We spent today at The Digital Signage Content Strategies Summit at the
The Island That Is – And Should Not Be - Digital Signage – As digital signage begins to capture the imagination of brands and retailers, an expanding list of companies stands ready to offer the software and hardware necessary to deploy digital signage networks. What many seem to be missing – with the notable exception of a company called LocaModa – is that digital signage is only one of several bricks in a retailer or brand’s digital out-of-home (DOOH) marketing strategy, all of which must be mutually reinforcing and fully integrated. The fact that most digital signage networks are isolated from each other, as well as from the other networks through which marketing messages are being delivered, creates enormous inefficiencies for brand managers and retailers trying to efficiently reach large audiences with multi-channel marketing campaigns. We are impressed with LocaModa’s effort to address this problem through a combination of technology and business processes. The challenge they face in creating a unified platform for purchasing and managing out-of-home advertising (and as importantly, for delivering reporting on its performance) across disparate networks are great, but we believe the benefits and potential rewards are too.
We Need Great Content - Now! - Digital signage technology suppliers have done a better-than-necessary job in creating hardware and software that can deliver content and manage networks. But advertisers and their agencies continue to assert that the challenges associated with developing great content remain. And we agree with Verne Freedlander of X20 Media that the standard for digital signage content is rising, and is being set by the HD broadcast TV industry (i.e. digital signage content must look as good as what consumers see at home on their HD TVs, or the brand is damaged). But we believe creative, technology-based solutions to addressing the cost and complexity associated with content development will emerge. We believe that the next area of intense competition among digital signage technology companies will be around content aggregation and simplified content re-purposing / authoring. The combination of an explosion in the amount of content needed to support growing signage networks and the increasingly high bar for the quality of the content creates a business opportunity that is simply too large for the industry to ignore.
The Future – Many More Signs, Much Better Content, And A Lot More Of It – Several years ago, Starbuck’s promoted a corporate strategy they called “
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