Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Digital Signage Expo New Attendee Tips from an Expert
By Jeff Porter, Porter Digital Signage Consulting

Your first trip to DSE?  Great!  There’s a lot to take in and only two days to do that, so please allow me to offer you some tips to take best advantage of your time at the show.

A common rookie mistake is that folks are completely overwhelmed with the breadth and depth of exhibitors at the show, and I’ve heard that many newbees end up more confused than when they arrived.  So let’s nip that one bud early.

There are many parts to the “digital signage food chain”.  And there’s a good chance you’re starting from the WRONG end of the chain.  You’re wanting to deploy a digital signage network and don’t really know where to start.  Let me give you a hint…start with having a solid content strategy.  Understand what sort of content you want to put on your screens to get the most impact from your viewers.  It’s probably more than just a simple video loop these days.  Maybe a news, weather, sports, stocks feed.  Maybe social media integration.  Maybe some web based templates.  Maybe making sure you can easily day-part your content so that the right information is being shown at the right time of the day.

Understanding your content strategy will help you pick the best SOFTWARE platform for driving your digital signage network.  Besides checking to make sure that all the content bells and whistles are easily managed by the software (without going crazy even for a larger network), you’ll need to decide if a cloud based system is good for you (so called “SaaS” or “Software as a Service”, where you pay a monthly fee per player) or if you’re looking to host this yourself with an on premise solution.  SaaS is pretty popular, since it has low up-front costs, but for a larger network, those costs can add up.  Not all systems offer both, so you’ll need to understand this up front.  Not all systems can be managed 100% from the web, so make sure that’s on your check list.  And if your IT department hates “the cloud”, you’ll need to find a software platform that your IT guys can host for you instead.  That’s a huge early decision point.

And I would probably stay away from software platforms that lock you into their proprietary hardware platforms.  You’ll have more choices if the software provider supports a plethora of hardware choices, from PC based embedded media players, to low cost android media players, and growing in popularity, embedded players built into many of the commercial screens from folks like Samsung, LG, NEC and Panasonic.  These built in media players (sometimes called “SoC” or “System on a Chip”) can provide a very low cost solution (the media player is “free”!) and also make deployment clean (no extra wires, cables and boxes) and easier to deploy.  So once you have chosen your software platform, find out what hardware options that company supports, and investigate those at the show.  Don’t bother looking at hardware choices that your software platform does not support!!

Finally, take a look at the screens.  The classic rookie mistake is to start with the screens, then other hardware bits like media players and finally software.  THAT IS TOTALLY BACKWARDS!!!

Surprisingly, there are NOT a lot of “total solution providers” at the show…folks that do hardware, software, content development, content management, network management, installation, and field service all from one company.  You will find some, but you likely won’t end up with “best of breed” or the lowest cost solution.  It’s not that they’re not out there.  It’s that they don’t usually exhibit at the show.  They’re walking the show, just as you are, and are looking for new best of breed technology pieces that they can offer their clients in the future.  So please don’t forget to attend all of the “networking events”.  Get to know your fellow attendees.  Work the room.  You’ll probably find some interesting folks that can help you on your quest to deploy the best digital signage network for your company.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Porter is one of the industry’s leading experts in digital signage and is the founder of Porter Digital Signage Consulting.  From business planning, to sales and marketing and technology choices, Porter has been helping his clients get all the moving parts of digital signage in alignment for success.  Prior to heading his own consulting business, Mr. Porter was employed by Scala, Commodore, Bell Labs and Eastman Kodak.  Mr. Porter holds a BSEE from Purdue University and a MS from the University of Illinois.  He can be contacted at jeff@porterdigitalsignage.com or by phone 610-202-7676.  For additional articles of interest on digital signage, check out http://porterdigitalsignage.com/Blog.html


Friday, January 6, 2017

🎇HAPPY NEW YEAR!🎉


For my "day job", I share "monthly words of wisdom" on Digital Signage. Here's my latest post: http://www.digitalsignageconnection.com/ask-board-january-3-2017-jeff-porter Enjoy!

What do you find is the most effective and accurate way of measuring dwell time?”

There are times when nothing beats an “old-fashioned” TIME STUDY with a human, a stopwatch and a clipboard. But honestly, in some areas, that is the most effective and accurate method.
If you are measuring dwell time for a transactional screen (kiosks or large touchscreen), then you can easily measure dwell time in the interactive app as well as many other things (dwell time per page for instance). Maybe in a QSR, the order management system can track the speed of service for a customer transaction from order to receipt of food.
But if you’re talking about traditional non-interactive digital signage, without having some sort of camera to count “faces,” a stopwatch might actually be the best.  Of course, the craze for anonymous video analytics can tell you dwell time and a whole lot more (e.g., rough demographic profile of the viewer).  It’s a lot of technology to set up, and it’s not 100 percent accurate. It generates a TON of data and is probably too expensive to deploy everywhere, but for a smaller sample size, it can give you hard data to back up your assumptions (or not!).

But don’t underestimate the power of just doing a simple site survey with your own “two eyes” to figure out where people “gather.” But, you’ll need to capture that at the right time of the day. And knowing who is watching at different times can be very enlightening for developing an effective content strategy, which is really the reason you want to measure dwell in the first place. You need to match your play-loop time to the dwell time for a given location. Most of the time, you’ve got three seconds at four paces to get your idea across in five words or less. And for heaven’s sake, don’t just put a screen where it might be convenient to mount it or plug it in. Putting the screens in the right place, in front of the right audience with the right content is what it is all about!

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Monday, February 22, 2016

Pre-DSE 2016 Show Podcast

The audio and video quality of this "google hangout" sort of sucks, but if you can get past that (and I prefer GotoMeeting which has about a million times better quality with the same equipment)...here's a podcast heading into the upcoming Digital Signage Expo Show in Vegas March 15-18.
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js7XyoWvvlE
Jeff

Monday, January 18, 2016

Here's a quick little video snippet of a cool new "Interactive Mirror LCD" at the National Retail Federation show in NYC (in the Samsung booth). This is my handiwork at Coloredge who's client is Calvin Klein. Thanks to the boys at Scala for some "Lift and Learn" techology bits, my buddies at Stylmark for a nice fixture, and the folks at Samsung for giving me a center stage position in their booth! https://vimeo.com/152105455

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Yes, another nice article written by yours truly...this one's a keeper! :-) Digital Signage Best Practices Guide December 2015 http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/ds_bestpractices_201512/index.php#/30

Digital Signage Best Practices: Future-proofing your Next Digital Signage Rollout on the Software Side
By Jeff Porter, Porter Digital Signage Consulting

Congratulations!  You’ve just rolled out a shiny new digital signage network!  Day One is complete.
 
But what about Day Two? Or Month Two? Or Year Two??  Will the same digital signage software platform do what you need then?  If you did your homework, then the answer is yes.  But just to review, let’s take a look at the decision process of choosing the best digital signage technology platform, so that you’re not having to explain to your boss (or the worse yet the client), that you’ll need to completely scrap the system a year or two later with some other new shiny digital signage system!

With more than 20 years in the digital signage business, I’ve seen a lot of networks come and go.  Allow me to share with you some of the secret sauce of success to make sure your network will serve you well into the future.

Number one…start with a decent understanding of the client’s content strategy and their use case for digital signage.  Please don’t lead with technology.  I know that’s hard for us technical guys, but trust me, choosing the correct platform will become obvious once you understand what the client wants to do.  Here are some basic questions to ask:
  1. Can you tell me what content you’d like to have on the screen?
  2. How often do you plan to update the content?
  3. Are the screens customer facing or employee facing (or both)?
  4. How many locations do you have?  Do you need different content in different locations?
  5. Are there more than one screen per location?  And do those different locations have different content needs?
  6. Will you need interactive capabilities? (eg: Touch screens, push buttons, other)
  7. Will you need dynamic data on the screen (eg: price of products, meeting schedules, KPIs)?
  8. Do you need news, weather, sports, stocks, or other content feeds?
  9. Who is going to manage the content on a day to day basis?  And how many people will need to have access to the system to manage that content (with different roles)?
  10. Do you have someone already picked out to provide content for the network? (and do they have experience with designing content for digital signage networks – as opposed to TV, print or web)
  11. Have you given any thought to where you’d like to have the screens?  Where do people have the most dwell time? 
  12. Are there special audio requirements? (many digital signage systems don’t use much audio as it can become rather annoying)
  13. Mobile: Is there a need for mobile integration?  Do you have an app already done?
  14. Walk me through the customer experience.  (that’s a good one to wrap it all together!)


Let’s do a little deeper dive into those questions, so you’ll understand how the answers to the questions will help you pick the best technology platform going forward. 

Many digital signage platforms are pretty basic in their operation.  Upload a few videos and play them in a loop.  What more do you need?   But imagine that you have 100 or 1000 locations and each needs a separate playlist of videos.  How do you keep your sanity with 100 or 1000 different playlists?  What might have worked well in a pilot, just doesn’t scale if the network takes off.  A content management system that allows for meta data and smart playlists means that ONE playlist can be made for many locations, and the players will dynamically “play the right media” without having to manually create a 100 or 1000 separate playlists .

Similarly, creating videos for every permutation of text overlay needed, will likely break the bank of the person paying for content development.  Imagine your 100 or 1000 locations each with a different price for different products in different stores.  Creating 1000’s of videos is a non-starter.  Creating one video with dynamic text overlays is the only way to go.  You can use brute force in a pilot, but if the network scales, you’ll be dead in the water unless your platform can handle dynamic text overlays.

Feeding the Digital Signage “monster” with regular content updates is going to be a key ingredient to making sure that your network is successful.  Having great looking content on Day One is wonderful, but if your viewers are ignoring the screens from Day Two onward, people will start to wonder if the investment in digital signage is worth it (or not).  Having timely, relevant, and compelling content on the screens every day will engage your customers more, and encourage people to participate in supporting your ongoing plans (to grow your empire!).  So make sure, in the budget planning process, there’s a line item for “ongoing content development”. 

Location location location is important in real estate.  It’s also important in digital signage.  Putting the screens in the wrong place (too high, too out of the way, too far away) will be a sure fire way to fail.  Think about locations that are eye level, where people have some dwell time, long enough to see the messaging on the screens that you want them to see.  And make the playloop length match the dwell time for that area.

These sorts of content questions sound rather simple, but it’s amazing how many people still get these basic assumptions wrong today. 

There are however some non-content related questions that you’ll need to consider for a given deployment that will have a large effect on your choice for a digital signage software platform.
  1. Will the IT department allow the digital signage players on their network?  If not, can you talk with them to ease their fears?  Is there any other way to connect your players?
  2. Is the client OK with a “cloud based” system or do they need to have the content management server set up within their own corporate IT infrastructure?  Many software companies only do “one or the other”.  Some do both.  So narrow your choices based on this answer.
  3. If your server is “in-house” and you have a large network, and your content is mostly videos, will the bandwidth at the server be sufficient to handle the traffic for each location to download their media is a relatively short amount of time?  Do the math on the bandwidth.  1GB of data times 1000 locations is 1 terabyte that needs to be downloaded from the central server.  How long will that take?  Longer than you think!  Do they have any restrictions on that traffic (eg: only at night)? 
  4. Consider if the digital signage software is coming from a company that will potentially become your competitor.  A lot of digital signage companies sell direct to end users.  If you are purchasing digital signage software to bundle with your value added services to sell to end users, be careful.  You don’t want your partner to do an end-run on you.
  5. To the nearest whole number….how many 1000 player networks has the software company in question ever deployed?  If you need to “go large”, find out ahead of time if the company has ever done a network that large before.  You don’t want to be the guinea pig.
  6. Check their financials, stability, track record.  The latest and greatest shiny new digital signage software might look pretty, but will that company or that software be supported for many years to come?  Are they financially sound?  Are their existing customers happy? 
  7. Does their business model match yours?  If your business model is based on a monthly recurring fee from your customer, does your software partner make you purchase everything upfront, or can you pay for the software on a monthly basis to manage your cash flow?


Top Five Technology Trends for the next Five Years

From a technology side, obviously things are changing pretty rapidly.  Allow me to gaze into my crystal ball for the top five trends that I see going forward over the next few years.

1. Displays will become even more affordable. That's one thing you can count on in the hardware business ... costs always go down!  This will be a HUGE driver to your business. I can remember the first plasma screens costing $15,000 each.  Now you can get an even larger commercial screen in the $1000 range.  More affordable screens means that your clients can deploy more screens in more places, and the ROI to justify those screens is almost not worth talking about. 

2. All displays will become smart-er IP addressable screens.  You’re seeing this already in smart screens from Samsung and LG (and others).  MagicInfo from Samsung and SuperSign from LG allow you to “just have a screen” and connect it to the network without the need of an outboard media player or PC.  Both Samsung and LG have software solutions supporting these new smart screens, and even some third party software companies like Scala and SignageLive support these built in players as well.  Again, lowering the total solution cost and making it easier to deploy will be a boon to your business.  The only trick is to make the built-in players more capable over time, or as Mark Twain said, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," when it comes to out outboard media players.  Sophisticated applications will still require an outboard media player.

3. Software in the cloud, players always connected (no more sneakernet). A shocking number of digital signage screens in retail are not connected to a network today, and just get updated via USB stick from time to time.  Really?  In 2015??  Unfortunately yes.  That's gotta change.  The Internet of Things (IoT) is undeniable and unstoppable.

4. Dynamic data everywhere drives content strategy. Just playing a simple video loop won't cut it anymore.  Content needs to by timely and relevant, and therefore dynamic, which in turn will be more engaging and successful.  Talk to your client about their content strategy upfront and engage with them at a higher level.  This will help you tailor the technology solution to exceed your client’s expectations (and get more business)!!

5. More retailers adopt digital signage as a "default" versus print. To quote another famous person, John Wanamaker, "Half of the money I spend on marketing is wasted. I just don't know which half!"  With 50 percent of print campaigns being either bungled or not deployed in-store, folks will realize that digital will guarantee 100 percent compliance (or close to that given human error). I don't think print will ever go away completely for permanent signage, but signage that ends up in the trash dumpster each week or month will absolutely go away.

Conclusion

Hopefully this discussion has given you a roadmap for engaging with your client to understand their needs and for you to recommend and deploy a digital signage network that will serve everyone well for many years to come. 

About the Author

Jeff Porter is one of the industry’s leading experts in digital signage and is the founder of Porter Digital Signage Consulting.  From business planning, to sales and marketing and technology choices, Porter has been helping his clients get all the moving parts of digital signage in alignment for success.  Prior to heading his own consulting business, Mr. Porter was employed by Scala, Commodore, Bell Labs and Eastman Kodak.  Mr. Porter holds a BSEE from Purdue University and a MS from the University of Illinois.  He can be contacted at jeff@porterdigitalsignage.com or by phone 610-202-7676.  For additional articles of interest on digital signage, check out http://porterdigitalsignage.com/Blog.html

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Another article from yours truly to end out the year...
Five Top Trends in Digital Signage

From our house to yours, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and happy new year!

The Cloud, Affordability, & Other Key Digital Signage Trends

By Jeff Porter On December 23, 2015

Digital signage has gone from luxury to necessity in the commercial AV space. It seems that everyone wants to go “digital” instead of static print for signage applications. From Corporate Communications to Education, Government, Retail, Hospitality, and Entertainment Venues, deploying digital signage is a growing part of your business. But how to you keep ahead of the curve in this fast paced industry? Having been involved with digital signage for more than 20 years, please allow me to gaze into my crystal ball for the top five trends that I see going forward over the next few years.
1. Displays will become even more affordable. That's one thing you can count on in the hardware business...costs always go down! This will be a HUGE driver to the Pro AV integrators business. I can remember the first plasma screens costing $15,000 each. Now you can get an even larger commercial screen in the $1,000-range.  More affordable screens means that your clients can deploy more screens in more places, and the ROI to justify those screens is almost not worth talking about. 
2. All displays will become smart-er IP addressable screens. You’re seeing this already in smart screens from Samsung and LG (and others). MagicInfo from Samsung and SuperSign from LG allow you to “just have a screen” and connect it to the network without the need of an outboard media player or PC. Both Samsung and LG have software solutions supporting these new smart screens, and even some third party software companies like Scala and SignageLive support these built in players as well. Again, lowering the total solution cost and making it easier to deploy will be a boon to the Pro AV integrators business. The only trick is to make the built-in players more capable over time, or as Mark Twain said, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," when it comes to out outboard media players.  Sophisticated applications will still require an outboard media player.
3. Software in the cloud, players always connected (no more sneakernet). A shocking number of digital signage screens in retail are not connected to a network today, and just get updated via USB stick from time to time.  Really? In 2015?? Unfortunately, yes. That's has to change. The Internet of Things (IoT) is undeniable and unstoppable.
4. Dynamic data everywhere drives content strategy. Just playing a simple video loop won't cut it anymore. Content needs to by timely and relevant, and therefore dynamic, which in turn will be more engaging and successful. As a Pro AV solution provider, don’t just stop at hanging a screen. Talk to your client about their content strategy upfront and engage with them at a higher level.  This will help you tailor the technology solution to exceed your clients’ expectations (and get more business)!!
5. More retailers adopt digital signage as a "default" versus print. To quote another famous person, John Wanamaker, "Half of the money I spend on marketing is wasted. I just don't know which half!"  With 50 percent of print campaigns being either bungled or not deployed in-store, folks will realize that digital will guarantee 100 percent compliance (or close to that given human error). I don't think print will ever go away completely for permanent signage, but signage that ends up in the trash dumpster each week or month will absolutely go away.
Author Jeff Porter is a member of the Digital Signage Expo Advisory Board and will be attending DSE 2016 March 15-18 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. For more information on any of the educational programs offered at DSE 2016 or to learn more about digital signage go to www.dse2016.com. Jeff Porter is one of the industry’s leading experts in digital signage and is the founder of Porter Digital Signage Consulting.  From business planning, to sales and marketing and technology choices, Porter has been helping his clients get all the moving parts of digital signage in alignment for success.  Prior to heading his own consulting business, Mr. Porter was employed by Scala, Commodore, Bell Labs and Eastman Kodak.  Mr. Porter holds a BSEE from Purdue University and a MS from the University of Illinois.  He can be contacted at jeff@porterdigitalsignage.com or by phone 610-202-7676.  For additional articles of interest on digital signage, check out http://porterdigitalsignage.com/Blog.html
- See more at: http://www.avnetwork.com/av-technology/news/the-cloud-affordability-&-other-key-digital-signage-trends/96551#sthash.dSASJec4.dpuf