The Display Before the Content: When to involve your Marketing Communications Team
By Stephen “Chewie” Stavar, West Virginia University, Digital Signage Specialist
With new construction and renovation projects come larger budgets and more grandiose suggestions from consultants and architects to install new technologies. One of those suggestions is generally digital signage. Digital signage has a more significant upfront cost than bulletin boards. Still, it allows for communications to have the ability to be dynamic and updated as the message needs to be modified.
No matter what the installation, I look at digital signage as having three main components: hardware, distribution software and content.
Digital signage can be a broad term with multiple manifestations. I define digital signage as the digital canvas your messaging is presented to the viewer through. This could be a monitor on the wall; an interactive kiosk; a computer lab or library study area full of idle computer monitors; a projector projecting on the floor or a lobby with floor-to-ceiling direct-light LED panels. The possibilities are limited only by your budget and the technologies you are able to leverage. Another great advantage to digital signage? The cost of these digital canvases continues to decrease while the feature sets and reliability continue to get better.
No matter what the installation, I look at digital signage as having three main components: hardware, distribution software and content.
Many times the hardware gets the most attention on a project. Hardware is that digital canvas the messaging will be on. There is a size to the display. Hardware needs to be in a building diagram. There is power and data to be run and blocking to be added to safely hang a monitor or projector. Hardware can be upsold and has a profit margin. Hardware is tangible.
With the hardware, the software can be part of a package from the project’s AV integrator. It would be really bad practice to sell your hardware with no way to put messages on it. I’ve seen it done. The problem is that there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of software offerings for digital signage. These programs are called content management solutions (CMS). Some are freemium. Others are premium. Generally, only one — maybe two — of these CMSs will be offered. They are CMSs the AV integrator is comfortable with and may be able to provide creative services or ongoing support for.
With all of these decisions to be made, the most important part of digital signage — the team responsible for it — may not have even been brought into the project yet. What will the content be on the digital signage? Is the company’s marketing communication department aware of the project? These factors should have been communicated in the conception phase. This is the biggest mistake I see in digital signage deployments today.
When designing a digital signage deployment, your marketing communication team will determine who the audience is and how often that audience changes. They know the current communications of the company and what additional information they can use digital signage for to supplement those communications. In a convenience store, you can have an advertisement for a certain product and see an increase in sales. Those advertisements could be sold to the distributor for an additional revenue stream and updated weekly or monthly. Your audience frequently changes, so your messaging doesn’t need to change too often. In a corporate or higher education setting, your audience doesn’t really change day-to-day. With deployments in this situation, your content must always be current and fresh. You won’t be able to measure return on investment as easily because your audience isn’t buying a product — they are buying a culture. Seeing the fruits of your marketing communications plan could take months.
In the first example, less content is needed. In the second example, content is needed to be created continuously. Does your marketing communication team have this ability or are you going to need to hire creative services?
Once the types and frequency of communications are determined, you can start the process of finding out how “beefy” a CMS you need for your network. This is where the “what if” firing squad comes into play. Don’t just think about your deployment in the first six months or a year. It would help if you were buying commercial-grade hardware that should have at least a three-year warranty. How do you think your deployment will grow over those three years? You don’t want to change CMSs all the time. Is the content shift so infrequently, and is the monitor safe enough where a thumb drive can be used? What happens to playback when the images are not the right size or the player gets to the end of files in the folder? Should your content be centrally managed? Do all of your players need to be networked? Are there enough ports in the switch to hardwire all of your players? How many users are going to be changing layouts? How many users are going to be adding or deleting content? How can you display social media content? What content are we already creating that we can repurpose for our digital signage? The questions are limitless but need to be thought of before you start looking for a CMS.
I suggest you find two or three CMSs, find companies similar to yours who are using those CMSs and contact them. Don’t ask for the CMSs to connect you with their end users. You want a clean, unfiltered look at what the CMS can actually do. The biggest issue with this is that the end user may not be leveraging the CMS properly. Ask for examples and long demos. Your information technology systems (ITS) team may be the ones evaluating the software, but make sure they are involved in the process if the marketing communications team is driving the software every day. The last thing you want to do is to spend money on expensive hardware and software and not be able to leverage your investment.