When you plan your network, your displays your 'strategy' - do you consider that different screens may be serving audiences in varying 'contexts' and thus varying attention spans or interest levels?

Take a corporate communication example: 

In the elevator the visitor is stuck for at least 15 seconds and has time to ingest only a short news clip, weather or a narrative of a corp communication piece.

In a boardroom or front reception, the audience spends longer time and is more receptive to longer corporate narratives or possibly a full 'headline news' reel. The viewers can even divide their attention between various information that may be segmented on a screen with multiple content layers.

Conversely, in the hallways of the building or in a busy foyer, visitors can likely only catch a few seconds of the screen content, leaving room for only 3-5 second branding spots...

In these three examples, the content strategy (type, duration, length, level of detail) should be different among all 3 'zones'. The long reception and meeting room spots won't work in hallways or high traffic areas. The Quick hallway spot will look rushed in the boardroom.

Obviously the content can be re-used and repurposed between the 3 areas (to keep costs down) but it does need to be altered to be most effective.

Redundancy, disaster recovery and planning for failure - how much do you pay attention these terms in your attempts to squeeze out every ounce of cost from the project? If not much, do so at your peril. 

While we ALWAYS try to analyze all possible failure points and resulting consequences with our customers we are always so very surprised when cusotmers seem to have almost no interest in doing the same (or paying for an adequate solution addressing these). Why? No idea, especially considering that it's their business we are looking out for.

Let's take menu boards for example. You would think these are pretty mission critical items, right?

When our sales guys come begging to me to remove $900 or so dollars it costs to add a second player to a dual menu-board configuration promising to close a major deal, our tech desk strongly opposes. 

We don't do menus with a single player. It's just not bulletproof.

Consider what happens if one of the players or screens die, for whatever reason: dust, heat, vandalism, whatever. You have no menus! 

Even the best of SLA's is not sufficient to get you back up and running in an acceptable time... How much money have you lost in the process? How much confusion would this cause with your customers? I bet it will exceed the money you saved by running an extended desktop, single license/player set-up with no failure plan.

In a dual menu set-up, we always recommend an emergency playlist that combines all essential elements of the menu on a single display. If one player/display fails, the back-up menu playlist can be urgently deployed while the issue is resolved. Total downtime is minutes, not hours or days.

Before you know it they got in the paper! Very small image (see the tag above the button), but we thought it was neat that the TTC Rider's committee (who rented them for internal use) got photographed in the Star!

Thankfully the new SamsungID video wall solution at least removes the hardware complexity for those installs that can be deployed w/in 2ft of floor-level. (In other words a jumbotron-like video wall is still a huge undertaking to install, but in-window, floor display and most common configurations are now a breeze.)

Now one comment would be that despite Samsung's promise to solve the video wall problem with their own software and a 'single cable to connect' that has been slightly oversimplified. Even Samsung's high-priced UD software (also available from the OEM Hiperwal) isn't exactly single-cable or turnkey by any stretch of imagination.

In the end, although we would not encourage our customers to attempt to run this puppy via a single AV cable, we do really enjoy the new Lego-like ease of hardware install made possible with the SamsungID solution. Thank you!

 

We were delighted to find out that iBizBook decided to feature us as February's "Business of the Month!" iBizBook is an interesting online community that definitely helped us connect with new clients and created new leads. We encourage all companies to get involved in similar online business exchanges.

BizBook is an online community that lets businesses and consumers connect for free.

"We live in a new economy an economy based on trust. We just don't trust advertisers and marketers, anymore, instead we trust our friends. iBizBook lets you connect with real businesses and real consumers for real conversations and savings."

Thanks iBizBook - http://www.ibizbook.com/live/

This is an important factor for dealership owners. By using digital signage to promote vehicles on the showroom floor, the dealership is no longer tied to a particular layout or arrangement of vehicles. Instead the messaging can be easily adjusted based on models in available inventory.

We are an increasing environmentally-aware world. As our clients become increasingly aware of environmental responsibility they carry, they ask for more ways their signage and marketing can be 'greener' or 'eco-friendly'. Becoming more cognizant of the tremendous waste generated from printing and marketing collateral our clients are increasingly asking if Digital Signage is a solutions to a greener marketing and communication strategy.

To address these questions we prepared a brief .pdf titled IsDigitalSignageGreen?. We hope it will help us to easily explain the eco-benefits of adopting a digital signage strategy and showcase what we do to ensure our solutions are as environmentally responsible as possible. 

We are excited about the amount of attention environmental aspects of signage is receiving and encourage everyone to pay more attention to the environmental aspects of their actions.

We wanted to thank the folks at Preset Group for creating and freely distributing simple, effective Digital Signage PSAs for the Haiti relief effort. We had a chance to share these with our customers and and received great feedback. Seems these spots were exactly what many HR departments were looking for to help rally their staff behind the case.

Digressing, it's great to see so many Digital Signage companies supporting the aid effort and donating content or space on their networks to promote fundraising. Such instant response is another example of flexibility of digital signage compared to classic "plywood" out of home billboards. Although classic billboard advertisers (Patison, Clear Channel, etc..) often donate space to PSAs in slow booking months, such gestures incur costs and take time to be deployed. Digital Out of Home by contract was able to mobilize almost instantly, taking up the relief cause.

Back to the point of this post, big thanks to the team at Preset!

Six Steps Restaurant Lounge, Tuesday January 12, 2010 my first opportunity to show-off TetrAD's new business cards. What a success. Thank you Dmitry @ Samsung for the invite. 

Hosted at Six Steps, a trendy lounge known for their collection of wines, event was well on the way by the time I arrived. I was asked to tweet with hash tag: #torontoDSmixer during the event, but the mingling caught me the second I stepped in. It was difficult removing my scarf, let alone working the iPhone.

Side note: Anyone who's interested in Digital Signage, Dave Haynes is the man to follow.  Check out his blog @ http://www.sixteen-nine.net/. Dave's articles are absolutely worth the RSS feed.

Event turned out to be a great opportunity to meet face to face many of the people/companies involved in my past media buys and installations. Putting faces to phone calls and trading business cards with people who sell, design, install, feels encouraging.  It's good to know Toronto has so much talent in digital signage space.

At the next event, look for me, the guy with the transparent haircut!