have these discussions in the first place. Because it's more about putting up the work of the children that day, make sure they feel proud. It's conversations that have been had, but we would stay away from those conversations fairly quickly. 

David: Yeah, it would be interesting, I think, for things like sponsorships or almost like donations in the same way that maybe a company donates a new playground for a school yard, that sort of thing that you would imagine in areas of the country, maybe up in the north, that don't have the same wealth and resources and everything else that maybe that would be a way to get these systems going? 

Neil Emery: Yeah, potentially. It just gets messy, I think, that's the problem. The focus is making sure that the customer understands what scientists can do first and foremost, and making sure they have a platform that's easy to use so that when we talk to them about what they love about the platform. Going to them to talk about how they might make money from companies advertising on the screens, yeah, it's almost as confusing as just simply trying to get signage running on an interactive screen, which sounds easy, but actually even that is completely a different conversation with schools sometimes 

David: I have to ask about the name. I did look up Trilby and saw that in America, it would be called a Pork Pie hat. Trilby is a hat, right? 

Neil Emery: If we were doing video, Dave, I would have worn my Trilby today. 

There is meaning behind this, and Ben would certainly be able to give you that more. There's an article on the website that explains it as well. But from a simple point of view, Ben's dad, Tony,  bless him, he’s no longer with us, was a Trilby hat wearer, and at our old offices in Birmingham, we had two lines of hats on the walls and he used to pick those between different ones regularly and where those, and it's nice because it's tactile. 

Again, I go to lots of school training and they'll be like, oh, where's your hat because they expect you to wear the hat, and I think senior leadership at schools and colleges like that tactile approach as well. They don't so much like those cleaner techie type names. They like something that feels a bit familiar to them. 

David: All right. It's been a pleasure to speak with you. If people want to look you up, where would they find you online? 

Neil Emery: www.TrilbyTV.co.uk. 

David: Perfect. All right. Thank you very much. 

Neil Emery: Dave. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you!

David Labuskes, AVIXA

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

There is a whole pile of back seat driving happening lately in the pro AV and digital signage communities about how to run a trade show in the COVID-19 era, and much of the focus has squarely been on Dave Labuskes, the CEO of AVIXA, which runs InfoComm and co-owns the even larger trade show ISE.

The show is happening in about a month in Orlando, and with other big trade shows saying never mind for 2021, there are endless questions and suggestions about the prospects of the show even happening.

It will, says Labuskes, unless there are measures like government-mandated closures. Given that the show is in Florida, that's probably not going to happen.

Labuskes has done some frank interviews lately that went into deep detail about InfoComm and COVID, and the business. I spoke with Labuskes late last week and did not see the value in rehashing and revisiting a lot of what he said, so in our chat we talk a little about how things will come off and why. But we spend a lot more time on bigger picture stuff about how trade shows fit, and whether a niche industry like digital signage can find a well-defined home and community at big, omni AV shows like Infocomm and ISE.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mr Labuskes, thank you for joining me. I wanted to get into a number of things, but I also didn't want to just rehash some recent conversations you had in an hour long interview last week with Tim Albright from AVnation that went into a lot of frank discussion about where InfoComm is at and everything associated with that, but I can’t cCompletely ignore that, and I just wanted to ask, where are things now , has anything changed in the last week since I watched that interview? 

Dave Labuskes: Mr. Haynes, it's good to be here. There have been a couple of other events that have announced cancellations, but there's been nothing that's changed in AVIXA's policy with regards to InfoComm. We still see a runway to a fantastic event with fantastic people conducting fantastic business.

It's been described as being the last trade show standing this fall, but that's not really true. There's all kinds of events going on here, there, and everywhere. 

Dave Labuskes: Yeah. There's a lot that's described that isn't necessarily really true, David. But yeah there's events and trade shows happening every day, all around the world, and I'm actually a little confused. For an industry that is really based on overcoming challenges and doing the impossible and making things happen that nobody believed could actually happen, there is that sort of a sentiment that trade shows can't take place right now and that just simply is not true. They're taking place every day. 

So I have mixed opinions personally. I was supposed to be doing a mixer down at InfoComm and decided not to do that, and that wasn't really so much about I don't think InfoComm should even happen or anything else, it was just as simply a fact of, I didn't quite see how a cocktail party, where everybody was wearing a mask and being asked to stand six feet apart would work terribly well and the optics were weird. 

It's one of those things where I could see a trade show happening, but I didn't see that happening well, and we don't need to get into all of that. I'm curious more about whether or not you're enjoying all the armchair opinions from people who say what you should be doing, but have never actually run a tradeshow? 

Dave Labuskes: Before I had this job, I was a partner at a large architectural engineering firm, and one of the gentlemen that was on the search committee that was interviewing me for this job, James Ford, owner of Ford AV and I'll never forget where he was sitting in the boardroom, he leaned forward and said, “Dave, you've got a really good gig, like why would you want this job?” And I'm like that's a great question, and I try to answer it, and he's like, “But Dave, here's the thing: You're running one of the largest consulting practices in the world and if you have a management meeting and you decide to go liveleft, then everybody's going to leave that meeting and they're going to go left, and the jobs that you're interviewing for you and your team are going to decide to go left, and then 50,000 people are going to tell you, you should go right!”

I actually celebrate varied opinions. I do think a lot of people express an expertise that is perhaps inflated in their own perception. Trade shows, they're a complicated industry. I've been doing this now for eight years and I have people on my team that have forgotten twice what I'll ever know. The interplay between the various different constraints, the challenges that people throw out there as though they're simple challenges. Yeah, they're a little frustrating, but I signed up for it. Nobody made me do this job. I was forewarned, so maybe I'm the one that has an exaggerated impression of my expertise.

Is part of the problem just simply that it's Florida and Florida is this eternally weird place at the best of times, but it's got a particular problem and people all the way up to the governor of the state who don't seem to recognize that, “Hey, maybe there's a bit of a problem happening here.”?

Dave Labuskes: Yeah. I think I'll be a little more politically correct than that, and it was nice for you to try it, but it isn't my first rodeo here. 

(Laughter) I wasn't trying to bait you. I just think that's a big part of it and the people, the armchair opinion makers who say why don't you just move it or why didn't you just do it in another city? There's a little bit of baggage associated with doing that but just simply speaking, it's a part of the country that has a particular exacerbated problem, but doesn't seem to want to recognize that it has an exacerbated problem.

Dave Labuskes: It all comes from the jurisdictions and it all comes down to point of reference, right? You can also just say, is it the problem that the event is in the United States, right? Because if you look at the United States and compare the United States to other countries, we're not necessarily getting a straight-A report card.

What I have said, and I know we don't want to have the same conversation I've had already with others, is that I don't think the brush that should be used in making that decision is Florida. I think the brush that we should use in painting that picture is Orange County. There's parts of California that may or may not be behaving in the same fashion you or I would do.

So I think you have to look at where are you going to fly into, where you're going to be, where are you going to have dinner, where are you going to sleep? Those types of things, and when you get to that stage orange county this morning had 79.4% of their population over the age 18 having had one shot of the vaccine. They've got a mask order that was issued by the mayor strongly recommending that masks be worn inside any public space. They've got plummeting hospitalization rates, death rates, positivity rates at 12.4%, I believe. 

So, I think, unfortunately the world and this country and all of the states have this polarization thing going on, and yeah, would it be more comfortable for people to attend an event somewhere else that are looking from afar and don't take time to do all that research? Probably. The headline, the abbreviated picture, is challenging, but I do think that there are people that are going to make a decision that attending a trade show weighed against other factors just isn't for them this year, and I think they'd make that decision regardless of where it is. 

Yeah. I guess that's the other thing that you didn't know you were signing up for was having an extensive ability to talk in genealogical terms.

Dave Labuskes: This is a true story, David. Last year, I came home from the office, and at dinner I said to my wife and son I spent an hour today reading a scientific study about the efficacy of washing your hands with cold water versus hot water, and that is not something I ever anticipated taking place in my career, I will admit that. (Laughter)

By the way, it is just as good. You just don't tend to wash them as long because it's less comfortable, but... 

I'm just impressed I was able to say epidemiology. 

Dave Labuskes: Happy with that. These are words that were not part of our vocabulary two years ago, right? 

Just drafting off of some of that: CEDIA which AVIXA has a relationship with because you co-own ISC had their event last week or the week before in Indianapolis and I won't go into how that went business-wise or anything else, but I'm curious if you had AVIXA folks there and did they see how things were done? I know they had signage and kind of cues on whether you are comfortable with people coming close and all that sort of stuff. Did those things work? 

Were there things that you learned from that you can take away and apply to InfoComm? 

Dave Labuskes: First part of the question: No, we didn't have anybody from AVIXA at that event that I'm aware of. Not that I know of, but I'm sure there were people there that were AVIXA members. We do have a close relationship with CEDIA. Obviously we have a partnership over a very large joint venture that owns and operates ISC and ISR and DSS. The show itself is owned by Emerald Expositions, and we have our conversational talking relationship with Emerald as well. In fact I have a call next week with Emerald to talk through lessons learned. 

I was in Louisville, Kentucky a couple of weeks ago at a SISO conference, which is the Society of Independent Show Operators. So it's Emerald, Informa, and mostly the for-profit trade show organizers and AVIXA was invited to attend. The industry of trade show organizers and meeting planners and event planners, we've joined arms and we recognize that this is a problem for all of us that we have to share best practices with, we have to share learnings with, we have to talk about what works and doesn't work.

It's kinda like the AV industry and as I'm learning more about it, the digital signage industry where people compete, but they also have a comradery where a rising tide lifts all ships kind of a thing, and so I think all trade show operators are working through this, associations as well are famously collaborating with regards to sharing information and learning and helping each other. So that's a good part of the pandemic. 

I would imagine one of the things that all these organizations collectively learned, if they didn't already know it, is that the whole virtual trade show thing just really doesn't work. Does it?

Dave Labuskes: It certainly didn't work in v1.0 of 2020. I think v1.5, and we're starting to get closer to 2.0, I think there's hope for it. The best visual I saw over the last 18 months is talking about books versus movies, and you don't convert a book to a movie by putting it on a podium and filming somebody turning the pages. And I think that probably is a closely apt description of what we all did with our first version of the virtual events. But I think you can tell a story, very effectively in print or in film, leveraging and celebrating the differences of the media. 

Where I am at now and where AVIXA is driving towards, and you'll see more developments about this in the next couple months is more about how AVIXA delivers on its mission, leveraging physical  events and digital platforms, and how do they interface and interact with each other? How do they mutually benefit each other? What's good in one, that's not good in the other?

Not a lot of good, special effects when you're reading a book, but a lot of great imagination when you're reading a book. Not a lot of ability to be character development through introspection in a movie, but it's really easy to do that when you're reading.

I think if you look at education, you look at delivery of information from provider to consumer, that can be done pretty effectively digitally. I think about human interaction and the break time during class is almost impossible to create digitally. That doesn't mean it is impossible. So I see a lot of assumptions that we made in order to achieve X, we needed to convene people face-to-face being challenged. But I also think that all of the pundits that got online in March and April of last year and said, this is the end of face-to-face, and we're going to be digital for the rest of our lives, have seen that they were probably not right with that either. 

I think the one thing that I took away, or what I have enjoyed about these virtual events is the ability to attend round tables panels presentations on demand. So I don't need to be somewhere or sit at a certain place, set aside things then at 10:00 AM, I'm going to watch this.

Just the simple fact that I got stuff going on. I can't do this today or right now, that I could click on it and see. Yeah, somebody from Brand X explaining this to me on my terms, and if I'm bored, I just click out, I don't have to stand up and walk out of the room and embarrass the presenter or anything like that. That part I like.

Dave Labuskes: I do too, and that's the irony of it is. If one of the things that all of us like is the absence of time and geography constraints, right? So it doesn't matter if that panel discussions take place in London or Nova Scotia or Orlando, you can still receive the outcome of that panel. 

Why are we saying that they should be organized and delivered between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM Eastern time on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week? That's where I get to this. I think it's more about a digital presence and digital community, a place where people interact when it's appropriate for them to interact, where they can organize their interaction times.

I'm old enough to have been in chat rooms on Prodigy and AOL and you remember you would organize with people like I'm going to be on at eight o'clock tonight for an hour, because you can only afford an hour. Because we were charged by the minute, and then I think that's what we have to recognize. So in that regard, I'm really excited about the fact that I'm not a trade show organizer, instead I’m an association that is committed to an industry and an industry community, and what I can do is build that community both digitally and physically. 

What do you think of the suggestion that the days of the big macro show are cloudy and that regionalized events make more sense, so an InfoComm Southwest, an ISE UK, that sort of thing? And granted that was tried a little bit in the past year, but that was out of necessity as opposed to design. 

Dave Labuskes: Yeah, I'm intrigued by it. But I think the loudest proponents of it are the attendees, not the exhibitors and the attendees don't pay. Doing ten small shows only costs a little less than doing one big show or less than doing then ten times doing one big show. The cost of doing a show has a fixed amount. Even in the smallest show, you're going to pay an X and then get to the big show, you may only be paying 2X where if you're doing a regional show, like 10 times, you are close to 10X, and your ROI on each of those events is smaller because your audience is small. 

Now that's using all the old rules. So if we go back to the last question, if I can segment an audience for an exhibitor and say, I'm going to bring people that have spending authority over half a million dollars that have a project next three months, it's going to require a high-end audio system. That's going to change that algebra, and so I don't think you throw it out the window, but economics has a factor in these things and it's easy to say I would rather go to a small event in Nashville, but the problem is I have to find somebody to pay for it, and even if you say I'm happier to go to a small event in Nashville, I bet you don't want to spend $195 for a ticket to go to that event? 

I get the hunger for it. I get the desire for it, but I don't see a business model around it right now. We've never been successful at small events being profitable. There have been good strategies like, before ISE launched. We did small roadshow events from country to country, it was before my time, but I hear stories from the old timers about the amazing sort of experience of going from hotel room or hotel conference to hotel conference across from Warsaw to Budapest to Rome type thing. And we've done them in advance of launching our Bangkok show. We did it in advance of launching our Mumbai show, but those become feeders to a larger event that has a more sustainable business model. We did a lot of what we used to call round tables, for example, we did the AVIXA round table in Baltimore where you'd have 15, 20, maybe 30 people come to them, and so you were spending a lot of money on an event that served 15, 20 or 30 people, and we just felt like there were better ways of spending the industry's money than that. 

The demise of Digital Signage Expo certainly raised the eyebrows at AVIXA and got you guys thinking, although you've always had digital signage as a component, you've had pavilions for many years, but there was an opportunity and a sense that something needed to fill that void. Granted, it's been refilled to some degree since then, but the show hasn't happened yet so we'll see how that comes off. 

How do you build up the digital signage affinity for InfoComm? Cause I've gone for many years, but I go to have a look at the gear. I'm not a gear head, but I write about it and everything else, but I don't really see it as an end-user show where a big retailer, those kinds of people are going to come to that they maybe they send their gearheads, but more likely it's the integrators that sell into big retail and so on are there are there, so how do you make all that kind of come together over the next couple of years?

Dave Labuskes: Boy, there's so much in that question, David. We should talk more often, I enjoy this.

Yes, it is an unfortunate demise and it didn't get folks in the AVIXA thinking. Yes, we've been looking at the digital signage industry for a long time. I do think it's a community within the larger industry that needs to be celebrated, and that's that other point with regards to small regional shows versus big shows. I think we see lots more shows within shows taking place, and I think that's probably the right solution, and I'm biased. I think AVIXA has the right place to build a home within a home for the digital signage community. 

First of all: there was this interesting dynamic between the association and the show operator, right? From an association perspective AVIXA has been having conversations with DSF, with DS-LATAM, with digital signage of Asia, and the various different entities in Europe. When you move from our association to association, one of the ways I think I actually described it to Rich Ventura, he and I were talking probably years ago and it's like you and I, David, are best friends, but our dads owns the competing gas stations on the corner, and so we can go to school and everything and be friends there but when we came home there's limits. 

That was kinda how I felt like it was and I felt like there's a window there to not have that dynamic. Now, some of that's changed and I respect Questex. I respect Paul and don't know him well, but I know him and I've had conversations with him and he's a smart guy and I believe he's committed to delivering a successful event. I think it's being honest, looking at what does an organization want, what is the community best one? And making honest agreements and commitments to each other, and then keeping them. There are advantages to working together, and I think the end goal is that “home within a home” and “a community within a community.” 

I think the challenge and opportunity for digital signage and InfoComm is the scale of the InfoComm show and the specificity and the heart and relationship with the digital signage community, and I think if we work together, we can build that home within a home. I think it can be more than a guest room. It can be an in-law apartment. It can be a place where it's identified and that's, yeah, I'm disappointed that you're not going to be there, and I know the mixture is just one manifestation of that home within a home, and we look forward to being able to do it in the future. 

Absolutely. One of the logistical problems or mechanical problems, so to speak, with a big show like an InfoComm is: yes, you've created these pavilions through the years of digital signage pavilion and some of the vendors have been in that, designated zone, so to speak, but the biggest players are the display manufacturers, and they've always had their spots, their Primo spots, and they're serving a whole bunch of audiences at InfoComm, not just the digital signage people. So how do you figure out a way to create a show within a show when you've got Sony in the front row, Samsung's got a giant booth in the middle of the hall and so on. You're never going to be able to herd them all into one hall, so to speak? 

Dave Labuskes: Yeah, so what do you do then? I think what you have to do and we're down to the details of tactics, right? But I think you start to curate attendees' journeys. You use content as the honey to attract and people will come where content is and content can be delivered where people are, and that's the challenge of starting a trade show, but we've done that. We know how to form a trade show and it takes time and it takes continual feeding until it becomes a self-feeding cycle, and then you have to create a journey that is guided a bit so the attendees that are coming from retail or the attendees that are coming from the advertising agencies can get to where they will be able to extract value and some of that will require tour guides, not maps and serendipity, because it's too big to just let somebody lose, but we have that problem now with end users in general at the show, you described as gearheads, but about 40% of the attendees at a typical InfoComm are end user buyers. It's part of what makes that show so valuable to exhibitors. 

A lot of them are brought there by channel members. The consultants are bringing their customers, the integrators are bringing their customers. But a lot of them are brought there by us too, with promoting them and developing conference content that would be of interest to them, creating a nucleus of community. It's all very explicit, but it doesn't happen by chance. There are hosted buyers that are brought in to shows around the world. There are groups that are sponsored. There are other associations that are partnered with. Richard runs our Asian subsidiary. He's a genius at identifying influential associations within the geographies and partnering with them to offer programs. Organizations like the Indian Architects Association are partnered with our InfoComm Mumbai event, and they are holding content conferences for architects in conjunction with our event. All of our channels want architects at it. Those types of strategies are part of the town and the team that works on these.

Last question, looking ahead a few months to ISE and it's hard to do the crystal ball thing, but I gather things are calmer in Spain. I don't hear very many people at all saying, hell no, we're not going to Barcelona or anything else, maybe that'll bubble up, who knows? But is ISC in Barcelona going to be normal-ish?

Dave Labuskes: Yes, I think so. Again, like you said, the crystal balls are not crystal clear and now, after the last series of conversations, I think I'm going to put the crystal ball into the same place where I put “pivot” and “agile” and “unprecedented” but yeah, the biggest indicator that you would have about and event like ISC at this stage five months out is sold show floor space, right? 

I don't think we've even opened registration for attendees yet, and show floor sales are, I think they're probably about 8% off of 2020. I guess there's no such thing as quoting me because we're recording this, but it's within that ballpark of the size of the last event at the Rye, which is, really the last event to compare it to. So if it's 90% of that size, 80% of that size, I think that's, that absolutely fits into your technical definition of normal. 

And there were lots of people who said, because you're going to Barcelona, as awesome a place as it is, it may mean you see a slight drop because people who might go to ISC in Amsterdam, because they can drive there, maybe would not go all the way to Barcelona? 

Dave Labuskes: Yeah, but there's other people that are going to drive to Barcelona that wouldn't have driven to Amsterdam. And yeah not a hundred percent a repeat audience, but…

Well, I’m not driving to Barcelona. 

Dave Labuskes: Yeah, me neither. (Laughter)

That's those armchair spectators that you talked about earlier, right? We did the homework to make a determination about that, and we love the Rye. We would love to have stayed at the Rye, but the Rye isn’t big enough to hold the show as it was moving forward in the future and it was starting to have a negative impact on attendee experience and you start to have those different factors impact a show and reach the value of the show. 

I'll just be happy if I can find my way around. 

Dave Labuskes: Yeah, it's a beautiful city. I'll tell you what it's like. It's the opposite of the Rye. It was one of the things I joked with Mike about. Finally I figured out how to get through the Eye without getting lost, and now we've decided to move the show. 

Yeah, me too. 

All right. I appreciate you taking some time with me. I suspect you're a busy fellow these days.

Dave Labuskes: Never too busy for you, sir. Congratulations on your recent deal. I'm really happy for you. 

Thank you!

Jackie Walker, Publicis Sapient, On QSRs

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

I've yet to meet Jackie Walker in person, but in our chats over the phone and video, she's quickly impressed me with her knowledge, insights and enthusiasm for digital signage.

Many of the people I've dealt with at big media companies speak an unfamiliar, very buzz-phrasey language that I barely grasp, but Jackie works for one of the biggest - Publicis Sapient - and speaks like normal people. Based in Houston, she's the head of strategy for that giant agency's work in what's called dining and delivery. That puts her front and center in planning out and then executing things like digital menu displays and the overall ordering experience at major QSRs.

Drive-thrus and their digital displays were a big part of how many QSRs got through COVID lockdown periods - when in-store ordering was restricted - and now we're seeing a lot of operators who didn't have drive-thru adding that capability.

Jackie and I had a great chat about the value proposition and ROI model for drive-thru display technology - including mashing up a lot of things like loyalty apps, readers and other technologies to customize or optimize what consumers see when they get in front of screens.

If you sell into or service the QSR space, this is a valuable listen.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jackie, welcome. We've spoken in the past and know each other a bit. I don't think we've actually met in person, and who does that any more? 

You work for Publicis Sapient, and you've been leading strategy for digital menu boards for a couple of big QSR brands. What does all that entail? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Publicis Sapient, for those of your listeners who aren't super familiar with us, we are a digital business transformation firm. So we work with many brands, many QSRs in particular, around how they can use digital to really optimize the way that they are connecting with their customers. It's on a lot of fronts, there's some mobile work, of course, loyalty work, customer relationship marketing, all of these suspects.

But I specifically have really been working very closely on digital menu boards which have been really interesting. The brands that I've been working with and I've now worked with five of the top twenty-five and different categories, right? A couple of the burger brands, a coffee brand, a chicken brand. What's really interesting, I think, for these larger brands is that they're really trying to push the envelope on what they're trying to achieve with their digital menu boards. But nobody has really figured out how to do that yet. So when we go in on the strategy engagements, we're really focused on the customer experience as a lens.

So the team is generally, me, a couple of strategists, a product manager sometimes, and a couple of UX people, so visual designers and user experience folks who can really think about the way you organize an experience for our customer to make it super easy, and we really look at three lenses, right? We look at where the brand is from a brand identity customer experience perspective. So as they think about how to transition from just translating a print menu, which is generally the way that this starts, right? How do you move from translating a print menu to actually thinking about broader digital capabilities? So we try to understand where they are with that. What's their mobile experience? How do they think about this on their digital channels today? 

We think about where they are from a technology standpoint. So that's really interesting work, right? Talking to their restaurant technology groups, sometimes their customer technology groups, trying to understand what they're doing from a loyalty standpoint, where they are with the point of sale capability where they are with their digital menu board vendor. If they're already down a path, so what are the capabilities they have and what do they don't have, and really thinking about those lenses so that we can get to a view on where they go from a user experience standpoint and then also, how do they continue to push the envelope as they build in more and more digital capabilities? 

So you've talked about pushing the envelopes. When digital many boards first started being applied in larger QSR chains, it was all around the operational issues that changes could be made a lot more efficiently and you can do dayparting. I gather what you're saying is the larger brands, at least in their heads, are way beyond that now? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. It's a funny thing, right? I think we're still talking about some of those basics. Everybody thinks of Mcdonald’s as the gold standard, which makes sense. They're the largest, they were the first to scale outdoors. But that's recent, right? So they just finished their rollout in the US at the beginning of 2020. So it's not actually that long ago that some of this hardware was being installed. So I think dayparting is still something that brands are very much thinking about. They're thinking about how to leverage dayparting. So if you look at the McDonald's menu, there are some obvious changes with the dayparts. You look at the background color, for example, breakfast is blue, lunch is yellow, dinner and late-night is black, right? That's the most obvious, but if you squint, you can't really tell the difference between the products that are laid out for lunch, dinner, and late at night. They're doing very subtle things with reorganizing products, but they're not really leaning into that capability yet.

So as brands are starting to think about dayparting, thinking more about. What can you do from a business perspective with that? Can you do promotions that are specific to a time of day, right? Can you have a special late-night menu that has different pricing on some of your most snackable items, as an example, do you play with brand voice? 

So some of these QSR brands really have quite playful brand identities. You think that some of these brands could have a really fun and differentiated late-night experience versus what they're trying to accomplish during lunchtime, that would be consistent with their brand. So still thinking about that, I think now the big thing is loyalty, and so with loyalty and I keep beating the drum on this one, that is really going to fundamentally change the drive-thru experience. Again, McDonald's pushing the envelope here. 

They completed their national loyalty rollout in July, in the US, which is their largest market, and what's sneaky, and I don't know if everyone's recognized it is now in McDonald's app, you can actually set it up so that when you go through the drive-thru, you can pay with your stored credit card via your app. So you go to the window, just you go up to the menu board, just like you normally would, you talk to the crew member, you place your order. You give them this code, and now it's applying loyalty points. It's using any coupons or offers or points redemptions that you've applied but it also does the payment through that mobile interface, which is really interesting. It's subtle but if you think about the experience of a customer, they don't have to go to the pay window anymore at all. You've just really streamline that. You don't have to hand your credit card out through the window. You avoid all of that kind of silliness. So I think that's a really interesting change, and I think other brands are really going to be forced to emulate that, and that's going to be a huge shift. 

Yeah, and that's part of it, right? If you have a lot of active use of your loyalty app, also blends payment in there when they get into the drive-thru lane long before they even get to the presale window, a system like what McDonald's bought with that Israeli company Dynamic Yield is that they pick that stuff up, they know that Jackie's back in and she's got her kids with her maybe or whatever, and when you get to the presale and when you get to the order window, they can dynamically recast that menu to suit your preferences or what they think might be your preferences and how they can upsell you on stuff?

Jackie Walker: That's where it's headed, yeah. So no one is really doing that particularly effectively yet, but that is absolutely where it's headed. The challenge that a lot of these brands are still working on is customer identification, and we've been talking about that for so long, we used to talk about license plate recognition, still talk about Bluetooth. How do you figure out who's in the car? Are you creepy and use cameras? What are you doing? So brands are really still experimenting and figuring out what is the best tech for that. McDonald's right now is just doing a shortcode so the customer still has to do some work, they have to open their app, they have to see that code, they read it to the crew, right? Code is different every time. So you have to actually look to see it, in that transaction, what your code is. 

But certainly even testing Bluetooth, DNKN is interesting. DNKN’s been partnering with a company called Blue Dot not so secretly, which does pretty advanced geolocation. So they're actually using really tight geofencing to trigger customer identification and doing some customer greeting based on that. 

So it would actually say, “Hi Dave, or Hey Jackie”?

Jackie Walker: Exactly, which is, I think still a questionable use case, right? 

Yeah. People will start looking in the rearview mirror and go, “okay, who's following me?” 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, exactly. My favorite actually is not the “Hi Dave!” at the beginning, but the “Thanks, Dave!” at the end of the transaction like that's been a topic is how do you personalize that screen at the very end of the order confirmation, which is funny because if you actually sit in a drive-thru for a while and watch, which I do, because that's part of my job as the digital menu board super-nerd.  

“Who’s that strange woman standing in the parking lot?” (Laughter) 

Jackie Walker: Oh God, Dave, I have so many funny stories. My husband always makes fun of me. It's like, “Excuse me, there’s a suspicious woman in leggings and a Volvo in the drive-thru!”

It's yeah, it's funny. But you realize that most customers have already driven away by the time that thank you sign presents anything, so they're not seeing that. So if you're investing a bunch of time and energy figuring out how you're personalizing that screen, all you're really doing is creeping everybody out because you're showing the next customer in line, the previous customer's information.

That's an interesting thing, and then Tim Horton's is playing with scanners. So actually installing QR scanning hardware in the drive-thru lane, the customer opens their app, has the QR code open, and scans on the scanner, which I'm intrigued to see how that's going to go. I think there are definitely some pretty strong cons with that in terms of that hardware investment is not going to be small, and then, we've all done grocery checkout, self-checkout, and you try to scan something even in good lighting, that can be quite challenging. So now you have a mobile phone trying to scan in direct sun. I'm predicting, there'll be some challenges with that. 

In Canada with snow and -30 and everything else. 

Jackie Walker: Yep. Sticking your hand out the phone with a big mitten on.

Edmonton in February doing that. I'm not sure it was going to be a big take-up, but you never know. 

Jackie Walker: So I think, brands are, to go back to the original question, what are they doing? There are still a few basics, right? Let's figure out how we're going to identify the customer. Let's build that foundation. It's really about how we're going to use dayparting more effectively really, gets the promise of that, suggestive selling is another area. That's quite interesting. So we've been using those examples in the industry for 10 years. Show ice cream when it's hot out, show hot coffee when it's cold out, but now the technology is definitely there to do much more sophisticated things.

So that's where things like McDonald's dynamic yield do come into play in a big way, is making some suggestions for customers that go well beyond what you could do with rules-based kind of recommendations, and then now it's like let's start using our imagination and getting creative. 

What does personalization look like if you know a customer, do you make it really easy to reorder recent items? That's a great benefit for both the operator and the customer, right? So if you show somebody buys their Whopper Jr., mine is no pickle, no Mayo, with cheese, if you know that I order that every single time you show that on the board and you just say, I want my Whopper Jr. my way, and there's a POS integration for the crew member to hit one button. You just saved a bunch of time, and really provided some additional value for the customer. So I think those types of executions are going to be really interesting.

Certainly in places like Canada, where you have a pretty substantial number of commuters who would go into a Tim Horton's every morning and they're going to order their Double Double or whatever it is, and they're not going to move off of that because that's what gets them on the road. To be able to just know that, okay, Dave's here and he's gotten his Double Double, and there's nothing involved other than payment, or maybe even not that if if you flash your phone right away.

Jackie Walker: Absolutely. Yeah, it's really powerful, and it's those moments, I think that are going to be the most interesting or where there's clear value to the customer and there's clear value to the operator, right? Everyone benefits from that kind of investment. 

Is that seamlessness a big part of it where there are different systems and it all just works and it makes your drive-thru experience better?

Jackie Walker: That is I think the kind of gold standard and that's where it's headed. I think it's really interesting, for a long time, brands were buying digital menu boards and it was really, they're buying a piece of hardware, especially outdoor because everybody's really terrified about making this big hardware investment. You really focus on the hardware and then you get some software along for the ride and you hope that the software has the out-of-box capabilities that you need to do what you want to do with it. 

I think now more and more brands are recognizing that that's not really how it's going to work for them. It's really about creating this customized experience that can integrate with their systems. It can integrate with their point of sale. It can integrate with their loyalty program. It can integrate with their master product data. These are really powerful benefits to an integrated system, that is software first and experience first and the hardware is just supporting it. 

I'm curious about drive-thru right now because of COVID. Prior to COVID, the idea of selling drive-thru was that it could do all these things, here's the value proposition, and so on, and it was being marketed that way. 

With COVID and the inability, at least in some jurisdictions, to even go inside to dine and order stuff, if you didn't have to the drive-thru, you were in a world of pain in terms of operating your business. Has that deferred the whole idea, that you could do all these things with it and just made it operational for the moment, or at least in the past year, we needed to put in drive-thru just so we could do transactions and sell food?

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I think that was a huge benefit for QSR. You think about the drive-thru that was pre-built for COVID, it's the ultimate kind of contactless almost service method. So I think quick-serve has a huge advantage over other types of restaurants, even if you think about fast-casual where some of them may have had drive-thru or curbside pick up, but that was a very small part of their business, whereas quick service has been trying to optimize drive-thru for years and years, and spend a lot of time and energy and money investing in ways to make that channel more seamless.

I wonder what's different now, and exciting is that the emphasis for a long time has been on the operational aspects of drivers. So how do you improve the speed of service and how do you improve order accuracy? Those are the two big things, and how do you drive throughput? Now there's this question and I think loyalty is a big part of the impetus for that. How do you create meaningful customer interaction? So not only how are you getting the customer the food they want, at the speed you want to get it to them and they want it to go. But how do you actually provide some additional value in that interaction and provide a differentiated experience? Which is exciting! 

How would that work and look? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think one of the things that's different about quick-service restaurants is that they still have a very large portion of their customers that are cash customers. You think about Starbucks, they've been extraordinarily successful at getting a ton of customers to just use mobile order pay and it's easy peasy. And then the challenge from an operation standpoint is just how do you get those mobile orders customers served quickly. 

QSRs are going to have a steeper hill to climb with that. They're trying to drive digital adoption. They're trying to drive known customer rates, like what percentage of their customers do they actually know that are registered customers or credit cards that they can attribute to a customer. But that behavior of people is gonna start on mobile ordering everything. So far, there's not really any evidence that there's going to be consistent. Customers like deals and offers that provide a lot of value. But if there's a way that you can hook into deals and offers without the customer actually having to complete the transaction in the mobile app, that's really powerful. Drive-thru is all about impulse. I can just pull in and grab my thing and go, and I don't have to think about it. I don't have to sit here go through the fifteen steps and in a mobile app to order. So I think it's really going to be that balance between bringing forward that enhanced digital capability with loyalty, which includes reordering, personalized offers. It includes all of those things and bringing that to bear in the drive-thru lane itself, and the menu board becomes a very powerful tool in reinforcing those value adds. 

If your customer is asking questions in the drive-thru you're in big trouble, right? So if you have a loyal customer, they don't know that you've registered with them, but you know it's them that's there, or they can't tell that you applied their points the way that they thought the points were going to get applied, to get a free ice cream cone you really create some significant operational challenges. So menu boards, I think, are becoming more and more of a tool to be able to reinforce to customers that you've got their back and things are going to be accurate in the way that they expect them to be. That's super powerful.

Is there an easily defined, easily sold, and easily acknowledged ROI model now for these drive-thru displays? Because by and large, they are being put in by the local franchise owner, not the head office, so that there's a significant $10-30k infrastructure investment to do this, and local operators are looking at this one and going, “I didn't save for that,” or, “Why would I do this?” or “What am I going to see?” 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, I will say that there does seem to be a pretty big sea change with regard to the franchisee's state of mind when it comes to this investment. I think there's real acceptance and I've worked with a couple of brands now where the initiative is spearheaded at the brand level, right? There's much more power when it comes from the brand and that capability is built centrally. The franchisees are just footing the bill for installation in their individual restaurant or set of restaurants but the franchisees are basically saying, let's go faster. How fast can I get this thing installed? And, they can't go as fast as the franchisees want them to go. 

I think what's interesting with the ROI model, in the early days, the math worked better for indoor because the capital investment indoors is a lot cheaper. There's a little bit of the cost savings of printing and having people up on ladders and the liability that goes along with that, the inflexibility of print. You could make a pretty good case for the return on investment with those indoor boards on cost alone. With drive-thru, your capital investment is quite a bit higher because the hardware has to be much more rugged to be able to withstand that outdoor environment.

I think what is shifting is now the value prop is not just about the cost savings and the increased flexibility. But it's also about the direct upside. So now that you have these additional digital capabilities, how do you actually build a customer's check by adding capabilities that are unique to digital? So getting really strong with the way you're using day partying or really thinking about suggestive selling and how do you do that in a consistent way, which is really driving. How do you encourage customers toward your more premium menu items? And you can get quite sophisticated in the way that you use that channel to build checks.

Is there an acknowledged metric around that? So pulling this out of my head, if you make this investment, it should pay for itself in the first 18 months or the first 26 months or whatever it is? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah, the economics depend a little bit on the restaurant, but generally the kind of rule of thumb has been, you're going to get like a 3% to 5% lift just by moving from analog boards to digital because the customer experience is just much better. I think the challenge is that wears off eventually is your customers get used to digital. You don't have that Disney effect on the third visit and fourth visit. But over time, it's all about driving that incrementality and the numbers are hard there, Dave, because a lot of people don't want to share. The brands don't want to share how successful or not successful their suggestive sales capabilities are. But generally speaking, it's all about driving that ticket over time, and then you can do the work back on the break-even time. 

But I think in general, what you said 18 to 24 months is in most cases probably about right. 

And I'm sure as in many things, the other QSR operators, regardless of category or size, pay very close attention to what the giants do, like a McDonald's and if they're doing a full rollout across their whole estate, across the United States, they're not doing that for giggles and they’ve thought this through?

Jackie Walker: Absolutely. With the ROI model, part of it is, what is the direct benefit, from an economic standpoint, but then the other part of it is very much keeping up with the Joneses kind of mentality or keeping up with the McDonalds in this case. How do you actually ensure that you're meeting customer expectations because once customers get used to that slick experience, you pull into a random Taco Bell with a ten-year-old backlit WITH half of them are blown out and they're all scratched up and dingy, customers do notice that stuff? So I think there is a little bit of just leveling up that guest experience and it is going to be contagious. 

All the big brands are really starting to think about how they do this, and I think now with the price of hardware coming down and the big players converting, so McDonald's is already there, RBI is rolling out across Burger King, Popeye's, and Tim Horton's, they're going to be the next big player to reach scale. It's really just a matter of when, and not if everyone's going to go digital on these drivers. 

So let's talk about inside the store. We talked mostly about drive-thru displays, but inside the store, digital menu boards have been around a lot longer, but they're changing too because you're going to see a lot more service ordering and a lot more pickup and you need digital menu boards that have to also function as queue management or notification, right? 

Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think what's happening is there's actually a proliferation of use cases if you want to think about it that way. So the digital menu board at the front counter is really just about providing a menu to customers that are in the restaurant and you're right, it's pretty well understood. I think that's interesting when I talk to customers about drive-thru, they get really excited about its personalization, and the word I always pushed to use is optimization even more than personalization because you get the benefit for unknown guests as well.

But once you get that working like a well-oiled machine, you start to understand customer behavior at the store level, you can actually apply those same principles at the front counter, right? So you're not targeting your messaging to an individual customer because that front counter board is meant to be a one-to-many experience, but you can 100% tailor that experience to the restaurant. So you can curate the menu for the types of purchase behavior that exists in that store or that type of store. So I think the front counter is going to continue to evolve, with regards to that, to become a little bit more curated benefiting from the investment at the drive-thru. 

The kiosk is another huge piece. I laugh and I think we've talked about this before, when COVID started everyone thought, oh my God, it's like the death of kiosks, nobody's ever going to touch it, touch screen ever again. But actually, it's done quite the opposite as we've understood better, that face-to-face is much worse than touching a screen and using some hand sanitizer. But what's interesting is that from a rollout perspective. Brands still think of kiosks as very different from menu boards, which I find fascinating. The way that it ends up shaking out is, brands think about their mobile experience and most brands are furthest along on mobile ordering. Then when they think about kiosks, it's the app, but on a big screen and a lot of brands actually manage it that way. So it's not the in-store tech groups that are managing that kiosk, it's actually the digital groups, the customer experience, technology groups that are delivering them.

And then you have the menu boards and they are very much firmly still in the restaurant technology side of the house. So there are different problems to solve altogether. I think more and more, there's going to be a little bit of consolidation across that. I always encourage customers to think about as you're doing drive-thru, you're building these mechanisms from a backend standpoint to actually deliver curated content and be smart in how you're merchandising product dynamically. There’s absolutely a play for that on front counter boards and a play for that on kiosks, and the kiosk is after all another piece of in-store hardware, and then to your point, Dave, there are these other use cases, right? 

So are brands going to start to put more queue management screens up like McDonald's has, where they have now served these customer numbers and they have the list for in-store and list for mobile. Do they start to do some things with digital displays near pickup areas as more and more customers are starting to use take-out options? I've even heard some thought around, are there going to be digital screens at mobile pickup? I'm still not sold on that one. Like a sign made out of metal does just great for, telling you a customer where they need to park. We'll see who's able to first define a use case that has a clear ROI for putting screens at those parking spots. 

The last thing I wanted to ask about was some fundamentals around digital menu boards. One of the things that I've found through the years and seems to be getting better as people learn is you have these eye charts that they try to cram so much stuff into a single display that you really can't read anything and it's mentally overwhelming, you look at it and go, oh my God, I'll just order the thing that I've got in my head and get the hell out of here. 

Is that sort of thing important? Color choices, font choices, certainly the volume of text, the size or point size, all those things?

Jackie Walker: 100%. Yes, and I think I'm glad you asked this question because this is my favorite question, right? If you look at how most of the brands: McDonald's is a good example, Burger King is a good example. It looks like the problem they've been trying to solve is how do you jam all the shit that you had on six panels print now on to two or three digital screens. Like if you just look at it, you can see that's what they thought they were trying to do. Really the opportunity with digital menu boards is to get more precise about what the content is because you can have advanced analytics, you can link what you display to a customer to a transaction. You can start to have a much better data-driven merchandising strategy. So you can really think about the use case for the drive-thru, which to your point is you have a customer that's freaked out, they're going to be in front of that board for probably 10-15 seconds looking at it at a peak time before they start talking or the crew member starts talking to them. So if you're trying to show them 85 SKUs, there is no way that any human is understanding 85 SKUs in 10-15 seconds. So the opportunity is really about curation, and I think when we approach menu board design, we don't think about it from an old-school menu sings print menu point of view. We think about it from a digital frame of reference. 

How do you guide wayfinding for a customer? How do you establish a kind of system design and a foundation that's going to allow the operator of the brand to substitute products in and out and see how they perform when they're in these different slots? Think about designing a poster, you think about designing a digital framework. I think curation is key. That's that to me really all of these personalization tactics that you talk about, it really comes back to how do I show less stuff that's more meaningful and the tactics are all different ways of getting at that problem. So I think that's what's most exciting about the move to digital menu boards is we can start playing there and as an industry get much smarter about how you actually serve the customer at that moment? How do you show them the least amount of information to get them through success? Either help them get what they wanted to get, they knew they wanted, or inspire them to try something new. Build tickets, improve their level of confidence. These are all the things that become front and center in this new digital menu board experience.

All right. Super interesting. I appreciate you taking the time. 

Jackie Walker: Lots of fun. Dave, always looking forward to talking to you soon and maybe meeting you in person. 

Yes. If we ever travel once again and do things like Trade Shows. 

Jackie Walker: Amen. Thanks so much, Dave.