The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

This podcast is a bit different, as I am on the other side of the interview table - answering questions instead of asking them.

That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years, and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it is time to slow the hell down.

I'm not leaving the industry, entirely. Just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work, working more when the weather gets cold in my part of the world and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a bit.

Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich at invidis, who have been longtime content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy, as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this business.

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TRANSCRIPT

Balthasar Mayer: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer. 

Antonia Hamberger: This is Antonia Hamberger. 

Balthasar Mayer: We have a very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart, and driving force behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time.

He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixes at trade shows, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind and now he's retiring, and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. Thank you. 

Dave Haynes: Yes, I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving a company. 

Antonia Hamberger: It is the exit interview, and we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine, and we're now doing the Nine:Sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career, and then you'll get sixteen questions where you'll give us rapid-fire answers.

Dave Haynes: Alright, I'm drinking Vice beer because I'm in Munich so this could get salty by the end of it. 

Balthasar Mayer: That is our goal to make it salty, and interesting at the same time. 

Antonia Hamberger: Dave, you've been doing this blog for 20 years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into digital signage? How did this happen in the first place? 

Dave Haynes: I was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press, and my first job out of school, working for a newspaper, was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in the newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands like Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, you name it, back in the early 80s, late 70s, just about anybody who was big at that time. I did an interview with them, which was quite interesting. At times, you would get lovely people and sometimes you'd get absolute a-holes, and everything in between. 

Antonia Hamberger: Probably also a lot of drunk people, drunk rock stars? 

Dave Haynes: Ozzy definitely was impaired, and Billy Joel, he stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in 1981 or something and he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band, and they had a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg, and he was very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. So that was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews. 

So anyways, then I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor, and got bored with being an editor in a market where not a lot of bad things happened, and as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than calm, stable situation.

When the newspaper started talking about doing new media, getting into digital, I stuck my hand up and said, I'll do it. So I took the newspaper online in 1995, one of the first North American papers to go online, and did that for four years and reported directly to the publisher and nobody on the executive team, including the publisher, bought into my concerns that this was going to be a problem for newspapers. They just tended to think this was a passing fancy. It wasn't really gonna happen. So, I just got frustrated and left and weirdly went to work for a company called Elevator News Network that was putting digital screens, LCD panels in elevators, office tower elevators in 1999. Very complicated, very expensive.

I started out as the GM for Western Canada, but pretty quickly became Vice President of Operations for the whole show. So I was putting screens in 70-story office towers in the elevator shops, in the shafts, and running all the cabling in the elevator shafts, and very expensive, very complicated, and very frustrating because you're dealing with unionized labor. With elevator companies, where they wanted to charge you $250 to stand there and watch you, that sort of thing. So I did that. There was a shotgun merger with another company in the US that was doing that, and I walked off the plank with the rest of the Canadian management team and found myself looking around, going, okay, now what do I do? And I ended up starting my own digital out-of-home media company, putting screens in. Public walkways in the underground walkways at downtown Toronto which was a great idea, but probably ten years too early because I would go to advertising agencies and say, I'm doing this, and they would look at me like… What?

Digital out-of-home was just not a thing back then. So I was the dreaded pioneer lying in a field with arrows in my back, having done that. So I didn't make a lot of money out of that, and my wife, bless her, said it would be great if we had an income. So I started working for what is now known as ComQi. At the time, it was called Digital View, and then it became EnQi, and then it became ComQi, and I was a business development person. So I was doing sales and looking around going, how did a guy who used to interview Rock bands become a sales guy for a software company? 

But I did that and went over to Broadsign because they offered me more money and then the Great Recession hit in 2008-2009, and that was that was it for salespeople. That company, Broadsign, ran into deep problems at that point. They totally rose back up like a phoenix, and they are a powerhouse now, but at the time, they were in trouble.

So that was 2009, and I decided, okay, do I wanna work for somebody else or do what am I gonna do? And I just decided to go out on my own and start just doing writing and some consulting, things like that. But early on, when I was still with Digital View, I decided to just look at the industry and the level of “thought leadership” that was available at the time. It wasn't very good. A lot of it was just nonsensical or badly written, and I thought, okay, I understand this space at this point. I've been doing it for seven years. I know how to write. So I just, for the hell of it, I just started Sixteen:Nine, and never thought that this would be something that would define my career, my later-stage career for many years, and be like a full-time job, and generate real money. So it just happened. 

Antonia Hamberger: But we're all glad it took that turn for you, Dave, because I don't think anybody would take you for a good salesperson. I think you're much better off as an editor and publisher. Because you would just say the truth and would probably offend a lot of people.

Dave Haynes: That was one of my problems when I was doing business development. If we lost a deal, if I could understand why the target company went in a different direction, I would be fine with it, and I think to be a really good business development person or “salesperson”, you've gotta just want to be a killer. You just wanna win every deal, and it doesn't matter whether you're the right solution, you just wanna win the deal and my mind doesn't work that way. I probably wasn't best suited to it. 

Balthasar Mayer: So just to understand, you founded Sixteen:Nine in 2006, and then you went full-time on it in 2009? 

Dave Haynes: I wouldn't say by 2009, I was full-time, but I liked doing it every day. But it wasn't necessarily my main thing. It was just something that I'd been doing, and I kept on doing it because I felt, so I had, at that point, I had a following, and it felt something of an obligation to do it.

In the first few years, I would have a Google ad on there, and every quarter, I would get like $37 or something from Google ads. But then I started getting questions saying, “Hey, can we advertise on this?” And so I would just get inbound, and that just built up and built up to become inbound. It took a while, but it was all inbound as opposed to me shaking trees. It took a while, and it was like making real money, and it was something that would be a proper income for me. At which point, I was able to back off doing much in the way of consulting or writing for hire and just mostly do Sixteen:Nine. 

Antonia Hamberger: For somebody who's been in the industry only a few years, I'm wondering what the industry was like when you first came into it, and what you hoped to contribute?

Dave Haynes: It was very embryonic. A few people understood it. When people would ask what I did, and I would tell them digital signage, they would just have to give me a sort of tilted head and say… Huh?  

Antonia Hamberger: I still have to explain it on a weekly basis to people outside the industry. So I can't imagine what it was like 15 years ago.

Dave Haynes: There are so many more reference cases now, whereas before you would have to say, you might be in a store, and you might see this. Now it's like everywhere. So I just have the digital menus in any quick service restaurant that's digital signage, and posters that you see on the sidewalks that's digital out-of-home/digital signage, and they go, okay, I get it.

In those days, it was very expensive. Few people understood it. There were far fewer vendors. A lot of the companies that were providing software in particular were companies that had, in a lot of cases adapted that software from other purposes like broadcast and turned that into something that would also work on as sometimes described a narrow cast, just like narrowly defined network as opposed to something sent out everywhere.

It was in those days not well known, not well understood, and I just felt that the writing that was available back in 2006 was a lot of buzzword bingo stuff, crossing the chasm, paradigm shift, all these nonsense phrases out of business books, and I just thought, if somebody's just gotta write something that says, here's this thing, here's why they're doing it, here's what's good about it, here's what I think is problematic and how it could be done better. So, it was a little bit of my, I don't wanna say bully pulpit, but it was a way to express my advice without being mean or anything else.. 

Antonia Hamberger: Were there any trends you predicted really early on that then became true or didn't? 

Dave Haynes: Oh, I saw everything. I would say more than anything else, you could see that whereas in the early stages, it was something that was nice to do, I clearly saw that this was going to be something that was needed to do for a company. It was going to be mission-critical. It was just going to be fundamental to how retailers and other businesses designed a space in the same way that they're thinking about their furnishings, thinking about their lighting, their HVAC system and everything else, they're gonna start thinking about, okay, where does the digital fit? 

And in the early days, it was to build a space and then look for empty space on a wall and go, okay, we'll put the screens there, even though in a lot of cases it wasn't the appropriate place to put it. I'd say the other thing was pretty obvious, and I started writing about this in 2011 but I could see LED was gonna come and come hard and start to supplant flat panel displays just because of all the benefits and the flexibility that I have. I invested a lot of time in in the last few years, went to Taiwan and China and everything else to visit factories and really fully understand what it is as opposed to just writing about it and taking what the manufacturers are saying because manufacturers as is their way, their marketing people tend to fledge the facts and play pretty fast and loose with what something is versus what it really is. 

Antonia Hamberger: In a lot of cases, they don't even know what it really is. 

Dave Haynes: This is true. It's the thing about the digital science industry. A lot of the companies still are run by technical people, engineers, electrical engineers, software developers, and everything else. They're not good marketers. Then they hire people to do their marketing for them, and those people with some notable exceptions, don't understand a damn thing about the space. So they just parrot what their executives say, which is far too technical and people don't understand it, and I always try to bang on people that if you're going to market your product, for God's sake, provide some relevance and context and to use my Canadian term, give me an explanation as to why I should give a crap about this and why should I care? 

Antonia Hamberger: I guess that's a thing that a lot of companies in the digital signage space struggle with. Finding those people who want to understand their product on a technical level. But we don't just wanna bash in the digital signage industry because there's a lot of great things in the industry, and. So what's your favorite thing about the industry? 

Dave Haynes: If we're talking in technical terms, I am impressed and encouraged and excited by how LED in particular is opening up all kinds of new possibilities to start to think in terms of displays being a building material, being a finish, being the curtain wall glass, being something that's a full exterior of a building. That gets way beyond just this idea of a screen on a wall, which is how this industry was defined for a whole bunch of years. 

Thinking about the industry, it's a relatively small industry. Even though we tend to think that it's giant and it's booming and everything else, in pure terms, it's very small compared to most technology industries. But that means you get to know a lot of people all over the world, and there's no shortage of knuckleheads, but I would say by and large, it's full of really great people, and because it's a small industry and it gets together two or three times a year at different events, I've got to know people all over the world and develop friendships with people all over the world that I never do at all in doing other work, which is fantastic. I'm friends with the Invidis folks, and here I am in Munich having a beer. 

Antonia Hamberger: Yeah, and we're always glad to have you. But you've also done a lot of trips over the years, right? You went to Taiwan. You visited some display manufacturers last year.

Dave Haynes: Yeah, I spent a week in Taiwan in October. 

Antonia Hamberger: So what was the best work trip you had during all that time? 

Dave Haynes: The best trip I had. I did an extended consulting gig on digital signage for a mobile carrier, a telecoms company in South Africa, and I went down there three times. I never would've gone to South Africa. It's very expensive. It's a long flight and everything else, but I was there for, I think, six or eight weeks, I forget now, and so I spent a lot of time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and that was absolutely fantastic, and it was just something I never would've done otherwise.

I would say the most interesting stuff has been going to Asia just because that's where it all emanates, and I think the second time I went to Hong Kong was when LEDs were really starting to come out. It was kind of a big moment for me in that I don't like to go to tourist places, although all of Hong Kong is really a tourist place, but I like to go off the beaten track, where you don't see all the people with their cameras and everything else and I was just walking in this district and saw over a nightclub entrance, a very large billboard, a LED billboard, that in North America would be a press release. There'd be all kinds of buzz about it, because look at the signs of that. 

Antonia Hamberger: In Germany, let me tell you that will be the breaking news, the news of the year. 

Balthasar Mayer: Talk of the digital signage town.

Dave Haynes: But there, it was just there, and it really told me that, okay, this is where this is gonna go where it just becomes commonplace. Because it was already there, and when you go to Asia, it's way over the top from what I've seen from a distance in China. I've been to China, but I haven't been in several years now, pre-COVID covid where you see entire skylines that've got LED lighting. Whether it's mesh lighting or they've got larger lighting that's illuminating the whole building, but entire skylines that are synchronized.

I don't really want that in whatever city I live in with all the light pollution. It looks amazing, but it's not appealing in another way, but China, Taiwan. Hong Kong and Seoul, all those areas really are instructive as to the possibilities, as well as Dubai. But Dubai's just insane.  I don't think that's a marker or an instruction of anything. It's just a crazy place. 

Antonia Hamberger: No, it just also has tons of money in that place. 

Dave Haynes: The building tires skyscrapers on a change order. 

Antonia Hamberger: Dave, was there ever a particular moment when you realized that your blog really has influence, because I know almost everybody in the North American proAV and digital signage industry knows you and reads you. But that has taken a while. So was there a moment when you? 

Dave Haynes: Oh, it was immediate.

Antonia Hamberger: Yeah? Oh. 

Dave Haynes: No. There were a couple of moments. Early on, I said I'd gone from one company, with Broadsign, and I went up to Montreal to do the interview. They'd approached me, and I was walking the hallways, and one guy came around the corner and said, “Oh, Dave Haynes, I read your stuff” and I went, oh, really? 

Antonia Hamberger: This is something we still have to achieve still. 

Balthasar Mayer: Yes, this is a big goal for us. Did you ever sign an autograph?

Dave Haynes: I have signed autographs which is absolutely bizarre. I was asked, can you sign your business card because there's somebody back in the office that'll just be thrilled and I go, really? I don't want to see what's gone wrong in your life, but the big thing that has always stuck with me is the number of times that companies have told me that part of their onboarding process now for new employees is, there's the parking lot, here's your parking assignment, here's this, that's your desk, here's your wifi password, and so on, here are the instructions for healthcare and this and that, but here's what you need to do on a daily basis, you need to subscribe to this thing, and you need to be reading it every day to stay current in this industry.

I've had dozens of people tell me that I'm just kind of part of their workplace operations that they've told people as part of learning this business, you need to be reading this every day, and yeah, that's always been really heartening and nice to hear. 

Antonia Hamberger: So apart from reading Sixteen:Nine every day, which is an obvious thing to do as part of your daily routine, what advice would you give to someone just entering the industry? 

Dave Haynes: Learn it. The flip side of what I was just saying is I'm always astonished at how many people I run into who've been in this industry for ten years or more, and they had no idea about Sixteen:Nine or something else that they're not learning about their industry, and I'm flabbergasted by that. How can you work in an industry without investing any time to learn emerging technologies and trends and everything else? 

I would say just invest the time. Make sure you invest the time to read about it and look at things with curiosity, but also with a degree of skepticism because as you guys well know, there's a lot of trade press and a lot of PR that's just cheerleading. It's just shaking the pompoms about, “This is amazing” and “This is world’s first” and all that. I've spent 18 years calling bullshit on things that it's not the world's first, and if it is, who cares? It can be the world's first, but it has no business application. It's just eye candy. 

So spend the time looking at stuff. Try to get your head past the wow factor and the eye candy side of things because we collectively go to trade shows and we will see people at certain stands, I won't name them, but they're slack jaws staring at this technology there going, oh my God, that's amazing… 

Antonia Hamberger: Did I hear the word hologram just now? 

Dave Haynes: I didn't say it but… 

Antonia Hamberger: I saw you thinking it!

Dave Haynes: Yes. It is just thinking about what the business application is, what you're gonna do with it, and get past whether you think it's amazing looking because as I've said for years and years, eye candy and wow factor have very short shelf lives. They're exciting the first time you see it, second time it's eh, third time you just walk right on by it. And that's a lot of money to spend on something that people aren't really paying attention to. 

Some of the best digital signage out there. I started using the term boring signage a few years ago. Some of the best digital signage is crushingly boring, but incredibly relevant to the people who are looking at it. Like, how busy is this washroom? Do I turn left or right? Is this lineup faster if I go this way or that way? It's just data, but it's immediately relevant to the people who want to know this. They don't need to see a hologram of somebody dancing or whatever, or pretending they're a security control agent. They just need something saying, “This line over here” because we're using AI to measure or computer vision to measure the density of lineups that this one's gonna take five minutes. The one you're right in front of right now is gonna take you 12 minutes, so they're gonna go to the left, down to the other one, and that's gonna load, balance the venue, which is awesome. It just makes operations better, but for the people who are all about the eye candy, it's not not very exciting. But it works. It beautifully serves its purpose. 

Antonia Hamberger: So learn about the industry. Take your time, learning everything you can. Learn about new emerging technologies and don't get wowed too easily by flashy stuff. 

Dave Haynes: View everything with a degree of skepticism and a business mindset of, okay, even if this is super cool, would anybody use it, or does this scale? Some of this stuff is amazing. But given the cost of it, there's never gonna be a whole bunch of them.

Antonia Hamberger: Balthasar, do you want to throw some rapid fire corners? 

Balthasar Mayer: Dave, you ran Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years. You gave great insights for the industry, and you're giving it over to us at Invidis. I really hope that we can keep up the spirit of Sixteen:Nine. We will try our best.

Dave Haynes: You’ve got big, smelly shoes to fill. 

Balthasar Mayer: The smelly part we can do. So we have sixteen rapid-fire questions for you. 

Dave Haynes: Sounds like a game show. 

Balthasar Mayer: Yeah, it's  in celebration. It's a celebration for you. I have sixteen questions. You try to answer them as rapidly as possible. Since this is your exit interview and your celebration, you are allowed to put one sentence into it. We are not that strict with the rules. We're a little flexible today. Today, on our very first podcast. You need another sip of beer, or are you ready? 

Dave Haynes: I'm good. 

Balthasar Mayer: Then let's begin. What is your first big thing you do in retirement? 

Dave Haynes: Ooh, boring yard work. 

Balthasar Mayer: After the show, wine or beer? 

Dave Haynes: After what show? 

Balthasar Mayer: ISE? 

Dave Haynes: That's Spain, so wine.

Balthasar Mayer: Infocomm? 

Dave Haynes: That'd be beer because it's hot. 

Balthasar Mayer: What do you like more: conferences or trade shows? 

Dave Haynes: Conferences. 

Balthasar Mayer: In conferences, on stage or in the audience? 

Dave Haynes: I like both. 

Balthasar Mayer: Blog or the newspaper? 

Dave Haynes: I'm a newspaper guy. Unfortunately, I love the tactile side of newspapers, but they're hard to find. So if I'm in New York, I'll pick up The Times. 

Balthasar Mayer: Hardware or software? 

Dave Haynes: Hardware. 

Balthasar Mayer: Hologram or MicroLED? 

Dave Haynes: MicroLED. 

Balthasar Mayer: What was the coolest story you covered in Sixteen:Nine? 

Dave Haynes: Oh boy, that's hard to give a snappy answer to. 

Balthasar Mayer: You can give the top three because it's the exit interview. 

Dave Haynes: I would say going to China, going to Taiwan, and, I always remember the LED billboard that is at 8 Times Square. It was back ten years ago or something in front of the Marriott Marquee in Times Square, they lit up what at that time was the biggest LED board, certainly in the United States, and probably among the biggest in the world and I saw the room where they had all the servers and everything else, and then I was there when they turned the thing on, and that was pretty cool. 

Balthasar Mayer: True MicroLED or OLED? 

Dave Haynes: They are so different. True MicroLEDs are still in their infancy. OLED is getting a lot better than it used to be. But I still don't see it as a digital signage project product by and large.

Balthasar Mayer: I messed up the numbers, but what was the silliest story you covered. 

Dave Haynes: Top three allowed. Oh. Most of those, I just don't run. 

Balthasar Mayer: We’ll change the question. What was the absolute silliest press release you got?

Dave Haynes: It's a tie between those Guinness World Records and those with the Frost and Sullivan Awards, which you buy. You don't win an award, you buy a Frost and Sullivan Award. 

Balthasar Mayer: But I have to say I love the Guinness World Records stories, but yeah, you're right. 

The coolest person in digital signage you interviewed?

Dave Haynes: The coolest? Can I say the best interview? That's easier. Chris Riegel, CEO of StrataCash, founder of StrataCash. Sole owner, as far as I know. Insanely smart guy. Very dry sense of humor, but so knowledgeable and so blunt. It inevitably or very reliably was a great interview. 

If he talks, people should listen.

Balthasar Mayer: We heard about your past. So, what was the best interview you ever had aside from digital signage? 

Dave Haynes: Oh, boy, I had a whole bunch of really great interviews when I was doing the entertainment industry. I think one of the ones that always sticks in my mind is Bryan Adams in his very early days, when he was still playing in local nightclubs and not in arenas or anything else. I had a chat with him at our offices. He came up there and he was playing at a local spot, and said, are you coming tonight? I said, yeah, I'll come. Is your wife coming? Yeah, she's gonna come with me, and I said, come and see me, and went up to see him after the first set, he said, did your wife come? I said, yeah and he said, let's go. 

So he sat down with Joy and I and friends of ours and shot the shit in between the sets. Super nice guy. I met some rock people who were idiots, but he was among the truly nice people, and that's always encouraging that fame doesn't get to them. 

Balthasar Mayer: The most useless digital signage tech you've ever seen? 

Dave Haynes: I know I rag on holograms. I do think they have a role. I just think they're overstated in terms of their applicability. Also, robots, screens on roving robots. Those are almost universally pointless. 

Balthasar Mayer: A technology you didn't think would make it, but became successful.

Dave Haynes: These are hard questions. 

Balthasar Mayer: Was there ever a thing you were wrong about or you misjudged? 

Dave Haynes: Oh, never! 

You know what? The rotating LED rotors, when I first saw them, I thought they were interesting, but those will disappear in a couple of years. To Hypervisions' credit. Hypervision is the company that markets them more than anybody. They've done a great job of marketing their product and getting people excited about it and I have seen instances of it where I think it's really applicable, but I've seen lots of other cases where I just don't get it. I was wrong there that I thought that would just disappear, but they've done a good job. 

Balthasar Mayer: You’re at fifteen questions now, so here’s question #16: Imagine you run a successful trade block for almost 20 years. You were very successful, and are a guiding star in the industry. If you retire, what is better: simple goodbye or emotional farewell?? 

Dave Haynes: A simple goodbye. 

By the time this gets up and listenable, I already have my goodbye post written, and it's me riding off into the sunset on my lawnmower. 

Antonia Hamberger: We couldn't top that. That picture of you riding off into the sunset on your lawnmower. We wanna preserve that memory of you. 

Dave Haynes: Just imagine a cowboy on an electric lawnmower. 

Balthasar Mayer: Nevertheless, thanks, Dave, for all the things you've done from all of Invidis. We’d really try to hold up your flag, and I think it's your time to have the last words. 

Dave Haynes: Thank you. I've known Florian and stuff and you guys for quite some time now. Got to not just be industry colleagues and people doing the same work, but friends as well, and when I decided to wind things down, I'm 67 now and at some point you gotta do it or you're gonna be sitting at a computer when you're 85 and trying to remember your name.

I think I'm leaving it in good hands. I've got a lot of respect for what you guys do with the yearbook, with your day-to-day stuff, and everything else. It would've been challenging to just have some person come into the industry and try to have a little baptism by fire understanding it, so to have it taken over by people who already know the industry, know the people in it, know the goods and bads, and understand some of the bullshit, that makes it a lot easier to kinda back out of it, and as I've said to you and I said to others, it's not like you'll never see me again, I'm gonna stay in the industry. I just decided I didn't want to do this every day first thing in the morning. I would be better off health-wise to get up, have my coffee, and then do some stretching and go for a walk, and things like that, instead of banging away on a keyboard. 

I'll be around, I'll still go to ISE and do other things. I'll probably still do some writing on Sixteen:Nine, but just as a guest editor as opposed to the daily editor. So it's been great, and I think this is gonna work out really well, and I'm excited for it. 

Antonia Hamberger: We're excited too. Thank you, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Digichief has been helping digital signage and DOOH network operators feed the so-called content beast for a bunch of years. While the Kentucky-based company started up in 2007, its roots go back another decade to a tech start-up that did similar graphics-driven content work for broadcast TV.

I've known co-founder Gene Hamm forever, but this podcast was the first time we had a detailed chat about what Digichief does and offers. We get into a bunch of things, including what's widely used and what seems like perfect contextual content, but hasn't caught on.

We talk in detail, as well, about more customized content, and about a new service called Mercury that Digichief spent more than a year developing and recently rolled out.

If you hear thumping sounds in the background on my end, that's the roofers. It wasn't until the morning we recorded this that I remembered about the racket they'd be making. Big job. Big bill.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Gene Hamm, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know much about Digichief, could you gimme the elevator pitch on what you guys do? 

Gene Hamm: Absolutely. Thanks Dave. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Am I the first one to say that? 

Probably not, among the first. 

Gene Hamm: My kids always say I've got a lot of dad jokes, so I oh, no, I won't bore with that. But thanks for having me today. I'm Gene Hamm, one of the founders of Digichief. 

In a nutshell we're a content solutions provider. Basically, a one-source solution for all things content. We work in a number of capacities. We have a white labeled solution for data feeds for those clients who want to control the designs themselves. Or we can provide an integrated solution with HTML5, our widgets for clients that don't want to do the heavy lifting on the design. We already have it baked into our APIs, and so we've built up a library of content over the years. All the staples, weather news, sports info, that sort of thing. We also have some short-form, video series, and some other products that we work as distribution partners, with digital art, things like that.

But in a nutshell, we aggregate, we curate, and we create content for you, and we provide it in a consistent manner. We take care of the licensing, and we keep up with the inevitable changes in the source, data feeds, and put it out in a highly scalable, cloud infrastructure.

So I would say in the early days or earlier days of digital signage, a lot of companies, I shouldn't say a lot because there weren't many, and there still aren't that many, but the companies that were doing the sort of work that you do, I would describe as aggregators that they were collecting and harmonizing data feeds from news gathering organizations, government organizations like National Weather Service and so on, and getting in a format that's structured, reliable and all those sorts of things so that CMS companies or end users could tap into your feeds and have something that's reliable, organized, and curated to some degree.

Is that a fair way of describing things? 

Gene Hamm: That is a fair assessment, and I think it's evolved over time. I think early on, it was basically, just kind of an aggregation model. We actually started the company, it's an offshoot of another company we'd started back in the 90s where we worked in the broadcast television space, where we were doing lower third tickers, turnkey systems. 

So kinda like Chiron? 

Gene Hamm: Yeah, we were third-party developers for Chiron. So we worked a lot with Chiron early on, but a lot of the stuff you saw on the lower thirds and newscasts around the country was our stuff. 

The dreaded tickers. 

Gene Hamm: The dreaded tickers that kind of blew up in the 90s, yeah. We did news headlines, we were doing integrations with AP Weather. We actually ended up doing elections, school closings, and internet chat. We were all over the board on that. 

So that's how we got our feet wet on integrating and aggregating content. In the mid 2000s, we saw the digital signage kind of take off, and we said, look, we've already got these connections with these sources, so why don't we just license these and license this vertical? So that's kind of how it started, but it's evolved over time. We certainly still do that and provide those in a consistent format, but then it's also moved into kind of bespoke projects where people will say, we've got this data, we've got, we want this, maybe we have to go out and do research on specific topics for “Cold weather starting tips for Automotive Dealerships”, things like that. So there's really a research arm to it that we can go out and create stuff for custom projects. 

So if you had to give a percentage of from a third party versus what you guys are developing internally, what roughly would that be? 

Gene Hamm: I would say about 60 to 70% of it is aggregating. All the staples, traffic, transit, flight data, news headlines, sports scores, the stuff that people want to display most often. So yeah, I would say roughly 60 to 70% of it, and then the other stuff is, a lot of stuff on the infotainment route is data-based that we've created over time and this could be for like “This day in history” trivia, fun facts, jokes, clean jokes of the day, holidays, whimsical, eye-catching things to get eyeballs up on the screen. 

The challenge I've always seen with using third-party sources for things like tickers and full-screen presentations, whether it's from the AP, Canadian Press, or Reuters, is that they typically don't write headlines for digital signage or digital at home or anything else, and they don't even really do it in a lot of cases online. So what you end up with are headlines that don't really say anything. It'll say, “This week's top news is this…” and that'll show up on screens. I see it on broadcast still, and I'm going, why are you even using this? Why don't you curate stuff that you know has fully formed thoughts and says in a headline what you need to know versus kind of a teaser? 

Have you guys struggled with that, or has it gotten better? 

Gene Hamm: We've absolutely run into that. You’re speaking to the choir here. We’ve knocked our head against the wall so many times, and I just think that for these news organizations, digital signage is an afterthought. Believe me, over the last 20 years, we've seen so many stories come out that we just scratch our heads, and I've had conversations with the editors to try to plead my case, and it just goes on deaf ears. 

So basically what we have to do with our news, we have two formats. We have one that's filtered, and we've got lookups and intelligence written in where if something comes out misformed or certain key phrases, we just kick them out. And then we have basically a curated version where we actually go in and manually approve and post. We look at the image, we look at the images is another problem with it, but we look at the story, and we say, this doesn't make sense, or maybe we change a few words around to make it flow better and fit into a kind of concise title and description. So yeah, it's been a big problem and honestly it hasn’t gotten any better in my viewpoint.

Does AI present an opportunity to clean things up? Because I will take the odd story that I write and dump it into Claude and just say, “Give me 10 suggested headlines” and it'll knock out ten headline headlines in 15 seconds, and I'll look at it and go, oh, that one's pretty good and I'll take that one and maybe massage it a little bit. But it does a pretty good job with that sort of thing. 

Gene Hamm: It absolutely will be a tool that we can utilize, and we're certainly looking into it right now to try to inject on our backend tools that you can request a specific, character-limited title that makes sense. One of the nuances to AI, which I know you're aware of, is that it's all in the phrasing of how you ask the question for the format that you wanted back in. 

Prompt engineering. 

Gene Hamm: Yeah. It's an art in itself, and what we see is that we think that AI can help this curation service to look at the headlines that we're getting and spit them out in more of a usable, readable, concise form. 

But it's not gonna be autonomous anytime soon. 

Gene Hamm: We'll see. 

Yeah, not reliably autonomous, it's still gonna give you some weird headlines and all that, but then again, you could hire somebody and they'll give you weird headlines. 

Gene Hamm: That's true. That's absolutely true. We try to say that our Soft News, which is our curated version, and we try to bill it as G-rated content that's not going to tick somebody off, but that's next to impossible these days because whatever you think is G-rated and is not going to satisfy everyone. We try to stay away from the political end of it, but there's always gonna be somebody that's offended.

Yeah. I've talked to a few people who just said, you know what, we don't even do politics on our feeds anymore, or what we show on our screens, because somebody's gonna be irritated, somebody's gonna complain, and it's just not worth it. 

Gene Hamm: Oh, the stories I can tell. It's funny. We have a custom bad word filter for stuff that we don't want to come across in the AP and so we've built that over time, and I could never let that see the light of day that the things that we've seen come across the wire that we now omit. Even the images as well. There are a lot of times we'll get images that don't really explain the story, it doesn't make sense, maybe they aren't centered on the right focal point of the image, and we think maybe AI could definitely benefit, maybe being able to zone in on what the main cue is of the image that we get with the AP stories or any of the news images. 

Have the demands and the uses, usage trends evolved through the years, like when I got into digital, more than 25 years ago now, there weren't really even smartphones, and the internet was still fairly new-ish, and you could have public screens in elevators or walkways or shopping malls or whatever that were running news and weather on there, and those would be a primary source for that information, you fast forward to now, and you can't get away from news, you can't get away from weather data, that sort of thing. 

I've always wondered, do those things need to be on screens anymore? 

Gene Hamm: That's definitely a good debatable topic. There are so many of these black screens in our hands that fight for attention. We work in the automotive space in dealer showrooms and you walk into the showroom there and people are in the waiting area, and they've got screens up with content on it, news headlines, weather, things like that, and everybody is looking at their phone.

So you're always thinking how do we compete with getting eyeballs up on the screen to get the messaging and whatnot for the client, as opposed to the ubiquitous news headlines and things like that. So yeah, it's something that our clients definitely have to deal with.

Is that something you coach to, to tell both your resellers and your end users, that it's important to really think through what you're using in terms of content feeds or your content mix so that it's hyper relevant and contextual to where you are versus just “We need stuff to run on this lower third” or “We need stuff to run in between our dealer promotional messages” or whatever it may be, whatever the venue is.

Gene Hamm: Absolutely. As you said, it's all in the content mix. If you're trying to get eyeballs up there on the screen, you gotta have relevant hyper-local content, whether that be local traffic maps or local sports scores or things like that for the market. 

But yeah, the dwell time and how long the content is on the screen, you want to get the eyeballs up there and then move on to what your marketing message is. So it's definitely a delicate balance between, you can't just inundate someone with all the news, all weather. You definitely have to make it in short, concise forms because people's attention spans go elsewhere. They go back to their phone or something else. 

A few months ago, you announced a partnership with a company called Stream, and I've done a podcast with those folks and laid out what they do and all that. 

How do you work with them, and could you kinda run down what they do and how that's resonating with your user base?

Gene Hamm: Yeah, so we met Anthony Nerantzis at one of the trade shows, and he came by and explained his interest. He’s kind of a broadcaster, newsroom journalist. So basically, what it is they do is a presenter-led, concise, short-form video of bespoke custom news, right? And it can be catered to the industry. 

So if it's medical, financial, or automotive, or what have you. They can go back, write the scripts, and of course, Anthony can describe this company better than I can, so hopefully he's not gonna be mad at me for giving this kind of dissertation. But yeah, I just thought it brought to the table something that we could really customize for our clients, and it's very professional, the workflow is great, you can provide some of the background, what you know the company's looking to do, what type of information they're trying to get across, their team can go back and write a script that’s engaging and they can automate the product to put it out on whatever the interval you need, whether it be weekly or monthly. 

Originally, when they came out, it was a closed caption type thing with lower third supers on the bottom of the screen and I had mentioned to them, “Hey, there are too many graphics on the screen. Maybe, you might wanna streamline that a little bit.” They did that because they’re very good about taking feedback, and now they've moved in. It was more of a no-volume type environment product, and now they've, they're able to do audio voiceover as well from the on-air talent actually speaking and you can actually hear it. 

Now they're getting into kind of the marketing communication end of it where, let's say it's a pharmaceutical company or something that wants to talk about things that like the president or the CEO wants to talk about certain things to their employees that they have going on, his team's able to go out and produce that and deliver that information and they can get eyeballs up on the screen, educate and inform the client. It’s been very well received and we’re also looking to work with them on some of our feeds, whether it's health-related type content, maybe we can work in some of the real, day-to-day, hyper-local information on the tail end of the video segment. Say if it's a medical facility and they're talking about medical health tips, things like that, maybe it comes in and we can integrate with one of our APIs and follow the levels of the flu levels there are for the specific area, so we can really hyper-localize it. 

So in a lot of respects, it's a variation on the sort of work that you've been doing, particularly on the custom side of it. But instead of it just being text and visuals, they can do a full video with on-air talent and they do that by green screening, on-air hosts, and then mashing that up with AI so that it's a human talking to you and doing a custom presentation as opposed to an anime avatar look that I think looks ghastly in most cases?

Gene Hamm: Absolutely. I think going to the presenter-led approach is advantageous and some of the early ones, like you said, that we've seen are just creepy. But I think what they're doing with their technology is amazing. I think it looks spot on. 

Yeah, I've looked at it a couple of times for extended periods, just paying attention to see if it's glitchy at all, and it's very smooth, and if you didn't know, you'd be hard pressed to know, this is AI-generated, but it's absolutely human. But the movements and lips and all that stuff are being massaged through AI. 

Gene Hamm: Yeah, and the neat thing about it, too, is just it's so scalable and they can automate it, and they can really like its bespoke content, so they can create the script, have it produce it in very short order.

So more recently, you've announced something else called Mercury. Can you walk through what that is? 

Gene Hamm: Mercury was created basically to give our users a more robust way to onboard our HTML content. We were getting requests for more of a web portal that gives more granular design choices such as colors, backgrounds, logos, the transitions. They can go in and micromanage the news they wanna see, or the sports they want to see, the duration that it's on the screen, and then, they can compile that into a playlist and then output it to a URL and that URL can be scheduled.

It's quite a long time coming. We certainly had HTML55 widgets before, but this just gives people a little bit more granular decisions and a web portal, and then we also thought it was a good way to showcase our widget library. We built up these designs over time. Many of the products that we have, there's multiple designs, and so for, we think it might be a growth area for new prospects, that it lowers the barrier of entry to go out and actually, sign up for a free trial, take a look at, it's an all you can eat type model where we've got all the staples, the news, the weather, the sports, the stocks, the infotainment and we’re adding new designs and widgets all the time.

I think it's intuitive where we spent well over a year designing the system, and I think it really gives people a way to sample our products and see how it works with their systems. 

Could you give an example of how a typical client would use it and what they do?

Gene Hamm: Yeah, so they sign up for the product. It's a subscription service, with volume discounts that they can go in, and we've got a kind of smorgasbord of content, a widget library and it's all categorized by, like I said, news, weather, things like that, and they can pick and choose what content they wanna build into a playlist? Now that could be just a single piece of content, whether, say, weather, and they've got a bunch of different designs, whether they wanna do a 5K five-day forecast, if they wanna do a full-screen weather map, they can choose their locations, and then they can output it as a URL that URL can be a plugged into a playlist and that pluglist can have their content or they can massage their own local content, through their own platform, so it just gives them the ability to do this kind of infotainment type stuff in between their other messaging. 

But yeah, they can build a playlist with a single asset, or they can build a playlist with 30 and build a longer duration, say, a 20-minute loop if they want. So yeah, that's the typical workflow. 

So more normally or in the past, if I were a corporate entity and I had a corporate campus in three cities in South Carolina. If I were buying that from a typical subscription content service or weather provider, it’s going to have a certain look and color schemes, everything else, and you can't really deviate from that, versus with Mercury, you can choose your fonts, choose your background, colors, everything else, and tweak it so it fits the way you want, maybe has the company's corporate colors and or just fits in with the overall look of the network. 

Is that a clear way of saying this?

Gene Hamm: Yeah. To make it very granular, the layout of, let’s say, a five-day forecast, the data itself is set on the screen, but all the other elements around it like if they wanted to upload their own. company logo, if they wanna match their corporate colors, they can choose certain fonts that may match what you know they're using. So yeah, they can make different transitions to it, so they can really make granular choices with it to fall in line with what they're looking for, but be on the same thing across the same board. We have stocks, if they wanna put their own company stock up there, they can do that. If they wanna do infotainment like trivia or whatnot, we have a number of different trivia categories that they can choose. So yeah, they can really hyper-localize. 

Do you put guardrails in terms of design choices that can be made? Like thinking particularly of font choices and Lord knows we've all seen online, particularly, and less so on digital signage, here somebody decides I'm going to use this font, and it's just the wrong choice. 

Gene Hamm: We have chosen a list of fonts that we have in a dropdown box that they can choose from. As you can imagine, this was our initial decision when we debuted this release system a few months ago, and our thought is that we wanna give them these options to an extent, right? So we have several fonts that we think we deem look good, and we certainly can add additional fonts as we go. But yes, I agree there's some god awful fonts up there that we don't think would at the end of the day look great on particular design. 

Is this the way to deal with the demand that can scale up so that if you were just doing this through managed services, where you would have companies come to you and say, “Hey, we would like a live custom feed that presents ou  weather and other information in these fonts, this background and everything else.” That's hard to do and hard to charge because if it's a one-off, you gotta charge a lot more for it, versus a service where you log in and you do it yourself, by and large, that makes it possible to do more. 

Gene Hamm: Yeah, I think so. I think with the pricing model, how we have it, they can use everything. It's all you can eat, in terms of all these different designs and content categories that they can go in and it's not gonna cost them anymore if they put the news or the weather up there. I think the value proposition to Mercury is that we're doing the heavy lifting on the backend, and that these local networks don't have to go out and find different sources, and like you mentioned, the National Weather Service. 

Early on, we were integrating with the National Weather Service and that got to be just an overwhelming task because of stages and formats, and changes in the designs and things like that. It just made more sense for us to go out and get an aggregated list. Actually, we have a couple of different aggregated services. So, like a lot of our staples, we have a primary source and a backup source. So if one goes inevitably, these sources have issues, and if one goes down. It really streamlines the whole process. 

Has the whole business of getting data from different sources improved? Have they started to, or maybe not started, but long since understood that you can't keep changing the structure. You've gotta stick to something. 

Gene Hamm: Yes and no. With sports specifically, they're good about giving us a heads up when things are gonna change. In the olden days, we would find out about it after it happened. So I think a lot of the source APIs that we have do a good job of giving us kind of a change. But there’s repercussions. If they do a full change of their structure, we have to integrate that, and if it has any changes to how we do content, we have to let our clients know, and we have to make sure the widgets are changed. We have to make sure they know that the structure's changed. 

During the pandemic, we really moved our cloud infrastructure from one cloud service to another. We added a lot of data points to our structure, and so that was really an uphill battle in terms of having to communicate to our current client base that had already done the design work and had already integrated with our APIs to let them know that's coming. So we don't take these things lightly and we've communicated to our sources over time about the repercussions to this. You can't just pull the trigger and give us a two-week notice. 

What about social media? If I go back 10-15 years, there were a lot of subscription content providers and CMS companies developing widgets so that you could display Twitter (now X) or Facebook post or whatever maybe on screens and I think over time people realize, oh boy, that's a dangerous thing to do unless you've got somebody sitting right on top of it all the time. 

Gene Hamm: It's absolutely the case. In fact, we were one of the ones early on that were doing native integrations with the APIs from Twitter and Facebook and whatnot, and it got to be a full-time job for our developers, changing not only the licensing, but the structure, and we finally threw in the towel on it and outsourced it to a company where that's all they do, and so we work with this particular company, and they take care of it. They've got a team of developers that don't do anything else, and they keep up on all the backend changes, the licensing, and so we're able to not only provide Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X, LinkedIn, all this as a concise data feed with different data points and assets, and then we also have an HTML version that integrates with it. 

So yeah, we've definitely gone the route of outsourcing that to someone who could keep up with it.

Is there a most popular resource and one that you thought would have traction and that just never worked out, and you've since dropped or rarely see sold?

Gene Hamm: About a year ago, we started with a health API, so seasonal and patient level data, and by seasonal, we mean pollen which is a big one and we have multiple sources for that. But, RSV levels, COVID-19 numbers, cold and cough, and flu. And then we can even get granular with patients. We can go and say a zip code in the United States, and say, what are the ten highest levels of obesity? And they can customize a message or an ad campaign towards that. Those particular zip codes we thought would take off at least the patient-level stuff and it was just really slow out of the gate. We've had a lot of interest and we've made a lot of presentations, but I think there are a lot of these companies that are still trying to figure out how they might use it. Flight data is one that we work with, and we have some clients using it. 

There are certain sources that are very expensive to keep up with. That's something that we thought would be selling more than it does. A lot of times, the people that you know that put the flight data up are probably going directly to the source as opposed to going through somebody like us. 

Is there one that everybody uses, or almost everybody? 

Gene Hamm: Everybody uses weather, of course, that's the big one. Everybody uses sports scores, and everybody uses news. That's news, weather, sports are the big dogs. 

Just a couple of final questions. Where are you guys based, and how big is your company? I'm thinking you don't have that big of a headcount because you don't need to, because you're using external resources.

Gene Hamm: Yeah, so we're based in Lexington, Kentucky. We also have partners spread across the world. But I got a partner in California. There are a few of us here, and then we've got a couple in Ukraine. So we've been working with a couple of developers who are now employees in Ukraine, well before the war. So it's been interesting seeing that side of it from an employee. 

It gives you a perspective on a drone flying over, and bombings and things like that. So there are five of us. We run a small operation, but like you said, we don't really need an extensive team. We certainly have worked with or contracted out some design work in terms of the graphical design. We've worked with the same designers for well over a decade.

All right, so thank you. If people wanna find out more, it's just Digichief.com, right? 

Gene Hamm: Yeah, Digichief.com, and then if someone wants to sample Mercury for a free trial, there's a Mercury link on there that they can go and sign up for, and give it a whirl. 

Gene, thank you.

Gene Hamm: Thank you, Dave. I appreciate your time.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by   trailer.

My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers.

Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up.

I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months.

We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa. 

Des Moines. So you're in flyover country?

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. 

It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right? 

Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south. 

Nice. How long has the company been around? 

Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December. 

You are a founder? 

Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO. 

So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs. 

So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back then, and were able to utilize that for a number of years after that initial introduction.

What was it back then? What was the technology back then, early LED? 

Tod Puetz: It was an SMD, It was an early 8x8 millimeter SMD back then. I refer to it as antiquated, but back then, it was pretty fresh and new. But yeah, just the idea of being able to drive this thing up to the driving range, the wings folded open on this thing and, within minutes we're plug and play and just really, fell in love with that concept. , 

Yeah. So did you buy the business from him or just get something going on your own?

Tod Puetz: Did not. We utilized them. It was a kind of a one man show there. It was more of a hobby for individuals, and they used it for four or five years. But they weren't interested in scaling this thing. As my career with TaylorMade progressed more and more, I ended up working with other companies, just trying to understand the LED business. So I branched out and helped a few other smaller LED niche companies to try to generate some business in the sports space. We just had a lot of relationships with the golf business and yeah, really just took the concept and I knew there was a different mouse trap here with that type of opportunity to scale it, that's where we started things in late 2015.

So the idea is just at its bare essentials, and I think most people understand this anyways, but just in case, is you've got a foldable all in one LED display that's on a trailer and your customers are rolling it out to different locations, whether they're entertainment events, sports events or something else, and finding power, plugging it in, open it, and driving a signal to it, and you've got a big display where it needs to be for three days or three weeks or whatever it is, right? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. By no means, does Insane Impact claim to be the inventor of mobile LED. Obviously, that has been one man for a very long time. Our business, Insane Impact, started up on the rental side. We designed, fabricated and engineered a handful of units, just to service what we thought was gonna be a Midwest boutique rental business and very quickly became a national presence.

And what we found was that the same people were renting products two, three and four times a year, and really, our thought process was, why don't we just own one of these things, and we can use it 365 days a year, if we want? And again, there were already customers out there, there were common trucks that were selling trailers, but it wasn't popular and we really started working back in 2016 to develop a plan where if you own the product, we can certainly start to feed your business as well, you can be part of our rental network and that's really what kind of, put the fuel on the fire. Each year, more and more units in the field, more and more customers from parks and municipalities, armed forces, college, university, all of the usual suspects out there that use these things on a regular basis, really became the traction for rapid growth in this endeavor. 

So your company, it's an interesting kind of mashup of different competencies, so to speak, in that if you are manufacturing rolling stock with lots of heavy-duty metals and wheels and everything else, that's one thing. And then at the polar opposite, you've got fairly sensitive electronics. So you're doing both sides of that, right? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. We take a fully engineered and manufactured trailer. These trailers weigh anywhere from 3,500 pounds on our smallest unit up to 18,000 pounds on a triple axle gooseneck. And they've got real high end LEDs permanently. We've approached it a little bit differently. We're putting a fixed product on it. So something that's used to and withstands the elements pretty much anywhere, including the road, and then obviously everything else on the unit is fully protected from shock, from absorption of weather. Everything's IP67 through the components side of things, and IP65 on the trailer, fully powder coated system. 

So we've really built, tried, and tested a product that's gonna last and withstand the elements going up and down the road at 75 miles an hour in any extreme environment. 

I'm guessing that you, in your early years, had some lessons, whether they were hard ones or whatever. 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't be any fun if we didn't. Our first major lesson that we learned, Dave and I think this is really what sets us apart is that we did the hang and bang modular cabinets on our product for the first, probably two and a half years and we learned the lesson real quick that those just aren't designed to withstand the long-lasting road and weather, wear and tear. At the time, that's what everybody was using it and that's kind of where we were at. It took a lot of headaches, blood and sweat, for those first two years to figure out what product really made sense. For the last four and a half years, we've really been rock and rolling on a specific product, chassis, and stuff that just really outperformed, in a big way.

So that was a very painful lesson because you're a year into this thing, and you've got issues, and those are hard to come by as a startup, but we were able to weather the storm and find what really worked for us and I think that really separate us from most right now is we just, we're putting some of the best products out there on the market on these trailers.

And you not only have to make it bulletproof, but I suspect you have to do it down like crazy, because this can not be something that takes 45 minutes and has a checklist, like launching a rocket or something. It's gotta roll into place and find power and open the hinges, lock them down, and get a signal in, right?

Tod Puetz: Yeah, you nailed it. I think one of the things as we built this thing out, Dave, is that the single most important part was customer focus and customer friendly, and I will tell you that you yourself, or even my 18-year-old daughter, can get this thing up and running in less than 10 minutes. We pride ourselves on delivering a turnkey functional unit to our flagship product, which is our Max 1710. You can pull in, and it'll take you longer to unhook it than it will to turn it on and set it up in some respects. We offer a generator-powered option or a battery-powered option. We've got a fully self-sustained, lithium-ion pack that is performing at an incredible level right now, which we're really excited about. 

So we worked with a major organization probably about 18 months ago, in the Armed Forces space, and we worked with them to design a fully self-sustainable battery pack solution and were really excited about that. We can talk about that a little bit more here, but at the end of the day, our electronics cabinet is an IP67 rated rack that basically opens it up, and as you know, with everything, we run Nova Star. So everything is just a straight playback video. So just hit the breakers, hit the power switch, and you're off and running. So we really did wanna make this thing turnkey. They come fully self-sustained with audio as well. We wanted to make sure that anybody and everybody could operate this thing very quickly. 

Is there a media playout box in there, or do you use an external feed and then just plug it into an HDMI or whatever it may be?

Tod Puetz: Plenty of different options. Most often our customers, like your Park and Rec municipality, the people that are using this thing to play movies and stuff, they're just streaming it off the laptop. But we got an IO box that they can drop in, SDI, fiber, anything else if you're running or whatever it might be. But yeah, anybody can bring us any signal within, within a minute, and we're up and running. So really trying to get in that turnkey facet of this thing to make sure that we're in a good spot. 

Okay, so you're sourcing the trailer from a third-party manufacturer as opposed to bending metal and doing all that yourself and you're sourcing the electronics, and you're basically doing final assembly, right? 

Tod Puetz: Correct. Yep. 

Doing it the other way would be very complicated. 

Tod Petz: We did that when we first started this little venture, we hired engineers, we bought the welders, we were buying cut parts and building them ourselves, and we realized very quickly that in a 4,000 square foot facility that when this thing takes up, it’d be impossible to keep up. So we were very fortunate to find a local vendor that was in the trailer business already but they took a liking to what we were doing, and it really has just been a wonderful partnership and relationship with them. They build a fantastic product, best-in-class warranty around it, and it's really the fit and the finish from premium laser cut, premium powder coat finishes, all the details that are there, and certainly, we work with some of the best engineers out there in the marketplace to create the best product so really exciting to have that partnership.

On the LED side and the electronics side, we're taking the trailer and we're taking the electronics and we're putting the fit and finish on it and making it function and delivering a finished product. 

I assume you have some sort of a contract manufacturer or a finished goods supplier in, whether it's China, Taiwan, or somewhere else you’re sourcing from.

Tod Puetz: On the electronic side, yeah, we do. So we actually just made an announcement here yesterday. We are partnered with DVS (Dynamic Visual Solutions). We've been working with them for almost six years now. 

Obviously, Chinese based, but we got in touch with the owner and the CEO of the US business almost six years ago and kind of started to understand what it meant for us and what it meant for them to be a partner and really have our hands on the technology, help them with some of the design elements that we needed within the product to make sure that it was gonna pass the buck and make sure that it lasted and, almost six years later.

But, yeah, we just had a nice press release announcing the partnership. We got a huge opportunity with them with the craziness that’s going on out there in the space. But great company, wonderful products, best-in-class warranties, and we've had the ability to shape what that product needs to be on our trailers. 

I suspect that was a bit of a journey too, finding the right supplier because we've all heard the stories about different companies who make a lot of promises, but what shows up isn't what you thought you were getting.

Tod Puetz: Yeah, it was. So we had gone through probably three to five different manufacturers, three to four at least prior to getting with DVS and it’s very painful on that side of it because you are dealing with somebody over in China, and sleepless nights and figuring stuff out and a startup and all of the fun things that happen around that.

When we were able to locate, DVS was based out of Florida. They really just took a liking to what we were doing and threw all the chips on the table and said, we've got a great modular rental business going, but we're really intrigued about this mobile solution. How can we help? And we really started to dig cautiously optimistic out of the gate because there are thousands of people out there trying to get the business in some respects. 

Could we go to one of the major five or six? Yeah, we certainly could have, but we felt like there was a little bit more of an intimate approach to this. We were a newer company. We took our time getting into what we really wanted, and we felt like we had a little more leverage working with a decent-sized company.

And with somebody who's got an office in Florida as opposed to Shenzhen or Beijing.

Tod Puetz: Correct. 

I don't want to get too deep into what's going on right now, but how are you navigating the tariff situation right now? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, that's the million dollar question and in some cases, multi millions.

When I started this company, Dave, I had two stances that I wanted to live by. One, I was gonna over-index on our employees and make sure that we had the right people in the right seats, and take very good care of them. The other one that came later on, probably after we had established and it was I'm never gonna run out of products. I just know that if we have products, we'll sell them. 

So after those first three, four years, we put ourselves in a position where we've rubber stamped our products, we know who we're selling to, we know what our core markets are, and we've got the right people in the right seats and I just knew that if I would run out of product, then I just make sure that we are collectively chasing the business. That's a really hard thing to do. But fortunately, we've got the right vendors to do this with. 

So back in November, after the current administration was elected or they won the nomination, knowing that this discussion of tariffs was on the horizon, we took a very calculated and risky approach, but we went out and bought a slew of equipment. So we bought basically upwards of almost a year of supply in LEDs out front. We went to our trailer manufacturer. They bought a year's worth of supply of our top three SKUs and hedged the bet with us.

So we're in a little different position than most, again, there are a lot of people out there who probably did the same thing. I'm not the only one out there who took that risk, but we did take the risk, and it's certainly paying off. That kind of gets you an idea of where we're at and how we've run our business. We just don't wanna run out of products. So fast forward to today in reality, I think there’s a blinking that’s happening, there's a stance, and this isn't a political statement by any means. This is just our gut feeling on this is, I feel like it's gotta loosen up a little bit here. It can only go so hard and so fast. But we've been able to weather the tariff storm, internally at Insane, impacted by some of the stuff we did on the front end. We have not been significantly impacted by LEDs. If we're to place orders today on LEDs. Honestly, it's been fairly minimal in the impact. We're seeing some of the expensive shipping surcharges that are happening. But I think there's just buying power that's come with some of the things that we've done with our manufacturer to keep them rocking and rolling, that have helped us mitigate a little bit of this.

But you're not like some of these companies where they're wringing their hands, okay, in order to get something out of a container in Long Beach, California, I need to write a check for an extra million dollars that I had not anticipated. 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, we're not dealing with that. I think where this thing's really impacted, the hundreds of, I'm just gonna call them mom and pop manufacturers over there, whether they're manufacturers or just the days of them just shipping, 12x7s into the States by air is probably coming to an end or they're pricing themselves out of the market a little bit. Either that or they just don’t care. But I think a lot of this is the consolidation in the short-term impact that we've seen in real life. The long-term impact, in my opinion, is gonna weed some of them out, and then obviously you've got all the Chinese entity companies, the larger players in the game that are having to come to market with distribution here in the US, where it impacts us the most.

So they're adding additional layers of cost and it's really gonna open the door from what we're seeing, it’s gonna open the door for us to other markets by virtue of that since we’re already and established US distributor.

When you first got in touch, I didn't know that much about you and thought, you're a rental company, but I was intrigued that, sure, you do rentals, but really, you're a manufacturer and you're selling to companies who are more regional rental companies.

That's accurate, correct? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, it's interesting. So we've really got three business units, Dave. But we started off as a rental company with a primary focus on the mobile solution. We did have modular hanging bangs as well that we took care of some specific customers, but when we kinda uncovered the opportunity, evolved is a great word into the more offside of the business selling video trailers, that opened up a whole other segment of opportunity for us to then really start to take a look at the fixed install stuff. 

Our three business units are really, primarily led by the mobile video solution on the trailers, and other new innovative products coming. Now, by the way, we do the marquees and the scoreboards and the highway signs, the airport conference room takeover stuff. We do all of that as well, and oh, by the way, customers that have video trailers, they become part of our cross-rental network. So this nucleus business unit feeds that we have, one feeds the other and that feeds another.

It’s really that we create a really cool situation here that allows us to have return business from our customers in all of those different facets. Because if you can't afford it, you can rent it. If you rent it too many times, then you can afford to buy it, and oh, by the way, we can replace your scoreboard or we can replace your, your, your classroom or your theater, modular wall, whatever it might be. 

We do all three of them, and we do, we feel like we do them pretty well, and again, we're very lucky to have those three business units that fill the pipeline on a regular basis. 

Is there a rule of thumb as to that point where, okay, we can rent this five times a year and that makes financial sense, but there's a certain break point where it makes more sense just to buy it?

Tod Puetz: Yeah, that's a wonderful question because it really comes down to there's such a tremendous education process. Again, up until maybe, really when we started, at least here in the US, there was nobody else that was mass producing or really proactively selling to the end customer, and when we started doing that, we were very fortunate just to have some relationships where they actually saw the light. “Oh, this makes sense.” 

Yeah, it's a high school or a college, and they're using it for their game day stuff. But what's been more fun for me in this company is to see just the evolution of the education that's had that's happened. Going to a city administrator and telling them, hey, it's not just the three movie nights a year, it's all of your chamber events. It's the community support events, it's the fundraiser stuff. So when they start to understand the use case of these items, these trailers, and that they can turn and burn and have these things up and running, whether it's just mass notification, you've got storms coming, or just any and all of those things. 

Once they understand the full use case of applications that these products can offer, then the light comes on, and then it becomes a much easier conversation for them to take to the stakeholders and say, alright, we really need this. Here are all the reasons why. So our sales team is incredibly focused on the educational side of the business on how this can impact the community, campus, etc. 

I realize you have a number of different sizes and everything else, but, for your primary selling unit, what would that cost? 

And if I wanted to rent it for a weekend, if I'm in Ames, Iowa, what would that cost to rent it for a weekend? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, great question. So our flagship product is our Max 1710. So 17 wide, 10 foot tall, 3.9 millimeters on their turnkey generator operation, delivery, and tech. To rent that thing for a day, in this market, it does vary a little bit based on coast to coast. You get a three-day festival and you're spending $7,500 to 8,000 bucks for a screen that's operated that comes turnkey, that has power if needed. That's gonna turn the lights on and be reliable. So that's a pretty good snapshot of what we offer from a rate card on that specific product.

If somebody wants to buy it, I'm gonna say turnkey trailer screen electronics, generator, audio. If you want the Mac Daddy package delivered to your doorstep, you're in that $150-160k range, which is gonna get you, 10-year parts, five-year labor on LED screen warranty, five-year parts, five-year labor on the trailer warranty, and then obviously an electronics warranty. So you're really protecting the investment there, Dave. 

We're not the most expensive in the marketplace. We're definitely not the least. We feel like we're in a really good slot, and I think our adoption within the marketplace probably supports that. But that gives you a quick snapshot of where we're at from the pricing structure.

So if you're a company that's on the rental side of it, you could see an ROI in a year if you're in a busy market. 

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. Yeah. I think, 1710, and this doesn't factor in your cogs, your travel, your truck, your tech, etc. Sure. But if you get 20 to 25 really strong rental events within your market on a single day's use, you're right there certainly, being able to pay it back. 

And it goes back to that education process. When we sell a customer a unit, we don't guarantee them any business, in terms of what we can bring to them from the cross-rental network. We're very forthright about that. But what does happen is if you're a proven, vetted, rental partner out there in the marketplace, you can bet, you're gonna get some help with monetizing this thing. That's the unique part about this business relationship with our customers on the trailer side is: we're gonna help you guys monetize the unit over time. 

I have season tickets to the local Canadian Premier League soccer team that does very well here. They pull 6,500 people to games, but it's at a somewhat temporary stadium, and they have an LED display, it looks like maybe a 17x10 on a truck. 

I severely doubt it's yours because it's a piece of crap. It's not very bright, it's not very crisp or anything, but it's something, so I gather that this can be all over the map in terms of what you rent. If you're an end user, you have to pay attention to the specs. 

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. We prided ourselves on being the leader when it comes to what products are out there on mobile products, in and of itself. But it really comes down to the screen at the end of the day. I guess we will probably take it a step further. We do take a lot of pride in the physical trailer itself, the metal that this thing rides on, because that's as important to me as it's the LED. 

But at the end of the day, having something that you can put up in direct sunlight and have the most quality, crisp image, is what we've over-indexed on that in a good way. So what we come to market with is a 7500 nit, 3.9 product, competitively in the marketplace. 3.9 from our core competitors are in that 4500-5500 nit and it just overpowers everything. 

So again, if you're rolling up to the game for a little pre-game watch party, you're gonna get the best viewing experience possible, with some of the product. But we do pay a lot of attention to the spec, the physical components, the quality, and that's very close to our chest, so we don’t take that for granted.

So you're doing lots of sports and entertainment events, probably some corporate events. I'm curious, what's the most unusual one that you're aware of? 

Tod Puetz: It was interesting. You look at Covid and the impact that it had on the industry, and all of these companies out there that have stages and rigging and modular and everything else, they took a little bit of a bath at the onset of Covid, and really, what allowed us to squeeze in and continue to, I would say, entertain, but take care of customers that had to continue to engage, whether it was employees or crowds or whatever. 

So we did everything. But this leads up to your question, doing drive-in funerals was probably one of the most unique things that we've done. They couldn't get into the churches, so we were pulling up to large parking lots and they were streaming the funeral from inside the church out to the streets. It was really wild, but I bet we did anywhere from 50 to 60 funerals in late 2020 and in early 2021 until the restrictions relaxed a little bit. So we had funeral homes. We probably have three or four customers that actually own these, as a result of Covid, and they continue to use them for different settings in the church and funeral space.

That would be the one that comes to mind, honestly, is that kind of the most bizarre one that you never really think about? Yeah. 

How many units do you have out there, roughly? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, so we shipped the first unit in January of 2017 to a gasoline company in Texas. By the end of this month, the end of April, we delivered right around 495 units into the marketplace all around the US.

We've got some army bases and navy bases over in Japan. We've got a handful of units over in Europe, a good chunk over in Hawaii, obviously I know that's US, but largely, 95 to 97% of what we've got is here in the lower 48. We do have a few up in your neck of the woods as well, but, yeah, we've been very to lead the charge there as it relates to the go to product in the marketplace.

Super interesting. If people wanna know more, they just find you at insaneimpact.com? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, InsaneImpact.com. They can learn a little bit more about everything we do, but it's an exciting time for us. I know there's a little bit of uncertainty and doom and gloom, but we're just keeping our heads down. We’ve got customers that want the product. They may want it, but how do we get them to realize that they need the product to continue to advance their business, regardless of the sector, and I think if they get in touch with our folks, we're putting ourselves in a good spot to provide really good information and provide a great solid starting base for our conversation.

I'm impressed with the advanced planning that you did. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who were sitting around this week and saying, I didn't see that coming. 

Tod Puetz: Head on a swivel constantly, there's no question. 

Alright, Todd, thanks very much for taking the time. 

Tod Puetz: Dave, I appreciate you. Take care now!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Every so often I'll get a call or email from an industry friend asking me about a software company called Zynchro, because they were in the mix, or the incumbent, on some sort of deal that was in play.

Yes, I'd say. I've heard of them. But that was about it.

Well, that's changed, as I had a good chat recently with Jose Behar, one of the two brothers who founded the company some 30 years ago. Zynchro has very quietly built up a nice book of business, mostly in the United States, with SaaS software marketed on the basis of flexibility, rock-solid reliability and low annual costs.

By its own admission, the Dallas-based company operates very quietly. But the installed base is north of 50,000 devices, many of them involving a couple of giant global brands. Like most whale clients, Zynchro can't quite say who those are ... but have a listen, and it becomes fairly obvious.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Jose, thank you for joining me. I have heard about Zynchro, but we've never met, at least, I don't think so, and while I've heard about the company, I don't know a lot about it, and you're one of those companies that seems to be very active, quite successful, but kinda an old World War II submarine. You're running silent and deep. 

Jose Behar: Yes, we were silent for a long time. Even when my brother and I started a company 30 years ago, we started doing multimedia and CGI animation, and one of our ways to do business was to keep networking, being a little bit silent on the media, but having a lot of reputation among client to client, mouth to mouth. 

So if I bumped into you in an elevator, and I'm not in this business and asked, oh, what do you do? What does your company do? What would you tell them? 

Jose Behar: Zynchro is a digital signage platform SaaS, software as a service. So, our clients can use Zynchro for different kinds of applications and in a lot of vertical markets. Zynchro is not only a content manager. Maybe a lot of our clients, or the people that hear about us, look at us as content managers, but we have different modules. We now have four modules, and we are developing two more for health monitoring for all the players in the network. Also, analytics, all kinds of different analytics for interactive and non-interactive presentations. Of course, the content management, and we also have the campaign module. The campaign module is the monetizing area. 

One of our biggest clients is one the biggest retailers in the market. They are using this campaign module, and you can see different media and articles saying that they are making billions of dollars using their digital signage. and now all the stores and all their home office and some distribution centers are using our software to communicate and to control their digital signage. 

So the campaign manager is basically enabling a retail media network?

Jose Behar: That's right. The idea is creating a TV network where our clients can sell their advertising spaces, and they can have all the inventory and all the reports that they need in order to show their clients all the information. 

There are a hell of a lot of companies out there that do what you do. You've been at it for a very long time, three decades. What is it about what you do that differentiates it from the scores of other companies who have a pretty similar offer. Everybody has their unique aspects to it, but what is it about yours?

Jose Behar: We don't use other hardware or software APIs. For example, one of the players that we use is BrightSign, and we know all the insights of the player. We are able to be a standalone. We don't need their software to be useful. 

Another thing is that we are the owners of the intellectual property, and we develop everything completely. So our clients are able to ask us for different kinds of customizations, all kinds of customizations we have done with all of our clients, and connect directly to their systems or allow different kinds of peripherals. For example, right now, we were selected by Sony Semiconductor to integrate their AI camera Aitrios into our software as almost a plug and play. We are now the only software that can manage that and use that camera in digital signage without any additional development. 

So for BrightSign and for Sony as well, when you talk about not really relying on APIs and things like that, do you have your own specific operating system instead of working with BrightSign OS, or how does all that work? 

Jose Behar: In the case of BrightSign, we don't have an operating system because they have their own, but we can control the player without using almost any of their APIs, and only using their application, that is, an operating system. We are almost ready in about four to six weeks to release a new version for Android.

So we have a partnership with C Labs, the players that are based here in Dallas too, and in that case, we are more into the players. So we work in that sense more like an operating system, and we can control and do more things with that kind of open architecture instead of a closed architecture like BrightSign.

Is that a client, ask or demand that they want as much extraneous stuff and other hooks stripped out of it so that it's clean and therefore less of a risk security and stability wise? 

Jose Behar: Talking about stability and security, we have been proven to be the most robust and secure platform. That's why this client, that is one of the biggest retailers, but other clients that we have that are almost the same size don't have any issues regarding security or stability. They have even been looking for other platforms for redundancy, because in a critical income business like that, they can have another option in case something happens to Zynchro but Zynchro has been proving that it is more capable and it can show more data and more information to the clients than any other platform.

Even showing and controlling the displays, the TV with serial commands, all that kind of stuff we can do, and of course, again, because of our capability of customization, we can add or remove any of the functionalities that our clients are asking for. Until the pandemic, we had a client, the biggest one in Entertainment Parks, and they asked us to have a special administrator. So nobody can mess with the imaging, nobody can mess with the pictures or with the animations, because for them it's their brand. So they used our server for all the information in the resorts, in convention centers, and even transportation. All the bus transportation, they had connected Zynchro to their main source for all the bus routes, and if the buses were coming in time or not, connecting the buses in real time. 

One of our other clients, the Central Ohio Transport Authority, has connected our system to their own system where at the bus terminals and bus stations, they can show the different routes and if the bus is coming on time or not with GPS on the buses. So that's one of the biggest benefits. The other, I think the greatest benefit here is also our pricing, which is very competitive. 

At this moment, looking at the market, now we are, if not the least expensive, one of the less expensive in the market because we want to have long-term relationships, not only one-shot deals. 

The challenge, of course, with competing somewhat on price is how do you make money? 

If you're not charging all that much per software license, part of it's obviously about scale, but how do you address that?

Jose Behar: Two main things. One, as we are the owners, and we developed this 18 years ago. In the beginning, it was for the Windows platform. We are constantly creating new upgrades and updates in order to be more efficient and for the software to be more efficient as our operation to be most efficient and the second one is that the clients like the way we do support. 

In the market, one of the most costly areas is support. So what we do is to reduce the support infrastructure and the support area by creating well-tested software. And being almost perfectionist of course, we are going to have a problem some time and we are going to have some  problems. But with our software, we try to have a quality assurance and a testing phase that may be longer than any other software. But with that, we can offer almost a support free platform: a platform that is very easy to use and also so robust that the client needs almost no support. 

We are one of the only ones that don't have 24/7 support. We have Monday to Friday, 9-5 support with a ticket system and that’s it and even with worldwide clients, it has worked pretty well, so reducing that cost in support is one of the main things that we have achieved. 

You've understandably danced around the names and are only able to describe some of your larger clients. I get that the bigger the clients, the harder it is for them to give permission to talk about them and the last thing you wanna do is get on their bad side about doing that sort of thing. 

But can you give me some sort of sense of scale of the footprint of your installed base? 

Jose Behar: Right now, we are managing around 50,000 players in our network. 

50,000? 

Jose Behar: Yeah, and we're still growing. We are at different gas stations. One of the clients that I can mention is in Canada, Lexus-Toyota dealers. All the Lexus-Toyota dealers in Canada are using Zynchro for the different areas like the waiting room or the service parts and that kind of stuff. One of the clients that I can mention in order for you to see the different kinds of verticals is The Omnia nightclub at the Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. So they are using our software for this nightclub. But also all the big screens that you can see from the Vegas strip, talking about Omnia, are managed by Zynchro.

So you're all over the place. I mean nightclubs and theme parks and big mass merch retailers, and auto dealers. Do you have a vertical market that you focus on, or is it kinda more of a generalist offer? 

Jose Behar: Basically, right now, we are focusing on retail and hospitality, because principally, the monetizing tool is a tool that helps them a lot for self-pay projects or even generating a lot of income.

But as I always say to my new clients or prospects, if you are uploading an x-ray or you are uploading a JPEG with coffee, for us, it's only a picture, it's only a file, and the same with videos. So, the only thing that we need from the client is the specific requirements in order to show them how to use Zynchro, logistically speaking. 

We have a lot of functionalities, like Smart Groups. With the Smart Groups functionality, you can program Zynchro and all the content based on logical variables. So with that,, you can upload only content with tags and automatically Zynchro is going to program the content depending on your programming. For example, with distribution centers, the administrator of the distribution center can upload images with the tag “distribution center one”, and automatically Zynchro is going to deploy all the images. In that sense, talking about administration, we have unlimited users, so those users can be organized by a matrix with different kinds of permissions. So you can even have your advertising agency only with the permission to upload content, or you can have the marketing director only to approve content, different kinds of directors only to see reports in real time, or a full administrator that can do everything on the platform. 

In that sense, we have clients that use our content management services because they don't have the personnel to do it, so the advertising agencies and the headquarters send us all the content. Or we have other types of clients that have a specialist area where they manage all the content with their clients and sell the spaces.

What you offer is on a SaaS basis, right? 

Jose Behar: Yeah, we are SaaS based, but with an annual fee. 

With your larger clients, some of these “whale accounts”, are they also doing SaaS, or do you have a variation of an on-premise for them? 

Jose Behar: No. Because with that, we can be responsible for everything that is happening. We have experienced a lot of different issues in the past with having installed the server on premises where sometimes nobody takes the responsibility of any of the issues or it goes from the hardware to the server, software to the hardware, and with infinite meetings.

We prefer to take all the responsibility, and when we have an issue, it's better and easier to detect where the issue is. 

For your larger clients, I suspect that almost every week, there's some competing company trying to work their way into your deal. Basically, take you out.

How do you kind of address that with your clients? 

Jose Behar: Being the best, and always trying to do our best work solving their issues. One of the things that all our clients appreciate about us is that, as we are responsible for the whole network, we are able with our system to detect a lot of different issues, even with different kinds of hardwares, so our platform also can send automatic alerts via sms or emails, and we have developed different kinds of automated detecting and self-correcting functionalities. 

So each day, with every upgrade, we have fewer and fewer issues and our team that is in charge of detecting the different kinds of problems or issues is very specialized, and we have a long time doing this, so we have detected almost all the problems, and 90% of the problems in our experience are hardware related. And even though we are not in charge of the hardware, we are still able to detect even if a cable is broken. 

So in that sense, solving problems is the main thing that the clients like about us and being neutral as we don't sell hardware, we are not compromised to any brand. We are neutral and we can say anything and say everything that we need to say without compromising our commercial status.

Does your software stack work with smart displays like the Samsung Tizen OS and LG Web OS? 

Jose Behar: Last year, we launched the Tizen application. For the Tizen application, of course, because of the hardware we have different restrictions compared to a full player. But yes, we are now working with Tizen. 

That idea was also to save money for our clients. That is our mantra. Our mantra is to create an income or to save money for our clients. With Tizen and with the service they support, everything is about saving money, because they make a playlist or maybe only show very easy content so they don't need to buy a full installation of players and splitters or whatever, only a connected TV, and that's it. 

So with the support that we are offering, they are also saving a lot of money without sending surveys or people to every store or every area only to see if the system is working. We have been able to detect black screens and automatically report the black screens, even when in parallel with our software, we are trying to solve the issue with automated functionalities. 

It's interesting because a lot of people generally in the industry and more broadly, just in general, would look at some of these very large clients to think, they're not gonna be all out concerned about hardware costs and month to month subscription costs and things like that because they're making bags of money and they're so big, but, they got so big because they worry about every nickel and dime, right?

Jose Behar: Oh, of course. If you multiply only an SD card by thousands, you're gonna have to invest millions of dollars and with players or with even a cable, if you need HDMI cables, long cables with amplifiers or whatever, you're talking about millions of dollars, but it is also about buying the hardware, it also about the maintenance of the hardware. Once this hardware is installed, sometimes it's installed in an area that is difficult to access or is difficult for the IT department to be trained in a  timely manner.

Our first concern is always to have the correct installation. We also help our clients with defining all the engineering layouts so they can have the best maintenance through the years. We had some clients, for example, that at this time, they're not even able to change a player even though it’s a very old area because of the architecture of the area, so they are finding ways to do what they need to do without opening the wall for that kind of stuff. 

Sometimes these people, as you said, don't even think about the installation or what kind of resources they will need in the ongoing activities, like with only energy, we have been able to detect that going black in the stores when they close or at different times we are able to save them millions of dollars in only energy. And that's why we can also control the TVs and we can have all the information about the TV, because with the idea of the displays, we can know how many hours they have left or when they are gonna need to replace the display or the splitter or whatever.

You mentioned working with Sony Semiconductor earlier. What is that about? I believe it’s a computer vision system called Aitrios? 

Jose Behar: Aitrios is a camera that added the layer for AI, so with that camera, we can detect gaze and face detection, not recognition. Recognition at this moment is illegal, and you need a database for a lot of phases or whatever. 

The idea here is to have a detection for two objectives, the first one is to have a report about how many people are in front of the display, their gender, age and also where they are looking because they can be in front of the display, but looking the other way, and they are one of the first hardwares that also can catch a lot of people at the same time, not only one person. 

So one objective is to have those kinds of reports in order for decision makers to have more contentless content because sometimes they have to pay royalties for the content, but if they don't have a lot of people, and adding the analytics that we have with the clicks and all the information about the experience was used, they can make better decisions.

In my point of view, the best objective of that is reacting in real time. So you can trigger content based on your audience in real time. So if you have a male around 50 years old in front of the TV, and looking directly at the TV, you can program it to automatically trigger maybe a Black & Decker advertisement. But if it's a female around 30 years old, looking directly at the TV from a distance of four to five feet, you are going to trigger a female orientation advertisement. So, now, segmentation is the name of the game. So you have people at the store who are there to buy already, but if you can also show them something that it's segmented for, then it's more probable that they are going to buy it or get a promotion for.

So this is Sony Semiconductor as opposed to the Sony Pro Display Business unit. Do they work hand in hand on this, or is it a separate thing completely? 

Jose Behar: Right now, it's a completely separate thing, Aitrios and Bravia, but also we are starting talks with Bravia to integrate Zynchro into Bravia like we did with Tizen, Samsung.

Because I believe Sony has Android TV, I believe, right? 

Jose Behar: Yes, Bravia is based on Android, the commercial specs and we are looking into that, doing some research. In the future, we may be able to have both in the same application.

All right, so your company's in Dallas. Is everybody working out of a Dallas office, or are you dispersed? 

Jose Behar: No, we are completely dispersed. It was like 12 years ago that we decided to start doing home office for all the programmers. They like it more because they can be with their families and also for some of them, it's like their hobby. They love what they do, right? So sometimes they work at night or sometimes when their family is watching a movie or whatever, they're still working, and as we have a lot of developers in Mexico, the idea was to help them avoid traffic, to avoid criminal issues. There are a lot of security issues in Mexico, so between traffic and all the criminal stuff, their efficiency went up more than 30%. 

How many people are in the company now? 

Jose Behar: We are a team of twenty seven.

Wow. You've got some monster clients for a company that's in relative terms is quite small.

Jose Behar: The thing here is that we have a lot of experience developing since the beginning of multimedia touch screens. So we have a lot of experience developing programming and how to do things more efficiently. 

All right. It was great to finally have a chat and understand a bit more about your company. It's one of those ones I've heard about here and there, and now I know more, and as do our listeners. Thank you very much. 

Jose Behar: Thank you so much for the opportunity and for your time.

I appreciate it.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day.

I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter.

New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators.

Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators.

In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts.

It's a really interesting chat ...

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TRANSCRIPT

Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing? 

Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better. 

I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control.

And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards. 

I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life. 

So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm? 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the software piece of it, because these business operators are using a new tool, even business operators who have been doing it for 15 years, it's still relatively new to them. So being able to provide that layer of service and support underneath them, and when I say service and support, I'm not just saying, here's how to use our software. I'm talking about how to use this tool for your business. Here are the business opportunities for you. Here are the things that you can do with these tools. I think it's really important, and, for me, as part of the business, it's been a big focus, and I try to influence the software development to accommodate as much of that as possible and make it as intuitive as possible. But a lot of it is just working with business operators, so the service piece of it is really important. 

Where's the company based? 

Gregg Zinn: Our headquarters is in New York and I am based in Chicago. I moved to Chicago, just short of eight years ago. My wife's family is from Chicago. I was living in Chelsea in Manhattan, and my young sons are getting to school age and New York City is very challenging for raising children. We were living in 700 square feet in Chelsea and the truth is, it was fantastic. I love New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. But my wife's family is from the Chicagoland area, the suburbs of Chicago, and we decided to pick up and move here, and now instead of looking at concrete and windows, I'm looking at a lake. 

Yeah, it's good to have that relief valve as well, the in-laws and extended family where you can say, “hey, we need to do this, can you guys take the kids?” Plus they see more of their family. 

Gregg Zinn: It's incredible. We do Sunday dinners and I love having the family around and it's great for me, it's great for my boys and now they're getting on in their teen years and doing all that stuff and it's great to see them grow up in this environment.

I got in touch because I noticed on LinkedIn you posted a piece about Menu Board Mastery and I clicked through and had to look at it and I thought, oh, this is interesting because as somebody's been around digital signage as long as you, maybe not quite a few, mid 90s, I only got in late 90s, but nonetheless, we've both been around it a long time.

I know that menu boards can be done badly, but I tend to think they're done badly when they're eye charts and there's way too much stuff on there, or quite simply, they're just not working. But your Menu Board Mastery pieces take a look at the science of it and of layout and the thinking and everything else. So I thought that would make a great conversation to get into, first of all why you felt it useful to put this together and then get into some of the key tenets of it. 

Gregg Zinn: Really the thing is, I've had so many conversations with business operators, at all levels, and that could be from single location operators to multinational operators and all of them seem to struggle with putting a strategic foundation underneath the concept of what they're gonna display, and even this many years into it, many of them just see digital as a more efficient way to get their print menu up on the screen, and even when they were doing their print menu, I don't really believe that they were tapping into some of the core ideas of using this as an incredible marketing tool. 

When I look at digital menus, I think a digital menu should be your perfect salesperson. If you could have that person talking to that customer and guiding them through consuming from your restaurant in a way that is ideal for you, and ideal for them, having it be the perfect salesperson. I think that's really important, and a lot of businesses have struggled to do that. So I took a look at this, and I thought, what if I put a series together that takes very interesting, proven, scientific complex ideas and makes them highly practical? And this has really been a core philosophy for me since I was a teenager. 

When I first read BF Skinner's Beyond Friedman Dignity and David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, I became fascinated with how people interact with information and how behavior is impacted by communications, and those various tools and many boards are no different. So I thought about giving people some very practical ideas. I want to make this industry better, like ever since we started SmarterSign, I don't want to just have a great business in the industry. I want this industry to be important. I want this industry to really impact businesses and be indispensable as part of the complete operation for every business. Obviously that helps my business. But it also energizes me. It engages me. 

Another key piece of my philosophy has always been moving people from theory to practice as quickly and easily as possible. Nobody ever said theory makes perfect. Practice makes perfect and helps people move to practice practical ideas and I use the phrase, “Is this practical?” all the time. You can have all of these great ideas and all of these visions for what can be, and you can sit there and ruminate, but really, when it comes down to it, where the rubber meets the road is where value is created, and can you put this into practice was the vision behind this series.

The first article that you put out was about visual attention. When you talk about visual attention, what do you mean? Apart from the obvious. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and it's funny because there are some very obvious things, but there also are some well-studied scientific understandings about how people's eyes move in the interpretation of information and I think in the article, we point out two very well-known, established patterns of how people interact with information. 

There is the F-pattern of how your eyes scan information, and that is typically for menus or information that is very text rich, and your eyes go across the top and then they go down to the middle and then across a little bit more, and then they go down to the left hand side and understanding the way that people's eyes are gonna be moving across your information helps you prioritize where you put your information that's important to your business, and I want to talk about what information is important to your business because getting to businesses do not really know how to take advantage of this tool. I think this is a really important piece of it, and I am going to be writing an article about this, and it's been a big focus as well. 

But let me continue on with the other way that people interpret information, and that is The Golden Triangle, and it starts in the middle, moves to the upper right, moves to the left, and these two visual patterns have been proven time and time again with eye trackers and studies to see how people interpret visual information in front of them. The Golden Triangle is very helpful for highly visual menus, and really the key spot in that menu is that upper right hand corner. If you can put your really high value items in that upper right hand corner, you are going to see a change in your outcomes, for the better.

It's such an interesting thing, and this is part of getting back to why the series is here. I want to be able to provide tidbits of information like that to help businesses change their outcome, and obviously for the better. 

Is this something you discovered or you've known because you've had that interest for a very long time in it? I'm curious if you started working with QSRs and restaurant chains and advocated doing this, and then did the reading and found out, oh, there's actually a science behind this. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's really a mixture of both because I had studied these concepts, and they were very interesting to me, all the way back in the 90s. They were very interesting ideas to me. Even before that, managing behavior was always interesting to me. But as I started to work in the practical environment of working with businesses, I was able to apply those ideas and see how they impacted. So I was able to grow a clear understanding of how these ideas very specifically relate to these types of business problems.

So it has been a full circle since I was interested in it, I was able to apply it, and now I'm able to move and help businesses perfect it. 

So one of the things you get into is positioning, like what should go where and how you wanna have prime positions for your high margin items and signature items, that sort of thing.

I've not thought about that at all. I've just thought that companies just laid things out the way they laid out their print menus and didn't really think too much about that stuff, or maybe they don't. 

Gregg Zinn: Many of them don't think about it and actually very early on, working with businesses, 2006-2007, I had come up with this idea called The Prominence Pyramid. The idea behind The Prominence Pyramid was to help businesses identify. What are the most important menu items on your menu? And most businesses couldn't identify it. I was really surprised to walk into the c-suites of large organizations and ask them very simple questions about what are the most important items on their menu and they were not able to answer that. 

But we would guide businesses through this process of putting items on a pyramid, say at the top of the pyramid. These are the most important items for you, and they're the most important for top line revenue. They're the most important for margin, they're the most important in terms of branding and customer experience, and those are the items that should have prominence within your visual space because they're the ones that are gonna help push your business forward.

There are so many moving parts to this as we're moving forward, and as AI has become part of the mix of tools, it's a very exciting time for me because I feel like we can use these tools to help give insights very quickly to businesses using real data using, using these known scientific ideas to help them get these ideas in front of them, and then once you know that, once you know what should be presented in these prominent areas in the visual space, then you could do things like change the sizing, change the coloring, add boxes around them, animate those sections, put little tags, customer favorites. 

Actually, we have a customer who just did this who just did this. He wanted to promote this one item, so we put a tag that said “Customer favorite” and sales immediately increased on this item. So we know that these tools can help change business outcomes. It's just a matter of helping businesses get there. And I think this series is gonna help people get there in bite-sized movements. 

So when you talk about things like prime positions, that's in your F-pattern or Golden Triangle, there's certain positions that are gonna be optimal. That's where the eye goes naturally? 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that these are actually things, but they've proven, studied, scientifically that this is the way eyes move to interpret information. 

So some of the other variables, and you've already mentioned it, are things like white space and borders around stuff, contrast, the font size. 

To me, being a knucklehead and not really spending a lot of time talking about QSRs, I just see ones where I can't read this, and my eyesight's assisted, but when I've had my glasses on, it's 2020, and I still struggle to read it. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it drives me crazy and I don't know if you have seen this, but I can send you a link to it. I had done a series called the Digital Menu Board Scorecard, and it was an evaluation of menu boards in the wild, not necessarily SmarterSign customers. But menu boards that we had seen, we'd take pictures of them, and we'd break down what are they were doing well, what are they doing poorly and we give them a score on a number of characteristics like branding, layout, organization, and actually, it's funny, just last week I was in the airport and I saw a menu from a pretty big QSR, and I just thought: Who made this menu? This is just terrible. 

I won't mention their name because I don’t want to get in trouble. 

When you did the scorecard, were you handing out as many “A”s? 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there were some As, there were few, very few, but every once in a while we'd come across a menu board where the business had a really good balanced sense of brand presentation, strategic organization, overall design, effectiveness of the menu to get people to order. That's actually one of the key things when you look at menus. Outside of getting their attention, it is how quickly can you get somebody through the process of making a decision and this is particularly true for digital drive-through, has been a real focus and we've seen some really interesting things done in that realm.

For example, having the menu change at 8:00 PM to be a more limited menu on the drive-through, so that it changes the operations from a kitchen point of view, but also gets people through the line quicker. 

One of the questions I wanted to ask was, is the thinking and the layouts and everything else different between the screens over the counter, the screens in a self-service ordering kiosk, and then the screens in the drive-through?

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, absolutely, and if you look at our customers who are doing interior menu boards and exterior menu boards, the layouts, the structures, the approach to the menus are different. It's just different. It's a different mind frame. It's almost a different form factor in many cases because a lot of times the drive through's gonna be portrait, and many times the interior board's gonna be landscape. 

But the whole business mission is really different, and taking advantage of what each of those environments do better. We don't do any touchscreen ordering. I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of it. I'm old school. So when I go into a sandwich shop, I want to talk to the person who is going to be able to take down my details of what I want, and I want to be able to say them and have them articulate that to the kitchen. Personally, I find it very difficult to do the touchscreen ordering and get that right and have the same level of customer experience.  AI is gonna change that because AI is going to somehow offer voice to AI ordering, which will take some of that UI cloudiness out of the mix.

You mentioned AI. I'm curious about computer vision and the idea that, I've heard this said, I don't know what it is really being done in-store. I've heard about it in drive-throughs, but dynamically adjusting menus based on the profile of the people who are approaching the counter.

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there's a few things that we've been working with in terms of studying, how this can be done in an effective way. It's a highly strategic concept and, as I mentioned earlier, businesses are really just struggling to translate their static menu to a digital menu in a very strategic way, but we're pushing this forward, and there are other technologies. 

There's license plate reader technology for drive-throughs where the same car is coming through, and you could tie it to their past consumption and we're gonna get there, and I think with AI, we're gonna get there much quicker and I'm super happy about that. Because I have been sitting in the running blocks waiting for the gun to go off and I'm excited about what AI means to accelerate some of this progress. 

When you started, almost 20 years ago now, APIs were known but they weren't widely available and I suspect it was very difficult to talk to a restaurant about actually jacking into their restaurant management systems in any way, but we're now in a very different world, and that's all possible. 

Is it being done? And how do you best leverage that other than the very simple stuff like price changes in the store system, you want to automatically change on the screen?

Gregg Zinn: Right now the two primary mechanisms that are interacting, that operating data with the marketing data on menu boards, are price changes. So having the POS system be the source of that price, that's your operating data, and that operating data points should be filtered through to your menu boards. You shouldn't have to manage it in two pieces. 

The second piece is inventory. We work with a lot of customers who run out of individual products, and that creates frustration for the customer, and it creates frustration for the person taking the order. So having the ability to show that something's currently sold out, is something that we're seeing being used. Again, this comes down to: Can so much more be done? Yeah, so much more can be done. 

But getting over that, what should be done, as opposed to what can be done. It's also part of my core philosophy is, a lot of things can be done, but only some things should be done. So we've stayed away from novelty. We've stayed away from a lot of the things that people are saying, whoa, what about this? What about that? We try to keep it as practical as possible. But we're gonna see a big shift. I don't know if you know the company Palantir. I love Palantir as a company. I love what their vision for using AI is. People ask me questions about it all the time because I'm in technology. People ask me about AI people who are late, not in the technology industry, and late people, and I always point to Palantir as somebody who is an applied AI company. They're using the data to determine what should be done as opposed to what could be done and I think they're doing a really great job of it. They're really leaders in that space. Now, they're not menu boards, but I do follow what they're doing because I think that they're very innovative in terms of how they're looking at the connection between data operations, real world and practical application.

In my years doing consulting, I've done quite a bit with some big companies, but the only QSR I worked with was a coffee chain and when I went in to start working with them, they talked about a bunch of things and I asked them about menu boards and takeovers, which I had seen in some of their stores where all of the menus went away and they had a tiled piece of creative, pedaling a particular promoted product and they said that they did some interview intercepts with customers and pretty uniformly the customer said, stop screwing around, just show me the damn menu, and I've since been in a number of restaurants where I had to wait for the menu items that came up because they were promoting something or other on the screen for 5-10 seconds and it irritated the living hell out of me.

Is it something you advocate? Just get to the point; don't try to be fancy here. Forget the video, just show me the items and pricing. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, intuitively for me, that customer response is obvious. They're trying to interact with a piece of data to place an order, and then all of a sudden it's gone and they're waiting. They have no idea how long it's gonna be before it comes back, and then they've gotta go find their spot on the menu again. So intuitively for me, we have always guided people against it. We've had customers asked to do it. Of course, our platform can do it. But it is not a good idea.

Now, that being said, with digital menu boards and you've seen them in QSRs, there's a lot of visual space, so you can use a portion of that visual space to do those kinds of marketing techniques. One of the really interesting things that we had seen, so we did an observational study of a food court, working with a customer who had a restaurant, a pizza restaurant, and a food court. We did an observational study, and we saw that nobody looked up at the menu when they came over to the counter to order. They didn't care about the pricing, they didn't care about anything. They never looked up. But the menu boards were not being used properly to get people over to their restaurant as a choice.

So what we recommended was: these really aren't digital menu boards in so much as they're digital billboards, and you need to use these as a “come eat pizza” sign, as opposed to thinking of it as a digital menu board. So we used some of the visual space as a “come eat pizza”, and we were able to draw some of that audience thinking maybe they'd go get Chinese food or Chipotle or another option over to them. So that's another way where you can impact outcomes by using the visual space as opposed to just menu boards. 

What do you do with restaurants? I think about one up here, Tim Horton's here in Canada that started out doing coffee and donuts and pastries and now does endless kinds of food items, and they've got a menu list that's far longer than it was when the chain first started. 

What do you do when you have customers who have like 40 SKUs and you've only got so much real estate on a screen? 

Gregg Zinn: It's a big challenge, and it's a funny thing because, when I look at operations like that, I've never run a restaurant, but when I think of the ideal process to get customers through and order your food, I think of a business like In and Out Burger. They've got a very specific menu. People come there for those items. They love those items. 

We have a lot of customers who have these extensive menus. I don't love it from an operations point of view, but from a presentation of the menu point of view, it's a matter of just being very organized in how you present that information so that you are able to get that broad menu into somebody's eyes, get them to where they want to order. If they want something that's savory as opposed to something sweet, get their eyes to that. 

A good example of that is Dairy Queen has a pretty extensive menu, and they've got food and ice creams and just being able to segment that out. So on their drive-throughs, for example, we do a number of franchisees for Dairy Queen. On their drive-throughs, they've got one complete panel, that's just their sweet treats. They've got a middle panel that is promotion, key promotional items, LTOs and things like that, and then they have a right screen that is their savory items, their burgers and sandwiches and hot dogs and things. 

The post that you have up right now about this Mastery series has to do with price anchors. That's not a term I know much about. What do you mean by that? 

Gregg Zinn: It's another behavioral technique where you can establish a baseline in a customer's mind by putting an item that you don't really expect anybody to consume, but what it does is it creates a mental baseline of price expectation, so that you can have them pay a premium price for that second level item, without feeling like this is too expensive. So it really is a decoy. It’s like look over here, this item is $30, but here's a really good value item at $22.

It's so interesting to me because particularly in the past five years, pricing's gotten outta control, and, for so many reasons. Supply chain issues, obviously going back to 2020 with Covid but pricing has gotten crazy, and my favorite burger place in New York City, actually where I got engaged, when I got engaged, the burger was, yeah, I'm a huge burger guy, but it was my second date with my wife. We went there, and we're both burger people, and that's where I proposed ultimately. 

You got engaged on our second date? 

Gregg Zinn: Oh, no, we went on our second date to this burger place. Seven years later, we got engaged, but in that same spot, but the burger was like $6 at that point, and now it's like 18. 

Oh, for God's sake. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and even the QSRs I go into sometimes, and I just think, who could afford $60 for a family of four?  It just doesn't seem like an affordable approach and I will tell you that from a pricing strategy point of view, all of the QSRs are recognizing this, and they're trying to adapt.

We're already out of time, but I wanted to ask one more question, just around when you're going into a new customer and you start talking about what we've just discussed, kind of the science and the thinking behind it, are minds a little bit blown because they're wanting to do digital menu boards because it's a pain in the ass to change the print ones, and they haven't thought much beyond that?

Gregg Zinn: We take it slow. It's been over 20 years and we’ve learned you can't just go in gangbusters and put all of these ideas in their heads about what's possible because it'll just confuse the situation. So we go slow with our customers. We meet them where they are.

Fix the first obvious problem, and then you can go from there.

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and I've said it a number of times in this call if it's not practical, it can't be done. 

All right. This was great. If people wanna find out more about SmarterSign and read these articles, they can find 'em on smartersign.com. 

Gregg Zinn: They can, yeah. All the articles are there.

In the resource section, right?

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and we've got a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel, of course, posting on other social channels like LinkedIn. But yeah, the primary source would be on smartersign.com. 

Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir. 

Gregg Zinn: Yeah, thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you and re-meeting you again.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The next plus-sized pro AV trade show on the annual calendar is InfoComm, coming up in mid-June in, yuck, Orlando, Florida.

I'm always curious about what will be new and different with the show, and that's particularly the case in 2025, because there's a new person running things.

Jenn Heinold joined show owner/operator AVIXA late last year as the Senior VP Expositions, Americas, so for the last several weeks she's been in drinking-from-the-firehose mode as she learns more and more about the industry, ecosystem and how people think about and use InfoComm.

Heinold is a lifer in the trade show business, and while she has run tech-centric trade shows, pro AV is new to her.

We had a really good conversation that gets into her impressions and thoughts about the industry, her perspective on ISE, the AVIXA co-owned sister show, and plans for what will be her first InfoComm in June - including what will be different and new.

We also get into what, if anything, will be affected by all the trade and geopolitical turmoil that's bubbled up since the US presidency had its four year shuffle.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Jenn, thank you very much for coming on. You've been on the job for how long now? 

Jenn Heinold: I've been with AVIXA for just over three months. I joined in December as the Senior Vice President of Expositions for the Americas, and I'm over InfoComm in the U.S., which will be June 11th through the 13th in Orlando, Florida and then I'm also responsible for our new InfoComm America Latina launch event, which will be in October in Mexico City. 

Did you know anything about the Pro AV sector before you got involved? 

Jenn Heinold: No, honestly. I ran the largest satellite technology show in the U.S. for 15 years. So I've worked in technology, but Pro AV is different and I find myself now everywhere I go looking for display screens and how audio sounds. It's so fascinating how quickly you become immersed within the industry and you notice that it's everywhere and it makes our experiences better. 

You'll be a display nerd in no time. 

Jenn Heinold: I'm working on it.

So have you always been in the trade show business? 

Jenn Heinold: I have, yes, I dedicated my career to trade shows. I am super passionate about what happens in a face-to-face environment. I love the serendipity of it. I love that what I do helps businesses grow. The community aspect is amazing, right? Bringing people together with a common goal or challenge. The education that we can provide at trade shows. You can do a month's worth of meetings in three days. You can do a trip around the world in three days in some cases, right? 

So I just love the format and really believe in what it can do for businesses and I'm excited to produce InfoComm.

Because you had some background working with technology trade shows, has there been much of a learning curve? Setting apart the obvious that there are different companies and all that, but I guess their needs aren't all that dissimilar, are they? 

Jenn Heinold: No, I think the commonality in working on technology shows is that you have the same structure where there are channel partners that are working to sell and integrate products, but then you also have all of the end users who use a specific technology. So I think it's important for us to be a forum for both Pro AV as well as our end-user audiences, and make sure that they each are fulfilled and feel welcome at the show and find value in the show. 

You went to Integrated Systems Europe a few weeks ago, I saw you there. That was your first big Pro AV trade show, I assume, and I'm curious about your impressions. 

Jenn Heinold: Oh, gosh, I was blown away by ISE. How could you not be? But for me, I was just so impressed by what the exhibitors did on the show floor. They really pulled out all the stops for ISE and the energy is amazing. It was so valuable for me to see the technology all together in real life, and then also to be able to meet with exhibitors here directly to know what are your strategic priorities for 2025 and beyond. Who should I be focusing on making sure that I have at the show, so it's the best for our exhibitors and our attendees alike? 

I'm sure you were walking around with people like your boss Dave Labuskes both at ISE and InfoComm. Did you get some sense that ISE is its own thing? InfoComm runs differently. Yes, there are the same vendors and everything else, but apart from the obvious of Barcelona versus Orlando or Las Vegas, it does do things differently in some respects, at least.

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, absolutely. I unfortunately don't yet have the comparison for InfoComm. I know what our plans are and what we're focusing on. ISE clearly has an amazing global footprint and InfoComm, while it is international, does skew a little bit more to North America just based on the location. 

I think we at InfoComm have a much more training program and educational offering, which I really think is valuable. We need to not only nurture our current workforce and make sure that they have all the tools they need to succeed, but focus on the next generation as well, and I'm really proud that InfoComm does that.

One of the things about ISE, as you said, there's not as much of a focus on training, there are certainly conferences and things like that, but it's more aimed at end users. 

Do you find that you're getting exhibitors and other people saying, hey, it would be great if we had more end users if there was more kind of focus on that part of it, as opposed to, I sometimes refer to InfoComm is something of a gearhead show, and I don't mean that negatively, but it attracts the people who are going to go look at things like cable connectors and mounting infrastructure and so on and stuff that maybe somebody who's an experiential designer for a creative tech shop maybe doesn't care that much about.

Jenn Heinold: Yeah. I will say that for 2025, we definitely are emphasizing the end-user audience. They are a key segment for us. Actually, one of the first things I did within my first week, Dave, was look at our end-user segments and compare what groups naturally grew when we were in Orlando versus Las Vegas, right? Just who organically was coming to the show and what I saw was a big increase in education when we're in Orlando, house of worship, retail, restaurants, and hospitality. None of this probably surprises you, but as we built out our marketing campaign, we've decided to really double down our investment on those segments that are organically growing in Orlando.

I grew up in trade shows and marketing, so this has really been a passion project for me. Making sure that we have the right audience in InfoComm 2025 is my number one priority and I had to prioritize when I started at AVIXA so I had six months to really execute the show. So if there is one thing that I'm focused on day in and day out, it's the audience at InfoComm this year.

When you say audience, are you hearing from exhibitors that they want to see more I end users or they want to see more partners because I think of an InfoComm as being a hyper-efficient way for a manufacturer to have a touch with a whole bunch of existing and potential resellers, and maybe not as worried about having like General Motors or some big retailer walking around. 

Jenn Heinold: I hear both, Dave, and I think distributors and integrators are a super important part of the ecosystem, just as the end users are. We are putting more end users on Stage on the show floor this year, as well as within our conference program and I think, having the end users talk about how they are using AV technology only drives more end users to come to the show. That's what they want to hear, right? Uses cases of how they had successful installations, and how they have better employee engagement because of their conferencing and collaboration tools. We've got some retailers actually who will present how they're deploying AV technology in their stores, and what it's doing to improve their business. So we are making a real focus on that piece along with, of course, all the traditional content and certification we offer for the gearheads, as you said.

I assume that's a bit of a tactic as well in, that if you invite, the Head of Digital for a big bank or big retail or whatever it may be to the show to do a speaking gig, there's a decent chance he or she is gonna bring some other people with them and then you've got people with big bank on the name tag walking around the show and you're able to talk about, look at the kinds of companies we're attracting.

Jenn Heinold: That's absolutely a tactic. The other tactic is when we market to these end-user segments, and they go to our website, perhaps cold, having not really known much about InfoComm, and they see like-minded people on the website speaking, they realize it's an event for them too. 

When you got involved, was there a discussion about how are things working right now? The old line about, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? Or were there things that you were told that are where we would like to grow, here's like where we would like to change things, that sort of thing? 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I mentioned some of the deep dive I took into the show data when I first started. I also read the last five or so years' Exhibitor and Attendee Surveys. In reading those, one thing that bubbled up was just the onsite experience overall, and it is hard when you compare a U.S.-based show to an ISE at the Fira Barcelona is lovely and the food options are really healthy and great, and, unfortunately, we're a little bit behind in the United States on those things, but we are making 

It's mind-blowing. 

Jenn Heinold: It is a little embarrassing sometimes, but, I will tell you, I have already met with the team in Orlando. I actually was there about three weeks ago and talked about how we want to upgrade the food and beverage experience, have healthier options, and have more seating. So you will see an upgrade in the onsite experience as well. 

That's something that we've done mindfully. When you have a better experience, you want to spend more time on the show floor, right? So, there's definitely another strategic priority for us. 

Might as well talk about it now, I, people like me would be very happy if we never went to Orlando or Las Vegas again, and in the past, long before your time, InfoComm did move around a little bit. I remember the first one I went to was in Anaheim, and then it got in this rota of, back and forth between Orlando and Las Vegas. 

Is that a finite thing or is that just how things are going to be? 

Jenn Heinold: I don't think it's finite. The reality is InfoComm can fit in about five convention centers in the United States based on its size and Orlando and Vegas are two of them. Chicago could be an option, Atlanta, and New Orleans might work, but there are just not that many venues that can hold a show of our size, and also where the cities have the infrastructure to host us, so we are a little hamstrung that way. 

I'm not opposed to looking at other cities. I think when we look at different cities, of course, we look at the cost structure. We look at the audience that is within a couple of hundred-mile radius and how accessible it is for air travel and everything else. I'm not opposed to it. We do have quite a few years booked already for Orlando and Las Vegas, but it's definitely something that I'm looking into. 

If you come to the show, you'll see a lot of questions about our future cities and where we might be in the post-show survey, because it's something that I'd like to look into in the future.

You've only been with AVIXA for three to four months, so you don't have a reference point for last year, but I'm going to ask anyway, what's going to be different this year with the show? 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I mentioned our focus on the audience. That is a big priority for us. We always do local tours where you're able to see Avian Action. But this year I'm really proud that we're in Orlando. We've got a few new tours added to the schedule. One is, the Cirque de Soleil show behind the scenes in Disney Springs. We are going back to the University of Central Florida. We're also doing a large mega-church in Orlando for a house of worship tour. So we've added some fresh content there. 

We also have a brand new panel discussion that we're launching this year called 2030 Vision. It will be moderated by Dave Labuskes, and we've got three visionaries from our industry, plus an end user up on stage to talk about what Pro AV look like in 2030, and what are the factors shaping our market. Our visionaries will be from Shure, Crestron, and Diversified. I'm really excited about having some different content models at InfoComm. 

I talked earlier about the upgraded experiences. Again, we're really being mindful about making the event more comfortable and enjoyable to be a part of.

I think in the last couple of years, AVIXA has really put a push on AVIXA Exchange and AVIXA TV. So I get a sense there's a lot more effort to educate the ecosystem and also use very modern ways to do it. It's not just the written word and case studies and so on. You're doing a lot of proper broadcast studio on-site at ISE and I assume probably something similar at Orlando. 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, absolutely. We'll have our AVIXA TV studios. The coolest thing about that, beyond being able to watch some of the interviews as they are recorded live, is that you get to see a fully functional broadcast studio on the show floor, right? You get to see how technology converges. It's not about just one box. It's about the whole solution and being able to present the whole solution is really special for us. 

We've also got three stages. You mentioned AVIXA TV, that's more of a campfire format, right? So huddle around, and talk about different challenges that we're facing. We have our technology innovation stage which is really about highlighting new products that are coming to market and then we have our innovation Spotlight Stage and with the Spotlight Stage, we will have some exhibitors presenting thought leadership, but we also have some content partners there like Digital Signage Federation Plaza. We'll talk about lighting and staging. IABM will focus on the broadcast market opportunity and specifically the intersection of broadcast AV and IT. And FutureWorks who will talk about content creation. 

Are you getting into some areas that - I saw at ISE that I didn't have enough time to really get over there and look at any, but it's enough just to get through those four days - but things like drones? 

Jenn Heinold: We don't have a dedicated section of the show floor for drones. But certainly, there is some content about the use of drones projection mapping, and other applications. 

What about the digital signage side? Through the years, AVIXA at InfoComm has tried to do “digital signage” pavilions, zones, and all kinds of things, and then in the last two to four years, I'm not sure of the number, you've worked with the Digital Signage Federation on a conference day called D Sign. Is that being replicated this year? 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, that'll return and we also have some content with Invidis who will cover a lot of digital signage as well so it's still a huge focus for us as part of the show.

One of the attempts has always been to try to create an area thematically around it, but I've always told people that's super difficult because there are exhibitors who've been at that show for 10-20 years, and they have their spot. So it's hard to just say, okay, all of you digital science companies, you go over here, the audio people maybe do.

Jenn Heinold: Yes. We don't have a dedicated pavilion for digital signage, but it gets back to our conversation earlier, Dave, I think it's a little bit less about one very specific piece of technology and more about the larger application and I think that's where our industry is going, and that's why really we can't box in those digital signage providers, right? Because they're doing so much more than just just a digital signage display. 

Yeah, and that applies to just about any discipline these days that everything is cross-pollinating. 

Jenn Heinold: Yes. So I think you'll see certainly some applications come to life at InfoComm 2025 and it'll be an even bigger part of our event design for 2026 where we are already having those conversations around what Infocomm 2026 looks like, which is really exciting.

There was some noise at ISE around some of the major exhibitors, like notably Samsung, suggesting that they're not going to be at the show, that they're pulling their big stand, and this and that, and those were swatted down at the time, but I'm curious where that's at. 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I personally speak to Samsung about every other week and they will be participating at InfoComm 2025. Will it be in the large booth presence that they have had in the past? Quite frankly, no, but, they will be there. They will have products on display. We welcome them and we're working with them to find the right marketing solution for what their needs are today and into the future as well.

I find that weird because they had a massive presence at ISE and you would think they want to be there and if they're just doing whisper rooms, that sort of thing, it seems an odd decision. Is there something behind that? I read stuff about Korean politics or whatever, Korean government stuff that may be in the way of it.

Jenn Heinold: I think that's a better question for them to answer, certainly, but they will do more than just a whisper room. They will have a presence at the show and we're working with them very closely on that. And they've been great partners. We want to continue to partner with them in a way that's mutually beneficial to both.

Of course. Are you seeing some new exhibitors? Again, I respect that this is all new to you, but, some significant exhibitors coming into the InfoComm that maybe didn't do in the past. 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I'm seeing, some more kiosk manufacturers. We're hearing more and more about that. Retail seems to be a really big end-user segment. That's a priority. We Just signed up AWS and they're bringing their equivalent of the Fire Stick for digital signage to the show. So those applications are fun to see and new for us. 

We are always looking at a little bit of AI technology, we're always looking to make sure that we're introducing new and innovative technology to the show floor and one of the most fulfilling things for me is when you see those new tech come in and they might come in a 10 x 10 in the far corner of the hall and then they work their way there, work their way up, and have a bigger and bigger presence.

Does your team do much coaching for some of the overseas exhibitors? 

I'm particularly thinking about Chinese LED manufacturers who show up at these shows and it's always been a source of frustration and bewilderment for me that they'll spend a lot of money to bring all their tech over and bring a bunch of people over, and then when I wander into their booths and start asking questions, they don’t tend to have many, if any people who can speak much in the way of English.

So do your people coach them by saying, “Guys, if you're gonna do this, here's our advice!” 

Jenn Heinold: We do. 

It doesn't necessarily work? 

Jenn Heinold: We do and we also try to help our exhibitors with their marketing campaigns and how to promote their presence at the show, and how to save money. A lot of the services are deadline-driven and talk through all of those things. 

Yeah, we do that. We partner with sales agents as well that are in the country and we encourage them to work with their exhibitors as well as to coach them on exhibiting. I don't know if that is not necessarily working, but I do think it's a longer process because there are so many elements that tie into that.

Yeah, and it's not easy to if you're in Shenzhen or Beijing or whatever, you just logically don't have a whole bunch of English-speaking people, but, I guess it's not that easy either to hire interpreters to come over and get questions thrown at them about chip on board and pixel pitch and things like that the interpreter is not going to understand either. 

Jenn Heinold: That can be a challenge. We hire some interpreters for our own staff to help interact. And, yeah, it definitely can be a challenge. I do think we are so close. You travel internationally. I travel internationally and with Google Translate and so many new AI tools, I feel like we are so close to really having some breakthrough moments with that though. It's so much easier now. 

Like the Facebook glasses, and there's some other ones out there where they can do real-time translation and it'll just show up on the lens, which would be amazing for just about anything I do once I leave this country or leave this continent.

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I see it too. I'm hopeful that'll really transform our shows. 

I have to ask about the current political and economic climate with tariffs and everything else. How are AVIXA and InfoComm navigating their way through some of that? 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, I think it certainly comes up quite often. I mentioned that was doing a trip in South America, Mexico last week, and I think it's a concern for our exhibitors, and what we can do is just help support their efforts. I feel really confident that our exhibitors know how to run their business and know how to do it well, and they will pivot and make adjustments I have studied the AV industry over the last few months, having joined AVIXA and having seen how our industry navigated COVID and having worked for an organization that had multiple trade shows prior where I saw a lot of industries not navigate COVID as well as the AV industry, I'm super impressed with how agile and smart our exhibitors are. 

I think this is just another challenge that we face. I have every confidence that we'll be able to navigate this too. 

Do you have any sense of companies deciding, given everything that's going on, really don't want to travel to the U.S. right now? 

I'm Canadian, so I suspect there's a whole bunch of people north of the U.S. border who are having second thoughts about, okay, do I really want to go to Florida right now or in June with all this stuff about Canada being the 51st state and so on.

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, so right now, we haven't had a lot of pushback on traveling to the United States. We have been able to maintain the exhibitors on our show floor, but it's certainly something that I'm watching very closely. 

As a show organizer, I do think it's our job to make sure that everyone feels welcome and that's what I'm focusing on. 

Yeah, I think most Canadians like me, I’ve got a bazillion friends in the U.S. and I would miss them and everything else and I don't think they're the ones who are stirring the pot here. So it's just unfortunate. 

Jenn Heinold: Yes, absolutely. 

We'll just leave it at that, right? 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah. 

So tell me about Mexico City. I'm curious how you guys, not really rationalize that, but you have to counterbalance that. Okay. If you do a show in Mexico City for LATAM, does that siphon away some of what is in InfoComm US? 

Jenn Heinold: I wasn't part of the initial launch conversations, but I will tell you having managed regional portfolios of shows, in my past life and now being part of a regional portfolio show, I really think that all ships rise with the tide, Dave, and having an event in the country and more specifically, the In the native language and being able to serve that community who may not be able to travel will only lift up and put calm in the U.S. as well. So I'm really excited about it. 

The pride that the local community feels to have InfoComm in their backyard is really palpable and energizing. I'm proud that we're able to do the regional event, and I do think that it'll feed even more of the audience to InfoComm in the U.S. because in many ways it's a great introduction to the brand and we can say, now you experience this and please come to the U.S.  show as well. 

Finally, I'm curious how things are tracking. I know that with ISE, I heard probably eight weeks out or something like that, it was going to be very busy, probably break records, and so on. I'm curious about what you're hearing or tracking for Orlando and also for Mexico City although I know Mexico is well out. 

Jenn Heinold: Yeah, so for Orlando, our show floor is about 95 percent sold. We're targeting around 410,000 net square feet of exhibit space and for registrations, we're targeting 40,000 which is back to pre-pandemic numbers.

Right now we're pacing really well. I'm watching it very closely, of course, and I'd love to check-in with you a little closer to the event and be able to share since we still have a few months to go. But all the indicators are really good for InfoComm in the U.S. We actually just added some hotel room nights because we were getting full with the hotels we're seeing our website traffic, pretty significantly year over year. We have to look at the full picture, but there are some really positive early indicators for InfoComm. 

It's probably a bit too early to know much about Mexico City, right?

Jenn Heinold: Mexico City's registration will open up in June, actually at InfoComm in the U.S. We've sold about 80% of the show floor. It's a much smaller show floor than InfoComm in the U.S., but I'm really happy with the early interest from exhibitors and support from the local community. We're hoping for about 5,000 attendees in Mexico City.

All right. Thank you very much for giving me an update. 

Jenn Heinold: Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The UK-based research and advisory firm Futuresource Consulting sends a big team every year to the ISE trade show in Barcelona, and then a few weeks later releases a big report that serves as a technical recap for the pro AV community - both for people who could not attend, and for people like me who did, but didn't have anywhere near enough time to see everything.

The 2025 report is out now and the good news is that it is a free download - a departure for a company that produces detailed reports that are typically paywalled and tend to cost at least four figures.

In this podcast, I chat with Ted Romanowitz, a principal consultant focused mainly on LED, and Morris (or Mozz) Garrard, who heads the pro displays file and looks more at LCD and OLED. We get into a bunch of things in a too-short 30 minute interview. You'll hear about mass-transferred Chip On Board tech. Where Chip On Glass, also known as MicroLED, is at. And we also get into LCD, OLED, e-paper and projection.

Have a listen.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Ted and Morris, thank you for joining me. You guys are from Futuresource Consulting. 

Every big trade show, like an ISE or an Infocomm and some other ones as well, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with, Futuresource sends a whole bunch of people to these shows. I'm curious how many people at Futuresource are on the pro display file, and why do you go to trade shows like ISE? 

Morris Garrard: Dave, I'm glad to jump in. Thank you again for your time today, and looking forward to tossing with you. Overall, we took nearly 20 analysts and business development people to ISE which shows Futuresource’s commitment to the trade show and our clients, specifically the Pro AV, we took four analysts, and I'm on the consulting and advisory side, so we had a really good representation across all the technologies: projection, flat panel, interactive, and LED. 

I assume the reason that you go is it's a very efficient way to see a whole bunch of new stuff and touch base with a whole bunch of companies under one roof in a matter of days.

Morris Garrard: Oh, absolutely. For me, it's just always, you walk in and you hit that Hall 3 where a lot of the display companies are, and it's just. Like that first impression you go, oh my gosh, here we are. How am I gonna do all this? 

It's always nice. I always start at the Lang booth because they always do a nice job of having that big wow something right there at the major intersection.

Yeah, they've done well with that. One thing about Futuresource is that the great majority of the material you put out is understandably paywalled. That's your business, you're producing subject matter expertise reports and selling them. So I'm always a bit curious about a complete 180 with these post-show reports. They're very detailed, there are many pages, and it's almost boy, that's more than you needed to do.

Morris Garrard: Yes, I think it's, this year was something between 40 and 50 pages to cover the many, different areas of our practices, but, yeah, we think it adds value to our clients to see the latest and greatest, what's happening and not just a reporting of this product announcement or that product announcement, but it provides the context of what's really happening the undercurrents and the, big stories, the technology transitions, if you will, that are happening that are driving shifts in the industry. That kind of helps us open doors with clients to have deeper Engagements with them based on our unique insights. 

Ted Romanowitz: I think just to add to that as well is we don't produce these show reports solely for the benefit of our clients. We also work with an extensive research network that benefits from these show reports, as well as other industry bodies that we work with, like trade associations, for example, and our channel partners as well. 

It's a way, obviously, that you're getting driving awareness of the sort of work that you guys do and what is possible behind the paywall. 

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly that. Yeah. It's a brilliant opportunity to raise our profile and also to raise the profile of the analysts working within these product sectors as well.

So we're already four minutes in, and I've got about half an hour to chat with you guys. So we should dive straight into some of what you saw and came away with, and I would say that the biggest thing is probably LED in the context of pro display, anyway. So let's skip past audio and some of those other areas.

You talked a lot in the report about mass transfer chips on board. Can you, first of all, describe what that is? Because we're in an industry that's overwhelmed by acronyms and why they're important, and what's the distinction? Why are you saying mass transferred when you're processing COB with mass transferred?

Ted Romanowitz: Yes, and not only are there a lot of acronyms, Dave, but the problem is that terms are being misused, and I've heard you talk about that a little bit. It's a really strategic inflection point that's happening right now, literally right in front of our very eyes at ISE, where you're shifting from packaged LED technologies that have driven the industry for 20 years where the LED: red, blue, green are packaged and then picked and placed onto a PCB. That's shifting to package list technologies where the individual chiplets are red, blue, and green and are being mass transferred. So instead of one pixel at a time, they're doing thousands, and when you think about it in context, a 4k display is over 8.2 million pixels. So if you can transfer thousands at a once instead of one by one, you save a lot of time, and so this package list technology is like a chip on board where the backplane is a PCB and it's a passive driver and then chip on glass or what we call micro LED. Truly micro LED, that is, sub-100 micrometers mass transferred onto a TFT black backplane with an active driver.

So at ISE, you saw this crazy tidal wave, I'm going to go with that term, this crazy tidal wave of companies that are announcing COB, and the biggest thing is that they're coming to the fruition of manufacturing processes so that they can mass transfer instead of pick and place. So the cost is going to be a lot less to make them, first of all, because you don't have to package first, then pick and place, and then secondly, because you can mass transfer. 

So we expect, and this is going to, within maybe the next 12 months following, this could drive up to a 50 percent decrease in the ASPs, average sales price of 1.5 millimeters and below. It's just truly amazing. We've been hearing about this for several years, Futuresource has been writing about it, and now it's happening right before our eyes. 

With COB, there are other inherent advantages as well, right? The first one would be that as they're manufactured, the finished modules have some sort of protective coating on them. That's just fundamental to how they do them, right? Versus SMD, it's the older school packaged LED displays where they're unprotected unless they've got this glue on board coating, and they're more prone to damage. 

Ted Romanowitz: Yes, exactly, and those processes have been perfected over the last two to three years. So not only can you do a nice job of encapsulating it, but they can repair the LEDs as well, even after encapsulation. 

So that's a major thing that's happening, and one of the things that I saw at the show was i5LED actually had a double difficult display that they did in the sense that it's a corner, an inside corner, which is difficult to do with LEDs to get, so there's not any seams or anything. But then the second thing they did is they put a touch overlay on an encapsulated COB display so you could touch. It had multi-touch on it. So again, really interesting to see the future of what's happening. 

Yeah, because touch and LED were different worlds for the longest time, and it's only been recently where you start to see IR frames around displays that would make them interactive, and you wouldn't want to touch a conventional SMB display because it was going to damage it. 

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, especially when you get to 1.2 millimeters and below. The joke has always been that you needed to put a little tray underneath the LED wall that you were touching to capture all of the LED pixels that were falling off. But now, that's improved with all these new manufacturing techniques. 

Are there benefits as well to COB in terms of energy consumption or brightness, things like that?

Ted Romanowitz: Yeah, and the answer is yes. It's really incredible to see. Early in the LED market, if you've got 600 nits that was a lot, now you're seeing indoor displays at a 1000 or 1500 nits, which allows you to put them in a high ambient light situation, room that has Florida ceiling windows, like an office or an atrium, or even in a store window or of course outdoors in a kind of a kiosk or a standalone LED display. So this package is like technology; the chips are getting so small that you're filling in the space between the chips with an ultra black covering. That increases the contrast ratio and makes HDR content sing. 

Yeah, it's like the old days of plasma displays and how their big benefit was deep blacks. 

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly. 

Yeah, so one of the things I came away with from ISE, and I had the impression in earlier shows as well, but really amplified this year with all the talk around micro LED and how it's coming, and that's like the ultimate super premium display. 

I would look at the current product line of manufacturers who are doing COB and think, okay, that's more than good enough. I don't know that the world needs to get to micro LED video walls for us to finally have good-looking LED video walls. We're already there. 

Ted Romanowitz: That's true, but really, it comes down to a cost basis, and this is where we've modeled. Working with some of the biggest OEMs and ODMs in the world, we've modeled the volume that they're going to be able to produce over the next several years, and the quality that they'll be able to deliver in mass quantities, and basically, the outcome is that by the early 2030s, let's say a 77-inch or 80-inch micro LED display chip on glass will be $4,000 or less and so that brings it into mass adoption and really makes it useful for, not only does it enable the close up viewing that chip on glass does, or chip on board, but it enables a price point where you're going to see it broadly deployed in meeting rooms and corporate, you'll see it in classrooms and education, all across stadiums, venues, hospitality, every different market vertical is going to be impacted by a price point of LED that's comparable to LCD today within the next several years. 

Why wouldn't that happen just with COB? 

Ted Romanowitz: It's the cost basis of being able to do things on a PCB is more expensive versus a TFT backplane. Over the long run, it has to shift towards a TFT backplane, a glass backplane. 

The barrier to that happening right now is unlike COB, where mass transfer appears to have been worked out. It's still a work in progress on the chip on the glass or micro LED side, right?

Ted Romanowitz: It is. There are a few other roadblocks that have to be overcome for chip on glass to be in volume with high quality, high yields, and when that happens, then you'll start seeing the volume ramp and the price really starts to drop. 

So there will be a day, early in the next decade, when chip-on-glass micro LED displays have the same dimensions, same resolution, everything else would be at price parity with LCD.

Ted Romanowitz: Yes, with LCD today. What Moss has been looking at with the rest of the team is what's gonna happen with flat panel LCD, interactive LCD, and projection. What are the unique instances where those need to be implemented, best-fit applications and what they're doing to drive price down and add value, differentiate to keep extending those product life cycles.

Moss, is there much runway still for LCD? I'm also very curious about OLED, which keeps getting better technically but is still pretty narrowly defined, particularly on the pro-AV side. 

Morris Garrard: Yeah. I think there are a few nuances here that we need to consider when we're talking about the LCD product lifecycle. 

How we looked at this in our recent strategic market outlook was to split the market into three parts. So first, looking at the video will market, then looking at the digital signage market, and then looking at what we define as the presentation market, so in front of classroom, front of boardroom devices.

Video wall, I think it's no real surprise that it is certainly being cannibalized by LED the fastest. We're already seeing that kind of impact happening at, I think, back in 2020; even LED overtook LCD as the main contributor to market value in the video wall market. If we then look at digital signage, which obviously would include screens that are sub 100 inch, which typically would have the price per resolution advantage over LED. We're already seeing LED making inroads to that market as well, so it's actually in 2025 that we're expecting LED to overtake LCD as the main contributor to the market value.

Then, looking at the presentation market, which is very much dominated by the likes of interactive flat panel display, but then also obviously nontouching in many boardrooms as well. Obviously, there is still that cost consciousness when it comes to presentation displays. However, in the more narrow pixel pitch segments, as Ted mentioned, that price attrition that we're expecting over the next few years, it's going to rapidly increase the adoption of LEDs within the boardroom, especially the boardroom, and perhaps less so in K12, which obviously makes up the bulk of the education segment. But we're expecting by 2028 that LED will overtake LCDs and market value share by that point. That's not to say necessarily that the LCD market is going away in volume terms. I think the key point is in terms of value. Prices are continuing to erode to really race to the bottom on LCD. And then obviously, yeah, with volume starting to flatten out, LED is making inroads quite rapidly. 

What about OLED?

Morris Garrard: OLED's an interesting one. I think the key stumbling block for OLED in the professional displays market has been the price, as opposed to LCD. We're looking at around about 1.5 to 2X differential, which within the cost conscious mindset, especially in signage, but also in presentation displays as well. It has presented an obstacle to adoption. So OLED, we're looking at around 1% of volumes across the global market in terms of volume, and really that's stayed quite stable over the last few years, hasn't ramped as perhaps was expected a few years ago, 

One thing that was intriguing to me was reading some of the stuff coming out of CES and then going to ISE, and I went to the TCL booth, I believe and they had a 120 or 125-inch something, giant TV, and I was thinking, okay, that I know what they're doing with these things. There's local dimming and everything else, and the visuals coming out of these displays are stunning. They look borderline OLED quality and at that form factor, as costs come down on manufacturing those things, they are starting to approach, very close in size to all in LED displays that a lot of manufacturers have in their product lines to simplify things for meeting spaces, conference rooms and so on.

Do you see these LCDs getting some traction, supplanting the all-in-one LEDs? 

Morris Garrard: Do you know what, Dave? That's a really interesting point because we had a number of conversations at ISE about the opportunity for larger than 100-inch LCDs. I think my answer to those individuals was that there may be an opportunity for now. I think the price attrition that we're seeing on all-in-one LEDs will bring those displays into, maybe not into price parity, then at least, within the same kind of ballpark. 

But I think the other key issue with, let's take 120 inch LCD, for example, is the logistics of it. If you're in a boardroom and you're on the fifth floor, and you've got to fit a 120-inch LCD into a lift, then where we're based in Europe, that's absolutely not going to happen. Maybe in North America where you guys have your freight elevators and whatnot, but I think in terms of being able to install the display itself.

You're not carrying that on the stairs. 

Morris Garrard: Exactly, and let's say someone does crack it on the floor as they're installing it, then you've got to replace the whole thing. Whereas with an LED wall, it's just one module that needs to be replaced. I think there are those challenges as well that will limit the opportunity in that segment. 

Are you seeing much innovation when it comes to LCD and OLEDs? 

Morris Garrard: I would say in terms of the commercial LCD market, over the last few years, the key points of innovation have been, as you say, OLED initially, 8K resolution, 21:9, and then high brightness and kind of outdoor displays lumped into one. Those have really been the key points of development. 

In terms of market adoption, though, they haven't really taken off. I would say high brightness and outdoors are probably the best examples, accounting for around 2 to 4% of market volumes, whereas the rest is still lingering around 1 to 2%.

There was a lot of buzz and quite a bit of activity at ISE around electronic ink products, e-paper products, particularly on the color side. They've gotten bigger. There were 75-inch versions there. I had seen them earlier when I was over in Taiwan, and I thought, okay, this is interesting, but it's really early days, and this is a proof of concept more than anything else because yeah, they didn't look bad, but they didn't look good. 

Morris Garrard: Yeah, I think e-paper is an interesting one and I think it presents a fantastic opportunity to the pro displays industry as a whole I think there has been a bit of maybe industry confusion around the purpose and the intended use case for e-paper and I think the point that really needs clarifying is that e-paper is not here to replace lcd I think in many ways it's there to complement LCD.

Yes, it’s there to replace print. 

Morris Garrard: It's there to replace print, exactly, and one of the key conversations around that exact point is, would using the 16:9 aspect ratio be the most appropriate? Obviously, for signage customers that are used to digital signage, then yes, but for those end users that are replacing print signage would actually like the A Series, for example, be a more appropriate sizing range to use.

I think that this market segment is still figuring some of those things out. But yeah, definitely a lot more, A lot more on on show at ISE this year, which was fantastic to see, and even new brands as well, not only kind of new models from those brands that were already active in the space. As I say, it's the early adopter phase at the moment, but I think certainly a lot of industry potential. 

It was interesting, though, because, with all the buzz around it, I don't know that many people because they don't have a reason to be paying that close attention to it. They don't understand that all of these color e-paper displays are coming from one manufacturer, and whether it's Samsung Sharp or Agile Display Solutions, they're remarketing and tweaking E Ink's product. Is there any other manufacturer out there that you've run into that's actually coming up with something that is also color e-paper?

I'm aware of some ESL manufacturers who are not using E Ink, but that's monochrome stuff. 

Morris Garrard: Yeah, I would say really the pioneer is obviously E Ink. I have seen some Chinese facsimiles, but I would say, generally, the major brands that we work with are working with E INk. 

Tearing through stuff here out of necessity, but I wanted to ask about projection. 

Morris Garrard: With projection, I think, there is a tendency within the industry to focus on all of the innovation that's happening in LED especially, and thinking that projection is going away silently, but we're still expecting the projection is going to be a very robust component of market value by the end of the decade. We're still looking at a multi-billion-dollar industry by 2029 or 2030. 

I would say the conversation within projection has shifted; it's a very mature product segment, of course. We're not really seeing the kind of product revolutions anymore in terms of feature sets or whatnot, the conversation has now shifted more towards the applications for projection. So where can projection be used where other display technologies may not be appropriate? One of the key applications, of course, that's grabbing a lot of headlines is projection mapping, for example, being able to scale an image at a massive scale onto things like historic buildings, for example. You're not going to be doing that with led in, historic cities in Europe, for example, it's just not going to happen. But finding other applications as well, for projection where the other technologies just wouldn't be able to be deployed basically. 

When I go to a giant show, like an ISE, I will run into folks like you two and lots of other industry people who've been around for a long time, and we'll always have the conversation of: so,  what did you see that? I need to go see that as well, and I have my own thoughts around that, but I'm curious if there are technologies or particular manufacturers who you came across and thought, “Oh, that's interesting”.

Ted Romanowitz: I'll jump in and say, both the chips on board, the wall at Samsung and the LG magnet at their booth looked fantastic, and then you saw chip on glass actually demonstrated in a large format, 136 inch at LG, as a kind of a TV kind of format. Samsung had the transparent micro LED, which I think shows they're starting to evolve their thinking. It's such a cool technology, but I think everyone's struggling with what the killer application for transparent micro LED is just because companies have been struggling with the idea of a transparent OLED. Where does it really fit in? Those are some of the killer things that I saw. 

The waterfall at Lang booth. I thought it was incredibly cool, as was the kinetic LED display facing the LG booth. Not practical, but it's cool. 

Yeah, and that one, I was impressed by a lot more than previous kinetic LED walls that I've seen because this was more like a game show spinning tile thing where you didn't have all this, very tight synchronizing of modules to make it look good, and I saw another kinetic LED wall I was talking to an old industry friend who said, yeah, this thing's cool, but it's breaking down every half an hour because his stand was right next to it. So it's handled with care. 

Ted Romanowitz: Yeah, I thought the other cool part of that kinetic display at LG was the fact that they drew in a social media aspect where you could, upload your picture and they do a little AI magic and all of a sudden you can see Dave Haynes right up there in the middle of the LG kinetic wall.

Yes, you could, but I tried that, and it turned me into a guy going through a gender transition, which I'm not quite sure how that happened. 

Ted Romanowitz: We love everybody. So that's good. We love you for just who you are, Dave. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

It's a side of me I hadn't thought about, but some people said you look good like that. I don't know. Okay, sorry, but it ain't happening. 

Moz, how about you? 

Morris Garrard: Yeah, we've already touched on it. Compared with the conversations I was having around e-paper at the end of last year, I was amazed to see larger than 32-inch form factors, let alone 75 inches. I think it was at the Dynascan booth. I was just impressed purely with the progress that technology is making in such a short space of time. So yeah, that, for me, was the takeaway. 

All right. This has been great. We could have easily spoken for three hours, but we had limited time somehow or other. I appreciate you guys jumping on the phone with me. 

Ted Romanowitz: Thanks so much. It's a pleasure, and we're headed over to Taiwan and Korea, so maybe we can talk again and give you some feedback on what we saw at Touch Taiwan with some of the big OEMs and ODMs in Asia. 

You gonna have some Soju?

Ted Romanowitz: I will definitely have that. 

Alright, thanks, guys. 

Morris Garrard: Thanks so much, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

All kinds of people in this industry are very aware that while there is lot of dodgy stuff, there is also lots of well made display technology available from Chinese manufacturers who have zero brand recognition outside of that country. Buy potential buyers don't tend to have the time or resources to make the big flights over the Pacific to visit China and directly source reliable manufacturing partners.

And they really - if they're smart - don't want to just order stuff, and then cross their fingers and toes hoping the stuff shows up, lines up with what was ordered, works, and then meets necessary certifications.

Jacob Horwitz saw an opportunity to create a new company that functions as something as a boutique digital signage distribution company that sources, curates and markets display and related technologies that its resellers can then take to market. Horwitz will be familiar to a lot of industry people for a pair of installation companies he started and ran the U.S. - IST and later Zutek. In both cases, he sold the companies, and he could have just retired ... but he didn't want to retire. Nor did his wife, because a Jacob with too much time on his hands would make her crazy.

So he started Illuminology with a longtime industry friend and business partner Stephen Gottlich, who for many years ran the digital file for Gable.

I caught up with Horwitz to talk about the origins and rationale for Illuminology, which is just spinning up but has some big plans.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Jacob, it was nice speaking with you. You have started a company called Illuminology, which sounds like you started a cult, but I think that's not what it is. 

Jacob Horwitz: Not yet, no, We hope it will be at some point, a good following, but first off, Dave, thanks for having me. It's been nine years since you and I first chatted on a podcast. I don't know if you realize that. It was December of 2016, and we had just finished, I think maybe the nationwide rollout of Burger King, you and I had a chat about that, and it's hard to believe nine years have gone by. 

This was when you had IST? 

Jacob Horwitz: Installation Service Technologies was a nationwide installation and service company, that was sold in 2018 and then a year later, I restarted a company called Zootech, and I was approached by a customer who was looking to be entrepreneurial and that company is now owned by Karen Salmon. It's a woman-owned business mow, and her father was the founder of Powerpoint of Sale.

I took a couple of years off. I have a person that I have worked with for 30 years, my business partner, Stephen Gottlich. I think you've met Stephen, and he has been working with Gable Signs for the last 17 years and I think what Illuminology is now is a culmination of really two parallel journeys. Stephen took a traditional sign company 17 years ago down a path of innovation, and Gable went from a bending metal traditional sign company to a visual solutions company my background, which has been installation and service for the last 20 years, brings together two people who are a little bit older than when you and I first talked nine years ago. 

It was probably 60 pounds ago when I talked to you for the first time. I'm a little gray or a little wiser and a little bit older. So the two of us come from really parallel journeys in different areas of digital signage, and we wanted to create something a little different in the United States. We'd seen some business models and other parts of the world that seem to be working. So we wanted to create a marketplace that would expand digital signage to companies interested in expanding their scope of business. So we focus a lot on traditional sign companies other technology-type companies, and installation companies. They all have some type of footprint in the verticals with technology but they're not carrying digital signage. 

So we thought, how do we expand digital signage to reach a lot more people? And we've come up with this business model. 

So for people who are completely unfamiliar with it, how do you describe it in your elevator pitch?

Jacob Horwitz: The easiest way to describe it is to think of us as a traditional distributor of digital signage to authorized resellers. Much like a Blue Star, B&H, except that we're very boutique, and we're very focused, and we're very passionate. Stephen and I are not, we've been fortunate in business. I'm 65, Stephen is 70-ish, so we know we don't have a lot of time to build something that's going to take years and years, but we wanted to build something special. 

So you would be like, an Almo or those kinds of companies, but much more focused specifically on digital signage? 

Jacob Horwitz: … And being able to support them differently. So take a digital traditional sign company, next month, we'll be at the International Sign Show in Las Vegas, the USA, and a lot of those people are digital, but it's amazing how many fast signs, and banners to go, those types of places that are selling digital signage today and have no idea what digital is. They're very old and traditional. 

I think of it if you sold typewriters or telephones a couple of decades ago and you didn't evolve in the IP phones and computers, you're probably not in business anymore. So we're taking a lot of those types of sign companies. We have a course called Illuminology University. We take them through an 8 to 10-week course. These are live training classes and curricula we put together to train them about what is a sign in digital singage, what's LED, what's LCD, what is GOB versus COB, just really teaching them about the industry and they have a lot of reach in the verticals that traditional people selling digital signage today don't have.

The other thing that makes us unique. When you go to traditional companies like Blue Stars, you don't have everything available under one distributor. We have an experience center that's opening next week in Kansas City. It's a supermarket of visual solutions, so you'll be able to see not just LED or LCD, but you're also going to see light boxes, you're going to see different kiosks, you're going to see where AI comes into play with digital signage, you're going to have a good understanding in our experience center of the programmatic side of how things can be monetized with a digital retail network.

I think that because of the 30 years that Steven and I have been involved in technology and in the last twenty in digital signage, we can be much more of a boutique to help people with a wider range of solutions, not just a traditional 55-inch monitor, but LED posters, you had on your blog a few weeks ago that digital desk, which is part of our showroom, so I think it's about innovation. I think it's about a wider range of solutions, and it's hopefully in our last chapters of life, having a lot of fun with our partners. 

So I assume if I call or contact one of the larger distributors who do unified communications, do all kinds of different things, and I start asking them about it, I'm a POS company, I have a customer who's asking me about menu boards and things like that. I don't know where to start. 

If you talk to a larger distribution company, they have a sheet or a system that lists all the stuff they have and they can rattle off, here's what we have, what do you want, whereas you're saying because you're much more focused on this area and you have an experience center, people could come in and you can try to find something that's tailored to their needs as opposed to what we have. 

Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, I think that all those traditional distribution models are very good at taking orders and taking money. A couple of them even have some departments where they're trying to help you with that consultive part of the business but I think at the end of the day, from my installation side, conservatively, we installed well over 400,000 displays in every kind of vertical you could imagine when I owned IST. 

We did the new SoFi Stadium. We did all of their point of sale. Arlington Stadium, we did all of their digital assets when Daktronics had contracted us. And Stephen has done every kind of hardware installs you could think of when he was with Gable. So I think that being able to work with a company and be there to hold their hand too, we've already gotten on a plane and gone to sales calls with our partners. You're not going to get that from a traditional distributor. We work and do the RFPs with them. We work with them on pricing and quotes. So it's a little bit different than just trying to take an order so I think that's what makes us unique and the education and our school of hard knocks, you know, god knows, we've made an awful lot of mistakes in 20 years So I think we're gotten pretty good at what we do. 

So are you selling strictly third-party stuff, or are there products that fall under the Illuminology brand or a related brand? 

Jacob Horwitz: We've been going back and forth for a decade now to China. Stephen and I's first project together, was Simon Properties, 250 malls, and one of the largest media networks for digital out-of-home in the country, we designed the kiosk 10 years ago that they were still using and running in their malls, and that was a factory direct where we worked directly with the factories, built a kiosk, and were able to give Simon an amazing solution, especially where technology was 10 years ago. 

So through that experience and over the last decade, we've met absolutely the best factories in China. There are a lot of stereotypes of what a Chinese factory could look like, and until you go and you see the automation and the technology there, God knows you've done it. You've been all over the world. It's not what a lot of people think. So we work directly with factories. We are creating two brands. There are more later on in the year, we are white labeling or branding our product. There'll be a line of displays called LightScapes, and then there'll be a line of kiosks called EasyOSK. So these are part of our longer-term business plan to have a brand.

So you're not just saying, well, we bought these from some factories in Taiwan Korea Vietnam and China. We work very closely with the factories. We work very closely with people like AUO who are on the display side, and the panel side, and we will have some things that are unique within that brand. It will not just be the same product that everybody can buy. But because we're doing factory direct because we've got ten-year relationships with these factories, and they know Stephen and me well. We've been going except during COVID several times a year to China. I think that we're able to buy from them at incredibly good pricing and pass those savings on to our resellers.

So what if you had a Chinese manufacturer that's strong domestically in that country and has a lot of them trying to come to the U.S. or over to Europe and say, here we are, and not get anywhere, would you sell their product under their brand or would it have to fall under one of your brands?

Jacob Horwitz: No, we sell generic products as well. So for example, that desk that you talk about, I was in that factory last month. The person who owns that factory is a very small equity owner within Illuminology because we've known her for ten years and anything that comes from any factory out of China, she will go do that quality check before it ever hits the container to get over here. So she's a very instrumental part of our business over there, but we sell some of the stuff out of her factory as a generic product. It's not necessarily branded with LightScapes. It might be branded with Illuminology, but when you go look at the certification tags and serial numbers, it's still her company name on it, whereas LightScapes and EasyOSK are true white-labeled products that are going to be unique to us.

Does that get around any regulatory issues in terms of what can come over from China if it's coming through you? 

Jacob Horwitz: The regulations that are driving everybody in our industry crazy right now are the tariffs. But, to us, I think some of the big things that you don't see out of Chinese companies are the right approvals. We're very focused right now on our products being a UL or UL equivalent. There are five or six laboratories that are like MET. That is exactly like UL. It's UL-approved. We had a very large factory send us apart to test and they looked at it yesterday and we already rejected it because the power supply was not a UL-approved power supply. We said, we're not even going to test it. 

So I think that those are things that are not regulatory from the U.S., but they're important to us, from a safety side, especially when you're working with enterprise tier one customers, they, have to have the right certifications, but I think the only thing that's causing us headaches is not the regulatory side, but, trying to figure out the right pricing with tariffs and how we handle that.

Cause it's changing by the day. 

Jacob Horwitz: Every time I look up, I'm afraid to look at the TV to see if it's higher or whatnot, but all of our pricing that we post to our dealers today is a landed cost from Kansas City. So it's including if we had inbound shipping or we had tariffs, we don't want our resellers to have to worry about that and they know that this is the pricing and if the tariffs go away, then we can lower that price. But if it goes crazy, they need to be prepared. We're working closely with some factories right now in Taiwan, Korea, and others in Vietnam so that we have a backup solution because right now the lion's share is coming from China. 

If it's touched in Taiwan or touched in Vietnam, but with Chinese components, does that make a difference?

Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, we just had that problem. We had ordered some stuff that came in from Canada, and this was before the Canadian tariff of 25%. This was two-three weeks before that, and we got a bill for tariffs, and we were talking with the U.S. Customs and the experts at DHL and UPS, and it turns out, if you're buying something from, for example, the great area of Canada, where you're sitting at home, but the company we bought it from manufactured their part in China when they ship it to us and their commercial invoice to U.S. Customs asks the company in Canada, where the country of origin it was manufactured and even though I bought it from Canada, had no idea that the part I ordered was not manufactured in Canada, we got hit with that 20 percent tariff on that product, and that surprised us. We didn't think it through or understand and the hard part is even when you talk to the absolute top people at U.S. Customs at the borders that are doing this, they're not even sure hour by hour what the rules are. So it's been hard. 

We had another container come in and we had, I think, a $7k or $8k tariff. This is when it was 10%, but it landed in the U.S. before the tariff started and they still would not release it without us paying the tariff. Two days ago, we got that money back from U.S. customs. They realized they shouldn't have even charged it. It was before the date the tariff started. But unfortunately, by the time we released it, they held it hostage for a bit. So it's a hard situation, but we're going to work with other countries and I think that everybody's in the same boat, and I think in terms of pricing, our distribution model is much like the traditional guys. It's on a very low margin. So we have to have a lot of resellers that are looking to expand their business.

So I'm curious about markets like Vietnam and India, which I keep hearing about, having gotten into electronics and being alternatives to Korea, Taiwan, particularly China, is that industry, particularly on the display side, mature enough now to buy products from there? 

Jacob Horwitz: Since September, I've visited sixteen different countries across the world, I think on three or four continents and getting ready for the right factories and the right things and just enjoying travel at the same time, and the one thing that surprised me is how far behind the U.S. is compared to a lot of parts of the world and how much digital signage you see. Also, when you talk to these people what they're paying for digital signage throughout other parts of the world is far less money than the U.S. customers paying us companies for digital signage. The margins in Asia and Europe are much thinner than the traditional margins that resellers have been getting in the U.S. 

Our motto, and you see it across our website, is “The Best for Less”, and we have tried to find the best factories in the world and be able to give it at a price that is not greedy. That's a win for us, for our resellers, and most importantly for the companies that are trying to buy and put that digital signage into their business so they can inspire and tell a story to their customer. And I think that even in the smallest towns of Vietnam, you still see digital outdoor LEDs on the sides of buildings and you go into the shopping malls and it's far more digital than you see here. So that was interesting to me as I've got to travel the world in the last four months.

Is it a function of cost or awareness? 

Jacob Horwitz: I'm not sure, but I'm assuming first it's a function of cost because where they're working on margins that are so much less, it allows that to get into people's businesses, and when you're charging $1k for a 55-inch commercial grade LCD, 500 nit monitor, it's a barrier to entry. So we're trying to brand something and bring something to the market where we can be 20% less to the end user than a lot of the traditional things, and we think we've accomplished that. The tariffs hurt us a little bit, but they hurt everybody by and large.

So I think that's really why the U.S. is slower. I don't want to use the word greed. I own businesses, but people have tried to get margins that I don't think you can get anymore, and I think that you're going to have to find other ways to monetize your business through the installation side, through the content side, and I think that it's also helping companies. It's a big part of what we do. I think of Chris at Stratacash, he has a whole area where he helps monetize their solutions and it's helped, and we're looking at that closely. We're working with three or four companies right now where we can have our resellers work directly with them and educate their end users on how they can monetize the solution, through advertising in certain verticals. Not all verticals are conducive to digital out-of-home, but most are. 

So that's an important part of how we're going to help move products into places that normally maybe couldn't afford to put the right solutions in.

I assume that there are all kinds of people in North America, the U.S. in particular, who are aware that they can buy stuff via AliExpress or whatever. But they've heard enough to know, yes, you can pay substantially less, but you have to cross your fingers when it shows up. 

Is Illuminology positioned as a safe harbor way to do it? Like we're doing the sourcing, we've figured that part out so we could pass on those savings without all the worry.

Jacob Horwitz: Look to me, those sites are a lot like a box of chocolates. You never really know what you're going to get when that product shows up. As I said, even with the sample we got from somebody yesterday not being the right display, UL, and approvals, we're not going to be a website where you can buy whatever you want. It's going to be very focused on innovation. It's going to be the same factories. As I'm sure you've seen I get if I get one I get at least three emails every day from some Chinese factory trying to sell you whatever and everyone is a nickel cheaper than the other and I think that's just Pennywise and quality foolish. 

So we're not going to be that it's going to be the best for less, and if we can create this supermarket of visual solutions, and it's a great product and the pricing can hit the street to an end user, double-digit, less expensive, and we are distributing through companies that have reached where the traditional resellers aren't touching, then we think that will help expand digital signage across the U.S. 

So these would be reached to like the sign companies you mentioned, maybe the point of sale technology companies, those kinds of companies? 

Jacob Horwitz: I have a guy I talked to a couple of days ago who sells medical devices. Nothing to do with digital signage. He's out there every day selling blood pressure machines or whatever medical devices he's selling and in the last few days, I've probably talked three times to him now about the opportunity he has to do stuff in the medical world because he's already out there calling on places to put in screens and some LED posters. And, so I think it's all kinds of places that maybe haven't even thought about incorporating digital signage into their end-user business, and these people are now educating why being able to tell a story through digital is so much better than a static sign. 

So yeah, it's been enlightening to see all the different verticals you can all of a sudden make inroads that you never thought about.

Yeah. So many companies are just going down the same familiar path of chasing QSRs, chasing retail, and I've always advised people to look at those other kinds of companies that already have established trust with your target vertical who supply other things to them and partner with them.

Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, it's been interesting. When I was doing the installation side, we did a lot of QSR, McDonald's, Burger King, Sonic, Del Taco, that type of stuff, and a lot of them have seen a few of the first initial posts we've done and they're calling and asking more of what we can do and I'm excited just about window technology whether that be an LED, a double-sided LCD hanging in the window of a fast food restaurant is so much more effective than printing two breakfast sandwiches for $5 and shipping it out to the store, hoping the manager puts it in the window during the promotional time. Half the time, three weeks after the motions are over, they still have that digital thing in there saying breakfast sandwiches or the static poster thing, and then at 10:30 when breakfast is over, they're still talking about breakfast sandwiches instead of talking about Value meals or other desserts or other things they could be buying during dinner. So it makes nothing but sense to have those assets in there. 

But the people who are buying their outdoor digital menu board don't even offer that product. So we feel that a supermarket with a full set of solutions, in a C-store to be able to do a stretch screen and a gondola and still do their monitors over their register and doing their digital menu board and having things that inspire people to walk in from the pump into the C-store, we have that full range of product where a lot of people just don't have a full range of offerings to that. 

When you say a full range of products, is it purely display technology, or does your supermarket have other things? 

Jacob Horwitz: We do light boxes, which are just an aluminum extruded frame that hangs on a wall with backlit LED, but it's a fabric, you see them in every airport. So we do a lot of light boxes, and that's a very affordable and very effective solution. It's a static display, but it pops. 

We are doing music. We have partnered with CloudCover. CloudCover is owned by SiriusXM, I believe, and Pandora, because we think that it's part of the whole experience, it's touching all the senses of when you go into that business, we think music is a really important part of branding your business. So there are several out there that are there. We've hitched our ride there on the software side. Because we have to support the dealers, we have, we offer two software platforms, and it's because of relationship and stability and they're the best.

There's a saying, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room and so we've partnered with people that make me where I am not even close to the smartest guy in the room. We love working with Navori. We think Jeffrey Weitzman is amazing. So we offer to our partners and we've worked aggressively to have a good distribution model in Navori to our partners and potential end users. So if I'm sitting in a room with Jeff Hastings, I'm not the smartest guy in the room anymore. So we offer BrightSign, and BrightAuthor, and the players we go with are either the Navori or the BrightSign players, and we offer that CMS. They're not. The cheapest CMS, you had a great interview with Alistair and what they're doing and I listened to you last night.

So there are a lot of options, but we have to support the dealer network. So to be able to have a dealer that wants to go off and do a different CMS, we support that. They can send us software and we'll test it to make sure, particularly if it's going to be SOC, that what they're using is going to run properly on that version of Android. So we'll support them that way or just before we order the product, we'll go into our lab and throw that on, but we can't support that dealer network on how to use the CMS. We have BrightAuthor and Novori, and we're good, and then we have two full-time people thatwho NOVA certified. So on the LED side, we're no, we have NOVA-certified experts, so we can help them with Novastar. So we can support that, but we can't support every CMS. So we encourage them, especially if they need a 4-a-month CMS, then I think that Alistair is a great solution, and there are a lot of those types of companies out there. But that won't be us. We'll have a couple of CMS, we'll have the music solution and we hope we can create a visual experience and a sensory experience that when they walk into an end user that's bought a product through one of our resellers, that product's inspiring consumers to spend more money.

You and Stephen are hands-on with this, but how many other people do you have working with you? 

Jacob Horwitz: Oh gosh, I've tapped into a lot of my old employees in a lot of years, so Stephen and I have known each other for 30 years. For us, it's more passionate at this age. It's certainly not about really the money.

This is because your wife said you need to do something. 

Jacob Horwitz: After years of being in the house and driving her crazy every 10 minutes, she made it clear I will either go find a job, or I'll have to support her next husband. So that had a little bit to do with it. But Stephen and I are wired the same way. It's about quality. It's about good solutions. It's never been about trying to make money on this. I think it's helping people. The people that I've brought in, I have a Project Manager who worked for me starting 15 years ago, and now she's ahead of our marketing, Becca, and she's been with me for a decade and a half.

The girl in my accounting department has been with me for over 15 years. I have a fragment in the house Legal who is my full-time in my old business and they've all been around at least 10 or 15 years. My CIO has been with me since 1999. So he was in college when he started. So we've got a good, like Stephen and I, that these are not newbies to this industry. One of my Project Managers started with me when we first talked nine years ago when she was a Senior Project Manager for Burger King. So, everybody that I've surrounded myself with so far, there's been at least a decade of hitting the shows, doing the installs, and that school of hard knocks.

So have you got 20 people, 40 people?

Jacob Horwitz: Right now, we're a team of maybe ten or eleven people. I have three people coming in next week for interviews after the experience center is open that are all industry veteran types and we're just getting started. The idea started in September. I went to Infocomm and then maybe I saw you and just started feeling the waters. We were going to launch in early January or February. We're a month old. The container of our showroom sat in Long Beach for six weeks before it got. It took longer to get from Long Beach to our offices than it did from China to Long Beach.

So we're just getting started. But we're going to stay in a boutique. We don't want to be all things to all people. 

Right, and they can find you online at Illuminology.com? 

Jacob Horwitz: Illuminology.com and there's an online brochure of the product and we thank you.

And Dave, I said this to you the other day, but I want to say it again. I need to thank you because, for everybody I've ever hired for the last decade, the first thing we have them do is go through your podcast and your blogs and learn about the industry, and what you do for us is so valuable and I mean that with all sincerity. 

Thank you. 

Jacob Horwitz: We hired a new sales guy and he started a month ago. He called me yesterday and said, Do you know this Dave Haynes guy? He didn't know, he did not know I had a podcast today. He goes, I am learning so much from him. And, I go, yeah, I'm chatting with him tomorrow. So thank you for what you do as well. 

Thank you. That's very kind. 

Jacob Horwitz: Very well deserved. So thank you for the opportunity to share our story and we look forward to working with the people in the industry, to help and expand digital signage into places that can be more like your Europe where it's everywhere.

All right. Thank you!

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The work on the big Future Displays report and then ISE kind of threw me off my weekly podcast routine, but we're back now - with a couple of interviews recorded, and more that are scheduled.

First up is Alastair Taft, a software developer based in Hobart, Tasmania - which for the map-impaired is a big island off the southeast coast of Australia. During COVID, he and another developer came up with a plan to use the windows of shuttered retail as projected surfaces for ads and other messaging.

That business didn't really go anywhere, but the exercise led to them having a solid software stack to play out and manage media - which led to the commercialization and launch of Luna Screens. The company goes to market with this key, minimalist assertion: Really Simple Digital Signage Software.

It's also, at less than $4 a month per device on subscriptions, really inexpensive.

I chatted with Taft about what makes his platform genuinely simple, and how being lean and mean - and making the software bulletproof - makes Luna Screen's business approach workable.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Alastair, thank you for joining me. Can you tell listeners what Luna Screens is all about, when it was launched, and the background? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. So we've been building Luna Screens for probably quite a while, probably about the last four years or so, but we only really started selling it about a year ago and what it is a really simple digital signage platform, that sums it up. 

Why did you do this and why four years ago? You mentioned “we” so I assume there are other people involved. What was the thinking behind doing this? 

Alastair Taft: Originally, it was a couple of us building it, a very small team. And originally it was something different, back during that great time around 2020. 

We had this crazy idea where there was lots of closed down shops and shopping centers and if you walk through any of them they were dead and it didn't look too good, so we had this crazy idea where we would set up projectors in all these shops and put this photographic film on the windows project, either artwork or advertising, so we built all this software to do all that and it didn't go anywhere.

It turns out we've actually built a pretty good digital signage solution here, so let's pivot a little bit. In reality, what we have now is a complete rewrite. It wasn't that much of an overlap, but that's how we ended up here. 

You're a software developer by trade?

Alastair Taft: Yeah, I've built quite a few things, mainly working for startups. So I've got quite a lot of experience building tech, getting lots of startups off the ground. 

Yeah. I think I saw on your LinkedIn page that you're a full stack JavaScript developer, which I know what that means, but not totally.

Alastair Taft: Yeah. It's just basically front end, back end, and everything involved in JavaScript. It's pretty ubiquitous. 

You're in Tasmania, and it's only 7 in the morning there, so you're given a pass on being too fluid with your talking; you haven't had your coffee yet.

Alastair Taft: That's true. 

When you say it's really simple, I know what simple means, but how do you define that? Because there's any number of digital signage software, CMS platforms out there who insist that they're relentlessly intuitive, easy to use, all those kinds of terms. What is it about yours that validates that assertion? 

Alastair Taft: I know this is probably what a lot of other platforms say too. We do think we are intuitive. When we say simple, that doesn't mean unsophisticated. But if you go on CMS and try it out, it is very simple. There are two things there. There's your screens and then there's your media library, and that's the only two things you have there. So you aren't overloaded with a million different configuration options. It's something you can get up and running quickly. There is a lot you can do, but that's the basic building blocks you get on there, you've got your screens and you've got your media library. And then there's way more powerful things you can do with your different media, with scheduling and playlists and all sorts, but that's the bare bones. 

The yardstick for sort of industrial grade, enterprise grade platforms is scalability that, yes, it can be easy to use, but yes, we can also scale and we have the elasticity, we have the data behind it and everything else to be able to very efficiently, schedule it to a whole bunch of screens. Are you there with that, or are you more focused on the small to medium business market? 

Alastair Taft: We are very scalable. I have a lot of experience building software that scales. For example, I've done some work for one of the largest supermarkets here in the past, and we've rolled out this personalized video that went out to half the country, so we can handle scaling with a software. 

Market that tends to be small to medium size businesses, but that doesn't mean we can't handle hundreds of screens. What we can do is if you want to roll out the same content to hundreds of screens, you can create what we call a Playlist, and on the Playlist, you can either have it looping content. You could have one item if you wanted to, or you could have very complex rules that you layer. If you have some certain thing you want to show on a certain date, or you want to show some out of hours or business hours content, then what you can do is set your screens to play this Playlist, and then every time you change that Playlist, it will deploy it to all your screens automatically. 

So when you were developing this, did you and your coding partner at that time put any time into looking at what other platforms did and how they were presented and the overall functionality, or did you just pretty much say, okay, this is the task, let's write something that addresses the task.

Alastair Taft: Yeah, we did look at a bit of other platforms at the time. What we found is there's quite a lot of clunky tech out there. A lot of the CMSs just seem quite clunky to use. I know there are a couple that are quite good that are out now, but not when we started.

How do you define clunky? What is it that you found clunky? 

Alastair Taft: Oh, you just have this feeling when you use it, like you press a button and you have to wait like a year before it does anything, I think, or, you look under the hood and it's pulling in about a thousand different dependencies and yeah, it's not nice to use really.

Yeah, it's one thing that I've spoken about a few times with people when they asked me about software platforms, and I said these days, if you are still releasing version 8 on the same software stack that you've been supporting for 15-20 years, I think that's troublesome, versus companies that are relentlessly modern and using whatever tool sets are available right now that can optimize what's possible.

Alastair Taft: Yeah, for sure. It's a fast-moving place, front-end development. So you have to keep up to date all the time. 

When you hear from customers, what's the impression you get from them in terms of what they want, and how does this meet it? 

Alastair Taft: So we hear a lot of positive things from customers about how easy it is to use. We have quite a few coming over from other platforms saying, “Oh, we really like this. It's a joy to schedule content.” 

Is that the big ask, just the ease of use? 

Alastair Taft: For our customers, I think they find we're probably quite affordable compared to other CMSs as well, which I'm sure helps. 

Yeah, you're a software as a service, right? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. 

If I'm remembering correctly, your pricing was USD 3.75 a month per screen. Is that really per edge device? 

Alastair Taft: That's right. Yeah. Per screen at $3.75, which I think is correct, but it makes us very competitive. I think there's only one other CMS that is that price. 

The counter, not argument, but the question would be, okay, how do you make money at that? 

Alastair Taft: We don't have all the bells and whistles like monitoring. Our focus is on a really simple platform to use for scheduling content and a reliable player and we're focusing on Android at the moment. So if that's what you need to do, we're a great option. 

Android player, what flavor? I'm looking at the website and the minimum version is Android 7, and you're saying any Android media player or any device like I've heard through the years companies say, okay, now we have our own media player because we want to get away from trying to support all these rogues gallery of different players out there, everything from really good stuff to junk that costs $49.

Alastair Taft: It's certainly a challenge supporting the different versions of Android. So it's a very hard thing to do, and we've solved a lot of things we've come across. But that is our goal. We want to support consumers' Android devices, and there's a lot of, I don't want to say tricks, but there's a lot of things you can do that we have to do to make them work reliably.

You're also on the Google Play store. So, is that for Chrome OS? 

Alastair Taft: No, it's for Android devices. 

Oh, okay. So it's just how you would get the player. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, or you can either install via the Chrome Store or the Amazon app store, or you can download our APK off our website and install directly.

You're on Fire Sticks as well?

Alastair Taft: That's right. 

Is that the official digital signage Fire Stick or the older ones? 

Alastair Taft: I believe we're not part of the software that comes pre-installed, and you can't get the official signage Fire Sticks over in Australia yet, but I imagine we're on there if you search for us. 

 

Again, your market, in many respects, are people who can't invest a lot of time and don't want to invest a lot of money in digital signage. So they want something affordable. It's not a big cost month to month, not a big cost front end, and it's gotta be dead simple so that they can sit down for half an hour or whatever it is a week to do things.

Alastair Taft: Yeah, pretty much. I want something reliable. Like you said, I don't want to worry about it too much. Get something up and running. I don't have to think about it too much. Easy to use. That's where we sit. 

You mentioned you don't have device management. Is that something that's nullified if you have a stable software stack, to worry around having device management? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, that's what we're going for. So you plug it in, it auto boots when you turn your device on, and it just keeps running. It's really simple, and it's a conscious choice. The more stuff we try and do, the more things that can go wrong. So we try to build a really simple solution that's just gonna stay up. 

What would be a typical customer? Like, how would you describe them? 

Alastair Taft: So I suppose the only correlation we have is the small to medium businesses, mainly the people that come to us. But we've got quite a few that kind of use it for their menus in their food shops, the menu boards, we've got quite a few that use this for that.

There's no kind of one industry that we're gravitating to. We've got corporate environments. We've got builders, merchants, and adventure playgrounds using us - no correlation, really. 

How are they all finding you? 

Alastair Taft: Some people find us just through organic search. We do now and again run a few ads, and that's it, really, at the moment. We've got some other ideas in the works, but we haven't done them yet. 

So it's all inbound. Do you have any outbound sales efforts? 

Alastair Taft: No, we're very laid back, really, don't like the hard sales tactics for call people and harassing them. So we don't do anything like that with our pricing either. It's all very simple and straightforward. 

Yeah. You're a software developer first, so having to do the sales and management side of this, I'm sure, is not your favorite part of the day. 

Alastair Taft: Not really. I like being in the weeds with the tech.

How do you manage, how do you balance that? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, it's a struggle. I keep it about 50-50. 50% on tech business and 50% on business development. 

Is this the only thing you're working on, or are you still doing work for startups? 

Alastair Taft: Mainly, this is the thing I work on. There's the occasional startup I help out on, but this is primarily my full-time job.

I have the sense that as a software developer, if you love this side of what you do, you don't do version one and then just leave it. I suspect you're constantly iterating. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, improvements are being rolled out all the time. You'll never notice them because they apply automatically, but we're very careful about testing before we roll anything out, but there are always improvements happening. 

Is it based on what you're seeing, or are you getting feedback from customers saying, Hey, it would be great if, if we could do this?

Alastair Taft: Yeah, we get feedback all the time asking for X, Y, and Z. We can't do it all, but we collate and use it as a kind of indicator of where to go next. But we're always working on the core underlying thing. So there might not be a feature all the time, but we're making the tech reliable and doing as much as we can to squeeze everything we can out of our player.

What about the security side? 

Alastair Taft: So, for the accounts, we do something a little bit differently. We never ask for passwords. You log in for a magic link that gets sent to your email, so your email is the login. I think more and more people are doing that, but that means we don't ever store anybody's passwords, which I think is better and a screen can only access its content, and it has its kind of authentication that you set up when you pair it, and that all happens automatically. 

I suspect that most of your client base are small businesses and some companies, workplaces, and so on, who maybe aren't thinking as much about security anyways, or are they like a larger company where they are concerned about it?

Alastair Taft: I suppose the small businesses aren't really thinking about it, but we do everything to protect them. So yeah, screens can only access their own content, and the only way you can get into the account is via email. So everything's pretty secure there. 

Is it always evident that you're using Luna screens, or do you have any partners who are white labeling your solution?

Alastair Taft: So we don't advertise any of the white labeling options or any enterprise options, but we do have a couple of customers that do that. But predominantly, no, we don't white label, but it's something we can do. 

There's been a lot of talk for several years now about the importance of APIs and how you need to be able to intermingle and work with other systems within a business. Are you doing that? 

Alastair Taft: So we have a pretty easy-to-use API under the hood, but we haven't made it available to the public. It's something we probably will do in the future, but right now, the focus is on a reliable Android player and a really simple CMS. 

Going back to the hardware, when Android first started being used for digital science media players, probably going back a dozen years, perhaps even longer. There were some good boxes. There were a lot of terrible boxes. 

One of the biggest challenges with them was that they were moving targets in terms of the build and the electronics that were inside the little plastic shell. Is it better now? More stable? 

Alastair Taft: There are some really good devices out there. For example, I've looked at the specs of the Amazon signage stick, and I've got comparable devices that I tested on myself and they work really well. So when we started, we were testing on the underpowered Fire Sticks because we figured if we can get it working on that, we can get it working on anything, and yeah, there is a big difference between devices depending on what specs you have. 

So, for example, with the underpowered Fire Stick, you wouldn't want to be running 4k video on it. It wouldn't perform so well. So you do have to get a decent box for what you want to do, but if you just want a slideshow of images, it'd probably be fine, right? 

When you get new customers and they say, “Hey, this is great. We want to go; we're looking at your screen, and it says you support Android. What do we buy?”  Do you give them recommendations on different devices that are reliable? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. So we were recommending it because we want to run on consumer stuff, and we were recommending using the Chromecast because it's not too expensive, and it's a pretty good piece of hardware, but that's now been discontinued, I believe, so like you said, we probably will shortly offer our own box just as an option. So people can get something that's going to work well without having to think about it too much. 

Amazon signage sticks and all those devices, I believe pretty much all of them come from China and you can find some good boxes if you know what you're looking for on the Chinese websites like AliExpress and Alibaba. They are the same ones that Amazon orders anyway, except they're not as expensive, even though they're pretty cheap as they are anyway. 

I'm curious about the state of software development when it comes to AI and I keep reading stories about software as a service platform being at risk because Agentic AI, the idea that you can just get AI to write an agent that's going to do everything you need it to do, is going to take the place of a lot of, particularly the more expensive, like CRM systems and all that sort of thing if you can get AI to just write something that serves your needs.

Do you see that as a threat? Is that more just people prognosticating as opposed to having a real good sense of what's possible? 

Alastair Taft: So I might differ in opinion to what a lot of other people will say here, but no, I'm not worried. If you ever see what code AI can produce, it'll create you more problems than it will solve and if you, imagine roughly how it works, the AI creates the next likely code in the sequence. So if you're writing some code, AI will figure out what you're the next based off, breaking it down to tokens, and figure out what the next piece of code is to write. It's been trained on everything available on the internet. 

So if you want to create something mediocre, use AI because it will be the average of what else is out there. 

Whatever you think of it, It's come a long way in about a year and a half in terms of capabilities. Do you see a point when it will get good, or does it just have fundamental limitations? 

Alastair Taft: I think we're hitting the limit because how it works is that it creates the next token in the sequence, and it'll have a matrix of, possible combinations, but every time you add like a new dimension to that matrix, you're exponentially making the computation bigger and bigger, so at some point, there's just no way this can get any better. 

So in terms of Luna screens, what's the size of your footprint? Are you in like thousands working with thousands of devices, hundreds of devices? You've only been at it for a year. 

Alastair Taft: So yeah, we're pretty small. Our customers are probably in the hundreds, we've probably got around a thousand screens we manage. So, yeah, early days, but we're going in the right direction, growing every day. So that's a good sign. 

Is most of that business now in Australia? 

Alastair Taft: No, it's all around the world. There's no one country that seems to gravitate, we've got quite a few customers in the US, quite a few in Canada, lots in Europe, quite a few in Australia too. 

Does it present a problem at all in terms of customer support or everything's email and if you write it correctly, you don't have a lot of support issues?

Alastair Taft:  That's the plan. If an issue comes up, we provide help straight away, and we look at how we can make this happen again. Okay. So the support effort is generally quite low, which is, I think, good. It's a measure that our customers aren't hitting issues, which I think is good.

Yeah, you don't want a 40-person call center that gets expensive. 

You're down in Tasmania and Hobart, not a part of the world I've ever been in, and I understand it's beautiful. Is there much of a tech scene down there? 

Alastair Taft: It's got some quiet achievers down here. There's a company called Procreate that makes this awesome software for tablets for artists to do drawing and they, you don't hear much about them down here, but they're huge. They're all over the world. So yeah, there are some quiet achievers down here. 

And you've always been down in Tasmania?

Alastair Taft: I'm originally from the UK, I came here about 10 years ago.

Oh, that's a big change. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. Although if I could go anywhere, this is probably the most English Australian place I could have gone to. The weather's the same. They drive on the same side of the road. 

The weather’s the same? 

Alastair Taft: Pretty much, yeah. When you think of Australia, you think of it as really hot, but Tasmania is the furthest south you can go.

Yeah, you're as close as you're going to get to Antarctica, right? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, but it's not cold, it's very similar to English weather. 

Oh, I didn't realize that. Was that an unfortunate discovery? 

Alastair Taft: Yeah, I landed up here by chance cause I was coming here for work, but, if I had a choice, probably should have gone somewhere a bit sunnier.

Yeah, it could have been in Queensland or something like that. 

Alastair Taft: Yeah. Although not at the moment, they've got a cyclone there, but yes. 

True. Alright, Alastair. Thank you. That was terrific. Very interesting to hear about your company. 

Alastair Taft: Great. Thanks for having me on. Great to chat. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Countless companies have tried sticking a screen above things in public spaces, thinking - or more appropriately hoping - that the scenario and dynamics were something that would interest brand advertisers. I won't say it never worked, but there's a lot of roadkill.

A company out of Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, is going at this notion - but in a very different way.

Intuitive puts 43-inch displays just to the rear of trash stations in busy public and private spaces. But instead of just running booked ad campaigns, the main purpose of the screens and supporting AI-driven tech is to change consumer behaviors. A computer vision camera uses AI-based pattern detection to look at the trash someone is about to drop into receptacles, and tells them what goes where. We've probably all had a last sip of a coffee-to-go, stopped to drop ti in the trash and recycling station, and then stood there wondering which bins to drop things in.

The company, whose founders have roots in robotics, had quite a bit of success selling ready-to-go systems to organizations. on the basis that teaching consumers to correctly sort their trash would save a lot of back-end labor and time. But customers were buying one or two systems for big venues, because that's what budgets would allow. Even though 10 or 20 were needed.

Based on a lot of real-world experience and enthusiasm from brands, Intuitive has now pivoted to a more traditional place-based digital media model. The business has blown up, with 10s of 1,000s of installs under contract, including a big partnership with Pepsico.

I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Hassan Murad, who calls himself the company's chief trash talker.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hassan, thank you for coming on my podcast. I was at Digital Signage Experience a few weeks ago and wandered around the trade show floor. It wasn't all that big or crowded with stands, but I saw the stand for your company and kind of went right on by because I have this attitude based on years of seeing companies trying to put advertising screens atop damn near anything. 

But I was compelled by a business friend to have another look and stop and talk with you guys. It was actually very interesting what you're up to. So can you explain what Intuitive does and how it got started?

Hassan Murad: For sure. And again, Dave, thank you for having us. I'm Hassan Murad, the co-founder, CEO, and chief trash talker here at Intuitive. What Intuitive started out as - I'll take you back to myself and Vivek Vyas, who's the other co-founder of Intuitive. Both of us grew up in India and Pakistan, were born there and our families at different points immigrated to Dubai. Then we met when we were doing robotics here in Canada, in Vancouver.

Our whole background was in robotics and AI. As we were starting to step foot in the real world, we had gained experiences working on drones to detect wildfires or for impact applications, submarines to do amazing things in an autonomous way, self-driving cars down at Tesla. Previously, I was proud to share working alongside Elon, but now I'm very careful.

Yeah, that's not necessarily an association you want anymore.

Hassan Murad: You have to be careful for sure. I describe him as the smartest person you can ever experience working for or be with, and a pioneer of this world. And at the same time, he's the dumbest person you could ever think of. But I hope this doesn't make it to him or else he will start bashing us as well.

I think he has a list to go through first before he finds us.

Hassan Murad: I hope so. The way that he fires off his tweets or whatever he calls it at X is just insane.

Anyways, back to the point. We’re both working on robotics applications and being flat on the walls in different zero to one moments where industries were being completely revolutionized by AI and we asked ourselves the question that for the next couple of years, if we are going to jump in and work on something, what is the problem that we care about solving? One thing we were really driven to think of solutions to was the waste problem. The stat that we had read at that point that was the game changer for us was that 98% of whatever we generate ends up in landfills, oceans, rivers, open dumps, and does not get recycled or composted. That basically says one percent was composted and one percent was recycled. That made us pause and say, okay, we've got to apply our solutions or backgrounds to something that's wrecking the world. 

Anybody that has watched WALL-E knows how the end happens, right? What happens to Earth? That's kind of how we got started. We were developing a solution that I'm happy to go through, if it makes sense, but it was a very robotics-based solution and then we pivoted towards education. And what that means is that instead of sorting it for people, we started developing a way to nudge and change behavior so that people could recycle better and cause less contamination because one of the big things we realized was there's no sensor for waste or materials in the whole space and people are walking up and they don't realize that the three seconds they take to throw something out actually is a very important point in their journey. If they make the right decision and if we help the facility realize that value, we have a very high chance of getting that material to the right area.

So what I was mentioning is rather than having a robotics-based approach and solving it for people, like handing them the fish, we taught people how to fish using AI combined with a digital screen to make it really smart and use audio visuals so that we nudge and change an individual's behavior.

So the nut of this is that, and I suspect anybody listening has had this happen to them where they've been walking along with a cup of coffee with a plastic lid on it and a cardboard cup, and they're going to put it in a trash and they'll see three slots and they'll be looking at the three of them going, okay, “which one do I put this in?” And you just take a wild stab at it and put it in one that seems to make sense or somebody else has put something similar in that one. 

Your whole thing is using computer vision to guide people to, based on what you're showing me in front of the camera, it ought to go in this one. Is that an accurate way of describing it?

Hassan Murad: Exactly. So we make that entire process - the individual walking up has an item or multiple items that consists of multiple materials, like that coffee cup example you gave. There's the cup that is made of paper, but it's plastic lined. Depending on municipalities, it could belong in trash or paper streams if they're accepting it or recycling. Then you've got the cardboard sleeve, and then you've got that lid and sometimes you've got liquid inside. So there's four different materials that the consumer has either no time, incentive, or reason to be putting all these pieces together to sort the item out.

Most of the time what happens is people just take a guess or are not even paying attention. What we change is that behavior. We have introduced Oscar sort, which is the core technology that you could put behind any recycling bin - busy bins in malls, airports, universities, stadiums. You put it behind that bin and it starts making that bin a lot more powerful. As you're approaching that bin next time, it starts even looking at you two or three feet out and it starts nudging you by visualizing how you could sort that item out. It tries to make that decision very intuitively and it attaches an incentive to it. So it's now this digital screen that actually rewards you for sorting correctly. And if you sort it incorrectly, well, Oscar could get grouchy. This whole gamification in a simple decision that was so pivotal for the facility, but also downstream, is where we've brought fun engagement and really changed the whole landscape.

So the business model on this is what?

Hassan Murad: Traditionally, when you look at an airport, a mall, a university, a corporate campus, everybody pays for a garbage bin and garbage bins have a recurring cost, because you have to make sure they're being serviced and not overflowing. In different areas, you have sorting requirements downstream. So if people don't sort, they'll take it downstairs to potentially sort as well. When you look in San Francisco, many stadiums we've chatted with have 10-15 physical people at the back sorting all the bins out and that is where Oscar has been approved as the technology - you don't need people at the back end to sort anymore because Oscar can help people do that. That was our starting niche. We started by focusing on Airports that have this bottleneck problem and we've been providing different amounts of Oscar sorts to these areas to help start their journey.

As you see this scale we're trying to reach, we're trying to make a dent in the universe in terms of the whole waste world. It's not going to make an impact when out of 700 bins or 200 bins in a stadium, we just provide 5 or 10 bins. That is where we have accelerated the business model towards a property becoming a partner of ours and we partner with them so that we provide Oscar Sorts to their facility and we utilize brands that are already on the Oscar screen.

So people are paying to be on the screen and they're the brand that wants to say hi to Dave that is walking up. So that coffee cup you're talking about is branded rather than generic. The chips bag, the bottle, the can. You can start seeing how brands want to be the brand in front of an individual as they're walking up, since we've created this new type of experience.

We've flipped the model around. We call it the Oscar Media and Materials Exchange - in short, it's OMX. That basically allows any busy property, whether it's in New York or Toronto or LA or anywhere, a busy property like a mall, university, airport, stadium, can put Oscars in, they can raise their hand to put Oscars in and we have sponsors and partners that will fund those units. So it has flipped this model so that we can get hundreds and actually make a material impact.

When I was at DSC, if my memory is correct, which is always questionable, I think you had something in excess of a thousand units in the field and each of those units was in the range of $15k capital cost to put in. 

I was impressed that you're out to a thousand and impressed that venues would spend $15k on this. Is that something you still do or is it just completely flipped around where you will put it in at no cost and recover your money from the brands?

Hassan Murad: We have flipped the model and OMX is our primary focus. We've proven the technology at the most leading airports, universities, stadiums, etc. And that's been an amazing journey - proving that people would pay, that it helps the operations of the facility, also that brands are fighting to be on the screen.

An example I can mention is when people walk up - and you probably saw this at DSC - we're seeing people spend a lot of time at the bins. Traditionally, nobody would get zero seconds at the bin - they toss it in as they're moving. What we're seeing is about ten seconds of engagement when somebody is trying to sort an item because they're like, what is this thing doing? And usually when they throw their item - I love asking this question - what do you think is the most shown item to an Oscar globally?

It'd be between soda tins and coffee cups, I would imagine.

Hassan Murad: Those are definitely the top five categories. But the most shown item, and this is where we saw that this is actually an engagement tool is that the most show item we started seeing was mobile phones. The behavior, once we started auditing and going to sites and doing behavioral user studies, is that people walk up, throw their item, and they're like, all right, this thing is telling me how to sort. What's the next thing I can show or try to trick it?

That's essentially where everybody has a mobile phone. So they take it out of their pocket or show the phone to see what Oscar does. We quickly iterated in the early days to add in a nudge or an Easter egg that essentially tells you, "Hey, put that back in your pocket."

I thought it was drug dealers with burner phones.

Hassan Murad: No, not thinking in that way at all. Dave, you’re watching too much Narcos.

Yeah, probably.

Hassan Murad: But essentially, we started seeing people show a lot of their phones again, not throw, show a lot of their phones. And then instantly, when we inserted the Easter egg, you saw that people are bringing their loved ones to be like, look, when I show my phone, it says, “Put that back in your pocket” and that became an Instagram instant hit, on Tik TOK and other areas as well. 

That really was the beginning of us understanding that this is an engagement tool. We have what we call the “bin-tersection moment”, right? People are going about their day and they're at this intersection that is like white space right now, nobody even notices it and we can actually disrupt and add value to their day by dropping something that is interesting to them. That was that whole journey and so now we see anywhere from one to two minutes of time being spent at the Oscar bin and usually people go, “What? How?” and there are these nudges that I just described to you. You can show items. But we also introduced something that we saw to be very popular and tested out in stadiums, called Trivia. 

And essentially what trivia is, you do a thumbs up to say yes, the question that you've asked me is correct, or a thumbs down to say it's wrong. And it's quizzing you on things. So if you're at a stadium at TD Garden, it's asking you about the Celtics. It's asking you about Carrie Underwood if she's performing at the back or Taylor Swift or whatever's happening. It's bringing up the relevant questions to connect with you with why you are there.

In terms of how this all plays out, you've got the garbage bins, obviously, you've got a screen in behind it. Is there a typical size? 

Hassan Murad: No, we retrofit any of their material collection systems, right? So they might have trash, recycling, compost, batteries, and collection bins. It could be textile, it could be beauty products, it could be anything that they're collecting at the property. 

They might be different sizes and configurations and everything else? You’ve got to figure it out case by case almost? 

Hassan Murad: No, we've got a standard 43 inch that we just provide, and if it's something that's wider, then we can provide two. So it’s modular, it latches on, it's a never ending waste bin. 

Do you ruggedize the thing? 

Hassan Murad: Yes, exactly. So it's obviously in airports and stadiums and other areas and it's built with aluminum and we've got casings, wherever people opt for that. 

Because at a Sox game, somebody's going to take that can and try to use the screen as a backboard…?

Hassan Murad: The funny thing is actually, Dave, we see little to no vandalism to the Oscar other than when construction is happening at that site. So that's good. 

Do you have a camera up above the display that's looking at, I assume, chest height of a typical human and doing pattern detection and looking for is that a can, is that a bag, is that a phone or whatever it may be, right? 

Hassan Murad: Yeah, exactly. It's pointing straight towards the bins where, and when anybody walks up to the Oscar, it blurs and destroys any information above the waist and so it just focuses on materials, waste, gestures, for example, if they're trying to play around with it, any items the site wants us to train for, to make it a fun experience. 

How do you know that it's anonymous, so to speak?  Is there feedback on the screen that shows that your face is blurred out? 

Hassan Murad: Exactly. So it's right then and there that it just shows people what's happening in the back end and I think that's very powerful to be doing. 

The creepiest thing is when you see other people put in cameras and they don't share details around what's exactly happening in the back end and that's something that's very different here. We work with governments of the world. We work with universities, schools, and so it's very important to have people understand what's happening. 

Like you just said, every Oscar right in the middle has the view so people can understand what's going on, but also there's a QR code right next to it so that they can understand, all right, what exactly is happening? What do you do with waste and materials? What are you trying to do here? And that's very important. 

What's the incentive for a venue, like an NHL arena, to install these units? Do they receive a share of the brand marketing revenue, or that comes back to you and their benefit is simply getting it for free while improving waste diversion and sorting?

Hassan Murad: It's a combination of both. You know how expensive it was to get an Oscar, that primarily is the biggest driver to a lot of people. If they wanted hundreds, they couldn't get that approval. They could get five or four units in, and this is now helping them to put this in at little to no cost from a property side and then it is added value towards sponsorships and advertising and activations which is a whole different team that is like, holy cow, there is a very customized experience. These are AI powered digital screens that drive impact, get two minutes of people's time that they're giving away and I have this available to me so that I can actually have a sponsor or have added value to this site. 

 

So could imagine adding a million plus dollars worth of value to your site if you just placed Oscar sorts across your bins. It increases the value of the property, but really the main reason people put it in is that this $15,000 thing is now being funded for them. It is going to help their operations. They're going to audit and understand what is going through their bin so they can improve their procurement and supply chain and then they actually understand if people are sorting better or not, so they have less cost downstream.

 

Those three things combined are very expensive to do because you have to hire consultants and do audits and dig through trash and we're making it very intuitive and easy using this OMX business model. Any property can apply. The main thing is people have to be visiting that property and obviously, you understand the digital out-of-home space is that the value of the property is if people are visiting and people and brands want to get in front and center over there that’s through the Oscar sort.

 

Going from a business model where you were selling into these kinds of environments and they were spending the capital to put them in and as you said, it's limiting what they can do. If you flip it around and you go to, let's say SoFi stadium in LA, where they want to have, I don't know, 120 of them, you get that deal and you're probably ringing the sales bell and everything else all excited and then somebody has to run the numbers and go, that's a big capital nut to do all that. 

It's a big change to go from selling them to having to deploy at scale. So how did you work out the capital and finance side of that? 

Hassan Murad: Yeah, and I think the right number for the site only pops up when we do an analysis of the site, right? They might have 150 bins but the most impactful ones are the cross section of that: do all of these bins get materials thrown out? And materials thrown out means people walk up there and we only focus on the busiest of bins, right? Because if you want to make an impact on the waste stream side, you've got to make sure people are actually accessing that. Accessing that means that you're getting the eyeballs and impressions. The powerful thing about this is that it scales and it focuses on the busiest of the bins. That's something we work with the property on. 

In terms of how the numbers are crunched and how we help the property. I think that's been something that has been quite straightforward to people as they look at this like they're running ads in different form factors across the stadium on screens on the jumbotrons and stuff like that and then they look at the Oscar and they're like, “All right, it welcomes me and when I'm not using it it is essentially playing curated content, which are traditional digital out of home ads, and then when I walk towards it, it essentially says “Hi” which could be a branded way, or it could be how the property wants us to. So it understands when somebody is close to it, so it's very measured, and then essentially, what are they doing? Are they starting to play the trivia? And after you answer the trivia, that might be AMEX powered, where American Express is giving you, if you've answered the questions correctly and you're the lucky winner, a trip to Hawaii. 

And that's the beauty of it. People are connecting and giving away different things through this medium where they know it is being measured rather than throwing in a QR code and on some screen and it's just not effective.

When you made this pivot, what's your deployed footprint now then? When I was talking back in December, it was around a thousand.

 

Hassan Murad: I can't share exact numbers, but now we're talking about tens of thousands and we'll be talking about it soon publicly. In terms of numbers and scale, it just has rapidly blown up.

 

Are these tens of thousands deployed or under contract today?

 

Hassan Murad: Under contract today.

 

The other question I had, because when you started off, you're talking about robotics and AI and everything else. Those are very engineering-centric kinds of pursuits and now you find yourself in the digital out-of-home media business, at least in an adjacent way. 

 

Those are very different kinds of meetings and very different kinds of people who speak their own language. How are you navigating that?

 

Hassan Murad: I think this is just the nature of everybody at Intuitive is that we rewire our brains almost every year. When you're married to the problem and not the solution, you almost have to let go of what you know and what you think is right and be very unbiased and just be heads down to what is the most scalable way. 

Just to mention this as well, when we were starting off, a lot of people were like, "All right, well, you could use advertisements to scale these units." At that point, the fundamentals of the Oscar Sort were improving - whether people would walk up to it, whether people would prefer this bin over another bin. There was this Hawthorne effect that was coming into play that a camera is helping you and is that helpful towards Oscar or against it? There were a lot of variables right at the start that we had to prove. We had to make sure that people would actually pay for the device. And not even the first year, but now we have customers that are paying in their fifth and sixth year. That was very powerful to see and prove.

Now is that perfect time where we've engaged these sponsors that we're talking about. Like our partnership with Pepsi, for example, that was publicly announced a couple months ago. They want to target all their key properties that they want to be going at, key malls, stadiums, universities, airports. It just tells you that brands want to take over the narrative and really make sure that they don't want all these middle layers to communicate to the consumer about recycling or material capture, about anything. If we can get straight away to them, that's what's amazing to see and we're doing that with other brands as well. 

That mobile phone example I gave you, a major mobile phone provider or telco saw that and the phone popped up. They were like, "Well, can we get exclusivity on this?" That’s the thing. It doesn't have to be a CPG or a materials-focused company to be advertising or sponsoring the Oscars. There are different brand moments. This is the way if you're doing anything sustainability, this is the channel to talk about what is the end of life. That’s the unique thing about it.

Of course, anybody can play standard ads and we have all the measured metrics versus a simple dumb screen out there because we have the sensor measuring interactions, engagements, passerby, things like that. So that's actually measurable rather than getting some data from some source.

I mean, I've been at this for 25 years and I've seen countless digital out-of-home efforts. 

We've got phone charging stations, we've got trash bins, we've got ATM toppers, we've got this and that and almost every one of them has not worked out because they were sold purely on the basis of an opportunity to see and here was an available space where they could stick these into a store or other environment, but there wasn't any other thinking beyond that. You have some connective tissue to that idea but it’s also very different, as you said.

Hassan Murad: That's where I think you can look at our history as well. It is not that we started building an advertising network right off the bat, but it was just really making sure people find value, create items that add value to properties that actually solve the massive problem and it is a self-sustaining business by itself and then we're seeing people accelerate to hundreds and thousands of units by itself because they want to get in front of people's attention and get their impressions. 

So merging these two things is now the accelerant to creating OMX, which is essentially the first climate focused or materials focused digital out-of-home network that we're building.

All right, that was very interesting. Thanks for spending some time with me.

Hassan Murad: Yeah, of course, Dave. Thanks for having us.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The people who build and maintain very large networks of displays, PCs, servers and other devices tend to have more to do than time to do it, and when some technical shit hits the operating fan, trying to work out what's happening and what to do about it takes experience, brainpower and what can be punishing downtime.

So what if generative AI could be used by a network operations center team to comb through knowledge bases and trouble ticket archives to identify solutions in seconds, instead of minutes or hours? And what if a lot of meat and potato workflows done to deliver services and maintain uptimes could be automated, and handled by an AI bot?

That's the premise of Netspeek, a start-up that formally came out of stealth mode this week - with an AI-driven SaaS solution aimed at integrators, solutions providers and enterprise-level companies that use a lot of AV gear. The Boston-based company is focused more at launch on unified communications, because of the scale and need out there. But Netspeek's toolset is also applicable to digital signage, and can bolt on to existing device management solutions.

The guy driving this will be familiar in digital signage hardware circles. Erik DeGiorgi was running the specialty PC firm MediaVue, but sold that company about a year ago. Since then, he's been forehead-deep working with a small dev team on Netspeek. We caught up last week and he gave me the rundown.

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TRANSCRIPT

Erik, nice to chat once again. You sold your company about a year ago, and I don't want to say disappeared, but kind of went off the grid in terms of digital signage, and now you are launching a new company called Netspeek. What is that? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Thanks for having me back, Dave. It's crazy. Time flies. I think it's well over two years at this point since our last conversation. 

We launched Netspeek at the beginning of the year. At the same time, we sold out MediaVue. Netspeek is bringing to market the first generative AI platform focused on supporting the day-to-day operations of mixed vendor estates of pro AV networks. Digital signage is certainly a component of that. We're really focused on the totality of pro AV technologies. So it includes a lot of UCC unified collaborations and communications technologies as well as signage, and really targeting office spaces. So think about meeting rooms and conference rooms. You might have a Zoom or a Teams environment in there as well as a signage system or classroom environments, and what we've developed is a generative AI solution that can be embedded into those networks, that can work alongside human operators, network administrators, technicians to help them support them in their daily workflows, and then also bring a large amount of automation.

So our platform can not only kind of observe what's going on in a network, kind of a 24/7-365 way, but then take action and use its own logic and reason and independent thinking to analyze situations the same way a human operator would and then structure and generate responses. So being able to directly address equipment and solve problems independently. We're pretty excited to bring that to market. We're launching to the industry here in a week, and then we'll be demoing at ISE at the beginning of February. 

You’ll have your own stand at ISE?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, and I did pull up the booth number ahead of the call, but of course now it's on a different tab. It's in the Innovation Park, and the booth number is CS820, and it's actually centrally located there in the Innovation Park. So actually right outside the digital signage area. 

Yeah, I think for people going to ISE, the Innovation Park is kind of along the main corridor in between halls. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yep, it's the central hallway. 

Okay, so people should be able to find you there. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Hopefully, yep. 

Not a sprawling booth like a Samsung or LG or something, but… 

Erik DeGiorgi: We measure in single meters. I think it's a 2x3 meter booth. 

Startup life.

Erik DeGiorgi: The price was right. 

There are lots of device management platforms out there, either independent third-party platforms that you would subscribe to and bolt onto your system or a fair number of companies, whether they're integrators or CMS software companies in the context of digital signage have their own device management code written in, how is this different? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely. Netspeek is not another monitoring platform. Monitoring is a necessary component, right? You need to know what you have on the network and know what it's doing as a foundation. But our value really lies in the intelligence that we're bringing into that. So it's taking that monitoring and observation, but then actually doing something with it in doing that either again to assist a human by bringing kind of an encyclopedic knowledge and institutional knowledge or whether it's through the automation, and so we're going to market with a total solution.

We have a monitoring platform that we've developed as a necessary part of our total solution, but we actually are also partnering with existing remote monitoring and management platforms to essentially bolt on to them, and then bring that intelligence to their monitoring platform and actually at ISE, you'll be able to see that as well. 

So they should happily run in parallel using APIs or…? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. So we hook into the existing monitoring platform and we essentially bolt on the, the reasoning and the intelligence, and then allow an existing user to leverage that front end, and that monitoring platform that they're already familiar with.

Who do you think you're primarily going to be selling this into? Is it like integrators and service providers who have network operation centers or would it be end users? 

Erik DeGiorgi: So it's a little bit of both, and candidly at an early stage, you tend to take a bit more of a scattershot approach, and test where the value emerges. It's a new technology, gen AI, everybody knows it's there and in a large part don't know what to do with it. But we've kind of honed in on three initial go to market opportunities.

One is like a total solution directed towards the end user. One is more of a channel centric focus, whether it's a system integrator managed service provider. We're actually already engaged with a few, of each, that are interested in leveraging the platform in that capacity. And then also, like I said, with, an existing management. You could be a manufacturer. So think about even an independent manufacturer, or a platform provider, like an existing monitoring platform. So an existing tool is specific to a manufacturer or a tool for more broad-based management. Like I said, we can kind of bolt into those and go to market that way as well. 

So in the scenario of a network operation center in the context of digital signage, an integrator that's doing the work to monitor a large QSR network for a restaurant chain that doesn't want to do that internally and they've got a whole bunch of screens up on a wall and they've got big curved desktop screens and the whole bit and they're watching what's going on. 

Is the idea here in part that. As a problem develops and it's kind of weird and not familiar that if you had to go into a whole bunch of manuals and archived information, it would take many minutes, maybe even hours to do it versus if this is all on a learned model that the solution or at least ideas on a resolution could come up in seconds?

Erik DeGiorgi: We really kind of lean into the personification of our platform. So our product is called Lena and Lena is an acronym that stands for Language Enabled Network Administrator. So we really have modeled the platform and the solution after the workflows that human operators perform every day. So imagine being in that knock and sitting there next to your colleague, Lena and Lena happens to be trained on every respective certification related to the deployment, and has been trained in every application software that's being used, has an encyclopedic knowledge of every technical document for every piece of equipment or technology that's in that deployment, has the ability to - at the speed of light - comb through any historical information like previous support tickets or anything like that that's been related. 

So being confronted with a situation, whether that's a critical situation or whether it's looking at something that's preventative, or maintenance-oriented, just imagine having this kind of superhuman user that can just as a human operator analyze the situation, develop a logic flow, think critically about that situation, pull in outside information to help diagnose a potential issue, construct a resolution, and then either autonomously or along with a human companion and approval, go ahead and execute that action.

One of the things that Lena can do out of the box is we've done all the integrations, and I say all we've done many, and we're continuing to do many more integrations with all the different devices and technologies that you see in these networks. So, as a generative AI, Lena can generate information for human consumption, but Lena can also generate structured information that translate down to device commands in various ways. So Lena can actually take action and do things on her own, and, we default to saying “her” because get used to personifying. Some people lean into that, some people don't. But you really kind of think about it as this if you had your next hire, your next employee that had all of this institutional knowledge and had the ability to take action in this way. 

What would be the ROI on something like that? I assume that if there's a problem emerging that seems kind of weird, that can take quite a bit of time theoretically to come to a resolution, unless you have somebody on staff who is almost like Lena and has that encyclopedic knowledge, otherwise it's going to take many minutes, right? 

Erik DeGiorgi: We quantify value in two ways, coming from two different directions. Again, think about the application. We're primarily focused on day one is kind of meeting spaces, conference rooms, classrooms, that type of stuff. So you have people, employees, workers going into those spaces, and your sales and marketing people having meetings every day and using those spaces. How much downtime is there in those rooms and what's the value of eliminating some of that downtime, right? So it's kind of a workforce efficiency quantification and we ran that as an exercise and based on our pricing models and some averages of salaries for typical people and took a stab at it and if we save one person in one room two minutes a day, it pays for itself. So imagine a meeting of four people. If you can shave 30 seconds off of that, it pays for itself. So that's kind of one way to look at it. 

The other way is what you were talking about is kind of the operational side. What is the cost to operate these networks and to develop that skilled labor, to deploy that skilled labor? And even with that skilled labor, there's kind of the human component. It takes time to process information to think through things. Lena operates at a different pace. So being able to not only just problem solve, troubleshoot, and come to a resolution quicker, but our real objective is actually to mitigate most of those problems from occurring to begin with. We're going to be showing a couple of things at ISE. I'll just give you a tangible example. A room check is something that we're going to be demonstrating. So for those unaware, at most corporate spaces, there are people that go around and check the rooms on a daily and weekly basis. It's a high frequency. It's a very manual process. I'm going room to room running a test call, making sure things are working before the start of the day. It's a high labor, high cost process. So we're actually demonstrating an automated room check where Lena being embedded in the network can go and perform that activity autonomously at really any frequency. 

So we're actually going to break the system and we'll be demoing Lena identifying that and actually resolving it. So something's logged out. I'm going to log back into that room's zoom account and run a test call and give it the green light. That's a very tangible thing. That's a real world thing that a lot of people do in these spaces that costs a lot of money and it's something that we're going to be able to help out with. 

Is this the way AI works, is it kind of a continuous learning thing, where the more that Lena is applied to a system, the more it's learning about its quirks and things that happen, or is it kind of a preset load of information and it's just working off of that?

Erik DeGiorgi: It's an interesting question. I would answer that by saying it's kind of a hybrid, because there's a couple things there. So first there's, I think, a data security and data integrity aspect, and that's something we take very seriously. So we were deploying and as we grow and many enterprises as we did in our previous company, of course, we're not going to be extracting any information or learning from that specific application and bringing that into the general knowledge. So none of our users' information related to this specific network gets brought into the general learning, right? So we take a very, data security approach.

I mean, AI is exciting. It's going to change things, but it's also scary, right? It's new, and we want to make sure that we have a very clear focus. I'm in a very clear message around that, that as we deploy this, any state specific or enterprise specific information is retained by that and it's not brought back into the general knowledge. But, in a different way of answering that question, our platform is built to think critically about situations and develop its own logic flows and reasoning flows. So what it is not is pre programmed, in a sense. If this, then that, right? That's not what we've done. We've created a body of knowledge and we've created a set of contexts and parameters, and then we allow Lena to kind of think on her own in order to address and identify and work essentially, again, the way a person would. So there's kind of a big question we could go in a couple different directions, but I don't know if that helps at all. 

Yeah, it does. I'm curious. The thing about AI, particularly in its early ages, and it's come a long way in the last year and a half, but one of the concerns was around hallucinations and AI models just making shit up.

How do you kind of wall that in so that if you have a resource archive that when Lena is trying to troubleshoot something and it comes up with a resolution, how confident can you be that this it's absolutely working off of what's there and not just kind of imagineering some other solution?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely. So just as a human being would, if I ask you a question, you're going to want to have an answer, right? And if you don't really know the answer, you might kind of fudge it, right? These models are not too dissimilar in that respect. So it's a complicated answer.

There are several, if not many things that can be done. There's a lot of context that's provided, so Lena is never reaching out to the internet and looking for information. Lena's on rails in that sense, there's a very kind of tight context, we have built in mechanisms within the platform to self audit and self check so when Lena is presenting something, you know like, here's an issue. I'm going to construct a potential resolution to that. There's actually mechanisms that we've built into the platform that will take that output and fact check it, if that makes sense, at a high level. 

So you're absolutely right. It's absolutely a problem. But there are several mechanisms that we've put in place in order to mitigate hallucination, and quite seriously, we interact with this platform quite a bit as you can imagine, and it's really not an issue.

So with automation, are there kind of guardrails around that? Because if anybody who's watched Hollywood movies thinks about Skynet and Terminator and everything in between. So if there's a problem, would Lena decide, okay, we're having a problem with overheating, so I'll just turn off all the power in the building.

Erik DeGiorgi: No, I mean, again, Lena has very tight parameters, right? And it's actually not that hard to constrain a model in that way. We're not just letting this thing loose and it's multifold, right? So it's built into Lena's programming to not do that, but beyond that, automation is enabled as much as the human counterpart want to, right? So  are there non mission critical things that we're allowing when it's fully automated? Are there things that we need, human confirmation, it kind of just depends on the workflow. It depends on the application, how much you want to automate and how much you don't to be candid.

You know, we're learning what the temperature of the early adopters is and seeing it. It’s a brave new world for all of us. We're trying to figure out, it's all new, right. And it's not gonna be hell where it kills the crew to protect the mission. So it's far more benevolent, I think. I like to think about it more as the computer on the Starship Enterprise. Let's use, like, a good one, right? It's your friendly AI that's keeping track of all your critical systems and is there to help you work through problems.

I'm guessing among potential customers, there's at least a couple of lines of thinking. One being that Lena would allow us to do more with the staff that we have in our knocks or whatever their operation they're thinking about for it, but the other one would be Lena can take the place of like five staffers and we can save half a million bucks or something 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's one we actually talk about quite a bit and you know, disruption disrupts in many ways, right? This technology is most certainly disruptive and that's not just in signage,it's going to be in every aspect of our life going forward. But I believe and it's just not my belief, but it's what I hear and observe, is that the teams, the humans that are actually tasked with doing the operational work every day are so overwhelmed, that it's going to be more of the former, right?

At least at the outset, certainly, there's so much we were talking about it the other day. You know, we have an immense amount of data. How much data comes out of these networks use your, example network, you were talking about the retail installation, how much data comes back from that network, whether it's telemetry or whether it’s telemetry coming back at the device level or whether it's information based on viewership. I mean, there's so much data that's coming from these systems. How much of it's actually used? You know, I don't know, if I take a stab at it, under 10%, 5%, I mean, probably very little of it's actually used. It's overload. So why don't you just put it on and now you have your data analyst and you can actually leverage that information. So there's a lot of work that's not being done in the spaces that Lena can step in and do that can support and work alongside human operators that are presently overtasked.

For those people who are listening and thinking well, this sounds interesting. I wonder if this can apply to my business and my operation they would then be wondering How do I do this? Am I buying an enterprise license? Am I having to install a local server? Is it a SaaS model? How does all this work?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so we are a pure SaaS model, and again there's a couple of different go to markets, whether it's your channel, but let's just say like the direct to end user. If I'm an enterprise and I want to adopt the platform, it's a SaaS model, it's largely a cloud based, all the magic goes on and in our cloud infrastructure. 

There's an edge client that gets deployed into each of the local networks in the enterprise, and between the cloud infrastructure, between the edge client, which is typically virtualized in the network, we securely and safely can communicate with all of the connected devices and operate the network as we've been talking about.

What kind of a learning curve is involved? I mean, I assume this is not the sort of thing that you just sign up for and get your activation code, plug it in and off you go to the races, like there would have to be quite a bit of onboarding, I would imagine. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Right. Well, so there is onboarding. I would say, in comparison to maybe some of the other universal multi vendor monitoring and management tools, it's less. I'll explain why. The burden to onboard our platform, so of course we work very closely with the client to do all of this, but we essentially do an asset dump, right? 

So every enterprise has a spectrum of asset management, let's just say, from enterprise to enterprise. So we bring that in, we clean it, we structure it so we know where everything is, there's a physical check to make sure that the right equipment is in the right place every. Again, we're focusing on rooms and meeting spaces and that kind of thing. So there's typically a specific vocabulary or nomenclature to those spaces that might be named after a sports team or something. I actually had an account of, believe it or not, that was named their rooms geographical places, but actually geographical places that they had other offices. So they had literally an office in Paris that had rooms called Milan and Berlin and everything. So imagine having to figure out how to train the model to not get screwed up with that. But nonetheless, that's our problem. 

So there's a bit of specific learning to the application. You onboard the devices and then really you're off and running because there's two main things that we do. We've done all the integrations with the devices so you really don't have to do that and unlike existing platforms where you have to do a lot of programming, like let's say you wanted a single touch to reboot a room or something like that and there's three or four devices or log into something, right? Typically, you'd have to program those subroutines and create those command structures, but all that's generated in our platform. So it's really saying, this is what I have, this is where it is, and that's it. So yes, there's onboarding, but compared to existing platforms, it's actually quite light. 

Is that onboarding part of the SaaS fee or am I paying like a number to get that part done?

Erik DeGiorgi: We're still figuring that out. What the objective and what we've done thus far is: you sign a contract with us. We do that work for you. There's no upfront fees and you're just paying your, your typical SaaS. 

But you're kind of learning on the fly and you may realize, Jesus, this is taking like two weeks of labor to onboard each our clients and need to do charge something to cover that 

Erik DeGiorgi: Well, that's why I chose my words carefully because I might we're figuring it out as we go. But that's the objective, right? The objective is that we just want to make it really clean, really simple. Hey, you're a customer you're locked into a year or two or three a contract, it's fine. We're going to get you up and running and we're going to support you along the way, and we're not going to nickel and dime you. 

So you talked to an integrator, I know you're kind of pre selling this to companies, at least making them aware. How are they responding? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Well, very well. We had a UC, industry veteran join us several months ago, he has about 30 years in the industry, Polycom, Crestron, and almost every day, we're having lots of really high level conversations with end users, integrators, partners at all levels.

We just kind of pinch ourselves. We're still batting a thousand, like every single conversation has led to more and everybody's very excited about it. You know, there's been this huge AI buzz. There really hasn't been a lot behind it, behind the buzz, and so we're super excited to show real world applications, bringing actual value to the industry and it's resonating, and we're very excited.

We had a pre-call and I asked about the level of activity among particularly larger companies in AI, and I was surprised when you said that it's largely just a roadmap item still for most companies. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Overwhelmingly, with a couple exceptions, the general feedback that we get is: we need to figure out how to do something with you. We know AI needs to be part of our strategy. You know, it's on paper and that's kind of about as far as we've gotten with it. 

If people want to know more about this, they could find you online at Netspeek.com, right? 

Erik DeGiorgi: That's right. Netspeek.com, and of course on LinkedIn, and for those going to the show we'd love to see you there. 

All right. Thank you, Erik.

Erik DeGiorgi: Great to catch up, Dave. Thanks so much.