Bringing quality and affordable content to the party

Digital Signage is still a relatively young industry. And like all children, it’s growing like a weed. What was once a limited field has exploded in recent years to include just about every kind of public venue imaginable.

Think of all the places you’ve seen digital signage recently. Electronic billboards are now commonplace. Sports venues bristle with digital signage, ranging from small flat panels situated throughout the concourse all the way up to the massive screens around or above the playing surface—Cowboy Stadium in Texas claims the largest high-definition screen in the world, at 160x72 feet. Flat screens delivering information and entertainment have been ubiquitous at airports for quite some time.

Look at restaurants. Digital menu boards at fast food venues began appearing as early as 2005. And still other restaurants, such as Starbucks and Arby’s are now introducing them. Flat panels at Denny’s restaurants in the waiting areas and in the dining rooms show standard entertainment fare interspersed with advertisements.

Going Campus Universities and businesses use internal digital signage networks to educate and inform. Self-service gas stations and convenience stores are beginning to deliver content to people at the pump with nothing else to watch but gasoline being delivered to the car. The list goes on and on, even to unexpected places like the backs of pedi-cabs.

What’s driving the explosion, of course, is the heady promise of digital signage: the ability to attract the attention of the audience, engage them in that first critical fraction of a second, deliver relevant, meaningful and understandable information, and perhaps persuade and motivate them. The ultimate goal is to do all that at a much lower overall cost over time than other alternatives.

Keeping a Promise But delivering on the promise means, above all, that the content that the viewer sees is top-flight. Certainly all aspects of the digital signage solution play important roles. But in the end it doesn’t matter how robust the infrastructure is, how capable the scheduling software is, if the content that’s delivered is noise. That’s why, “Content is King” is true.

So how has digital signage content, as well as the ability to create and deliver it, changed as the industry has grown?

One of the changes is the nature of suppliers. Until recently, the industry was dominated by a handful of suppliers who supplied everything needed for digital signage—soup to nuts. These early entrants, visionaries really, who saw the promise of digital signage before everyone else, provided complete turn-key solutions.

The hardware, software, networking and often creative development were all tied into one. It was critical that they do so, because one sure way to kill a new industry is to complicate it while people still are grasping what it’s all about.

Simplicity, however, comes at a cost, and in this case the cost was in limited options. That was true even when it came to content and its development. Some digital signage providers required that they alone create the content—and charged hefty fees to their captive clients.

Others offered home-grown content creation tools to their clients, but these had all the hallmarks of the after-thoughts they were. That shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. The companies who created and built the digital signage industry prospered because they were terrific technology companies, not because they understood how to develop software for creating the type of highly-evolved content that the consumer has come to expect and will pay attention to.

That’s why the content creation software offered by many of these companies was little more than a set of templates into which the real content—created with some other content development tool entirely—was plugged.

Creating Content Options for creating the content have been at two extremes when viewed both in terms of the output produced and the expertise—and expense—required. At the low end: Microsoft PowerPoint, usable by just about anyone, but limited in terms of what can be created. At the high end: professional tools like Adobe’s® Photoshop® (for static graphics), After Effects® for motion graphics, and Flash® for interactive content. These tools are capable of producing stunning and highly polished content, but are also very complex, have a steep learning curve, and require a high degree of product-specific expertise. Consequently it’s a costly and time-consuming proposition to create content with them. And that’s just to create the original content. To keep it fresh and up-to-date is equally costly and time-consuming. Many organizations simply can’t afford it.

And that’s been the content dilemma up to now. Do you live with inferior content that’s affordable and can be kept up to date, or do you invest heavily in top quality content, and live with long update and refresh cycles? Neither is acceptable and neither delivers on the ultimate promise of digital signage. That’s why many companies, after making huge investments in digital signage systems and infrastructure, were appalled when they found out what it costs to keep their systems fed with suitable content.

But new content creation software is changing the digital signage game because, for the first time, you don’t have to choose between affordability, top quality and updatability. You don’t have to engage high-priced professionals because it’s simple enough to use that anyone can use it. You can have content that’s indistinguishable from content that’s generated with Flash because it is Flash, even though Flash itself—the Flash creation tool—isn’t used to create it.

Keeping content fresh and up-to-date is easy because the creation tool is easy to use. You don’t have to be a programmer or professional developer to make simple changes, like swapping out graphics or video files, or even changing text. No more submitting a request, waiting a week and then overpaying to do something like change a price.

In the old paradigm simple equaled static, boring, underpowered and largely ineffective. That’s no longer the case. Today simple can include the ability to draw from an unlimited number of professionally designed, fully animated templates, even highly-interactive templates for organizations deploying touch-screen systems.

Now consider that these templates can be modified in any way and then saved as new templates. Imagine the possibilities for organizations of all kinds. Those that are just getting started and without access to skilled resources can be deploying their own polished content in no time by sticking close to the templates until they develop their own creative skills. Yet organizations that do have access to skilled resources gain as well, because they can focus on creating new proprietary templates that communicate in new ways while enforcing important standards like branding guidelines.

What is the Cost? In the old paradigm powerful equaled expensive. But content creation software like Flypaper changes that forever. You no longer have to be a Flash—or after effects—animation expert to create high quality motion graphics content. But more importantly, you can use drag-and-drop components to enable your content in new and exciting ways. End users can add an RSS feed that is similar to CNN headlines. It is also easy to drop a component on the page and pick the feed, plus add local weather information. Drop in a component.

Components like these are making it possible to use digital signage in ways never really before feasible. For example, imagine arriving at the reception desk of another company with which you’re having an important meeting and being greeted with an attractive welcome message on their digital sign that includes your picture, up-to-minute news about your company, and its up-to-the second stock price from the exchange. That could easily change your perception of that company. Now consider that this could be done by the receptionist simply dropping your photo in a computer folder and updating a text document or Excel file.

Another example: grocery stores work on the thinnest of margins. A store manager sees that the inventory of milk approaching its sell-by date is dangerously high. In seconds, she is able to update the store’s digital signage, which periodically displays the day’s bargains. Or even update a touch-screen display where shoppers can find out what’s being featured or on sale. All this can be done without ever touching the content file that is playing on-screen at all.

Small examples perhaps, but this kind of empowerment will change the way we think about how we use digital signage to communicate, inform, market and sell. These are examples of what’s feasible now, but let’s also consider where digital signage is going. The technology is already available to detect who is actually looking at a sign, determine which content seems to interest them by where their eyes are focused, and gauge their level of interest by the time spent.

Characteristics like gender and estimated age can be detected. The implications are far-reaching. Imagine digital signs on the end-caps in grocery stores that dynamically update the content being presented based on the characteristics of the people passing by, and further refine it when someone is paying attention and appears to be particularly interested.

Both shoppers and the store benefit: shoppers by seeing information that’s more likely to be of interest to them, and stores through increased sales. Soon shoppers will be able to opt in with their loyalty cards, such as frequent shopper or ‘VIP’ cards, and have them RF enabled so that signage is aware of the shopping preferences of anyone viewing the sign and deliver content that might be of interest, just as supermarket check-out stations now print coupons selected based upon one’s shopping habits.

All of these scenarios depend on one thing: the availability of a vastly increased amount of content, which must be high quality and up to date to be of any use at all.

For large-scale deployments, content creation software is enabling important changes in the way people work together to craft the message, helping them get it right far quicker, for less cost. Most digital signage content is created collaboratively, and the number of people involved can be quite large.

Good Communication The opportunity for misunderstandings and errors increases exponentially as the size of the group increases. But collaboration features can enable people to mark-up and annotate content, request changes, ask questions and give feedback. And all this can be done the way people really work. That is, independently on their own schedule or in groups, from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day, which means higher quality, much faster and far less expensive content.

What this means is that times in the digital signage industry are rapidly changing. Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message.” In the broad sense that McLuhan meant it that continues to be true. But looked at in a different way it provides a useful way to think about the evolution of the digital signage industry. When it was emerging, the medium was the message: digital signage was a novelty and gained audience attention and interest for that simple fact. We could engage our audience and communicate somewhat effectively simply because people hadn’t seen it before, especially when gorgeous flat panel displays and digital TV were uncommon in the home.

But now these things are commonplace. So, in digital signage, the medium is no longer the message. To deliver on the promise—attracting the attention of the audience, engaging them in that first critical fraction of a second, delivering relevant, meaningful and understandable information, persuading and motivating them, and doing it all at a lower overall cost—the focus now must be on the content. Fortunately, solutions like Flypaper are making it possible for people of all skill levels and organizations of all types to focus on the content and deliver on the promise.

Don Pierson is the founder and president at Flypaper.