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

In the last two or three years, I've sensed a big shift in the understanding and execution of big LED displays - with way more focus on content than in the past. For a long time, most of these big jobs were so focused on the size and pitch of the screens they kind of forgot about what was really important - what was on the screens.

That's changed a lot with big dollar projects, but not so much - at all - with the 10s of 1,000s of smaller, lower resolution LED displays that are resting on pylons along roadsides or mounted on the sides of buildings. They're just straight marketing and messaging centers for everyone from auto dealers and grocers to churches and community theatres. In most of those cases, the sign operator is working with very basic play-out software and has little or no creative capabilities or resources.

So what's on those signs often doesn't look very good. Doesn't have an impact. And rarely gets changed.

That's why's Brady Haag started a little company in Wichita, Kansas that is expressly in the business of making the production of creative for these kinds of screens fast, easy and inexpensive. Project Content is a cloud platform populated with a ton of pre-designed templates that subscribers can easily use and output as finished files.

Templates are not at all new to digital signage, and a whole bunch of CMS software companies have template libraries. There's also third-party services that have these libraries. But those are for HD screens, what you'd maybe call everyday digital signage. The big difference here is how Project Content is solely focused on these low-res LED screens, with all the quirks and the special thinking and design needed to make them look good and have an impact.

TRANSCRIPT

Brady, thank you for joining me. Where are you today? 

Brady Haag: Hey, thanks for having me, Dave. We are located in Wichita, Kansas. So in the center of the US. 

The fly over country? 

Brady Haag: Exactly. We're actually the air capital of the world, but I don't know if we can even consider us that anymore with all the aircrafts leaving us.

So what is Project Content all about? 

Brady Haag: So Project Content is an effort by my team and I to elevate the outdoor EMC content game. I noticed when I joined the industry about seven years ago that there was a really big problem, especially with the EMC side of things, and I drove around the country with some colleagues and realized that 85%ish of the content wasn’t driving revenue, it was just sitting up there not producing anything and sign owners love the idea of having an EMC, but they don't think of all the work and all the thought and time that needs to go into that EMC that they purchased. 

I was on your site, and I know what EMC is, but can you explain that to other people? Because my community just calls them digital signs. 

Brady Haag: I actually like LED displays better than EMC but EMC is an electronic media center or message center. They're outdoor billboards or digital commercial boards that can promote marketing messages based on whatever the client wants to put up there, so driving down the highway, you can see that a lot of car dealerships have them and like to promote their car specials on the road. 

Yeah, so EMC is the same thing as a LED display. 

Okay. So you're less focused on internal digital signage and much more so on the kind of the roadside stuff and the LED stuff on pylons and so on?

Brady Haag: Exactly. We're working our way into the indoor digital space, but it's so oversaturated right now, and we're just trying to focus on a solution for the outdoors first. 

Yeah, as you mentioned, a lot of these are small businesses and they just have no idea about what to do for content or what it should look like or anything else, right?

Brady Haag: So we call it, in-house, the black box debacle because it came to me one day when I was giving a seminar at a place in Missouri.