Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Doug Lusted, AdStash

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

Much has changed through the years in digital signage and digital out of home, but one thing that's been pretty constant is how small businesses like the technology when they find out about it ... but don't want to pay for it.

Doug Lusted has seen and heard that for many years, having founded a Canadian startup that was doing proximity marketing and venue analytics almost a decade ago.

He gradually, with his team, started pulling together the idea and eventually the platform for AdStash - a service that enables small business operators and service providers who target that sector to get digital signage in place, and make money from the screens, instead of paying monthly bills for them.

The core premise of AdStash is small to medium-sized businesses - from one-offs to groups of venues - can tap into advertising dollars from a dozen supply-side ad exchanges and generate incremental revenue. They don't pay any recurring subscription fees, and the only upfront cost is an $80 Raspberry Pi media player.

Based in suburban Toronto, but virtual in most respects, the company is investor-backed and already has a footprint of some 70,000 screens in the U.S. and Canada.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Doug, thank you for joining me. We've known each other a little bit for quite some time now, and I would say your company has been on a bit of a journey because when I first ran into it, I believe you were doing proximity marketing, right? 

Doug Lusted: That's right, and we're still doing that. That was our first product and we're heading out to our second one now.

And that was called, Linkett, wasn't it? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, so to clear it up because branding is often a question. The company name is Weston Expressions. Our first product was Linkett, which is an audience measurement platform that still operates today, and then our second product is AdStash, which we'll get into.

With the first product, what was that all about? That was NFC-based, right? 

Doug Lusted: It started out to be NFC. We were trying to track engagement and impressions, but ultimately that morphed into WiFi. So it's predominantly a WiFi tracking platform today. 

Because every smartphone has WiFi probably turned on or at least available, and not everybody was equipped with NFC and not everybody had it activated, right?

Doug Lusted:  You got it. 

So this was just a better way to go, and now you've launched AdStash. Can you tell me and the listeners what that's all about? 

Doug Lusted: So what AdStash does is provide digital signage networks the technology they need to go programmatic with no monthly fees, and so on a deeper level what that really means is that the core technology we've built is an API that connects your digital signs to multiple programmatic ad exchanges at once. So it saves you all that integration time and money. 

And if you become an AdStash customer, what are you getting and what are you using? 

Doug Lusted: It depends on your network. We're pretty flexible. We've got a bunch of different pieces to the puzzle. 

But basically, an API connection that lists you on all the major SSPs or most of them. Now, if you need a media player, we can provide you that. If you need a content management system, we have a free one. Those are typically used by our smaller networks. And the enterprise users generally stick to the API because they've got all of that in place already. 

Okay, so if I'm already on Brand X CMS, there are hundreds of them. You don't need to back out of that and use your CMS platform or anything like that. The CMS is meant more as something that enables it for smaller businesses?

Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly, and sometimes what happens is we'll have a customer who's growing their network, and they realize, I can use this CMS that doesn't have any monthly fees. I'm going to switch to that now while I'm deploying. But yeah we can integrate with any CMS. It's a fairly straightforward open API.

I guess it becomes a delicate dance of working with other CMS companies, because if they're hearing that, you don't need to use a commercial or fee-based one, you can just use ours for free they may be thinking, “I don't want to work with you.” 

Doug Lusted: Yeah. It's a good point, and to add a little more color to that, it's a very light, basic CMS, right? We can show videos on full screen, maybe a traditional L-bracket, but that's it. 

It's very light, more kind of aimed towards small and medium-sized businesses. If you're a large enterprise digital signage network that needs some bells and whistles, sticking to your current partner is probably the best bet and we're pretty open about it. 

Is that intentional or is that more a function of, “if I want it to have something that was a lot more robust, that there's a whole bunch more time and dollars that I need to put into it to get to that point”? 

Doug Lusted: So we found that most of our early adopters were small and medium-sized businesses that weren't too picky on what's going on the screen? So it would be hard to give out a content management system that's free that has all the bells and whistles as I said, so I think it was intentional. It's just like a backup plan. 

One thing we noticed in this industry is that there's a massive amount of supply in the market that is just a mom-and-pop shop with the TV turned off. So we're just trying to make it as simple as possible, like “Hey, here's this box. There are no monthly fees, plug it in and you're ready to go.” 

And if they opted for this, let's say I have a nail salon in a strip mall because every strip mall has a nail salon and they want to do this. How does it work? What do they get out of it? How do they use it? 

And in terms of what they get out of it, what kind of revenues would they see? Is it something that just is going to just pay for the TV in a lot of respects? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, sometimes. So basically if you use our full tech stack, you get the media player, plug it in just to HDMI and power, and then WiFi or Ethernet and then a free content management system that's cloud-based, the nail salon often puts up their own content on the screen, hours of operation, promotions, that good stuff, totally self-serve, and then we, just like almost any programmatic platform, we aim for a 30% fill rate with third-party ads that we're getting from our programmatic partners. 

Given the infancy and where we are with programmatic, some months we hit 30%, some months, we don't, depending on a whole bunch of variables. But the idea is that I think for a small mom and pop nail salon if you look at our data over the past 24 months, minus the closures, due to the pandemic, the average locations making about $50 to $70 a month in revenue that they wouldn't have gotten elsewhere.

And for a lot of businesses, that would be like, you know, who cares? But is that a meaningful number to these people? 

Doug Lusted: It is, and especially with COVID impacting a lot of the revenues of these businesses, they're hungry to figure out any way they can earn a couple extra bucks, and most of our clients aren't necessarily one-offs, they own 10 stores, they own 50 stores, and so when you start scaling it, it becomes a nice little incremental piece of business that doesn't require much work. 

One of the big challenges that I've seen through the years with these kinds of initiatives is, working with small to medium businesses is not terribly efficient. You've got to sell them one by one. You don't just go in and get an enterprise deal for a thousand locations or anything else. 

How do you deal with that side of it and how do you sell it? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, it's a great point. So in the very early days, our Guinea pigs, we were going door to door on these businesses directly. But now I would say 99% of our business is through the digital signage channels so digital signage distributors, smaller and medium place-based digital networks looking to go programmatic, and if you look at the adoption curve, it's similar to any company, start with the little guys and you start climbing up the chain. So we've taken that route and we're working on the channel right now. 

So using the example of the nail salon again, how would they find you then? Would it be through like a Synnex or Ingram Micro or something like that? I can’t imagine a nail salon knowing what Synnex is. 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly. So we do inbound marketing, right? So they'll probably find us online. But like I said, it's a small portion of our business, but they'd be able to find it through any of our paid campaigns, whether it be through Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, etc. Word of mouth is probably our biggest channel, right? 

Somebody starts making money they didn't before and they want to tell their friends, they want to move it to the other properties they own. So organic's been a big one for the smaller customers. 

Yeah, and if they need it, you provide an $80 media player. So I guess if they make $50 to $70 a month, they pay for that thing pretty quickly. What is that? Is that a little Raspberry Pi or...? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, it is a Raspberry Pi with our firmware on it. It's got a couple of extra little components to it, like just some USB antennas and things of that nature, but under the hood, it's a Raspberry Pi. 

The analytical side of the business that you started with, is that bundled with this, and would a small business need it/use it? 

Doug Lusted: It is bundled with it, but it's generally hidden from the small businesses.

The reason why we need it is that we need to know what traffic is in front of the screen when ads play so that we know how much to bill these programmatic partners, everything's impression. 

Would a nail salon really need a big data platform to understand its user’s behaviors? Probably not. So we hide it, but it is built in there so that we can gauge traffic levels for our advertisers. 

So if I am the nail salon and I opt in, what am I using to update content and manage the thing? 

Doug Lusted: In terms of our content management system, they're logging in and uploading their own creative. We don't provide a designer tool or any type of creative tool ourselves. They just upload whatever they have. 

Okay, and they do it off the desktop or can they do it off mobile? 

Doug Lusted: They can do it on desktop or mobile. 

Specific app or is it just the web version of the website?

Doug Lusted: We have a specific app as well. So on mobile, we have an AdStash app. You can download and manage your digital signage network just through your phone if you'd like. 

I've always been curious about the mindset particularly of the small to the medium business world. By far, the most active blog post on 16:9 is one that lists all of the free software options out there.

Do you find that generally for small to medium businesses, digital signage is not a major core initiative of what they're doing, it's just something that maybe they can use, that there's a real resistance there to spending any monthly fees? 

Doug Lusted: I think so. We often A/B test this ourselves to test what is the bigger value prop, the ability to make money on programmatic ads or save money on subscriptions? It's really a mix of both, but the smaller players for sure are interested in anything that isn't going to be recurring, and we also have a lot of requests from the digital signage groups that they outsource this to. 

Like I said, our average user has got about a hundred screens. So this is generally something they've outsourced, they've told their digital signage partner, “Hey, you've heard of this free AdStash thing, check it out!”

Okay, and what's your installed base right now? 

Doug Lusted: So across North America, we have 70,000 screens. The US is a lot more dominant than Canada. We've seen some pretty exponential growth there. But in Canada, we've got about 6,000 screens and then the rest of the US.

Okay, and what do you figure you have to be at in terms of footprint to get something akin to critical mass? Or does it not really matter as much when it's programmatic? 

Doug Lusted: It doesn't matter as much when it's programmatic, and I think that's one of the huge attractions to it, especially for the medium size players.

If I've got a hundred screens, maybe 50 in Toronto, 50 in Montreal, that's not really big enough to attract a national campaign, but programmatically, by nature is grouping everybody together to try and attract a national campaign. So I think that's a really big thing. 

Most typically for these small business screen networks, it's hyper-local advertising. It's like the local injury accident lawyers and mortgage brokers and that sort of thing. What kind of advertising are you seeing on the screen? 

Doug Lusted: So given that we only do programmatic advertising, most I would say is national. Now we do have some local, right? The Calgary Stampede brought in a lot of local ads, even though like DoorDash will do a national campaign, they'll have custom creative or calls to action based on each local community. But for the most part, at least for now, we're seeing a majority of it nationally. 

And with the analytics that you're able to generate, what do you see or what are you learning about sites? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, so traffic data is the most important for sure. Impressions or visits, right? Unique visits, dwell time and frequency are the big three per location. 

It's really interesting to see the dwell times. That's what I'm interested in because, during the pandemic, medical was really one of the only things that were open, and you can see our dwell time doubled so the average person sees twice as many ads. What does that mean? How is that going to affect things? 

So the most important thing right now is traffic. A lot of these exchanges, like HiveStack or BroadSign, have geofencing technology, so they can gather demographics on their own. We have that capability, but most of the time the exchanges say, “Hey, we got that covered.” 

With the rise through the years of computer vision for doing on-premise venue analytics, once in a while, something bubbles up and people get all freaked out about the idea that there's a camera looking at me. 

We've seen that a few times in Canada and it comes up elsewhere. What's the situation with your users when it comes to WiFi. Do they care? Are they alarmed in any way? Like they seem to be well on the camera side? 

Doug Lusted: Some of our bigger customers are, but we've been pretty proactive in being GDPR compliant. So from a consumer perspective, they don't see anything. They don't see a camera being pointed at them. There's a little box behind the TV that no one sees. So we don't really get any questions on the consumer side. 

From the actual kind of business side, yeah, just, are we GDPR compliant? Are we collecting any personally identifiable information, which we're not. 

Where are your servers? We get asked those questions a lot, but after they read through what we're doing with the data and they realize it's very anonymous, high-level traffic counting. We've never had any problems with it, and in fact, It's helped us in a lot of deals. Like we're an airport, and as I said before, we're in medical clinics where you can't put a camera. So we carved out a nice little segment of the market, where we seem to be dominating that market share, at least in Canada, just because of those regulations around those venues. 

Is it easier to compete with some of the other kinds of focused networks out there? Through the years, I've seen bar networks and hair salon networks and nail salon networks, and everything else. Because you're broadly based, you're not saying, “We're the guys for this.” Is it easier to sell into a broader diversity of businesses? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, it is. But it's also a little confusing because any other place-based digital network, in some sense, if they're on programmatic and not going through us, they're competitors. But on the other side, they're also prospects. So if it gets very confusing, okay, who's a competitor and who's a prospect who should we target? And there's a lot of his “frenemies” in space, and it's getting even more complicated as more and more programmatic platforms come into play.

When your resellers and channel are meeting with a company that has a hundred screens across a network, do they even get into what programmatic is and how it works or do they just say, put this in, we will sell the ads for you and it’ll start showing up within three, four weeks and you should see a check of $50 to $70. 

But I'm guessing they don't really want to understand, is this a demand side platform or supply side or any of that stuff? You're just basically saying it's like Google Adsense, it will just show up. 

Doug Lusted: Exactly. They don't get into all the nitty gritties.

You go into a nail salon and try to explain what a supply side platform and demand side platform are, it's probably not going to work out. 

It's getting more and more confusing as more and more are popping up. But yeah, it's basically, “Hey, we're going to install this new box to your TV, ads are going to show up hopefully and make some revenue”, and another thing is like a lot of our channel partners, they're selling ads directly themselves, not programmatic, just traditional direct sales. So a lot of the time, it's not just us who's responsible for revenue. We're just adding the icing on the cake. 

Okay. So that would be like the guy in your part of the world around Toronto, who's got some medical clinics and he's using your platform, but he would have direct sales as well that he could go to a medical equipment supplier or whatever, and say, “do you want to advertise on these?”

Doug Lusted: Exactly. So our agreement, with our customers, is that we have the exclusive rights over programmatic sales. 

We're going to connect you to all of the SSPs that we're partnered with and we're going to handle that relationship for you. That's the value we bring, but we're not shutting down your existing line of revenue when it comes to traditional sales.

And that's why you're talking about like a 30% fill rate that there should be this broad understanding that, “Hey guys, this isn't your sole answer if you're an ad network, this is part of your answer.” 

Doug Lusted: Exactly, and I think that's where we're at in the programmatic industry is this strange hybrid model, where we're putting a bed on and focusing on that or predicting that more of it will shift the programmatic as adoption increases across the industry. But right now, yeah, this isn't your only source of ad revenue. 

So I'm HiveStack and I'm working with you guys. What visibility do I have? Like what do I see when I'm trying to place an ad of some kind or drive a campaign across your screens? 

Doug Lusted: We try to be as transparent as possible. What you'll see is an address obviously, of where the screen is located, their analytics will tell you the type of audience that's in there. We'll provide you with the traffic counts that are in there. We even require our users, when they install a device to take a picture of the screen, so that you can actually see what the screen looks like and that it exists, and then you'll just obviously see the playback reporting o how many times did your ad play there and whatnot.

And I'm assuming the analytics side of that is increasingly important, even if it isn't to the venue, it is to the programmatic side? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly, and I think, anybody who's been in this industry for a while understands that that's one of the biggest bottlenecks of programmatic right now. There's not a clear winner of measurement. There are a whole bunch of different vendors, and we ourselves, as the digital signage industry are confused about it, which then makes it almost impossible for these programmatic exchanges to wrap their heads around it, or come up with any standards.

And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, and one of the reasons why is, I think that we need to understand that there's going to need to be different methodologies and technologies to measure outdoor screens versus indoor screens. These are two very different things, I don't think one solution is going to be able to cover both. So we need to really think, how are we going to frame this, how are we going to put standards around it and take the time to educate these ad exchanges on how it's gonna work? 

Do you get pushback at all from, let's say some of the larger, more established to programmatic platforms saying, I don't know who you are, you're not big enough for me or anything else, or do they all look at this as more inventory and it's properly described and the analytics are available and so on. So, it doesn't bother me that it's a nail salon and it's not a major international airport?

Doug Lusted: So in the early days, we got pushback from programmatic exchanges because we didn't have that many screens, and it's that chicken and egg problem. So we went out and started building our supply base, and I would say now, we're one of the bigger players with 70,000 screens.

So they look at it and say, not necessarily, this is more screens, cause that's not always how they think, but they say, Hey, this more audience profiles. This is more traffic for us. 

And I assume all of your venues are data tagged every which way? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah. So not only just what type of venue it's in and where it's located, but what size is the screen, what things are around it, there's a lot of data that's associated with it, and thankfully we are not tasked with having to have a UI for that, that the advertiser has to see, that's basically our programmatic partners job and that's not an easy one. 

Going back to the nail salon thing, I signed up for it and I'm running a set of nail salons, which is about as bizarre a thought as I can come up with. Who would do the data tagging for that? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, we do all of that. So once you install the device, you do take a picture of your screen once it's done. We have a list of venues that you can select from a dropdown that is in accordance with the IAB standards. They just find and select a nail salon, which is one of them, and that's basically it. We do everything from there, everything is pretty much automated, 

So it's a free service. The obvious next question coming out of that is how do you make money? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah. So we take a commission only on the programmatic revenue that we bring to the table, that flows through our pipes. The commission depends on volume and how many screens you have, but that's how we make our money.

I think I saw the baseline was like 30%, and it scales down from there with the larger jobs? 

Doug Lusted: It does scale down, yeah. Sometimes it'll actually scale up depending if you're missing core components of technology.

So someone may say, “Hey I don't have this feature in the CMS, can you build it or can I have it?” And they'll say, yeah, but if you don't want to pay for the custom dev time, then the way we'll make our money back on that is maybe 35%. 

Even in that case, it wouldn't be fee-based, it would be built around the commission?

Doug Lusted: We're pretty flexible. Most of our customers have come to us because they don't want to pay fees. So it ultimately ends up being a commission, whether we like it or not. 

Is that just a concession to the realities of working with a small to the medium business world is that they would like to have this, they just don't want to pay for it. So let's work with them as opposed to just saying, “We won't work with you, goodbye!”

Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly, and I think that's the whole notion of AdStash, and one of our big hypotheses is building this business as there are so many screens that are not being added to programmatic exchanges because they can't afford the technology that's required to do so. 

So whoever activates, all of those screens are going to own a huge portion of the supply in the market, and nobody's pulled up their sleeves and gone after that segment of the market because nobody wants to pay for anything. 

So was AdStash something, going back to 2013-2014, that you were thinking about, or is it just through the years you came to this realization, having worked with a lot of end-users that there's a hole in the market for this, we can build it and get there before somebody else does?

Doug Lusted: It was a bit of both. So when we were really focused on analytics back in 2014, we weren't thinking about it, but we heard rumblings of programmatic and we always thought to ourselves, audience measurement is great, but it's hard to tie return on investment to, especially if you're talking to a digital signage network, like, “why should I invest in in analytics, if I can't guarantee I'm going to get more ads?”

So we always thought, in the online world, advertisers demand it, and then so when we heard of programmatic coming down and we're like, wow, our data is actually going to be very valuable here and mandatory. So this is a good space for us to get into, and then we were just really early adopters of it, we started working with Campsite right when they started in Toronto and Montreal and it just escalated and we rode the wave. 

And how many programmatic platforms are you integrated with now? 

Doug Lusted: So right now we're live on 12. We've got a few contracts signed we're just finishing up integrations with, but as of today, we're on the 12th.

I'm not as close to programmatic as a lot of people seem to think I am. Twelve is what, like half of them out there, or my impression is 12 is like 1% of them. 

Doug Lusted: So it's a little complicated. There are SSPs and DSPs. The DSPs, yeah, there are 80 of them out there, but not all of them are doing digital out-of-home advertising, only a small fraction of them are.

What we're doing is aggregating all of the SSPs into one link, the supply side, the supply-side ones that actually do digital out of home. There are tons of supply-side platforms out there that you can join your website, but for digital out-of-home, there aren't that many out there yet. So I would say, of the active ones right now, we have a large majority of them. 

Tell me about the business. You founded it. Is it completely bootstrapped, self-funded or have you been involved with private equity or VC companies? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, we're VC-backed. So in 20014 ish, when we were just doing the analytics, we raised a small seed round, and we went through an accelerator in Silicon valley called 500 Startups, and then when we launched AdStash, we raised a second round of funding, a bigger round of funding to help push this product. 

Where are you at in terms of the size of the company? 

Doug Lusted: So right now, we're at 13 and growing. It's been unique for us during the pandemic, we’ve done fully virtual and we were hiring during the pandemic too. So it's been interesting to have a team with some members you've never met before. We were surprised to figure out that some of our employees are like 6’4”. We had no idea they were like these big people, so it's been a unique experience, but a majority of our team is software developers. 

We're not a heavily focused sales and marketing organization because that's what our programmatic partners do for us. They're doing all the sales. So of that 13, the majority of them are software developers.

And we were talking before we turned on the recorder that you moved from downtown Toronto to the burbs. Based on the last year and a half, are you concluding that, hey, we don't really need a physical office or any of those things? Maybe we have a kind of virtual rented office and a mailbox kind of thing and it'll do because so many tech companies have gone that way? 

Doug Lusted: Yeah. Speaking on behalf of our company, I don't think we need an office. We like to do monthly hangouts where we'll all meet somewhere. Just rent an office for a day and talk strategy and whatnot. But when it comes to the day-to-day operations, we don't need an office. Again, software developers, most of the time, are locked away coding, they don't really need an office. 

They don’t want to talk to other humans anyways. 

Doug Lusted: Yeah, exactly. But yeah, as long as they have a kitchen nearby, things are good. So for us, we'll keep doing the virtual way.

That being said, it has presented interesting scenarios in terms of culture. It's very hard to build a company culture virtually, there's only so many things you do. So that's why we really like to implement at least monthly hangouts where the whole team comes together in person and does something to try and build that culture.

That is what's probably important to keeping virtual employees nowadays, because if they can get a new job without having to move and just simply saying yes, you gotta build that company culture to want to entice them to come work for you every day. 

Yeah. It would be pretty easy to leave if you have absolutely no emotional attachment to the people you're working with. You don’t know how tall they are. (Laughter)

This has been great. Just a quick question. If people want to know more, where do they find AdStash? I'm guessing, it's AdStash.com. 

Doug Lusted: Yeah. AdStash.com. Best way to get us. 

All right. Thanks a bunch. 

Doug Lusted: Thanks, I really appreciate you having us on.

 

Chris Riebschlager, Dimensional Innovations

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

There have been numerous traditional sign companies that have, through the years, developed a sense of their ground shifting, and responded by adding a digital component to their business. A lot of the time, it hasn't worked out so hot, because it's just too far outside what a company knows and does. But sometimes it works, as is the case with Dimensional Innovations.

The Kansas City company nicely straddles physical and digital components to jobs, bolstering the idea that having both skillsets, and mindsets, under the same roof is going to work better than sub-contracting.

DI, for short, does projects all over the U.S., in particular, and while it has some especially active vertical markets, its work serves all kinds of different use-cases. DI does a lot of pro and college sports venue work, but it also does experiences for museums, hospitals and retail.

I had an interesting chat with Chris Riebschlager, who runs the company's software efforts.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, Chris. Thanks for joining me. Can you tell me what your company does? 

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah, absolutely. So Dimensional Innovations started in the late 90s as a signage company, making just traditional signs, and in the time between the late 90s and now, the company has grown to include custom fabrication of all kinds and in the last six and seven years, we've added a really big technology practice to that. 

So in addition to building and fabricating and designing spaces, also activating those spaces with interesting technology, that's hopefully beautiful and useful and makes spaces better. 

Where's the company based? 

Chris Riebschlager: The company is based in Kansas City. 

But you have offices elsewhere, right?

Chris Riebschlager: Yes, we have folks that live and work in LA, Atlanta, Minneapolis, a few in Colorado. So yeah, we got a presence all over the United States.

All right, and are those offices or are those like home offices and that the big epicenter is Kansas City? 

Chris Riebschlager: The epicenter is certainly in Kansas City. The other offices are focused a lot on project management and sales for the projects that we are working on and supporting in those locations, but yeah, the heart of it's here in KC.

It’s interesting. There's been a number of traditional print companies that have taken a look at the digital signage space and tried to get in it and for the most part, have not been very successful because it's just too different from what they normally do. What's been the difference with you? 

Chris Riebschlager: So I think the way we approach spaces, I think lends well to activating those spaces with both digital signage and more immersive tech installations.

I think when we approach a new project, it's really about getting inside the head of the person that is in that space. Why they're there, what they're doing there, what's important to them, what's in the front of their mind when they're in a space like that? So we had been satisfying those needs with built environmental stuff and I think it's a natural pivot to then say, what technology could help this person accomplish what they need to accomplish or make this space better or make a bad experience much better. 

So you're already fabricating physical materials to make a space interesting, and digital allows you to introduce a different kind of material and make it active and so on, right?

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah, absolutely, and I think part of what makes us special is that we are doing this from both sides, right? Both the fabricated and design side, but also the tech side. So I think if you can have that happening on one team, I think the end product always ends up better because, when I have to sit down at the table with a person who's going to build the thing, they understand what I needed to do, I understand what they needed to do, and I think that hand in hand tight integration just makes for better stuff. 

And you run the software team. Am I getting that right? 

Chris Riebschlager: That is correct. 

Okay, and how big is that team? 

Chris Riebschlager: We have six developers right now. We also have a 3D team that kind of has branched off from my software dev team. They focus on 3D modeling and animating, and also some of the game engine development stuff that we've been getting into with Unreal. 

Oh, cool, and if you had to guess, I realize you're not the COO or anything, but you have some sense of what the split is of your business, between analog stuff and digital stuff, is it like 60:40 and has it evolved? 

Chris Riebschlager: I’d probably flip that split, so maybe a 40% and then 60% goes to the physical build-out. 

The blend there is kind of fuzzy. It's not all one or the other, usually in client engagement, there's a big fabricated, a big build-out that we're injecting technology into so that the borders between those two are pretty fuzzy.

And that's how it should happen, right? 

Cause God knows I've been involved in projects or being exposed to projects where it's all about the digital side of it, and they get fixated on that without thinking about the whole experience and the whole look and feel of it. 

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah, absolutely.

Ideally, I don't want a person walking into a space that we made and seeing a hard delineation between what is a physical built-out piece, and what's a digital add-on to that space. They should all feel very cohesive and family together in a way that makes sense holistically, and we're not picking apart digital activation and physical activation.

And I guess it's helpful that because your company comes out of the physical background that you're not having to rely on third-party fabrication companies to build that side of it. You can control the whole bill of materials, so to speak. 

Chris Riebschlager: Absolutely, and that's huge, especially when we're trying to make something that no one's ever seen before. You really need that tight integration between the physical engineering team and the software engineering team, because silly things like mounting a camera, having access to that camera, and knowing where cables need to run, etc. The tighter integration you can get between the person building the thing and the person who knows where those wires need to run, that's only going to end in better projects. 

Yeah. You start embedding display technology into a physical enclosure. If you have no experience around that, you don't know about things like ventilation and then you have big problems. 

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah, and at this point, we've run into all of those things. We've had all the problems. So at this point, we've hit our stride and now we have solved all those ones and do not worry about them anymore. 

Yeah, which is very helpful, I'm sure. One of the things that were intriguing to me is with a lot of companies I talked to, they sorta have a defined vertical or maybe one or two verticals and that, like they're active in hotels or they're active in retail, whatever it may be, and I look at your kind of portfolio of projects and it's like all over the place. 

You're doing sports stadiums, you're doing work for college athletic teams, but you are also doing work for children's hospitals and museums. 

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah. We do have some verticals that we do specialize in. Stadiums being a big one, college athletics, being a big one, children's hospitals and zoos being another. 

Also, there are corporate environments like corporate headquarters. We do a lot of client experience centers, just the big immersive environments that usually are attached to a corporate headquarters where they can tour clients through and show their product offerings in a compelling and interesting way.

We're hopefully coming out of a pretty rough year and a half in terms of what's been going on and things like particularly the sports industry kind of being “on hold” as well as some college athletics, but the workplace has bubbled up. 

Has business shifted in that time?

Chris Riebschlager: I wouldn't say shifted. The last year forced us to reevaluate some of the things we were doing and the things we were adding to spaces and being a little bit more mindful of, as things opened back up, how are people going to want to interact with things in a space? Are they going to want to touch things? Are we going to need to figure out ways for people to interact without physically engaging with this stuff? 

I don't think our core business changed at all, but the last year was a really interesting opportunity to reevaluate how these interactions work in these spaces. 

Yeah. You have a product or service or something called DIVE, which is Dimensional Innovations Virtual Experiences. What is that all about and how has it resonated with the people you're talking to? 

Chris Riebschlager: So the genesis of that was, early in 2020, we were starting - before COVID hit - we had planned a lot of client experience on our work with a few clients where we were going to install a bunch of new spaces that would serve in that client experience center capacity, where we're touring clients through and showing off-in an immersive environment type of way-product offerings, and since that was now off the table for 2020, we had to pivot into, okay, how do we provide that same experience and have that same docent or client-led multi-person experience, but in a way that isn't going to require someone to fly to a place and go into a building that is going to be closed for an indefinite amount of time.

So we started messing around with some video conferencing technology and experimenting with ways to take that same content that we had running in a theater or large screen experience in the space and how to use that same content, those same ideas, that same spirit, and put it into an experience where a docent kit can invite a dozen or more people to a website where we're all seeing each other in video and they're able to tour people through these immersive environments, show content and throw up polls and questions, and different points of engagement there. So the same things that would be happening in that space, just distributed to everyone's devices, wherever they are. 

Have you seen much take-up on that?

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah. I think as people got burned out on Zoom, mid-2020, people were looking at and going, okay, this is fine. The utility of it is there, it's great. But there's gotta be something more we can do with this technology. 

Like, if we can get everyone live audio and video between a bunch of people, there's gotta be more engaging things we can do with that. So I think as people started to push those edges, that was really appealing to people to be able to have what we had in DIVE, which is a way to craft a more immersive environment for those people to be in and have a little bit more interesting points of engagement than just sharing your screen and have a routine when looking at a PowerPoint or whatever.

It seems a little bit like the virtual trade shows that of course came up like crazy in the past year and a half. How does it differ from that? 

Chris Riebschlager: I think the main focus of DIVE is really just that custom content. The framework is Zoom-like. We have a video and audio connection. That's the solved problem.

The more interesting thing in new client engagement with DIVE is, what are we going to do now that we have basically the entire web stack and everything you can do on a website, everything you can do with live audio and video, what are we going to do content-wise, in a compelling way to show, offer, to communicate the message that we want to communicate?

And now that we're seeing physical trade shows and people are getting on airplanes and flying to go see clients and go to experience centers and do that sort of thing. Does your company see DIVE as something that was an interim measure and you put it back in the closet or has it got long-term legs?

Chris Riebschlager: I think it has long-term legs. I think there are ways that it could be a supplement to what we're already doing in the built-out space, we’ve thought of incorporating it, even in a client experience center, where we have a bunch of people we've invited into the space, they're still maybe subject matter experts or people that we'd want to bring into this experience that couldn't fly in, or we want them there every day. We could use the same technology to put that person up on his screen. So we can say, “Now we're going to talk to Todd about X YZ, and now Todd's in that space. He's thousands of miles away, but now he's in this environment with us.” 

So I think there are ways we could incorporate that same tech to enhance and supplement the stuff that we're doing in the building.

I obviously follow a lot of what goes on in digital signage and innovations and new ideas and so on, and what I saw in the past year and a half, is some great stuff, but also a number of times where it really seemed like companies were just trying to find something that they could get attention for and that they could sell at a time when their traditional products were not really moving. And I would see efforts to do gesture-based interaction, like touchless displays and QR codes, and I was looking at something on LinkedIn yesterday that was like a live person on camera with her being replicated as an avatar, and I looked at it and thought why are they doing that? I don't want to see something that looks like something out of a Japanese anime cartoon. If this person looks presentable, put her on the screen. 

So what has worked and what do you see as being effective and what is just eye candy that gets a client excited for 10 minutes?

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah. So early in 2020, we'd decided to pivot on some of our touch activations. We obviously wanted to find a non-touch way to do those. So we did dive into the whole process of moving the interface to the user’s phone methods, like just hitting a website via QR code on the display, and that I think is going to be something that now that we have that kind of locked and loaded, something that we can add as a value-add to existing projects.

So in the future, if people aren't going to be a little bit more cautious about what they touch in public space, that's always going to be an option. I don't think touch is going away certainly. I think that's going to be. always in the mix, but now that we were forced to solve that problem at the moment, I think that's going to be a really great way to value-add the work that we do moving forward.

I think your creative designers probably found that there are certain applications and in situations where that works well and others where it doesn't because I've seen pitches for stuff where just for us to snap a QR code and launch the controls on your phone and stand right in front of the display and do all that and I'm just thinking, just touch the damn display and use hand sanitizer after it's going to be a lot easier. So where does it best work? 

Chris Riebschlager: I think it's really contextual to the project. So with something that's really content-heavy, where we need a lot of information from the user to present back to them, something that they want.

For example, we do a lot of work with athletic departments where they want a way for everyone to see every athlete that had attended that school, and that usually involves some texts century and text century is usually best done with a keyboard or onscreen keyboard, and with that level of interaction, yes, you can offload that to a phone, but there's a point where you get diminishing returns with that. Getting someone to take out their phone, scan a code, and then go to the site, that's asking a lot of a person in a space like that where they really aren't in that mode of paying that much attention. So for that, I think for the foreseeable future, I think we're gonna keep moving the UI to the user's device as an option but I think a lot of that is just going to still happen on screen, but there's a lot of interactions that we do that are a lot lighter touch. So motion-driven interactives where we're using a connector or a camera to find human bodies in the space and the interaction is just driven by their emotion. I think for that level of thing, that's largely unchanged. 

And there's no learning curve? It's just triggering something because it's picking up that there's something there. 

Chris Riebschlager: Exactly.

Is the learning curve important? Cause I think I've said this a number of times on different podcasts. I call a lot of these gesture-based systems that you see in public spaces like malls and transit stations and so on, I call them stupid people tricks because you're asking people to do things that are except for the extroverts, it's embarrassing and it takes awhile and may not work, and there's a subset of people-mostly kids-who would find that exciting, but most adults would go, “No, I'm not doing that.”

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah. As you said, kids get it immediately. There's no learning curve with kids with these motion-based interactions. They mess around with it until they just get it, and then they're off to the races. 

So there are well-established UI patterns with everything else that we interact with in a given day, like the phone, the computer, we all get how that stuff works. When we're presenting something entirely new to people, I think to get them over that learning curve and to get them over that curve quickly, I think it's just a matter of making it as simple as possible. 

Like with Kinect-based installations, I hate introducing the idea of menus there, because we're thinking in terms of a mouse and a cursor. I think we need to take that off the table when we're talking about gestures. You're not there to point and select things. Let's think about different ways that you can use your body as this user interface that isn't just trying to copy-paste a mouse interaction or a keyboard interaction. 

Yeah and stop thinking about Minority Report.

Chris Riebschlager: Oh my gosh, Minority Report ruined my life when that came, out because that was the expectation. Just make it look like it was in the movie, right? 

No, and you don't want that by the way. 

Chris Riebschlager: It looks cool but in practice, it just leads to tears. 

On the company website, you’ve got a pretty robust resource section and blog posts and so on, and you've written a couple of pieces around generative art. What does that mean to you and how is it applied? 

Chris Riebschlager: So art is something that's really important to me, and it's one of the things that I'm just not very good at. Like I cannot draw to save my life, but I can program. I can write really decent software and I've found a way to create art that's interesting to me by using the tools, the software, and the frameworks that people smarter than me have created. 

So generative art, I think is a really interesting way to explore ways of art-making that are a collaborative practice between you and a computer. It's like, I'm setting up some rules about what I want to happen. I set the computer to go follow those rules and make something interesting and present it back to me, and maybe I like it, maybe I don't, but that back and forth between the computer and me, is just a really interesting art making practice to me. 

In the context of installations in corporate buildings, public buildings, airports, and so on, how is it applied and what do you need to think about? 

Chris Riebschlager: So I think there's a lot of things to consider. In past projects, I think a lot of the creative direction comes from existing artwork in this space. So we did some work with the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and they had already been working with an artist in the Netherlands, I believe and his work was just in the primary colors, blue, yellow, and red. So we knew we had a palette to work with. There is a lot of previous work already installed in the space so what we added to that space was just an interactive version of what was already happening there. So it was a familiar as well which was already existing there. But I think that's the primary consideration. What makes sense in that space? What other artwork does this need to live with? 

But also I think an interesting way to approach this is what other inputs do we have available? If it's a lobby, do we have the motion of people? Do we have traffic data or weather data, or any interesting data from the country that we're working with that could be incorporated into this piece, that could present some meaningful message through the work? I think there are so many fun opportunities there to incorporate live data in and present that back to people in a beautiful and compelling way. 

When I have conversations about data visualizations or generative art, I ask the question and I'll ask it again, does it matter, when you talk about data inputs, does it matter that the viewers understand that this is why this is changing because the weather has changed or the winds stronger or whatever it may be, or does it just need to be visually pleasing?

Chris Riebschlager: It really depends on the client's expectation there. To me, you take work like a Refik Anadol, right? His work is ostensibly data-driven. If I look at one of his pieces, I have no idea what data is being presented to me and what it actually means. It looks amazing, but I have no idea. I mean he could just tell me that it’s data-driven and I just have to take his word on it. 

Yeah. I know the Charlotte airport, for instance, he uses things like baggage handling data and things like that on this giant display. But I think like a fraction, 1% of the people walking by would know that's why it's doing what it's doing.

Chris Riebschlager: Exactly, and that could be a pre-rendered video and no one would ever know. But I think there are ways of incorporating those ideas into meaningful representations of that data. So the ways we've done that in the past are we did a lobby screen in Atlanta that was right next to a transit stop for a train and the idea was we have the actual transit information for that stop, like the next train arriving in five minutes on the screen. So that's one layer of this piece, but the bigger portion of the screen is given up to this flock of birds, and they're very calm and very chill when there's not a train arriving. And then as the train is approaching, they get more active. There's more happening on screen. 

So we have the literal data that you need and also some supplemental, beautiful, interesting thing to show that is connected to that day. To me personally, drawing a clear connection between what's happening on screen and the data we're trying to represent is very important to me.

Yeah. It reminds me of an ad on just like a digital poster in a subway platform, I think in Stockholm or something like that, and they did this very clever thing where you would have a model in the poster and as a subway train approached, her hair started to fall back and then, when the subway was coming into the station, she was in a wind tunnel and then she calmed down. I thought that's very clever. That's driven by data and triggers and everything else, and it's not quite generative art, but it's the same kind of thing. There's a relationship between what's happening and what you see.

Chris Riebschlager: Exactly, yeah. 

For the company, what are some projects that people who are listening to this would be familiar with?

Chris Riebschlager: Oh, my gosh, locally here in Kansas City, we have a project that when people ask me where I work, I always say do you know the big books in the library garage downtown? We made those. So it's a parking structure next to the library downtown in Kansas City that we did and it's basically to make it look like a huge bookshelf and it's a really cool landmark here in Kansas City. 

Is that an analog thing or is there a digital thing? 

Chris Riebschlager: That is just an analog. 

Okay, and in terms of digital ones, I think he did something with a big torch or something in a stadium? 

Chris Riebschlager: Yes, we did. We just installed what is the largest 3D printed structure in North America, certainly, and I think the world for the Las Vegas Raiders. So we created the Al Davis Memorial torch, which they had in Oakland at a small, maybe 15-foot tall torch, and we wanted to create just a huge monument in the new stadium to that. So through our L Sam large-scale additive manufacturing machine, which is essentially just a carwash size 3D printer, we created a huge torch sculpture. I think it's 90 feet tall and has eliminated LED structure in the center to represent the flame, and it's just a remarkable, amazing piece that made the news. 

I think it's transparent LED or LED mesh? 

Chris Riebschlager: I don't think it's a LED mesh. It's LED in that metal structure that they basically made a flame form that goes in the torch and then eliminated that from within. 

Have you done any big corporate lobbies and things like that with giant video walls where you're developing content for them?

Chris Riebschlager: Oh, absolutely. A couple that comes to mind and we just did one last year for State Farm in their headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois. Overall, I think it's a 3,000 or 4,000 square foot space that is like a monument, a museum to  State Farm history, which has a century-long history, a lot of artifacts, a lot of video and audio content. It's a really amazing space. We recreated the office of the original founders, and then created an interactive where you can explore around the space and find out like, this is the pen that was actually used to sign the initial corporate contract or whatever, and as part of that, there's also an immersive theater in the center that lets you play different videos that kind of unpack the history of State Farm.

Yeah, and that's a company like Geico, that's trying quite hard with its marketing and everything to not be just boring insurance company? 

Chris Riebschlager: Yeah. Insurance can be a pretty dry topic, but we tried to make it as interesting as possible. 

My son is in insurance. (Laughter) We can talk a lot about it but I don't want to get him in trouble. 

Chris Riebschlager: It’s a very fascinating and very important industry.

It's an amazing industry. 

With the company right now, what are some projects that over the next 6 to 12 months we should be looking for that you’re allowed to talk about? 

Chris Riebschlager: We have a lot of activities going on at the new SoFi stadium in Los Angeles, which is going to be the new home of the Rams and Chargers. So if you haven't seen images of that stadium, it is absolutely bananas. It's got what is the biggest Oculus LED screen? 

Yeah, the giant Halo, the Samsung screen. 

Chris Riebschlager: This is absolutely massive, and it's an amazing space to have the opportunity to install some work in. So we have some work for different brand activations in that space. So one of the big ones is the YouTube theater, which is a performance venue, as far as the stadium that we did a large LED wall on the outside of that theater and also a YouTube icon, a structural YouTube icon in the Plaza in front of the theater that we have the LED screen in that is going to function as a magic mirror. It’s just fun, interesting, “look at me, I'm up there” and look at all kinds of crazy things, but also show off a YouTube content creator stuff and highlighting the content creators. 

I'm sure the people in LA are excited about the concept of actually going to a football game that has the full capacity as we get healthy. 

Chris Riebschlager: For sure. 

All right, Chris, thank you so much for taking some time with me today. I really appreciate it. 

Chris Riebschlager: Absolutely. Thank you.

 

 

Amanda Benzecry, Take Down The Ads

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

As much as people in the digital signage industry are understandably excited and enthused by the appearance of more and more digital displays in public spaces, it's important to remember that not everyone is in love with screens.

There's always some people who don't like ad posters and billboards just because. But there are others who have tangible, well-researched and argued positions about why they're not big fans.

I recently came across a small, grassroots campaign in the UK that has a running slogan of Take Down The Ads! It grew out of the appearance of LED ad spectaculars that went up a few years ago in a lovely, leafy part of southwest London.

Their appearance offended Amanda Benzecry, who has been leading an effort online and through the local government process to fight their existence, primarily on environmental grounds.

It could seem, from a distance, like just an effort to rid the neighborhood of something the locals don't like or understand. But Benzecry actually comes out of the advertising industry and understands how things work.

We had a great chat about why she and other similar efforts around the UK are fighting the steady influx of digital out of home displays, and the reasons behind their opposition.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Amanda, thank you for joining me. First of all, can you tell me what the Take Down the Ads movement is all about? 

Amanda Benzecry: It goes back about six years and it all started with a very local issue, completely relevant to the immediate area in which I live and the appearance of three very large LED screens, I'm talking huge, now marketed as the Barnes Landmark and the Barnes Tower, which appeared without really much, or if any local consultation, and this is in Southwest London. It's on a road that is called the South Circular, but at the point in which these screens appeared, it's only a two-lane thing. So we're not talking about a big motorway and it is a gateway between a number of sort of conurbation, Barnes, Roehampton, Putney. It gets a reasonable amount of traffic going through it, but it is not a motorway. 

It was previously characterized by being very dark and very leafy and sits opposite a designated nature reserve, which sounds weird for London, but we get these little pockets. The complication was that in this case, the screens went up on the land that belongs to a rugby club, so it's not like other LED screens around the borough, which sit on council land. This was actually an application by a rugby club. To have permission, to have screens erected, to generate funds, to ensure the future of the rugby club. And that was the justification for allowing the screens to be erected in a location that if you look at all the planning guidelines, it should not have been allowed, but they found a way around it. 

Now, I don't believe that anybody should, and I'm not against the sport and not against rugby, but I don't think that given the location of those screens and the implications because it impacted on a wildlife corridor and bat movements and things like that. I have always campaigned on an environmental platform. So Take Down the Ads began with a specific campaign against those screens, and unfortunately, it became a sort of Twitter storm and I was accused of wanting to put a rugby club out of business, and it was never that. It has always been an environmental thing. And really the change to the landscape is absolutely unacceptable. 

Also, this rugby club happened to be located in metropolitan open land. Metropolitan open land is afforded certain protections. So, the whole thing was really quite suspicious as well, and I think the key thing is, and this is what started the whole issue, is that the location was quite vulnerable in that there weren't many neighbors around because it was opposite a nature reserve because there is meant to be a degree of local consultation when certain screens go up, but then in this instance, they didn't need to be because nobody was effectively living immediately opposite. But my point was actually the result implicates the entire environment and all of us, even if we live a quarter of a mile away, I have to drive past them and I would really have liked the choice to comment as to whether I wanted to have these things up or not. 

That's a very long explanation but Take Down the Ads started six years ago, but it started with a particular campaign. Then it grew, although it's much more challenging for me in this part of London, into looking at the incursion of these screens across the borough. I would say probably that we don't have too many, but I don't think we should have any because they are now on a scale that is completely unacceptable. They are marketed, the main contractor here is JC Decaux. They are marketed as towers. They are the size of buildings and we now have a number on high streets which are just huge and completely unnecessary and environmentally damaging and adding more clutter to what are extremely busy streetscapes, because remember, we don't have wide avenues in London. It's all very narrow, everybody's on top of everything. We have old buildings, we have new buildings and these things sit on the street and they are mind-blowing and you don't have a choice. You don't have a choice to switch them off or not to look at them. They just glare down at you. 

This is what the digital out-of-home companies like about it. The fact that you can't miss them, but I think it's important to stress, as people are listening to this, you actually come out of advertising. You're not somebody who just hates ads. You understand the business. 

Amanda Benzecry: Absolutely. It is not about advertising. It is about the medium and what that medium does to a local environment, the pollution, and also mental pollution because when you're driving in London, bloody hell, there's so much stuff going on and then suddenly there are these big screens. So there's environmental pollution, mental pollution burning away, I know they're LED and, but I think there is a place for these screens, like in airports, on airport concourses or train stations where you've got a captive audience and you might want to be entertained. Where they start to come in and add clutter and they're huge and spoil the environment and just add to the mental pollution, I think that is unacceptable, and particularly when, there are many ways to advertise to people now and all those ways that you can reach people, then people still have the choice to not view them or whatever. They can false forward, or they can delete or whatever. 

With these, you just don't have the choice, except for, I try not to look at them when I'm going past, and I think that is an arrogant selfish thing to do, especially nowadays when we are so worried about our environment and mental health and things like that. 

This caught my attention based on Twitter, and I think you included my Twitter handle in a tweet or something like that, and I'd look at it and went what's that? You have a petition that you're looking to get circulated and t's pretty modest compared to a lot of petitions.

Amanda Benzecry: It is quite interesting, and I am quite frankly slightly disappointed that it doesn't seem to have caught the attention. 

Well, now with Sixteen:Nine covering it… (Laughter) 

Amanda Benzecry: Well, yeah, exactly.

But I think, to be honest, we're getting a bit of petition fatigue. Interestingly, for the CARPA campaign, when I initiated the campaign against the rugby club. That one has currently got 650 responses, but it's a very old petition now.

Again, it needs to be in the thousands for anybody to really take any notice. But I think disappointingly, I'm not seeing anybody in a position like a green party actually taking it up as a cause and promoting it, and I'm not sure why, other than that, maybe there are just big bucks involved. These screens do make money for councils and there would be a loss of revenue if they weren't allowed to rent the land to the JC Decaux and Clear Channel and stuff like that. So clearly there is a commercial argument that is working in the favor of the LED screens. I think what is also quite interesting is there have been instances where the local council has refused planning and then it goes to the government level, to the planning inspectorate and then they override it. They override the local council. So my personal view is that it needs somebody, a politician, to take it out, but nobody seems to be willing to, and that is disappointing, particularly now when the environment is so important.

SoI can't explain that other than there's money somewhere involved, and that's that stopping it, I would just say interestingly we, Take Down the Ads that did get involved in an application for the screen over a major arterial road, and that was an application by Transport for London who is responsible obviously for the underground system, and their stance on these screens actually is that they believe that a driver can cope with lots of different messages. So the safety aspect is a very difficult platform to campaign on because you don't get their support, but in this case, the road runs along from outer London into central London, there are a number of roundabouts and overpasses, and then the road goes under the roundabout and there are bridges if you like, and they have steadily through the area, erected these LED screens claiming, excuse me, that they're great for disseminating traffic information. 

I have never seen traffic information on them, and it came to a point where we've got an intersection locally, which is really the intersection between Putney common, Wimbledon, common, and thank goodness, we were actually able to campaign on an environmental platform and the local council rejected it and they didn't appeal. So that was a small victory. But it was pretty obvious, but there are other areas where it's particularly a conversion from paper to LED. That seems to be just fine. If there's been a poster there already has a poster then you can change it to LED pretty easily actually. 

So in the context of what you do, if you get word of a plan out there, is it just yourself, or do you have a circle of people? 

Amanda Benzecry: So to be honest, for the most part, it's probably three of us, but don't tell JC Decaux that, but also we have joined a network of ad blocks across the country.

Yeah, people across the country are doing things locally. 

Amanda Benzecry: Yeah, but the reality is if somebody is applying for the installation of a LED screen in my area, the local authority isn’t going to take any notice of that because they're in Bristol. But certainly, there's also a number of societies in the area and we keep an eye on planning applications and make sure that we don't miss something. So if something comes up, we're able to challenge it, but the reality is you have to challenge it in a sensible way, grounded in those planning policies.

But I think one thing I have been doing or certainly Take Down the Ads has been doing, which has had some effect because I believe that it was acknowledged that it was having an effect from the feedback I got, again, in relation to the rugby club is that we've been writing to advertisers. And some of them ignore it. Some of them do withdraw their ads and that has an implication on revenue. On environmental grounds, and not saying come down and see this for yourself, but just giving the picture and saying the choice is yours, but we just wanted to advise you that the screens are controversial on an environmental platform, and that has some currency with some advertisers. 

Interesting, not the automotive guys. But some of them have said, thank you for your attention to that. We won't use them again, or a couple of them are taking them down immediately, which is nice, so that is an interesting strategy, and I've said to the other guys to just writing to the advertisers because I think the only way you can possibly affect change, if what you're saying is that the industry doesn't really understand how consumers are feeling, then if you write to advertisers and the advertisers keep coming back and saying, hold on, what's going on here? This is controversial, then that's another way round it really, I think. 

I gather much of what you're saying is, yes, there are ostensible controls in place at the council level and above that, but unless people such as yourself raise the issue, that the controls are just rubber stamp exercises and things go through.

Amanda Benzecry: I think that is the case because one of the primary directives is, you have to sensitively handle advertising and it should not add clutter into an already busy streetscape. Well, it does. Yeah, so I think to answer your question, yes, definitely. I think it will slip through unless there is a concern and an effort to remind the planning department of their obligations and of the planning policies, which is remarkable really.

You would have thought that they would automatically protect an environment, but I'm seeing countless decisions, not only with LED screens, but buildings and stuff, where they seem to put an interpretation on planning guidelines, which I just can't believe that they've done, and yeah so I think it is really important for locals to make an effort when there is the news and we keep an eye out and look at the planning applications when there is an application for a screen that as many people as possible know about it and can comment. 

You would think that because people from around the world come to London because they want to see the old buildings and heaths and everything else, the leafy areas that there would be a business concern from the tourist end that if you start to dot the landscape, particularly the areas that are supposed to be visually attractive, like there are lots of parts of London that, up by the airport and so on that it's not going to be this attractive anyways, but people won't come if it just looks like suburban Cincinnati or something.

Amanda Benzecry: I think to be fair, we haven't arrived at a situation yet like when you're traveling on the motorways in America and stuff like that, it's not as bad as that yet.

So I think one has to think ahead as to the more these things go through. That's the beginning of a slippery slope and we absolutely don't want that to happen. I suppose it's difficult, isn't it? When you don't know what it was like before they were there, you can't really judge how bad it is.

For example, the three screens that started off my campaign. I think people are used to them now and that's the danger as well that our tolerance becomes greater and all, and we just become complacent and then you turn around and suddenly there's another, do you see what I mean? But I don't believe it's bad enough, certainly in those tourist areas for the moment that it would have a detrimental impact on our tourist industry. I think there are many other things that have a detrimental impact on our tourist industry, but I can't honestly say that those screens would be one at the moment. 

Somebody did say, there was a petition comment that said, “We don't want to be like America” and some American people got very offended by that. And you do see them all along the motorways and, I think what is quite interesting is that some of the companies are being quite creative with the way they present these screens. So we're seeing some sort of architectural input that sometimes gives them validity. Again, with the rugby club, they decided to make the surroundings look like rugby player posts, which actually made it even worse because you've got these total posts, and just give it permission that somehow they're making some artistic contribution to the environment, which I don't think they are.

Do you get the flip side of the argument from the councils that this adds to our revenue base by doing this. If we don't do this, do we have to raise taxes?

Amanda Benzecry: Well, yeah. We actually live in a borough where that's a whole other argument, we pay too little council tax as a borough, and I don't know, to be honest, I haven’t done the calculations to know how much our council tax would increase if they didn't have any LED screens in the borough. I couldn't begin to comment, and so who knows, it could be a lot, could be a little, but I do think that this particular borough, being a conservative borough, always tries to keep the costs low unnecessarily, and that's an awful thing to say because I'm sure, there are a lot of people on the breadline, but the whole structure of council tax is a whole other podcast.

But on the face of it, yes, I understand how there is an argument that says, we need the revenue and just as the rugby club, their argument was if we don't have the revenue from the screens, we'll go out of business and that's really hard, and so therefore you're putting an environmental argument against a commercial argument and which one should win? My view would always be to find other ways to generate revenue so it's not so damaging to the environment that it has to be the environmental platform. There are always other ways if you weren't able to do it, you'd find another way. 

Is light pollution an issue at all?

Amanda Benzecry: It's interesting because I've read somewhere that one of the companies is talking about taking measures to mitigate light pollution, maybe turning them off at night. The rugby club screens go off at night blessedly, which is great. A lot of others burned through and I think so that it would be very helpful if there was a time limit set on these things, it would definitely be because it would calm things down in the evening. 

I would argue that but again, you see there's no proven evidence, but I would argue that the wildlife corridor that was opposite the nature reserve, the bat route because in this part of London, we have these green spaces that interconnect and therefore there is evidence that wildlife moves between them and yes, in the winter, there is no winter because the lights are still burning till 11 o'clock. So whether that confuses wildlife, I'm sure it does well, and apparently, the insect population is declining, et cetera. But to be honest, there's nothing, there's no comprehensive and absolutely categorical study that has said yes, over the last 10 years, we've seen the insect population decline by 20% because of LED screens.

Do you see what I mean? So it's really difficult. 

So the overarching thrust of all of this in many ways is not purely take down the ads don't want any more advertising, anything else. It's an in-your-face statement, but it's really about to let slow down and really look at what's going on and enforce the controls that are supposedly in place?

Amanda Benzecry: I think so, but also I do think that because of the size of them and things, I think that there are places for them, and I don't believe that the place is in London anyway, because of the size of it, and the small roads. I just don't think they should be in our city.

I think they can be in our airports and in our railways, absolutely. But not in the street with all the traffic and the mayhem and the pedestrians and the cyclists, and I just think they are effectively unnecessary distractions. 

Have you ever spoken to a JC Decaux, Global Outdoor, or any of those?

Amanda Benzecry: JC Decaux blocked me actually because obviously, the “I damage the environment, take me down” graphic which was produced here. I absolutely blitzed them with that and I replied to everything and all their clients and this one and that one, and in the end, I'm afraid I was blocked, and I think it’s still not enough, and I think advertisers actually need to take some responsibility as well, but you can understand how everybody's all excited about them and they look fab and the brands up there and all that. I get it. 

But I think what you said earlier is that people need to just slow down and think about what it's doing to our streets and people and the distractions and just the business of it all, and I think just to be a little bit more judicious with their choice of locations, I think is what one would hope for in the way moving forward.

So if people listening to this are in Southwest London in particular or elsewhere, and want to be supportive of what you're doing and maybe lend a hand, how would they do that?

Amanda Benzecry: I think they can certainly tweet to me, @takedowntheads. The Facebook page is actually called CARPA. Unfortunately, I wanted to drop that and change it, Take Down the Ads, but Facebook won't let me do that. So that is still called CARPA and I think there's an email address on there. So yeah, I think locally the entity is pretty well known, but also look at the petitions as well, and support the generic petition, which would be great, which is to get the government to consider the proliferation of these ads and, and more public consultation. 

All right. It was a pleasure to have some time chatting with you.

Amanda Benzecry: Thank you. I think I chatted at you, didn't I? 

That's what interviews are for!

Amanda Benzecry: Oh, that's okay then. Anyway, thank you for inviting me on, and I really appreciate it. It's been very nice. Thank you very much.

 

Alberto Scirocco, Leftchannel

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

While the people who wake up in the morning thinking about digital signage fully understand and appreciate the value and importance of great, effective creative, there are lots of end-users who don't quite get that part of it - and still think of display projects as AV technology exercises.

It's particularly true with large format display jobs - which are being green-lighted all the time based on lots of discussion around pixel pitch, scale and cost, but almost none about what will be on the display.

Alberto Scirocco is the Founder and Creative Director of the motion and design studio leftchannel, which is technically based in Ohio, but is largely virtual. His office, for example, is on the Italian Riviera. Poor fella.

I had a chat with Scirocco about the Wild West nature of the business, when it comes to design. We had a great conversation about  what makes displays interesting and engaging, and how the good ones have a function.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Alberto, thanks for joining me. You’re off in Italy!

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah, that's right. I am in Italy right now. 

Can you tell me the background about leftchannel? 

Alberto Scirocco: We started leftchannel about 20 years ago and at the beginning, we just started as a motion design studio, so a more traditional format at the time. Did a lot of advertising, music videos, film titles, and a lot of our gigs were really artistic execution, and then, in the course of time, through the years, we've become more and more involved in actually crafting some of the messages that we're animating and putting in motion, and it's been an interesting road, and of course, markets change in a lot of different ways and technologies have changed in lots of different ways, and one of the things that have been interesting for us has been adapting to all the new stuff and we have an experimental nature.

I come from industrial design and fine art, and so I'm always gonna have this foot in both camps of being engineer minded, but also have a real passion for really expressive artistic work, and in the last several years, we have been being more and more focused on really trying to apply strategy to design and making sure that we were doing stuff that's useful and not just pretty.

This would be more motion, graphic design than video editing? 

Alberto Scirocco: Correct. We end up having to do a lot of production, but generally, our focus is design, and so when we do production it is because it's part of a piece that we'll have design and animation within it. 

I'm guessing if you've been at this for 20 years, that the demand to do things on screens has grown quite a bit because 20 years ago, digital signage was one of those things where you had to explain what it was. Now, there are so many screens out there and there are so many large format displays where it moves away from just being messaging to experientially engaging stuff where you really have to think about the creative. 

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah, exactly. I think that's part of what motivated this conversation is exactly the fact that, as you mentioned, signage used to have a very practical, very pragmatic mindset, you think about billboards and advertising and there's a very clear function of what those things are for. For a while now, screens have appeared in a lot of different places and it's bringing a lot more functions to the table, a lot more opportunities of what screens can do and some of them are really quite powerful, and so yeah, the demand has grown quite a bit. The nature of the request has grown quite a bit, because like you said, I think when I first started there were jumbotrons, and you were doing pixel animation, stuff that looked like 80s video games on this gigantic screen. So they were very delineated into what they were trying to do. 

But now it's wide open. You have art installations, you have places that completely define placemaking, completely defined by the screen and the experiences inside. So, it's a pretty exciting time. I have to say for this type of work. 

You're doing in Italy. leftchannel, I believe is based in Ohio, but you're virtual and you work around the globe, right? 

Alberto Scirocco: That's exactly right. We have people from all over and also when we were very much in Ohio, we still didn't work in our geographical area. So we’ve always done national, international work just because the nature of the work is unique, and so it's attracting people from all over. 

In the context of digital signage and large format display, what are some of your projects that people listening might be familiar with?

Alberto Scirocco: I think there were a couple of Times Square videos that are likely to have seen something we did for Disney and Exotica which were very visible and that stuff folds down that category of the more traditional type of work that you would think, but it's very noticeable, it's really big and flashy and you're really competing for eyes, but it was really fun, project because of the fact of combining animation, obviously they're very illustrative look and then very graphic components and having to support Exotica and the product and advertising. So we love things like that, briefs like this, where there's lots of complicated stuff that need to come together. That's stuff that we get really excited about. 

Have you done much in the way of permanent installations, like the creative for permanent ones? 

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah, there's actually a couple of large corporate pieces we have done for companies, which is also a very exciting and interesting field for us.

Once again, we tend to get involved in a lot of different things, but there was a common thread and the common thread is trying to build something that does something. I know that it doesn't seem like much, but it was actually the real thought behind it. We really love work that has a functional quality and sometimes even artistic pieces have a very functional quality, right? I refer frequently to the Samsung screen in Korea, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and it's interesting because some of that work obviously feels very artistic, but it has a great effect on that area. It defines that place completely. 

So there is a function to it and the function is not always directly advertising, which is actually one of the issues that I have sometimes in industry is how to directly focus on advertising. A lot of this signage is missing some of your opportunity, but yeah, we've done some large installations on corporate buildings. And like I said, that's also a very interesting field sometimes because you're trying to create something that is doing something for the audience, and so it's entertaining and interesting, it defines space, it does something for people passing by. It's still telling a story of a company and there's lots of different ways that you can do that. Sometimes it's a very explicit story, but sometimes it's just a complete composition of impressions as well. 

If I look on your portfolio page on the experiential side, I see did the Sheraton Dallas and Verizon stores and things like that. 

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah. So it's a very broad spectrum.

The Sheraton was a very fun project. We're still engaged in the project, we visit to refresh their content from time to time. Very interesting placement of these two structures that are wrapped with screens because being on the doorway, they have this almost like arch triumph feel, right, where they are greeting people on the way in but they're also are still addressing all the people on the inside, from the bar and restaurant inside the lobby. And so they have a dual function, so it's really interesting to create work that has that impactful effect on people that come in. But it also has an ambient peaceful environment feeling for the people that are on the inside. So yeah, that's been an extremely fun project.

We're actually rolling out a couple of new modules for that in the next couple of months. 

Your managing director, Candy, I was trading emails with her and she was saying how experiential is in something of a Wild West phase. What do you guys mean by that? 

Alberto Scirocco: If you think about advertising, in its infancy, there was a lot of defining what advertising could do and then if you fast forward all the way to today, there is a science to advertising. There's a lot of things that are just so clearly defined to the point that, unfortunately, there are also expectations on both ends, right? You just know how certain things are gonna look and sound, but it's because there's clarity of how people react to things and what works.

And in truth, there's always creative space in every place. But when something gets very refined and it's not in infancy anymore after a while, there's just a little bit less space. But digital signage is really in a sense in its infancy, there are still firsts that are coming out. And people are going at it in a lot of different ways. Sometimes they're going at it a little backward. So there's a lot of people that, for example, will look at a space and they'll say, we need a screen there, and that seems to make sense, because they're looking at in terms of hardware, “let's put an opportunity there” but obviously, the screen is just an opportunity. It's just an empty potential, and when people walk by a screen, they don't see a screen, they just see what's on the screen, and so it's odd how a lot of these installations are basically being done that way, without a real strategy of the necessary hat are we trying to do with this space, what do we want people to see? And then sourcing the technology that supports it. 

I know there are really a lot of situations where people are saying we're going to put something there and somebody will figure out what goes on. 

Yeah I've heard stories. I remember a friend of mine, who's a creative director for a digital shop in the Toronto area saying he got a call one day from an AV integrator who had put up a big LCD video wall somewhere, and the guy was asking, “Do you have any content we could put on this thing because we're lighting it up today?” Michael, my friend, was on the other end of the phone, just looking at the phone call going, “What the hell?” 

Alberto Scirocco: That actually happens a lot. You mentioned that and I know it seems crazy and I think to most people listening to this, it might seem like a very odd thing, but it actually happens so much that people contact us and ask us for blank content to have for those situations, just generic stuff to fill screens. So it's a little bit crazy, right? If you imagine that movie theaters did that, they just put up screens and, speaking of that, I tend to make this kind of comment, when's the last time you told somebody to go down to the theater to have a great new projector? 

People are very unaware of the technology and technology is transparent to the user. At the same time, I get it because I understand how people, especially coming for real estate, feel like if we had something here, they didn't want to lose that potential, and because, as I said, this is a little bit far west, because it is a little bit lost. Right now you can go to a number of people to have a conversation about creating an experience. You could be talking to an architect and that kind of makes sense. You could be talking to a company like us, a video company, you can be talking to a hardware manufacturer, you can talk to an integrator. So there are lots of different people you could be interfacing with and obviously, they're all coming from a different position.

You go to Best Buy to buy a TV, you walk out with a TV. There is an understanding that there's content out there you're going to see. Similarly, with subscriptions, the content is a given, and so with the same mindset, you go out, you buy a gigantic screen, maybe it's just an ultra-widescreen, and all of a sudden there's really nothing for that thing out there. That has to be made by somebody, and for us, sometimes that's amusing and entertaining because somebody hands you a very weird form, and then we suddenly have to figure out, who's here, what is the story, what kind of mindset there and how long ago as well, like we have to visit in reverse trying to figure out what we can make with space, and t, that can be fun for designers, but as you can imagine there was an opportunity in kind of planning things if possible.

You mentioned being somebody who has an affinity for things that have a function to them, do big experiential/engaging displays need to have a point, or is it enough to be wow factor/eye candy? 

Alberto Scirocco: I don't know that I can make such a blank statement. In my opinion, there's always a point, that is the point. I’m in Italy right now, which is where I'm from. There's a lot of art, a lot of public art. There's also a lot of decorated places. So most buildings are decorated, most gates are decorated. You just grew up with this idea that wherever you lay your eyes, there's going to be something pretty. Somebody is taking the time to decorate it, and but there's also a lot of functional spaces out there, especially modern spaces that tend to be very functional.

There's just a certain sense of what a strip mall looks like, and it's a very undecorated place, right? There are a lot of very pragmatic places. Certainly, something that is just pretty and the spectacle can really do quite a bit for space and that's a function, making something beautiful is definitely a function. So when I say function, I don't mean that automatically it is creating schedules or whatever, but the point that I make is that, if you are trying to make a place interesting, then maybe advertising is not the right thing to do with that space.

And for example, there's actually an airport that I won't mention. They went through a

very large renovation and part of the renovation, they put these two gigantic screens and all to do is show advertising and it's almost like an intentionally designed strategy to make people ignore the two biggest screens on earth because when you think about it, I don't know, there's a bigger softball than people in the airport. People are just bored and pretty much everything you're doing, the airport is waiting. So you're waiting in line, then you go wait in another line, and if you have nobody in line, you are just simply waiting, and so it'd be pretty easy to entertain those people, but that's the one thing that we have gotten really good at doing is not looking at advertising, and a hundred percent of retiring programming is really not a good use of that space, and so then it's a whole lot of people that are wasting a lot of opportunities. 

Is there a monetization model for this sort of thing where it is experiential as visually interesting, but you're doing something that's going to pay for this what is still pretty expensive tech? 

Alberto Scirocco: I think there are lots of them, I think there are lots of different ones. If you have a mall and more people are coming, that has value, and so there’s a monetization for the children area in the mall clearly iins the fact that you're creating traffic, you're attracting people who can spend time. So there's really a lot of monetization strategies and for a lot of different situations, and that's what I mean by function. Those are those situations where you can have that conversation and say, what is it that we want in this case?

I think sometimes people fall into that trap of directly monetizing something and then say we're just going to sell space. But that's not automatically something that is going to work. So sometimes you have to be a little bit more strategic about really what do we want out of this space and how is that going to be functional for us? And sometimes, traffic, the quality of the experience of the viewer. You think about theme parks and theme parks are money machines in a lot of different forms, right? People pay at the door to get in and everything in there is expensive, and then they're just gigantic shops but people are enjoying themselves. And so that's the point. You're trading something for something you've giving the audience, and you're charging them for it, and I think everybody's very comfortable with that. We all don't mind paying for it. That's a good win-win, consumers are comfortable with it.  So I think if you make a space worth people's times and people having a good experience then they're okay rewarding you, by spending their money on your experience as the product you offer.

So I think that's really what it comes down to. You're trying to make sure that it's a dialogue between two groups, and so you want to give the audience something that fits with their story. So where they are, where they're trying to do in this specific place, that makes sense for where they are and people are rewarding you.

So when you engage with a new customer or maybe re-engage with an existing one, what's the process? How do you sit down and set the intention for the project? 

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah, that's a varied answer because the customers are coming from lots of different places, and so sometimes you have people that come to the table with nothing. They just know that for example, I have a property and they want to embellish it or they want to create something that will give a sense of value or sometime they'll have a property and the city is asking them to invest in art and that's it, and they have to invest some percentage. So there are lots of different agendas, but you also have marketing teams and insights who have a very clear sense of what they're trying to do.

And it varies quite a bit, so it depends on really what people bring to the table. So when people have no real idea what they're trying to do, we try to take a really broad approach and explore the opprtunity, understand the space, understand the audience of the center, who could be there, who is there, what will be good for them? It's essentially a design thinking exercise, as you can imagine, it's just really clearly understanding who we are on our end and meaning us as the client, and so understanding, what they offer, what they can do that is positive and obviously, what they have to gain and then the same, do the same thing for the audience and then try to draw vectors, trying to understand really what's a place where both groups can overlap in a natural way and it translates into the design.

When you’re producing content for a client, how does the conversation go when you're talking about the sustainability, the shelf life of the piece? Because I've seen lots of work that looks fantastic, but it's there too long. It becomes stale dated. 

Alberto Scirocco: That's right, and that also changes greatly because it changes, based on how frequently people go to a place.

Going back to the example of theme parks, sometimes some of those experiences stay for a really long time, because you're not just going there every day, and so you might experience it twice in the arch of seven-eight years, and so it doesn't quite get old. But you put something in front of a mass transit terminal, like a subway and the same people now are going over twice a day or two, four times a day, every day, and now it's quite different, and again that's what really comes down to what we're talking about. So really understand the situation, understand the use. And then of course there's always the component of finance. What makes sense financially? 

So if the frequency is important, then you have to be creative about creating content that has an ability to change frequently, and as you said, that really is an application of the space or the use. They're all different. But that's something that definitely figures. We definitely try to be really focused on that as well. How frequently refreshes, how refreshes are going to come together and, is there going to be a need for drastically changing the content, because maybe it is like an array of different pieces, or is there a story that gets to be evolved? We have some corporate clients where we're busily redoing or modifying the piece every couple of years and which is a fairly long period of time, but it is an evolution of the same story. So it still satisfies the original brief has just new content, new footage, new design/ 

One of the workarounds for the cost of content and the challenge of keeping it refreshed is doing visualized data. There are several pieces out there in the world at airports, in public buildings, and so on. I'm a fan of the set-and-forget types that it's very efficient and everything else, but I'm starting to wonder more and more about its effectiveness because I just wrote about one at the Sydney Australia Convention Center yesterday, it's a 96-meter long display, and it'almost looks like a blue screen of death, but it's not obviously. Code running across the screen. It looks visually interesting. But I wonder sometimes when people are looking at this, do they know what they're looking at? And does it matter whether they know what they're looking at?

Alberto Scirocco: But, it's funny to some degree it doesn’t. Some of those pieces, they're really much more akin to art and video generative, something that is generative work that is generated by data. In the end, it's really more for our satisfaction to know that it’s generated by data, but it's a very plastic piece. It looks like what it looks like and if it's beautiful and it's interesting to see, then it's something you can watch for a period of time, it's like watching a waterfall. You can pretty much watch it endlessly because it's just naturally interesting, and so if you're able to recreate that natural sense of something that has just enough evolution, enough variety, but some qualities that are attractive, so that piece can stand forever, and then when it was generated by data or not, but it's irrelevant, and it's very transparent tp most users, it becomes really cool for designers. 

People get really excited sometimes, but it does but is they are really visible. I don't know if you're an audiophile, but I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to this stuff and I love audio stuff, and sometimes you're looking at an amplifier and that its distortion is so low and but in the end, you're not really hearing that. You just know it, so it becomes an intellectual appreciation that your body really just ignores.

Is it a little bit like buying a car in the old days, everybody would open the hood and look at the engine and all that, and now I suspect 99% of people never even flip the lid open ‘cause they don't know what they're looking at and who cares? 

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah, exactly. It just knowledge. It's nice to know about the product. It's nice to know what's happening behind it, but it doesn't necessarily affect your experience of it, but it's interesting. 

It's interesting work and it's cool that work is out there. It's cool that people have found a way to in some way, intellectually you can compare the fact that something moves very naturally, but is still generated by data and so you can say the way that the flow of data kinda ends up being similar to a form of chaos controlled chaos, which is similar to nature. This stuff is all really interesting in theory. In the end, if the piece is beautiful, then it's beautiful to look at, and then at the same time, as you said, it could also be puzzling but then, a lot of abstract work is, so I think there's a lot of good in that.

And as it's right application, like you mentioned, the airport is a good place for a piece of art, especially a piece of art that is constantly evolving. You have the perfect audience, in that case, to sit down and contemplate something that is just transforming, I think that's really a good application.

You mentioned the Samsung board in Seoul’s Gangnam area. There's been a lot of stuff on LinkedIn and I guess more broadly on social media about these anamorphic displays. Are you seeing a lot of demand for that from inbound customers? 

Alberto Scirocco: Yeah, we are. There's definitely conversations that come about it and all these things, it's always funny.

We were very experimental at the beginning of our careers as a motion design studio. I was very interested in really doing things just to see what you could do with the media, and it wasn't like a desire to be different. It was just like curiosity about what the software and the medium could do, because it was new.

So we did a video of photo parallax, which is a very trite technique today, but, in 2004, it wasn't, it was very new and we put it out there and it was a video for a DJ and it was the first video of MTV put on their online presence, and for a couple of years, it was a daily email of somebody asking us to repeat that and then years later, we did something else which was visit combining cell animation with 2d work, with digital work and trying to make, so another thing that also became very popular eventually, and then for a couple of years, it was everybody asking for the same thing, and so that's how it works. 

Somebody puts a waterfall in the lobby, everybody wants a waterfall in the lobby, and their first waterfall is super cool, it's a really cool idea and it's great. The 40th that’s out there, It's still cool, but it's not necessary. What basically ends up happening is that you, as an artist, find yourself getting constantly typecast, and when you're concentrating to break that typecast because what you are trying to say to people is, “I can do a lot of different things, and that was an idea, and I have more ideas”, but it's easy to shop for a thing that you see then for ones you don't see, and so I think that's what happens.  

That screen you mentioned, it’s very successful, it's very smart. It's also very simple, and it's really good, you know what I mean? It's just a beautiful, fun thing and I love to see it and that's what you want it to be. You want it to be something that you just said, I'd love to go see that in person, and so now everybody's thinking, “oh, that's it, that's the solution!” 

But you'll have to break it to them thatthe visual effect really only works from a very specific angle.

Alberto Scirocco: I know. Here is this massive thing that's visible for a really large surface, but it really only works for one slice of that. But when you are in that slice, it is pretty cool but it's a very good solution, and I think it's a great thing and that's what we were saying earlier about what you brought up about the wild west. It is wide open right now because when we do something that is going to be on a curved surface and everybody's going to be really stoked about that, and then there's going to be something else because there is a lot of space for exploration which, as I said, that's what's attracting us a lot, it's another opportunity to try stuff and do new things.

All right, Alberto. That was a great conversation. Just one quick, last question. If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online? 

Alberto Scirocco: leftchannel.com. I know we went real deep on that one, but we have lots of work on Vimeo and work and other channels as well. But yeah, people come and check us out. 

All right. I appreciate you giving me some of your time. 

Alberto Scirocco: Thank you so much for having me.

 

Sean Wargo and Peter Hansen, AVIXA

The trade organization AVIXA invests a lot of time, resources and dollars into trying to get a handle on what's going on in the audio-visual industry, and regularly publishes reports, briefs and even video explainers for members.

One of the big efforts is an annual industry overview, and the the most recent one provides a picture of industry that got kicked really hard in the shins in 2020 but appears to be coming out of it now.

Sean Wargo, AVIXA’s Senior Director of Market Intelligence, and economic analyst Peter Hansen kindly set some time aside to walk through some of the findings, and drill down a little more specifically into how digital signage was impacted in the last 18 months or so, and how things look going forward. 

The good news is things are already looking up, and the forecast is pretty darn sunny for AV and signage.

The cloud platform I use for recording had a bad hair day, so you will come across a little back and forth about who could hear who, and Peter's audio eventually just disappeared on us from the file, so the episode is about five minutes shorter than normal as we nipped out the dead-silence and stitched it together. Things happen but it is still well worth a listen.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Hi guys, thanks for joining me. AVIXA does a lot of research about what's going on in the marketplace. You recently pushed out a big one. What's that all about and what did you find? I know that's a big question. 

Sean: Sure Dave, happy to be here. So we do an industry forecasting effort every year, that we refresh every year, we call it our Industry Outlook Trends Analysis (IOTA), Since we're in the tech industry, we have to have acronyms, of course. But the idea is that we're hoping to essentially provide guidance on the size and direction of all things proAV. We've drawn a pretty big definition for what that means, some more IT-sounding technologies are sometimes included. 

Long story short: the idea there is a revenue forecast that companies can use to see where the opportunities lie, challenges, etc. As you can imagine, particularly important as we come out of the pandemic and are looking towards recovery. 

Now, is that something that as an AVIXA member is expected, or is it a bonus part of membership? I don't belong to a whole bunch of industry associations, so I don't know if this is normal or something you just saw a hole and decided it needed to be filled. 

Sean: Yes, in the sense that most trade associations will do some sort of industry forecasting effort. AVIXA, formerly known as InfoComm, had studies that had been done through the years. We decided to do it a few years ago, it was to step up the game a little bit, go a bit deeper, broader with our analysis, and expand upon that forecasting effort. So we have a two-part offering to the marketplace.

There is a lot of that research that we will share with the membership, whether in the form of briefings, webinars, presentations that Peter and I will do out to the membership to help them understand the broader trends. But we also offer it as a paid offering. So dashboards, deep reports, forecasting notes, a whole bunch of additional deliverables that a company can buy into for those that are really needing to immerse themselves in data to make strategic decisions. So a little bit about a little bit of both. 

As somebody who spends all this time looking at this industry and writing about it, one of the challenges I've found is finding useful, relevant, trustworthy information about digital signage in particular, there are endless reports that you can see pop up on Google alerts, but they're all coming out of India, and the handful of what I would call legitimate research companies that are taking a look at this space are also generally looking at other stuff. 

So there's this real sort of absence of focused information about AV and particularly signage, at least it seems that way. 

Sean: Yeah, definitely true.

I think there are a lot of offerings out in the marketplace for market research about any given topic, especially if it has any currency, if there's any buzz happening in the marketplaces about a certain issue, you're going to find a lot of studies that you can subscribe to.

I think we wanted to approach it as an industry kind of insider, having the direct need for the information ourselves, we recognize that there was a gap, as you're noting, for digital signage conference and collaboration, all the bits and parts of the industry just really weren't well captured, measured, forecasted, etc. So it was part of why we stood up for this improved version of forecasts a few years back. 

Also because while you might find say bits of pieces of research on a certain segment. There's not a lot available that tells you the complete package, the complete story of pro AV. We recognize though, as you're noting by the lack of offerings in the marketplace, what that's telling you is there's not a lot of people that know a lot about the business. And so we also wanted to make sure we partnered with a company that has broad subject matter expertise, lots of analysts covering the underlying product categories, to provide that expert analyst commentary and input to crafting a forecast. So methodology and vetting of partners were really important to us as we built this out as well.

What's the important stuff that companies should be paying attention to? 

I get asked every week by somebody, what's the total bullet total addressable market for digital signage or for workplace digital signage or whatever it may be, and I also see endless presentations that assign a value to the overall digital signage marketplace, whether it's North American or global, and I look at this big ass number and think, okay that's an impressive number, but what does that mean and is it meaningful for a company? Or is it just a big number to impress people? 

Sean: That's a great point, and I think, what you're hinting at is that it's a starting point. So what a lot of companies are looking for, let's pick a manufacturer as an example. If you're a display manufacturer, you're wanting to see how big that total addressable market is, so you can calculate things like market share, you can plot your own growth forecast off of it, you can say, all right if the market's growing 80% compound annual growth rate, we're expecting better or worse based upon our specific situation. Maybe we can do better and get to 16 or 20. So it's a starting point. It's a reference point. 

What a lot of companies are looking for is that kind of reference point, whether it's global, to a specific geographic area, to a specific product segment, to a particular market they're serving. They need input and validation or a challenge to inside expectations. So that's what we're hoping and wanting to provide out there is that third-party view of a market situation. Understanding that in some cases that big fat global number that everybody likes to point out may not be useful to a very local company. But it can, when whittled down and segmented via some of the filters, can provide them a TAM number that they hey can then use inputs to craft their own forecast. 

Peter: Everyone disagrees about what a TAM of digital signage exactly means, and that's where we like to help people get dashboard access.

So they can understand, “do I dip my toes into the content side?” You know, the server storage, transmission and that are billions of dollars there. Or, I'm really focused on exclusively the screens along with the infrastructure, mounts, and stands, et cetera.

And so you end up with these different numbers there and to some extent, we try to take a stance and say it's a big market and an AV company, it can be working with all this, but also, we allow and encourage folks to dis-aggregate because we also don't really want them to take a step where if they are doing digital signage, they have to do XYZ. Your business should fill whatever niche it thinks it's best at, and that one number, as you say, can be a little ridiculous just to look at a single number from the perspective of most companies, because no company probably will fit exactly. “I only do North America for all parts, all every single product that goes into that number that is on the headline.” 

It must also be a challenge to draw a distinction around what is digital signage because I have seen no end of product pitches out there that have talked about collaboration displays as being digital signage and vice versa.

How do we wall this off? How do we say what digital signage is and then assign a value or a forecast? 

Sean: Yeah, that's probably the most important step of the process of forecasting is your definition phase. How are you drawing a circle around that particular segment or the industry as a whole and as Peter mentioned we want to make sure that we're including in our definitions a broad enough opportunity set.

Digital signage is a great example because I've seen digital signage forecasts that really are only the displays, and that's it, as if digital signage was only a display on a wall, forget the mount for a second, forget the media servers and AV servers that are feeding the content to it, forget the networking backend that may have to be built out to support the content distribution. So there's an ecosystem there that when we did our definitions phase, we purposely drew our circles a little bit larger, our definition is a bit broader to allow for a company to talk about, you know what, I'm in digital signage, but I'm going to serve this particular segment of it, this particular facet of it and that'll be my opportunity area. 

An example for us in signages, we include a very big number for what we call media servers, and the reason is that as we all know, you put a display. We think of it as the hungry display now needs to be fed, it needs content, and so you need servers to basically aggregate, distribute, optimize that content out. So that's a big area of spend within the signage category as a solution area. Soit's the right question to be asking, as you're looking at numbers is how do they define, and then of course, how do they measure, what assumptions are they making? What inputs do they gather? Those kinds of things to evaluate the research offering.

So we're coming out of... I hope we're coming out of a very rough 17 months or so and COVID-19 obviously had a pretty significant impact. I'm looking at a slide here that said 2020 was $214 billion in revenue for the AV industry globally. What had been the expectation for 2020 prior to the pandemic?

Sean: Sure. I think when we did our forecast in 2020, it was around when we started it in November of 2019 ‘cause that's when you start your forecast process, you gather your input. So right around March, April was the time we're looking at our numbers and saying, okay, here's what we had thought would happen. Now we have the pandemic. What do we think is going to be the impact? As you're sitting in May, which at that point, the assumptions we made is, maybe this is like many other viruses that have hit us where it's one or two waves and then it goes out, and so possibly by the end of 2020, the situation is improving and that there are vaccines being distributed, that most of the waves are done, all that kind of stuff, and we expected a return to business. So we expected 2020 originally to be only about a -8% in terms of revenue decline. In the end, when you look at all the surveys we did through 2022 AV providers, manufacturers, distributors, the final analysis said it was more like -17%. So double the decline that we originally forecast, and that's often what happens is you only know what you know at the time. You tend to be pessimistic or optimistic. I would say we were about the middle of the road. But we ended up providing that down. So the two 14 numbers that you're looking at now is much less than it would have been in normal time, say normal trajectory, but there's an upside to that too.

So because 2020 was worse, we seem to be in that recovery mode meaningfully. Now that. It looks like the trajectory coming out is even steeper. So you have bigger growth percentages in 2021, in 2022, and then it starts to level out by 2023 and 2024. So that we're able to say by 2022, we think a good portion of the globe is starting to look like what it did in 2019 and exceeding those revenue peaks as we come out of this.

Is it deferred spending or that money that didn't get spent in 2020 is lost, and this is a new budget? 

Sean: It's a bit of deferred spend, certainly, but it's also an adaptation. One of the big trends that we've highlighted in our reports is that the pandemic was a disruptor, not just because it shut down industries and economies, but also because it forced us to shift to remote everything, work, play, education, et cetera, and there are some lingering effects. I think we're in an experimentation phase right now where we're trying to see what does return to work look like. How hybrid is it? How virtual, how in person? 

So some of the spendings are an adaptation. It's learning t, and now emphasizing and investing in new ways of interaction, new ways of engaging audiences and workers and students, et cetera. So there's a bit of both, but I would also point to innovation. One of the things that disruption does is you start to think differently about the way you do business, and so new solution areas that we probably haven’t even fully thought of yet that kind of come out of this also is the mother of growth and an investment in our industry. But we look from a macro econ side. So Peter probably has some addition he can add to that in terms of how the economies and industries recovered too. 

One of the things that we cover, we have a strong macro econ section of our reports and one of the primary things that we look at is how is GDP expected to change, recover, et cetera, as we come out of the pandemic. And so, that has looked brighter and brighter. 2021 has a strong GDP estimate for us in many parts of the world. There are some challenging areas but we then benefit from that as that improves, we start to grow and improve as well. So I will look to that economic improvement as a kind of contributor and a driver of pro AV growth too. Not without challenges though.

When you set your filters for zeroing in on information, can you get a sense of the hit that happened overall for global AV in 2020? Can you drill down to the hit on digital signage? 

Peter: Yeah, so digital signage is actually one of the technologies that have been mostly closed to AV overall in the last year and this year, which I don’t think is that surprising. 

We talk about AV and how it pertains to the wider economy, we usually link it kinda at the start of our presentations, reports to GDP because it reflects the economy because AV is an in-person specific technology in general, thinking about live events, sports, museums, but it also has its collaboration side. And digital signage is a minor part of that, so big solutions that are used at stadiums, it’s part of branding in malls, etc. But it’s also part of the communication: a grocery store needs to communicate restrictions to its customers, a fast-casual restaurant has a platform to use maybe for point of purchase assist as well. So it suffered from the lack of in-person activity. But it’s also been supported in some areas because it's such a flexible communication, a distanced, safe way to communicate to clients.

In the last year, it was a little bit over 15% drop and it's recovering quite strongly this year about maybe 10-12% bounce back in 2021. So kind of following the overall industry numbers with those percentages. 

In terms of what's happened in the past year. Obviously, a lot of it's coming back. Some of it's deferred money, some of it is new money, but when you take billions of dollars out of an industry, not everybody's gonna be able to weather the storm and come back. Do you have any sense at all of what the impact was on the numbers of companies and jobs? 

Sean: Yeah. Good question. We did some survey research in 2020 to track this, to see how providers were being impacted along the way, and what we were seeing is, unfortunately, a steady, let's say 1-2%, each week that was saying, I've had to close my doors for good. And so there was real attrition. 

What was the total? It's really hard to tell because of things like stimulus and other modes of say, sustaining your business to where people may have gone into almost a hibernation mode or a sustenance mode just to keep things rolling, but it looked like in terms of attrition of individuals, so laying off riffing roofing employees, it was probably about an 8% decline in staffing over the firms that we're tracking and were surveying throughout the process. So yeah, real impacts to real people and real businesses. 

One of the interesting things that I could see happening was companies, particularly live events companies, who obviously couldn't do concerts or conferences or anything else. Some of them pivoted and started doing some interesting things like virtual audiences in sports arenas and things like that. 

Did you see much of that? And were these things short-term measures or did they turn into industries? 

Sean: Yeah, the jury's a bit out in terms of how much that's going to be a lasting impact, but those kinds of pivots or innovations, creative uses of their skills in technology and services is what allowed live events to not go to zero. So we saw a 60% decline in revenues for live events in 2020, just a dramatic horrific impact on that business. But I think they did shift over to things like content distribution, streaming services, capture, and optimization of content for then later streaming.

As you noted, they did support virtual events. In some cases, event managers would stand up on a store virtual studio and still would use some technology. I know, for example, AVIXA, to support some of our events, we would rent a green room in order to do some footage that we could then port over to put a virtual backdrop and all sorts of stuff for some of our creative presentations. But yeah, I think it's that kind of innovation that helps these businesses to at least persist through the period. If not, in some cases, perhaps shut down temporarily in order to re-emerge as businesses re-emerged. 

Yeah, and some things like those extended reality virtual studios just came out of nowhere, but seemed to be a really hot trend now.

Sean: Yeah, definitely. I'm curious to see how much of that stays because what we've learned is that trade shows don't work virtually. I think we've all tried that and replicated that booth to booth experience, the trade show floor experience just doesn't happen very well on virtual. But a conference track does. So you can really imagine a world where let's say a major trade show could wrap around its edges, some virtual content to hype up the show before it starts, continuing the long tail of content afterward to engage audiences, and so that gives a live events company opportunity on-premise, while the show's going on, but a tale of opportunity around events too, to help capture and read and distribute content.

So I think there's a number of interesting business models that could come out for a live events company around this kind of audience extension, content extension, content optimization, virtual studio, all that kind of things. It will be interesting to see. 

if you go back 15-16 months to March of last year and started to look at the industry and start to do some of these forecasts. Are there things that you expected to happen that didn't happen and other things that did, that surprised you? 

Sean: Originally, we did not expect the conferencing and collaboration category to boom, quite as much as it ended up. So our original forecast around conference and collaboration, which in all fairness, largely was about conference rooms, auditoriums, in-person kinds of venues for office buildings. So we expected that industry, that market to decline a little bit, let's say a few points, so not bad, and in an environment where most things are, double high or low double-digit declines, conference, and collaboration, that's a pretty strong outcome. 

In the end though, we saw a flood of money going into it consistently through licensing, through kits for remote work support, all that kind of stuff just really made up for it. So the whole support of remote was an even bigger phenomenon than we originally had forecasted, probably partially because we did, as I noted before, we believed that there would be a return to more in-person stuff earlier in the process, late 2020, and by now we'd be pretty much fully back. So that would be one of those things that was a bit more pronounced than we had originally thought, and that's a lot of what it was is not necessarily complete surprises, but more pronounced versions of things than you would've expected originally.

Okay. Thank you very much, guys. Just one last thing for Sean, just very quickly, if I'm listening to this and I want to have a look at the latest report or highlights of the report, where would I find that? 

Sean: Sure. Probably best to reach out to me, at swargo@avixa.org. We have some resources on our website, avixa.org, but starting with me can point you in the right direction probably a bit more efficiently. 

Thanks again for taking some time with me.

Sean: Thanks so much, Dave.

 

David Weinfeld, Screenverse

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

Advertising is hard - and a lot of companies, from startups to majors, have found out the expensive way that creating and running a screen network that's funded through booked ad spots is no walk in the park.

There are lots of programmatic advertising options out there to make access to brand advertising easier for network operators, but a start-up called Screenverse is going down a different path - basically saying to a lot of companies that have screens: "You focus on what you're truly good at, and we'll take over the ad sales and management of your network."

So in the same way that some solutions providers are the outsourced digital signage operating units for companies like QSR chains, Screenverse is doing the sales and related work for companies that happen to have a screen network as part of much larger businesses.

A great example would be TouchTunes, which has 1,000s of digital jukeboxes in bars, with screens on them that support booked advertising. Screenverse now runs and sells the ad display side of the business, so TouchTunes can focus on what it is super-good at - music content curation, licensing and overall ops.

The company was started by a couple of guys I have known for a long time in this industry - David Weinfeld and Adam Malone. While less than two years old, started just in time for a pandemic and nuclear winter for out of home advertising, Screenverse is making money and recently announced a quasi acquisition deal to bring on the sales experience and business ties of The Danaher Group, a boutique media sales run by Sue Danaher, who many industry people will know from her days running the DPAA.

David and I go back to the days when we were consulting partners on The Preset Group. It was terrific to catch up, and get a better understanding of how his company fills what is a pretty obvious need in the market for companies that want to monetize the screens in their network, but struggle (or would struggle) trying to run ad sales and media operations within the walls of a company that otherwise knows very little about advertising.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

David, thank you for joining me. It's been a while since we've caught up. The first thing I wanted to ask is what you've been up to? Cause we've known each other for more than a dozen years and you've done a few things lately and then got into starting Screenverse. 

David Weinfeld: Yeah, absolutely.

So prior to starting Screenverse, I had been working in different startups, largely in the digital, out-of-home, and digital signage space. Most immediately, I was at Vistar Media leading their global supply-side sales team, and that was an incredible experience, really being able to see across the whole of the landscape, building out their enterprise software business that included their ad server and player software and building that out and enterprise relationships with companies like Top Golf, RedBox, etc.

But even as I was doing that and playing on a lot of the experience that I had in the industry, even dating back to our days at the Preset group, understanding that there continued to be this prevalence of networks that at their core weren't media businesses, and so they might've had thousands of screens in grocery or Walmart stores or in office buildings, but really weren't in a position to maximize the revenue that they could generate. 

They were seeing success by connecting to an exchange like Vistar, but I just saw so much more potential in the way in which they could monetize those assets, and as I started seeing that, I really got the idea for this vision of the business, Screenverse, playing on my time, working with you at the Preset group, consulting to major display manufacturers like Samsung and LG and others, but then really looking at the networks that I most enjoyed working with were networks that were just entirely new to the media side of the business, and as you and I both know, and most people listening to the podcast, there are so many stories that we can tell of the digital out-of-home networks that have come and gone. The skeletons of past networks that otherwise you would've thought, there's a foundation for success here, and sometimes it's the expectation of, if you build it, they will come, and the advertiser is just going to knock on our door, and what I've since learned is that's obviously not the case, and programmatic, there does open that door to a degree and create some of that opportunity, but really Screenverses exist to really blast that door wide open on behalf of our network partners, and so when I left Vistar pre-COVID, it was with a very clear vision of the business that I wanted to start.

I was lucky enough to found the business with another great industry professional in Adam Malone, a friend who I've known for over 10 years, and in doing so, we built up a company whose entire focus is on ad management and monetization for digital screen networks and really taking networks like Pursuant Health and there are 4,600 screens in Walmart stores nationwide. Our partners at Corner Media, Touch Tunes, Touch Source, Paramount, Smartify, Spin, and others, and really being able to best package and position their inventory, no matter however a brand or agency wants to transact against it, whether that be through a direct IO or by way of a programmatic channel.

If you had to do your elevator pitch, the 25 words or less of what all that you do, what would you say? 

David Weinfeld: Yeah, I would say that we turn our network operators' side business, which is bringing third-party advertising through their screens, to our main business.

So that includes everything from ad operations, media packaging, CPM management, optimization of deal flow and management of their inventory, both through the direct and programmatic channels, in such a way that's going to maximize the revenue that they see from agencies, brands, and demand-side platforms. There are some analogous companies in the digital space. Some of those companies are Inc.’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies in 2019. There’s a comany by the name of Freestar, who I really admire the way that they've grown and built their business. 

Cafe Media, Adpushup, are all examples of companies that exist to really demystify for publishers and companies, how to maximize their revenue generation and take advantage of existing technology. So we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're most certainly not trying to be a supply-side platform. But our goal is to be the best possible service layer, leveraging technologies like a Vistar or Place Exchange and others, and being able to build lightweight technology on top of that, whose entire purpose is to realize greater revenue and greater efficiencies in the sales and ad management process. 

So you've got companies who have screens associated with their business, for whatever reason, like during waiting rooms or in Touch Tunes that have digital jukeboxes that also have screens that you can sell ads on, but it's not their core business so effectively they can outsource all of that to you, to people who understand the game, understand the process and everything else, instead of trying to understand that internally and be a skunkworks and a business that spends 98% of its time on other matters, right?

David Weinfeld: That's exactly right, and what I've seen historically is that it's very hard for those types of businesses to hire really strong and capable media salespeople, and for good reason, because they're not media businesses, and so they ultimately are challenged from the outset, whereas it's much better and actually a lot less costly and creates a lot more opportunity and potential against their inventory to bring in a company like Screenverse where that's our entire focus.

I really like to think about companies and their capabilities. What can you be the best in the world? What is your superpower? Well, our superpower is monetizing digital screens in the physical world, and so if we have companies like Touch Tunes who are incredible in building out distributor relationships and building out the largest footprint of digital jukeboxes in the US and globally, or a company like Pursuant Health, who has kiosks in every single Walmart store nationwide for blood pressure, BMI assessments, and other major health assessments. That's what they're best at in the world, so let us manage the media business and the media side, and especially as programmatic becomes an increasingly important part of the digital out-of-home landscape, understanding the nuances of that channel and how best to navigate different SSPs and DSPs, agencies and the way in which they're transacting, whether direct or programmatic becomes really important. And it ensures that their inventory is getting in front of the right buyers and that they're seeing the greatest value from their inventory and by packaging partners together, we're able to create some really unique audience segments, such that, by itself, a network might not have the scale to get the attention of a major brand, like Starbucks or Unilever, but together complemented with other assets and other inventory, it tells a complete story.

So a digital out-of-home network, in something like let's say waiting rooms or whatever, they could do direct sales themselves, but they're going to have to hire people to do that. They could get a rep shop, but they rep all kinds of things that might not even be digital, or they could think that they could just use programmatic, but the reality is programmatic isn't going to fill their inventory. 

So you need to have this hybrid and you either do it internally, or you go to somebody like your company, right? 

David Weinfeld: That's exactly right, and there are a lot of companies who really media or being ad supported is their core focus. So you have companies like Doctor's offices, patient points, or you have companies in gyms, Zoom media, right? Those are not our target partners because they already have in-house sales teams and the entire business is built on how do I monetize those assets? But we really look at companies that otherwise might be in similar environments. 

So we have a partner in a company called Touch Source that is one of the largest providers of office building directories and screens and major healthcare offices to the tune of 10,000 screens nationwide, whose superpower is building out these great solutions and interactive experiences and managing tenant databases and directory user experiences, but there is an advertising opportunity there, and one that in order for them to hire an in-house sales team and think through all the nuances of how they marry that against their existing business, is we formed a partnership with Touch Source, such that we can really manage and own that and act as a consultative partner, and we certainly work together to strategically think about which screens within their overall portfolio of 10,000 make the most sense to bring third-party advertising to, and we're not recommending or saying that, “Hey, our expectation is to light up advertising on all 10,000” but we are in the process and we're at a hundred buildings today, but our expectation is to be in the not too distant future at a thousand buildings, where you're talking about is a network that has multi-million dollar media sales potential in a post-COVID environment, and one that otherwise would have struggled to access those dollars, even by just connecting to programmatic pipes like a Vistar Media or Place Exchange. 

You still need people, even though it's technology-based and there are automated workflows, you still need people to manage these systems and there are still relationships at the core of the transactions that happen, and so that's really what we say, there's an opportunity to connect to an exchange and gather low-level dollars but you understand CPM, you understand the dynamics of the demand and supply within the ecosystem and what the competitive landscape looks like, and all of a sudden we became not just a cost center to our business, but we realized success in partnership with our network operators, such that it hopefully is an easy decision for them to work with us. 

Yeah, it's been interesting to listen to this because I admittedly didn't fully understand what Screenverse did, but now I do, and one of the reasons I understand it is I've lived it. Years and years ago, I started a network in the pedestrian corridor system underneath downtown Toronto. There's like miles and miles of walkways with retail down there and everything, and hundreds of thousands of people. Great media environment, in a lot of ways, but this is 2003-2004, and people didn't get it. So I needed professional salespeople to do that for me, and I tried doing partnerships with companies who were already digital out-of-home, and while they understood the pattern and everything else, they just weren't fully invested in it because they had their own product to sell, and at the end of a meeting, they went, “Oh, by the way, we have this thing too. I'm not quite sure what it is, but are you interested? No? Okay. Bye.” 

It just didn't work. You need somebody who's focused. 

David Weinfeld: Absolutely. It's really where opportunity meets execution.

And the understanding and we're entering an environment and thanks to programmatic, and I really, especially the more time that I've spent on the demand side, I have a much greater appreciation for the work that Michael Provenzano and the earliest employees at Vistar did, and frankly, building out the programmatic market.

But now that they have, and now that it's much more robust and it's still in its early innings, there is an opportunity for networks like that to get access to dollars that they otherwise would have been challenged to, but to do it entirely on your own and not understand the advanced capabilities or options that are available to you, it is essentially leaving dollars on the table and programmatic is all about minimizing loss and maximizing gain, and so if you can be in a position where you can bring in the right partner, and again, we're a partner. We don't physically own any screens. We haven't invested capital in building out screens. So we don't have any interests that could otherwise be muddied by bringing on additional networks.

We curate the partners that we work with. We say more “No” than we do “Yes”, and it's really important that we think about how they fit within our portfolio, not just in the near term, but in the longterm and how our sales team, frankly, can be successful on their behalf because the last thing I would ever want to do is set unrealistic expectations, which I think can very easily happen, not just in this industry, but really any media space of well, I have this many millions of impressions that equates to this media value so I should generate a million dollars a month and that's nice on paper, and it's nice when you build out projections, but the reality tells a very different story.

And one of the things that, myself, Adam, our team prides herself on as being very open and transparent with our partners and setting very clear expectations of this is what we believe your network is worth, this is what we believe that we can deliver in terms of value. Our hopes far exceed those numbers, but we also don't want to go into a relationship where the numbers far outweigh what we think the market can bear. We do have very high hopes, or as optimistic as I think anyone in this space around where digital out-of-home can grow and what it can become in the media mix. But the reality is that programmatic is still a small part of digital out-of-home spending, it's around 5-6% of our overall spending, and thanks to COVID in industry and out-of-home in the US that was approaching $9 billion, got knocked down to between $6-7 billion and is fighting its way back. But I've long believed that in order to unlock the greater demand and revenue that should be coming into out-of-home in general, it's going to be by way of digital buyers. It's going to be by way of buyers who understand that, layering in contextually relevant digital playspace like with a partner of ours, the bulletin who was in a high rise, residential apartment buildings in major cities in the US, layering that with targeted campaigns, it's hard to beat for a D2C brand like a GoPro or Hell Fresh, or Uber eats, but right now they're not really thinking about that within their total strategy. That of course incorporates Facebook and Google and Instagram and connected TV, and so if we can get any access to those budgets, we should become a much more important, incredible part of the total media landscape.

Is there a distinction between endemic and non-endemic advertising at this point or is it all just like data flags? 

David Weinfeld: We really think about it on a network by network and kind of category of venues standpoint. So with the network, like Touch Tunes and, by way of our acquisition of the Danaher group and bringing on incredible talent in the form of Susan Danaher, former DPAA President, CRO at Ad Space (now Lightbox), SVP at Viacom, Victor Germaine, who was a VP at Screen Vision and major sales leader at GSTV and bringing those individuals into our business, but their specialization and where they really focus their energy were on vice categories naturally like beer and alcohol, who were endemic brands through the bar and restaurant category, just as much as you might say for an office building network. That would be B2B financial services or a retail-based network. Endemic brands are much more CPG-focused, but we do see also across all categories because we see a lot of otherwise non-endemic spend from insurance companies and others that you might not immediately connect with a bar and restaurant environment, but who make a ton of sense, just the nature of the audience. 

So it really depends upon the brand and agency and what their objectives are. If their objective is to really be where the product is sold, well that's why we do a lot of business with Anheuser-Busch and Heineken. But if you're also thinking about a brand that has a relationship by category adjacency, or just reaching that audience. So think about any of the brands like Uber, Lyft advertising in a bar or restaurant, or a brand like a USAA advertising in a Walmart location, the product itself isn't sold there, but certainly, the constituency that they're looking to reach, that they target by way of other channels are very present in those environments, and so we have a mix, but it really speaks to how we position different networks, and the reality is when you undertake a business like Screenverse, you end up having networks across a variety of categories. It's our responsibility and job then to figure out how best to package and curate that, not just for ourselves, but for the market et all. 

So we're not just going to an agency and presenting a disparate menu of offerings but we understand their client mix. We understand the way in which they buy and what their objective is. So we might just say, “Hey, for the types of brands that you represent, and the fact that you're looking to reach a millennial audience, then you're best suited reaching them in bars and restaurants or reaching them in high rise apartment buildings in cities like Chicago, New York, and DC” versus a brand like USAA, that's looking to reach a much broader population across the entire country, and that's where you start pushing them into inventory, like in Walmarts or grocery stores or convenience stores where they can segment potentially against an older demographic or certainly a broader segment of the overall population.

So if I did a spreadsheet exercise of costs of taking ad sales and media operations, in-house versus outsourcing to Screenverse, how is that going to look? 

Is it going to be more costly to do it internally or more costly to do it through you guys? 

David Weinfeld: Yeah, so we actually, in many cases do this modeling with our partners and it's definitely more costly internally to make that happen. But the other aspect is even if the model shows that it might be less costly, by way of, “if I hire three people, I can build up this sales organization”, you have to look at it and say, what is the success you're going to yield? And that to me is even more important than just doing your cost exercise and saying, all right, I'm going to need two senior sellers and an ad operations person to build up any type of sales business unit, but that alone isn't really going to be successful and do those individual sellers. It's not an easy thing to find people that know the digital out-of-home space and know how best to navigate out-of-home agencies and digital agencies, and are they going to be equipped to really tell a story that's large enough to get your network noticed, but that's also why we look to have our model based on success, such that we're not a hard and fast cost against the business at the outset, but we see success when our partnerships see success. So ours is really a percentage of revenue-based model, such that it's not, you need to make this large upfront investment. We actually believe as much as you do in the potential of this, and we're going to invest a lot of time and energy upfront to get our team trained upon the inventory, to package the inventory, to leverage our relationships across the industry to tell your story and activate you on programmatic platforms if you haven't done so, help you build out those integrations, if you don't yet have them.

And so there's a lot of nuances in that, but I would look really to what's the totality of success that a network could realize trying to go it on their own versus trying to partner with a company like Screenverse, and what we found with a lot of those partners is it becomes a very large challenge to try to do it on their own. And I give everyone the absolute best of lock-in and I support any network that wants to build out their own sales team and thinks that if it's core to your business and you can be the best in the world at selling your inventory, then you absolutely should be the ones to do it. But if it's something you're trying to do on the side, and it's really not part of your brand value, it's not part of your overall culture, overall story, I've seen that very hard and it feels like an extra appendage that doesn't necessarily fit within a company. What we can do is say, we're going to be here and consult you. You don't need to worry about becoming experts in this because guess what? We're thinking about this day in and day out, hour after hour, and we're going to meet with you regularly. We're going to provide you with updates. We're going to demystify the industry in a way that I'm hopeful that, even if we have a network relationship where after two or three years they go, you know what, you've helped us so much, we've actually now had the confidence and belief that we can do this in house, I still see that as a successful outcome because we delivered on the promise of helping them grow their business. I, of course, would love to be with our partners for 10+ years and really build out the highest level of success. But if they decide to bring that in-house, after we've helped them level up their understanding and connections with them, that's successful. 

Yeah. Everything you said is so spot on and I wanted to say something about cultural fit and you did, just cause I have seen that as well, where you see a media operation bolted onto the side of a very traditional company and I've watched it play out and it almost never works just because, as one person described it, we’re the land of misfit toys, you just don't fit! 

David Weinfeld: What's funny too, and I look at it this way and I wake up every day energized by trying to change this mindset. But even if you look at out-of-home overall, so out-of-home is a marginalized part of the media industry. Overall, it really occupies sub 5% of total media spend. When you look across all channels, then within out-of-home, digital out-of-home is the minority of revenue. That's certainly changing and shifting in the US and other parts of the world. But then within digital out-of-home, digital place-based, this is very much the marginalized aspect then is looked at as a subcategory, knowing that digital billboards take up a lion's share of dollars.

And so I wake up every single day excited because I'm in the area that is that diamond in the rough that has the greatest potential that is maybe being undervalued and underutilized, but it's growing, and it's in an area that I do believe in its efficacy and value, and there are so many studies and so many data points that I know you've read, and the readers of your blog that you published, that people have talked about on this podcast of the efficacy of marrying digital out-of-home with mobile, with social, with connected TV. I just believe in my heart of hearts and I know it's taken longer in many cases than a lot of people have expected. But I so directly believe that once more people start seeing those studies and realizing the results for themselves and leading into space and thanks to programmatic and DSPs, like the Tradedesk and Verizon media and EMOBI and Adelphic and others leaning in and ushering those digital buyers that have access to larger budgets into our space. That's really what's going to drive a sea change and that's what I wake up each and every day, knowing, we're nowhere near where we need to be or where we can be even as a company or as an industry overall. But boy, if I can be part in any way, shape, or form of ushering that forward for my team, my partners, the industry overall, that's what drives me because I look at it as if we can bring more revenue to our company that otherwise looked at advertising as this headache, or this is a tough thing to manage. 

But all of a sudden, by working with us, they're seeing seven figures of revenue and they're much confident with understanding, right? It can be hard when you look at programmatic and you see peaks and valleys of revenue and disparate spending come through, and it can be very confusing. But once you have someone that can walk you through the dynamics of how people are going in and spending and how we build deeper relationships with them and what's happening indirectly. Now all of a sudden you're part of a business that, maybe you're not driving the car, but you're a much more confident passenger. And when you're a much more competent passenger, the great news there is you're much more willing to then make investments and build out your network and build out your infrastructure, and ultimately that benefits the networks, it benefits the advertisers, it benefits the SSPs. It benefits the DSPs. And that's what really drove me to start this business and why, when I was at a company in this space, like Vistar that was innovating and driving change and was very successful, that I just felt this push, that there was an opportunity for someone with my background and experience and with Adam and now bringing on Susan Danaher and Victor Germaine and our larger team and the expertise that each of them brings to the table, we have the opportunity to really build a company that has staying power that can ultimately bring an enormous amount of value and also create some efficiencies for SSPs or create efficiencies for networks that they otherwise might have been challenged to find on their own. 

Are you bootstrapped? 

David Weinfeld: So we've raised a small friends and family pre-seed round of just around $400,000, but actually we'd been profitable in 2020.

We officially incorporated the business at the end of April 2020. We were profitable in 2020, we're profitable today and, we're thinking about it what does raising funding against this business look like? And we look at it, not as a requirement, but as a mechanism to accelerate growth. You know the most important pillars of our business are great people and great network partners. 

So the deal you did with Danaher Group, it's probably more like a joint venture sort of thing in a lot of ways? Because obviously, you couldn't buy them out in the traditional sense of a private equity deal or something. 

David Weinfeld: Yeah. So I would definitely categorize it as more of an acquihire, and so really being able to bring those individuals in-house. Thanks to our growth and thanks to the revenue that we build, our equity has value. So there are definitely mechanisms within our partnership that involve that, and so that the Danaher group team that's now joined with Screenverse can participate in the success and growth, and that's really ultimately how we were able to put that together, and it was on the back of getting to know Sue for many years in this industry and really aligning on the vision.

I had such admiration for the business she had built at the Danaher group and the importance of the relationship that she and Victor and their operations lead, Taylor had with touch tunes so much so that they were truly an extension of that company, and I said that's so much in line with the vision that we have for the partnerships that we form on the supply side at Screenverse, and we would love to bring your leadership, your knowledge, your experience into our business, and oh, by the way, we get an incredible network in the form of Touch Tunes, and we can just have that part of our overall growth and at a time where bars and restaurants have been challenged in light of COVID.

But now that we're starting to come out and restrictions have all but been eased across the entire US, Los Angeles and California were the final metropolitan areas that had any restrictions on bars that have since been lifted and really say, “Hey, bars and restaurants are hopping right now”, and so if I'm going to double down on any piece of inventory, it's going to be in that segment. And if I'm going to double down on talent, it's going to be with people like Sue Danna, her Victor Germaine, and Taylor, and that team and their knowledge and so much of what they bring into our business is fueling growth, not just against Touch Tunes, but against all of our partners, and as we bring on additional sales directors, as we bring on additional operations, team members, it's really all geared toward how do we maximize success for the network partners that we work with and how do we ultimately build campaigns that are going to drive tangible results for those brands, such that they continue to invest, not just in us, but in digital out-of-home and digital place-based in general

All right, David, that was terrific. We could have talked a lot longer, but I'm afraid we gotta wrap this up. Great to catch up with you. 

David Weinfeld: Yeah, it was absolutely great to catch up with you, Dave. You're someone who I have absolutely, in the past, love working with, who I have such great respect for in this industry.

Thank you for having me on the podcast and really look forward to being able to continue having these conversations and sharing the growth story of Screenverse with you and your audience.

John Steinhauer, Barco

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

Technology advances have made it feasible and relatively easy to fill large spaces, inside or outside, with big digital visuals that fill a defined space like a building lobby or other physical structure - with the idea of creating experiences that are memorable and have some sort of desired impact.

It's being done with large format LED video walls, with projection mapping and still, in some cases, with skinny bezel LCD.

Barco is in an interesting position because the company does all three, and has done so for many years. One of the first high-profile examples of what's been coined "techorating" (not my favorite phrase, but I get it) was the Comcast headquarters tower in Philly, which filled the entire back wall of its vast lobby with LED. That project was done, more than a dozen years ago, using fine pitch Barco LED product, and the experience is now a tourist attraction.

I spoke with John Steinhauer, VP of Entertainment for Barco in the Americas, about the whole notion of incorporating large format digital into the original design or renovations for large spaces - from building lobbies to airports and attractions. We talk about the business model and recommended approaches.

We also get into his experience in the past year. He started his new role - driving business for things like entertainment attractions, sports venues, live event and cinema - just as COVID hit, and all those activities dried up.

They're coming back, he says, in a BIG way. 

 

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

John, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your role is at Barco? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, of course. First, Dave, thanks for having me. I really appreciate spending some time with you today. I am the Vice President of Entertainment for the Americas at Barco and I came to this position at an interesting time, almost the first days of the pandemic.

Timing is everything they say, and I like to tell people that my first year has been an eventful year, but certainly, there've been no events and that was a challenge. But it did put us in a position to really look at our organization, look at our strategy or go to market, fortify our strengths and address our weaknesses. So it's really been a great first year and reflecting on it now and we’re getting prepared for the big recovery, is what this is all about currently, and I think we are. 

VP Entertainment sound like something teenage kids would love to have for their dad? What does it encompass? 

John Steinhauer: I think eventually it will encompass some free tickets to shows. I know that you're right, Dave, my kids said, wow, that's a great job. What are the perks? 

Yeah, but I'll define what entertainment is at Barco. It is our live events business, our rental and staging business, our proAV business, and our cinema business. There's also a group that does high-end residential and simulation, which is a really interesting business for us with flight simulators and things like that, a lot of government contracts. So we really have a wide expansive portfolio that addresses a lot of very different applications.

As you said, just as you got started, I'm sure one of your first charges was to identify what the opportunity pipeline looks like and everything else, and then a pandemic hit and most of your markets dried up. 

John Steinhauer: Exactly. There were really spots of innovation along the way to where I was really impressed by the live events industry and their resiliency and their creativity and how nimble they are, just by virtue of what they do. They build these elaborate systems and solutions for one night and they tear them down and take them somewhere else the next day. It's just who they are in terms of being nimble and things like using LED for XR stages, it became something really interesting, and a lot of people started driving a new form of production, you know camera production in front of the LED. So things like that came out, and other trends are really blossoming now around immersive museums, for example.

So I think this is an industry that has a lot of resolve and it's going to take much more than a pandemic to bring it down. I'll tell you, I've been really impressed by the caliber of the partners we have and their strength and keeping a positive attitude, and really looking for ways to drive forward. If an industry ever deserved a comeback as this one does, it's going to be epic. I tell people that a lot, and when everybody hits the road at the same time, which every artist is hoping to do, it's going to be the recovery of a lifetime, I think, and we're really looking forward to it. 

Why do you describe it that way? Are you hearing that sort of thing that there's going to be this tidal wave of live events and installations and everything else? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, everything from residencies in Las Vegas being announced, to the first shows putting dates out now. We do think there'll be a little latency around the sales side of the business because so much equipment has been dormant for so long, and it's finally going to be back at work. So it's not a statement on sales as much as it is on activity levels that will eventually become, I think, a boom all the way around. 

You talked about the pause that COVID has created, and I've certainly spoken with a number of companies who said they use the past 15-16 months to examine what they do, their processes and their products and the whole nine yards. 

I would imagine the same thing as applied here, that a lot of the people who are in the various facets of the entertainment industry, see the time to re-examine how they do things and maybe stop the momentum that kind of saw them doing things a certain way because they'd always done it that way.

John Steinhauer: Yeah, definitely, and for us at Barco, we've had a history of being somewhat of a siloed company and difficult to do business with at times, and we had a chance to really reflect during this pause to just figure out culturally, what needed to change in how we went to the market and how we work together internally and just making it an easier experience to do business with us.

I think when things light up, the community is really going to feel that. I know that during the downs. They're feeling it, we're staying connected. We have furloughed employees, like most of our customers have too. We're bringing back people. We're actually investing in hiring now, too. I think the future looks bright. We're guilty of investing ahead of revenue a little bit because we know it's a safe bet. This is an industry we know a lot about. We consider ourselves members of the community and not just vendors to the community. So we're reading the tea leaves and getting ready for what we think is going to be an explosive rebound. 

Barco is in an interesting position because when we talk about some of these large-format displays that you see in live events and museums and buildings and everything else, they're LED, they're fine-pitch LED, but you can do fine-pitch LED, but you can also do projection and you can also do a narrow-bezel LCD.

You've got the UniSee product, which genuinely has narrow bezels, unlike sometimes I see the product literature, I think that's not terribly narrow, but you're calling it invisible. 

John Steinhauer: Yeah. We have a broad portfolio and you're right, and UniSee is definitely a big part of that portfolio.

An LED is the first thing people think of when they think of wow factor in large format. But when you add in projection as you said, things like projection mapping are really experiencing a resurgence now, because not only are businesses trying to bring their employees back to their offices but the cities and municipalities are trying to get people out of their homes again.

We're doing some incredibly creative outdoor mapping On bridges, landmark buildings, and cathedrals, and it's a global trend that is really exciting for us because we have a lot of horsepowers when it comes to those super high lumen projectors. 

And the other big shift there is that it's a lot easier to do.

I wrote a book, like a coffee table book, about projection mapping, 10 years ago, and at that time, it was just starting to emerge, but it was incredibly complicated to do, just the alignment and everything else, and now it's almost widgetized software. 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, and it's crazy flexible too.

If you look at this trend of the Van Gogh exhibits, that's going around the world, really taking traction here in the US too in multiple cities. They're re-purposing real estate, and sometimes warehouses and old buildings and building a museum and so think about that, the complexities of mapping, where you have to place the projectors. You're just going into an environment that is unknown sometimes and very different at times, and trying to position everything to get it just right, and that series has been incredibly successful for us, and we have a line of projectors that fits the bill perfectly, and it's one of those situations, it was something in our portfolio that wasn't the rocket ship. 

It was the G-60 that I'm referring to, and this particular application put it on the map to the point where it's a supply chain issue now, and that's another podcast talking about the supply chain challenges currently, but it's interesting too when these things hit, you're not really sure what's going to emerge as the solution for the future. You have to ride with the industry, I think and follow the community, especially the creative side of the business. If you ever put a product out in the market, tell them this is what it does. It won't succeed. They'll tell you what it will do and you'll work with them to make sure it does. 

Yeah, I was gonna say that I did an interview the other day where I was the person being interviewed and we're talking about trends and everything else and I said, one of the big mistakes I see over and over again regardless of the size of the project is people go in thinking about how they're going to apply a particular type of technology instead of, looking at the scenario, the environment, the circumstances, the dynamics of it and everything else, and then figuring out okay, if we're going to do something here, what would be the technology that would work best? 

But, you see over and over again, people saying, “I'm going to put in a big LED video wall”, or “I'm going to put in a fine bezel or a narrow bezel LCD video wall here”, and they don't really know why. They haven't really thought about the content yet, but they’re going to do it. 

John Steinhauer: Exactly, and I think one of the strengths of our portfolio, in just that situation, we've been doing this during the downturn with the re-educating ourselves teams and training them, is that we're not selling tiles. We're listening to what the application is, what the experience needs to be, and then fitting a solution into that, and one of the nice things about the entertainment businesses is that we do get to speak directly with the creative decision-makers and the folks that are doing the design early enough, where we can have those kinds of conversations. We're not just responding to RFPs and things like that. 

Yeah. One of the things that have also impressed me lately is when you have jobs that mash-up different technologies. So instead of it just being a LED video wall, that's part of it, but there's also projection and they're reactive with each other and they're synced. That to me is really exciting ‘cause you're doing the walls, you're doing the ceiling, you're doing the floors, potentially. 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, and that's we're going to get to this “techorating” idea, and it's interesting because that term is old, it's I think it dates back to ‘08-’07, maybe even earlier.

That term used to mean something, and I think now it means something very different, but it's what you just described. It's the overall experience, and there can be a number of ways you get there and it's not necessarily a wow factor lobby at a casino, it can be eBay's headquarters in California, it can be any corporate customer. 

I know you have a digital signage background, a lot of signage, essentially pushes information to your people, and that plus an information and an entertainment component to that, and an immersive environment that draws people to the environment, whether it's bringing employees back or bringing people out of their homes into a city street, this application is different than the original, the original “techorating” trend. 

Yeah, techorating is one of those terms that makes me cringe a little bit, but not as much as phygital. That one, just nails on a chalkboard, but I get it, I understand the concept around it. 

What are you actually seeing out there? I think of techorating, going back to the Comcast Tower, which is actually a Barco installation going back a dozen years, maybe even more, where they filled a whole wall with LEDs that picked up the look and the look of the side wood walls, and all of a sudden stuff appears on it. Are we seeing much more of that? I get the sense that it's happening, but we're all in our little bunkers here, so I don't see it in person anymore.

John Steinhauer: Yeah, exactly, and that's the whole point, right? I think what employers are trying to do is creating that pull back to the office instead of just saying, okay, here's how it is, you have to come back to work. Cause we know how that's going out there, people are getting comfortable in a new workplace and some roles will be distributed and remote, and we're even going through this at Barco. Some roles really require you to be in the office. 

With the whole techorating, I think it's interesting because at one point, it was all flash and no one's ever seen it before, and I always go back to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, that's the first time I really experienced it. Super cool. But this is more, I think a lighthouse rediscovery of that. The concept's there, but it's really safely drawing ships back to shore, bringing the employees back into their workplaces, and depending on budgets, it can be very elaborate, it can be the kinds of things you saw in that lobby at the Cosmopolitan, or it can be just more technology than usual in different places, like not just in the experience center up on the top floor, but throughout the organization, multi-purpose rooms will have more technology in them in different types of content.

I think this is also a great opportunity for our content providers. Companies who do this where, you know, before putting up displays in a break room or something was all about new policies, new hires, the temperature of the stock ticker, whatever. Now, employers want to create content that's compelling and creative in those spaces.

Are you working directly or through some of the AV consultants that work with Barco, are you talking to people who design physical spaces and to engineers and to architects? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, architects, meeting planners, all the above, consultants, everything you mentioned, Dave, that is the community. That's really driving this because, unline pre-pandemic, where we were and before trends like this, it was very much established, “This is what you do. The briefing center is on the top floor. This is what resides in this room, this room, and this room.”

Now companies are taking a fresh approach and they need guidance. They need expertise, and they're calling in these creative content companies to help. 

And is that part of the secret sauce, not making this an AV or IT project? It has to be something like from the very first meeting, the site survey, the walk-through, the whole bit where you've got to have the creative people, you've got to have the architect. You've got to have all the different parties that are going to touch on this to really make it work. Because if you just put in a screen and then say, now we need something on it, that's not going to work! 

John Steinhauer: Exactly, and it is that immersive experience approach to these environments that weren’t there before.

What's the business argument? 

John Steinhauer: I think the business argument mostly right now is bringing those folks back into the office, and having a compelling reason to get them out of their space. If we had a video for this podcast, I could show you that I have a very carefully curated environment in my home office but I started in the video conferencing world. We were trying to get HD out at Lifesize early days, and I learned that early on. There are a lot of colors in my office, Placed in the right places. Most people don't do that, and I'm sure you've experienced this because everyone has. You've seen everything in the background.

You've seen spouses walking by, you've seen dogs and cats and landscapers wailing into the un-muted microphones outside the windows. 

In Canada, we have members of parliament who stripped down in the middle of conference calls.  

John Steinhauer: I've seen that viral clip, yes. (Laughter)

So I think what employers need is that environment where people say, okay I want to come back, and not only that, I want to be proud of the company I work for.

I work for a great organization. This is a cool job, and I love going to work every day, and the 30-40 minute commute is worth it because I have great bandwidth, I have amazing facilities, all those things, and this is just a part of that puzzle, bringing those employees back, I think.

Is that being driven by the employers? I mean, If you're the anchor tenant in an office tower of some kind or big house office block, that's one thing, but in a lot of cases, you have office towers where they might have 20 different tenants, and I've heard a number of times that commercial property owners are “techorating” their lobbies and other spaces because, A) it attracts tenants and B) it hangs on all the ones they have.

John Steinhauer: Exactly. Yeah, I think you've totally seen it in those types of spaces and other kinds of perks. We just built a new space in California, I was there earlier this week. We have a little health club in there, a little gym, all those amenities, to attract your folks back in.

Does it have to be on a grand scale, or are you seeing stuff that fits the size and maybe in a less vast space, you can also do something compelling? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, it totally fits the size, and again, I'll mention my trip to California this week. We have a lot of LEDs in our office. We don't have big voltage ceilings. We don't have a big grand lobby, but they're placed properly where it makes the space seem bigger, it really does, but it doesn't overpower the space. 

We had a really good design consultation upfront on how to utilize the space appropriately because you're right too, you can totally overpower an environment. There can be heat dissipation issues that you don't anticipate and you can turn your office into a tanning salon after a while if you have too many LEDs on them. 

Yeah, and I think that gets lost sometimes, in that everybody understandably because these are six-figure, potentially seven-figure projects. There's a lot of money involved and the buyers are looking at the visual quality of the displays, obviously, but maybe they're not thinking so much about things like heat generation, power consumption, weight, all those sorts of things. 

John Steinhauer: Absolutely. Yeah, and those are important considerations, and that's why it really comes down to that team of consultants upfront. Everyone from the consultant themselves to the meeting space, the real estate, this is a team sell. We used to call it, I came from Whitlock before I joined Barco. So we were a large systems integrator, and we used to call it the Team bus. 

We put everybody on the Team bus to go to that meeting because we have to consider all those things before anybody sends out a quote or starts thinking about how they're going to put this together. All those considerations have to be taken into account. 

Is that going to be problematic going forward because people are going to be more reticent to travel. Even if they're vaccinated, they just say, you know what, I haven't traveled in a year and a half, I don't need to as much, or do you think it'll just shift back to on-site meetings because if you want to do this you gotta be there? 

John Steinhauer: I think hybrid is here to stay. I'll be honest with you as someone who walks the walk, right? Last week I was in Atlanta for a live event, and it was spectacular. It was an opportunity to shake hands, see old friends, and have corridor conversations between the sessions, and I flew home thinking, this is the greatest thing, I missed it so much, this is the only way to go. And the following day I had to part two of that session, which was a virtual session. Big WebEx, a hundred people at it, instead of the smaller group based on COVID guidelines of how many you can have in the office in Atlanta. 

So when I flew back here to Phoenix and I hosted that one, I just experienced all the benefits of reaching that many more people all at one time. The interactive chat boards we had, and we had production value on one side, and it was the best one to punch ever. I left there thinking, what we need to do as an organization is we have to figure it out to do both at once, right? We have to have that virtual aspect to go along with the live aspect so we can stream out to more people, we’re looking into doing that with our next event, and I think that's going to carry over into live entertainment too, where these concerts, some cities are going to have restrictions on capacity, how many people can be in the arena and there's going to need to be that live stream that goes out.

But there has to be value wrapped around it, incentive like a backstage meet and greet on video, question and answer for the artists after or before the show. All these pieces that first of all, make it something that you can charge for but also make it accessible to more people. So I think hybrid, overall, it's not a trend at all. It's something that's here to stay. 

We've talked about office lobbies, building lobbies, that sort of thing, and you also mentioned museums and extended reality for production sets and so on. What kind of applications are you seeing out there?

John Steinhauer: The most established application is the Van Gogh tour that's on right now, and that's projection mapping on a large scale. So about 70 to 100 projectors in each location, just a lot of expertise in the mapping side of it. It's just incredible. 

I have not been to one yet. I've been invited to an opening and in London in a few weeks, when I go over there with some customers, hopefully, guidelines permitting and that one’s called The Impressionists, so it’s a different group of artists. But that is quite established. The XR stage stuff, the shooting in front of the video wall is also in the trend stage right now. We speak to a lot of people that are really active in that space and they believe that's here to stay too, but in a more of a hybrid: some location shooting, which is very expensive and some studio shooting around the LED wall.

We play a big role in that with our image processing and it's an important sector for us. We feel as though there might be a shift from this pop-up experience out there. There was a need in the community, rose to the occasion, and created these studios and warehouses and all different kinds of locations. We think that trends are going to continue into the actual film studios and the Universals and the Sonys of the world too and that they'd have their own facilities over time. But right now it is in that trend phase, where it's all being outsourced to out of necessity. 

Was that purely triggered by COVID or were some production companies starting to do that anyway?

John Steinhauer: They were starting to do that and they were on the bleeding edge, when this happened, it became more viable.

What about other places like attractions and sports and entertainment venues? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, sports, in particular, has always been good for us. If you're a hockey fan, you're Canadian, so please tell me you're a hockey fan. 

I have to say it quietly, or I'll lose my passport, but I'm more into Premier League Football. 

John Steinhauer: Okay. Fair enough. You know the playoffs are going on right now. The Canadiens are making it to the Stanley cup. The team they beat, Las Vegas Knights are a customer of ours, and if you watch the openings and I love the difference between the arenas, right? Because Canada has a very limited capacity for the crowd, it is very obvious, and then when you go to Vegas, it's a full house. The Canadian venue doesn't have the same amount of technology built into it, and it's pretty obvious when you watch on TV, but when you watch the Knights, well, it's Vegas too.

But man, do they put on a show, and part of their show is our ice mapping. So the ice show you see at the beginning with all the player’s names and the flags when the anthems are being sung, that's all our technology up in the rafters and we've had a lot of reference sites where we're doing that in the NHL, a lot of new franchises or some anyway, coming into the league that we're working with. My New York Islanders. I’m a born and raised Long Islander. Hopefully, we'll win tonight and advance. But they're building a new arena in Belmont, New York, which is right by the horse racetrack, and we're working with them on design and things now, too. So yeah, in the sports arenas, mapping is a very good business for us. 

These are all-immersive, somewhat specialized things, but there's a long tail in all these kinds of facilities, particularly when you get to sports and entertainment venues where they're putting LED all over the damn place, is it inherent that you have to sell across the whole venue? 

Like you can do the LED ribbon boards, you could do the scoreboard, you could do the big, fine pitch displays on the concourse and the whole bed, or can you just do the projection mapping? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, this is where our great partners come into play, and I'll speak about Whitlock, which is no longer around, the expertise that we brought to the table was... 

They’re part of AVI-SPL, in case anybody's wondering, they didn't just die. 

John Steinhauer: No, they didn't die. I exited before that piece of the puzzle came together. So I've never been a part of that team, but yeah, it turned into the big mega guys in the industry and they are very skilled at putting together applications like this, everything from scoreboards and things that you mentioned that we don't do. They have access to that technology, all the audio, which is, a huge part of the venues. They do all that kind of stuff too. 

So I'm an architect listening to this, or I'm a designer or end-user potentially, how does one engage with Barco? Is it through your partners or is it direct? How does all that work? 

John Steinhauer: Yeah, it's through our partners, and through our sales team here in the Americas. But the best way I would say, because I want to have something concrete to say here at the end, in terms of contacting us, is to contact me, you can contact me directly and I can steer you into any direction you need.

John.Steinhauer@Barco.com, and I'd be happy to help anyone who needs more information. 

Perfect. That's a great way to end it. 

John Steinhauer: Thank you, Dave. 

Thank you. I appreciate your time. 

 

Paul Miller, Questex

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

When news broke back in March that the live events and publishing firm Questex had bought the assets of Digital Signage Expo, there was, understandably, a lot of interest and speculation about whether that might mean the defunct trade show and conference would be revived.

It will be, likely around the same timeframe as the past, and back in Las Vegas. It is also likely it will have the same name - though it might just be called DSE. 

What's also clear is that it will not be a simple re-boot of the old show - which makes perfect sense, since the Digital Signage Expo that ran for 15+ years would politely be described as spinning its wheels - with attendance flatlined and exhibitor counts shrinking.

I contacted Questex when news first broke of the DSE assets being acquired at auction, and have had a few conversations since then with the company, including its CEO Paul Miller.

I wasn't sure how much he could tell me, but we had a terrific, very open chat about what went down, and his company's thinking around a new and different DSE in 2022. 

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

David: Paul. Thank you for joining me. Who is Questex? 

Paul Miller: Hi, Dave, thanks for having me first and foremost. Questex is a media and information services business that produces events alongside its media sites. We have been in existence as a company for about 15 years, just over. We are a company that focuses on really five or six markets, that is the life sciences and healthcare markets, the technology markets, and then we also focus on the areas of travel hospitality & wellness, and all of that is wrapped up around a focus on the experience economy. That's who we are and we do events, we do media websites, we do all kinds of connecting of buyers and sellers in those areas. 

David: So of those properties that you have in the context of the Pro AV world, what would people who are listening to this most likely know, LDI or the Nightclub & Bar Show? 

Paul Miller: Yeah. They would probably know our Nightclub & Bar Show in Las Vegas, mainly because that would have been in history. Some cases would collaborate with DSE and in some cases would just sit alongside so they would know that. 

They probably would know the Lighting Dimension Show, the LDI show that you mentioned. Yeah, that's also one that is quite well known in this space. I would say outside of that, there are events that I think are relevant in the hotel area, in the spa area, in the gym area where we’re connecting owners of hotels & operators of hotels and gyms and spas with various people that want to sell into those spaces. So of course digital signage is a huge area for all of those end users. So they may not know those, but certainly, I think they're areas that we think are very relevant. 

David: We'll get into acquiring assets of DSE, but I was curious when that happened, so I looked up Questex to see who they are and how they work and I get a sense that your typical approach is you have publishing wing as a foundational thing that kind of sets the content for that particular vertical market, and then you grow and market the live event off of that. Is that a fair assessment? 

Paul Miller: Yeah, I think that's a good assessment, Dave.

We believe that we should be engaged with communities 365 days through the year because people don't always wait for an event before they make their decision. So we want to help them through that buying process through content that attracts them to our websites. As they interact with that content, we like to use that data to produce what we would consider a very relevant show. So when you come to the show, it's content that's been popular throughout the year, probably speakers that have been writing content that you can come and meet live. So we see a full connection between how people in the B2B world look for content, and how they go through that buying process, and the event is part of that. 

In many cases, it's an exciting part of it, because people come to actually buy. In some cases, they come to network. In some cases, they come to get educated, and in some cases, all three. So, that idea that we would just do an event, and then see you next year is not really in our DNA. We're more, “Hey, we want to serve you throughout the year, and we'd love to see you live at the event if relevant.” 

David: And I also get a sense that that the events look different depending on the vertical. So you don't necessarily do a full trade show with exhibits for a certain vertical because it really doesn't fit, whereas, for other verticals, it may. 

Paul Miller: That actually is a really astute comment. I think sometimes in our world, not the digital signage world. This is our world at Questex. We sometimes talk about events a little bit like somebody saying, “I'm going on vacation to Africa,” and your first question is what country you're going to because you’re going to have a different experience depending on where you're going. 

In the events world too, there are various flavors. In some events, it truly is sort of a cash and carry. You bring in your goods, you set up your store and people come in and they buy your goods, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. By the way, I do not think that applies to digital signage, certainly on the whole, but that there is a flavor of event that we do that sort of emulates that, that is very much you come in to buy stuff and the exhibitors are there to sell stuff and success is how much did I sell, frankly?

And then there are the educational type events which sort of surround large conferences. I think you'd be familiar with these: great speakers, good education, and some really good networking off-piece at the hotel bar afterward, et cetera, and then you can get into some really specific events which are matchmaking buyers with sellers. This particular buyer is looking for this solution and we're going to put you in a room with this seller. They tend to be more intimate, very VIP, in some cases, we will host those buyers. So we tend to be, and I think your comment is right on. We tend to look for what fits what element of the market at the right time.

I think where it gets exciting, Dave, and this probably leads us into sort of our thoughts around the Digital Signage Expo is that in many cases you can do all three. You can have a great conference, you can have a great show, trade show floor, and you can do great matchmaking, and it doesn't work all the time. We have a feeling that it is relevant to DSE from what we've been hearing from the market, but you're absolutely right on the money. We don't really have a one size fits all approach as a company, and I think given the communities we serve, that would be very difficult for us to shoehorn in certain templates if you will. 

David: Right. So back in, I think you said it was April, but you acquired the assets of Exponation. What did you actually acquire? 

Paul Miller: We acquired the assets of Digital Signage Expo which would have included the trademarks, the websites, the database, the customer database. I think that was about it. A few other URLs, websites that sort of surrounded the industry a little bit. But everything that Exponation had that was DSE-related is what we acquired. 

David: And how did that happen? Was there like a Broker who came to you and said, “Hey, we have this”, or do you have people who just pay attention to this sort of thing? 

Paul Miller: No, it was strange, to be honest. The last year has been strange in many ways. Firstly, we’re very aware at Questex of DSC. We had, as mentioned at the start, we had seen the show, we had visited the show. I wandered over to the show while at our Nightclub & Bar event.

David: Just to sober up? (Laughter)

Paul Miller: Yeah, actually, just to see what it's like at a B2B show that isn't serving alcohol, which is a different field, and actually we had been impressed for many years with the show. We certainly didn't really know the understories and what was really going on, but from a very shallow view, I would say, the show looked very professional. There were great companies, and there was good buzz, and we always said to each other that, that looks like a great event, and that was about it, just for the record. 

Then I forget the actual timing, but sometime in the fall of last year, we obviously saw the story that Exponation had filed for Chapter 7, and that sort of alerted us about that a lot of us that are in the events business, the pandemic has been devastating. It wasn't that it was a surprise, but to be honest as having that sort of very narrow and shallow knowledge of the show, we were like, wow that's a shame that, that was a good looking event and we're probably going to see more of this was our initial reaction. Then what happened, Dave is that we got a notice from, I think it was the bankruptcy court. I can't remember who it was, but anyway, we got a notice that the assets were going to be auctioned to help raise funds, for those people that the debt was owed to if you will.

So we said, okay we like these assets and we've got some things that we could bring to the event, or this was before we knew, by the way, that might be relevant. So we entered into an auction process and it was the first time in my career that I've ever been through such a process and it truly was a person on the phone, basically banging the gavel and saying, “Yep,  sold to the people at the back,” and that ended up being us. We obviously then did a lot of homework before we went into the auction. We got our hands around a little bit. What was the size of the show? What was the target audience for the show? What do we think we could bring to the show? And it checked a lot of boxes for us. Yeah, we went into the auction seriously and we won that auction, and then, of course, you find what actually have we acquired? And that was a fascinating sort of few weeks of research. 

David: I've spoken with you in the past, I've spoken with someone else from your company and a consultant, Brent Gleason, who you've engaged to help out with this. 

I'm curious, as you've done your kind of due diligence and exploration of the industry, what have you been hearing about the industry, your impressions on that, but also, we can go from there to what are you going to do? 

Paul Miller: Sure. So firstly I have to say, and I think you know this that there wasn't a lot of ho-hum type of commentary in the research when we went to the industry. People were very passionate about space, very passionate about this product. Not all of it positive. I think there've been some negative experiences for certain people, but what we did find, Dave, was that this is an industry that is going through terrific growth and that growth looks to be sustainable, certainly, through the next half a decade if not beyond in our opinion, so great sort of 7.5% CAGR growth rates, touches a lot of verticals, and I know that people listening and yourself would know this, but this was our learning, touching verticals as diverse as healthcare, through to retail, through to hotels, houses of worship, hotels. So that was really interesting for us.

We also found and heard that the industry actually wanted a place to gather. They do see this as an industry that has its unique personality. It's not all about one thing or another thing, and there are definitely some trends that are coming in, the digital out of home space for instance, that in my opinion, is akin to what happened between print and the internet, back in the late nineties, a lot of data starts to be kicked off and a lot of backend technology starts to get into play. With digital signage becoming the forefront of that, it's where people first interact. So we got very excited very quickly. Some of the comments frankly, were hard to swallow or people saying, “Hey, the event was not what it used to be.” “It was starting to lose a little bit of its luster.” 

Obviously when the show was canceled last year. Some people were really quite upset about the lack of refunds and what went on there, and I fully understand that. We had to cancel a lot of events last year as well. It was a very tough scenario for everybody, but the industry we felt as we got into it had an opinion, and it was a strong opinion and people wanted to talk. We had incoming people calling us saying, “I want to talk to you about what you've bought here and let you know what you've got.”

And actually Brad was one of those, by the way, Brad said, look, I have a lot of history with the show, and I'd love to help reinvent it along the lines that I feel, and I think what the industry feels it should have been going in any way. So look, we have the ability to “start again” in many ways. I don't think the Exponation had that ability. They had a product, they had to try to grow that product. We've acquired a set of assets, but we have a real strong ability to listen to the community and try to create a new experience for the community that they're telling us they want. And that's unique. So, we purposely were have been extremely patient. We just said, let's listen, and the more we listen, the more we're finding that the industry wants an event, it wants a place to gather, but it doesn't really want your grandmother's DSC. 

I think the event has reached its limit, if you will, in terms of value and people wanted to do something else going forward, without losing some of the great things about the event, seems like it was a fantastic place for the industry to network and meet once a year. We don't want to lose that. That's a super reason for having an event. So, it's been a real experience. I mean, this is a very good acquisition from my experience, acquired through auction had gone into Chapter 7 through the pandemic and it has a set of stakeholders that really want to have a say. I mean, nobody said, sorry, I don't want to talk about it, or, I don't really have a comment. Everybody had something to say and I think that's great. That shows some passion. It shows some engagement. It’s just that not all of the comments were positive, I have to be honest.

David: Oh, for sure. When we chatted in the past, I said, I don't think there's enough to do at a trade show with a whole bunch of exhibit stands and everything, the way it was done in the past. There's a diminishing number of companies that want to spend those kinds of dollars, and I just didn't see it. Is that what you’re hearing more broadly? 

Paul Miller: Not really, no. I get your point, and we actually gave people the ability to tell us what they really want. Now, I will say that the number one thing that's coming back is that we want to meet people that are going to buy our product. So we want to meet, we don't really want to just get together and talk to each other. But it's a very expensive meeting to just talk to other people in the industry. So there's been a lot of questions to us like, do you reach people in the hotel industry? Do you reach people in the restaurant space? Do you reach people in other areas where digital signage is needed and can be engaged with? 

And when we've explained, as I did up top, that these are the markets we're in, people have gone, if you can get those folks to attend an event, we absolutely will bring a booth and we absolutely will exhibit, but you gotta bring buyers. You're not going to get away with putting up an exhibit and meeting without competitors across the aisle, that’s not enough. 

David: Right. I know with Exponation, they worked their butts off trying to get brands to show up, to a level that they were putting them on advisory boards and things like that, just to make them feel like they should be there. 

Paul Miller: Yeah. Look, I've been in the events space for sort of 25 years. It is not easy, particularly when, and this is where it comes back to the strategy of Questex, I think compared with Exponation, we're a huge believer in content.

I think I've said this to you before content is still king or queen, but the kingdom is data. Once you have people and you've attracted them, around content, it's really about understanding what their needs are, what they're looking for, engaging with them, and I think if you're a pure-play event company, what you do is you put on an event once a year, you're sort of reliant on a lot of partners to produce that content for you, and not in your environment. So you don't get the data as much, and I think that makes it very difficult in complete deference to what Exponation was trying to do. 

I think they were trying to do the right thing, but when you don't have that daily engagement with the community, it's quite hard to hit it out of the park on every single thing. You're going to find your content probably gets a bit tired, sometimes the loudest voice gets to be the speaker, as opposed to the one that everybody wants to hear. There are certain things that data takes out of the room. It takes that emotion out of the room and it says like this audience is engaging with this type of content, that's what they want to see live. That I think gives you a little bit more data-driven decision-making around what the industry wants, as opposed to my gut feel or what somebody just told me at the bar last week at the show. 

David: So, based on everything you've been hearing, everything your team has been doing, do you have the bones of an idea of what we’re going to see?

Paul Miller: Yeah we do. I think that's a good description. I'm not sure we're fully fleshed out, but I can certainly tell you a few things that we're going to do. 

Number one, we are going to relaunch the show. Just to be clear from the top, we are going to relaunch the show. We do think that the show has to be repositioned somewhat to be a broader show to bring in those customers, as I mentioned, We're looking at experiences around a broad-based agenda of life and business and mid the re-emergence of society and the global economy. So this is more about where does digital signage fit in the “roaring 20S”? So we are looking to bring back the event. We're looking at next Spring and we are looking at Las Vegas. I can't go much further than that at this point in time, because we are obviously trying to secure venues and we're trying to secure dates, and that by the way, is easier said than done in a post-pandemic environment and everybody wants dates.

But we do have our Nightclub & Bar rebranded as our Bar & Restaurant event in Las Vegas next spring. There's the possibility of bringing that together again if you will. We will have an exhibit floor but also adding things like show floor experiences, very inclusive. You know, “let's demonstrate some applications, do some showcases, have some themed presentation stages.” So a lot of buzz on the show floor, but at the same time, a really engaging conference program, lots of curated presentations, tracks based on innovative applications, why do this, what are the outcomes, what you should be looking for?

And last but not least we are hoping to have multiple layers of networking at the event. That's one thing that this community told us is, “Please don't lose the networking!” 

As I think, you know more than I know, great parties, great places for the industry to come together and celebrate, learn to buy, to sell. So yeah, we were even looking at guides around Las Vegas itself, tours of installations so people can learn, form real-life applications, not just what somebody might tell you what could happen. Let's curate some tours, and we do that by the way, for our Bar & Restaurant event, we take people behind the scenes at a Nightclub behind the scenes of a Vegas restaurant, so they can see everything from point of sale applications through to what's going on in the kitchen, and how does the food come out? We think that the audience, the community is telling us it wants more, hands-on more, show me what works, more education, more demos and bring it all together as an event that is an experience beyond just, ”I walk the show floor and I meet a couple of friends at the bar.”

David: Yeah. I've certainly heard many times and when I did a little survey asking about, where should a trade show go? The comment that's stuck in my head was, I know when I go to something like DSE, I'm landing, and that's what I'm doing that week, or for the next two, three days, that's my subject matter versus an ISE or an InfoComm, which are great shows, but they're Omni shows covering a whole bunch of different vertical industries and technologies and everything else and you don't have this aggregate of people who are just there for digital signage. Now you could go to a party and talk to 20 people, and they're all doing things that have nothing to do with digital signage, but they're in AV. 

Paul Miller: Yeah, by the way, I think both are relevant. A lot of respect for ISE and InfoComm and the AVIXA Association in general, I think they do great stuff by the way.

And I think there is relevance in attending a show that is broader than just the sort of industry that you're in. I think that's where you do see adjacencies and ideas that might be applicable. But what was loud and clear from this community was we wanted our own place. There's enough going on in the digital signage space for us to need to focus on our industry, our solutions, our ecosystem for us to want our own place, and that, by the way, was one of the key learnings over the last 8 to 10 weeks of listening to people. 

There wasn't one person who said, I don't think the industry needs its own place. There are a few people who said can I afford the time to go to all of these events? And I think that's a relevant comment and that's all about saying, well, we have to win your respect to get your time, and we have to have a program that you walk away after two or three days or a week, and you go, “Wow, I'm going to recommend this to my friends because these guys really put something on that it creates a fear of missing out if I'm not there, and I think more importantly than all of that actually creates business interactions. People actually do write orders and they do write RFPs at the event.” That's what we're here for at the end of the day. 

So yeah, I think the need for an event that's focused on this particular community is clear: that's actually a box that was checked very clearly. it wasn't a 50-50 decision.

David: There will be people who listen to this and think that's great that you're doing a show, but spring in Las Vegas or just spring in general in the trade show industry is very crowded. There's a lot going on and you're putting this in between ISC and InfoComm, which are AV shows, there's NAB, all these other ones that happening around then there, I've heard many people say it would be lovely if an event like this was in the fall instead.

Paul Miller: Yeah. Unfortunately, the fall is also busy. It's got its own interesting issues and particularly around the pandemic where shows have been moved around, and they're off cycles. The feedback that we got, Dave, was again, you're right, “It's crowded. Please don't put it over the top of another show because we don't want to be forced into a decision. Do we go to this or this?” 

The feedback we got was, “We liked where it was before,” which was, around that April timeframe, spring timeframe. So we've taken that into account and we didn't have any huge set of people saying, “Hey, move it to November or get it out of the way.” The other option we had by the way was to think about, do we put it alongside our lighting show, which is in the fall, October, November. 

The more we get into it, the more it becomes clear to us that actually, the lighting show is not as relevant as an audience, they tend to be lighting designers, people that are doing the rigging of lighting, et cetera. A better audience would be people that are buying stuff for their restaurant for us. So yeah, we're never going to get a date that's going to satisfy everybody, unfortunately. Our feeling is we have the best chance to bring the right set of buyers to this event in the spring of next year. 

David: And if you do it somewhat in tandem with an existing show like your Bar & Restaurant show, I imagine there's some efficiency around Ops people, like, you don't have to bring double the staff. You may bring more than you would for one show, but not of double compliment. 

Paul Miller: Yeah, the efficiencies come with, obviously the show place itself. So if we do go to the Las Vegas convention center, obviously you get efficiency. If you do two in one, if you will. 

From our team perspective, maybe Dave, in terms of we could send seven people rather than two sets of five, for instance, which is where I think you're going. But I'm not sure, I think what we're looking at for this event is and also by the way, for the Bar & Restaurant event, as you can imagine, the experiences there are pretty high end. You've got people launching new dreams. You've got people launching new bar and restaurant concepts. So I think that it would be the same as at a reinvigorated DSE. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not looking for cost efficiencies, let me put it that way. That wouldn't be the reason for doing it. 

David: When do you think you'll have a launch or an announcement saying we're going to do this? 

Paul Miller: We're in the midst of recruiting an advisory board. We're getting some great traction there, by the way. I can give you a few names if that helps. I would say we are a matter of weeks away from a full announcement and maybe not many weeks. 

David: Yeah, and I guess you really have to be because planning cycles are long, right? People are already budgeting for 2022. 

Paul Miller: We gotta get moving, yeah.

It's not just the budgeting aspect of this. It's the sales team that has to be implemented. You've got to have your content team in place. Your advisory board needs to meet so we can start to get around the sort of flavor of the show. So no, we gotta get our skates on, no doubt about it.

David: So who are some of your advisors that you can say? 

Paul Miller: Some that I can say, and by the way, there are a number of others that we think are going to be really exciting for the community to hear about, but we've got Rich Ventura, B2B Business line manager at Sony, I think previously the chairman of the DSF. We've got Rick Robinson, Chief Strategy Officer for Billups, leading voice in the out-of-home industry, and by the way, a play on the advisory board, just for the record is these four quadrants, there's the industry veterans, those people that really know this space, the new voices, and the new faces. We said we're going to reinvigorate, let's get some new voices. So Jackie Walker, digital signage subject matter expert at Publicis Sapient is one of those. 

We've got a number of others. Laura Davis Taylor retail & reality, we've got some people here that I think are going to bring some really great new voices and faces alongside the veterans, also strategic partners that we're looking at, and of course, people like yourself in the media. We'd like to have a balance of all of the above and if we're going to deliver on our promise of a reinvigorated show, I think the definition of insanity is doing something the same way and then expecting a different outcome, so we've got to make some changes here and reinvigorate the advisory board, get new names and voices and faces involved, but don't throw away the baby with the bathwater either, make sure you've still got the people that know what they're talking about. 

David: The last question I suppose is will it be called Digital Signage Expo or it'd be something else, or is that TBD?

Paul Miller: Yeah, that's a great question. We have, interestingly, sometimes for how things happen without doing more sort of fundamental research, but internally we're using the DSE acronym quite a lot. I don't know is it Digital Signage Expo? Is it Digital Signage Experience? Is it DSE? At the moment where we're sticking with brand equity. Words and all that come with digital signage expo, but it's interesting internally, and we do refer a lot to it as DSE, and sometimes that just turned into the experience as opposed to the expo. So a little bit more about the industry, a little bit less about the product itself.

I would say a personal front, from what I've heard from customers, Digital Signage Expo is fine. People are calling it DSE anyway, and I don't know if I want to go through a massive rebranding exercise at the same time we're doing a relaunch of the event. 

David: Yeah. It's more of the communications and the people you bring on board and everything else. 

Paul Miller: I think so, yeah. At the end of the day, I think it is: have we delivered a product that people go to and say you know what, these guys are on the path to creating a must-go-to event, we did some business, it was great to meet the community again, and I learned a lot. If we can check those boxes, I think we can then start to think about, okay, what now? And at the moment, we're just fully focused on producing something that people walk away from Vegas going, “These guys nailed it, they listened and we've got an event that's a must go for our industry, and they want to listen to some more on how we can make improvements from stage one.”

So I think at the end of the day, that's what really matters. Yes, people have a lot of opinions. Yes, there's a lot of baggage. Yes, there's a lot of words that we're using right now that I hope resonate with the industry. But at the end of the day, it's did we deliver? 

David: All right, Paul, thank you. I appreciate your time. 

Paul Miller: Dave, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

 

Jay Leedy, Sony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Leedy: You mean in terms of…? 

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

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

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

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

Jay Leedy: That's right. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So a small job versus a six months job? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Christophe Billaud, Telelogos

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

I first bumped into Telelogos when I started going to ISE in Amsterdam, and while I'd never heard of the company, I wandered off impressed by what I'd seen.

The digital signage software company had a very solid platform and some of the deepest, most powerful device management tools I'd seen. It sounds boring, but that's the stuff that can really matter when you have big, scaled networks.

The company is French and has worked mainly with big, enterprise-level clients in that country, and in other parts of Europe. It has also had quite a bit of success in Asia and the Middle Wast, particularly in banks.

In the past year or so, Telelogos has started laying the groundwork in sales and business relationships to establish itself in the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

I spoke with Christophe Billaud, the company's Managing Director.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

David: Christophe, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Telelogos is all about, the background, and so on? 

Christophe Billaud: Yeah, sure. We are a software company, a pure software company that comes from IT and have existed for more than 30 years now.

At the beginning of the company, we were making file transfer software and then a data synchronization and data integration software for four major retailers. In fact, the software was intended to basically automate, secure, and optimize the data change between one corporate server and a remote location. So mostly retailers who have a lot of different points of sale, and want you to secure their data transfer between all their shops and the head office. So that's where we come from the IT: Data synchronization, data integration, and then we added the device management features because customers want to manage their IT equipment, first the POS, then mobile devices, and all the equipment they have in the shops.

So we come from this world and10 years ago, something like that, we added a new domain in our portfolio: digital signage, and, and of course, as you understand when we develop the digital signage software, we didn't reinvent the wheel and we integrated inside our digital signage software, all the data synchronization integration and device management capability that we already had. So that's what makes it a little bit particular in this market as we come from this IT world and not from the content or the AV market. 

David: Yeah, that's really interesting. I talked about the importance of data integration and device management, and most of the companies in the digital signage industry, the software companies started with the presentation side of their platform and gradually they've added some degree of data integration, and they've got better about device management, but you've come at it from the complete opposite. You did all that stuff first and then added the presentation layer. 

Christophe Billaud: Exactly that, and again, that's what makes us a little bit particular and that's what is interesting in our positioning today as we’ll talk about later, but we think there is a shift between from the AV to also an IT world. That's what makes our offer interesting for the integrators, I think. 

David: How do you see that shift happening, is it just in the discussions or who's in the meetings, that sort of thing? 

Christophe Billaud: Of course when we discuss this with our customers and partners, but we see that in projects, it seemed that before most of the projects were about only broadcasting media with few interactions, almost no integration with the information system, even on the Seabright network.  But now it seems that there is a real trend towards exploiting the huge amounts of data that companies have. Everybody's talking about data mining, et cetera, but people usually don't truly know how to use that, but I think it's really a change for the industry, for the digital signage industry, because there is a great opportunity to use and make the most of these data with digital signage.

There was a possibility with platforms like ours to make these data visually accessible to the workers and customers and to use also this data to condition and to trigger the content to make it really efficient. So I think it's a real opportunity for all the industry. 

David: Yeah, I think it's really important to focus on data just because there's been this endless problem in the digital signage industry of how do you keep the screens populated with fresh content and relevant content? And the way you can really do that and make it hyper-relevant is using data from information systems that matter, and as you say, content that can be triggered and shaped and everything else by what the system is telling you. 

Christophe Billaud: Yes, and that gives also the possibility to have a wider customer range, because before digital signage was retail, banking, corporate, but now we see that it's across all verticals, can be manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and what is really interesting is that digital signage is shifting from a “nice to have” application to a business-critical application. 

So that's really important for the customer because you are really optimizing for productivity and also for the system integrator because you are not just offering simple digital signage, like a loop, but you will offer a business application to the customer. So the value is not the same in the profit also. So that's really important for all the industry. 

David: Most of your business historically has focused on France and Western Europe, right? 

Christophe Billaud: Yes, historically. But for example, we have been selling to Asia in China for almost 15 years now.

David: Are there particular verticals or types of companies that you tend to have worked with? 

Christophe Billaud: We work in all verticals, but it's true that we have a lot of banks in our portfolio. I was mentioning China, for instance, we're having China City Bank, Bank of Communication, Rural Bank. In Hong Kong, we have the ICBC. We had an interview with Nedbank, South Africa some days ago. In the Middle East, and of course some banks in Europe. So we have a lot of banks in our portfolio, I think because security is really an issue for them and to have a really robust infrastructure and that's what we offer with out software.

So yeah, baking is something really in our portfolio, but again, we have a really good market share and corporate and retail, and now we see a lot of new projects in manufacturing, supply chain, logistics as well. 

David: There's a lot of options out there. Why is it that they would go with you guys, given so many companies selling software solutions?

Christophe Billaud: Yes, I think we're talking about the shift from AV to IT, I think that's one y point for the partners now because we believe that in most projects like that when you have to integrate data, it's not only an AV project anymore because you have to integrate this data. You have to find a software solution, which is agile enough to be able to integrate the data at the beginning of the project but to make it evolve also, and that's really important because almost everybody is capable of hard coding and bespoke development for a project at the beginning. But you have to keep in mind that the project will evolve. You have to connect to the legacy system, but to all the new applications, et cetera. So you need to get the system, which is agile enough to do and thanks to where we come from, we have this data integration capability, which is really simple.

You just have to set parameters, and that really helps the partners to follow the customer and to follow the project, and there are all the things that are really important when we are going on any project. Because when we are talking about data integration, that means that you are in the company network. Before, usually with the projects, we were on a different network because there was no integration with the information system. Now, when you are in the network, of course, you will have security concerns. You have to make sure that your software would comply with it and security rules. So you must make sure that you have really robust software, that's also something that we offer, and the last thing that we see is that today most projects are not only traditional displays anymore, but you have a lot of new devices coming to the field. Of course, you have SOC inside the display, but you will have tablets, you have smartphones, kiosks, even IoT devices sometimes.

So you have a broader range of devices, and usually the traditional AV integrator, they are not used to that. So they are asking for tools, how can I manage these devices? How do I integrate this data? We will help them by providing them with the tool, and of course, the partnership and the service to follow them.

David: The kind of partners that you have in different countries, do they tend to be more on the IT side systems integrators side, then on the AV side and that’s traditionally putting in conference displays and things like that. Could they work with your platform?

Christophe Billaud: Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, we have more AV partners than IT partners because this market is coming from the AV. So since the beginning, we had AV partners, but now it's true that we see new competitors for the AV industry, pure IT integrators because they can see digital signage project as a traditional IT project because, for them, displays like a screen, a player is like a PC. You have a network, you have data, so for them, it's an IT project, but of course, this is a company that will miss all the expertise on content, on these kinds of things, and I think that AV companies are going to take the skills of IT companies to be able to face this new competition. 

So to answer your question, we had a lot of AV integration companies. We still have a lot and most of our partners are still AV companies, even if we have a new kind of partners like Gemini or this kind of IT company because I think that bigger companies see digital signage as an interesting market, because it's not small project in silo in a company, but it can be across different services in bigger companies worldwide. 

David: As I mentioned earlier, there's a whole bunch of digital signer software options out there, and a lot of them are kind of islands of activity like you log into a digital signage system, you do all your content management and everything out of that, but it doesn't really relate to other systems it's its own thing.

Do you see the future being much more where digital signage is just a component of a larger sort of AV/IT initiative? 

Christophe Billaud: Yes, I think we will have a lot of interaction between digital signage in global projects, and it will not be just a digital signage project. That's why we think that's our strategy, which is to focus on developing software is a good strategy for that because it will be something independent that will be able to interconnect with any kind of IT equipment in the company. 

David: Is it getting easier to extract and use data from different kinds of business systems than that in the past? 

Christophe Billaud: Easier, I'm not sure of because you have more and more applications, you have legacy applications, new applications, so I would not say that it's easier because you have a lot of data or multiple choices. That's why, I mean, it's really important to have a platform, which is really agile where you have just to set parameters, because if you make bespoke development, then you're stuck with what you have done at the beginning, it's really difficult to make it evolve and difficult to maintain and it's really costly. 

David: How do you encourage a sniff test on this sort of thing? Like with all these companies now saying, yes we do data handling, we do data integration. We can show real-time data. 

You've been doing that for 20-30 years. I suspect there's a difference between what some cloud-based CMS is saying and what you're saying. So if I'm an end-user, how do I sort out what's good, and what's kind of threadbare? 

Christophe Billaud: Yes. Sure. As you mentioned, everybody can say that they do data integration or even device management. But I think that the main difference is in the way you do it. Again, you can make bespoke development to be connected to one specific application. That will work. You can do it by coding but then you have a lot of different data sources when you want to change regularly the data structure, when you want to do a lot of things like that and make it evolve.

If you don't have just an easy software with parameter setting, which is ready to connect to different applications, that would be a nightmare. So all companies will be able to connect one specific application by coding. Everybody can do it, but to have software be able to connect to different application data sources, databases, just by setting parameters and to make it evolve reasonably, it's really something different. 

I mean, for all these users and all the integrators, I would say just come and talk to us where you can test out the software easily, see how it works, and how easy it is to use. 

David: think you have a lot of data connectors already pre-written, right?

Christophe Billaud: Yeah, that's the mechanism we have. We choose all of that and we also build a partnership with different companies and to be able to make that, for instance, we just launched a partnership with SAP in manufacturing. That's something really important to have access, to all this data and to be able to beta serve all these customers, to make all these data visually accessible again in manufacturing or transportation or logistics, for instance. 

David: So if you're hooking into an SAP system or something, is that relatively easy or is that like a quarter million dollar job? 

Christophe Billaud: No, it can be easy. I mean, like in every project, it depends on how far you want to go, how much data do you want to extract, the process you have, but no, once again, it can be something really easy to use. 

To begin a project, it's not a hundred million dollars and it can be done in some really easy steps.

David: When you're working with larger enterprise-grade companies and talking about things like data to data handling and device management, are they asking you about that, or are you selling that into them? Saying this is the sort of thing that you could do or do they already know. 

Christophe Billaud: With large companies, I would say it depends on the verticals.

For instance, in banking, they are used to doing that to get the financial data and the extraction into their information system. But for instance, manufacturing or transportation, logistics, they don't really have the use case. They don't even think of digital signage sometimes. So we have to tell them, yes, we can do some kind of digital dashboarding of what you can extract from your information system, from your ERP, and what you can have. 

I mean, they usually don't think of it. So in some industries, that's something really new. So we have to tell them about what we do, for example, all the verticals to the manufacturing and logistics, we tell them that it's possible with digital signage.

David: Once you tell them about it and explain that you can visualize your KPIs on the production floor of a factory or whatever. Do they still have to think about it and rationalize it, or they kind of conclude that would be very useful? 

Christophe Billaud: Really most of them think that it's really useful. It’s just that they have to find the time to make it. But yes, it's really a prediction game and something that is really important for them because they're always trying to find a way for the manufacturing to really bring this information in front of the worker when they are working and it's always a nightmare.

And that gives them these possibilities, and what is interesting with digital signage that you can have a mix between these KPI information coming from the information system, mixed with security information or in general communication, that's also something important. 

David: Yeah. I'm sure that if you just have screens up telling you what the production volumes are and all that, after a while it starts to become a wallpaper. But if you can blend it on other things, then people are going to look at it repeatedly. 

Christophe Billaud: Yeah, exactly, and sometimes it's really prediction-oriented, meaning that when the guys are working on a specific operation, we will trigger the right content to tell him what he's doing right now two minutes after bringing another media. So, as I said before, you can make the data visually accessible and also trigger the right information during the operation process. That's also very important 

David: Where does Telelogos start and stop in terms of services? 

There are increasingly software companies who are becoming quasi integrators and also consultants on everything else. What's the scope of services you guys offer? 

Christophe Billaud: Yeah, that's an interesting point. We have seen a lot of companies like that. I mean, coming from software and being integrators mostly in retail, because they want you to get there and say, “Okay, we do software, we got a name. We can have the project.” We do not think that's a good idea. We will keep our business model, which is really clear. We just do the software and we sell through via our business partners. First reason is that the integrators, they are our partners.

If we become a service and be an integrator, we become a competitor to our partners and that's not what we want to do, and secondly, I think that's not the trend of the market. If you look at the not only digital signage market but globally speaking for example on IT, we see that a lot of companies tried in the past to make software and then to add services. But finally, that you didn't make it because it's a different job, and again, you have your partner as a competitor, and we also feel when we discuss with customers now, especially large customers, that they want to build the best solution to be free. Sometimes they want to change a piece of the puzzle, not to be stuck with one partner and each priority solution. So I think for the customer, it's really important to be free and to have one integrator, which is the best solution, and if the customer is not happy with one or the other, then it can change.

I think one of the reasons also that digital signage projects, some years ago, where you just launch a project or a new concept in retail, for instance, and this concept will be the same for five years now. We see that there are a lot of needs for evolution, not only with the pandemic, but globally speaking. So you need to change the concept to change something, to connect to another data source, to do something new, and that means that you also need agility and you have to change that, and the last thing about that is that the digital signage project is also evolving, meaning that before you had one digital signage project in silo, in a company and more in a big company, we see several projects in different services in retail and supply chain then corporations and they will have different needs and they will not take one vendor that has a different solution every time, sometimes they will want to validate one software, one solution to use it for different services, sometimes not.

So they want to be free to change, and so I think that the future of the markets, that the company will choose their solution and they will choose an integrator to make the whole project. 

David: Yeah. I certainly hear that over and over again, that they don't want to deal with five different vendors, all pointing their fingers at each other when there's a problem, that they want to deal with one person, one company. 

Christophe Billaud: Yeah, I mean, they can have just one company in front of them, but inside the project, you have different solutions.

I think that's important for them, and when we are coming to IT, also in terms of security for the IT people, I think it's important for them to validate software security validation takes time in big companies. It's really important. So if, for example, in a big company, they have 5 or 10 different digital signage projects, because one is for retail and one is for corporate, etc. They don't want to validate 10 different software, but once they validate one, which is good for all that they are doing, they're usually happy to use it for different uses, and then they will choose an integrator to integrate all the solutions. 

David: Tell me about CLYD, it's a device manager, but it's its own entity. Is it not? 

Christophe Billaud: Yes, it is because CLYD is a device management software. It's included in our digital signage suites media for display. So when you buy the entire digital signage solution, you have it on board, but there's also software and mobile device management, which is used on its own to manage mobile projects.

David: So it can be completely distinct from a digital signage project? 

Christophe Billaud: Exactly. It can be totally distinct, but of course, it's really useful in digital signage because it will allow you to manage not only the content with CMS, but to manage the device themselves, players, the displays, and that's also something which is more and more important that asking our partners and customer because they want to make sure that the project is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to make sure everything is working by having software, hardware, inventory, to also be able to make what we call preventive maintenance.

And that's with this software, we can monitor any critical elements of the PC, so we can check the hardware software, the disc space, the fire, the nature studies, et cetera, and when there is a problem, automatically we'll have alarms and we can launch automatic action to prevent or fix the problem.

David: Do you sense that your buyer base, your customers understand the value of device management more than perhaps they did in the past? 

Christophe Billaud: Oh, yes, they do. That's for sure, because, again, before digital signage was just a project on the side. Even sometimes IT didn't even know that they had digital signage because it wasn't on their own network.

Now that it’s coming to the IT infrastructure, that's a must to manage the device, not only to make sure that it's working, but it's also to ensure security, to make sure that it complies with IT and security rules. For example, when today we have a lot of Android devices going on the field, I don't even know if the customer knows how many devices, Android devices, which are deployed are rooted systems, just because it's easier for the manufacturer and for the software provider to have a rooted system because, and it's a little bit technical, but in Android to make some particular function like reboot, or to make a silent installation, you have to get some special rights, but when you have a rooted system on your network, such a huge security breach.

So that's why you need a real device manager, which is loaded by Google and by Android to be able to pair from all these features and to ensure the security of the device, but now in big companies, security’s just a must and device management also is a must. 

David: The company started to take a look at North America as a market to expand into, I know you already have some partners there, but you're taking a serious look now at North America. Correct? 

Christophe Billaud: Yes, completely. As we mentioned before, our major footprint in EMEA. We have a lot of customers in Asia also, in Africa. We now have an office in Mexico actually. But in the US even, we have some partners, and now we will have some nice customers, but it was some opportunities.

Now we want to expand our footprint in the US. That's really important for us, so to find new partners and we are also looking for an acquisition or merger or strategic partnership in North America to be able to accelerate and to really be able to build a real transnational company in EMEA, Asia, and America.

David: Is it a challenge to reach from France or because you've been doing Asia and elsewhere, it's just another market? 

Christophe Billaud: It's not just another market, I think. North America is a huge market. It’s a good market, a technical market. I mean, there are a lot of competitors there, and I think it's difficult to go quickly and have great visibility without having a local partner.

That's why we're really looking for a strategic partnership there. 

David: How was that going so far? 

Christophe Billaud: So far we are just trying to find the right company, but we are still looking for that. So if some company is interested to contact us to discuss it, we will be of course, totally open.

David: I speak with software companies and with private equity and VC companies, and there's a lot of shopping happening, right? 

Christophe Billaud: Yes, that's true.

David: So it's a competitive market in its own way. There's a lot of companies saying we would entertain a discussion and there's a lot of VCs saying we would love to be able to be introduced to X and Y.

Christophe Billaud: Yeah, that’s true, I mean digital signage, I would say is a recent market. So like all emerging markets, there are a lot of small companies and now they're reserved for consolidation, so that's totally natural, and it's true that there is a lot of consolidation now. But it's not that easy to find the right company with the same strategy and this mentality.

David: Yeah, there are lots of people who would happily sell to you, but do you want to buy them? 

(Laughter)

All right, Christophe, that was terrific. I appreciate you spending some time with me. 

Christophe Billaud: Thanks a lot, Dave. 

Transforming QSR Drive-Thru Roundtable

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

Neil Longuet-Higgins, The LED Studio

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

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

Clearly, I needed to speak with this guy.

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

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

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

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you prefer TruLED? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They would last what, like 3000 hours, maybe? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the buying audience more mature? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neil Longuet-Higgins: Absolutely. 

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

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

 

Remco Veenbrink, VideowindoW

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

If you spend any time on Linkedin, or even platforms like Instagram and Twitter, you've likely seen quick videos of LED displays somewhere in Asia that are using anamorphic, three-dimensional creative to get viewer attention.

We've seen spaceships look like they are emerging from the screen. Giant sloshing waves inside what looks like an aquarium. Huge robot hands reaching out from the screen. And on and on.

It's becoming a thing. But it is not a terribly well understood thing.

Which is why Larry Zoll from Sensory Interactive, which does what it calls dynamic real estate, reached out and suggested the emerging creative trend would be a great thing to explore in a podcast conversation.

Zoll is the managing director for technology and innovation at his firm, and has been fielding questions and requests about this stuff for a long time now. What's clear is that not many people understand what's going on and how it works. For example, customers ask if the LED display technology they have in place, or are putting up, will support the anamorphic creative pieces they want to do.

The short answer is yes, because this is all about the creative, and not about the display hardware.

We had a really good chat about what this visual trickery is all about, how it's done, and its limitations. If you watch 10 videos out of China and South Korea that have anamorphic creative, you'll notice nine of them are shot at a very specific angle. Because the visual effect may only work from that angle. 

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Remco, thanks for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Video Window is all about? 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah. Thank you for having me, David. Video Window is a glare controlled with a media platform. You can compare us to segmented tintable glass, which doesn't exist. So it's tintable glass with segmentation and those segments work like addressable pixels and with those pixels, we control the transparency of the window. But as we show content, we can actually show interesting videos, graphic art as glare control. So our system controls the transparency of the content, and we're developing all kinds of nice content for Video Window to work like glare control.

So you can think of gamification. We already had Pong. We're now working on Space Invaders which can be controlled by passengers because our main target area sector is aviation right now in any public transportation hub. Based on QR codes, people can then grab their controller and play Space Invaders, but it is glare-controlled, and we also have generative video art. It's all glare control. 

So it's smart building glass that doubles as video walls. This would be a quick way of saying it? 

Remco Veenbrink: If you change the word “wall” for “window”, then yeah.

It works like a video wall, but it’s transparent and that way we don't need to be in front of a wall, we can be embedded into the glass, and we actually serve people, the planet, and profit. We can also reduce the CO2 emissions of a building and help in reducing the carbon footprint of that building. So there's the tintable glass aspect.

So what's the underlying technology. Is it switchable glass stuff or is it LED embedded in glass? 

Remco Veenbrink: It's liquid crystal. That's the core, it's a thin-film transistor liquid crystal display. So it's TFT. We started out with a twisted nematic, so TN LCD, and we recently developed a high-resolution display based on TFT. 

So when you say high resolution, for a typical structural glass panel that you're using would you be realizing full HD resolution or 4K, or how does all that work? 

Remco Veenbrink: It's 2K resolution right now, and we're happy to work together with an OEM who can actually build that for us, because before we had a 15 millimeter, like half an inch sized pixel that was a rather big pixel, but this new generation of Video Windows is built together with an OEM. 

Okay. So you're - I don't want to say approximating, it’s the wrong word - but the visual experience is not that much different from what you would see on a conventional LCD display then, in terms of resolution? 

Remco Veenbrink: Nope. It's a 2K square pixel resolution. So that's a bit different from a normal LCD display. They are subdivided into subpixels. So you have RGB sub-pixels, and we don't have those. We have square pixels, it’s a monochrome pixel. 

Is there any opportunity to go to RGB or is it always just the way you do it and it makes the most sense to be monochrome? 

Remco Veenbrink: RGB subpixels take away so much transparency that you need a backlight, and as we use the exterior light, the sunlight, the daylight as our backlight. So we wanted to make it as transparent as possible, and with RGB subpixels it's dark. It's pretty dark.

With LCD technology, I don't think we will get an RGB transparent screen that could work as glare control the way we use it. We've seen some interesting developments with the electoral wedding which was done by a Dutch professor. He came by, he showed the technique, but that's years out before that will be available.

That's a very fundamental technology that's still under development and that's a CMYK solution, and that means as there is no black in there it's pretty watercolorly still but it's an interesting technique. I don't think that with TFT LCD, we will ever see an RGB transparent display that can be used in the way that we do.

So using the natural sunlight as a rear illumination of the display, so to speak, what happens at night? 

Remco Veenbrink: Then our backlight is gone. Predominantly, we’re glare control so we embrace the sun. We embrace the daylight, instead of fighting it, whereas video walls would actually increase the lumen output and really put more nits in there. We actually have a higher contrast ratio when there's more sun. On the new panel, we're testing it and averaging it out but it's around 8 Watts per square meter, and we average this out because usually, you don't show a full black as an image. So when we put it as a full black image, it's around 8 Watts per square meter, and that's so little especially if you compare that to those high brightness screens, they become more efficient over time but that's 800 Watts easily per square meter.

So if you address the areas that we aim for 100-400 square meters, you're looking at some serious energy consumption, and yeah, for us the 200 square meters you could still run that on a normal outlet. It's very energy efficient.

So if I'm sitting in a departure lounge at the airport in Rotterdam, what am I seeing on this window glass? What's showing, and how does it look? 

Remco Veenbrink: Right now, we have content agreements with the local museum, with a local art Academy and they all provide content for us. So it's a lot of cultures, it's a lot of art. We also have poets that provide work. So we have poetry that shows, we make that with the motion graphics into an interesting film and we have a Pong playing, so you can log in with your phone and play pong and that's all in a mix. So we have five-minute mixes. So we show commercial content, we show artistic content and we show gamification, and yeah that's how we add value, and next to that, we also have a close connection to the internal communication department from the airport who uses our screen to address certain messages to passengers, for instance, all the COVID measures, we run that. In every other film, we show those measures that people should take into account. 

And you show operational stuff as well, like “You're at Gate 5 and this is a flight to..”, that sort of stuff? 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah, that's the new stuff but we haven't installed our new high-resolution screen yet. In two months, it will be installed, and there we can show flight information and wayfinding because that is too detailed for pixels with a 15-millimeter size, and even though we have a 25 square meter set up, you can only show one flight at a time and people like to have an overview. But that's definitely coming and that's what we're building right now, is the API integration to have that flight information shown on our hardware. 

And you mentioned you're primarily focused on mass transport, particularly airports. Why are they interested in your product?

Remco Veenbrink: Good point. Their main issue right now is non-aviation revenue, making more cash flow. So they need more money, and we can help them with increasing their non-aviation revenue by showing commercial content. So we have a threefold advantage. We have ad experience cause we're mostly at addressing the gate areas.

So we can add more experience for the passengers by showing artistic content, gamification, and interactive content. We can actually reduce the CO2 emission by helping the climate control system and by being more transparent which allows for daylight to be a bigger part of the basic illumination of that area. So we can help save energy, and then with the commercial content, we can help add non-aviation revenue so that we are addressing their biggest pain, that profit part. But, they all have to also live up to their goals, which is reduced CO2. 

When it comes to the media side of things on monetizing these window displays, do you get pushback because A) it's only in black and white, and B) it's only running during daylight hours.

Remco Veenbrink: The daylight hours, we can address. It's all proven technology. It's just not so sustainable and we really like the sustainable aspect of our proposition. The color, I tried to explain to them that if you have an 85-inch commercial content full-color all over the place anyway, do you really want a 100 square meter display to be full-color? Your entire terminal will be blended or washed away in all kinds of colors. 

Color is very intrusive apart from it being actively lit or, 

The fact that it's black and white allows for such a big screen to be part of your building. So it integrates really nicely and even has a soothing effect with our generative video content. We show biophilic design, so we show leaves and flowers and we imitate the canopy of a dense forest where sunlight is broken up, and we create a very nice shadow pattern, which is moving, which is very soothing and that shimmering light really is calming down the passengers. 

This is an added value that really doesn't need color. But there's a lot of communication that we can do with being monochrome and a lot of premium advertising is still done in black and white by choice because it just has a more premium feel to it.

Do airports typically use a tintable electronic glass of some kind, or is this new to them, regardless of whether it has the media capability that yours has? 

Remco Veenbrink: Tentacle glass is being implemented, I've seen it in a couple of American airports. That's done by either Sage or View, those are two big players. One is American, the other is French. 

Tintable glass is a good solution. It's just that it's pretty expensive, right? Your return on investment is taking pretty long. So with our solution, our segmented tintable glass pays for itself immediately because we offer it in a leasing option, so the costs for leasing are way below the profits for advertising. So actually we don't ask people if they want to buy our stuff, we ask them how much money they can make from their glass. 

So you work with some sort of a leasing company and if an airport comes to you, you are able to set something up for them?

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah, that's how we do it. We work with the Global Leasing Company, or at least in the States, that's how we do it. So we reach out to them. We have a potential client in Luxembourg, for instance, how can you finance that, then they do their jobs and yeah, they find a leasing solution, and then we can offer it to them, and then, most of the time that's done pretty quickly. They take one week maybe, and then we can make them an offer, and then together with the media department of the airport, we can assess the media value for them, and then we can each see how far we can make a profit for them and how fast. 

And is it typically like most airports would have or at least substantial airports would have a media partner that owns the out-of-home media rights for that property, like a JCDecaux or whatever. Would they be the ones selling this space? 

Remco Veenbrink: It would be a collaboration. We had an airport that already had that concession in place. Decaux is a big player, Clear Channel in the States and there are many more players. Some airports still do it themselves. They don't have an intermediary agency in between. But we would work together with those players and agree to make an agreement. 

We saw in Europe, here in the airport that really like our solution for the added experience was to be installed near the security area where we also proposed a nice film for the security to show how it's done, those instructional films, but we had some nice content creators, and the airport really wanted it because they also had a glare control issue near the security area. So they just came to our table and said, “The two of you need to fix this.”

We see Decaux as a partner. We are not the media agency, we can turn any content into glare control and that is our main differentiation, and we don't have a sales department that reaches out to advertisers on a daily basis.

What about control of the displays, in terms of airports again Decaux or the airport themselves will have some sort of a content management system, whether it's Decaux with a BrightSign, or I don't know whether they're using Omnivex or whatever it may be. Do they work with your CMS or do they have to use your content management software to update your Video Window display?

Remco Veenbrink: The latter, because we need to adjust the content to work as glare control. So our content is the active layer, controlling the amount of glare control, controlling the amount of transparency. It's a good question by the way because that's what we're now working on with our software engineers, to create an API that can fetch content and then on the fly, adjust it. 

The challenge there is that our screens are depending on where they're placed, but they're so big that architecture and architectural elements like pillars and columns, and what have you are breaking up the display, the canvas, and the building is part of the canvas.

So what we want to automate, and this is under development, is to do an automated plan and scan, where we make sure that crucial areas are always shown at the unobstructed areas of our screen and logos, they cannot be obstructed by a pillar, eyes shouldn't be blocked by column, that type of intelligence. That's what we're now implementing in our content management system. Other than that, we have an editor standby that can do that on the fly, but if we want to move into programmatic advertising this has to be developed and that's what we're doing, but that comes with a lot of convolutional neural networking image recognition, it’s pretty next level. 

Complicated stuff, yeah. So speaking of complication you're having to come at this from a few different angles, and from what I can see from your background, you've got one founder, who's a Banker, and the other founder who's has a fine Arts degree, but you're dealing with structural glass design, you're dealing with the engineering of sound baffling at an airport, you're dealing with software for glare control and you're dealing with media displays. It's very involved. 

Remco Veenbrink: It's a lot of challenges, yeah, but we have great advisors. You know this is something across multiple sectors: glass construction glass is a world of itself with a lot of demands and safety regulations. We don't pretend to know that, but we do know people who are fully an expert in their field, and yeah we tied that all together. So we have the expert of liquid crystal display so he knows that world. Glass construction we work with Bill Kington who is really open to innovation. That's a strong name. The content management systems, we work with the best of the brightest from the technical university here in terms of computer engineering. 

So that is what we are developing in-house. We always reach out for the best expert available, and if he's not available, we make sure that he gets interested in what we're doing. 

So would you say you're a software company primarily? 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah. Now that we start using high-resolution screens, we decided to be agnostic in terms of our display components and we set up a whole spec sheet. It's built on our spec sheet but we're not intending to build displays, that's a whole industry in itself and pretty challenging and its margins. There's only a couple of OEMs left, so it's all consolidating.

Yeah, that is a market, and once again, there we just reached out to the best and they know how to do it. 

So if you're going to sell against some of the other technologies that are emerging out there like transparent mesh LED and LED on a film that can be adhered to window glass, and then even LED embedded in glass, what's the argument for your product versus those options? 

Remco Veenbrink: Those options are great, but they’re not glare control. So you can’t put them in the sun and try to read them. If you're looking against the sun with those structures, it's not happening. 

If the Window did not have any active glare control happening, is it 100% transparent, or is there a kind of sense of haze or how does it look? 

Remco Veenbrink: It's transparent, but as you probably know liquid crystal displays work with polarizers. So you don't have a hundred percent transparency, but the transparency that we have is very much comparable to glass that is implemented in buildings these days.

It's tinted in some ways?

Remco Veenbrink: There's always a tint in the glass, and there are coatings in the glass which are fixed. So the thing with that, and the great advantage of tintable glasses, for instance, in the winter, you don't want the block the heat. You can actually use the temperature that the sun produces in the infrared spectrum to warm up your terminal and that can really save a lot of money and really save a lot of energy and really help reduce the carbon footprint. So if you could switch on and off the ecoating, that would be really interesting. 

That doesn't exist. So Ttintable glass can really help to warm up in the winter, and in the summer we play our content a bit darker, and then it's tintable glass and you can really help to bring down the energy usage to a good place.

Are there any limits in terms of display performance or updating speed? So for instance, you can do 30 frames per second only?

Remco Veenbrink: We can do 60 frames per second, which really makes it stand out from the others that use the electrochromic process, which is a chemical process where ions go back and forth. That takes minutes. So you know, that will not bring any video footage to the window anytime soon, but there are developments which also use liquid crystal display. For instance, Merck is developing tintable glass based on that technology, and we were in touch with them.

We're in touch with the founders of that technology. Actually, they already exited the company, so those are our advisors. So these guys who have developed this for Merck are also advising us on how to do it, and yeah, they don't do segmented, they do mono cells, big mono cells, but switching time is indeed much faster.

And then there are suspended particle devices from research frontiers which also take seconds to alter the state. Nothing that we know of is as fast as our technology, which is 60 frames per second, and that allows for video.

And in terms of updating, if there was some sort of an alert for say a gas leak in an airport terminal and your CMS is tied into the alerting system, would it take minutes for that alert to show on your screen, or would it be as instantaneous as it would be on a normal digital sign?

Remco Veenbrink: No, we run with their signage systems. So, they can overrule any content that we’re playing, and they can own their communication tool, obviously.

So it's not going to take, as you were saying where some of these other technologies take several minutes for a new message to build on the screen or whatever. if there's an alert, it's an alert and it happens right away. 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah, we can install that. We haven't installed that yet, but yeah our technology allows for that. That's like an API integration where they have pre-set images or notifications that they can then push, and when they push something, it will over overwrite or override any other content. 

Okay. So you're in Rotterdam's airport right now. Are you fully in there or do you just have a demo?

Remco Veenbrink: No, we actually have two installations. One is facing Northeast and the other is facing Southeast. 

And that's like one exit away from your offices, right? 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah. 

And you're also in Amsterdam’s Schiphol? 

Remco Veenbrink: The funny thing is that the Schiphol group actually is the owner of Rotterdam airport.

So it’s a small country and the Schiphol group has several airports, amongst which also JFK Terminal 4 and Brisbane. So yes, we are talking to the Schiphol group, and they're all very eager to come over in two months to see our new installation, a high-resolution installation. So yeah, we have high hopes there.

So if I wanted to see Video Window right now, I would have to go through Rotterdam airport? 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah. For now, that's true. But we're also talking to a museum in Philadelphia that’s interested. We are discussing some installations with airports in the States. But due to Covid, it’s a bit quiet on that front. 

What's the state of the company right now? You’re obviously a startup. How big are you? How are you funded? 

Remco Veenbrink: Oh, we're bootstrap, self-funded so far and any investors out there can reach out to us. 

We are nine people at this point. As you said, there are two founders, and we have seven software engineers and they're all doing honors programs, and so they're the best of the brightest and we're very happy with our team, but we're looking to expand. 

We to set up shop maybe even the States, we were reached out by several system integrators who would like to represent us in the States and in Canada. Also in the middle East. So it’s starting to move fast now, and that's really great to see because as a startup, you have a dream, you build on it. That's great to see that it’s catching on and South by Southwest also really helped in that sense. We were pitching there. We were second in the future of travel still.

So that was a very nice experience, and we were also actually approached by a American investors. So we are discussing raising money. 

Yeah, there seems to be a fair amount of investor money out there right now. I get phone calls and emails. 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah, indeed. Yeah, interest is so low that, if you have money you better invest it into something. And yeah, it's a very likable product. It's pretty cool. It has a high wow factor. It serves people, the planet, profit, and it gets noticed. 

That's great. All right, Remco, thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Remco Veenbrink: Yeah, Dave, thank you very much for doing this podcast. 

 

 

 

ACE Roundtable: Personalization In DOOH And Digital Signage

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

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

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

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

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

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

My panelists included:

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

This is a special edition of the podcast.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

Larry Zoll, Sensory Interactive

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

If you spend any time on Linkedin, or even platforms like Instagram and Twitter, you've likely seen quick videos of LED displays somewhere in Asia that are using anamorphic, three-dimensional creative to get viewer attention.

We've seen spaceships look like they are emerging from the screen. Giant sloshing waves inside what looks like an aquarium. Huge robot hands reaching out from the screen. And on and on.

It's becoming a thing. But it is not a terribly well understood thing.

Which is why Larry Zoll from Sensory Interactive, which does what it calls dynamic real estate, reached out and suggested the emerging creative trend would be a great thing to explore in a podcast conversation.

Zoll is the managing director for technology and innovation at his firm, and has been fielding questions and requests about this stuff for a long time now. What's clear is that not many people understand what's going on and how it works. For example, customers ask if the LED display technology they have in place, or are putting up, will support the anamorphic creative pieces they want to do.

The short answer is yes, because this is all about the creative, and not about the display hardware.

We had a really good chat about what this visual trickery is all about, how it's done, and its limitations. If you watch 10 videos out of China and South Korea that have anamorphic creative, you'll notice nine of them are shot at a very specific angle. Because the visual effect may only work from that angle.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Larry, thanks for joining me. What's your role at Sensory? 

Larry Zoll: I am the Managing Director of Technology & Innovation for Sensory Interactive. 

And what does that involve? 

Larry Zoll: That's a great question. It involves a little bit of everything. We get involved in projects from conceptualization and revenue assessment all the way through content creation and operation of a lot of the projects that we get involved with.

My role really depends on what the scope of the project is. I help our design teams bring what they draw to life, I help our project management teams implement a lot of the technology that we're talking about/that we're implementing, and I am also the main point of contact for most of the vendors that we work with and learning about what's available on the market and what's new coming to the market and how we can best represent our client's interests. 

So you're the poor guy who gets the sales and biz-dev people walking up to you and saying, “Hey, I promised that we could do this. Can we?”

Larry Zoll: Yeah, that's exactly right. “I already told him we could do that. It's doable, right?” 

You're in Boston, but Sensory is in a few cities, I think? 

Larry Zoll: We are in six cities. Our headquarters is in DC. We have offices in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, and Austin. 

Yeah, I had it in my head that Austin was the head office, but it's just an office?

Larry Zoll: It is right now the biggest office, but the headquarters is in DC because that's where Randy is and Randy's our CEO. 

Okay, and how would you broadly describe the company, are you like a solutions provider, would you say you're an integrator? 

Larry Zoll: No, we're not an integrator. We don't sell anything. We are an owner's representative and a trusted advisor to our clients. We work with commercial real estate developers and corporations to help them bring digital experiences to life. 

Randy has trademarked the term, “Dynamic real estate” and that's a large focus of what we're doing. 

Like I said earlier, we really can work from conceptualization and revenue assessment all the way through operations. Our Austin team has a group of architects that do a lot of our design work. We have a full project management team that does construction project management for the projects that we get involved with. The revenue assessment team helps our clients to understand the potential return on investment and internal rate of return that's associated with their projects. Our operations team in Dallas runs a lot of the installs that we end up installing. We have a creative team that can build content as well. 

Okay. So you would have a commercial property company come to you and say, “Hey, I saw this big LED display on the facade of this building downtown, whatever, or I saw it in the lobby of a commercial office tower. We'd like to do that. Please help us.”? 

Larry Zoll: Yeah, exactly, and that can mean a number of different things for a corporate client. That t might just mean that they're looking for somebody to help them boost their brand presence in their building.

But more often than not, we're working with clients who are looking to generate revenue off of their installs. Sometimes that's a big lead. Sometimes it's a network of LCDs. Sometimes the digital experience doesn't necessarily have to have any display technology at all. It could be about analytics and all kinds of other stuff.

Okay. So one of the reasons we're talking is because you sent me an email on my having written several posts recently about anamorphic 3D visuals on LED displays primarily in China, but also in Korea to some extent, and I wrote the other day about one in Indonesia, and there seems to be a lot of buzz and excitement around these displays because it gives you the sense that there's something jumping out of the screen or emerging from a screen, but there's a lot involved in it to get it right, and you were telling me that you have clients who are coming to you saying, “Hey, we saw this, can our LED display board do this?” 

Larry Zoll: Yeah. It's been very interesting because those videos have been circulating foR the past six, nine months or something, and it's very exciting to see, you see these videos from a street corner or from a highway and it looks like a spaceship or the wave is coming to crash down on you, and I think it's very well-crafted content.

But I think there is maybe a misconception that what you're seeing is based on the technology of the display itself and not the content that's created for the display, and that's why I emailed you. It's a conversation I've had a couple of times with clients or prospective clients now about how, what your display is capable of is has nothing to do with not necessarily with the content that goes on it, but you have to think very intentionally about what that content is. 

Yeah. So you don't need a particular type of display. We both go to lots of trade shows when those things were on and they have like glasses-free autostereoscopic, 3D LED, and this was this and that, and you see it and think this is stupid, but somebody’s trying to sell it and it's not about that at all. It's about what you produce. 

Larry Zoll: A hundred percent and just to put a point on that. I did some research on the displays after we had talked and the displays in Korea are the manufacturers that we see out in the marketplace on an everyday basis, there's not one given manufacturer that's creating a piece of hardware that is capable of displaying this content.

A well-planned installation with a capable content management system and capable processing power is going to be able to play this content regardless of who's making the actual display. 

I pay attention to this stuff all day every day, and when I first started seeing these anamorphic displays or anamorphic content pieces, I was thinking this is pretty amazing, and I got a note from somebody else who was a content creator that said, “Yeah it's very cool but what you need to understand is in a lot of cases, the visual effect that you're wowed by is only visible from a very precise angle, and it's usually with those ones that wrap around a corner.” I don't know what the geometric term is, but it's off that angle, right?

Larry Zoll: Yeah. I noticed the same thing. Almost every video, especially if it's the one display in Korea. They're all taken from basically right off of the corner of that display. 

The way the anamorphic content is created is that it's basically a morphed perspective. So since you're morphing the perspective, that morphed perspective is only going to be effective from a very specific point of viewing comb. So if you go out to the far side, either one of the far sides of that display, it's going to look very different than it does from that corner, which is one of the reasons I think the Jakarta display is so interesting because the content on that display is meant to be viewed straight on, which I imagine, it provides a much more consistent view of the content. 

Yeah, just for people who are listening: the Jakarta display is on the side of a building, a commercial building on a busy roadway, although I think every roadway in Jakarta is busy, and the way it was designed to take on the look of the building and the concrete horizontal bands on that building, and then you see from distance, stuff just appearing to emerge out of that building, and you get that dimension and unlike, as you were saying, it's not just from a certain corner, you can see it from a faraway, driving along this roadway. 

Larry Zoll: The whole process is very interesting though. I was talking to the head of our content creation team the other day about this, and it's such a precise process to put these pieces together because of the way you have to morph the perspective on these things, creating it as a is quite an impressive feat.

Is there a toolset for it or is there like an Unreal Engine for this kind of thing? 

Larry Zoll: I don't believe there's a specific toolset. We were talking about it and from what I understand and keep in mind, I'm not a content creator. I'm a general technology guy...

But you know how to talk to the animals... 

Larry Zoll: (Laughter) I do, yeah. But from what I understand, the content can be created with any of the other tools that are used to create content. It's a matter of understanding the process and doing the math to morph the perspective correctly.

Interestingly, I think the term anamorphic’s original definition was surrounded by the aspect ratio of different films, so changing a 16:9 film to a 21:9 film is an example of doing something anamorphic and so using the term for creating this 3D content is somewhat of a new concept. 

Yeah. These are visual tricks that have been around for centuries in a lot of respects. Obviously, there weren't motion graphics in the 1400s, but there were Trompe-l'œil paintings way back then that were effectively doing the same kind of thing, where it creates this idea of dimension. 

Larry Zoll: Yeah, a hundred percent. If you search YouTube for 3D anamorphic before any of the content that we're seeing on the digital displays now, you get a bunch of tutorials about basically how to create a 3D anamorphic effect with paper. So a hundred percent, this has been around for a long time in a variety of formats, and I think this is just the latest iteration of that. 

So if I'm a motion graphic designer and I realize neither of us are, how steep of a learning curve is there to do this stuff well? 

I can't imagine that if I'm used to just creating Ad spots for, I don't know, a JC Pennys or something like that, with price slides in, the photo slides out, all this and that to then have somebody say, “Okay, now do this!” There is like a Mount Everest curve, right? 

Larry Zoll: Again, neither one of us are content creators, so everything might be useless, but from what I have seen, I don't know that it's a huge learning curve. I guess that depends on your skills and your expertise, but it looks like it is largely centered around creating a grid for your piece of content that would represent your display and then creating a secondary grid on which you build that content and then stretching and morphing the two grids so that they match, and that's where the crux of it comes in. 

Now, how do you figure out what the proportions of each of those grids are? I don't know. That's not my area. I don't know what math or what other skills are necessary to figure out what those two grids look like. But I don't believe it's necessarily a huge learning curve, but there's definitely some process there. 

The display layer - as we were saying earlier, there's no specific type of display that supports this, but do things like a pixel pitch or anything else factor in terms of the quality of it, other than just the pure viewing quality as it relates to distance? 

Larry Zoll: I’m sure as with any other display or the content for any display, you need to be cognizant of what you're designing for and who your primary viewing audiences are. When we talk about LEDs, we're very intentional about the pitch that the display is manufactured out of, because we are thinking about who's going to be using that display and where they're going to be standing, or what area they're going to be walking through.

I think as long as your display has been well thought out, I think that the level of thought that goes into anamorphic content would be equal to any other content. 

When I had demos years ago of some of the early glasses-free 3D LCDs that were coming on the market and never really went anywhere, two of the things that I was warned about were: a) the video files are monsters, and b) they take a lot of time to render and some skills around it too to do it well. Is that the case with this or is it just the way you produce it and then it's just a video file like any video file? 

Larry Zoll: It's basically a video file. We have seen internally, we have seen a lot of changes in the way that we create content over the past couple of years. We have our farm of servers that we use for rendering our content, and obviously, the amount of cores you have for processing has a direct effect on how long a piece of content takes to render. 

We, and other content creators that we've been speaking with over the past, I don't know, I'll say 12 to 18 months are really starting to take advantage of some of the tools out there that don't require that sort of rendering time. There are more and more content creators that we're seeing who are taking advantage of things like Unreal Engine and Unity and things like Touch Designer to create content that's immersive and realistic and easily adaptable without a lot of the large rendering times that we see from a lot of the more traditional content creation tools.

So let's talk about - for lack of a better description - the point of these things. 

I've seen a lot of these videos and it's a flying saucer emerging from the corner of a building or a bull jumping out or whatever it may be, and I thought these are really cool, but I'm not sure what the point is, and as a company that works with these real estate companies and they come to you and say, “Hey, we want to do this!” 

What's the process and the needs assessment and the decision-making that you do that would decide whether this makes sense to do? 

Larry Zoll: That's a really interesting question.

I think the point of the ones that you've seen and the ones that I've seen are exactly what we've seen, it’s just getting eyes on these things, and so many of them, I can name at least three or four off the top of my head that have gone viral, that have gotten millions of views on whatever online platform you've seen it on.

What does that do for the display itself or the brand or the owner? It's a great question. I mean I can't think of a single one of them that has a brand associated with them or has a name associated with them. It took me a few minutes of Googling just to figure out where one of the displays in Asia was, and who did the content. So whenever we're talking with clients, especially when we're talking with clients who are looking for revenue-generating displays or revenue-generating projects, we're discussing the entire life cycle with them. 

I mean content is so important and keeping content fresh is so important, but if the goal is to bring recognition or brand presence or something then that needs to be a major part of the conversation throughout the life cycle of the project.

So if you have something like a giant wave splashing against an aquarium-looking LED facade, what's that doing?

Larry Zoll: That's a good question. I don't know if I have a direct answer for you. As I said, there's nothing on that giant waves splashing that tells me where it is or who's sponsoring it, or why I should be paying attention to it. It just looks really cool, and it's great to look really cool. It's important sometimes just to demonstrate what these things are capable of. 

I don't know why it is important if you're in transactional ads or if you're a sponsorship partner. It's hard to say without any sort of messaging on there at all.

So it may be a simple case of this being a somewhat nascent idea at least for LED video boards and the early creators of content are doing stuff that just looks cool, and maybe the next wave is stuff that actually has some brand relevance or some more relevance to the location or whatever. 

Larry Zoll: It could very well be.

It kinda reminds me of the hologram from Back to the Future 2 with the stadium, it's headed in that direction, right? So right now, we have a bunch of people who are creating amazing-looking content that is just amazing-looking content, and maybe the next wave of that is a transactional ad campaign that's taking advantage of those tools to create something that really brings a lot of excitement around a given brand or something like that.

Is there any reason why you could not do this on, let's say a 90-degree corner with a pair of 85-inch LCD displays, would you be able to do the same thing? 

Larry Zoll: That's a good question. I think you might have some trouble because with the LCD you're going to have a bezel there in the middle, which might have an effect on the perspective, and the viewing angle on those 90-degree LCDs is not going to be as good as being around the corner with LEDs.

So I don't know if that would be as effective. If you were going to do it with an LCD, I have to imagine you probably want to go more with the straight-on shot.

And could you do it with projection mapping, if they are edge-blended? 

Larry Zoll: I don't see why not. There's already so much you can do with projection mapping that you can't do with anything else. I don't see why that would present any challenge. 

So for all of the real estate companies who you work with, when you say they're trying to monetize, is it primarily through third-party advertising, or do they quantify their monetization in other ways?

Larry Zoll: When we approach a new client and when we're trying to figure out a plan for new ways for clients to engage in revenue-generating displays, it can really be through any number of different methods. 

It could be a straightforward, transactional advertising agreement where the real estate owner works directly with the media sales company. It could also take the form of partnerships or sponsorships or any number of different agreements, either directly with brands or with media sales agencies or something similar. 

I have heard a number of times from companies that work with real estate firms that they're putting large LED video walls into the lobbies of their buildings or some other public area in a building with a monetization plan, but it doesn't have anything to do with advertising, it has to do with recruiting new tenants and retaining the ones that they already have. Do you hear that? 

Larry Zoll: That's something we come across for sure. Creating amenities is another thing that we're working on actively with a number of our corporate clients, and something that doesn't have to be directly monetized to have value. 

I think that's a part of what's been successful about some of our more corporate work is that we help them create these environments that are exciting and associate a brand with a look and a feel and something dynamic. And I think that in and of itself has a lot of value, not just from an amenity standpoint, but also from a brand-building standpoint. 

You know, if your building has a large LED in the lobby and you're able to sell that to a particular client because they want to make sure that they have space for their brand to be seen outside of 10-30 floors in the building, I think that's absolutely valuable. 

Yeah, I mean Comcast Center is an example of a very large corporation doing that in their lobby for 10+ years now, but I'm sure there are other buildings that have multiple tenants where they're just trying to create an overall buzz about the place and make people think, “Okay, this is a cool building to locate my company in”, or “I want to stay here because these guys have this and other places don't”, and “This is what impresses my clients and my staff.”

Larry Zoll: Sure, absolutely. We’ve done a few of those ourselves. (Laughter)

What do you see as important to still be developed in this wall space. So when I think of it, I think of LEDs still being quite fragile unless you're using these ones with hardened coatings. Is that important if you're putting something in a public space? 

Larry Zoll: Yeah, I think we're in a really interesting time in the narrow pitch industry right now. There are a number of different ways that a lot of the manufacturers are thinking about a) the pitch itself, and b) how to make these displays more viable longer-lasting, and all of that. 

It's really interesting watching the industry develop around that right now. We've gotten to a point where I liken it to the digital camera industry. For a long time, it was all about megapixels, and then at a certain point, everyone realized for the everyday person, there's not a huge difference between 15 megapixels and 20 megapixels, so what else are we going to do? We're going to increase the sensor size and talk more about the color depth and gamut and all of that, and I think we're getting to a very similar spot in the narrow pitch display industry because we've gotten to a point where there are multiple manufacturers out there at this point who have sub-one-millimeter displays.

So what else are you going to do? Everybody knows that those displays are fragile. So we got to figure out a way to make them less fragile. So does that mean there's a glue-onboard display or does that mean a chip-on-board or a flip-chip, there are a million different ways that are being explored across the industry to try and figure out the best way to approach this market that I would say we probably got another 18 to 24 months, at least of seeing things just really taking a lot of different turns until the industry really settles on a consistent path forward.

Yeah, I think we're coming out of the pixel-pitch war so to speak, and everybody for the last five years has marketed on the basis of, our pixel pitch is just that much tighter than the next guys, and I've found it interesting with the manufacturers that are out there microLED that if you look at their product specs, their pixel pitch is like 1.2, 1.6, that sort of thing. 

But what it does, because the light emitters are so small, there's all this black, so they're marketing on the basis of, or at least they should be marketing on the basis of contrast as opposed to pixel-pitch, because who cares about that, it's all about the black. 

Larry Zoll: Yeah, a hundred percent.

In addition to that, we've also been having a lot of conversations recently about pixel density, and why that matters in terms of the number of pixels and how quickly that number changes. In fact, I was talking to a client the other day who was trying to decide between a 1.67 mm display and a 2.5 mm display, and even though to a lot of people that sounds like a very slight difference, when you do the math and dig into it, you're talking about a difference between close to 15,000 pixels per square foot, and 34,000 pixels per square foot.

That's a huge difference. So there are a lot of different factors and when you bring micro-LEDs into the mix that changes, that changes the conversation again. Because obviously, they’re much smaller, so you can fit more in there. But yeah, contrast, pixel-density,  hardening technology, there are so many different ways that the industry is going right now, and it's really fascinating to watch and to stay on top of. 

What about video wall processing? When I was at ISE last year, the last ISE that there was, I bumped into an old industry friend and he was sitting in a booth that was just being built, and I looked over at this display and thought, “Whoa, that looks really good”, and I asked him, what is that, like a 1.5 pitch? and he said, “No, it's a four,” and I said, “really?” And he said, “I work for a video wall processing software and a server company now, and this is what we do.”

It was a bit of a revelation for me and granted that a lot of it goes to just choosing the right source content to begin with, but it really seems like video wall processing is one of those things that's not all that greatly appreciated yet in the industry. 

Larry Zoll: I agree. Processing is important now and it's going to become more and more important in the very near future because of these narrow pitch displays and how much more common they're getting, resolutions explode very quickly. And you need to make sure that the processor and the equipment that you have behind the display that's parsing all of that data, parsing all of that information, is able to provide you with the best possible result because once you get above 4K, I don't think the industry is to a point yet where 8K is anywhere near standard, but once you get up to 4K, it becomes a real challenge to push all those pixels, and if you don't have the right technology behind it to do that it doesn't look good. You gotta make sure that equipment is rock solid. 

Is there a project that Sensory is working on right now that we should be looking out for some time in 2021 that you’re allowed to talk about?

Larry Zoll: That is a good question. We most recently finished advising on the Moynihan Train Hall in New York. We did the digital strategy on that and did a lot of the project management work on the install there, and if you haven't seen it, it's a really great representation of what a digital network can be. 

There's LED, there's LCD, and everything is tied together through transactional media and train schedules and it was a real feat by everyone who was involved in it. It turned out really well.

Yeah, and it'd be pretty wild for somebody who comes through an old Penn station in that basement like thing that's there, and then you go across the street into this Train Hall and think, “Oh my God, this is beautiful!” 

Larry Zoll: It is a gorgeous space. 

Well, I look forward to seeing it, when and if we are ever allowed to travel again.

Larry Zoll: Absolutely. 

All right, Larry, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. 

Larry Zoll: It was great talking to you, Dave. Thank you.

 

 

Sam's Club, with Wovenmedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

So basically in-store media. 

Mike Hiatt: Correct.  

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

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

And what's the scale of this network? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susie, how often does content change on the network? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Hiatt: Yes. (Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s more like new on shelves? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the old PRN network, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Hiatt: Yes.

Susie Opare-Abetia: Thank you! (Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Mike Casper, Azumo

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

Generally speaking, the sun doesn't play very nicely with LCD displays when they're running outside.

The brightness has to be cranked just to cut through glare, and all kinds of R&D work has to be done to effectively get out all the heat that builds up when a screen runs out in the sun all day.

So what if there was display technology that actually did well in direct sunlight?

There's e-paper, but that tech can't do the full motion or rich colors that are inherent in LCD displays. So how about a display that's reflective like e-paper, but is otherwise a more conventional LCD flat panel? 

That's the premise behind Azumo, a Chicago company that has developed a micro-thin front light for LCDs, taking the place of the backlighting arrays that illuminate millions or billions of TVs and display monitors. By day, in bright light, an Azumo-equipped display doesn't even need a light on, front or back. And at night, that front light illuminates the screen.

Right now, Azumo does smaller displays for industrial and medical uses, and is developing the tech for tablets. But the company is equipping its production lines to do larger displays, with the idea that customers like media companies and QSR chains would take a liking to digital posters and drive-thru order screens that didn't run up big power bills just to be viewable.

I spoke with Azumo CEO Mike Casper.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

David: Mike, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Azumo is all about? 

Mike Casper: Yeah. Thank you, Dave. So Azumo is a display technology company that is really enabling something we call LCD 2.0, and that effectively is using all the great things about LCD, but it's making it much more energy-efficient, much more effective for all environments and ultimately safer on the eyes as we stare at screens more and more these days. 

David: And how is it different from the LCDs that we all know in traditional consumer or primary commercial displays? 

Mike Casper: Sure. So most LCDs that are out there today, the vast majority of them are transmissive LCDs and so the way that these work is the pixels essentially act like shutters of light, and so they either close or open allowing what's called a backlight to light up the screen and let the light pass through. While these backlights in these older transmissive style LCDs, they only allow about 7% of the light to make its way through those pixels.

So 93% of all this heat and light and really wasted energy generated is stuck behind the LCD and so with this new style, and what we're helping to enable here at Azumo is what's called a reflective LCD. Essentially what the LCD manufacturers have done is put a mirrored surface on the back, so no light can pass through it but what happens instead is that light from the outside or external lighting will reflect off the surface and that's the way that you can see the display. So it's saving 90% energy, much better viewing in bright sunlight and outdoor environments, which is why it's a great application for signage.

David: So it's a little bit like electronic ink in that you're using natural light to illuminate the visual surface. But different in a whole bunch of other ways? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, exactly. You're spot on. So E-paper and electronic ink were some of the first successful versions of reflective displays. Now those just like paper, ePaper paper are more diffuse and it's a lot easier to have light bounce off the surface and so if you've ever read a Kindle or a Kobo or any of these e-reader devices, they're fantastic out in the sun, the battery lasts a really long time. But just the way that those work, they're somewhat limited in color, a lot of them are only black and white or have some muted colors.

But I think more importantly they're pretty limited with how fast they can update themselves and so they can't really do video or some of these other great things that we're used to with LCDs. Reflective LCD on the other hand can help to overcome some of those limitations with ePaper.

David: So all of the compromises that you might have to make with the paper, particularly if you want to do motion media or really rich saturated colors and all that stuff, it's very difficult. But with this, you're effectively using the conventional LCD displays except your lighting from the front to the back, right?

Mike Casper: Exactly. The vast majority of the LCD architecture is essentially the same and so you're able to get high-resolution, full video, refresh rates, all those great things about LCD, it's leveraging almost the exact same manufacturing process so there's a nice, robust supply chain. There's just a lot of great things about reflective LCDs that many people don't know about.

David: So do you manufacture finished displays or is your technology something that goes into the displays that are made by mainstream commercial LCD manufacturers? 

Mike Casper: Good question. At Azumo, we manufacture and design and manufacture what's called the front light component. So we're really the lighting component, the key enabling technology for these higher-resolution reflective LCDs.

Because it's fairly new, what we've done with our supply chain is as we've been working with some of the major LCD manufacturers to package their display with our front light and then we'll sell the whole module to a variety of OEM customers and industrial and medical and other consumer products. However, now that the industry's starting to build and improve upon the reflective LCD and know more about us and the fact that our front light does exist, they're also starting to purchase the front light directly from us, and then they'll create the module and sell it to their customers.

David: What does that front light look like? I'm trying to picture it. 

Mike Casper: The best part is it's invisible. So you almost can't see it.

David: That’s why I can’t picture it. (Laughter)

Mike Casper: That's one of the key features for front lighting. So essentially we're a light guide component and light guides have been around since even when LCDs first started because most light guides are used, as I was describing earlier, for traditional LCDs, you have to light it from the back.

And so most light guides are hidden behind the screen. You don't even see them. They're typically buried within the module and it's very easy to hide them ‘cause you have the LCD on the front. If you try to take that same light guide and put it on the front of a reflective LCD, it has to be completely transparent. So that's why it hasn't really worked using conventional lighting methods in the past and why something like our invisible front light is such a critical component because you want the user to see all the beautiful things apart from the LCD, not any components sitting on top.

David: So is it like LED edge lighting with kind of a sheet or something? 

Mike Casper: Effectively, yeah. So we're using a modified edge lighting approach that is able to get an LED coupled into our material and when I talk about our material, it's about 50 microns thick. So it's about 1/20th of a millimeter, extremely thin. This is why we're able to get that embedded in the top layer of the LCD and the way that our system works, we're still able to capture all that light from the LED, channel it in, and then serve as a light guide that can deliver the light to the front of the reflective LCD when needed. 

David: So why would I want to do that?

Mike Casper: So the biggest reason is really two-fold: 

Power savings is number one. Using reflective LCD with our front light module, can save 80 to 90% power consumption compared to some of the other EMS of technologies like micro-LED or OLED, or compared to even some backlit LCDs. So power savings is number one. You're actually using the light around you when you use a reflective LCD module and especially in the case of signage, oftentimes this is outdoors, you got the bright sun out there, let's use this great light source we have here which is the Sun. Why not just use that to our advantage? So that's the main reason. 

The second being, viewability in all environments. The Sun in that example looks fantastic, the brighter the sun, the brighter the display, and then in the case, if you're viewing it at night or in a darker environment, that's where our front light will turn on and so you get a nice glow on the display without it being distracting to the user. 

David: It seems from what you're telling me, like the application for this in terms of large format displays would be for high brightness outdoor displays. Is that a reasonable assumption? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, I think that's a great application for it.

When you look at what other display technologies are trying to do for high brightness environments there's a lot of challenges, right? You've got to pump a ton of light, whether you're using Emissives, micro-LED, or OLED, you're just pumping so much brightness just to try to beat the sun and it's a lot of wasted energy. So yeah, I think that's a fantastic application right off the bat. 

David: Yeah, I've done some work recently around outdoor displays and talked to a lot of industry people and they're cranking 3500 nits, 5000 nits, that sort of thing and the amount of power has got to drive that, but also for those guys, when you talk to them, they talk about the sun being the enemy. They're doing everything they can to counteract the impact of the sun, whereas it sounds like you're putting these out there and saying, “Bring it on!” 

Mike Casper: Exactly the brighter the sun, the better. So yeah, I think that you're exactly right, that's the key. All these other display technologies are having to do all these workarounds, even think about micro-LED or LED billboards. They don't even have to be micro-LED, just regular LED billboards that are having to pump fans and other cooling mechanisms just to overcome the heating element of making these so bright during bright environments. The whole point of having LEDs, I thought was to save energy, not consume more. 

So I agree the sun is their enemy but in this case, with a reflective LCD, it actually boosts the performance. 

David: So to use the example of a Phoenix or Las Vegas, if it's outdoor street furniture at a transit shelter, that sort of thing. Through the day if the sun's out and beating down, do you even have lighting on?

Mike Casper: No. In that environment, you wouldn't need to. We could see there would be sensors, maybe some brightness sensors that if it start to get cloudy and whatnot, it could turn the light on, but 80-90% of the time, you would have the sun out, it would be bright enough to see on its own and you wouldn't need any external lighting. 

David: I suspect you've got an engineer or you're an engineer and you've done the mathematical models. I'm curious what kind of money this would save? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, it's quite a bit, especially when you start talking about many of these digital displays that are out there right now, a majority of them are LED billboards.

And today, some of the recent studies that have been done on the standard billboards outdoor for the transportation area are already consuming the same amount of energy as four households in the United States within a year, and so just one LED billboard that's running throughout the bright sun, throughout the night is already consuming a significant amount of energy. With reflective LCD, this could be reduced by 90%. 

David: But you can't replace a LED billboard with a reflective LCD display, can you? 

Mike Casper: Yeah. So what would you end up doing, I think it is very similar to how the LED billboards are built, where the modules are essentially started to daisy chain together to make larger sizes. You can do the same thing with these reflective LCD modules. 

You can have a very nice thin bezel and have say up to 55-inch diagonal displays, just be tiled next to each other until you build up the full size that you need. It’s also another benefit with the Azumo light guide, the front light that we're able to use. Most light guides have a bunch of LEDs along the edge that have hotspots and so this is why most backlit LCDs have to have some sort of a bezel or border to block those hotspots. But because our material is so flexible, we're able to actually bend that all the way behind the display. We are able to get a nice tight radius of about half a millimeter. So our border can be really thin and enables you to tile these close to each other. 

David: So this would be the equivalent of the super-duper-oh-my-god-amazing, add a few more adjectives in there, narrow bezel display? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, exactly. 

David: So they would just be like a hairline and I guess at a distance, you wouldn't even see that, like a billboard? 

Mike Casper: Right. It's all about that viewing distance. But yeah, especially when you're able to get some of these higher resolution LCDs in the tiles themselves, you can start doing just as good dynamic content on both as opposed to an LED billboard as well.

David: So I suspect there are some people listening to this thinking this is interesting, but whenever there's new technology like this, the costs are through the roof and it sounds amazing, but it's not financially feasible to do it. So what are the cost implications of this? 

Mike Casper: Yeah. Good question, and I'd say we're at the forefront of it right now. You're starting to see over the past year or two more and more of LCD manufacturers showcasing these reflective LCDs in larger sizes. So I think Sharp maybe showed a 32-inch or around 30-inch last year. I know JDI has been showing a few examples over the past few years. Same with BOE up to 55-inch, I believe. 

So they're starting to showcase this potential, and with that, I should say is, I think they're also trying to understand the market dynamics and pricing. The good thing is that because it's built on the LCD infrastructure, which has been out there for years and years, fully capitalized equipment, minimal switching costs. So I think they're able to fundamentally keep the prices within an LCD realm, nothing crazy where you've got to go build a whole brand new,OLED fab or anything like that. You can actually use some of the LCD manufacturing capacity that's already out there. 

But then like any new technology, as you said, it's lower volumes to start and how do you price it and extend that out over time? I think that's still to be determined. 

David: So if you're working with a Sharp, NEC or a company like that, are they getting your layer at the original manufacturing line or is it something that they would add after the fact and say, “okay, now it's reflective”?

Mike Casper: Yeah, so what we're doing at Azumo, with our front light technology, we're scaling up our production lines for these larger sizes as we speak, and so everything we've done over the past few years has been on displays ranging from one inch up to about eight inch diagonal. 

Just last year, 2020, we installed some new production equipment that enables us to go up to about 20 inch diagonal, and so in order to get to these larger displays, we're going to be installing some larger equipment to handle these larger panels. So today, our products can be found through the smaller displays and we're working with the LCD manufacturers to be scaling that up in the future, to be able to offer this to the signage industry for these larger panels as well.

David: So it's not a physics challenge or anything else, it's just a matter of having the right equipment to do the larger displays?

Mike Casper: Exactly. 

David: How do you deal with intellectual property? If you're dealing with Chinese manufacturers, there's a bit of a history there. I'm not totally sure how fair it is, I don't know. But there's always some antsiness about working with overseas manufacturers about their intellectual property and what's going to happen. 

Mike Casper: Sure. What we've done at Azuma, wwe're located in the United States as our headquarters, we do have some operations in China.

And most of our core IP elements are actually still produced on equipment here in the United States, fairly close to us too, in suppliers that we use, so we're able to keep it close to the chest, especially those really core IP elements, I think that's always a key strategy for any display technology. But also recognizing that the entire display ecosystem for the most part is in Asia. So, you're going to have to be, as you scale the business or scaling technology, you're going to have to integrate along the chain there, and so finding ways to, from us, just determining at what point we have the production here versus a different location where we're still able to protect and maintain our IP. 

I will say too, it's one of those where we're always constantly innovating as well, and so filing new patents on new technologies as we're developing is another strategy of ours as well.

David: So with those displays that are already out there, you mentioned the smaller ones getting up to as large as 20-inch, but a lot of it's a one-inch, eight-inch, that sort of thing. What are they being used? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, so all of the smaller products, when we first launched a little over three years ago, really the only reflective LCDs in the market at that time or monochrome, for the most part, going after industrial and medical applications, a lot of handheld products that we're using have these smaller displays looking for that power savings, and we're working very closely with Sharp. We're actually one of their value-added partners in their preferred lighting component for their reflective LCDs.

So a lot of these handheld industrial products, medical products, IoT products, are out in the market today using our modules, and what's exciting for us. In the second half of this year, we'll be delivering some tablet products with our technology and reflective LCD embedded as well. So stay tuned for that, but that should be out the second half of this year. 

David: So that would be good for, again for medicine, but also for things like restaurants and so on, outdoor dining patios and people taking orders that way? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, that's another great application.

The particular customer set for this tablet is more in the education space. Children staring at screens all day long, reflective LCD also has the benefit of being a little healthier on the eyes, so you're not blasting light from a backlight or from an OLED screen in your kids' eyes all day long,  

David: I guess it extends the battery life too, right?

Mike Casper: Exactly. 

David: What is the operating life of your technology? Does it have any impact? A normal LCD might be 60,000 hours, does it bring it down to 50 or increase it? 

Mike Casper: Yeah, I think at least in terms of applying it for UV protection, a lot of those other materials and coatings that need to be applied for outdoor signage applications would still be applied here as well.

So being able to get the 5-7+ year lifecycle needed for the UV protection can be incorporated. The LCD side, which I think is very similarly to how these LCDs are being used. Now what you might find actually is, because of many LCD specs that are quoted today for outdoor applications like you said, the 60k hours, that's probably actually more tied to the backlight because the backlight has to be pumped up so bright to fight the sun that it’s probably burning those LEDs out in the backlight. It's not actually the LCD itself, but probably the LEDs. 

So I think you could even extend that because you're not getting, you're not fighting the sun with those. 

David: Again, talking about the sun, some of the issues that have been around with outdoor LCD is obviously glare, but the one that really concerns operators more than anything else is that the displays are going to burn out and they're going to turn black. I think what they call isotropic, is that still a reality or because you're taking daylight heat out of the equation, it’s not really a worry? 

Mike Casper: That's a good question. I think probably the verdict's still out on that, but I would imagine that because the sun reflecting is actually making the screen brighter, I think you'd be avoiding that issue. But that's a good question. I don't know if there's been enough longevity studies with it quite yet in terms of what the long-term implications would be. 

David: How long has the company been around? 

Mike Casper: Azumo started in 2008. So we're coming up here on our 13th, 14th year. 

David: And how did it get started, like what led you down this path? 

Mike Casper: Good question. Bringing out the memory bank here. So we started down a completely different path. We actually started the business with technology around advertising signage in the sports industry specifically.

So we were putting illuminated advertising logos, frozen in the ice of hockey rinks. Imagine all those logos on the ice that are always there and just started blending into the background, we could make them disappear and start glowing, in between whistles. So that was how we started the business and the technology, nowhere near LCD displays, but it helped us really think about different ways of creating really thin lighting.

As you may know, ice for hockey rinks is pretty thin. They're about an inch thick or so, so you've got to have lights that can go really large and really long, but being very thin and invisible, and so over time we adapted that to now provide a front light for these reflective LCDs. 

David: See in Canada, you could also do them in curling sheets.

Mike Casper: Yep, we looked at that as an option. 

David: And then you saw how small the market is? (Laughter)

Mike Casper: Yeah, there were some good advisors and investors early on that suggested we pivot a little bit. 

David: Yeah, just advertising in general, a lot of startups get into that and then they realize, “oh, this is actually hard!”

Mike Casper: Yeah. It's a lot harder than it sounds. 

David: Yeah, the technology is the easy part. It's schmoozing media planner. 

Mike Casper: Exactly. The ecosystem and the industry were just not what we anticipated, and luckily for us, the reflective LCDs had been improving and had a need and so that enabled us to pivot the business and move to what we are today. 

David: So where are you at now in terms of size of the company, number of people, all that sort of stuff?

Mike Casper: Yeah, so we're almost 30 people now. Our headquarters is here in Chicago, in the United States. We've got about 20 different sales rep organizations globally now, both in North America, throughout Asia. 

We are still venture-backed, so we've got a great set of investors that are knowledgeable in the display industry and focus on energy savings, and the last round that we'd closed was our Series B. 

David: Okay, and what are the plans in terms of getting into transitioning or expanding, I guess would be a better way of describing it from what you've been doing to date, to getting into the sort of thing that we've been talking about for digital out of home and QSR drive-through displays, that sort of thing?

Mike Casper: Yeah, and so that's a current growth area for us that we're putting a lot more effort behind. So the new production equipment, as I mentioned, can get up to 20-inch. There are some applications now that we can get into these smaller signage spaces and work closely with our LCD customers on some modules. So we're going to be showcasing some of those here coming up and then really expanding our production capabilities next year and getting on some of this larger equipment, being able to handle these larger panels, larger signage applications grow as well. 

David: Are you feeling the pressure to get on the outdoor stuff?

Just because of the pandemic and how drive-thru has gone from something that a lot of people do to something that in a lot of cases is the only way you can get food from a fast-food joint. 

Mike Casper: Yeah, that's a great example. I think, there's definitely an increased demand and an interest that we're hearing from the LCD customers, because a lot of them already have a lot of those relationships with the out of home, and so we're already hearing it. more of a reverberate through, which is due to the pandemic. 

David: And do you want to be a brand or do you want to be just like a component inside that the manufacturers know about, but the regular digital signage ecosystem and certainly the end-users wouldn't know, wouldn't care? 

Mike Casper: That's a good question. I think, right now our focus is working very closely with the LCD manufacturers and serving them as our customers. In the future, we do see opportunities to partner with them, especially because we live and breathe this low-power reflective LCD, day in and day out, and so we think there are some opportunities to work together to create our own joint modules that are even further optimized, whether that's branded with us or something else, that's still to be determined, but either way, we want to partner with the LCD manufacturers and really drive the technology and performance to serve this market.

David: There are observers in the industry who say that LED is going to completely take over. Between micro-LED and just fine pixel pitch LED, the need for LCD is slipping away and it'll be a niche product. 

I don't totally buy into that, but I can see how things are transitioning. Where's your head at with that? 

Mike Casper: There's obviously a lot of talks, like you said, with micro-LED and while there are great benefits with that technology I will say too, the LCD industry is massive. The ecosystem, the supply chain, there's a lot of vested interest to adapt that technology because it is a great backbone, and so that’s why I think micro LED, it's not going to take over. There's going to be great places for it, absolutely. But LCD is still going to have a predominant position, and that's why we're coining this reflective LCD as LCD 2.0, it's just taking the great things about LCD and adapting it for the world of the future, and I think especially with outdoor, it's a great application for it.

David: Is there a lot of education that you have to do with the display manufacturers or do they get it and by extension, do you think the same thing will have to happen as they adopt it, that they'll have to educate their buyers?

Mike Casper: Yeah, definitely a lot of education, because for those that know a little bit about reflective LCD, you're probably thinking what you saw with transflective LCD years and years ago, right? 

Like the first Game Boy, for those in the audience that played that, or remember that, that had a transflective LCD, which was retty grainy, had pretty bad colors, and so a lot of people I think have that in their head when they hear reflective LCD. “Oh, how great can it be?”

So now that the industry is being able to leverage the Azumo front light, which is this again, transparent portion of it that enables the underlying LCD to have much higher performance, much higher resolution, better colors, et cetera. So there is a re-education about what reflective LCD is now versus what many people may remember it in the past.

David: If you don't know what you're looking at, and you had a reflective LCD and a conventional LCD with the same brightness and basically the same panel, just lit from the front versus the back, would an observer be able to see the difference? 

Mike Casper: So depending on where you are, you'd see a couple of things different.

So obviously in a bright outdoor environment, that would probably be your first obvious difference you'd notice where the reflective LCD looks fantastic, the backlit traditional one is going to have that glare, the contrast is going to get muted because all the blacks look a little grayer and the colors look more washed out, and you're fighting the sun which is going to overpower any backlight. So that'd be the first noticeable difference. 

If you're in a darker room or if you're really close to the display. Again, depending on what the application in the viewing distance looks like, the backlit LCDs at least historically have had a higher resolution and a little bit broader color gamut. Now a lot of that is due to the fact that reflective LCDs are still fairly new but they're increasing that color gamut and the resolution. Some of the latest ones I think are shown by Sharp are close to 300 PPI now. You would notice it today, there's a slight difference. But that’s a question of what's the application: are you watching it on your phone, 18 inches from your face, and you've got the latest and greatest Netflix movie on? Or you're providing information to a user that might be walking by in an outdoor environment?

So there's definitely some room for improvement, but they're making a lot of strides and a lot of sealing room here. 

David: So if I'm to use the time-honored example of Coca-Cola and their particular Pantone red, would you be able to replicate that red? 

Mike Casper: Good question. With working very closely with the LCD manufacturers and tuning their color filters, we can actually put,t in our front light, we can have an RGB LED set that has finely tuned wavelengths, and I'm getting a little technical here, but we can essentially tune the color to match the color filter of the LCD to really boost that color gamut. And so that's where we can start getting towards that Coca-Cola Pantone and really the broader color gamut that's required for signage. 

David: Okay. All right. Really interesting. If people want to know more about this, where do they go? 

Mike Casper: You can visit our website, www.azumotech.com. We're also pretty active on LinkedIn and you can reach out to us at any time. We'd love to chat about your application and really appreciate the time here today.

Marc Van Eekeren, DetaiLED

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

The direct view LED market is crowded with companies that are all, for the most part, selling variations on the same things.

Because the technology remains unfamiliar to a lot of integrators, resellers and end-users, many companies have started selling LED bundles with fixed sizes and matched components, as an effort to simplify the products and the proposition.

A U.S. company called DetaiLED Solutions has gone down a different path - focusing mainly on custom solutions that fit the dimensions and contours of a space. They work with mainstream pro AV people, at times, but they also work with architects and firms that specialize in making built spaces visually interesting.

I had a good chat with Marc Van Eekeren, a founding partner and a guy who has been selling LED display solutions for almost 20 years, tracking back to his time with Barco.

We spoke about the company's roots, where it is focused, and cover a lot of the current trends and thinking in LED these days.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

 

Renaud Lafrance, Stingray

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

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

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

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

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you. 

Chris Chinnock, 8K Association

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

There was a lot of skepticism and debate in the digital signage community when 4K commercial displays started coming on the market, with industry observers openly wondering if visual messaging applications needed that high level of resolution.

Several years later, 4K is perhaps not common, but certainly being used in many projects, and both accepted and supported.

And as 4K bedded in, the industry started seeing some of the bigger display manufacturers showing 8K displays at trade shows, and the debate about the demand and the challenges for super high resolution displays started all over again.

One of the ways an industry builds awareness, acceptance, support and standards for a new technology is to have working groups or organizations of stakeholders. There's an 8K Association now, and the companies that got it going asked display industry veteran Chis Chinnock to step in and run it. An industry observer, writer, analyst and consultant, Chris has been around displays forever and seen the evolution. He understands what the engineers are going on about, but has the skills to explain it in terms mere mortals can understand.

He explained to me where 8K is at on the adoption curve (it's still early) and we get into the implications of 8K on infrastructure. He also explain who will want and use 8K, and why.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, Chris. Thanks for joining me. Can you tell me what the 8K Association is all about? 

Chris Chinnock: Sure. Thanks for having me on your podcast, appreciate that. 

The 8K Association was formed at CES in 2019, so about a little over two years ago, and it was formed with panel makers and TV makers primarily and that's when 8K TVs were starting to come into the market and we had some initial goals which was to promote those 8K TVs, to develop a certification program for those 8K TVs, to begin gathering 8K content for our member use, and to begin education of the professional community, because we're going to need a full 8K ecosystem from content creation, through distribution and display for this to become mainstream.

Is this the sort of thing that wouldn’t necessarily just happen organically?

Chris Chinnock: It would happen organically. We just wanted to form the organization to try and help facilitate communication and maybe move the ecosystem a little bit faster than it would've done organically. That's all.

And is this something that manufacturers do? I think of some of the other certifications and reference designs out there?

Chris Chinnock: Oh, yeah and there's tons of these organizations out there with different marketing goals or ecosystem development goals, so we're not reading any new ground here. We're, this is a tried and true kind of approach. 

For example, in the 4K transition, the UHD Alliance came up to do a promotion and development of UHD or 4K content, mostly aimed at consumers and then the UHD Forum was originated not long afterwards, which was focused more on trying to educate and develop the 4K ecosystem and the professional community and they developed a bunch of guidelines and whatnot to help broadcasters and filmmakers implement 4K workflows. In many senses, we're following that model and learning from what they did and trying to leverage that going forward. 

Yeah. It's an interesting thing. You have lots of people saying, “8K: is that something we're ever really going to need?” “There's no content for our…” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. These are all the things that were said about 4K and lots of questions as to whether 4K whatever take route at all and it certainly has, is it the same argument or is this a little more nuanced because 8K is like super duper high resolution? 

Chris Chinnock: It is the same argument. We had naysayers six, seven years ago for 4K. We've got naysayers for 8K now. Absolutely, it's a different environment now, but there's also a lot of things that are similar to what was happening in 4K six, seven, eight years for sure. 

With 8K, you're talking about super high resolution. In the context of digital signage, where would 8K be particularly useful and applicable? 

Chris Chinnock: From what I'm gathering, we've actually been poking around in the proAV space, trying to understand what the needs are for 8K, to tell you the truth and what we're learning is the big need is really in distribution and transport. So the canvases are clearly getting bigger and larger in digital signage. An 8K digital signage is not uncommon, I don't think nowadays. But it's not necessarily in a standard 16:9 format. They come in all kinds of aspects, ratios and configurations.

But what we're starting to see is, these big canvases, you want to start with a higher resolution source of master file, so that you can have a piece of that 8K master going out to various parts of this display. So if you letterbox it or clip a PC in there, you want to start with a high resolution piece and not have to do upscaling at the display itself, if you can avoid that, because there are some issues with that.

So the main argument is interesting, with the 8K Association and the website, you even have on the navigation bar, just straight out, “Why 8K” and I go through things and some of those objections, so to speak are: you can't see the resolution, that the human eye can't even raise, can't even resolve 8K now. 

I don't think that's quite accurate, is it? 

Chris Chinnock: No, it's not and people make that argument based on simple acuity, that is the Snellen chart and it's literally based on geometry and that is a big part of vision. There's no doubt about that. But human vision's far more complex. There are higher order things going on, they call it hyper acuity, so that allows you to see, for example, the differences between parallel lines and slightly unparalleled lines. It allows you to see stars in the night sky that simple acuity says you can't see and perhaps more importantly, we form images in the brain, the retina and the eye is part of it, but the brain puts those signals together to create an image. So we sometimes and often do fill in details in our brain to create that image of the world. 

So if you have an 8K image versus a 4K image, it has less artifacts, it has more texture and detail. So it creates a higher sense of realism. It's subtle and the hyper acuity may say you can't see that difference, but all these other factors reinforce that it's more real, it's more present.

Do you have to be within a certain kind of viewing cone or proximity in order to appreciate that difference between 4K and 8K? 

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, certainly the closer you sit, you will see more detail and sharpness and texture, and that's for sure, because that's part of the simple acuity part. But also remember, we're talking HDR signals for the most part with 8K content now. So it's high dynamic range, it's white color gamut. All these things make a big difference. 

Yeah, if you're using high dynamic range, then you can see an incredible amount of detail that isn't otherwise revealed. 

Chris Chinnock: Exactly. 

From your point of view, are there certain kinds of applications for signage that make more sense than others?

Like from my point of view if it's at a museum or something where you're going to get people who are going to be walking up close, that's when it starts to make some sense. 

I just don't know that anybody's ever going to need a 8K digital menu board in a QSR. 

Chris Chinnock: I agree with that, absolutely and museums are one perfect example. I know I've seen in some trade show demonstrations, they'll have an artifact that can be either a video capture, a 3D video capture of an artifact, or it could be a very high resolution computer generated image. 

But now you can go up to the screen, you can really look at this artifact. You can zoom in on it. You can rotate it and you don't see any discrepancies in that image. You've got lots and lots of resolution to play with here, so it's much closer to lifelike 

In terms of math, what's the difference? And I hope I'm not putting you on the spot here, but just generally the difference between a full HD file and an 8K file, in terms of size and what are the implications in terms of the equipment, graphics cards and everything you need to play it out. 

Chris Chinnock: File size is going to depend on the compression that you use. Maybe a better way to look at it is what's the bandwidth you would need, the uncompressed bandwidth you need for various files.

So I think full HD is somewhere around three gigabits as I recall. But now if you want to do 8K, I think the highest reasonable level that you want to do is 8K at 60 frames per second, 10 bit and now the difference comes with color subsampling. If it's video, you're going to do four to zero color subsampling, that's about 30 gigabits per second. So ten times full HD, right? If you want to do broadcast quality, that's four to two color sampling. That's 40 gigabits. You want to do four-four,-four for high resolution graphics in proAV, 60 gigabits per second.

Woah!

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, so here's the problem: it's a distribution challenge, right? So there are solutions out there. If you want to do proAV, you can use HDMI 2.1. You may have to use two connectors if you want to do four-four,-four. That's a real challenge, just to sync those and it's going to be short distance, right? So your player's gotta be right by, probably a standalone 8K display of some sort. 

The other side of the coin is IP distribution, right? That's a huge trend in the whole proAV space. So there's a lot of solutions that are out there to do that now. A lot of them are focused on one gigabit networks and that's just not gonna cut it for 8K, right? So we're starting to see, there’s at least two organizations that I know about that are trying to develop some standards in this. One is the Software Defined Video Over Ethernet (SDVOE) and that's focused on using a 10 gigabit network to support it.

10 gigabits is okay if you use some kind of a mezzanine codec, like JPEG XS. That's supposed to be a lossless codec that you can compress up to fifteen to one. So you can get all those signals onto a 10 gigabit network easily with JPEG XS and then the other organizations I'm aware of is the AIMS Alliance organization, and they're developing what's called the IPMX standard. What they're doing is borrowing video over IP standard from the SMT organization from broadcast and that standard is called ST2110 and it has all kinds of high-end features in it for broadcast, including redundant distribution. So you have two Ethernet channels So if one fails the other one's always there. It's got high-end timing and grand master clocks. 

We don't need that for proAV for the most part. So the AIMS Alliance is specifically trying to take that broadcast standard, strip out what you don’t need, add in some things that you do need for proAV and develop a new standard.

So if I'm somebody who runs a facility operations for a Fortune 500 company and at their main headquarters office campus, the CEO has bought an 8K TV for his home and says, “I love 8K. I want my whole digital signage network converted over to 8Kx8K displays. It can replace the 4K's or the 2Ks that are hanging up on mounts and all that.”

What are the infrastructure implications if you want to be moving files around on the wide area network and everything else? I suspect you're thinking about even the cabling, certainly have a lot of the hardware that's moving data around everything else. 

Chris Chinnock: Absolutely and that's why you have to have a network that can support this. If your corporate network is based on a one gig ethernet structure, you're going to have to upgrade that. I know some of the new Intel motherboards support both 1 gig and now 2.5 gig ethernet outputs over, I think that's probably over Cat 5 cables and that may be sufficient if you're using a video and can compress that enough to get on a 2.5 gig network. It's pushing it a little bit but it's possible. It, again, depends on the client here, if they're really sensitive to having pixel accurate images or if it just has to look pretty good, I should say really good, but...

If you want to go to a 10 gig network or a 5 gig network, these are all much better because you can use less compression. But they come at a cost: all your network switches and maybe the cabling have to be upgraded to support this as well. 

Yeah.So like a regular Cat 5 may not support it and then you're pulling hundreds of meters of new cabling? 

Chris Chinnock: Potentially. Yeah, absolutely. Or, maybe just go to a fiber network to be future-proofing who knows? 

Wow and so I would imagine some new builds are future-proof like crazy, but there would be probably 90% of the built environment out there would probably need to be tweaked in some way, right?

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, I think so. 

One of the other arguments about 8K is that there's no content available. Is that true?

Chris Chinnock: It is true. There is very limited content out there. The interesting part of that is that actually a lot of content is shot on 8K cameras and there are now 12K cameras out there. Black magic design is a 12K camera. So it's being captured in 8K or higher, but it's not being finished in 8K or distributed in 8K yet. 

Is that because there's no market for it? 

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, partly. You gotta have a certain critical mass of 8K TVs out there before you start streaming to it and I think streaming is going to be the first way that we see 8K content coming to consumers and you need good codecs out there to distribute it too. 

NHK has been broadcasting 8K content for over two years now but they're broadcasting at 80 to a 100 megabits per second with high compression ratios, and that's just too high. Netflix is 15 to maybe 25 megabits per second, that's where most of the streamers are coming in right now for 4K content. That's where you need to get, maybe you could start at 40 or 50 for a premium 8K streaming service, but you quickly got to get down to that 25 area, I think in my opinion.

Is there a likelihood that there will be more content produced that is in the right format? What changes that?

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, I think again, you need that critical mass of TVs out there. You need a cost-effective distribution system and when that arrives, especially with these new codecs that are coming like VDC, I think you'll see major streamers jumping in with an 8K service.

Another argument is that production costs are also high. Is that primarily the costs of cameras that are like Black Magic Design and RED cameras that can shoot in that? Or, are there a whole bunch of things?

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, there's a bunch of things there and those were exactly the same arguments for 4K adoption, six, seven years ago. It's more memory, it's more bandwidth. The camera costs are a little bit higher. The storage costs are a little bit higher. That's all true but I think we're also in a very different era now. So with this pandemic, we've seen a big acceleration of production workflows to the cloud. There's no doubt about that, with all the remote production that had to go on. We're also, I think, going to see an evolution of that. So more and more production will go to the cloud and I think that actually favors 8K production as well, because what we're seeing and a company, FrameIO just demonstrating this, they have a camera to cloud service now. So you can be on set shooting with 8K cameras and as soon as you finish that take, it goes right up to the cloud. The original camera files are in the cloud and then from the cloud, you can do proxy editing proxy color grading. You can do everything and have dailies right back on the set the next morning.

This is going to revolutionize, I think, the way movies and TV shows are produced, 

When you’re talking about compression. I think in terms of compression somewhat clobbering the file, does it have any noticeable impact on quality as opposed to the native file? 

Chris Chinnock: Sure and that just depends on the compression ratio.

JPEG XS up to 15:1, that's supposed to be a lossless thing. So visually lossless, if you're at that kind of compression ratio, but if you get into a distribution, that's called a Mezzanine Kodak. If you get into a distribution Kodak, one goes to consumers, Amazon or Netflix is using, HEVC and is going to be hundreds to one in compression and so you can potentially see our artifacts that way. 

Especially now, when you put us on a very large screen, that's tens of meters wide, you'll definitely see things on that size screen that you wouldn't see on an 80-inch screen.

Is 8K best suited for flat panel displays as opposed to LED? 

Chris Chinnock: Not necessarily. With LED again, because it's a bigger screen, it's less forgiving, because any artifact is just more visible. 

What about the timelines on all this? You mentioned how six, seven years ago that the fuss that was out there was around 4K and nobody's ever going to use it or anything else… What do you see are the timelines to a time when 8K is a shoulder shrug? 

Chris Chinnock: Well, there's a graphic that we one of the market research companies put together that showed that the resolution transitions and now we're talking about displays here. So when a display of a new resolution was introduced to the time it was selling at 50% of retail sales.

So SD to Full HD, Full HD to 4K, and now 4K to 8K, that cycle is seven years and consistently seven years. So you could argue that we're a year, maybe two years into the 8K cycle at this point. The pandemic probably added a year to that. So if in seven years 50% of sales are now 8K TVs, we saw how fast 4K TVs were adopted and how fast 4K streaming came onboard. 

Will history repeat? Probably. 

Is this primarily a consumer driven product or do you envision a lot of commercial adoption of 8K displays? 

Chris Chinnock: I think the push today and certainly the focus of the 8K Association has been on consumer entertainment, production and the entertainment production value chain. But as we have already discussed, there are clear needs in the proAV space here as well, particularly for all these larger canvases for rental and staging, for corporate environments, for pop-up events. We talked about museums, there's medical imaging that's an important area as well, that's coming on board. 

How about 8K VR? That's starting to happen as well. So there are a range of different applications here, including broadcast as well. It's happening in broadcast too. So yeah, it's happening in a lot of different areas, even security cameras. There's 8K security cameras now. 

Is some of that just a function of end users and integrators and everybody else wanting to have the latest and greatest and say, “We're doing 8K, we're doing AI, we're doing machine learning.”? Or, they're just jumping on the latest? 

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, and I think, that's what companies do, and they always have to make the next product a little bit better than the previous one. So 8K is a natural next step and I'm glad you brought up this idea of AI as well, because that's also very different from where we were during the 4K transition. 

Upscaling in the 8K TV, AI based or machine learning based and neural network based now is a  completely different technology from when we had upscaling and 4K TVs. AI is being used in the encoding space as well to help reduce those bit rates and do seen optimized encoding now. So we're just at the very beginning of this AI capability and the cloud capability. So the combination of these I think is going to be very powerful.

If you're using display technology that has AI based upscaling and it's that good, do you really even need to produce at native 8K or are you in a lot of situations and are going to be just fine with 4K upscaled? 

Chris Chinnock: Yeah, today that's a very acceptable solution. In fact, it has to be the solution because that's what we have out there.

But one of the scenarios that we're trying to standardize in the 8K Association is, we don't really have a good name for this yet, let's call it Smart Streaming just for purposes. But the idea here is that you encourage those 8K camera original files to now be mastered in 8K, so you create a naked finished movie or piece of content. 

You now smartly downscale that to 4K with some metadata about how you did that. You now use conventional encoding techniques, HEVC, or AV1 to distribute that content the way streamers are doing that now and if you have an 8K TV, you can now read this metadata smartly, upscale that back to 8K and theoretically, that gets pretty close to a native 8K distribution scheme in terms of image quality.

If we're talking about four to five to six years before 8K is really settled in, companies that are thinking right now about a refresh of their display technology and the supporting infrastructure for the digital signage network they're running across whatever environment it may be in, do they need to be future-proof now? 

Or they're fine with what they have at the moment and they can just have in their heads that the next refresh cycle, we'll be looking at 8K?

Chris Chinnock: I think it depends on the number of pixels they want to put up there. If it's a big canvas with a fairly tight pixel pitch, which means it's a lot of pixels then absolutely, I would be thinking of a higher network structure for that. If it's a smaller display with a bigger pixel pitch, then maybe you don't necessarily need it. 

And we're talking 8K, but I have seen the stories for 12K and I believe even 16K. Are those things that will exist beyond labs? 

Chris Chinnock: I would not underestimate that capability, yes. I believe that will probably happen and we'll go through this whole cycle again. “No one could see it. We don't need it. It's too expensive.” 

I read something saying 16K is pretty much perfection, that's like 20/20 equivalent, perfect eyesight. You're seeing everything! 

Chris Chinnock: That depends on the screen size. 

Ah, okay. This is all over my head. 

Chris, how did you get involved with the association? 

Chris Chinnock: I was actually asked by the TV manufacturers to help form it. So I said, yes. 

And is this a full-time gig or among the many things you do? 

Chris Chinnock: No, it's one of several things that I do, yeah. 

Just for the listeners, what kind of work do you do? 

Chris Chinnock: I've been in the display industry for close to a thousand years now. (Laughter)

I've done all kinds of things. We published newsletters for quite a while. We did market research reports, consulting services. I've run a bunch of events on this. I do white papers for clients, et cetera, et cetera. So my focus has always been on the cutting edge of display related technology. So 8K is one of them. 

I'm also very active in the light field and holographic displays, AR and VR are key areas for me and micro-LED and mini-LED is also an exciting technology for me as well. 

Yeah, and the fun thing is everything you're looking at is ever evolving and always interesting.

Chris Chinnock: That's why this job is fun. I learn something every day, right? 

Yeah. That's the same with me. People ask me, I'm in my early sixties now and people are asking me, “Are you thinking of winding down?” And I say, not really because the stuff I work on is interesting and I follow the stuff that's emerging and that's always fun.

Chris Chinnock: Exactly. I'm with you. 

All right, Chris, I appreciate you taking some time with me. 

Chris Chinnock: I appreciate the time. Thanks, Dave.