Wirespring Dynamic Digital Signage

A few weeks ago, Paul Flanigan posed the question of whether the digital signage industry is really an industry at all. He put up a short survey on his blog, got back a good handful of responses, and ultimately decided that no, we're not an industry. Paul has devoted two articles to the cause, and Ken Goldberg proffered his own opinion as well. Since this is one of those rare opportunities for us digital signage folks to share a meme that doesn't involve corporate name calling, I'd like to offer my opinion on why there is a real industry around digital signage, why that's important, and why all those dolts going around calling themselves digital signage experts are going to cause problems for us down the road (if they aren't already).

An industry by any other name...

Paul's main arguments against calling digital signage an "industry" are that (a) most of the parts that go into our projects are off-the-shelf commodities, (b) our clients have trouble figuring out a return on their investment (and look to other industries to figure out how to do it), and (c) ad agencies and media planners still don't like us. I agree with all of those points. But I don't think they have any bearing on whether we're an industry or not (and we are).


Image credit: Paolo Massa A really basic definition of an industry is simply a group of companies that sell similar products and services and have similar business activities. Well, whether you look at the hardware, software or integration aspects of our business, there are lots and lots of companies out there selling products and services that are frequently indistinguishable from one another. Well-diversified companies like Sony and Cisco have put effort into developing industry-specific products to supplement wares offered to dozens of other industries. They're joined by literally hundreds of smaller companies that sell specialized hardware, software and services, and exist solely to help enable visual communication on digital screens. These companies, in turn, are supported by thousands of integrators, dealers and resellers that provide supporting products and services -- frequently to many other industries as well. Well over a billion dollars was spent last year enabling new networks and managing old ones. And that billion almost certainly spawned several billion more in ancillary economic benefit.

Our rag-tag group of misfit companies (if you don't want to call it an industry) also supports two bona fide trade shows, four non-profit organizations, a couple dozen conferences, two magazines (plus plenty of column-inches in others), and innumerable blogs, websites and online newsletters. Yes, we generate a lot of hype, and spew a lot of garbage into the press channels and onto the Internet. But we also attract minds and money from industries as varied as education, government, retail, advertising, health and hospitality, just to name a few.

Why should we even care about being an industry?

What's the big deal, you ask? If companies are already involved with digital signage, why worry about the semantics of calling them part of an industry? Well, there are a few reasons. First of all, the aforementioned trade publications and outlets do actually draw more people into the industry. While a newcomer might be overwhelmed, he's certainly not going to be at a loss for places to find information. Websites and magazines spread the word to people who've not yet heard of digital signage -- and yes, there are still quite a lot of them. Trade shows give potentially interested parties a way to kick the tires before deciding whether to get involved. And conferences help draw in fresh minds from big companies who like to attend those things for ongoing education purposes (and frequently, for the free drinks).

Second, being an industry -- and actually behaving like one -- means that we can solve common problems without having to reinvent the wheel each time. This might take the form of one company pointing to another company's "Digital Signage 101" presentation -- as published on an industry blog -- to help educate a new customer. Or it might take the form of emerging industry standards that make it easier to know which types of content are supported by multiple digital signage vendors. Heck, it has already kinda-sorta started with the general acceptance and use of terms like "digital signage" to mean the screens, players and mere ability to send messages, and "DOOH" to mean the advertising-focused application of digital signage.

Despite a few nagging concerns about ROI, our chief obstacle as an industry is actually our own inefficiency. Too many companies doing the same thing -- and too many "experts" giving out bad advice -- wastes money and manpower that might otherwise go toward successfully completing projects and trying out new ideas. As lone companies, it's impossible for any one of us (no matter how cranky) to do much about this. But as an industry, we can act together, either through a formal association or just an adherence to de-facto best practices, to not only avoid this for ourselves, but hopefully make others less likely to suffer the same pitfalls.

A brief word on expertise

Adding a few letters after your name on your business card does not make you an expert. Attending a one-day class does not make you an expert. Even hanging a few screens out in the world doesn't make you an expert -- though it's a good start. An expert is someone widely recognized as being highly skilled in his or her art. And because of the broad range of industries that digital signage touches, there are plenty of digital signage industry experts, digital signage technology experts, digital signage advertising experts and even digital signage project experts. But I can count on one hand the number of people who I would genuinely consider to be across-the-board digital signage experts. At present, "expertise" is far too easy to come by, it's not specific enough to tell potential customer what a vendor is actually good at, and there's no recognized way of validating it. As an industry we do a poor job of shining light on these problems, so they're left to create more confusion, add more hype and cause more wasteful spending. I'd certainly be interested in hearing suggestions for how to go about fixing them.

Are we an industry, or are we not? Do you call yourself an expert, or do you use a more low-key approach when describing your skills? Leave a comment below and let us know!

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

The concept of shopper marketing has grown in importance, and it's an area that industry players should keep an eye on -- particularly given the number of retail-based networks that are in operation today. Dr. Christopher Gray is the vice president of shopper psychology at Saatchi & Saatchi X, a leading shopper marketing firm. One year ago, he shed some light on the emotions and drivers of shopper behavior in a down economy. I caught up with him by phone last week to see how things might have changed during the past 12 months.

Q: Where are we now compared to one year ago in terms of consumer behavior and psychology insights? What did we learn from the past year?

One of the important themes for us to understand is that shoppers are willing to do what it takes to maintain their lifestyle while spending less. They're smart, they're savvy and they're resourceful. I've seen literally hundreds of shoppers over the last year and I'm always impressed with the creative ways that people are going about cutting budgets, but also trying to maintain a certain level of lifestyle and to feel good on how they're caring for themselves, their families and their homes. Some of the ways shoppers are doing this include shopping less frequently, shopping around for the best deals and perhaps trying new brands or trying private label. What's key also is that shoppers are looking to the marketers, retailers and brands to help them do so. There is a growing sense of what I'm calling "recession fatigue." People are getting worn out to have to pinch pennies and think about every cent they're spending. As a result, I've been seeing this expectation and need from shoppers to have retailers and brands provide them with solutions not only to save money, but also to maintain a lifestyle, or at least feel good about what they're spending or buying for themselves and their families.


Image credit: Ed Sweeney Q: So what does this mean in terms of the emotions driving shoppers right now?

I think the fundamental emotional benefits that shoppers seek from retail and shopping experiences don't change. What does shift is how we go about getting those needs met and this is where we've seen a lot of the shifting. If I go into a store, part of what I am trying to do and the emotional benefit I want to feel is that my family is well taken care of. I want to feel like I'm a good mom. Such self-centric emotions around who I am and what kind of person I am stay the same. But how I am getting those needs met will change based on the circumstances. I think what we've seen is that as wallets have tightened and as the economy has challenged a lot of shoppers, they're trying to find ways to meet those emotional needs, in unique and very resourceful ways.

Q: How will this affect the messaging we give them?

It's messaging, but it's also products, innovation and merchandising. I've been hearing a lot about shoppers trading down. But shoppers don't want to trade down! It doesn't feel good when you're buying something that you feel is substandard for your family or isn't meeting the standard that you have previously. It feels terrible. It doesn't feel like you're being a good mom and it doesn't feel like you're being a good provider. It also doesn't feel like you're doing the best for yourself. I think in the past the only option when times are tough was to buy something cheaper. But shoppers have a lot more options now. We're seeing a lot of retailers and brands out there providing solutions that offer low prices, but also style, design, quality, great flavor and performance. Shoppers are now expecting those solutions from retailers and from brands.

Q: Pricing has obviously been a big issue given the economy, but are you doing any research around what attributes consumers are most concerned about?

We do. We do it across different categories for our clients and we see a lot of different things. The themes that we see are those we've been talking about. It is still very important to continue the low price messaging since it gets people's attention, particularly when budget is something that's top of mind. But what we're seeing again, is shoppers aren't just looking for an opening price point - they're not seeing value as price in a vacuum. We've done a lot of research in home care, on items such as laundry detergent, dish soap and dishwashing detergent. A consistent message that we've heard across this category is that it's not a good deal to me if it doesn't work the first time. If I open my dishwasher and the dishes are dirty, it means I have to redo them or wash them by hand. In this case, I don't care how inexpensive it was, I'm never buying that product again. While shoppers want a low price for sure, they're much more demanding when it comes to the quality of the product. It goes beyond a functional need; it's also an emotional benefit as well. If I buy a dishwasher detergent and it doesn't work, I'm not feeling very good about myself at that moment because I made a bad choice. I don't think we understand well enough as an industry how those emotional benefits really direct shoppers' behavior.

Q: How do we try to decipher and understand the shoppers' emotions and behaviors?

A lot of my work is around the emotional lives of shoppers, their expectations and the benefits they're looking for. You have to use a lot of unique types of research. You can't just ask somebody "did you feel happy when you did this?" You have to use more indirect methods and psychological techniques where people can indirectly talk about or indicate the emotions and motivations that are really driving their behavior. For me personally, I don't like to use surveys by themselves. Again, you're asking very direct questions about things that are difficult to articulate, difficult to admit to, or to identify in yourself. So if you're asking those questions directly, you're either going to get no response, or you could get a response that's inaccurate, or at worse misleading. If you're building a foundation of knowledge about your shoppers, the last thing you need is false information because that's going to exponentially create problems down the road when you create messaging or create merchandising and other experiential aspects. When we use surveys, I prefer that we also mix in more qualitative methodologies as well so that we can cross-reference and cross-validate. Being a psychologist, I have a certain bias in the methodologies that I like to use. Specifically when we're talking about emotions and needs and the underlying motivations, I prefer to use projective techniques - to use things like visual representations of our experiences, of our feelings, of our thoughts, to use narrative, to use personification.

Q: So where do you see us going in shopper marketing?

I read a lot of studies over the last year about how shoppers have fundamentally changed and are never going back to their old ways. I don't agree with that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we see a history of this kind of tightening of the belt, then loosening of the belt when things get better. If you look across the globe at financial crises in the 70s, 80s, 90s, we can see the historical reference that behaviors do tend to shift back. Also, I noticed that a lot of the studies are based on self-report by consumers, which I think should be taken with a grain of salt. As a psychologist having worked with a lot of people who are going through their own personal crises, if you ask them when in the midst of a personal crisis if they can imagine things getting better, you always hear no. No, I can't. It's very difficult for people in the midst of a crisis to see the light at the end of the tunnel, or see that things might change or be different. So I think when you rely on self-report in the middle of a crisis, you're going to get the report that no, I'm never going back to that behavior again. In general, we'll see that as the economy loosens up and as people don't feel the need to budget quite as tightly, we are going to see some movement back towards more spending. Tied to this is the idea of price versus convenience. At some point, shoppers are going to shift whether they think it's worth doing all the extra things to get lower prices (clipping coupons, finding deals online, shopping across multiple channels, etc.) because they do come at a cost of spending time on other things. We're going to start to see the shift as the economy loosens up and people are going to say, it sure would be nice to spend more time with my family or take care of the yard versus spending all my time pinching pennies and finding the best deal.

Want to learn more about shopper marketing?

Find out how Dr. Gray's colleague Peter Viento uses shopper marketing insights to support creative at retail. Peter is the executive creative director at Saatchi X in New York and is a featured speaker at this year's Digital Signage Content Strategies Summit, to be held on April 12th and 13th in Las Vegas. For details on the conference, visit http://www.strategyinstitute.com/041210_dscss5/dsp.php.

(Full disclosure: The author of this article works for the Strategy Institute, the producers of the Digital Signage Content Strategies Summit. WireSpring has sponsored Strategy Institute conferences in the past, but is not involved with the conference mentioned in the article. WireSpring did not receive any financial compensation for publishing this article.)

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

By pure coincidence, a young man I met during my DSE panel discussion wound up sitting in my row on the flight home from Las Vegas. My session, entitled "Do it right the first time: the politics and pitfalls of digital signage deployment and how to avoid them", had been well attended -- mostly by prospective or current network operators long on entrepreneurial spirit but short on experience. My row mate's situation was typical. He has started a doctor's office network that currently has just two locations. His questions for me (and the focus of his two-day fact finding mission at DSE) included weighty topics like, "should I get serious and expand?" and "where is digital signage/digital out-of-home going?"

Good question... where is this industry going?

Digital signage veterans (some of us have been around for over a decade) have never seen as much activity nor felt as much energy as we just experienced in Las Vegas. Exhibitors entered DSE 2010 anticipating the norm: few buyers, but lots of "tire kickers" walking the show floor. Instead, there were plenty of indications that buyers were qualified and conversations were positive. Some vendors were even writing business on the trade show floor. So the future is bright, right? Maybe yes, maybe no. Certainly the short-term view is encouraging. Digital signage/digital out-of-home finally seems to be approaching a heightened level of maturity. After dipping their toes in the water in past years, two mega-players -- Intel and Cisco -- reportedly are diving into the deep end. And established entities like LG, Sony, NEC and others are expanding their traditional, conventional DS/DOOH offerings. All of this suggests money is about to pour into the space which, logically, means the good times are about to roll.


Image credit: Athena's Pix Good times, with a caveat

Geri Wolff works for Exponation, the company that produces DSE. Part of her job is to compile the collective wisdom of DSE's advisory board into a form that can be passed on to the digital signage community at large. At the DSE advisory board meeting the night before the show opened, Geri polled the board for advice. She asked: what are we (both the DSE & the digital signage industry in general) missing?

Patrick Moorhead, VP at Chicago-based agency Draftfcb, did not hesitate. Patrick said, flat out, there simply are not enough ad agency types in attendance. None of us disagreed. We acknowledged that currently, there's no reason for agency folks to care, let alone attend.

Ironically, this comes at a time when agencies are slowly warming up to the idea of sharing the wealth and spreading the buy. The TV audience is shrinking. That can't be disputed. But those TV dollars won't automatically default to DS/DOOH unless the agencies see it as a media buy that makes sense. Right now, they generally don't. And that can't be disputed either. Thus, unless the focus of DSE -- and the industry overall -- shifts more toward the audience and less toward bright, shiny tech, the agencies will continue to stay away in droves. That's one of those things that keep "good times" just out of our reach.

Where art thou, content?

Back to my flight home from Las Vegas. My new friend said that by walking the trade show floor, he felt he received an adequate overview regarding digital signage hardware, software, etc. But he had a nagging question. "I need help creating content that will look different from all of the other content, content that makes sense for my doctor client and his patients. Why isn't there more help at the show regarding custom content solutions?" My knee-jerk answer: "Because it is extremely difficult to make a living creating custom content solutions as custom content is not valued in the digital signage industry."

  Oh, there was plenty of content literally jumping off the digital displays on the trade show floor. From an aesthetic standpoint, some of the content was truly spectacular. (The Christie MicroTiles were amazing. But then, Christie could have hooked them up to an old security camera and would still have stopped attendees in their tracks.) But from an editorial standpoint, the content playing on the show floor was, at best, generic. Mind-numbingly generic. No-one-pays-attention generic. As my Preset partner Paul Flanigan tweeted from Vegas, "I know the weather in every city in the world by walking the show floor. Does everybody do weather?"

Unfortunately, it seems that everybody does do weather. And stock tickers. And news. They combine to form an easy default. But weather, stocks and news are not the answer to our collective problem of mediocre content.

Where should DSE and this industry be in 5 years?

That was another question Geri Wolff asked the DSE board. I spoke up. "Unless this show and this industry changes its focus from being transaction-based, unless it shifts its focus away from hardware and software and starts focusing on the audience, the person on the other side of the screen, and focuses on the messages we are sending to that audience... unless that happens, in five years, digital signage will still be a bunch of technology folks talking to each other." And the digital signage show, as Patrick Moorhead observed, will be nothing more than vendors "selling picks and shovels." Shifting the priority from an emphasis on prettier pixels to an emphasis on compelling consumer communication will not be easy for this industry. But the opportunity has never been more, well, more opportune. Digital signage/digital out-of-home has momentum, and momentum attracts resources and buys time.

It's time to provide an offering that compels the agencies to recognize digital out-of-home as a viable alternative, and time to pay more attention to what plays on the screen and less attention to the screen itself. If that shift in emphasis comes to pass, every DS operation will benefit: the mammoth enterprise projects, the two-office network operated by my new friend, and all networks in between.

I can't wait to see where we're at in five years. Meanwhile, what do you think the next half-decade holds for our industry?

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Hang screens. Connect screens to Internet. Sell screen time to interested parties. It all sounds so easy, right? Yet while we've all heard a thousand variations on this theme, time and the free market have rendered 99% of them dead and gone. Now if we were in a normal industry, that kind of failure rate might make us step back and re-examine the overall feasibility of the screen time model. But instead, it seems as if the number of people trying out new (and often wacky) sales and business models has been accelerating, fueled by the remnants of failed digital signage companies. From time to time, I think I'm getting caught up in the movement too. Whereas at one point I'd pick out many of these freakishly outlandish sales pitches and dismiss them out-of-hand, these days I find myself thinking "Gee, I haven't heard that one before. Maybe that means it could work..."

♪♫ Nobody knows... the trouble I've seen... ♫♪

I'm not so far gone as to immediately think of those off-the-wall ideas as surefire hits. After all, the digital signage game -- fundamentally at least -- isn't different than any other line of business. Thus, we should expect all of the standard business rules to apply. So, for example, we can expect that less than half of new businesses will last five years. (30 years of US Census data tells us that story with pretty good accuracy.) Of the remaining half, a good number will be liquidated (which doesn't technically count as failure according to the government), and still others will shift directions entirely without closing down the business. (For example, changing from a digital signage company to a bed and breakfast.... Don't laugh. You know it has happened.)


Image credit: Joe Abbruscato But in addition to all the typical new business caveats, I definitely get the feeling that there's another layer of trouble heaped on top of DOOH firms. For example, lots of companies that try some variant of the screen time model literally can't prove their worth. With no solid ROI numbers to stand on and still no accepted means of measurement, everyone looks at them skeptically. Additionally, many companies think that just because it's easy to scale the technology, it will be equally straightforward to scale their business -- something they'll need to master in order to achieve profitability. Meanwhile, back in the real world, front-loaded costs, perpetually changing financing options and spotty deal flow combine with logistical issues, install-time difficulties and other mundane but important challenges to make scaling organically harder than almost everyone realizes.

Different doesn't always mean better, but sometimes, better must be different

An anonymous commenter left an incredible comment describing the rise and fall of Reactrix on a recent blog article about how to sell your digital signage company. Reactrix had a very different model, different technology, different... well, pretty much everything. In addition to building out their own technology platform, developing their own physical infrastructure for each venue and designing brand-new, totally custom content for each advertiser wanting to try the system, they also had to convince prospects of the feasibility and desirability of all that new stuff.

Many less ambitious DOOH companies have run into trouble, too. In fact, "I'll put your ad on this screen if you pay me X" is such a tough sell for so many that we've seen and heard about hundreds of variant models that try to make it easier to pry the money out of prospective advertisers' tight grips. Some have involved co-marketing funds. Others relied on government programs to make the purchase a tax write-off (or close to it). And still others used barter arrangements, in-kind transactions and other non-cash incentives to make screen time buys seem as manageable as possible to potential buyers.

There are a couple of problems with these techniques, though. First, there's no guarantee they're going to work. The difficulty of explaining your compensation model might be enough to drive prospective buyers away before they have a chance to make an informed decision. Or, your model might be so far outside of what the client is used to doing from a business and accounting point of view that they'd just as soon not be bothered. This is especially true for networks that plan on securing national or regional advertising through media planning agencies. And second, unless you're already very familiar with the ins and outs of your model, there's a very good chance that your too-good-to-be-true, guaranteed sales generating business approach will promise too much, ultimately not leaving you enough to actually run your business on.

Using the unusual to your advantage

In order to close digital signage deals, it's important to be creative -- and essential to be flexible. A while back, I might have discouraged new networks from starting out with nonstandard business terms. But these days, I honestly believe that the oddball deals are doing more good than harm, gaining wins and concessions that probably would not have happened under traditional terms. One thing that worries me, though, is that I still haven't seen a surefire execution strategy. We've seen multiple incarnations of even the strangest business models, and just like anything else, sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. I suppose that can be chalked up to all the usual business execution challenges and market forces. But it'd sure be nice to know that there was some plan -- when properly executed -- that produced consistent results.

Have you heard about any bizarre sales strategies? Can these unusual approaches succeed in the long run? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

This month's Shopper Marketing magazine features an interesting article on a P&G program dubbed "Store Back," which encourages the firm's plethora of media agencies to consider the retail environment when coming up with marketing campaigns. Noting that big media ideas dished up by highfalutin traditional agencies don't always translate well into store-level fixtures and media, Store Back dictates that the in-store executions get considered first. If they work well at-retail, they can be converted for use with other communication channels and media. If not, the brand won't suffer from having an otherwise great above-the-line campaign that can't effectively be applied in-store, at the First Moment of Truth. If Store Back and other similar programs do indeed take off with agencies, they may represent the best chance the digital signage industry has encountered to involve above-the-line media agencies in digital out-of-home campaigns. Plus, the Store Back approach might pave the way for content and campaigns that work better and are more tightly integrated with traditional media.

How does Store Back work?

According to P&G's Phil Duncan, the program encourages brand teams and agencies to "start with the store in mind as they evaluate their big ideas, because what we have found is we actually develop better big ideas if we think about the store first and work our way back." Working on the premise that "if it doesn't work in the store, it doesn't work," P&G's own internal brand managers are working with the agencies that represent them to refine the way product campaigns are created. As Andy Murray from Saatchi & Saatchi X notes, "you still start with the idea." But that idea gets tested, either literally or figuratively at the store level, before being considered for a wider rollout on the Internet, mobile, print and TV. Consequently, ideas that can't be properly demonstrated in the retail environment may get left behind, while those that excel in the selling space will be given a more prominent role in mainstream media and marketing channels.

And this is good for DOOH?


Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker You bet, and for a few reasons. Those mainstream media agencies aren't going to "get" marketing at-retail any time soon, so their impulse will still be to go with what they know. More often than not, that means TV. Since the most similar in-store medium to TV is digital signage, we'll be seen as the "low-hanging fruit" in their quest to transition to a Store Back-like mentality. From a content and execution standpoint, we'll see plenty of mistakes in the short run. But these will be mistakes that the agencies can learn from at their own pace, without us having to harangue them (which I think just encourages them to ignore us more).

Additionally, as the agencies become more adept at this kind of work, in-store digital media will become a natural part of their repertoire -- again, without us having to wring our hands and explain how great DOOH really is. With first-hand experience and at the demand of major marketers like P&G, they'll be forced to experiment and adapt, or else potentially lose business in their bread-and-butter business areas like TV commercials. Let's face it: big media agencies aren't going to bother with our fickle little networks unless there's a big reason (read: $$$) to do so. P&G and other store-centric brands have deep pockets. They've also shown a willingness to both try out new things in-store and push their agencies around to get them done. Initiatives like Store Back thus offer a compelling reason for big agencies to look at digital signage right now -- maybe even on the customer's dime.

Can we speed things along?

I doubt it. Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to help push agencies in the right direction. But if P&G is only just starting this program and other marketers haven't even embraced it yet, there's little hope that our ragtag band of misfits has any hope of changing things. And the very sparse attendance of agencies at events like DSE's Content Day indicates that they're not (yet) really interested in the educational expertise and advice that we have to offer. Expect this to change as Store Back and similar programs become the norm (if they do), but it seems unlikely that we can do anything to hurry this along.

Wait, so we can't do anything?

Well, I've come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time to go after the Madison Avenue clan. If they have a client that wants or needs to do some digital signage work, they'll call us. But trying to push them into more complex, less lucrative digital signage work from the bottom up seems implausible right now.

Where we can make some potential headway is with digital agencies who are already doing digital out-of-home-esque things. Twitter, Foursquare, social networks and viral video are being adopted as legitimate techniques by large, respectable digital agencies working for large, respectable clients. The unique properties and capabilities of digital signs offer a lot of synergistic opportunities with those channels. If you're planning to lobby an agency, I'd focus on one of these guys first. You'll at least be speaking (approximately) the same language.

P&G's earlier work on the "First Moment of Truth" added much-needed legitimacy to the marketing at-retail argument. Do you think Store Back will have the same effect? Will it be more or less important? Leave a comment below and let us know.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

For the most part, I've noticed that when we're selling kit to a client who's going to install and operate their own digital signage network, they don't really give the media player hardware a second thought. As long as the price is right, it's small enough, and it has a good warranty (and really, just as long as the price is right), it's good enough for them. Then there are the channel partners. Whether they call themselves distributors, resellers or VARs, they all seem to fall into one of two distinct categories: "Magicians" and "Technicians".

The Magician

Once upon a time, computer skills were a rare commodity. The big, beige cases they came in were like mysterious obelisks, and those who could command them to do things were no less than magicians in the eyes of many. Fast forward to today, when my two year-old is already starting to hunt-and-peck and my tween neighbor's iPhone has a hundred times more CPU power than NASA used to put men on the moon, and it's clear that the technically capable have lost much of their mystique. But for all that, there are still a group of tech professionals -- the Magicians -- who rely on mystique to make a sale. When these folks come to us, they want to know what we can offer that's unique, unusual and decidedly different than what their own competitors are selling. Often, they'll focus on physical characteristics like size, or even demand a player that uses a RISC processor instead of an Intel or AMD, just so they have something that can still conjure a little bit of mystery when they show it off to their clients. The fact that it's much more difficult for a customer to get price comparisons for a unique product probably doesn't hurt either.


Image credit: Lucy Boynton The Technician

  The sworn enemy of the Magician is the Technician. These folks are hell-bent on ROI, and are only interested in the things that will get them the most bang for their buck. In the digital signage media player world, that usually translates to fairly stock PC-like devices running off-the-shelf hardware. Technicians can still be swayed by a fancy form factor or tiny case, but only if it will let them shave a few minutes off an install because the smaller hardware is easier to mount behind a screen. Technicians also seem to really like having some optional components available (for example: more storage, better graphics, adapters for tuning TV signals, etc.), because they can add extra margin to otherwise thin deals.

  Technicians rely on good deal flow to make ends meet. Because they're usually selling a bunch of commodity parts tied together to form a system, their margins tend to be lower than those of Magicians. However, because their products are typically easier to explain and thus more straightforward to sell, they make up it by being able to complete more deals in the same amount of time (in theory).

One size rarely fits all

  Over the years, we've wracked our brains trying to come up with a product that would appeal to both Technicians and Magicians. At this point, I'm pretty sure it's impossible. We've had good luck selling embedded media players hand-built specifically for us. And we've had good luck selling "media players" with names like HP and Dell stamped into them. We just haven't been able to sell them to the same people. Today, a number of vendors make small form factor PCs specifically for the digital signage market. These systems look like anything but a standard computer, yet still have the right innards to run most off-the-shelf software. While some have found reasonable success in the field, most of those vendors are stuck in the low-volume world. Unfortunately, this causes problems for the Magicians and Technicians alike. The Magicians, often tempted by form factor and the allure of the "black box" that can't be shopped around online, tend to be fickle once they've realized that they're just buying regular (albeit small) PCs. They themselves turn into shoppers, going from vendor to vendor in search of the newest, coolest little box. The Technicians, on the other hand, have a hard time justifying to their clients why a small box from an unknown vendor should command a 30% price premium over an only-slightly-larger box from a big name PC company.

There's still room in the digital signage ecosystem for both the Magician and the Technician, just as there's room for both Macs and PCs in the desktop world. Price erosion driven by intense competition and relatively tepid demand definitely makes it harder to sell a tiny $1,500 media player whose main benefit is that it can do everything a $500 machine can do in 1/3 the space. But there are still clients who -- for whatever reason -- find that pitch appealing. Likewise, Technicians have to move a lot of inventory to make money when the price of systems gets pushed lower and lower. But falling prices bring new opportunities, since mass acceptance of once-esoteric digital signage means they can spend less time explaining, and more time selling. When it comes down to refining your own sales pitch, I suppose it comes down to a simple question: does your ability to close deals more often hinge on having a unique or unusual proposition, or simply a good proposition at a good cost? If it's the former, put on your top hat and tails: you're a Magician. If it's the latter, lace up your work boots, because yours is the Technician's lot.

Will the market be more kind to Technicians or Magicians in the near future? Is there still room for the hardware guys who specialize in low-volume, custom-built systems? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Like many of you I'll be heading to Las Vegas shortly to visit the industry's big trade show, the Digital Signage Expo. The nice thing about the show is that it has become a de-facto meeting time for vendors, clients, partners and (dare I say it) friends, and has spawned a number of other meetings and events that take place at the same time. There's sure to be plenty of eye-popping tech on display, and I'm certain that the hyperbole will be thick enough to cut with a knife. But I'm most looking forward to spending a little time with clients on the floor, and then catching up with folks in a few of the side-lined events.

POPAI's technical standards meeting

Yes, I'm one of those digital signage geeks who can actually get charged up about attending a standards committee meeting. For what it's worth, the POPAI Digital Signage Standards Group shindig at the DSE is one of those rare opportunities for a bunch of smart people who normally compete with each other to get together for the greater good. During the meeting, we'll take the time to exchange ideas and compare approaches to the various problems we've all had to solve over the years. The goal is to work out some of the details for our standard for creating playlists that are interoperable with many different digital signage software packages. While our weekly meetings are generally restricted to members of the group, anybody can attend our live events (held at DSE and Infocomm). The discussion always starts out with a broad overview of past accomplishments and current goals, though after that the discussion can definitely get pretty technical. Still, if you or anyone you know would like to stop by and join the meeting, you'll be more than welcome. We'll be meeting in room N260 at the LVCC on Wednesday afternoon from 4:15-6 pm.

Seeing MicroTiles up close


Image credit: DailyDOOH I've heard a lot of exciting things about MicroTiles over the past few months, but for one reason or another, I haven't yet been able to see them up-close. That'll change on the DSE show floor, where MicroTiles will be on display in a number of places. In case you haven't heard about this technology, Christie's MicroTiles are basically small projection screens that can be stacked in virtually any configuration to make nearly-seamless, high-definition video screens in all sorts of weird shapes and sizes. They've gotten a really good reception from digital signage and AV industry experts who've seen them up-close, and WireSpring's own limited opportunities to work with them have proven very positive so far.

Gaggles of new, small-form-factor Atom and ION players

Ever since Intel released their Atom processor in early 2008, we've had prospects and customers ask about using Atom-based systems for digital signage applications. That's not too surprising, since you can get a tiny, Atom-powered PC for about $200. While we haven't been too impressed with straight Atom offerings, some of our customers have had great success with Atom-based PCs that use NVIDIA's ION chipset to do things like HD video acceleration. While these devices were few and far between in 2009, 2010 seems to be the year of the Atom/ION combo. In fact, I expect that a number of little booths in the back of the show hall will be demonstrating inexpensive, tiny media players capable of driving full-HD video, with power to spare.

The Preset Group's first annual mixer

I have to imagine that Dave Haynes, Pat Hellberg and David Weinfeld know how to throw a party, but come Tuesday night I'll know for sure. The dynamic trio (and founders of the Preset Group) are hosting a pre-DSE kickoff mixer that sold out within 24 hours of being publicly announced. At about 200 people, it's big enough to be productive (and fun), but small enough to stay intimate (and hopefully quieter than the jet-engine caliber din of the DSE's own open house the next day). I'll be looking forward to catching up with old acquaintances in a vendor-neutral environment, and possibly watching Haynes do some cage dancing after one too many vodka and tonics.

When it comes to finding sources of digital spectacle in Las Vegas, I've just scratched the tip of the iceberg. But to me, these things will go a long way towards making my trip to DSE interesting and hopefully worthwhile. And I'm sure that everybody heading out there this week has an agenda of their own. So tell me...

What are you looking for at DSE? Which other events shouldn't be missed? Leave a comment below to keep us informed!

By the way, if you need to get a hold of me during the show, I've set up a special email address that goes right to my Blackberry. Just email billg-dse@wirespring.com and I'll get back to you as quickly as I can.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Earlier this week I participated in a conference call with a writer who is fairly new to our industry. He posed a simple question: "why is the digital signage industry so enamored with advertising?" My immediate answer was, "beats the hell out of me." But that was somewhat unsatisfactory, so I made a little list of potential reasons why everybody from one-man startups to Fortune 500 companies feel they simply must get into the digital signage advertising business, one way or another. After writing down just a few items, it suddenly became abundantly clear why there's so much hype in our industry, especially compared to the amount of actual business being done.

Advertising is where the money is (or could be, at least)

  This one's the low-hanging fruit. A number of national advertisers have ad budgets that exceed the GDPs some small countries. And for each of the past five years (even including the last two really ugly ones), the total ad spend inside the United States has been over a quarter trillion dollars. Stop and think about that for a second, and you can start to understand the allure of going after advertising dollars.


Image credit: Marcin Wichary Of course, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, only a tiny fraction of ad dollars are being put into any kind of digital out-of-home right now, and advertisers, brand marketers and media planners don't seem to be in too much of a hurry to change that. Oh, and you have to be able to actually sell ad time to reap any of the rewards. So, all of those AV VARs out there who are hocking "free" products that promise a lifetime of easy (and perpetually recurring) ad revenue are going to be sorely disappointed.

Advertising entices people with the lure of the unknown

This argument starts out with clichéd axiom #1: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. And for many people who have spent their careers working in technology or sales, digital signage seems to be exactly on the other side of the fence that they've found themselves up against. It's reasonably familiar, yet just slightly different and more exotic than what they're used to. That exoticness, I posit, gives many of these people enough imaginary license to ignore harsh realities like "I've been terrible at selling everything in the past, so why would this be any different?" Instead, they just presume that everything will work itself out later.

Needless to say, it doesn't usually turn out that way. So we end up with clichéd axiom #2: hindsight is always 20/20.

Advertising drives new leads and new projects

  As I made my way down the list (I have another half dozen or so reasons in addition to the two biggest ones above), I decided to put my vendor hat back on and figure out why so many digital signage hardware and software companies contribute to the fantasy of an advertising-driven paradise. The answer there is simple: a lot of leads come in already believing that it's within reach. As vendors, we either try to educate them (which turns many of them away), or we humor them and take their money. And as long as the products that each of us sell actually deliver on the features and functionality that the customer is looking for, it's hard to fault the vendor if the customer's half-baked advertising sales plan goes awry.

While I'd love to say that every digital signage vendor always operates with the best interests of their potential customers in mind, from the amount of noise in the industry press channel it's quite clear which approach most companies take. For example, there are innumerable examples of vendors issuing press releases "on behalf of their clients". In the typical scenario, the vendor is announcing the deployment of a 500-location advertising network when only the first few sites are in place (if that), and the rest of the deployment is contingent upon hitting performance goals -- a rather important detail that you'll rarely see mentioned in a press release. This type of boasting does nothing for the client, but it does make it look like there are many more big, successful networks in operation than there really are. Which is why every Friday (it seems), I get four or five calls from venture capitalists in various stages of due diligence, asking why my curmudgeonly blog posts go against everything they've read on every other site on the Internet (with the usual exceptions of Adrian's, Dave's and Ken's blogs).

What role will advertising play in the future of our industry?

Ultimately, while people like Steve Gurley have come out with reports suggesting that digital signage advertising will likely never take off in a truly spectacular fashion, I believe that ad-driven networks will continue to play an important role in the industry's growth. I do think it's a little disingenuous to cite advertising as being the key to the industry's long-term success, though. And I would like vendors to stop spreading half-truths about how easy it is to monetize screen time just to score a few easy wins. That kind of misinformation leads a lot of people down the wrong path, causing a lot of waste and inefficiency in the process.

Of course, if you have a solid sales model and a means of actually closing deals with potential advertisers -- and you're not dependent on impossibly unrealistic goals like securing ten national advertisers during your 30-day pilot project -- running a successful advertising-driven digital signage network is not out of the question. But for the vast majority of people who undertake the task, it is a lot harder than they originally expected.

Who's to blame for all the hype surrounding advertising networks? Is this even really a problem? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

The big news in digital signage circles this week may require you to pull out your acronym dictionary. You see, ExpoNation, the parent company of the Digital Signage Expo (DSE), announced the creation of the Digital Signage Federation (DSF), an organization to rival the Digital Signage Association (DSA), which is owned by NetWorld Alliance (NWA). Can the two associations coexist and thrive? Is the DSA SOL? Could the DSF be DOA? IMO it's a bit more complicated than thinking that one group or the other will prevail to the detriment of the other. After all, we're all in this together, right?

Alphabet soup

All kidding aside, what the industry is now facing is a showdown between two for-profit groups backing two different industry organizations. And I say showdown because, despite whatever political posturing may be going on in public, it's clear to all that our tiny little industry simply doesn't need two dedicated organizations to foster education, advocacy and similar goals. Simply put, NetWorld Alliance, the publishing company behind DigitalSignageToday.com, has been nurturing the Digital Signage Association for several years now. The group has been very successful in signing up members, and has held a number of well-attended webinars and talks, but has been hampered by the fact that they're essentially owned and operated by NWA. Meanwhile, many digital signage companies have been critical of ExpoNation for running a successful trade show but not doing enough to be an advocate for the industry.


Image credit: C'est la Viva While the formation of the not-for-profit Digital Signage Federation would seem to be a sign of ExpoNation's desire to play nice with the industry veterans that pay for all that exhibit space at the DSE, the announcement of the DSF was not met with universal enthusiasm. For example, Adrian Cotterill -- perennial fuss pot that he is -- wondered whether the DSF is "really riding to to the industry's rescue as they described late on Wednesday or is this a knee jerk reaction and an attempt to protect [ExpoNation's] own business interests in the trade show arena?" That's a fair question, since in recent months there has been plenty of gossip in the channel about the DSA pressuring ExpoNation to cede a bit of control of the DSE show over to them (or a similar entity). If that's true (and I'm not saying it is -- you should know it's dangerous to believe everything you hear!), ExpoNation's move to create another organization could be seen as a defensive play. And by making it a bona fide 501(c)(6) not-for-profit, they also nicely side-stepped a lot of the criticism handed down to the DSA and their owners, the for-profit NetWorld Alliance.

Can't we all just get along?

I'd really, really hate to see two anemic organizations competing for resources and mindshare, so it'd be best for ExpoNation and DSA to work out their differences. As Adrian also noted in the article I mentioned above, the DSA folks were due to vote on whether to detach from NetWorld Alliance and become an independent not-for-profit entity next week. With 420 members and a fair amount of inertia, it seems like the best possible outcome would be for the DSA to detach, establish themselves as a new 501(c)(6) -- or become a chapter of some other similar organization -- and have Exponation serve as a contributing member. Or if the DSF really is properly incorporated already, perhaps the DSA simply transfers their membership (and even their name) to the DSF. Either way, the industry would wind up with a single, unified organization with an instant member base, sound financial backing, and an appropriately open and unencumbered legal standing.

  To an outsider like me (WireSpring doesn't belong to either the DSA or the DSF), a single combined organization seem like the best outcome. However, I'm sure that the people looking out from the inside have their own opinion of what the ideal outcome of this situation would be. And considering that next week's DSE show will feature both the general meeting of the DSA and the formal introduction of the DSF, it seems safe to assume that some significant changes will be coming to one or both of these groups in the near future.

Who will prevail in the struggle between the Digital Signage Federation and the Digital Signage Association? Weigh in by leaving a comment below.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Building out a digital signage network takes a lot of capital -- there's no doubt about that. And for many companies, the challenge of raising enough money to get a network started is matched in difficulty only by the subsequent tasks of raising follow-on money for expansion, and making a successful exit via merger or acquisition. (I'd normally add "or IPO," but I'm hard pressed to find an example of a publicly-traded digital signage company that I'd be willing to call successful.) That's where Kevin Covert comes in. You may not know him by name, but Kevin and his firm were the force behind Reactrix's $45 million capital raise, as well as SignStorey's $71 million sale to CBS. Since he's going to be speaking at Strategy Institute's Digital Signage Investor Conference in October, I gave him a call to see what he thinks about the market, the interesting deals he sees on the horizon, and perhaps most importantly, what it takes to be successful with mergers and acquisitions in the digital signage space.

Does raising more money upfront = success?

I've written about the do's and don'ts of digital signage a number of times in the past. And as any regular reader will tell you, a surefire recipe for digital signage failure is expecting to be ad-revenue supported without any prior experience selling ads. That's by far the best way to crash and burn (or, more typically, sputter and die) in our market. But a close second is not leaving enough working capital in the bank to cover the longer-than-expected road to break-even/next milestone/profitability. And Kevin echoed that same sentiment. But is raising a lot of cash early on a guarantee of future success? Not always, and one of Kevin's own deals -- Reactrix -- is a good illustration of that. The firm raised $45 million very early on in their life, with little more than a tech demo and a dream. Their buildout was fast and furious after that. Unfortunately, so was their burnout.


Image credit: Shayne Kaye Admittedly, Reactrix worked themselves into a tight spot. Not only were they faced with the massive expense of building out their own network of interactive displays, but they were also designing their own technology in-house. And if that wasn't enough, their medium of gesture-aware projections on floors, walls and ceilings was unlike anything that advertisers had ever worked with before, so they also had the extremely tough (and ultimately fatal) challenge of convincing advertisers that the totally custom content developed for their brand-new medium was going to pay off in a big way.

Is anyone actually buying and selling companies these days?

Pop quiz: if there's a frost in California and the state's orange crop freezes, are OJ prices likely to go up or down? When I first heard this question, I thought "up, of course, since the supply of oranges decreases." But in fact the opposite is true, since those oranges are probably still fine for juicing even if they're no longer pretty enough to be sold as whole fruit. This is analogous to what's happening today with companies facing growth and exit challenges. The finance markets are still tight, and many private equity firms are having trouble raising new funds. Worse, the money they have in existing funds is often required to go to existing client companies. This makes raising new money expensive -- if you can get it at all. To make matters worse, the IPO market is only just beginning to recover after nearly two years of neglect by investors. For many cash-strapped and growth-constrained companies, the best options left are mergers and acquisitions.

While big companies still prefer to do big deals, Kevin indicates that the market for smaller deals is also thriving. This is probably due in part to acquirers being more conservative with their resources and more averse to risk. Simply put, when cash is king it's easier to get board approval for smaller, tuck-in acquisitions than for game-changing mega-mergers.

So, what's your company worth?

I know that dealmakers are often hesitant to give shoot-from-the-hip estimates about hypothetical companies and deals, so I'm grateful that Kevin was willing to give me some perspective on the going rate for "typical" companies these days. So if you're planning your exit or penning your business plan, what can you expect to come out with? Well, if you make it to profitability, somewhere between 5 and 8 times annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) is the norm. You'll find yourself on the lower end of that scale if you're stuck in high single or low double-digit growth. Although most of our discussion focused on DOOH network owners, Kevin also shared a few very rough estimates for the folks who provide the software that powers these networks. In particular, licensed software guys can expect somewhere around 2x annual revenues. SaaS guys do a bit better, provided they aren't hemorrhaging customers. For SaaS providers, a rough estimate might be around 3-5x annual revenues, with the upper end of that scale reserved for companies with a 30% or higher growth rate.

If you're growing but not profitable... well, you're in for a tougher sell. Kevin suggests that potential acquirers will look at not only your assets, but the amount of money you've already raised, the milestones you've reached on that cash, and any peculiar provisions that past investors may have inserted into their contracts.

A word about scale

One more thing: remember the digital signage M&A article I wrote a few weeks ago, where I noted that some companies were employing the "roll-up" strategy to bundle together lots of smaller networks? Apparently that's a good thing. As mentioned above, bigger companies still prefer bigger deals. But more importantly, Kevin suggests that in our industry -- and particularly on the network side -- there is real value in scale. I can only imagine that this value will be multiplied if and when somebody can finally present a rigorous analysis of just how profitable digital signage networks can be, and how powerful advertising at the point-of-decision really is. While our industry has made a lot of progress in a variety of areas, our medium still isn't in the mainstream. That means it's more risky. And even if that higher risk is commensurate with a greater potential reward, when it comes to selling your company, a bigger risk almost always means a lower valuation.

Don't believe me? Ask Kevin Covert yourself

As I said, I reached out to Kevin because I noticed he'll be speaking at the Digital Signage Investor Conference this October in NYC. If you're shopping for a digital signage company, or if you are a digital signage company trying to raise money or get acquired, this conference is a great place to meet people who can actually make deals happen. Wall Street analysts, private equity guys and M&A guys like Kevin will be speaking on a broad range of topics and will be available for questions afterward. So instead of stalking them via phone and email, you can simply corner them in the room!

Nonsense FTC disclaimer: edicts from an obscure branch of the federal government apparently trump the free speech clause in the Bill of Rights, so I'm required to say that I don't work for Strategy Institute and they're not paying me for this post, but I will be attending the Digital Signage Investor Conference at the Strategy Institute's invitation.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

In the past two months, I think I've seen more articles relating to consumer privacy and in-store tracking and measurement techniques published in major, mass-market publications than ever before. Starting with the Intel/Microsoft digital signage "platform" unveiled at the NRF in early January (which prominently featured gaze tracking and demographic analysis features), and continuing with the World Privacy Forum's recent report on the privacy implications of such systems (PDF format) last week, there's a lot of hype and misinformation surrounding the issue of consumer privacy and the effect that "active" digital signage may have on privacy in the near future. As one of the people who actually instigated this discussion a few years ago, I thought I'd try and set the record straight about what's going on in the industry, what the real concerns are, and what various industry groups are trying to do about it.

A brief history of the in-store privacy discussion

About four or five years ago, a number of companies came to market with products that could analyze live video feeds to see where people were looking (called "gaze tracking") and also recognize certain demographic characteristics of people caught on camera. Many of these companies originally devised their systems for military or civilian security use, and were seeking to adapt it for other purposes. By 2008, some of these companies were courting digital signage networks and software companies to integrate their wares. Their arguments for doing so were fairly straightforward. First, by identifying how many people were looking at a digital sign at a particular time, it would make the screen time that much more valuable for advertisers. Second, by identifying a person by demographic, the network could immediately display information thought to be relevant to that group. But people seemed to be glossing over the privacy implications of the technology, which led me to write an article explaining why digital signage networks must guarantee viewer privacy.


Image credit: Rob Pongsajapan Over time, a number of articles appeared in the mainstream media (including the New York Times) asking whether this kind of tracking should be allowed without providing any notification to the people being recorded, whether its abilities should be restricted in some way, and what the ethical and legal implications of using such solutions were. About 18 months ago, Laura Davis-Taylor of Retail Media Consulting (and now CRI) and I both found ourselves fielding questions from potential customers over whether the ability to use gaze-tracking systems and other methods of collecting in-store demographic data were useful and/or ethical. Lacking sufficient domain knowledge to make an educated statement at the time, Laura and I brought the topic up at a regular meeting of POPAI's Digital Signage Advocacy group in mid-2008. POPAI decided to adopt the issue as its own. Over the ensuing months, I contacted a number of privacy and consumer advocacy groups and experts -- including Pam Dixon, author of the above-mentioned report from the World Privacy Forum -- to learn about the current state of affairs with regard to out-of-home consumer privacy. The field turned out to be much bigger, more complicated, and more riddled with existing laws and loopholes than I ever expected. But after working with the other members of POPAI's Digital Signage Advocacy group, we eventually authored a draft set of best practices for people involved with collecting and using "Observed Tracking Data" (OTD).

In early 2009, I spoke out again about the topic, this time asking if digital signage is invading consumer privacy. By mid-2009, the POPAI best practices document was finalized, and was reviewed by members of POPAI's board of directors, as well as POPAI's strategic planning committee. Dick Blatt (POPAI's President at the time) took the draft document to an informal working session at the FTC, which is the government body that manages most of the legislation surrounding consumer privacy. The FTC folks agreed that our draft was the correct first step toward the kind of industry self-regulation that, if properly managed, would keep members of our industry out of the FTC's targets later on. At roughly the same time, Nathan Purcell of DCSI reviewed a draft of the best practices document with former House of Representatives member Barry Goldwater Jr., one of the primary authors of The Privacy Act of 1974, and a recognized expert on consumer privacy matters. The positive feedback from both government-related endeavors led us to believe we were on the right track.

What are the best practices for collecting and using data?

The POPAI document is called "Best Practices: Recommended Code of Conduct for Consumer Tracking Research", and you can download the full 11-page document directly from their website (PDF format). In general, we tried to focus on the four or five things most likely to get you in trouble with your local, state or federal government, your customers, or both. If you are planning to collect, store, process or use any kind of surveillance-like data gathering (especially with technology that can uniquely or individually identify consumers, which we'll cover in a minute), then you really need to:

• Disclose data collection methods: Put up some signs, make some pamphlets available, put up a web page. I know that this will be anathema to retailers, but our expectation -- which is mirrored by the FTC's own recommendations to related industries -- is that the more potentially privacy-invading the tracking technique, the more good you can do by plainly disclosing it ahead of time.
  
  
• Get customer consent to be monitored: I know this isn't going to be practical in all cases, but again, giving your clientele a modicum of power inside your venue translates to an improved sense of trust and a stronger customer relationship.
  
  
• Know the difference between unique and individual identification: In short, unique identification means that you can track an individual apart from other individuals as they travel through the venue. Individual identification means that you can take that tracking data and correlate it to a specific person, either via some personal information like a name or address, or via an account number.
  
  
• Allow customers to opt in (or opt out) of more intrusive monitoring practices: Like getting consent, I know this isn't going to be practical or even possible in many cases. But the opt-in (and even more so, the opt-out) is the thing that will keep our industry out of the hands of regulators.
  
  
• Practice cross-channel and cross-domain marketing constraints. This is another area that may get our industry into trouble in the future. Imagine a scenario where a cross-retailer loyalty program can track an individual as he goes from the supermarket to the dry cleaner to an apparel store to a big-box retailer. Such a system would clearly be able to collect a vast amount of personal information. Just as the FTC is currently trying to limit the ability of Internet marketers to track consumer behavior over a large variety of Internet properties, they will certainly try to do the same thing in the real world at the first sign of trouble.

The fact is, there's a lot more to following best practices for consumer privacy than what we crammed into the 11 pages of the POPAI Code of Conduct. A lot of it comes down to common sense. Before you implement a system that shows different ads based on viewer gender, ask yourself whether the ads that show up (or don't) could even remotely be considered discriminatory. Ask whether the techniques used to identify the viewer might be considered invasive. And ask whether a shopper might want to opt-out if they knew what was taking place.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (or: Who will watch the watchers?)

Who's watching the watchers, you ask? My personal belief is that we'll eventually need a fully independent, non-commercial, global not-for-profit organization set up to align shopper and marketer interests. POPAI would be a great choice for this role given its current global presence, non-profit status, and clear interest in seeing the digital signage industry continue to expand and flourish. (For a truly excellent analysis of why our industry needs a non-profit advocacy organization like POPAI at the helm, I highly recommend Ken Goldberg's recent article on the subject.) For now, given the early stage that we're at and the hard time we're having just getting the message out, I think such a move is a bit premature. But rest assured that government and private entities alike are keeping a very close eye on what's going on with real-world consumer marketing programs, and that one of them will ultimately pounce.

So, that's the digital signage privacy debate in a nutshell. If you're angry or upset about it, I guess you can blame me, since I'm as responsible as anybody for perpetuating the discussion. And if you think it's a non-issue, then at least you can take solace in the fact that I'm wasting my time on it.

But if you're the least bit concerned, or you're a major brand or retailer thinking about implementing tracking mechanisms, or you're a company that deals with gaze tracking, RFID tracking, mobile tracking or anything like that, then I highly recommend you spend a few minutes with us at the Digital Signage Expo, where we'll be doing a seminar on the best practices for using observed tracking data. Here are the details:

Opt-in or Opt-out? Navigate the Consumer Privacy Issue for Future Profit
Seminar #S21
Thursday, February 25 at 8-9 AM

Hope to see you there!

What do you think of the new POPAI guidelines? Leave a comment and let me know.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Whether they're placed in retail stores, libraries, waiting rooms or corporate lobbies, digital signs generally have to accomplish one of two things: inform the audience, or persuade the audience to take action. In the past, we've spent a lot of time looking at how to make digital signage content that informs, studying things like making the content as comprehensible and memorable as possible, and creating minimalist messages that get the point across in the first few seconds before a viewer's attention starts to fade. And when it comes to purely informational content, those are the most important things. However, when the goal of the content is not merely to inform but also to persuade, that brief message not only has to inform, but must also make an appeal to the viewer. Despite a good, solid century of effort by the advertising industry, we've yet to find an effective path to persuasion that doesn't stem from one of the three modes that Aristotle denoted some 2,300 years ago: ethos, pathos and logos.

Ethos: What Would Oprah Do?

According to Wikipedia, "Ethos is an appeal to the authority or honesty of the speaker. It is how well the speaker convinces the audience that he or she is qualified to speak on the particular subject." Simply put, we tend to believe people that we respect, which is why the ideas of many so-called "experts" persist even after they've been debunked. Ethos almost certainly fueled Activia's choice of Jamie Lee Curtis as spokesperson: she's recognizable and generally well-regarded, and has made graceful aging her "brand" for the past several years. It's also the reason why Donald Trump was a good choice for the boss in The Apprentice. The show's producers were no doubt attracted by the TV-worthiness of his insane rants and lamentable hairstyle. But besides the pure entertainment value, viewers and contestants are likely to view the Trump "brand" as being synonymous with making money. The Donald convincingly commanded authority because -- love him or hate him -- he made himself rich.


Image credit: Temjin In the world of digital signage -- and particularly in high-traffic environments like retail stores -- using ethos to help persuade your viewers is really, really hard. Unless your content actually features somebody both identifiable and well-respected in your field, you simply aren't going to have enough time to introduce your argument-maker, establish him as a reputable, respectable and noteworthy expert, and have him deliver your argument to the viewer. Heck, most infomercials can't even get this done in a 30-minute spot. How somebody might think they'd do it in a 30-second spot (of which a viewer might only see 3 seconds or less) is beyond me.

Pathos: What FUD was called back in 300 B.C.

Pathos is an appeal to your audience's emotions, whether positive or negative. It's when you make a statement about some value (e.g. "big government is bad") in hopes that it will reflect your audience's own perception of that value. Real-world examples? Remember those "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" commercials? Classic example of pathos. While fear and uncertainty are definitely the low-hanging fruit for producers working on pathos-driven content, positive emotions work equally well. It's the reason why everything gets decked out in red, white and blue around the 4th of July in the US (patriotism). Or why retailers start piping in Christmas music in December November October (nostalgia, or if you're a kid, toys).

There are a number of convincing ways to use pathos in digital signage content. For one, it's an appeal that lends itself well to imagery. If you're putting together a spot advertising the availability of the flu shot, add in a picture of a crying baby to induce feelings of responsibility and compassion, while using text to make the argument that neither you nor your children want to get the flu or give it to others.

There are also some text tricks that can help convey pathos. For example, it's common to use simile and metaphor when making an impassioned argument. I'd recommend skipping metaphor, since unless it's a very common metaphor, it might be misconstrued by your viewers. But similes are fair game in my book. So saying that the exhaust from your new hydrogen-powered car is "as clean and clear as spring water" and coupling that with the appropriate imagery will impart more pathos than the image alone would. Whether this would be more or less effective depends on how important the particular value is to the viewer.

Logos: Or, how to overestimate your audience

If all it took to win new customers was sound reasoning and a cogent, logical argument, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere waiting for my manservant to bring my morning libation in a coconut. OK, probably not, but you get the picture. We all love to pretend that the average person is a rational being, but when it comes to advertising, logos is almost never enough. If it were, all ads would consist of a few lines of black text on a white background, and agency creative departments would look more like the accounting department and less like... well... have you seen what agency creative departments look like?

Now, that's not to say that your advertising copy shouldn't make a measured, logical appeal. We know that explanations of how products save time and money are some of the most effective out there, and we also know that most viewers respond well to simple statistics (e.g. "2 out of 3 plumbers recommend PipeClear!"). But because content on digital signs is typically seen for only a brief amount of time, logical arguments must be very basic, very clear, and very short to guarantee viewers see them in their entirety. Additionally, they work best when based on information and premises that the viewer is already familiar with, since transmitting new information takes valuable viewing and comprehension time. In short, a logical argument is most effective when it reiterates or reinforces an argument that was already made elsewhere.

Much like creating effective digital signage content, being persuasive requires both science and art. And it certainly takes a lot of practice. Yet for all the effort that content producers put into making clips that are pleasing to the eye, much less time is spent making those clips persuasive. (Big brands tend to be the exception, but let's face it, most digital signage content is not provided by the big brands.) Given that ethos, pathos and logos account for just about every form of persuasion that one might find in an ad, it follows that brands, networks and content creators are already using these tools in their ad campaigns. But if they thought about these things in the context of digital signage, the decisions on when, where and how to use each form would be considerably different than they are today. And that would lead to better, more effective and more persuasive content on screen.

What's the key to making persuasive digital signage content? Text? Imagery? Sound? Something else? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Whether you pose this question to a wide-eyed entrepreneur or a seasoned veteran in our space, it's pretty obvious what the answer will be. In fact, ever since the term "digital signage" gained traction about a decade ago, the hardware, software, services and advertising segments of the market have seen double-digit gains (or more!) every single year. And new reports from Frost & Sullivan, PQ Media and a number of others tell us that that while the rate of increase may start to decline a bit, we should continue to see healthy growth for some time to come. I was thinking about this while studying the web analytics for wirespring.com and this blog's subscription sources -- via RSS, email and plain old web page views. You see, starting in 2005, the blog saw geometric growth in its number of subscribers every year until 2008. Then, suddenly, the growth rate became linear. In searching for an explanation, I noticed something interesting: according to the Google Trends tool, the growth in the number of queries for key terms in our industry has slowed down dramatically in the last year or so, mimicking what I'm seeing on our blog. While I don't think this is a perfect analogue to what's actually going on in the market, it could indicate that we're reaching a critical growth point where hype and volume matter less. Well... maybe.

What does Google Trends say?

Google Trends is a web-based tool that tracks the number of search queries and news articles submitted for various keywords. Although Google is immensely popular, and so many people use it, the main shortcoming of Google Trends is that it can be unreliable for search terms that don't have a huge amount of volume. This latter group includes the vast majority of search terms important to our industry. However, when you plot a few of the popular-enough terms over a couple of years, Google clearly shows a slowing growth curve. Take, for example, these queries for two popular search terms, "digital signage" and "digital signage software". I added the green line to the first graph to show the approximate "best fit" curve, but these are otherwise unchanged from the Google Trends output:




Discarding seasonal anomalies like the year-end slowdown well known to so many industries, search volume actually peaked in 2008, and saw a very slight decline in 2009. I'm sure the recession played a large part in that, but even during the bulk of 2008 there was little change in the search volume for these terms. What's more, the overall news volume at best held steady during that time. This tells me one of two things: either those companies who normally do lots of PR aren't accelerating their actions (probably because determining the ROI for a given piece of PR is very challenging), or, since there are more companies in the marketplace than ever before (which seems true, anecdotally), the average number of releases per company may actually have declined a bit. If you're wondering about those flat lines on the "digital signage software" trend graph, that's because that term just barely has sufficient search volume to register on Google Trends. If you graph "digital signage" and "digital signage software" together, you can see that "digital signage" by itself gets about an order of magnitude more search volume, on average:

Less hype? Isn't that just wishful thinking?

I'm no fan of industry hype, and I suspect everybody knows that by now. So I suppose the above analysis could simply be a case of me wishing that things would change for the better. On the other hand, my company's success depends on the growth and success of the industry, so it's really not in my best interest to think that our growth rate is going to fall off a cliff.

Are there other ways to explain what's happening?

Of course there are, and most of them make things look less dire. For example, since 2007 our industry's main news portals and blogs have become much more popular and professional, so they may be absorbing some of the traffic that would previously have gone to Google. Likewise, there are newsletters, clipping services, magazines and e-zines, and other forms of marketing and news publications that get pushed out to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people now, which again may be taking some amount of search volume away from Google.

Another explanation is that as our industry matures, we ought to see fewer tire kickers and more serious buyers. On the high end of the business spectrum, these buyers may do fewer and more concentrated searches, or might be turning to other avenues like consultants, trade shows, and partnerships with existing vendors and VARs to learn about products and services. On the low end, mom and pop businesses are probably using a wider variety of search terms based on their particular needs. For example, if people are getting useful search results from a query like "digital restaurant sign" because there are now enough vendors providing that service (and enough articles about it) to make the first web search a success, they might never have the need to do a broader search for "digital signage." Both of these trends -- if correct -- would be great, because they signal the start of our industry's next phase, where solution specificity and bona fide business relationships become increasingly important, making general hype less effective (and thus theoretically less pervasive over time).

What about additional data points?

If it were up to me, I'd have to say that yes, the digital signage industry is growing. It doesn't take a $1,500 research report to notice the huge number of screens being placed in virtually every conceivable out-of-home space these days. However, when it comes to the volume of research being conducted over the Internet, I'm less sure. It seems possible to me that we may have plateaued, in which case we might not see another big spike in activity until a) the economy improves, b) some technical innovation is made that significantly lowers the cost of entry, or c) something dramatically increases the amount of attention that our technology and medium receives. The question is, which of these things will happen, when, and what will be the driving force behind them?

Is the market for digital signage still growing? If so, how quickly, and what's driving that growth? If not, what do you think will spur the next wave of development in our space? Leave a comment below and let me know!

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Just a few days ago, two mathematicians from the University of Pennsylvania posted a solution to the Boltzmann equation, a complex, 7-dimensional formula used to model the behavior of gases. More than 140 years after the equation was first developed, these mathematicians proved that gaseous systems as a whole remain stable when small, local disturbances (called perturbations) are introduced. How can this possibly relate to digital signage, you ask? If you guessed that it's because we vendors use a 7-dimensional formula to develop our pricing models, you're wrong -- though having seen the gyrations that some of my competitors go through just to generate a quote, I understand why you might feel that way. Basically, in layman's terms, the Boltzmann equation was the science behind the notion of the Butterfly Effect, which suggests that tiny perturbations can have really big consequences. The quintessential example is that of a butterfly flapping its wings, and those tiny fluctuations changing the weather elsewhere. Essentially, the newly discovered solutions to the equation show that the Butterfly Effect is bogus. As one commenter put it, "it takes a very large perturbation to convert a stable portion of atmosphere into a storm, and the flutter of a butterfly's wings is not significant to tipping the balance." See where I'm going with this yet?

Wanted: One very large perturbation

A few weeks ago, I lamented that we've yet to see a truly "game-changing" event in the digital signage industry. But when we do -- for better or worse -- it will make everything that happened in the past look puny by comparison. A number of people commented on that idea, some saying that we've already seen some big deals, others saying that I'd better not be holding my breath.


Image credit: Edwin Dalorzo To those who believe the significance of any deal depends only on the number of dollar signs attached, I ask you: if PRN sold for nearly $300M, SignStorey went for over $70M, and other reasonably high-dollar-amount deals like the Danoo-IdeaCast-National CineMedia experiment have taken place, where's the newfound value to the industry? Hell, where's the value to most of the acquirers? Thomson famously bought PRN in 2005, but never seemed to take much interest in building on their purchase. If it weren't for the skill of PRN's managers, they could easily have fallen into obscurity or disappeared altogether by now. And as for CBS buying SignStorey... I don't think I could even make up a way to spin the results of that in a positive fashion -- unless you include how the founders made out, perhaps.

There have no doubt been deals over the past five years that transacted for very respectable sums of money, regardless of what industry you come from. But their overall effect on the strength and viability of the market could be likened to a butterfly's ability to change the weather. Ditto every company that has launched a "revolutionary," "game-changing," "paradigm-shifting" new product, feature or service over that time. We've seen evolution, yes. And that's important -- it's a sign that our core is solidifying and maturing. But for revolution we need a much, much larger catalyst than we've had so far.

In short, we're still waiting for a large perturbation.

And while we're on that subject...

Making killer content is hard

Another thing struck me as I read about the solution to the Boltzmann Equation: this is why it's so freaking hard to consistently make good content! Time and time again, we'll be working with clients and find out that we can develop a methodology that, when properly followed, makes content that performs better. But on a scale of 1 to 10, we can only consistently turn a 2 or 3 into a 5, 6 or 7. It's nearly impossible to consistently turn anything into a 9 or 10. What's standing in the way? In short, we start running into the "small perturbation" problem, where after a certain point on the quality scale, small optimizations can only yield small improvements. To make content that's a 10 requires a major perturbation in the process, and the necessary changes can vary with every single piece of content and every single message to be communicated. This drives up the cost of content development. It makes me think that Show+Tell's Phil Lenger was right on the money during his DSE presentation from last year. According to Phil, digital signage content only needs to be exceptional some of the time. If reaching peak performance means revamping your design protocol for every clip, it quickly becomes too expensive and exhausting to make each one a 10 out of 10.

Will our "game changing" event be driven by technology? Content? Business model? Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts!

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Last week's article on Digital Signage Mergers, Acquisitions and Bankruptcies generated a lot of commentary, some of which either corrected or clarified the observations I made in the post. Richard Lebovitz from Digital Signage Expo also yielded further insights on the quantity and quality of business in the industry, as he passed along this quarter's DSE Business Barometer report. Our analysis last week, the subsequent reader commentary, and DSE's quarterly report agree on some things, but show stark differences in opinion when it comes to others.

In defense of "Bankrupt"

After publishing last week's article I took some flak for simply writing that a company "goes bankrupt" or "went bankrupt", instead of explaining the type of bankruptcy, primary cause, and current status of each company in that category. For example, as Matthias at 42 Media noted in a comment, they're still conducting business. So is Muzak, as Digital Signage Universe's Lionel Tepper noted. But the number of companies "going bankrupt" is an important thing to track, regardless of whether that means liquidating assets or filing for creditor protection. That's because -- aside from a tiny minority of cases where it's actually a valid strategic option -- bankruptcy is more or less an action of last resort. So while one company going bankrupt in a small industry might indicate troubles inside the company, lots of companies taking similar action points to serious health issues with the industry as a whole. And again, as a number of commenters pointed out, my list was extremely non-exhaustive. There were easily another 100 or more small network failures in the past 18 months that were too small for me to uncover.


Image credit: whatleydude Once again, "going bankrupt" does not necessarily mean "going out of business forever." But it almost certainly does mean "taking evasive maneuvers because of extreme financial hardship," and that's what I was most interested in looking at.

In search of a forecast

I've complained about the fragmentation of the market a number of times in the past, and while the 40-odd deals noted in last week's post go a little way toward addressing the problem, it's nowhere near solved yet. Interestingly, the issue of industry consolidation was a common one in this quarter's DSE Business Barometer too, with one respondent astutely observing that "there is a lot of confusion and misrepresentation in the marketplace created by various rep agreements and aggregators. As a result, there is early evidence of mistrust in this vertical." Likewise, consolidation was cited as one of the ongoing industry "growing pains" keeping us from getting out of our own way. But on the balance, the people who responded to the latest DSE survey seem optimistic about the future, with the vast majority indicating that revenue levels and ad spend levels would remain the same or increase next quarter. Granted, respondents to this survey made similarly rosy guesses in the past four quarterly surveys as well. But if the data is to be believed, many companies are experiencing sales growth.

Whether that growth will continue through 2010 is anyone's guess. But it seems that short of another financial apocalypse, the industry should at the very least resume the 7-10% growth rate forecast by many analysts in 2008. To the best of my estimates (and in the face of more optimistic projections I made early last year), 2009 probably saw about 0% growth. Aggressive purchasing by small- and mid-size networks offset losses due to attrition and closure, but couldn't make up for the number of large (500+) venue installations that simply stalled out. Since there's little sign of slowdown on the low-end, if even a few of these larger networks resume their projects (in conjunction with the already-healthy number of large projects being floated right now), 2010 should mark a return to "normalcy." (And I use that word very loosely when describing our industry.)

Whether consolidation would actually help create new digital signage/DOOH business is another matter of debate. It seems unlikely that employees of a failed software venture would go on to start a network that might purchase technology from other, more successful companies. However, the consolidation (through merger) and dissemination (through dissolution or layoffs) of industry "experts" is surely going to drive new projects. These people will take their knowledge of digital signage business opportunities with them to future jobs and companies, and some percentage of them will successfully plant the seeds of future networks, whether they know it or not. On the flip side, as natural market segmentation and growth via organic and transactional means continues, expertise will "clump" in certain companies and segments -- which should be a competitive advantage that lets the "haves" further distance themselves from the "have-nots." And all the while, the march of progress will tirelessly continue, lowering the cost of technology and bringing more tech-friendly millenials into the job market.

Cobbling together the industry

I'm on the fence as to how far this industry can go without some kind of major, transformative event. Ten years ago, I would have expected to see a mature, multi-billion-dollar behemoth toiling along like a well-oiled machine by now. What we have instead reminds me of that 1980s board game Mousetrap, where you have to Rube-Goldberg together a contraption that barely gets the job done, only to learn that your little sibling ate some of the plastic parts, and you can't find all the marbles.

That's us. We've lost our marbles.

  While knocking on wood, I'll say it: our industry appear to be out of the danger zone. But I'll be carefully tracking the ongoing M&A in our space to try and objectively measure and monitor our health (and I know I won't be the only one doing so). We're still one big game-changer away from becoming the mature and respected industry that we should have been. Who's going to make it happen? Will it be one of the Fortune 500s who have stumbled into our space? One of the old stalwart tech or network companies? Or will it be a startup who sees the connections that everyone else overlooked, and can't understand how we've missed the forest for the trees this whole time? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

About 18 months ago, just as the true scope of the economic crisis was becoming known, many in our industry wondered how a global downturn would impact the adoption, acceptance and growth of digital signage and related technologies. Many predicted a near-catastrophic decrease in demand. Others (and oddly, most of the "research" companies) renewed their expectations for hyperbolic, high double-digit growth. I think most of us expected a decrease in demand that might slow growth, but couldn't possibly stop it entirely. But one thing seemed certain: any sudden change in the economy would probably signal a new wave of mergers and acquisitions that would bring some much-needed consolidation to our industry ecosystem. Eighteen months later, has that prediction come true? Let's take a look at the data.

To merge, or not to merge?

  Before we get into who's been doing the buying, selling and folding, I'd like to pause for a brief history lesson. Back in the dot.com heyday of the late 1990s, companies with no customers, products and revenues to speak of were merging left, right and center out of fear. At least, that's what it looked like to the casual observer. Many dot.com execs believed that passing up an opportunity for growth through acquisitions would lead to certain death by asphyxiation, as they'd be squashed between newly-merged megacompetitors and a drove of upstart startups plotting from their dorm rooms. But as the bubble peaked in early 2000 and the recession of 2001 took hold, we witnessed a new kind of tech-driven M&A strategy: the roll-up. A roll-up is simply when an acquirer (who might be a cash-rich company, a holding company, or an institutional investor) buys up a bunch of competitors in a market with the goal of achieving economies of scale. In other words, they keep all of the acquired companies' revenue sources (i.e. customers) while reducing operating expenses. Unfortunately, a lot of these deals turned out badly, as overeager M&A firms suddenly discovered just why so many companies had no products, customers or revenues to speak of in the first place.

Fast forward to today. While the digital signage industry is nowhere near as large or overinflated as the dot.com guys were a decade ago, we do face many of the same problems as our tech brethren did. At present, we have a large pool of vendors serving a fairly small pool of clients. Because of this, many try to "create" demand by hyping the industry and making impossible claims. Despite the existence of four not-for-profit groups that serve our industry, we still have significant problems with basic items like terminology, cost/benefit analysis and technical standards. Meanwhile, many of the A-list networks in the space routinely have revenue problems, punctuated by layoffs and new rounds of investment just to keep the lights on. On both the vendor and network side, far too many companies are too reliant on equity investments to stay afloat, let alone thrive. Heck, some of the biggest names in our industry have found themselves scrambling for cash in the past year or so.

What sort of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies have we seen lately?

In a quick and totally non-exhaustive search, I came up with a list of 41 merger, acquisition and/or bankruptcy events that have taken place since August 2008, which is roughly when the true effects of the global recession became noticeable. (Special thanks to Adrian Cotterill for his help -- this research would have been a lot harder without the DailyDOOH archives.) I know there are others beyond what I've included in the list, because I left out several deals in China, Japan and Taiwan that I'm aware of, and that's just for starters. Regardless, I think we can all agree that 40-or-so deals in an 18-20 month time frame is pretty significant in an industry where a six-figure customer contract is still considered "huge." So without further commotion, here's my list of acquisitions, mergers and bankruptcies that have taken place since August 2008, presented in alphabetical order:

• 42Media Group goes bankrupt
• Access 360 Media purchase Arena Media
• Ad-Dispatch acquires Volt Media
• AdWalker goes bankrupt
• Artexe SRL acquires Emmerrelogic SRL, becomes DOOH.IT
• Avanti Screenmedia goes bankrupt
• Bally Technologies acquires Coolsign's gaming division
• ClearOne acquires NetStreams (and just received its NASDAQ delisting notification)
• Core Technology merges with Studio 911
• Danoo acquires IdeaCast
• Digiadvans acquires Mobile Eco Ads
• Digital Poster AS goes bankrupt
• EDR Media acquires The Golf Network, becomes Sports Retail Networks LLC
• Fujitsu acquire global rights to TELentice (after bankruptcy)
• JCDecaux acquires assets of Titan Outdoor UK
• Kaleidovision acquires Music Concierge
• Litelogic goes bankrupt
• Medscreen goes bankrupt
• Mermaid acquires Media Solutions AB
• Millennial Media acquire TapMetrics
• Minicom Digital Signage spins out from Minicom
• Mood Media acquires Music Matic
• Muzak goes bankrupt
• National CineMedia makes strategic investment in Danoo (now RMG Networks)
• NCR acquires NetKey
• NetKey acquires Webpavement
• Pixman Nomadic Media goes bankrupt
• PlayNetwork acquires Channel M
• Primesight acquires Titan Outdoor's UK roadside business
• Redbus Group acquire assets of Streetbroadcast
• RMG Networks acquires Pharmacy TV
• Screenred disappears (and presumably goes bankrupt)
• SMART acquires NextWindow
• Sony acquires Convergent
• TargetCast buys Ripple Networks
• Touchtunes acquires Barfly
• Verifone acquires Clear Channel Taxi Media
• Vision Media Group goes bankrupt
• Visser Digital Media acquires CampusLink and LevelVision College
• WSJ/KPCB make strategic investment in TargetCast
• Zoom Media & Marketing acquires Sports Display, ClubCom, GymTV, Allied Media's nightlife network and Wellness Health Education Network

For many, being on this list isn't exactly a good thing. In fact, more than half of the companies listed were acquired out of necessity, or simply went out of business. Yes, there were a few bright spots. Zoom Media & Marketing, for example, has been clearly and aggressively pursuing growth through acquisitions. Others, like National CineMedia, used their strong balance sheets to make forays into strategically valuable markets on the cheap. But most, sadly, were either reorganized, acquired, or simply imploded due to insufficient cash reserves, poor planning, skittish financial backers, or some combination of the three.

Whereas the roll-up strategy was pretty ineffective after the dot.com implosion, it could do somewhat better in the DOOH marketplace. The most obvious case would be when network owners (like Zoom Media) expand by acquiring venues and screen real estate for far less than the cost of buildout. But even tech vendors stand to gain. Netkey, for example, had been strong in the interactive kiosk market for over a decade, but had very little presence in digital signage. An inexpensive purchase of Webpavement, who was rumored to be foundering at the time, solved that problem. More importantly, it gave them a more complete slate of offerings, which ultimately contributed to them getting acquired by NCR.

Where will the next batch of M&A activity come from?

The deals listed above, along with the others I've missed, have brought some much-needed consolidation to our space. But I don't think we're done yet. I expect the frequency of deals to decline a bit in the coming months, but I believe we'll still hear about a few big surprises before the year is out. Stratacache is still sitting on most if not all of its $25M strategic investment fund. Navori has been making noise about expanding (through acquisitions) into the US market. And, as Adrian likes to remind us of frequently, PRN is going to be bought by someone, and that someone is suddenly going to inherit one of the largest DOOH meta-networks on Earth.

Lower costs, better acceptance, and a re-centering of expectations will drive more money into digital signage in the next 18-24 months. Combined with the re-emergence of venture capital and private equity funds -- who had all but disappeared from my radar up until about a month ago -- the revitalization of the global economy should bring with it a new wave of organic and transactional growth in the digital signage market.

Did I leave out any notable transactions from the list? If you know of any that I missed, please leave a comment below. With your help, we can turn this page into the most comprehensive M&A list for the industry.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

Unless a Hollywood-style disaster manages to destroy the Earth in the next few days, Friday will mark the start of a new year. While it might not be as climactic as Y2K (remember partying like it was 1999... when it actually was 1999?), for many people the year 2010 will bring change and mark important events. Here at WireSpring, we'll soon be celebrating our 10 year anniversary. Despite making me feel uncomfortably old, this milestone gives me a great sense of satisfaction. The market has changed dramatically since we set out in early 2000, and somehow along the way we've managed to roll with those changes -- and occasionally even use them to our advantage. In fact, this blog started WAY back in 2004, and ended up being an early and accidental "innovation" that has helped us grow personal and professional relationships for years. After thinking about that some more, I decided to take a look through our web server's logs to see what people have been reading, and which of our articles have been the most popular this past year. (These are the articles that got the most page views during 2009, regardless of which year they were originally published.) I've listed the top posts below, and I think you'll agree that while the list is a bit peculiar, it underscores just how broad and diverse our industry -- and the companies and disciplines that feed into it -- really is.

Let's start the countdown...


Image credit: Sally Mahoney #10: Is Wal-Mart's in-store TV network really more effective than TV?

Let's face it: love 'em or hate 'em, Walmart's actions frequently define and dominate whatever industry they're playing with at the time, and that's certainly true within the digital signage community. Between giving PRN their big break, forming the Saatchi & Saatchi X agency to manage in-store marketing activities, and launching the new Smart Network this year, Walmart has given us great examples of what to do and what not to do over the years. So it's no surprise that people want to find out whether they know what they're talking about.

#9: Budgeting for a Digital Sign or Electronic Sign Network

Budgeting articles made a strong showing in this list, as you'll soon see. And why not? With so many people citing cost as a major factor in considering whether to implement a digital signage network, there's still a strong need in the industry for reliable pricing data. This article is the grandaddy of them all, hailing from way back in September of 2004, and pushed us to establish the annual pricing guide as a tradition here at WireSpring.

#8: Making great digital signage content: A quick reference guide

Our series on content creation best practices continues to draw plenty of visitors from around the world -- despite the fact that several companies have copied our content wholesale and are passing it out as part of their presentation materials (without attribution, the jerks). This handy reference guide gets updated every time we add a new article to the series.

#7: Focus on shopper marketing to improve store experience & ROI

Shopper marketing has been a buzzword for a few years, although it means different things to different people. For some, it's a full-cycle marketing program encompassing in-store marketing, in-home branding, trade promotion and more. For others, shopper marketing exists only within the store. With so much confusion surrounding the term, people are scouring the web -- including itty-bitty digital signage blogs like this one -- for any information they can find on the subject.

#6: Using in store advertising to win the First Moment of Truth (FMOT)

The "First Moment of Truth" is another buzzword that people in the marketing world have really been pursuing for a couple of years now, and is again something unfamiliar enough to force them to research on the web. And as we've learned, digital signage can certainly affect the first moment of truth, making it last longer and feel stronger.

#5: Five visual merchandising tips for your in store network

Retail digital signage installations often take the form of a bunch of screens tacked onto existing retail fixtures wherever the host venue will allow -- and not necessarily where they'll work best. More progressive venues know that merging digital signage best practices with tried-and-true visual merchandising techniques will help them derive greater value from their networks.

#4: An Updated Budget for Digital Signage Hardware and Software

Yup, another budgeting article -- this time, from 2008. Like all of our annual pricing studies, this one has a link to our master pricing article so that readers can see how things have changed over the years.

#3: 15 Digital Signage Blog, News, Magazine and Forum Sites You Should Be Reading

Once upon a time, ours was one of about three or four blogs dedicated to digital signage and/or interactive kiosks. Today there are literally HUNDREDS of sites, magazines, blogs and social media feeds devoted to these topics. Some are really good. Some are... not. This article lists a few of the high-quality sites that I use to keep up with the latest news and trends.

#2: Digital Signage Cost Estimates and Price Guidelines

ANOTHER pricing article elbows its way up to #2 on our top 10 list, further highlighting the industry's desire for dependable pricing information. This page is actually our master pricing article, which contains links to every pricing analysis that we've done over the years. That's cool for a couple of reasons: first, readers can easily peruse each article to get a feel for overall historical pricing trends. And second, since we cover different elements in each year's article (like content costs, staffing costs, and other non-capex things like that), it gives people an easy way to go through all of those estimates from one place. Plus, it has a pretty interesting comment thread.

And our #1 article is...

#1: Electronic Billboard Pros, Cons and Safety Information

Despite the fact that we derive practically no revenue from electronic billboard software, we have a couple of blog articles devoted to the cause, and they seem to attract a lot of visitors. Electronic billboards are big, and apparently make a big impact on people. That's probably why this article has been viewed over 10,000 times this year, has nearly 70 comments, and gets more every month.

Wishing you a great 2010

Congratulations! If you've made it all the way through this article, you probably have some free time at work today, so enjoy it! If you're reading this from your ski chalet whilst on vacation... what on earth are you doing? Turn off the laptop and get outside! And of course, we here at WireSpring wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

Finally, I'd like to extend a big thank you to everyone who took the time to read our articles and contribute to the conversation during this past year. We look forward to bringing you an ample supply of thought-provoking, fun and useful articles in 2010.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

While 2010 still finds us in the midst of a significant recession, the volume of deals being done in the digital signage industry is growing. These days, it's hard to go to a restaurant, hotel or retail store that isn't using some kind of place-based digital messaging system (whether they're using it effectively is another matter altogether, though). So I think it's a good time to start talking about the changing nature of how people are selling digital signage products. In the past, most of our time was simply occupied by explaining what digital signage is, what it does, and if it works. Today, most of those things are accepted and reasonably understood by most businesspeople. In my experience, the challenge now revolves around two key elements: explaining why the client should buy a "luxury" item like digital signage, and why, amongst the large and varied field of digital signage providers and integrators, your solution is the best choice.

Selling a luxury commodity

A consumer buying a Rolex or a BMW has a set of expectations about their new purchase. They may expect it to deliver an experience they wouldn't have otherwise. Or perhaps they expect it to provide access to people, places or things otherwise unattainable. Or maybe it just satisfies their aesthetic sweet tooth. Whatever the case, products that aren't necessities still have to do something for the buyer. Otherwise, they wouldn't buy them. In business it's no different. Very few businesses truly need digital signs. For most, they are nonessential luxuries that hopefully bring along some added values and benefits. The expectations of what digital signage will do for them vary from reaching tangible goals (like increasing sales of advertised products or promoting the use of largely unknown services) to yielding intangible "improvements" (like enhancing ambiance within the venue). But if the client can't articulate their expectations in some form or another, they won't buy a digital signage system, because in essence they haven't sold themselves on the idea yet.


Image credit: Brandon Baunach When faced with a client who falls clearly into the "digital signage as luxury" category, we start by getting the client to explain their needs (which aren't really needs -- they're "wants") and their expectations. With those in hand, selling a high tech B2B product isn't much different from selling any other luxury good. In the end, it comes down to the skill of the salesman and the client's willingness to splurge. Of course, it also helps to be able to show them how they'd actually reach their goals before they buy.

Selling a commodity luxury

Next, let's look at the flip side. As a product developer, my resellers and I are offering a product that is fairly similar to other products available on the market. Much like how BMW tries to convince their buyers that they have the ultimate driving machine (even though it's just a car), we work to demonstrate that FireCast is the best digital signage platform by appealing to customers' needs and expectations. If an enthusiast wants to take a test drive, we let them take a test drive. If he's a gear head, we let him pop the hood. And if he's searching for luxury and convenience, we show off the hand-stitched leather interior (yes, that last metaphor is a bit of a stretch). More often than not, a client who's on the fence about making this "luxury" purchase will need to do all three of these things before feeling comfortable -- not only with buying our digital signage system, but with the idea of buying any digital signage system.

Every vendor's system has different bells, whistles, gadgets and doodads. Most of the time, prospective customers start their research without knowing that many of these things even exist. But over time -- and more importantly, with the experience of having compared several platforms -- they get a feeling of which features will make their operations better/easier/more successful, and which are truly unique amongst platforms (whether important or not). Interestingly, it can be useful to focus some attention on the latter group (the features the customer might not even need) simply because they allow the product to stand out in the customer's mind. When selling to customer "wants" instead of "needs," this can be a critical step toward winning the deal.

Even though a customer might walk through your door not "needing" a digital signage system, the skilled provider can turn it into a must-have item replete with newly mission-critical functions. Making the client wonder "how did I ever get by without this?" is absolutely an achievable goal, though it does typically requires a good deal of hand-holding, even after the sale is completed. For larger companies, or those whose business is selling the nuts-and-bolts, it might not be worth it. But for those who know they can drive incremental revenue, repeat business, and positive buzz towards their products and services, the payoff can be considerable.

Do customers still view digital signage as a luxury item? Do you think this perception is changing? Leave a comment and let us know.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

As an industry, we have always struggled with the seemingly basic question of where to place our screens. I've lost count of the number of people that I've consulted with over the years who wanted to know the "best" places to put their displays. That's a noble goal to be sure, especially when tackled before the screens have been deployed, found to not work, and are in danger of being scrapped. Unfortunately, we still run into plenty of situations where the host venues aren't as cooperative as we'd like, and we're forced to make changes to our "best possible placement" plan to account for the realities of retail fixtures, shelf space, and store traffic patterns. While we've written a bit about all of these things in the past, I thought I'd share a few more of our analysis techniques today. That way, when you're out there planning your next deployment (and you don't decide to call us to ask for help), you'll have a few more resources at your disposal.

Where people look





If you've been reading this blog for a while or happened to drop in on my presentation at the Digital Signage Expo last year, you may have already seen the first two charts above. They appeared in our series on Digital Signage Screen Placement, which you can peruse using the handy links below:

• Digital Signage Screen Placement: Understanding Store Layout
• Digital Signage Screen Placement: Angle, Height and Text Size
• Digital Signage Screen Placement: Modeling Consumer Behavior

In the article about angle, height and text size, we examined the field of view that a typical person of normal vision has, and how large the field of view becomes over typical in-store distances. Specifically, we found that a typical shopper walking the "power aisle" of a store moves about 20 feet in 5-7 seconds. To maximize the number of viewers that might encounter a screen, many networks have opted to raise their screens up high. But as we discussed in that article, this actually decreases the amount of time that a screen can appear in a viewer's active attention zone. Honest Abe can help explain that one:



The first thing you'll notice is that when somebody looks straight ahead, they don't really get an even view of what's above and below their direct line-of-sight. That's because our eyes have a wider field of view below the level plane -- we see about 75 degrees below level, but only about 60 degrees above. Consequently, the 20-or-so degree active attention zone is pitched slightly downwards too. Translation: the further up your screens are from the ground, the more likely they are to be outside of the active attention zone for your viewers. Left-to-right, the zone of active attention is actually a bit larger, since humans have a nearly 180 degree field of view, with about of third of that in full, binocular stereo. The active attention area is about half of the stereo area, or about 30 degrees laterally.

What people see

With these two numbers in mind, the next thing to think about is how your screens will appear to the viewer. Since we tend to prioritize the things we pay attention to based on basic criteria like motion, size, color and shape, manipulating those variables can have a significant impact on how and when your screens are noticed, and for how long. Remember, the screens themselves are going to be static: you can only move the content on your screens, not the screens themselves. So in virtually every case, size is going to be the primary determining factor in how your screens are perceived. The basic issue here is that the angular size of an object decreases as it moves further away from you. (Fancy terminology: the angle subtended by an object is the width of that object divided by its distance away from you.) Thus, if you were using 40" screens (which are about 35" wide and about 20" high), and wanted to make sure that they were going to be in the active attention zone (say 10 degrees above or below the level plane, and within 15 degrees of center laterally), you might derive a table like this:

.btable { width: 550px; border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse; } .thead { background-color: #333333; color: white; font-weight: bold; } .cell, .thead { border: 1px solid black; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 5px 15px 5px 5px; } .cell { background-color: white; } Distance between viewer and screen Vertical % of attention zone occupied Horizontal % of attention zone occupied Total % of attention zone occupied 5 feet 91.6% 100% 91.6% 10 feet 45.8% 50.5% 23.1% 15 feet 30.5% 33.7% 10.3% 20 feet 22.3% 25.3% 5.8%
As you can see, even moving a small distance away from the screen means that people will have many new items thrust into their field of active attention. At 20 feet away, your viewers will have about 17 other visual areas competing for attention. Even if your screen is by far the most interesting (and it might be, considering that the other items in the viewer's field will be things like ceiling tiles, rafters, etc.), that's still a lot of competition to get past. Similarly, because the amount of area one can perceive in the active attention zone gets so big, so fast, using much larger screens (e.g. going from a 40" to a 50") doesn't help much.

How to get people to look at your screen and see your message

Why do so many digital signs underperform in the field? Based on the calculations above, the screens are simply too far away from the target viewers. There are three ways to solve this problem:

1. Use really big screens. Giant screens can occupy a larger portion of the active attention zone for a longer period of time. Plus, they have novelty value. But they're expensive.
   
   
2. Use regular-size screens, but put them right in front of the viewer. This will work in lobbies and waiting rooms where movement is constrained, but you'll probably have a hard time convincing your grocery store hosts to put screens on top of stands in their power aisles, or place them on their endcaps (even though they'd arguably work the best there).
   
   
3. Guess where attention will be focused, and place screens strategically. If your host won't give up 700 square inches of endcap space for a 40" screen, ask for 300 and use a smaller screen. If you know a particular endcap performs well (based on sales data, traffic pattern analysis, etc.), that might be a worthy tradeoff, because you're essentially increasing the probability of your screen falling inside of the viewer's active attention zone.

  Ultimately, the willingness of your host venue -- whether it's a hotel, retailer, break room or otherwise -- to accommodate the ideal installation of your screens rests on their own ability to calculate a positive return on investment from those screens. If your venues don't stand to gain anything, you're not going to convince them to give you better placement. But if they win when you win, hopefully they'll be more willing to work with you and your data-driven analysis.

What's the most effective digital sign placement that you've seen? Was there a setup that made you or the viewer sit up and take notice? Leave a comment below and let us know!

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.

For a software company, we spend a surprising amount of time working with content. We don't make a lot of content in house -- hardly any, in fact -- but we're constantly testing, tracking and qualifying new technical formats and creative experiments in search of smooth playback, consistent performance and effectiveness in the field. We've also discovered that whether the client plans to handle content production, management and scheduling in-house or outsource it to somebody else, they've often left a lot of very basic questions unanswered. And this can have serious effects on the company's efficiency, growth and even survival.

Getting back to basics

These days, most of the startups and companies starting new networks that we come across have at least a basic understanding of the fundamentals. However, some still refuse to ditch their pie-in-the-sky projections even after a slap in the face with some data on why so many digital signage projects fail. Often the way we help them to see the challenge of scale, for example, is by using content (both its source and management) as a proxy. By getting the client to answer some very basic questions about their planned network rollout, we can approximate the amount of content (and thus the amount of labor) needed to fill their screens. For example:
Image credit: Quinn Dombrowski

• How many venues will the screens be placed in?
  
  
• How many unique channels of content will there be in each venue?
  
  
• How long is the average content loop?
  
  
• How many unique pieces of content will need to be created from scratch each month?
  
  
• How many unique pieces of content will be provided by third parties each month?
  
  
• About what portion (%) of a typical channel might be changed out each month?

By walking a newcomer through this simple list, they necessarily have to start thinking about related concepts that will invariably have a big impact on their strategy and execution. For example, "average length of content loop" requires the client to have a basic understanding of things like traffic patterns, average dwell time and trip duration. Those answers, in turn, will feed into future questions about dayparting and the associated creative and logistical needs for that. Likewise, the question about content provided by 3rd parties is actually a loaded one. Many networks -- even inside big, established and sophisticated companies -- presume that an agency or creative shop is going to hand over a perfect piece of media that they can then simply drop into their scheduling system. In reality, the content frequently comes through improperly formatted, or in a form that's useless for digital signage (e.g. an unedited 30 second TV commercial). While I find it's nearly impossible to convince a lot of these companies about the reality of the business, I at least have a jumping-off point for proffering some "what-if" questions that let them build out a more accurate worst case scenario budget.

These days, our "starter" content questionnaire consists of about 25 questions, and can be filled out in about 15 minutes. Needless to say, though, it spawns more questions and conversations that can take days to walk through. But for a prospective digital signage network company, time spent answering such questions (hopefully before their rollout begins, but frequently after, in response to some crisis) is time well spent.

More questions than answers (for now)

The boys over at The Preset Group have also been pondering the content question and looking for better ways to get networks up and running with great content. They've developed an online survey to sort out where the weak links are, and what might be done to strengthen them. It's short and easy, and the answers are entirely confidential. According to Preset partner Dave Haynes (whose honesty is the stuff of legend, mind you), it won’t take more than a few minutes to complete, and will hopefully generate a useful snapshot of the current state of content needs.

To thank respondents for their time, Preset will be handing out a summary of the findings, at no charge, to anybody who chooses to leave their email address. They promise not to spam you. And if they do, let me know about it and I'll bust some chops on your behalf. Promise.

So head on over and take the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/content_provider_survey. And if you'd like more info on our content questionnaire, feel free to let me know via email or in a comment below.

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What's WireSpring's Blog All About? WireSpring provides hardware, software and services for digital signage and kiosk projects. But our blog is a labor of love. Our posts cover everything from case studies to creative briefs, and are authored by some of the industry's most well-respected leaders.