Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

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

The Outdoor Advertising Association of America represents and guides the interests and activities of some 850 member organizations across the US, including the biggest media companies, brands that do a lot of outdoor, agencies, ad-tech providers, and suppliers.

That's billboard, of course, but also the other formats for advertising, from transit shelters to place-based media networks on TVs in venues like bars, clinics and workout studios

The OAAA has been around since 1891, and these days is seeing rapid growth for the medium, especially on the digital side. If they're not already doing digital, most OAAA members are going down that path and also adopting technologies like AI.

I had a really good chat, about a bunch of things, with Anna Bager - the association's President and CEO.

We get into the state of the medium, which is particularly busy because of ALL the money flowing into political advertising. We also touch on issues like a need to simplify the planning, buying and distribution ecosystem, and the OAAA's perspective and activity around something that's huge in other regions like Europe - sustainability.

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TRANSCRIPT

Anna, thank you for joining me. This is going to be a simple question to start out with, but can you tell me what the OAAA does and why it exists? 

Anna Bager: Absolutely, so we are the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and we are what I would call a classic trade association. We focus on two things. We want to protect the industry and we want to grow the industry. So on the protection front, we have a pretty big government affairs unit. We do state and federal lobbying on things that really matter to the industry, such as the First Amendment, anything real estate, infrastructure, and the Highway Beautification Act, which controls the number of signs or at least roadside that you can have in the US and privacy is another area that we're increasingly interested in privacy and data regulation. Keeping an eye on what's happening, making sure that there are no laws that don't work well for the industry that is being passed or hopefully not, and, also looking for opportunities, where we can, as an industry where we can maybe benefit from some of the legislation and more things that are happening in DC or state level that can work well for the industry. 

So that's one part lobbying and government affairs and a lot of legal operations, and then the other part is the growth side, and for that, we do research on behalf of the industry. We do a lot of promotion of the industry at our own events or other events. We're out there talking to advertisers and brands about why they should be. Spending more money, and investing more out-of-home, and then we create guidelines, standards, and frameworks that help the industry operate better and make it easier to buy and sell. I think that sums it up. 

It’s a member organization? 

Anna Bager: It's a member organization. We are the largest out-of-home association, I think, in the world, actually. We have probably close to 800 members and pretty much everyone who is in the out-of-home industry in the US and some other international members. 

So this would be Lamar all the way down to an almost hyper-local kind of media owner?

Anna Bager: It would definitely be but it could also be a gas station TV. It could be a cinema. It could be Airports and transit, so we cover it all. It's not just the roadside, it's all the different formats. 

Is there a cutoff? I'm curious about some of what they call faster consumer TV networks like Atmosphere and Loop and so on that are in bars and it's a streaming app.

Anna Bager: They are members too.

Okay, so where would you cut it off? 

Anna Bager: I don't cut it off. I think we welcome anyone as a member if they're in out-of-home advertising, which is, we're called out-of-home, but if I had been the one to take a pick, I probably would have called it location-based media because that's really what we are, right? Wherever there is signage or any type of ad that's there because of the location, and the context that is there it seems to be a good place to reach consumers or business people because they're there at that time and they might be receptive to a message.

So anyone who's in that could be retail media networks. It could be retail organizations, could be place-based. It could be a point of care, like doctor's offices, but we typically don't have those companies as members, but they could be. Also, one thing that I think is common for most of our members is that we're one too many advertisers. We're not targeting individuals so it can be seen by many. So anyone who's doing that could be a member of the OAAA. 

You mentioned retail media networks. I was going to ask about that later, let's get into it. You mentioned it. I'm curious because of the rise of that and how you're starting to see more and more activity around the in-store piece of it and not just the online and mobile parts. Are they different budgets? 

Anna Bager: I think so. I think it depends. It's certainly a growth opportunity for the industry. Retail in general is taking place in a store, a lot of it online, but you have to get people there or you have to get them interested. You also may want to amplify a message before they're in the store, you want to serve them an offer and that's where we can come in. 

The retail media networks themselves, buy a lot of media also on behalf of their advertisers. So it could be a Coca-Cola, right? They buy media for them. I think that out-of-home is a natural part of media that you should buy to create the most bang for the buck for a company, it's not just in the stores, it's everything around and creates an audience extension, et cetera. So there might be other budgets. It's definitely a different type of buyer, but I think we're uniquely positioned and I think we play an important role in the world of retail media, reaching consumers on the go or even at home. 

I think what these networks have can be very useful, especially now that out-of-home has become more digital and you can increasingly use data and target in a very different way and also change out messages really fast. These guys have first-party data, from loyalty programs or consumers basically leaning in and allowing them to use their data and the ability to then use that data on the knowledge of where consumers might be or on the go, or, the interest they might have and use contextual and location-based advertising makes it just so much better. I think it's a great match. The ability to use the data to do that. 

So what's the state of being out-of-home at this point? In your keynote, which I think was for your annual conference, you talked about double-digit growth. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I mean out-of-home has had an interesting journey since the pandemic. Before that, we were growing very steadily every year, then obviously we had a dip in the pandemic and then we had an amazing year in 2022, where I think out-of-home were faster than any other ad media. And since then, it's been steadily going up. This year is particularly interesting. There's a lot going on. We have an election that's coming up that's driving a lot of ad dollars and also not just ad dollars into out-of-home, but also into other media where other brands then look for a positioning somewhere else. So there's just a lot of movement in the market right now.

It’s an economy that hopefully will start growing again. So it's been a good year. We keep growing and I think next year is going to be hopefully even better than this year. 

And does digital now represent the overall kind of installed base and also a percentage of overall revenue?

Anna Bager: Digital is interesting. So I think it's probably around 30 percent of all the installed base, but it's close to half of the revenue and most of the growth is coming from digital, so definitely an area that the industry is investing in and I want to keep moving forward. 

Is it harder and harder to sell static?

Anna Bager: No, I don't think so. I think it's just really easy to sell digital. I think you can still sell static. Static has a lot of benefits too. You have a message up for a very long time, right? It's very sturdy and you know that it works and then again, you put a billboard up, for example, it's going to be there for 30 or more days. So It's the same message that just is engraved in the sense of a little bit of a mini landmark, right? So static works really well too and for certain types of advertisers. It's absolutely key. But obviously digital has the ability to switch out content fast, use data, and do some interesting creative executions too because it's a huge growth area for us.

We talked about retail media before the ability, you can do that with static too, and you can get static up fast today, but the ability to include out-of-home in more of an omnichannel media mix, it's far greater over digital because it's just there. You can just kind of plug it in.

Is efficiency the big attraction? The fact that you can book something very rapidly. 

Anna Bager: For digital? It all depends on the goals of the advertiser. Obviously, to be able to get a message up really fast is important. Also, to be able to switch out a message really fast, if you need to, is important. The ability to again, be able to use data. If it's raining or if it's sunshine or if there's a specific event going on that day or in that place or in that moment, you can use that knowledge to put up better ads, but it's also sometimes, the creative opportunities you have with digital can allow you to do really cool things. Anything spectacular and amorphic, brands love that, right? That's mostly digital. So there are just so many different things you can do. It all depends on what the advertiser wants to achieve. 

You mentioned anamorphic, the idea of 3D visual illusions, is that kind of the bright shiny object, and there's a bright shiny object every 2-3 years that comes along and the old object gets abandoned?

Anna Bager: I don't think so. Out-of-home is so many different things. Some call it iconic, some call it spectacular. Within that category, definitely it's the anamorphic or things like the Sphere. I think that's just a different part of being out-of-home, which I think will always be very interesting to brands who want to make a big mark.

Clearly, you can get a lot of earned media through great executions because It's very socially shareable and you can give it global legs, it's done really well. So I think that's one type of out-of-home. I don't think it's a shiny object, even though it is a shiny object. I think it's just something that brands are very interested in right now, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there are other types of digital boards or signage, and not just roadside stuff, that works really well for brands in certain ways. I think the power of our industry is that we can reach pretty much everyone at any point in time, anywhere, right? And it doesn't really matter if that's static digital or anamorphic. It's just the reach that we have that then, through social media and other channels creates a sort of an interactive space too. That's not just a physical space. The power of the medium is the reach and it doesn't really matter what type of signage it is, I think. 

It's interesting with the anamorphic stuff, I've seen it in person, and I've seen tons of videos around it. Most of it's not very good. It's something spinning or pushing out of a screen and who cares, and it begs the larger question, when I drive around in a big city and I see a lot of digital out-of-home billboards, I think most of the creative isn't very good. There's too much on there, and I just find it weird for an established medium that so many creatives just don't get it.

Anna Bager: Out-of-home is probably the most prestigious thing you can do as a creative if you want to go for those really big campaigns, but it's also really hard and that's why it's so prestigious. Less is more. Simplicity works really well. Don’t overdo it. Think it through. But it's an art form.

I think there's a lot of bad creative but there's also some really amazing creative. The interesting thing is you remember both. So from my perspective, and it doesn't necessarily take away from your opinion of the brand if you don't think the ad is great. You still remember and you see it and you register and you might go and buy the product.

But obviously, I think, I wish everyone did better, because there's so much you can do with out-of-home because you own the whole campus, it's all yours to do something with, there's nothing but a location surrounding it, you can do really cool things, but, yeah, there's good and there's bad, but like I said, you still remember it, and I think that's the real key point, but I think with out-of-home market, just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should, and I think, I agree with you, but it's very subjective, what you like, obviously. But with that type of signage, still a lot of experimentation, I think, on let's do something really cool, and then does it really make sense or does it have a connection to the product? Maybe not, but yeah. 

Yeah. I suppose it's like any advertising. There's really great national advertising and big-budget campaigns, but there's a whole bunch of more local and even hyperlocal ads and they're not produced by big agencies with top-tier creatives.

I was in a rental car recently driving through Toronto on the 401, so 401 is slow, so you got lots of time to look at billboards, and I still couldn't absorb everything on some of these because there was just so much stuff trying to be jammed in there. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. You have to think about that. You have to think that the audience is going to have very little time to look at it, right? Unless there's a traffic jam. Therefore you have to make it so that they can see, they can register, they can get it. They also maybe can remember that one little thing that you want them to Google, it shouldn't be too much on them. I agree.

But I have to say that, and I just came back this morning from my, event that we did in Las Vegas where we had a lot of our members present, different interesting creative executions, and there were a lot of great local out-of-home. You don't have to be, like, one of the biggest creative agencies on Madison Avenue to create good content. There are a lot of locals out-of-home that play to them, it is very local, just knowing the audience. 

I'll give you one really cool example. There's a law firm called Morgan & Morgan and they are pretty much everywhere, they're big out-of-home buyers, you would consider that local advertising, even though they're in many parts of the country. I think this was last year, they took some of their billboards and put graffiti all over, the Morgan & Morgan information called Morgan & Morgan and what ended up happening was that they got so many calls. Where people said, Oh my God, your billboard has been vandalized. Are you aware? And people really paid attention to it to the point where they had to take them down because people couldn't get through. Because there are so many calls. If you're very smart about it and you're speaking to an audience that is there and feels a certain connection to it because it's local, you can do really cool things and I think there's great advertising on both sides and bad. 

Is the profile of media owners evolving? I asked because I used to think of media owners as just being the media companies, Mars and Patterson up in Canada and so on. But I have been hearing that property owners and commercial property owners are blocking and tackling big LED displays on the corners of their new builds or renovated builds, and then engaging a media company to sell their stuff. So they own the display as opposed to the media company leasing that space. 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I don't know if that's more now than before I can speak to that. That's definitely a phenomenon, right? And you see not just in the U S that all over the world. If you own property and you're smart about it, if there's an ability to put up a sign there, of course, you should do it if it doesn't make the building uglier or cause problems in any other way, and I think we see more and more of that and then they usually use media companies to sell it for them because out-of-home is not that easy.

Yeah, I've been in this for 25 years, and I still remind people that advertising isn't as easy as you think it is. 

Anna Bager: No, it's supposed to look easy, but very hard. That's for sure, and there's a lot that goes into I think especially with out-of-home I am fairly new to the industry. I've been here five years. I come from the regular traditional digital media side, and it's fascinating, like the know-how location and real estate and just like how to best leverage the space that you have, that this industry has, that is not the same in other places, even though the concept is the same, it's just very different. 

In the keynote you did earlier this year, one of the things you said is we need a clean, simple supply chain without too many intermediaries. What did you mean by that? 

Anna Bager: Yeah, I think that's very important. Basically as the industry becomes more digital, and not just the industry, as advertising as a whole is more and more transacted in an automated or programmatic fashion and you can do static in that as well. It's important that once you start doing it that way, you lose a little bit of control of what's going on, and there are a lot of middlemen that can insert themselves along the way, and there can be a little lack of transparency as to who's actually making money or who's taking cut where.

And that's something that digital media on the traditional side, as programmatic started growing and automation struggled quite a bit, and it wasn't just under the transparency and understanding of kind of how, what the supply chain looked like from a commercial point of view, it's also from a brand safety and fraud perspective, you want it to be very clean, very simple, and very straightforward what goes on in the supply chain.

So the media owner knows what's happening between them and the brand actually posting the ad, and the other way around, it just makes things a lot better, and I think we have an opportunity as an industry because we're building this now to avoid a lot of the mistakes that I think did happen, when digital media came up and if you look at digital media today in programmatic, there's like 30-45% fraud or impressions that never get served. Now, our industry doesn't really have that problem. Our ads always get served pretty much, but, so maybe we don't need to have verification in the same way, but there's still, a lot of things that happen there that where there's a waste, and we don't really know where that money goes, but I think we can avoid, on our end. So that's what I meant, and I think these next couple of years are going to be critical. We're going to need a lot of people to learn a lot of know-how we're going to need to learn. There are a lot of interesting companies that can help, but there are also a lot of players that are just going to try and make a buck because they can and don't necessarily add any value to the overall transaction.

When I look at the ad tech landscape, I get cross-eyed very quickly because there are so many companies selling their capabilities and they all describe what they do a little bit differently. It must be daunting to somebody taking a look at this. 

Anna Bager: That's exactly it. There's a very, who you may know, smart banker, but he's also an industry figure, Terence Kawaja from Luma. He's created something called a Lumascape, which kind of illustrates, and yes, you can get lost in that pretty quickly. We want to keep it as simple as possible. There's like an ad tech company for everything. There's been a lot of money to invest in those types of companies, but in the end, you really have to provide value and improvement to the transaction, otherwise, you shouldn't be in there. 

You also said in the keynote that more than 50% of media owners are now using AI. What hit me with that is why it is so low? 

Anna Bager: That actually was a survey that we did, I think at the end of last year. So I'm sure it's higher now and I think it's growing exponentially. At the time I thought, huh, interesting. I think everyone uses AI these days and I think you have to, if for nothing else, because everyone uses it. So you're going to be way behind if you don't, and I think in our industry, same things as everyone else, great creative solutions, great ways of just getting content out faster, making sure that you take into consideration all the different data and things that you might need to know to do a better job. So I think AI is critical. There's a lot of bad with AI, but there's also a lot of good.

I think the industry this year, since we did the survey, is probably a lot higher now. We should probably do it again. But we haven't done that yet, but it might be more, it might be closer to a 100%. 

Yeah, it strikes me as it's not the highly visible stuff, the creating ads from scratch and so on. It's much more about automation and the things that can be done to increase efficiency and accuracy. 

Anna Bager: Yeah. In the end, that's where it really can help. That and content creation. Of course, you just have to be very careful with AI because you really need to know where the data is coming from and how it's being used and be able to argue that if somebody were to challenge you, right? There's a lot of privacy, and regulatory murkiness around the whole thing. So you gotta be responsible and try to know what you're doing when you're using it. But obviously, it's an incredible tool. 

You mentioned earlier, that this is an election year, which no one can't help but know that these days. I'm curious in terms of budget and financials and forecasts and everything else, does a presidential election year have to be weighted in terms of every four years, there's a bit of an anomaly in terms of spend and then we go back to normal? 

Anna Bager: Obviously big elections, definitely there's so much more money on the market, but out-of-home as a platform is great, every two years there's an election, there's a lot of local elections all the time, there's a lot of advocacy groups and others that are out there with political messaging and our platform lends itself really well to that.

Out-of-home is not just an advertising platform, it's also a platform for public service messaging. A lot of that, right? And we're there, we can reach any consumer. Consumers who might not trust the media, who might not speak the language, whatever it might be, you can put a message up and reach them through signage. Political advertising, depending on how you defend it, I think it's a growth area for out-of-home and something that's not on or off, but obviously this election is also how it's happened, right? There's a lot going on at the very end. I think for everyone, it's a huge opportunity and then we'll have to deal with the aftermath of whatever that might be. 

Oh boy, hopefully not too much of an aftermath. 

I've been over in Europe a couple of times at conferences in the past year and speaking on panels and one of the things that would come up over and over again was sustainability which is a huge issue in Europe for digital out-of-home companies and all digital signage operators and I was asked, "What's happening in Canada and the US?” And I said, it's nowhere near the issue. I'm curious what the OAAA's take is. 

Anna Bager: Oh, we have a sustainability task force. We are very closely monitoring what's happening in Europe. We have a lot of members or not a lot, but we have a few members that have operations there too.

I think it's not as much of a focus here as it is in Europe, but I think it will be, and if you look at big global brands and agencies, they are going to ask for a better insight into how sustainable something was. So you need to pay attention to it. I think what's interesting with out-of-home is though, we might see him as a non-sustainable medium because you drive cars or you ride on airplanes or, But given that we are a one to many media, one ad can reach so many people, and it sits up there for a reasonably long time and it pretty much always reaches an audience, and it doesn't consume as much electricity or power as a lot of other media, in particular, digital does, the production of the ads can be very efficient.

There's something called the Green GRP. We are probably the ones who are best positioned there. We are far more sustainable in other media formats. So what we're focused on is how we better tell that story without greenwashing, and how we can help our members grow with the increasing demands that will come both from the government and from the brands and the agencies around these issues.

So I think it's important. I also think it's important, right? Like whether you believe in it or not, there's definitely something going on with the environment. So it's good to be protective of it, and I think our industry is very responsible. A lot of our members, even if they're in the US have sustainability officers and are constantly looking at how we can improve and make our industry better from that perspective. 

So no, it's a very important thing for us, and we are really looking into both who we can partner with and also what's going on in other markets, to see if we can learn. 

Is the adoption of the change going to be driven somewhat by starting to understand the impact on power bills and realizing, Oh yes, we can do work to address climate change, but we can also reduce our operating costs? 

Anna Bager: Sometimes, probably yes. There can be efficiencies and that's always good, but I think it really depends. I don't think everything reduces the operating costs, but some might, and then that's a form of sustainability too. Yeah, I think you should take all things into consideration. 

I think it's definitely something everyone should be aware of and take a close look at how they're running their operations, and see if they can make changes. 

I met recently with a company that does specialty displays, primarily focused on the digital out-of-home market and one of the things they're tinkering with is large format e-paper displays. So very energy-friendly. I know e-paper quite well, I've been looking at it for years and years. It's getting quite good but there are compromises in terms of color reproduction and everything else, and I asked, what do the brands think of this? Are they fine with it? 

And I was surprised to hear that, yeah, they get it. They understand we don't have maybe the exact color reproduction that we want, but it does other things for us. 

Anna Bager: That's a great example. You don't let perfection get in the way of good, or whatever it is that you say.

Look, we all have a common interest here, and I think if there's something that you can use that's more efficient or more sustainable, maybe less costly, I think that's a good way to convince the brand to do so. That's good news, I think. 

It's also smart to go and ask them for us before developing something, saying here, “Look what we did”, and then they go, “Yeah, I don't like that.”

Anna Bager: That's a a very good point, for sure. 

Happens all the time, but people keep doing it. 

Anna Bager: That is true. 

Alright, thank you for your time, this was great. 

Anna Bager: Thank you, this was really nice and good to speak to you.

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

When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive.

I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications.

I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side.

David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage.

Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers.

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TRANSCRIPT

Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams.

For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo.

Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave. 

Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right?

Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology? 

And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive.

You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right? 

Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time. 

So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left. 

It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it. 

We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good. 

My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool.

So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate. 

Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office. 

So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer?

Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home?

I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things.

So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it. 

When you say customer-facing, how do you define that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment.

What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar. 

How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outstanding way to show use cases and product information, and really shape an experience when you have your customers in your space. Tell me if that was a good answer for what you were hoping to define.

You did fine. Since more and more in the marketplace, larger customers, whether you want to call them enterprise or choose a name, are looking to slim down the number of vendors that they have, and they would like one vendor to do multiple things. Have you found that with some of your established clients that maybe you started with the workplace communications piece that they've then asked about doing large video walls, things like that, and on the flip side, maybe, whether it's an airline or an automaker, I'm thinking of some of your clients, more established clients. Have they said, yeah, we'd now like to also do workplace communications. Do you do that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. First of all, if we make our clients successful, naturally, those teams that manage whatever solution they're implementing are getting questions from their peers on, how do I do that? You know, can you help me, and, who's your partner making this possible?

So we see expansion across the products they own and new use cases. As you mentioned, maybe they're doing employee comms on screens and then it becomes large video walls and experiential things, maybe it's facilities related to meeting room signs, wayfinding, et cetera. 

To the other element of your question, they're also saying if that partner is making us successful, where else can we use them? They do want to consolidate solutions to one vendor that they have success with. That's the biggest question that comes up with my clients. If I invest in you, how are you going to guarantee this solution is successful? And my team sees an ROI and it's not another tool that goes unused. So without a doubt, there's a desire, I believe, by Finance and IT to consolidate technology and vendors, as much as possible, especially if there's a track record of driving a return on the investment and making teams successful.

I'm guessing the conversations are very different than they were, 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, in terms of. I would say in the past, in the history of this digital signage was sold and people were interested in, from the idea of the kind of the sizzle of the screens, the visual elements of it and these days, instead of talking to marketing people, you're talking to IT people and they care about security and they care about data integration, things like that, is that accurate? 

Joe Giebel: That is 100 percent accurate and I think you highlight in 2005, when we started the screen had such a sizzle, most homes didn't have flat-screen TVs. We were talking about plasmas back then. The iPhone didn't exist. So the concept of a touch screen and a large flat screen display, made life a real fun for digital signage. 

Now the screens are more common. security and value, are kind of the table stakes to get into the game and where you really start to differentiate, you you understand the use case and how that is going to benefit a company, whether you're increasing productivity, reducing risk, and is that apparent? And do they understand how you're going to deliver that? And then on the security side, you almost don't get to pass go if you don't have a security posture that can scale globally, and, provide a safe feeling.

I don't even think they have worries, right? You just don't do business with a vendor that's going to create worry, they've either got the security you need or you move on. 

Yeah, and I mean, at least historically, I'm not sure where you're at right now, but historically you had a very large casino group and you had a very large Airline and those are two companies that have to be like, everybody has to be concerned about security, but they really care about security. 

Joe Giebel: They do. It's paramount, obviously it presents a ton of risk. If you don't have that secure environment that matches their standard and those two examples, especially within the gaming world, those are tremendous partners of ours that kind of walked us through: Here's where you need to be, and we're so fortunate to have worked with them, and been able to develop that security posture with them in real world scenarios. 

If you haven't set up gaming integrations and received gaming licenses. That is an in depth process that most of your leadership gets to go through and they get into personal stuff, they do a great job of remaining secure 

So if you're going to work with those kinds of whale clients, you got to be prepared for a lot of hand holding and a long process? 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. They're going to look at everything. I mean, they will find if you've got an NFL pick thing going on internally and you somehow put that interface onto a website, they're going to find that and they're going to ask you questions on why you're running a gambling ring. It goes that in-depth.

They will see your resumes, they're going to do background checks on most of your team. So, there is a process to it. it takes some time and they leave no stone unturned. 

It's been a few years now. Was the process of blending two companies, and I believe it's actually three companies that were kind of blended together, was that a bit of a journey?

Joe Giebel: It is absolutely. Our company for the early history, we bootstrapped it. We had a visionary CEO that founded the company with one partner and we were a tight-knit family that didn't have outside investors. Taking on outside investment was a journey, and an experience, and then as we acquire, these are new experiences for our teams and so it is a bit of a journey. 

There's the whole business operations side of things and how do you get multiple systems to speak to each other? How do we blend processes and then you've got the cultural elements of bringing organizations together, and you have to balance all of that? The people need to remain happy, the systems have to work. So it was a process and if I look at my resume and time with these organizations, what an education it's been for the last 19 years. 

Are there kinds of tribes, so to speak? I'm curious if the operation in Cork, Ireland, which was where Poppulo, came from. Is that the workplace side and are the people in Denver more focused on digital signage? 

Joe Giebel: You know, that's part of the journey and the early stages of the journey you definitely have. I'll stick with your term tribes and people that have knowledge and quite honestly, comfortability with a certain way of doing business.

Along that journey, you start to see that tribal element go away, and you start to see the company mesh and become one organization that grows, and so early on, Denver had to be the hub for digital signage. It’s a, I don't want to say complex, but if you're used to selling a pure SaaS solution, and then you start to add in hardware and the different elements of digital signage, it's more than you're used to and without a doubt, I hadn't talked about email and corporate communications in that sense prior to the acquisition. So it took me time to understand it.

 I would say now, our entire company is so excited about a multi-channel tool, that everybody's leaned into it at this point and we work cross functionally quite well. It extends the workday quite a bit. 

I'm sure there was also a bit of a journey kind of massaging and figuring out the right message, because going to target customers and saying, we do this and we do this, and we also do this must've potentially left them a little cross eyed.

Joe Giebel: Without a doubt. I think we've learned along the way, when to talk about. the channel for a client and when to focus on a specific offering, and that's a delicate dance as well to feel that out. Because not every customer understands our vision quickly, and they certainly don't share the excitement that we have over new stuff because it's not at the forefront of what they do every day. So you can absolutely create a ton of confusion, and we probably did that, in the early process of coming together as Poppulo. 

It probably feels like you're trying to sell them more stuff. 

Joe Giebel: You know, as a sales guy, I'm probably insensitive to that, but, yeah, absolutely. You kind of get that sense when someone's sniffing out a salesperson coming into the room, and I bet we did pass that as well. 

At the end of the day, we are trying to sell more stuff, but if we can't illustrate what the value is and why it makes sense to buy more solutions from us, we haven't done our job and we're probably not going to win that. So at the end of the day, we really do want to try to enhance the offerings and drive value to our client base. 

You also have an office now in Bangalore, India. Is that a Dev team or a remote Dev team? 

Joe Giebel: You know, we've got a number of functions, including development in Bangalore and that's an exciting market. I just saw endless content about how important digital signage is in India, and so we were excited to open that office up. I think it's been open for several months. We held our grand opening last week, but we've got a great team there, including a lot of technical folks and so we're very excited about that expansion. 

But it's sales as well? It's not just purely, what would be perceived at least as being lower-cost, software development than what you would pay in North America. 

Joe Giebel: Correct. It's not purely an offshoring effort. We see some strategic elements there. We've always provided technical experts to support our clients 24/7. That certainly helps the effort. We used to do that from Denver and have people working through the night. We now have folks in support as well in Bangalore. 

The work culture in India, I think opens up a ton of possibilities for any digital signage vendor. That's looking at how do I enhance the workplace and employee experience within an office. I think that's going to be a tremendous market. 

Yeah. I mean, it's a vast market. I suspect the challenge is based on the emails and pitches I get from people that the expectations on cost for SaaS licensing, software, and so on are somewhat lower than they are in North America.

Joe Giebel: It's interesting, and some of the organizations there, that's a tough game if you don't have scale in what we're talking about, oftentimes though, if an organization is looking at this correctly, they're looking to roll out at scale and obviously we can build in better commercials that way, to better understand that, but without a doubt, as we look at a number of our clients are truly global, you do feel that pressure, as you go region to region, and that's an interesting thing you've got to handle, and try to solve for. 

Do you have a client who you're allowed to talk about, because often the larger ones, it's difficult to get any permissions, that kind of really reflects the full meal deal of what you can do in terms of workplace, venue-based, customer-facing digital signage, maybe staff facing digital signage, like the whole shoot and match? 

Joe Giebel: You know, I think Delta Airlines is a great client that takes advantage of most of our solutions, and then especially within digital signage, they've got so many use cases that they deploy both employee-facing, above wing for the passengers and below wing for the employees.

So I think that's a good client that, we're fortunate does a lot of speaking about the solutions and is someone we can discuss. 

Yeah, you've had them for a long time, right? Like, at least a decade. 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. Long-term client. They started out with employee comms, and they've won a number of awards in the industry for some of the innovations that they do. I believe last year we started rolling out passenger-facing applications broadly for flight information displays. 

Yeah. I did a podcast with Ryan Taylor going back about three years or something, and I've been seriously impressed by what Delta is doing.

Because they totally get it, you can use screens really help inform the passenger journey and from the moment you walk into the check-in area all the way post-security. What was really intriguing was what they were doing, as you said, below the wing with, ramp information screens that are talking to the guys who are heaving bags into the planes and everything.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, that's right. It's heartwarming when you see them roll out, one Ryan, leads a team that focuses on a number of things. Digital signage is a large part of it and they all understand what use cases and applications we can leverage digital screens for to help our customers and our employees.

But when you see images of a 30-year pilot pulling up to a gate, and the ramp information display is saying, thanks for your work and dedication to Delta, and you know, that pilot's retiring it. That's a cool use of the technology, and it feels good that they think that's helping them build their culture and recognize people. It's awesome to see that in use, and in context like that. 

The industry obviously has evolved quite a bit over 20 years. I'm curious about what you're seeing these days that you're seeing more and more customer demand for, I suspect it's things like data integration. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. I think data integration is the key and trying to understand, how do we make these things real? 

The industry is asking for, it's odd when I hear it, I want consumer grade. Because I think 15 years ago you wanted everything to be the commercial grade which seemed to mean Strength quality, you know now they're thinking about the experience and consumer-grade is the goal. Consumer grade meaning I want it to react and be as simple As you know, maybe a social media app, and what I experienced on my personal devices need to be intuitive and need to be smooth.

There can't be a need for training on how to interact with this thing. So, part of that is data integration. Is the data automated? Is it near real-time, and accurate? And are we putting the right data in front of people that they want? And you've got to have flexibility on that integration side because oftentimes, we'll see things get deployed and we see behaviors driven and it's like, wow, we didn't predict our clients and us and our project teams will say, we didn't predict those results. Let's tweak this and this to get back towards what we were driving and that flexibility and data integration, I think is the cornerstone of being able to deliver that experience.

You have a platform you call Harmony. Is that the piece that kind of stitches together the different components versus, yeah, I just want the digital signage thing or I just want the email marketing thing? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. So as you start to think about all these channels coming together, we call that platform harmony and it is a multi-channel, omnichannel approach to putting content really, I want to say communications, but, let's say getting content in front of the right people at the right time, and it gives you that ability to broadcast across every channel, or maybe you're using our analytics to say, “Look, we know these disconnected workers are not looking at the email, so we don't need to address them with email, that's creating too much noise.” So that concept or that name of Harmony, is the concept of all these channels coming together in harmony within an organization. 

Without giving away business details, I'm curious, what percentage of customers are using Harmony versus those who still just want the traditional workplace comm stuff and those who just want digital signage for their retail environment or whatever it may be?

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we've got a massive client base. So I would say about 10 percent of them are taking advantage of multi-channel, and on what I would just define as the Harmony platform, and I would say we've probably had serious conversations with about 80 percent and are working with them on plans for which channels might make sense.

Oftentimes you've sold one solution to a team in the past, and that team's not going to necessarily handle that full digital strategy. So then it becomes a process of meeting the other stakeholders, showing them the value, and then planning how we roll this out. Because these are so highly visible, both digital signs, email, what we call feeds, putting messaging into collaboration tools, it's so visible that you have to be thoughtful on how you roll that out, how you plan it. So it takes a little bit of time. 

I'd say 10 percent are the early adopters and taking advantage right now and it's certainly something we evangelize across the client base. 

I suspect the leadership team likes that situation because there's a lot of growth potential there. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we absolutely love it.

The question then becomes, and what we've been working through quite honestly, for the last two years. How hard do you push on a platform play? And then how hard do you focus on nurturing the existing solutions and making sure that the teams that originally bought them aren't getting flooded with, “Hey, here's a shiny new toy.” And they're getting the adequate focus from us on how we make you most successful, within what you own and what are your expansion plans for that singular solution. 

So there is a balance and, honestly, it might come across as a little disrespectful, if you don't pick up on what the client needs in the moment and we don't mean it that way. But you got to have your ears open, and stay customer centric, as you kind of navigate those waters. 

All right. This is great. Good to catch up. if people want to know more, they'll find you just at poppulo.com? 

Joe Giebel: Poppulo.com is the best place to reach us and you'll start to see all those solutions, both from an individual, description and promotion, as well as here's how all these channels play together.

All right, Joe. Thanks again! 

Joe Giebel: Dave, great catching up. Thank you.

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

Projection has always been something of a fringe player in digital signage because of a series of technical barriers to adoption, most notably the limited operating life of the lamps, and the product and labor costs of switch them out. Laser projection has addressed that issue, but the other one that's harder to conquer is dealing with ambient light. Unless the projector is the size of a fridge, super-bright and seriously expensive, the environment's lights need to be off or dimmed and any windows covered.

A startup called Obsidian Screens, based on the fringes of greater Toronto, has developed a projection screen that can show visuals that aren't washed out even with the lights on and the blinds open - and as the brand name suggests, the screens are black instead of white or silver. It's a super-thin laminated material light enough to marry with foam - like a poster with a 1/4-inch foam backing to make it rigid and ready to hang.

Co-founder Chris Cavalieri and his business partner use Ambient Light Rejecting technology - something that's been around for years - but have their own "nanofilter" technology that does a better job, he says, of preserving projector brightness and visibility. And just as is the case with LED video walls, the more black on the display surface, the better the contrast.

The company has been around for seven years, but remains quite small ... as they have struggled to find the right partners to specify, sells and deploy their tech. They've run into at least a couple of challenges - with end-users who were disappointed by conventional projection set-ups, and pro AV integrators who for logical reasons want to sell systems that cost a lot more and need ongoing paid support and services.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thanks for joining me. You're based outside of the Greater Toronto Area and you've been working for a few years now on a company called, well, a product called Obsidian. Can you run through all of that for me? 

Chris Cavalieri: Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate taking the time to talk about it and boy, do I have lots to say.

You have half an hour. Go!

Chris Cavalieri: All right. Perfect. No pressure. So Obsidian, I should probably talk a little bit about projection. So what we've been trying to do and we've been doing for a while, is trying to find a way to take all the benefits. So if anyone's in digital signage, I assume there's a few listening to this what incredible things can be done with projection. So things like projection mapping holographic displays, very unique, creative stuff, and it's absolutely fantastic, and when we started out, we looked at things and said, like, why isn't this used more? 

You know, we go to retail stores, we're going to shopping centers and there are LEDs, we've got LCD video walls now and only a few set cases, maybe a performance or display are using projection to its full potential and it begs the question is why, and that why is how we found it, our idea of Obsidian, which is to create a solution to get those benefits projection and make it a lot more accessible and practical in place of, or as an option compared to say our elite typical LED signage and LCD video walls. 

So, I mean, projection, it's very renovation friendly, it's very scalable, and depending on what projector you use, it can be quite a low cost, the benefits are endless, and compared to LEDs, which are quite glaring, most of the time, I'm biased, obviously, no shame in that, but most people don't want to stare at an LED board as a backing, screen for like a speaker stage, for example, casino games. We've talked to fellows in Vegas before. It causes fatigue for people who are near them for too long. And that's, that comes down to the human eye and there's a whole science behind it, the wavelength of lights and all that. I won't go into it. It works. It's bright. It gets people's attention, but it just doesn't give the same aesthetic as a good projection setup would. 

So coming back to it, why don't we use projection? And quite frankly, it's because it mostly just sucks because it fails. You need to have a dark room, dim room, or very well-controlled lighting, and by having controlled lighting and those restrictions, designers or retail commercial designers can't do solutions they want to do where this challenge is like a window nearby and sunlight there are challenges that they can't overcome and maintain a good looking display and that's where LEDs kind of help punch through that. 

So the question is what if we had a solution where projection can punch through that can give you those same benefits and versatility, but you can have nearby lights? You don't have to overly control your space. I mean, of course, you can't do shopping in a grocery store with your lights off or a shopping mall. You know, it's not practical. You might be able to do a half-hour show or presentation, but it doesn't make sense, and that's at least my conclusion personally, my experience is why we don't see more of these really cool-looking projection map displays than we do now. It doesn't work in most cases. When it does, it's great, but most of the time it doesn't. 

So Obsidian is basically to solve that problem. we've got our own proprietary technology and IP around it, and we've designed a system that harmonizes the projector and the screen, and we include the lighting as well for nearby lighting to essentially use the nanofiller technology to work together and what I mean in a very blunt sense from that is that these systems will work independent of the environment around it. So if people have heard of light rejecting screens, ALR screens essentially you have a gray screen or a silver screen. It'll absorb about 50%-60% percent of your light in the room and that gives you contrast, which is great because it helps you have a more adaptable, flexible display. 

What our system does is the same thing, but that absorption, instead of normally it'll absorb your projector. So your white becomes gray, silver, whatever it is. In our case, your projector can shine on the screen and your lights can shine near or on the screen and have no loss, so it will reflect off of it. It keeps its colors, it keeps its white balance, and then the ambient light that is basically using this filter will absorb completely, not just the 60%. Whereas everything else gets knocked down by 50%-60%, and it creates this really neat illusion and really efficient display where fundamentally it's the same as any projection system, but you can see all your colors just popping. You maintain your contrast and your white balance and it's almost like you've doubled the lumens in your projector, and we love this because this opened up an option for again, adding an accessible and affordable solution somewhere between a TV set, and an LED video wall, where again, you can have something that's highly visible. It's got wide viewing angles. It keeps its color resilient, but you can also be adaptive. So again seasonal renovations for a retail environment stores, places where you don't really want to control lighting or it's too much work to deal with it. Plus you can install the thing in under a day. I mean, we've hung screens in under an hour compared to perhaps weeks on a video wall. So maintenance costs and benefits are endless. 

So that was our goal with Obsidian again. What is holding it back from creating unique creative solutions? And how do we overcome that in this nanofilter system? And I think most people are afraid of it because it wasn't easy to develop and there are restrictions to it. Again, it's got to work as a cohesive system, that scared people and got a lot of resistance, but boy, does it work. 

You're an engineer. I'm absolutely not. For simpletons like me, the simpleton explanation would be that instead of this being a white or silver screen, it's a black screen, correct?

Chris Cavalieri: It is a black screen. So if you turn your projectors off and look at it, it'll look kind of a charcoal gray, maybe a little bit of a greenish tint to it, and you know, that's kind of like a decorative wall panel, and that's what it looks like. That's what it is, and that's because the light is bouncing off, it's still being absorbed. Their eyes don't have the nano filters in them. If you wear polarized sunglasses, you might, it might be interesting but that's essentially what's going on there. So it is indeed a dark-colored screen. 

When you describe it as a system, you're talking about the kit of parts, but your part is the screen. The challenge with projection and the reason. It wasn't it hasn't really grown very much in digital science or anywhere else used to be with the projector and the lamp life and how you'd have to replace it all the time and it was unreliable and also that it wasn't very bright. Lasers have changed that. other technologies have improved. So that side is somewhat conquered. However, if you want a very bright projector, you're getting something the size of an Austin Mini. But, the screen thing is still by and large a white screen, right?

Or film that you apply to a window glass that will make an image appear, but it's not very sharp or bright, I mean. 

Chris Cavalieri: Exactly. I mean, that's the only solution people had to date is to get a bigger projector, and what's really unique about using our nano filter technology is you don't need a brighter projector to achieve the same result as you would. So there's almost a savings. I mean, I don't want to just say upfront savings, there is maintenance still involved, laser projectors have been a huge benefit to the industry on that front. They still need to be replaced eventually. But by using these filters and creating this super high-efficiency system effectively, it's not just the screen, it's the pairing of the projector and the screen. You can add the lights optionally as well. That allows you to use about half the lumens you would require in just a punch-through projector to achieve the same visible results that same effective brightness called legibility, of the display, and you're getting a little bit higher contrast because the screen is naturally darker than a white canvas or a white painted wall.

Is it front projection or rear? 

Chris Cavalieri: Front projection right now. We do have a prototype of the rear projection. It does work. We were working with the Art Gallery of Ontario at one point on a display which was kind of fun, so we almost accidentally made it just out of curiosity. There is a rear projection system for it. It's got, it's. own little challenges and restrictions, mostly just size, I say it's the only thing remaining. So while we don't offer it as an off-the-shelf product at the moment, customized solutions, that is something we can whip up together and it does work quite well.

So is this almost like an architectural material that you could use instead of wallpaper or something if you wanted a projection surface in a retail environment or whatever?

Chris Cavalieri: Absolutely. In fact, at one point, we had a version where we put an adhesive on the back instead of, we normally use PVC foam just to keep it rigid for hanging on the wall and we called it digital wallpaper and I know TV sets have tried to replace that and transparent LEDs, but absolutely this the screen itself is only about a millimeter thick. It is flexible so you can wrap it on columns, you can create decorative panels, and again, it does have a nice finish to it. You can route the edges, it's cuttable, machinable, you name it, and from an architectural standpoint, yeah, it's perfect. I mean, decorative panels, unique shapes. You can do multiple shapes in an array. You can make it continuous, join them together, and project whatever you want, and even when it's off, it'll have that kind of charcoal gray, very soft, it's a glare-free canvas finish to it like a print, and it definitely works.

Could you print on it? 

Chris Cavalieri: Yes. We haven't done it, but because it's built as a laminate, there was a layer on the front layer that we'd be able to print on the back of before it's assembled. So yeah, we could print a still image into it or a texture, maybe like a woodgrain pattern to it onto that one layer, stick it together, and embed a static image to it, which you could then nest to the digital content. That'd be really cool. 

Is the front surface, the laminate part of it, is that like a fabric, or is that like an acrylic coating or something? 

Chris Cavalieri: It's a polycarbonate substrate. So it's a kind of a semi-rigid plastic, a very thin layer, but there's a few layers. So it's kind of a blend of vinyl polycarbonate. We've got a few in there, but that top one would be a polycarbonate. So quite durable, quite resistant. 

So you wouldn't have to rope it off or anything, people could be near it without being terrified that something's going to get damaged. 

Chris Cavalieri: No, it's quite resilient. I mean, you can scratch it if you really try, but to break it or crack it is extremely difficult.

What do you see as the primary use cases for it? 

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, I've been dreaming of retail, commercial, public display, but honestly, I'm one person. I'm an engineer. I just want to get these in the hands of absolutely phenomenal designers, architects out there, and interior designers, to let them just run wild because it's so adaptable. In fact, you can shape it, you can wrap it, tile it, and do 3D shapes. Usually, when we go to trade shows we'll do like we have a pop can, it's like a cylinder and we put like a Pepsi animation on it and you can do arrays of different shapes together, and like the limits of creativity are endless.

It's just like any good projection map and application. Get those into the right hands and it's a dream. So, I mean, I pictured grocery stores for advertising, to justify costs. So a lot of the time they have printed posters or a big mural at the back top of their store over their freezers and just put panels up. You have tons of ceiling space, running power, and signal to it, it’s dead easy compared to like an led array for that size of display, and now you have a source of revenue, advertising, promotion of the week, whatever it is, and you have that control. So I mean, a store designer can really go to town because of that ease of use, ease of access, and the flexibility of a projection system, which now works by using our filters.

What kind of challenges do you have around projection angles and things like that? 

I gather we're talking, ahead of this a little bit, and I was asking about ultra-short throw projection and so on and there are some limitations around that, like you want to be a little bit further back in terms of the throw on the angle.

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, so right now, a short throw to a standard throw, and of course, long throws are all good for it. We have done some tests with ultra-short throws, unfortunately, the optics in the ultra-short throw right now do conflict with the optics in the laminate. So we can't use it with that at the moment. Although, secret R&D projects #1, #10 or #20. We are working on a potential solution to that, which should be independent of the projector that may work, but I won't say it will till I prove it. So let's assume it doesn't for now, for an ultra short throw, but again, standard throw and even short throw, long throw setups are all fine. That's what we recommend, and that's nice too, because that gives you, again, control over angles. We do play with the optics a little bit on the screen and it's part of our secret as well, we do narrow a bit of the vertical cone and bend light horizontally. So you have a more uniform viewing experience for things like foot traffic from left to right. So there is a restriction, but it's quite wide. 

Most ALR screens, you might be able to see the thing at plus minus 30 degrees, sometimes usually less, where it comes down to a half-brightness angle. So we get very dark at an angle. Whereas ours actually, you can see funny enough, it's beyond 180 degrees, it gets brighter. That's steep, and it was really weird, totally not intended, but, so that's part of a little bit of the magic of our specific laminate that we've built is it has that really unique uniformity, kind of like paper, close to paper at all viewing angles left right around it.

So there's a workaround. The challenge I've seen sometimes with projection systems is that they're great except when somebody needs to get up close to it or walk by and then there's a shadow and so on. So you can let's say in a corridor, a wide hallway, or something like that, you could mount this on like a track system or something like that and project down and people could walk by without, unless they're right in front of it, they're not going to, come into the shadow there?

Chris Cavalieri: Yep. I mean, because we have that steep angle controlled on it, it can also affect bringing the projector into it. So we can have the thing off to the side. You can have it overhead. You can kind of project from steeper. So again, not quite an ultra-short throw, but that's because of the actual lensing in it. But a standard projector at a steeper angle will work quite well with that. So you have a lot of versatility and adaptability for that. Again, just making sure it's over people's heads, and by the time they block it, technically the advertisement, has done its job. So it's not too much of a concern on that front, but you can get away with quite a bit, and a lot of retail stores and public displays have lots of ceiling space to play with too. So it's very flexible there. 

Do you have to monkey with the content in terms of how it's rendered or have particular software running on the media player or whatever to make all this happen, or it's a screen and point the projector at the screen? 

Chris Cavalieri: That's why I love it because, I mean, ironically all the research we've done again, me and my colleague, both engineers, we love to keep it simple. So we've got a few projects on the go as well. Same idea, but all the software you need is the same that's already out there. It's projection mapping. Like that, nothing has changed. Nothing you learn there. If you know how to do projection mapping, or you have a team of guys who know how to do it, nothing's different. That's just content. All we do is you're putting the right projector with the right screen, and then you can see it. Simple as that. 

So I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about an installation in London in a coffee shop, and it was a black wall with a kind of chalkboard, and they were putting the menu on that instead, well, on flat panel displays and it looked pretty cool, but the coffee shop was having to dim the lights and do everything else because there are windows and doors out to the street and so on. 

If they're using your technology, do the lights have to be cranked down, drapes pulled, and all that, or it could behave as though, it is just being a regular shop?

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, that's a perfect example, and that's exactly what we want to do, and in fact, we tried to approach McDonald's, Tim Hortons, and all that, and of course, they tell me to get lost because who's Obsidian, but that's just, it is, you don't need to turn your lights on. 

Part of the founding purpose was, that Adrian, my colleague, kept tripping on everything in his classroom because he always had to turn the lights on and off and is prone to that he's always back and forth showing his slides and it's a safety risk. Even old age homes, we had approached at one point as well for they have movie theaters, they share and it's just not practical to do that, and like I said in the beginning, that's why projection isn't, and I wouldn't recommend using it in a lot of cases because if you're working as a barista and your lights are off, you can't see what you're doing. It's bad for your eye strain. If you're trying to focus look at what you're pouring, you're going to have accidents, you're going to slip, probably can't clean as effectively. And there's so many reasons you'd really need to have lights on for safety, if nothing else, and our screen will let you do that. 

Again, we've had beams of sunlight across it, still keeping the thing readable. keep your lights on. I mean, there are things you can do to play with it. It depends on the projector you use, you'd use a brighter or dimmer one. You can control the lighting as well, and we do recommend it when you can, but you don't have to be quite as aggressive when you do it. So you can keep those lights on. 

Part of the rise of the LED technology within workplaces has been the idea that in presentation theaters, big meeting rooms where more typically there's been a projector, but then the drapes are closed or a control room where the lights are very low so that you can see what's being projected on the screen.

The idea was that a DV-LED would change all that. You could open the windows up and crank the lights and everything, and you'd be able to see what's on the screen with no problem. But the challenge is cost. 

Chris Cavalieri: I mean, there's cost and there's also, I mean, with LED, do you want to see it? It's not very pleasant to look at for a long period of time.

I mean, the concept is right. All these technologies have a purpose, and I'm not discrediting the value of LEDs like outdoor displays, and billboards, I mean, they punch through light. They're very good at getting through it. They're extremely visible. They'll get your attention. But they're just not pleasant to read, if that makes sense so in terms of a boardroom yeah, it could work, and I've seen stages done with full LEDs instead of a projection screen, and it's just unpleasant. Even if you're recording it, there are aliasing effects and a lot of unpredictable things you don't really expect.

So it's one of those things that's good on paper, but in practical use is not great, and then the cost is the other end of it. So there's the cost to maintain it, install it, you have to calibrate it all those things because LEDs wear out, not no LED is the same when they come out of production, there's binning to them, all sorts of things to keep in mind.

That was our other motivator with projection. These are my famous words. You don't have to blow your budget to blow minds, right? If you do something right with the right technology that's good enough, right? You got to know what your application is, know who your audience is, who's using it, and really understand and appreciate that and Obsidian was our way to say, look, you have another option. Because light ambient light is an issue. Architects absolutely love giant windows nowadays. A funny story about a university in Ontario that got millions of dollars to renovate their classrooms, I won't name them, and big giant skylight windows without drapes, funny enough, that would let the sunrise right in that window and really make the presenter glow at the front of the classroom and which also happened to have a projection screen, which was with white and not Obsidian, and let's just say it didn't end very well, and even the another Yoko university has used projection. They've put drapes on and with those giant lights, but they're not full block-out drapes. You know, they usually let a little bit of light in. Even with the drapes closed midday cloudy day, you still couldn't read the screen. So it is a major problem and aesthetically, the rooms look beautiful. 

I mean, the architect is doing their job on that front. They're gorgeous buildings, beautifully renovated very nice aesthetics to them, but it's not functional. You need technology to overcome those challenges and to date, your only choice is to guess it is LED you either put up with it just squint or not reading it or you stick something expensive heavy bulky, and kind of blinding and you know now you can read it but you've also sort of made people uncomfortable in this space too. So you need another solution, and that's what we're hoping to do.

It's an interesting predicament for companies such as yours in that you're offering what's presented as a better option and probably far less cost. But for the companies that sell into environments like higher education, corporate, public utilities, all that sort of thing, it's not necessarily in their business interest to sell them a cost-effective, low-maintenance solution.

There's a lot more money to be made on the margin of one hell of a lot of LED and then calibration and support services and everything around it, as opposed to just selling them a display and saying, thanks, very much, call us at three years when you need a new projector. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah, absolutely, and this has been driving me absolutely insane, to be honest. This projection system has existed for almost seven years now, and I still, we're still a startup. It says a lot. I mean, yes, we're engineers. We're probably terrible at sales and marketing and we are, but c’mon…

You're not the first.

Chris Cavalieri: It’s just we've approached distributors, we've gone through universities, we've thrown sales in front of them practically, and the reality is in the end, you got to go where the money's at. They want something that's predictable. The use case is the same. The installation is the same, and the training for their technicians and the customer is the same. Everything's the same because once you've got your company up and running they're not wrong. It's expensive, change is expensive and it's risky, and nowadays no one wants to take that risk. They don't want to do anything different. You know, it might be better for the customer, but. I like my margins. You know, I need my income. I got to put food on the table. I got to pay my team. 

Now, we're going to do this job because that's what we know how to do, and that's where we make money, and we understand that, and that's fine, but there's got to be someone who cares about the end user to find unique creative solutions find solutions to problems that You know, push the industry a little bit further and this has been an ongoing battle for years for us, and it drives me nuts. 

So you're absolutely right that it's a paradigm for them if they're not used to working with it. If they do, it's a white screen and they know when and where it works, and that's the end of it. There's zero reception for anything else and I hope that changes. 

I suspect there's a bit of a taint as well in that, a lot of larger environments will have used projection in the past and have the experience of going, “Well, God, I can't even see the screen properly, or anything else, so projections are off.” 

So when that gets revisited, unless you have the opportunity to have a really high-quality conversation with them, they're thinking, well, shit, I'm not doing projection again. That was a mess. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. “Oh, we have used projection before. It didn't look that good.” The customer wasn't happy. You know, we can't have that, and I mean, that's valid too. 

So is a better specifier or audience for your technology, quite possibly the architects and people who think about physical spaces and experience?

Chris Cavalieri: I think it has to be, I think those are the only people that really get the experiential side of what you can do with projection, they have the vision they can see they have a basically working towards a solution, right? They have a client who wants something unique they're left to their creative devices to develop this solution or overcome a challenge and they need all the tools in their toolbox and the actual installers, the AV text distributors, but they're not the right people to do it. They're going to do business as usual. It's gotta be the people making the design decisions who can see something greater or want to do something, and previously, let's say they couldn't, that's where proceeding could fit in.

So getting it in front of them, and that's something we're trying to do as much as we can network. That's also been challenging because these people are hard to find. I think I waited four months for a meeting at one point and met an interior design firm, and in the end, they didn't know or want to hang a TV set, so it wasn't a commercial designer, more of an interior designer, the right people are out there, and those are the people that, again, the architects, designers, those are the solution providers that really need to get their hands on this. 

It sounds like along with the physical cost of the substrate or screen or whatever you want to call it, there are really minimal additional costs in terms of a mounting system you don't need to go to the sorts of mounting systems that would be used for DBLED or LCD anything else. There's not all that metalwork, right? It's just this piece of foam that hangs on a wall, like a poster that you get foam mounted.

Chris Cavalieri: That's exactly it. That's what we tell everyone. If you hang it, you just hang it like a poster or a mirror or a print, and it's all adaptable too. Again, we do a lot of customization. So we can put the French cleat on, and hang it on your wall. What we love about that PVC foam is it's you can superglue hard points onto it from this very inexpensive and very lightweight, let's say like a 24-inch by 54-inch panel, so 4.5 feet by 2 feet, is I think about 8 kilograms, basically per panel and put a cleat onto it. We've screwed into it. We've put hooks to hang off of for summer trade shows, for portal displays. You can screw into it, you can cut it, shape it, layer it, can thicken it, or thin it, it's very versatile for the installer and whatever the application is. 

So to really get our goal, the whole vision of the city is to remove barriers, remove restrictions, and that's a mounting system we've enjoyed because it really harmonized with what we're trying to achieve lightweight. It's just no metalwork. It doesn't take weeks. It takes under an hour. You just hang it on your wall. You can butt them together. Done. Very simple. 

So you're a startup. So I assume there's not a cast of thousands working at the company? 

Chris Cavalieri: Nope. We've got two and a dog, we're very small.

I mean we've got a few people out there who are kind of advocates for us as well. So we've networked that way. We've got a really great PR guy as well who is helping us out network to the States, and Canada. He's absolutely fantastic. So we've officially the team is two, but we've got a number of people helping us. We've had some advisors we've worked with locally as well, from the university and then the forge and Hamilton as well, for example. So we've got lots of support, so we're a small team, but we're quite effective at what we do, and we've got contract manufacturers. 

We have a whole network in China if we really had to go down the road for volume production. So we see a path to mass production very quickly if and when we get to that point, but we're still two people at the moment.

Your biggest challenge is just the simple thing of awareness and finding people who get what you've got. 

Chris Cavalieri: That's it. I mean, it's spreading the message, and I mean, anyone who's done a startup knows how hard it is. Anyone who's been an engineer or even not an engineer knows how hard it is to push a product on someone. It's sort of forbidden, forbidden knowledge to do that, and we've tried and iterated our design many times. 

For example, we've made a home theater projection screen you can buy at Walmart right now. We have an adaptation of this technology for home use because during COVID everyone was at home. No one's putting signs in. I mean, we're very adaptable, flexible, and I mean, that's the benefit of being a very small, but creative, dynamic team is you can do these things we have the technology, we have to know how to do it and frankly, we love design and we love creative challenges. So that's something we do and we'll continue to do. 

Are there any sort of caps on resolution or anything like that? Like, I don't really understand screen technology. If somebody has a 4k output, that's what's on there, that doesn't really matter. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. So the resolution is all just coming from the projector itself. So it depends on the projector you choose. I'd say the only limitation, people listing stuff as like a 4k projection screen is just. Throwing jargon at you to make it sound cool. It's, plastic. It'll be stretch vinyl or painted vinyl. The only thing that might affect your resolution in general is if the screen has a high texture in it. So sometimes there are some optical screens for an ultra-short throw, for example depending on the size of those you might see speckling or something at a certain resolution.

That's the only thing I can think of you could justify putting a resolution to a screen, but we don't have that.. 

So if people wanna know more, where do they find you online? 

Chris Cavalieri: So I mean, you can dig me up on LinkedIn, but obsidianscreens.com would be a good starting place. Shoot me an email, and then my name's Chris Cavalieri, should be on the screens look me up on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. We got Facebook, we got YouTube, you name it. So save screen technologies wherever you can find them. 

All right, well thank you for your time. 

Chris Cavalieri: Yeah. Thank you so much, Dave. It's great to talk with you, and I hope we'll get to see you soon. Well, 

We'll see what I can do. 

Chris Cavalieri: I'll show it off. I hope all my words live up to it in person.

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

LED video wall technology is now so pervasive, and there are soooo many vendors, that it is increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate and compete.

That's compounded by a lot of manufacturers selling on specs like pixel pitch, and the form factor of their products. Very few, however, spend much if any time talking about the why and what of video wall projects - as in why is this project being considered, what's it for, and also what's going to be on the screen when it gets plugged in.

So I was intrigued when I was in touch with Chanan Averbuch, a South Florida LED industry vet. I learned he'd left his longtime executive sales gig with an LED display vendor to join a spinout that makes premium LED displays, but leads with creative.

The company is called Blue Square X - with the X being short for experience. While most manufacturers just make the stuff, and ship it to integrators, Blue Square plans to bridge a couple of gaps - acting as consultants and producing creative for digital experiences ... with integrator partners doing the final install.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Chanan, thank you for joining me. We've traded messages on LinkedIn and everything else and as we were saying before I turned on the recording, we probably had a brush by, “Hey, how are you doing?” I think at some trade show, but we haven't chatted at length. Can you tell me what your company Blue Square X does, because I'm unfamiliar. 

Chanan Averbuch: Sure. Blue Square, I guess you could more or less call it the parent company has been in business for over 10 years. But Blue Sqaure X is a relatively new venture, leveraging more of my background and my partner's background in the space, and inside Blue Sqaure X, I'm focused on the innovation side more so than anything else.

So Blue Square X is displays that are 90 inches and larger on the LCD side, and on the LED side, everything from, 110 inches all the way to unlimited sizes. We have projects we're doing that are a hundred-foot-long LED walls and 40 feet high, concave, convex, curved, all that stuff. 

But Blue Square X at the end of the day is not another led company. We're focused on the experience first, which means content first, software second, and LED third. 

Yeah, which is quite different because, through the years I've had no end of companies, relate stories about how they sold big LED displays, had them installed and then the customer would look at them and say, “This is great, what should we put on the screen?” like an afterthought. 

Chanan Averbuch: I've gotten that over the years, time and time again, somebody will have the brain fart of, “Wow, it would be really cool if we did a sports bar instead of a bunch of TVs, let's do LED.” Okay, and then two weeks before the grand opening, “Wait, what are we doing on this thing from 8 am to 4 pm when we're not watching sports games when there's no live sports?” So we did digital art in those spaces. 

So you're, the terminology I use is, a solutions provider in that you're not a pure play integrator because an integrator doesn't tend to think about content or experience so much. There's the odd one that does, but for the most part, we put together the projects we deploy, maybe we manage them, but we don't really think that much about what's on the screen.

Chanan Averbuch: Spot on. I think one of the key issues that I've experienced over almost the last two decades in the AV industry is that most of the channel has thought about how to move a box and has never really thought about what the client is trying to feel from an emotional perspective in a space. 

What are they trying to create when someone walks into a space, when they leave a space, how do they want them to feel?

I think in the era now where you're trying to get employees to come back to work, right? It doesn't matter if you're in the US, on the Democratic side or the Republican side, it doesn't make a real difference. If you want employees to come back to work, you have to give them a compelling reason for what it feels like when you come to the office beyond the barista, the coffee bar, and the cereal crap, you gotta have more of an experience too, oh my gosh, I love going to the office. It makes me feel a certain way, and that's where experience matters. 

Do you find that many end users have their heads around what they want to do?

Because I know from my consulting experience that I will ask customers what they want to do and why, and quite often they'll lean back in their chairs and think, I haven't really thought about that. 

Chanan Averbuch: To be brutally honest with you, what was always my struggle for the last 13 years is trying to get people to understand what to try to make a space feel like, and I've been blessed in the early days now in Blue Square X, when we, in a very stealth mode, went to market, our first projects were actually luxury retail and it's not luxury retail where you would historically imagine where they have a big TV or big LED wall. It's now digital art being built. In an immersive space within luxury retail, there are several stores that we're going to be coming to live with soon with some beautiful case studies, very similar to what we're seeing in the real estate market. 

We have a bunch of case studies about to come to market now as well for a luxury real estate sales center. So when someone launches a $100M or $2B project, they want to sell units fast. So having a projector in a sales center doesn't quite do it, but having an immersive theater and immersive LED wall with custom content where it looks like the waves are coming at you and things of that nature in a real way, not the 3D naked eye stuff. I'm talking about the real anamorphic content where it feels like you're buying into a lifestyle. When you're able to translate that, condo sales come along with it. 

Quite often, I've also found that those customers who understand that kind of thinking, then have their heads snapped back when they start to understand the cost of doing that.

Is there a lot of work in getting them over the line or do they just understand that this is a $100M development, yes, we're going to spend $250,000 on content or whatever the number is. 

Chanan Averbuch: So it's funny that you say that because I think when I was personally going through my own journey and starting in this space, it was hard for me to explain that value, right? The good thing is, that we've already done in a very short period of time, some of these unique experiences where we're able to talk about the cost of capital, and the return on their capital, because in the world of real estate, for example, it's all about return on your investment. And they have interest payments in addition to principal payments that they owe to the bank. So the faster they sell units. The less they owe the bank. 

So because we're focused more on the luxury and premium side, and they, I guess you could say the true experiential environments, the price is not necessarily as much of an issue. As the expression goes, price is only an issue in the absence of value, but because we're not trying to sell an LED screen. We're talking about the experience, we're talking about the content first, the software, how to get it there, and the LEDs, how you display it. It's a different conversation that we're having. We're talking usually to the marketing folks. We're talking to the innovation people. We're talking to the people who say, how am I going to get my ROI?

And it's very easy to map that out, and that applies in luxury retail. That applies in real estate, and even because we're focused on the channel still looking with larger AV integrators, we're working with the AV integrators to help translate that value into how it's going to pan out and what it's going to do for their consumer or their buyers, whoever it is in their environments.

So when you say you're working with the AV integrators, you wouldn't describe yourself as an integrator that's competing with them for business but as more of a partner? 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. So, thank God I've been very blessed with working with the AV channel to do control rooms, do experiential environments. That still has not changed for me. The only real difference in what we're doing in Blue Square X is that we are being engaged directly with the sports teams, we're being engaged directly with the architect or the interior designer, and then they'll say, who can execute this with us in addition to the Blue Square X pro services team, right?

We don't run data cables. We don't run power. We don't put pressure on systems. That's not our business. We're not pretending to be an AV integrator. We're still going to be partnering with the AVI SPLs or the AVI Systems or the Diverifieds of the world, et cetera. 

Okay. So you would quite possibly maybe own the customer, so to speak, but you're not doing the whole solution stack, you're gonna sub a partner with, I don't know, pull a name out, AVI, SPL, or whoever it may be. 

Chanan Averbuch: Yeah, and I think there's a huge value added to that too, because not just because they have 5 employees, it's because, oftentimes when I would historically get a call in, my previous job, it was, “something's not working”. Well, screens are usually pretty dumb, right? If the playback is not working, that may be a different story, or it's often like a hiccup in the crash drone or whatever the control system may be, and having that first line of defense as an integrator who's down the block, perhaps. It's a lot more valuable for me than to ship my team to Brazil, ship my team to Korea, or ship my team to Qatar.

You mentioned your previous work and experience and so on. I was aware of you when you were working for an LED company. What is your background in this industry? 

Chanan Averbuch: So I really started 13+ years ago with Primeview, and there I started as a Regional Sales Manager, then Business Development Manager, then VP, then SVP, then EVP.

I was initially just trying to provide for my family. I guess it was like, it was a trunk slammer or whoever it may be. I tried to do business with you when I first started. I just had to put numbers on, and then as things evolved in 2017 and coming to 2018, I was able to pioneer the all-in-one space back in 2018 out of a sheer lack of resources, to be honest with you, on an engineering side. It was funny how that evolved. But the all-in-one category is something that, I'm very pleased to say, had some of my first, with Microsoft, with Citigroup, and some really substantial clients, and then as that all-in-one category evolved and from indoor to outdoor to 32:9, that's when all of a sudden I started realizing, wait when we get out of the 16:9, what happens to the content? How does that work? And that sort of just blew my mind, this whole content space, and I started developing that further, and that thesis when working closely with digital artists, and I have some amazing projects that are about to go live now within Blue Square X, where a lot of times we're getting pulled into projects where we're not even involved in the LED.

We're not even evolving the playback. We're just doing the content, and if I could quote one of my great friends in the industry, Britton Gates from Newcomb and Boyd, he always asked me previously, and we're going to be doing this now: if there are so many people out there that could use help, Even if you're not doing the lead, are you willing to do that? And the short answer is yes. I want to help people create experiences, even if They're not buying our LED today. 

Yeah, you could make the argument that the content side of the business is more interesting and easier on a company just because you're not having to worry about shipping and everything else associated with the hard technology.

Chanan Averbuch: Oh, a hundred percent. I think the same line of logic would imply that if it's an inferior quality LED, and it's just like another OEM, it could also make my content look bad. So I can take from personal example, I was traveling this past week for a very high-end install that our team was doing, and in part of the travels, I remember going through the journey of talking about what the content is, and once we figured out that it had to be not SDR, but HDR, our team had to get on a frantic and run 32 cables instead of 16, right? So talking through the content strategy early on also impacts infrastructure, not just hardware, really.

I anticipate that almost everything that you're going to see from 2024 and beyond is going to be HDR on the experiential side. Everything, because the blacks and the grays, it's day and night. 

And what does that mean for existing deployments out there? 

Is HDR backward-compatible, so to speak, or do you either have an HDR display or you don't?

Chanan Averbuch: Good question. I think when you think back two years ago when people started really talking about HDR on the commercial side, not consumer, but on the commercial side, I think you had people talking about HDR, talking about what they call HDR-ready. This means some of the components can potentially work with HDR, but to go and truly retrofit or change the hardware to now be able to be HDR is not as simple as one may think, even though the marketing materials on that spec may have said previously HDR-ready, it's not truly HDR.

So I think in reality, retrofitting certain sites to be HDR is going to be difficult. I think they're gonna have to understand that SDR is what they bought and it's either they upgrade all their hardware to go and be able to truly be compatible with HDR or they're gonna have to just settle and stick to SDR today, as sad as that may be.

What would that mean? It's not like SDR is going to look bad. It's just HDR is going to look really good. 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. I think even if you look at consumer playback devices as simple as an Apple TV, right? Even Apple TV today is HDR-ready, and it really can play back HDR, but like we're doing now a significant amount of work in the home theater business, it’s not a business that I was actually pursuing, and I'm now seeing these massive home theater projects with commercial integrators. Yes, they're residential integrators, but they're sometimes bigger than commercial projects, these home theaters. 

I had to go down the rabbit hole of what a Kaleidoscope is and what real HDR playback is and cinema-quality playback. So really only once you're in this space and focused on delivering the high-end quality do you understand all these little peripheral devices for playback and content are so significant in the ecosystem. But unless you're in it, you don't know it. 

One of the things that I concluded walking around ISE at the front of the year, and then Ifocomm again, was that the LED display market has matured to a point where just about everything looks really good. Yes, some companies come over from China with, purposefully, low-cost, material that looks crappy, even when it's optimized on our trade show floor. But in general, the stuff all looks really good. It's all sub one mil now and everything else. Have we hit the peak of this? Where does it go? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So I think to your point, I think when you talk about what's market has called mini-LED or COB or some of these more standard technologies today, the COB at a 0.7 look really freaking good. But even within those LEDs, the differentiator between HDR and really great quality scan rates that what I would say is considered broadcast quality or production quality or luxury retail quality, there's a differentiator in the market at that point, because one is good enough, and the other one is truly providing a higher level of experience, and what that means is the quality of the components. 

So on a simple level, you have Nova Star, A6, A8, A10, et cetera, right? You have all the different Nova Star receiving cards, for example. The different receiving cards produce different quality results and have a higher level of spec. That's definitely the case for the mass market. I think there are ways to build materials to change things, and then there are also certain instances where having a higher brightness panel or LED bulb is great. Sometimes it's not good. You have to know the real application because it generates different heat. But in that instance, we've gotten certain projects now in the last few months where having a higher nit bulb helped. We have instances where they wanted a lower nit bulb because they wanted to not have to redo their infrastructure and energy and power, right? So they were repurposing LCD and they wanted to stay with LEDs and if they had gone with a higher bulb, they would have had the max power draws where you require more power. 

But on the evolution of LED itself, COG, chip on glass, that's something that's going to be coming out soon. There are some other new things within the LED world we're about to be launching a product that's almost like an x-ray where you're able to print patterns on an LED and shine through it, but at a high resolution, not low resolution like you see on the market today. So there are definitely innovative ways of producing technology where just imagine a Calcutta marble, finish backdrop, and we print that Calcutta marble on a physical LED, and you're able to still protrude through it with a high brightness bulb LED.

So there's a lot of these technologies that are about to come to market that we're working on, but it's from an innovative standpoint, not everyone else is doing it. How do we just be cheaper? It's what's the experience that we're trying to create, and then how do we solve that in a way that has never been done before.

So when you talk about chip on glass, are you talking about micro LEDs? 

Chanan Averbuch: Correct. 

That is a horribly abused and misused term. 

Chanan Averbuch: Yep. I try to shy away from the specifics of talking about COB GOB or SMD. I honestly try to focus on what's your environment, what are you trying to do? I'm fixing other people's problems now, just not on the content, but where someone sold SMD in a public space that should have been COB and in other environments where it should have been GOB to pretty protective solution. Like I just saw a curved LED that was so chewed up, I told the end user, you may consider replacing it completely. And he goes, with what? I said with a glue-on-board version, because otherwise you have to protect this thing, because it'll look like crap. 

Through the years, I have seen some SMD stuff in public spaces and I thought, what in God's name were you thinking? Did you somehow magically believe that nobody was going to scrape this thing? 

Chanan Averbuch: But in truth, it's not just about specifying the wrong technology. A lot of things that we're doing now at Blue Square X is because we realize other people didn't do it, and it's not just about the content or the software side. It's also about the trim kit the cladding and the framing. For example, one of my friends I was talking to at Leon Speakers, where we talked about the idea of hashtag framing every TV. 

The idea of framing every TV is not just so that it looks aesthetically pleasing in a residential environment or in your conference room. It's also to protect it to a large extent. So when I think about framing, there was a project recently, it was comical that we recently lost ironically. And I thought it was great that we lost it. My partner was like, what do you mean we've lost it? I said I'm so happy we lost it. He goes, why? I said because the other guy is putting a product that's going to get destroyed in this environment because there are no protective elements in the backside, and it's IP-65 front-rated. IP-54 in the back and they're putting this in the harshest environment, humanly possible. I'm happy that my name's not on that.

So framing every TV, trim kit, cladding, mounting, and protecting the LED is equally as important as the technology that you're going to use. But people don't think about those things. I want to get the project. I want the box. That's not smart business 

I wonder if the market is now at a point where it's like buying a high-end vehicle in that the salesperson can go on and on about what's under the hood and the typical buyer just doesn't care and in the same way, they don't care really whether it's COB or what controller is used or any of that stuff. 

They just want to know how good is it going to look, does it suits my needs and what's the budget. 

Chanan Averbuch: So I think you're definitely getting more to the commoditized point of the marketplace, which is where I think you're going to see several players disappear. It's already starting to happen. Hence the reason why I've always focused more on what it's supposed to create and what it's supposed to feel like, how much you're supposed to be immersed, which is why it's content first, software second, LED third in our world, and then trim kit, cladding, framing to follow for that same reason.

It really comes down to how do you not just differentiate yourself, but how do you actually demonstrate that difference. Having the right content obviously helps, having the right software helps, having the right LED helps, but one of the things that we're going to be investing heavily in on a national level to start within the US with Miami, then New York, then Chicago, Austin, then LA is physical experience centers throughout the US and that will be going global as well in the near future. 

What I'd like to do is when a client from a sports team a luxury retailer or a real estate developer, whatever it may be, wants to see the product, Yes, I could do a Zoom. I can do a Microsoft team, whatever it may be, but I will, on my dime, fly you into one of my experience centers on my dime and I am a hundred percent confident that the tech stack between the content, the software, and the lead will be noticeably different when you come to the experience centers, noticeably, it'll be a finished product, a true turnkey, a real solution. 

Now, the devil's advocate side of that, if I'm a buyer, this is a highly controlled environment where you're able to think about everything ahead of my visit and optimize the whole nine yards versus operating in the real world where power can be shaky. There's public, there's ambient lighting, and everything else that can play into it. How do you counterbalance people like me who walk in and say, yeah, but… 

Chanan Averbuch: Great example, I just spent $20,000 to do a massive outdoor demo for one of our clients, and we did the demo at one o'clock in the afternoon at the harshest moment, exactly where the sun was hitting strongest.

And you explained that? 

Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah, and he intentionally chose the spot, that was the harshest spot, where it's direct sunlight. I'm like, gentlemen, how do you think this looks? And they told me how it looked and they were pleased, obviously, I said, this is the worst it's ever going to look. He goes, what? He didn't understand what I meant. I'm like, you chose the most sun exposure, like the worst. If you think this looks good, it only gets better from here, and I explained to them why, and they're like, got it. But I spent $20,000 on that demo to do it the right way.

So I agree with your thesis and what you're saying about that in a controlled environment, but with that said, in our experience centers in our showrooms, we have a complete AV system, multiple sources, multiple HDR sources, and multiple cable TV boxes. I could show four cable TV boxes. So if a Sports Park comes in here, like Dave and Busters, I could demonstrate that. If it's a home theater, I could show it with surround sound, Dolby quality, as well as HDR with the collide escape. I could show. Exactly in an indoor environment. Yes, but outdoors? Absolutely. There are environments where you have to put it outdoors and do the real stress test. No question. 

So if you're going to market as an LED manufacturer and your marketing focus is on: here are all of our technical specs for all of our different pixel pitches and this and that, and basically blind the person at the other end, the buyer with all of this flurry of buzzwords and jargon, does that work anymore? It strikes me that the LED market is now somewhat commoditized. 

Chanan Averbuch: So frankly, you're a hundred percent correct. I'm not focused on the tech specs of the LED whatever. 

Does the customer care about it? 

Chanan Averbuch: I think there are some exceptions in the market. There's an artist that I'm working with who really understands the technical spectrum. They understand color parameters. They understand DCI like some of them understand this stuff, but that's like the 1%. But the 1%loves us because we're able to produce, and deliver those exact results. 

But to your point, the conversations we're having are very different in the sense that for example, we just closed a deal with a major sports team. They originally wanted a 3:3 LCD. I said to them, I'll work with you on pricing to get you to the LED world. Because I know for a fact, the LCD is the wrong approach for your application. You're going to be doing spreadsheets, and you have a bezel in between, and now bear in mind, that Blue Square, the parent company, has a ton of LCD business that we do with Samsung, right? On Blue Square X, we want to make sure that if the requirement is there to do an LED, then it should be there, and the reason why we're able to successfully take a 3:3 or 4:4 and turn it into a lead project is that we're asking the right questions. We're educating, not just the marketing person, not just the facilities director, not just the branding team, but everyone along the way is saying: Where's your seat? Where's the closest viewer? What's your content strategy? We're not asking about the LED. We're talking about what the actual application is.

Because you're right, in a commoditized environment, what's the difference between the first 30 Google searches they come up with an LED? It's hard to differentiate. But those other 30 companies are not asking those questions. They don't want to. They just want to move boxes. 

Yeah, they just want to know how much wall space there is.

Chanan Averbuch: That's it. But they're not asking about content playback. They're not asking if have you partnered with Novari, or do you have experience with with Samsung's MagicInfo. They're not asking the right questions because that requires education and training, that requires industry experience. 

Now with Blue Square X, do you have preferred manufacturing partners or are you getting your own led custom manufactured by white label or how does that end of it work? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. So we are day one, day two, and day a hundred, and from here on out, focus on the premium side. So nothing that's off the shelf in the market is of interest to us. Nothing that exists today on the LED production line is of interest whatsoever. 

We are designing specs for the higher end of the spectrum. That's where we want to be. So our LED partners are not people I've worked with in my previous role or others, it’s, I would say, the higher-end side of specs and therefore we are designing to our needs from day one. So it's definitely custom spec to something that's not available to the mass market. 

So does that mean you're doing the technical design over in the United States and then getting it a contract manufactured by a high-end production line, probably in China or Taiwan?

Chanan Averbuch: And Mexico as well. Yeah. 

Oh really, in Mexico? 

Chanan Averbuch: For TAE purposes. It is a market for governments as well. 

Interesting, and on the Mexico side, is it final assembly or are they manufacturing the LED? 

Chanan Averbuch: So there is some manufacturing done here, and assembly. So there are certain components, obviously, that don't make financial sense to do complete production here. It really depends on what the next president of the United States looks like because I think that'll determine some of the taxation side of things and how tariffs come into play. So we're just ultimately preparing for the doomsday scenario and the ideal scenario simultaneously.

How do you deal with the cost end of it? It sounds like you're going after premium clients, is cost not as big an issue if you can, as you said much earlier on, really go after the ROI model and what the real benefits are? 

Chanan Averbuch: While I definitely believe in my heart of hearts, price is only an issue in the absence of value, at the end of the day, the clients that we're talking to understand that there's a way to hit something that should be a $100 and pay $60, and there's a way that if you get the $60 solution, it's not going to look or perform like a $100 product either. We communicate the values of both extremes.

Like we'll go and say to the customer, if you want to get this $100 solution, I don't feel comfortable giving you the $60 solution. But if you only have the $60 solutions, this is what it looks like, and what we'll try to do is we'll offer the financing option as an OPEX model so that they don't have to get to that, I don't want to say it, but the crappier option, the lesser quality. We'll gladly take the OPEX model and work with them so that way it fits within their budget because I wouldn't want a lesser experience for myself. Why would I want that for my clients? 

Is that an increasing demand these days? Can you help with the financing on this? 

Chanan Averbuch: So, I think it's coming up more. Is it actually translating to the numbers or percentages that I thought? No, they're not, but it's evolving and growing in the markets. I'll give you an example. If someone is in the car wash industry, okay, and they're used to doing static signage, and now they're trying digital to jump from zero digital CapEx expense to spending half a million dollars. It's hard to get approvals for, but now if you break that down to $5,000 a month or $8,000 a month over three years, whatever it may be, all of a sudden it looks a lot more palatable. 

So I think it depends where the organization, where the institution, and where the non-profit is in their experience with digital and how their internal approval process works.

Now there's a harsh environment, car washes. 

Chanan Averbuch: Oh, it's so much fun. So much fun. We went to the car wash show in Nashville and I'll tell you the most amazing thing that I discovered. There's people like you alluded to that get it and they realize it, and there's people that don't. The ones that get it realize I can't buy crap, right? I can't buy inferior quality. The ones that don't get it, get burnt usually. So I wish them only the best. 

Tell me about the company. Where is it based? 

Chanan Averbuch: Blue Square X is based in South Florida. Home of no state income tax here in Miami, and the market is actually a bit on fire here on a regional level where others say the real estate markets are slowing down, Central Florida, Northern Florida, and South Florida has not slowed down just even a bit. Velocity here is amazing. This is our home base for us but we're about to finalize a few other locations here in the US as we speak. 

What's the size of the company, both, Parent and, just the X side?

Chanan Averbuch: Under 20 employees currently at this moment, but we're hiring and growing rapidly. 

For Blue Square X? 

Chanan Averbuch: Yep.

And for Blue Square itself? 

Chanan Averbuch: So it's hard to say right now because some of the resources are shared at the moment. But that's obviously been a change from the install professional services and the creative side, again, we're very focused on the creative side more so than anything else. 

But one of the partners also is very strong in the rental and staging business and has a whole plethora of warehousing and service support models throughout the US so we have that extra tier of support from one of the partners.

All right, and where can they find the company online? 

Chanan Averbuch: Great question. If someone wants to reach out to me directly, you could definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. As for the latest to the company, it's bluesqx.com and you'll be seeing some of the press releases coming up about it I really look forward to engaging with customers.

I know people get scared a little bit when we talk about premium, they assume it's price. It's all about the experience, and if you work your way backward through the experience, then everything else that seemingly doesn't matter matters now. 

And the clientele you're going after would tend to understand that more than maybe a certain car wash operator.

Chanan Averbuch: Oh yeah. But as you alluded to, the ROI is there if you're trying to evoke an emotion or an experience, that's what we care about. We want people to walk away from a retail experience, from a school, from a broadcast studio, from a control room, from a real estate and say, holy cow, how did you see that? It has to be Instagrammable. It has to be something that creates that wow moment. We want to create those wow moments. 

All right. Thank you for having the time or taking the time to chat with me. 

Chanan Averbuch: Absolutely. God bless, and thanks again for your time as well.

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

Feeding the content beast is an endless challenge for most companies who have invested in digital signage technology for their venues, particularly when the messaging mission is not data and pricing, but material that informs, educates and generally occupies the time of viewers.

There are a few companies out there with suites of free streaming content channels, curated and sorted by interest areas. But free means ad-supported. So the action channel a bar owner might have up on screens has digital OOH ads, just like linear TV.

A start-up called Stream is coming at this from a different angle, producing custom content that looks like cable TV news channels and is sorted by interest areas, like channels for medical and dental offices. The big differences are no ads and low-cost monthly subscription fees. The service puts people on screens, but AI is also used to what Stream calls augment the videos.

Started just a year ago and just coming out of side hustle/stealth mode, the founders are going after what they say is a gap in the market for this type and style of content. But in meeting with prospective customers, they've also uncovered hidden demand for private label TV channels for larger clients.

I chatted recently with co-founder Anthony Nerantzis.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Anthony, thank you for joining me. I knew nothing about your company, Stream, until the other day I got an email, I looked at it and I thought, this is interesting, who are these guys? And I asked a couple of questions and concluded that perhaps we should have a chat. Can you give me a rundown of what you do?

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on your program. A big fan. My name is Anthony Nerantzis, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Stream. Stream is in a unique space and we think of a new space in the digital signage industry. 

What we're doing is producing really premium, but low-cost and customized content solutions for CMSs, network operators, and so on to put what is a premium content product and deliver premium content product to their end users. Our whole content model is based around on unique streaming channels. So we have both plug and play, but also these white-label custom channels that we produce for brands and organizations that want to get their messages out in a contextual way to drive engagement with their customers and their viewers and we're really excited about it. 

So if I'm looking at one of your content channels, what does it look like? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah. So what we did is the founders of Stream come from media and comms backgrounds. So what we’re the best at is telling stories, visual storytelling, narrative storytelling, audience engagement, and what we identified is that a broadcast news look and feel with a host, with that graphic representation of messages, people are drawn to that. People want to engage with that sort of content. It's a premium, high-level content, think ESPN or CNN. So all of our content is based around that broadcast news style, look and feel. 

What we do is for different, contextual environments, different venues, we create content that's relevant to those venues. Think of a broadcast news channel for a doctor's office. Think of a broadcast news channel for the C-Store. It's really contextually relevant content for those different environments, and it's delivered in that nice look and feel of a news broadcast. 

So it's audio-driven?

Anthony Nerantzis: We do offer audio solutions, but what we've found for the digital out-of-home environment, typically, there is no audio, and that's for a few reasons. First, our file sizes, just as far as the handshake and the transfer, with our partners, a smaller file size, easier to transfer, easier to upload. But second of all, a lot of the end users that we've worked with, especially on the white-label channel side, don't want noise pollution in their environments. They're just looking for that visual component. So that's where our focus is. 

We obviously do audio, but our bread and butter is, that visual aspect, brilliant visuals, that draw people in.

So if it looks like broadcast news, is there a reporter or a host or whatever you want to call it, on-air talent, talking, but you subtitle it or is it more visuals with supporting, titles or captions? 

Anthony Nerantzis: It's a great combo of both. So we do have our lineup of Stream hosts that we utilize for our production and our development and then they do appear on the screens, and yes, with a subtitle delivery of those messages, but we have graphics of messages, headlines, subheads.

You wouldn't turn our broadcast stations on your TV after a long day and sit down on the couch, but if you were to do that, it does appear as if it were a CNN, ESPN, or Fox News sort of broadcast look and feel. 

That sounds expensive. I mean with on-air talent and everything else and the news resources that you need for that, having some experience in that in my old newspaper days and everything else, and there's a little bit of rxperience with broadcasting. On-air talent and everything else costs real money. How do you get around that?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. So, as I said, we come from the media and the comms space. So we do have that production value, that know-how of the space. What we've done is we've integrated some neat, really revolutionary, AI augmentation, to our displays and the content. So not only does that accelerate. our production process but it also helps us keep our costs, you know in check And allows us to provide what is really low-cost content to our end customers. 

Obviously right now we're priced to scale. it's not cheap but we're excited, you know comparatively to a lot of the other options content out there. We're able to come in comparably, if not in a lot of cases lower, but still delivering a premium product. 

Are these AI avatars, are they generated hosts as opposed to real on-air talent? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So not generated. So we call it augmented because they are our host, they're on payroll and we work with them for a number of different creative, creative situations and use cases. But yeah, so one of the ways that we're really able to within our tech stack drive our costs down is  through the rendering process. Again, augmenting our hosts rather than it's not what we're doing is not fake or avatar generated in that capacity, but we are using our, real life host talent and then using them as AI generated through and to deliver them across our streaming channels. 

It sounds like there's two ways to go at this, the standard sorts of channels that you already have, and there are custom channels. If it's a standard channel that's going into a doctor's office, what am I subscribing to? What roughly am I going to pay? I'm sure there's and it depends on there, but, also just what's the refresh cycle? Is this something that's refreshed daily, weekly, monthly? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So I think a doctor's office is a really great example of where we show up in a way that current content options aren't quite there.

What we're doing, I would say on the plug and play side, we have several channels. We have Med One, which is a catch all healthcare sort of channel of healthcare infotainment, and then we also have a dentistry channel, and then we also have a dermatology channel and we're looking at other avenues for other use cases within the medical field.

But what these are doing is they're showing really interesting infotainment content that's relevant to those spaces. We like to say contextually relevant. They're sharing news from around the industry, news from across the health landscape across the US. It's all G-rated. We use the four year old test. If you're a mom in a waiting room, what would you be comfortable with your four year old seeing? So it's not gory.

It's just health tips and interesting stuff. That's going on studies hey a new study came out that lifting weights after 60 is good for bone density, things like that, and then our custom channels, if you are a bigger network and you own a network of, several hundred screens across, dentists office, we can really get really custom on that white label space with corporate branding, corporate messaging, and really for those brands, taking the exact messages that they want to deliver to their customers in that really unique five to ten minute waiting room experience, and getting them off their phones and having them focus on the screens, with relevant content.

As far as pricing goes, that's where we're really excited and probably most proud. So for our venue channels, that's our kind of our second tier. Those really environment specific channels such as healthcare, those can MSRP run anywhere from $10 at the high-end and $5 at the low end. So compared to what it would cost for a CNN Health with through a cable subscription, it's really nice, it's obviously a fraction of that. But it's also a step above rotating PowerPoint slides, with messages that say, “Go get your flu shot”, which after the third or fourth flip, people are tuning out. 

From a cost perspective, it's extremely competitive. And then the white label channels, that's also really exciting for us because we're able to deliver those brand specific channels at a really affordable cost. 

I suspect that's definitely a “it depends” thing on how much they want and everything else. But if you had a typical, private label channel, would that be like a hundred bucks a month a thousand bucks a month?

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question So it depends on the end point and you got me with “it depends.” It does depend but for now, i'll give you an example. We have a network with a hundred end points and that they ask for a white label channel and you know with regular updates, it's not daily updates, but with regular updates, we're able to deliver that at 50 bucks an end point so considering the value that you're getting, the brand itself is getting their very own broadcast news channel. 

When our CMS partners put us in front of these folks, and they say, hey, this is something new, this is something exciting and you can have your own broadcast news channel. The end users are thrilled. Going from rotating powerpoint slides to something like this is such a value add as far as customer engagement. We've really found an enthusiasm for that sort of new age content. 

Are there personalization options out of those private label ones?

In other words, can the dental office in Cincinnati versus the one in Cleveland inject their own kind of messaging like, “Please welcome our new hygienist, Sarah” or whatever?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and it's actually funny you say that because the network that I just mentioned previously, they have a network of doctor's offices across the state of North Carolina, and each one of those offices has their own little, news, notes, updates, awards that they want to highlight that maybe might not be appropriate to share across. Someone in Winston, Salem might not care about what's going on in Carova, so we can make it really specific based on the location, obviously at scale, but yeah, we can get really granular as far as how tailored we can make it to each specific location.

This is different from the streaming channels that companies that I see out there like Atmosphere and Loop and that. Those exist for the purposes of having content supported by advertising. You're not doing advertising at all, are you? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a really great point, and no, you're right. We are not doing advertising.

We are all about content forward, grabbing that audience's attention and giving them the content rather than diluting it with ads. I think that we're different, from that fast TV space in a few ways, very low cost subscription model, not ads. We're not necessarily a walled garden. We work with CMSs and we work with operators and distributors as a puzzle piece to what they're doing and really being allies to them so they can go in to their partners and their end users and say, we have this really cool puzzle pieces that we can fit within our system. So we're trying to be allies in that way. We don't have a player we're not a walled garden and then I would just say third of all we are at the end of the day, we're producing that premium content. We're not licensing it from other folks so we can control that messaging. 

We can control what's showing up on the screens, make sure it's G-rated, make sure what these brands want in their locations and environments and venues is really tailored to them, not a lowest common denominator loop-based sort of system. 

So you've got a content team that's paying attention to the news wires and just the general run of news out there as well as press releases and everything else, industry reports and so on to pull together your stuff?

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, and that's really our strength. Our team, the founders specifically, we come from some of the biggest media and comms companies in the world. So we understand that space. That's where we think our biggest value is, yes, tracking the news, but also identifying these brands and organizations.

What are the best messages to connect with your core audiences? How do we drive this forward? Especially infotainment, but also in a retail media space where it's about conversions, driving action. That's our specialty and that's where we've been really able to flex our value with our current client book.

You mentioned, you work with CMS companies as opposed to them. How does your stuff plug in?

Anthony Nerantzis: CMSs are our best friends. If there's a North star for us, it's really being partners with the CMS is because they're so powerful in the sense that they have the distribution, they have these relationships and they know what their customers want.

So when we talk about integration, we are coming to them in two ways. First, a simple integration of our plug and play apps within their app store. So when a customer has their interface template up, they can plop us in, and then our content is really seamless. The handshake is very seamless between us, and then our content can show up on their screens.

Is it streamed straight from your servers or the host that you use for streaming or are the CMS getting a file and it's stored locally on the player? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. How it typically works is that HTML5 is our best friend. We provide the content feeds through that, they plug into the CMSs, and then the CMS from there distributes that URL through their app store.

So when someone selects us out of their app store, it plugs in basically they're given access to the license through the URL. We can get as simple as we've had clients come to us. End users specifically if we're working right with the end user and they're like, we just want an mp4 file, so we'll just drop an mp4 file in there in their Dropbox and they plug it into their CMS template and they're off and running. We pride ourselves on universal connectivity. We'll meet you where the customer is 

So if you have an end user who says I don't want a CMS. I don't want that additional monthly cost or whatever. Can I work just directly with you? Can they do that? 

Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, our most important ally in the space are these CMSs. So we respect that relationship. So if we're working with a CMS and there would never be a situation where the client would be like, see you later, CMS, we're just going to plug in the stream. We value our long term relationships more than any sort of, short term gain of an individual network.

And then beyond that, and this came up the other day, we're working with the CMS and their client has a few dozen screens and there might be a few hundred other screens on the horizon in the next few months. We make very clear, we were brought onto the project by the CMS. We're not going to expand past the boundaries of where their players are plugged in. We respect those relationships and I think that's really the key to our success. 

Yeah, and I think the end user community, if you want to call it that, is also more knowledgeable than they were for a good long time, where they understand that having a proper content management system with device management, monitoring, all those other things, the ability to scale and all that are really important versus just, finding some server player that can call a URL.

Anthony Nerantzis: A hundred percent and I think that's what we're recognizing, and we really can only go as far as our CMS partners, media players. We're not going to give individual URL feeds to a thousand screens. We rely on them for that distribution. 

Maybe my mind blanked or something, but did you talk about the typical frequency of content changes? 

Anthony Nerantzis: That's a great question. So for our flagships, our news and sports, obviously that's quick hitting news and that needs to be updated throughout the day, which it is. 

For our venue channels, those are mostly environments, for example, a doctor's office, you might really only be in a doctor's office once every six months, and you'd think that we'd say, we just need to update those channels every six months. What we really go for is, perception is everything. So if that venue owner isn't seeing it updated that often, they're going to think they're not connecting those dots. We're there to connect those dots for them. We're there to consistently fresh content. So when they're walking into their place of business, they're not like, wow, this is the same thing that was playing two weeks ago. So for our venue channels, we do updates at least two or three times a week to keep that content fresh, relevant. 

Our biggest fear is stale content. That's what we want to get rid of. That's what we want to move past and we want to show up well for our CMS partners that their end users are happy with the content that's being displayed. Obviously with white label, it really depends on what the client wants, but again for us it's all about going above and beyond and being proactive in that sense to provide fresh content so that's kind of part of our bread and butter. 

When you were developing the business plan for this, were you thinking white label was a big part of the business or is that something that you landed on as you started talking to customers or potential customers?

Anthony Nerantzis: White label was not part of the plan at all whatsoever. That was born out of really, I would say a listening ot users. So pre launch, we were meeting with a lot of folks, and they were thrilled about and saying, hey, these plug and play options are great, compared to our rotating PowerPoint slides. Let's get this going. 

But what we noticed was there was incredible demand, really desperation for tailored content. Obviously now everything's going to be tailored, customizable, and contextual. Not only in the infotainment space, but in the retail media space. So we're ideating, Hey, what if we make these custom channels? What if we can go to a brand and say, Hey, whether you're just trying to entertain your customers, let's entertain them with news and updates about the company? And then if you're trying to sell a customer on something, why don't we drive action through content and messages, that will achieve those goals.

What we did was, we obviously went through a pretty big development phase on what we did is we put these samples in these productions in front of folks and the reaction that we got was incredible, and it really showed us that this tailored content and this white label content is really where things are moving away from the lowest common denominator and really going towards contextually relevant brand centric content.

I assume that was a pretty happy discovery because you're able to, in rough terms, 10x the monthly subscription fee from an endpoint. 

Anthony Nerantzis: We were very fortunate to be in a position where we were already tracking towards it. So yes, it was a “whoa” sort of moment, which was cool.

I don't think we could have imagined the reaction that we've received from it, and transparently, we really used InfoComm as our major kind of launch point to get our name out there, and we were expecting to show up, shake hands, get to know people, meet people. 

We brought, obviously, a little tablet. We were showing people what we were doing, and the reaction, specifically for these white labels… We were on our flight home, from Vegas, with huge smiles on our faces, I don't think we could have imagined how much these white labels, channel offerings, how much interest that would have generated.

So you were at Infocomm and I walked right by, apparently. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I guess so. I'll have to catch you at the next one. I think it's in Orlando next year, right?

Yeah. It's starting to ring a bell now that when I walk around, I take photos of stands thinking, I don't know anything about them, I don't have time to stop right now, but I'll look this up later. 

If I go through my photos, I bet you there's one in there like that and my apologies for not stopping, but, I get swarmed that week. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I'm going to let you off the hook. We did not have a booth. We were just walking around. Maybe a booth next year. Maybe you can take a picture of a booth next year. But we were just on the ground getting to know folks, trying to make the most of it. 

And you're able to do that just by having chats with people? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yeah, we're really fortunate. Obviously, the founders are from outside the digital signage space and someone who's been a huge mentor to us is Bob Ratcliffe. I don't know if you're familiar, but he runs, really, what we found to be an incredibly consultancy and, he's really been our mentor and also guided us around the show floor, and introduced us to who we needed to know. So we're fortunate for Bob and he's obviously a great partner with us. 

Yeah, subject matter, knowledge and contacts and all that are invaluable. So how long ago did this start?

Anthony Nerantzis: As I said, we usde Infocomm to put our name out there. Transparently though, I would say since June of 2023 is when the idea was first born. 

Oh, so this is like real new? 

Anthony Nerantzis: Yes. I think I mentioned earlier, but we thought we had an idea, we thought we had something, but what we did was we did a lot of listening. We met with partners even before we really put our name out there publicly.

I can't tell you how many Zoom meetings, in person conversations that we had with people in the space, CMS operators. What are you looking for from a content perspective? What are you missing? What's your current situation? The production and development process, obviously, of our software stack, took a long time, to optimize it and get it up and running to what we wanted it to be, to show up in a way that we were proud of.

So I'd say, yeah, about a year and a little before our one year anniversary, we came out to the world and timed up perfectly with Infocomm. 

So what's the state of the company at the moment? Is it like a full time company or is it a side hustle for you guys? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So we are just breaking out of our side hustle, which is amazing. The last month and a half have been an absolute whirlwind. We are in a full growth stage right now. We're incredibly proud of that. So We're going full on and we're fortunate that we were able to get so much excitement right from the jump that we're able to make this decision.

So we're definitely in the growth phase. I think the next three, six, twelve months are going to be extremely exciting. We have a lot of really cool stuff coming down the pipeline, not only with product development, but with partnerships. So we're excited about where we're at.

Actually, just last week, we were accepted into NVIDIA's Inception program for early stage startups. So that gives us a whole suite of tools that are going to propel us, even further forward with our capabilities. So we're really excited about that. 

Yeah, that's how I got wind of this and I, admittedly, didn't know a darn thing about NVIDIA's inception program. What does that do for you? Is it funding or is it just support or connections?

Anthony Nerantzis: I think a lot about the last one. So it really integrates us directly within their partner network of VCs of developer support. So I would say just from apartner in a network standpoint, that's going to be the biggest value add. The second really huge boon for us is going to be access to some advanced features within their software suite. Obviously we're always looking for ways to level up and optimize our production processes.

And with Nvidia, with their help, and being part of this network, we're going to have access to a lot of the really cool things that they're doing behind the scenes. So we're really excited about that and hopefully over the next month or two here, we're going to be able to roll out some things that are a direct result of that, being within that network, so a huge opportunity for us for sure. 

So that gives you access to a whole bunch of computing power, particularly on the graphics side, which I'm sure it is intriguing.

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely. That's the name of the game right now. We need it and just to have a partner like that is pretty awesome.

If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you? 

Anthony Nerantzis: So we're a few places. I think our channel of choice is for sure LinkedIn. go ahead and follow us on LinkedIn. We're Stream, and then our website is streammedia.news.

So we kicked .com to the side because we want to really show that we're news, we're content forward. We're not streammedia.ads. We're focused on that content with the news. With the news portion. So I encourage everyone to check us out. 

I suspect streammedia.com was also gone many years ago.

Anthony Nerantzis: Dave, you're exposing me. 

As was the stream.com, probably gone in 2003 or something. 

Anthony Nerantzis: I would imagine, yes. 

Or 1993, I don't know. Alright, Anthony, that was great. Thank you. Happy to learn more about your company and best wishes with all this, and I guess I'll see you in Orlando next year.

Anthony Nerantzis: Absolutely, Can't wait. Thank you so much. We really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you to all your listeners and we really had a lot of fun.

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

Dubai, Qatar and more recently Saudi Arabia have developed a reputation in digital signage for bankrolling projects that seem mainly focused on sizzle and scale. But there's a lot more going on in the region than work that's just about Wow Factor.

It's a busy, high opportunity part of the world for companies delivering big visual display projects, but also one that presents a lot of challenges in how things work - everything from regulations and timelines to cultural differences.

I've got to know a Dubai-based company called Blue Rhine Industries through its strategy director, Nita Odedra, who I first met at an ISE conference. I'd already been impressed by how the integrator actually produces useful marketing - tight, explanatory videos that do the job of explaining what was done and why. It seems sensible, but is remarkably rare in this sector. I see a LOT of it, so I know.

Nita and I had a great chat about the company's roots as a traditional sign company, and how and why it expanded into digital. We spend a lot of time talking about what's happening in the region, what customers want, and how business is done.

If your own company is thinking the Gulf region presents a lot of opportunity for expansion, that is indeed true. But like a lot of things, it looks easier that it appears. Local knowledge and experience are invaluable.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Blue Rhine Industries, can you give me a rundown of what the company does? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So we're a digital signage system integrator headquartered in Dubai, in the UAE, and we are working across the entire GCC on various projects. That includes additional screens, software, and interactive solutions, across a range of industries. That's us in a nutshell. 

What are the roots of the company? 

Nita Odedra: So we formed in 2006 by a gentleman called John V. Joseph, who still runs the company now, and he started the company as a static signage fabricator.

So very humble beginnings where we were fabricators for static signs and shop signs. So it could be a Starbucks sign or a Cartier sign. Then inside the retail stores, it would be the category signage, light boxes, and menu boards in F&B, and that's how we started the business. 

And you went to digital, was it because there was an opportunity or it was one of those things where you looked at it and realized, okay, we have to go this way?

Nita Odedra: Yeah, it was the latter. It was that we identified that there was a shift happening, in retail, in F&B. So where we felt this the most was the quick-serve restaurants where they were changing their traditional lightbox menu boards to LCD screens, and that was a big business for us, lightboxes, menu boards, keeping those menu boards updated.

So at that point, we realized that there was a shift happening and we were going to start losing the lightbox kind of offering that we had we formed a relationship and exclusivity with Phillips Professional Panels, Professional Displays at the time, and we were their exclusive distributor here in the UAE for a number of years and that's where the digital signage business began. 

And what does that represent for Blue Rhine now? Is it like a big part of their business or like a sideline? 

Nita Odedra: More than half the business now is digital signage or some type of static signage, which incorporates digital signage into it. So we have fully dedicated teams. It's like the business is almost split into two and digital signage is where we're seeing the most growth. 

I suspect the two are complimentary still in that if you come across a job that involves something more than hanging a screen on a wall, there are a lot of solutions providers that don't really have the expertise on the engineering side, don't have the man lifts or any of these things to do the more aggressive or complicated work.

Nita Odedra: Absolutely. So that's really our differentiator in the market here is that because the company grew from being a fabricator. So we have four factories. We have facilities for large steel structures, both indoor and outdoor large totems. So we're doing canopies for gas stations as part of our static business, which allows us to be able to do those large unipoles for the out-of-home media agencies, for example, down the highway. 

So the ability to manage that whole project from technical drawings on steel structures and, the housing and all that type of stuff, all the way through to fabricating in our facility, installing it in-house, having the digital signage arm of the business, the software, the content, we're able to provide that full end to end solution and that means that when we're doing these installations, especially indoor environments, where we're doing the secondary structure, every millimeter counts when it comes to that perfection of LED screens, for example, and having that beautiful screen housing structure, that's all done by us.

Lord knows we've seen around the world, large format display projects that have been done by companies who probably don't know what they are doing because things fall over or fall on people and everything else. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've seen that recently, but, we've got in-house engineers. We've got those project managers in-house. We've got guys doing BIM in-house as well. 

So we have that technical capability all the way from the drawings. Then we've got the fabrication facility with skilled workers. We have multiple HSC kinds of offices that are going on-site. Most recently we did quite a complex project, from beginning to end, which was the Dubai Mall Aquarium, which was a long installation. That was six months. Because it's a fully operational mall, we had a very short window at night time to go in to put all the access equipment up and work. we had to take out the existing screen, which was an OLED LG display, and then replace that with the infrared screen that we put in and that took six months and we're very proud of that installation because we had zero HSC violations over six months and our team just did a fantastic job there. 

Is that an anomaly or is that kind of the work you do? 

Nita Odedra: That's very much the kind of work we do. So it is these large screens, it is custom fabrication. It will be complex sites. So we're doing one at the moment, which is a very large outdoor screen on the corner of a building, which is also still in construction. So this is very typical, especially when we're looking at those large format screens. 

Those are jobs that don't come along that often, even in your region. A lot of companies would rely more on the, use a term I use quite a bit, meat and potatoes kind of work where it's conventional flat panel LCDs for menu displays.

Nita Odedra: So here the market is a little bit different because we've got so many projects, new developments, they're trying to do things differently. We’ve got cylinder LCDs, we've got pillars being clad, etc. But yeah, you're right there. Our bread and butter and the fast-moving business that keeps the lights on is the retail business. That is the LED screens, the LCD video walls, and interactive displays in retail environments. 

When we get those orders in, they turn around pretty quickly, within a couple of months, the payments are pretty good on those because you're delivering in a shorter time frame, and on the larger projects, that's where, sometimes we can get our money stuck, projects get delayed. An example would be Abu Dhabi Airport, Terminal A, where that project was delayed over a couple of years and we had that stock ready, and then COVID came, the project got delayed, and that became from what should have been two years became five years.

You just have to sit on that stuff. 

Nita Odedra: You're sitting on it or you install it and then the airport's still not open. You've got a screen up there that's not ready for any content yet. But it's just the way it is, especially in this region, projects sometimes do get delayed and we just have to be prepared for that when we're resourcing the company and now we're at over 750 people, almost 800 across the region. So it's managing those resources and making sure that the installation or the fabrication that we're aligned internally on manages everything. 

So from a distance, I look at the GCC region and I see these mega projects being announced and I always wonder how many of them are actually going to be built and how long does it take? 

Nita Odedra: So these are ambitious projects, right? So we're looking at projects in NEOM, like The Line, we've got several projects in and around Medina, and they are very ambitious when you look at them on paper. They are happening, but some of them are being scaled back. So you may have heard Neom The Line that was scaled back from, hundreds of kilometers down to just a couple of kilometers. 

But it's still one of the largest building projects in the world, even at that scale-down size, right?

Nita Odedra: Absolutely, and we are seeing that these projects are now coming to life. So things that were announced, what, five years ago, probably like 2018 when they set the 2030 vision for Saudi Arabia specifically. A lot of those projects are now happening, the hotels are opening, the resorts are opening, so we look at places like the Red Sea Development, which has luxury resorts. It's going to be a tourist destination. They're already accepting guests there now. They've got Qadir, which is picking up pace. We've got King Salman Park, which will be the largest urban park in the world. When you're in the city, work is happening and it's happening at a very fast pace.

Who is largely funding these? Are you in a better position to see them actually happen if they're coming through a big fund like PIF in Saudi Arabia? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So a lot of the work that we're doing and the projects, they are being funded by the government, by the public investment funds.

So those are the ones that are picking up speed, but of course, other private companies are coming up with their developments and they're turning the round very fast. There are out-of-home media agencies that are doing phenomenally well. They're companies like Al Arabiya who are sweeping up these new developments for their network.

Is it very competitive in your region? I'm familiar with three or four companies who do what you guys do, different routes, and everything else. But I suspect because of the money that's going into the region, there's all kinds of other companies in the region and in Europe and even in North America are looking at it and thinking we need to be there.

Nita Odedra: There is competition. There are system integrators, smaller ones that we're having to compete with quite aggressively in the retail space, but where we're different is we've been in this game a lot longer. So perhaps we've lost some clients in retail for a year or two, they've experimented with perhaps other system integrators. Some have been successful, some when it comes to those retail projects, a little bit more complex where, the fabrication element comes back in again, experienced project management that comes back in again, HSC, when these elements are not supported by a competitor, they end up coming back to us and we're able to maintain that retail business.

But absolutely in retail, we have a lot of competition. But there is a lot of work here. There are lots of malls still opening, whether that's the UAE or in Saudi, where there's a huge number of malls opening up, there is business there. 

Does it feel at all like a bubble? 

Nita Odedra: It feels like a bubble when I look at politics internationally and how we don't have that here and we're a little bit in a little happy bubble here.

So yeah, it does feel like it sometimes. And it's easy to forget that this region is an anomaly. We are a region where there are a lot of ambitious projects with speed happening. There is work. There's a very positive attitude towards these projects that are being developed. There's a very positive attitude towards the hosting of sporting events in the region. People are excited about it. They welcome it. It's something new, right? 

So it can feel like a bit of a bubble sometimes when we have so much regional excitement that, perhaps globally, it's not the same landscape. 

Yeah, you mentioned shopping malls going up, and I've been to Dubai, it's been a number of years, but I thought even at that time, okay, there's enough shopping malls here now. But they just keep coming. 

Nita Odedra: I'm shocked as well. So every time there's a new mall, I was like, surely they're not gonna be busy, and then you go, and they're packed. This is low season right now. So the school holidays started last week and we don't get much tourism in the summer, but the mall was absolutely packed.

It's very much a small culture here. We don't have historical high streets or historical villages. Everything is new. Everything's flashy and people want to go to the mall. That's the only place that they can go to for F&B, for entertainment, picking up their groceries, and doing their usual high street shop.

There's a practical reason behind that too, just that it's, so crazy hot there that malls are air-conditioned. So the dwell time, I gather, is not measured in minutes and hours. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, it is not unusual to be in the mall for six to seven hours. You'd perhaps do two meals there, watch a movie, go shopping, and then leave after doing your grocery shop. So it's high dwell times. 

It's incredibly hot here. So I even have friends who go to the mall In the summer, just to get their step count in. So they'll go, grab a coffee, do their step count, pop in, run some errands, whether it's dry cleaning, or whatever it is that they've got to do, but they'll do that step count inside the mall, as opposed to a park, or the town pavements.

Does that make it a better media environment? 

Nita Odedra: Absolutely, So for the out-of-home media agencies, they've got a good captive audience there. It's all indoor. So I think it works really well for the media networks and or the out of their media agencies. 

We've chatted a few times in the past. I'm always curious about the impact of the wow factor on Projects over there and how important it is 

Nita Odedra: culturally, I think we've got a bit of history here with Dubai because it's been established a little bit longer in terms of these, ambitious developments, but they want to be the biggest and the best, whether it's building the tallest building in the world, the Burj Al Arab, the largest mall in the world, maybe the busiest mall, the busiest airport terminals.

They do have this pride in trying to put developments out there that are new, and ambitious. Something that is the largest, and what that means is sometimes it comes with a bit of flash and you've got all bells, all whistles installations for screens. Dubai Mall is an example where I think that's the largest indoor screen in Dubai Mall and you'll have other ones coming up in the next couple of years trying to beat that I'm sure.

Now, as somebody whose role involves strategy. I suspect it's a bit of a delicate dance for you in that you're hearing about these ambitions of being the biggest, the best, and so on and you have to sit there and think, monetarily, that could be great for us, but strategy-wise, I'm not sure that's the right move.

Nita Odedra: Exactly. So we have to be really careful about which projects we take, how many projects we take, and when we take on new partners and new product lines. When we dive first, we're adding more software with, we're providing content now. So we've got to be really careful about what our strengths are and stay true to who we are.

We get asked all the time to do things that are, outside of our scope, but we really have to say no, scale it back, and just stick to our objectives, our strategy as a business, the direction we want to go in, and that's very much customer experiences, passenger experiences. So we're one of the verticals that we're, growing at quite a fast pace is transport.

So airports. There are a number of domestic airport openings in Saudi, we've got new airports opening in Dubai and, across the region. So that's an area that we strategically know that we can take on large projects, we're capable and we're going to see good business. 

Airports, I talk about a lot as being, if you want to see the state-of-the-art and digital signage, look at a refurbished or newly built airport because it just covers the waterfront in terms of digital out-of-home, conventional signage, wayfinding, everything. 

Nita Odedra: An airport is a perfect example of where you could probably take somebody for a site visit and show them every single type of installation for a digital screen possible and software and integration. Airports are the perfect vertical for us to really penetrate and all our complete offerings can be in an airport because we're taking our experience within malls for travel retail. We're taking our experience from mixed-use developments, and all our experience from all the other verticals can now be applied within transport and airports specifically.

Yeah, I'm curious if you work with the large engineering and architecture companies, like, all the way up to Populous who I think is involved in the Qiddiya project. 

Nita Odedra: So we work very often from concept all the way through to delivery, and that would mean the contractors, the architects, the cost consultants, the design consultants, these are all stakeholders that are involved quite early on in the conversations and remain in those conversations almost through to delivery. 

What about on the services side? Obviously you're doing the front end, you're, deploying, you're, designing, fabricating everything else. Are you doing ongoing aftercare? And you mentioned content before? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So services are part of the complete solution, right? So we've got to offer the AMC afterward, and that can be anything from servicing the screens to maintaining them in this region. You've got LEDs outdoors and they need to be maintained, and cleaned of dust. That's very much part of the AMC. There’s remote content management where we're providing content management solutions for retailers and that's for outside of the region as well. So retail operators who are not just in the GCC, but all the way through to Malaysia, Europe, travel retailers who are in Norway.

So managing their content from Dubai, and then, more recently providing the content creation piece as well. So that's where we will have partners. We've got our preferred content partners who are delivering fantastic work globally, and we're transparent with our clients as well that, this is our partner, but we're offering the complete solution under our canopy. 

You're managing screens in Norway from Dubai? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we're managing the content for screens in Norway, all the way through to Malaysia, and Indonesia, I think even in London, so it's becoming global now. So even though we're delivering work within the Middle East region and our direct offices and fabrication facilities, warehouses are all in the GCC, so those are the Gulf countries, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE. We are also in Egypt. We're delivering into North Africa and the wider Middle East area. 

Do you have a preferred list or go to a set of partners on the display hardware and software side, or do you take it project by project? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, that's a great question, actually. So as I spoke about earlier we started this journey with Philips Professional Displays that was for a short period of time when we were starting out. We then realized that distribution wasn't for us. We want to be a system integrator. We were shooting ourselves in the foot there. So that was handed over to another business within our group of companies. So our owner has a trading division. So that was handed over to them and they are now the distributor.

And we fully threw ourselves into being a system integrator where we were able to develop relationships with a number of different vendors and partners, and we remain agnostic. So it's dependent on the project. What is right for that project? And yes, there'll be periods of time where sometimes we're getting great pricing from Samsung and we'll deliver a number of Samsung LCD screens, and then LG. The next day that changes and that's very much price driven if I'm honest Based on the availability of the screens then when it comes to the LED screens, that's far more complex and that is a problem based on the project and the requirements, and that can be very different from project to project.

We have a fantastic Head of Digital, Neeraj Vyas, who's been with us since the beginning, been with us for over 11 years now, and he is in China almost every month going and doing that quality control, really getting into the details of the screen, and he's the one very often who will spec out which, the hardware we're going to use for those big projects.

Do you find that the customers or the specifiers, if they're an engineering firm or an architecture firm, do they know what they need and what they want to use? Or are they saying, yeah, we want to use COB here, or it needs to be this pitch or whatever, or are they relying on you? 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So that does happen. They are informed and there are lots of great resources available for them to have a vague idea of what they want. But just yesterday I was on a call with our head of tech and a design firm where they loosely knew what they wanted and what they needed. But when we were drilling down into the requirements and the structure of these screens where they're going, and is it facing daylight? Is it not? We then realized that there was a support that they needed and some guidance on the specification of the screen. 

So there was one specific screen that they mentioned, and we said, actually we have used that screen in an outdoor environment. We probably wouldn't recommend it for X, Y, or Z reasons. They understood the reasons. Because we're also the fabricator and we've got all this experience in indoor outdoor environments in this regio, we know the ventilation we know how to design those structures with ventilation, what type of provisions have to be made so we're able to get in quite early with these guys and educate them guide them on considerations that they may not have made 

The heat in your region obviously tough on humans, and I know that any display technology company has to worry about getting that heat out of the enclosure or whatever, but do you really have to think about it there?

Nita Odedra: Yes. We really do have to think about it. There are the manufacturers there who are saying, of course, that it will withstand heat to 50-60 degrees, even beyond some of them, but having done this for over 12 years. 

But having installation throughout, the peak summer period for testing. We do have to make provisions for ventilation, for AC, for cooling. These are all provisions that we do have to make for outdoor screens, especially the LCD screens, mainly the outdoor LCD screens here, but for LED screens, of course, we still have to account for ventilation.

Yeah. With them, you have to worry about blowing off all the dust and everything, and the sand that gets in. 

Nita Odedra: Exactly. maintaining those, making sure that the sand, making sure the structure as well isn't capturing all that kind of dust floating around. So yeah, even simple things like, when you've got touch screens inside malls and stuff and the IR frame back in the days, there's dust captures in there or sensors. These are all things that we have to consider quite early. 

I first got an idea of your company on LinkedIn by seeing a video that I believe was for the Dubai Mall, the project you were talking about before and what struck me is, Oh my God, there's an integrator who actually gets marketing. 

Nita Odedra: Funnily, the John who I spoke about earlier, my boss, his background is marketing. So I think his degree was in marketing. So he's very passionate about our marketing. He's very hands-on and I'm getting WhatsApp messages in the night saying, let's try this. Let's do something different, and he's the gentleman probably on the video that you saw, and we're a bunch of passionate people. We've all been in the company for a while. He's been there since the beginning. over 17 years, I've been there for almost eight, or nine years now.

So we were passionate about the business. We've grown with the business. We've seen the business grow and we're so excited about these projects that we're delivering. We're excited about what's happening in the region, not just for us, but we love to talk about other things that are happening in the region as well. So yeah, I think, we're doing the marketing justice and he's great on camera as well. 

Yeah, I mentioned that just because I so often see reports about projects and I'm lucky if they even provide decent photos. So to come across videos that explain this is what we did, this is what we use, this is where it is, this is how it works without overwhelming you with Euro disco music or whatever, just the facts, it was almost stunning. Oh my God, somebody got it. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah. So he really came up with a decision very early on, probably about six years ago, seven years ago, actually, that everything needs to be video content. He wasn't even happy with just images. He was like people are digesting content in videos and this was like the days, early days of, videos being on Instagram or LinkedIn. So we started churning out a lot more videos, to begin with, which were just the videos of the projects, and then that evolved to us giving kind of explainers, educating the audience and just making them short and snappy.

We're making more data-driven decisions on the type of marketing we're doing, where are we getting the most engagement? What are people enjoying? What are they engaging with and sharing? And it seems to be that the ones where we're explaining in a very short space of time, like you said, within 30 seconds, get straight to the point. “This is a pixel pitch, 1.2, the size of it. What have we delivered? How did we do it?” And just get straight to it. That's what people want to know. They want to see the screen. They want to know how you did it and what did you do? Keep it simple. 

Yeah, we were collectively on a panel a couple of months ago now in Munich at the Digital Signage Summit, and it was about doing business in your region and what I asked the group was how easy or hard it is because it is different, right? 

You can't just drop your company into this region and expect to start getting the business rolling in. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, we've got 17 years of experience, but still monthly, there are new regulations. There are new challenges, whether that's employing locals. So in Saudi, we've got Saudinization where a set quota has to be local employees. Resourcing regionally as well can be a challenge, just licensing and all that paperwork for us still is a challenge. So I know how daunting it is for system integrators, and vendors trying to enter into this region and there are certain cultural sensitivities that we've got to keep in mind, there are a lot of different cultures working together as well. 

So the culture here is very different from European culture and American culture, even more so. There's that consideration to have as well when you're entering into the market. But I would say to anybody that wants to enter into this market, partner up with somebody, to begin with, find the opportunities, find some local partners, get started, have your hand held a bit before you make any decisions, and jump straight into the deep end. 

Now, for a company that's from Europe or from North America or elsewhere, looking at going into that region and saying, okay, I agree, let's partner. They're probably going to be intimidated that this partner may result in us losing the larger business because now we have a partner instead of doing this solo. 

Nita Odedra: Yeah, I do personally believe that there's enough in the piece of the pie for everybody, especially in this region. But, we look at long-term partnerships. So we're quite selective with who we work with and how we work with them, and we do believe in honest, transparent partnerships. We will make sure that we've got contracts in place to protect them more than we even. So if they have, because we are looking long term, if they've brought a client, they've got a client who is from the US or Europe and they're looking to support them here regionally and they need a partner. We'll ring fence that client. We'll put contracts in place, it's a ring fence for them. It's only them. We won't touch them directly and just make sure everything's covered legally for them and honor that as well, so making sure that even from the top down, you've got that commitment. So we always make sure on all of our partnerships that from right at the top of management, I'm getting them in conversations with those partners and getting that commitment on what we will be delivering on, and also not creating any exclusivity either too early.

Sometimes getting exclusive with a partner straight away and it's not good for them. It's not good for us, to allow them the flexibility to go out to other system integrators. They don't have to work exclusively with us. 

And just finally, on the cultural side, I would say the common perception is it's very different over there and challenging to work in and everything else, but in talking with you and speaking with other people who work in the region, they've said, yeah, it's different, but it's perhaps not what you think.

It's not as challenging and things have relaxed, particularly in areas like Saudi quite a bit. 

Nita Odedra: I've seen a shift here. So I've been in the Middle East now for almost 10 years, and I'm originally from the UK. I'm just outside of London. I worked in London and across Europe and America in terms of my territories. So I'm familiar with the European market, familiar with the North American market, and the way of working. 

There is a different culture and pace here, but the projects are happening at such a speed that things do materialize. They do happen quite quickly. So it's not that much of a culture shock. You've just got to be prepared, the professionalism, should we say, is different. It's there, but it's just different.

All right. Leave me hanging on that one. 

Nita Odedra: Timelines, deadlines, all that kind of stuff. Those get pushed back a lot in this region, adhering to timelines. So most of our projects that get delayed, get delayed by the client side, approvals for drawings, client. 

One of the biggest challenges we have is site conditions. They'll push for us to have, I don't know, let's just say 300 outdoor interactive kiosks ready. They'll pay a premium just to have them turned around faster because they're not willing to wait nine months. They want them delivered in four months, and then there's no data or power, and we're sitting on 300-plus outdoor kiosks and charging them for the storage, and that is not uncommon. 

Interesting. Great to catch up with you. We see each other here and there at trade shows, but we're obviously many hours apart. So it's not a routine thing. 

Nita Odedra: Thank you for taking the time out, it's been a great conversation and I look forward to seeing you hopefully at ISE.

Absolutely. 

Nita Odedra: Thank you.

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

Motion graphics designers tend to enjoy the creative side of their jobs, but there can be aspects of their work, like editing and rendering slight variations of the same spot, that are best described as soul-sucking.

Neb Savicic has lived that as a motion graphics designer, and with a couple of friends in Serbia, concluded there had to be a better way. So they put their heads together and, after testing interest, started Plainly - which automates video creation and produces finished spots at scale. Like 1,000s of videos in a matter of minutes.

This is not a library of pre-made templates that end-users can then tweak. It's a SaaS tool used mainly by creatives in agencies and studios to take what's developed in a professional toolset - Adobe's AfterEffects - and plug it into Plainly's cloud platform.

The net result is that a creative team that is charged with producing, let's say, 500 videos for a QSR chain can do that with one template and a spreadsheet file that has all the differences itemized per location. What might take weeks to accurately produce, instead takes one click and a few minutes to get rendered, ready-to-use videos.

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TRANSCRIPT

Neb, thank you for joining me. It’s nice to chat with you. We met in Munich a couple of months ago. I didn't know a lot about Plainly. I wrote a piece when you did some sort of a partnership with SignageLive, but for those who don't know who you are, can you tell me about the company, what it does, and how and why it was started?

Neb Savicic: First of all, thank you so much for having me. So Plainly is a product that helps creative teams automate and scale up video output while keeping the quality of their videos high. What that means, in a nutshell, is we have a platform that allows users to automatically render variations of their After Effects videos just by providing data that's going to be in those variations.

So the benefit of automation is you can produce videos at scale. You can produce a lot of videos quickly without all the monkey work to do each of them, right? 

Neb Savicic: Yes, so the key benefit, and that's the problem we're solving, is that in many use cases, creatives have to spend their time changing text, changing images, and creating variations of the same templatized video they created a month ago for different markets, screens, and products.

My background is actually in video. I was a motion designer before planning, and I always hated those kinds of projects, and that's where the inception story came from, and, I was like, there has to be some better way. So we created a platform where you can create one template, and one After Effects project, and then our platform will automatically create all of the different variations you need. At the same time, you can focus on different, more creative, and more important tasks.

So I understand that for a lot of social media things, even for things like utility company bills, if they want to do a video summary, customer by customer, how would this be used in the context of digital signage or digital out of home? 

Neb Savicic: When I first came into this industry, and I was looking at the content that the companies were putting out, and I said this on another podcast, the one thing that always bugged me is that these companies invest so much money into their systems into their digital signage systems and the content doesn't look that good. You invest so much money to have this great system running in the background, and the thing that's actually displayed and the thing that your customers see is the thing that's getting the least amount of effort. 

So using a tool like ours, you can actually make sure that you have relevant content, personalized content, and updated content all the time on all of the screens. So you can imagine… This is the easiest example, but like a QSR where they have the same content on every screen in every restaurant across all the locations, and that's just because they have a limitation of human resources, they just don't have enough employees to create different content. So they're satisfied with the same stuff. 

With a tool like Plainly and the power we give you, you can actually create individualized content for each screen. So, let's say it's raining in London. You can make different content when it's raining compared to Manchester, where it's sunny, and you're going to sell different stuff, it’s that ability to automatically create different individualized relevant personalized content on a large scale that's what we give to the digital sign, to our users from the digital signage industry. 

Do you have companies that are actively using this?

I know I mentioned that a partnership was announced with SignageLive. SignageLive is always good about working with emerging companies doing interesting things, so it's not surprising they're one of the first to do that. But how are these company’s customers using it? 

Neb Savicic: We work with many agencies, some of the biggest agencies, especially in the advertising and creative industries. These agencies are using it for digital signage for their clients and the way they're using it is exactly how I described it. 

They were spending so much time creating different variations of the same content and they realized they needed to offload this to machines and open up some of that time for our creative team to actually do something more, they paid these people a lot of money because they're great and spend time moving the pixels around, their users, agencies, and in-house creative teams all use Plainly in the same fashion, where you can just drop in a big CSV, a big Google sheet with all of the different video variations and in a click of a button you can get a hundred or a thousand different video variations. 

To be clear, this is not a template system like a lot of digital signage CMS companies have. I think they are sometimes called composer systems where you just open it up and you use templates that exist there, and you can adjust what's on them. 

This is developing templates within Adobe After Effects, usually, templates designed by motion graphics designers who know their way around AE. Then, that's where you plug in, right?

Neb Savicic: Yes, exactly. One of our key selling points is that we are a native After Effects solution. So our users have to be After Effects users. That's why I'm saying they're in-house creative teams and agencies. So what this means is that we are not offering you boilerplate templates that are the same for everybody.

You can actually create your own custom-branded bespoke templates that look awesome and then use our platform to increase the output of those templatized videos. 

So, what would the workflow be for? Let's use that example you had about QSR chains and wanting to have different menus based on weather conditions, geography, and that sort of thing.

How does that work in the real world? 

Neb Savicic: Okay, so there are two ways you can achieve this. First of all, you can do what's called a batch renderer, which is very nicely demonstrated in a video we did for the SignageLive integration. Basically, what you do is upload your After Effects template into Plainly.

You say, okay, we want to change the product's price, the product's name, and the product's image with every video. You create a big Google Sheet that's gonna have all of the different variations. You drop in that Google Sheet or a CSV into Plainly, click Render, and Plainly renders all of the different variations. That's the simple, no-code-needed way. 

The second way, which is a bit more advanced, is using our API. With our API, you can actually create any kind of workflow, and this is where we can also talk about programmatic. You can programmatically create video variations on demand. So let's say you have a system that detects it's rainy in New York, let's create a new content piece, that just pings our API and says create a new video, and we send you back the video so there are a couple of ways you can achieve the workflow, depending on the technical abilities.

What's the timing and everything of that? If you hit “Batch render” or whatever the button is, you click it, does that take 10 seconds, 10 hours, or 10 days? 

Neb Savicic: You can see this on our YouTube channel. We actually made a video in which we rendered 1000 videos in 17 minutes so it's quite a fast system. Obviously, it depends on how complex the video template is, but it's quite fast, and it's quite capable of producing like we have customers doing tens of thousands of videos, like fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, so the core of our product is the scalable infrastructure that can output any number of videos.

Are you using big, cloud-based compute systems, like AWS or whatever to do that, or is this your own iron? 

Neb Savicic: No, of course, we use Google for the rendering. 

So that gives you all the scalability you need. 

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. It's scalable on demand, and we don't have to worry about them shutting down.

No, they're not anytime soon, at least. So what is the output file? 

Neb Savicic: It's a video, first of all, that's the big thing for digital signage. 

It's not an HTML5, it's a video. 

Neb Savicic: No. It's an actual video, MP4 or MOV. So that also has some benefits in terms of being able to play it on older screens and any kind of screen so that also has some benefits. 

So any media player, unless it's a complete piece of junk, supports playing out the video, whereas it might not play out HTML5. 

Neb Savicic: That's one of the benefits, yeah. 

Are there settings? If I say, “I want 720p, 1080p, 4K,” and “Here's the format: it's portrait or it's landscape,” can you munch on those things? 

Neb Savicic: Of course. So all of those things are actually handled in After Effects. So the customer decides what's the duration going to be, what's the dimension of the video going to be, what's the design, but then also some of the agencies we work with, they actually do stuff for broadcast. In those cases, they require very specific output parameters. Because of that, we have a feature where you can define these specific outputs, such as, if you want to change the bitrate, the FPS, or any of those more technical parameters. That's also possible after the video is rendered.

If you do, use your example, a thousand videos in 17 minutes. For each of those videos, where do they go, and how do you distinguish which one is which? Can you give them names based on metadata so know this is Spanish, Escondido in California, postal code, and that sort of stuff?

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. There are a couple of ways you can achieve this. One is naming the files. You can use the data parameters from the video. If you have a product name, and then you want also to add Spanish, you can name them. But in the case of the API usage, you can include the metadata in that API call, which will be how you distinguish those videos.

But specifically for digital signage, and this is one of the things we did with SignageLive, so let's say in the spreadsheet you also have a column that says, where is this piece of content going to go? In SignageLive, it's called tags. You can actually use those tags and automatically distribute the videos to the screens with SignageLive because of their integration and the way we did it. But generally speaking, you can achieve that level of automation where you're dropping a CSV or filling out a Google sheet, the videos are read automatically, and they are distributed automatically to all of the screens where they need to be.

I assume there are guardrails and checks and balances on this stuff. Automation is awesome, but it can work both ways. If somebody makes a mistake or something goes hairy and the rendered videos are incorrect in some way. How do you make sure that doesn't happen?

Neb Savicic: So that's up to the user. We don't alter the data in any way. So what we get is what we put into the video, and then it's up to the user to introduce some checks and balances and security measures to make sure that the content looks right. 

So if there's an approval gateway of some kind that you want to look at each piece of video and go, okay, yeah, that looks right. That's up to the customer. That's not something inherent in your system? 

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course, and we do it also for security reasons. Of course, we don't want to be liable for approving something and then making a mistake. So we leave that up to the user and ensure they have the flexibility to do it in the way they want. 

I think I saw in one of the demo videos that you do have or offer users the ability, at least at the creative stage, to do a draft render, look at it, and then go in and change some of the things, right?

Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. If you see a video that may be in, the data was incorrect. You can easily re-render that video, or, as you mentioned, use a draft version to make sure that it actually looks good before it's published. 

You're starting to work with AI, as everybody says they're working with AI, but how are you using it?

Neb Savicic: So we are introducing AI into our tool to help our users do the tasks they always do with the assets outside of Plainly. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a product image. Those product images, in a lot of cases, have backgrounds, and in the video, you want to have an image without a background. So we are introducing features that will help you - we call it pre-processing - remove the background or denoise your audio, and do those things that really help make the lives of our users a bit easier. So they don't have to do things outside of Plainly. They can do everything in one place. 

It's very much what I hear from people talking about the coding side and using AI to remove or take away a lot of the grunt work. 

Neb Savicic: Exactly, and I think that's the right use case for AI. It's just that there are tons of tasks that people just don't want to do, and it's the same as with Plainly like nobody wants to change the text layer or the product name 10 times like you should use machines for that, and I think you should also use AI for those kinds of tasks where. It's so obvious that it's useful in that regard. 

So what about the idea of putting in a chat GPT prompt that says, “Make me a video for hamburgers that are $2.99. Sundays only”? 

Neb Savicic: That's a good idea, but it's not what we're trying to build, unfortunately. What's really interesting about Plainly, is that given that we are an API-first solution, we are very modular. We have clients that are actually doing a bunch of AI stuff before the assets go into Plainly.

For example, we have one customer, at this point, multiple customers who are using AI avatars. So Plainly doesn't really add AI avatars. Still, since we have an API, they can quite easily bring our solutions together and have a solution that's creating an AI avatar. Then that video goes into plain to be included in the final video. If you want a ChatGPT prompt, you can just introduce ChatGPT before Plainly stringing them in a workflow and making any kind of workflow you want. 

I have some history with content automation and using After Effects templates, going back 10 years. The struggle I had was where it was a partnership. The big challenge I had was people didn't get it. They didn't understand the idea of templates and automation and making their lives easier. 

I'm guessing that it's much easier with this because you're not going to end users. You're not going to resellers or solutions providers. You're talking directly to the agencies by and large. 

Neb Savicic: Yeah, it's quite an obvious thing for them because it might seem tricky from the outside because, you could say oh, you are making Motion Designers obsolete. You're taking somebody's job that somebody changed names of the product there all day. But being a motion designer before Plainly, I don't look at it from that angle, I look from the angle of, you can have that Motion Designer to do a lot more work, different work, different creative work and use his or her time a lot more efficiently. 

Why do that menial work in that manner that’s soul-sucking, when you can create different templates and different projects and that's what the agencies see. They see an opportunity for new revenue. Basically, they can take in more clients because they now have this tool that's going to help them output ten times more content than with the same amount of staff. 

Yeah. I was curious about that. I suspect there's a huge problem, it depends on its qualifier, but I'm curious how much time and money this can save.

Neb Savicic: Depends... I'm kidding. 

I did some calculations, I was looking at some templates that are with our customers, and I was like, realistically, how much does it take to create ten videos from this template? And even if you have a fully templated project, you have all of the data ready to go, it can take anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes per video, depending on how complex it is. If you need to create ten videos, a hundred videos, thousand videos, you can see how that easily adds up where we clean with just literally one click. You add the CSV and can do thousands of these in 17 minutes. So the time savings are massive, but not easily counted. You cannot easily calculate it.

At least some of it is owed to, it's the old phrase around garbage in, garbage out. If you don't tag everything properly in the After Effects file, automation is not as easy, right?

Neb Savicic: Yes, of course. But it's not like you have to do some special work to prepare a template for Plainly. 

You just have to name your layers and things. 

Neb Savicic: Of course, every good Motion Designer or Video Editor will name their layers properly because otherwise, they won't find a way around their project if they return to it a month or six months later. 

Believe me, I've fallen into that trap. It's very hard. So you just have to be organized. You have to name this name stuff properly, and everything is going to work like with some other solutions on the markets they all say they're After Effects supported, but the reality is that yes, they support After Effects, but it's not natively.

First of all, you must alter your creative process a lot, meaning you have to work with a plugin or some special effect to import After Effects into their platform. With Plainly, you're just working with After Effects. You put After Effects into Plainly, and it's going to work. So we don't alter your creative process in any way. We just empower you to create more videos. The other thing is that if you're not an After Effects native, that means that with a lot of solutions, you're actually turning After Effects into some intermediary format, which means that you cannot use all the effects or there is some quality loss that happens in that transition. So that's what our users love about Plainly. 

I would imagine this opens up the opportunity for a “boutique level” agency or creative shop to take on very large jobs at a scale that, in the past, they would go, “We would love to have this work, but it would kill us.”

If they have this tool now, they can compete with the larger agencies, right? 

Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yes, and that's what I meant when I said it opens up new revenue opportunities because you can now take on more work, be a huge company, you can be outputting hundreds and hundreds of videos, even though it's… 

coming out of your spare bedroom.

Neb Savicic: Yeah, out of the basement. 

How does pricing work? 

Neb Savicic: Oh, so it's a SaaS, which means you pay either monthly or annually for a subscription and that all depends on the number of minutes you export. It starts as low as $59 per month, but it can go higher if you need more minutes. 

So classic pricing tiers are based on the amount of work you do and the amount of output. 

Neb Savicic: Which makes sense. 

You charge on finished rendered videos, not on the draft, in terms of time? 

Neb Savicic: Yeah. We just look at the output, not what you're doing to plan on, just the output. 

You started this a couple of years ago, or three, four years ago?

Neb Savicic:  2019. 

Okay. So five years ago, there were already some companies in the market doing maybe not the same work, but similar kinds of things. I did a podcast a few years back with Dataclay and I'm aware of SundaySky and some other ones out there. 

How do you compare to them, and when people say, okay, why would I use you versus brand X, what do you tell them? 

Neb Savicic: So there are a couple of things. First, if you compare Plainly to some other solutions, obviously being cloud-based, there is a difference to some of the other tools, like you don't have to worry about your rendering infrastructure because that's us. If something doesn't work, that's our fault. That's the core of our product. We ensure you can render as many videos as you want, as many videos as long as you have money. That's one thing, and then, of course, there are things like being After Effects native, where you can literally add any kind of template.

We have had clients with amazing 3D-based templates that wouldn't be possible in other solutions, and then they were API-based. So a lot of our customers are actually building internal tools. They're actually integrating Plainly into their apps or internal tools for creative teams. So those three things are what separates us from the market. 

So for the big agencies with internal software developers, who would use the API, this is great. But for the smaller agencies or the purely creative agencies, they can go at it using the no-code side of it and not have to worry about APIs and things.

Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yeah, that's it. 

Where are you guys at as a company? I saw that you got some seed funding from, what, the Serbian incubator fund or something? 

Neb Savicic: That was the first thing. That was in 2020, and then we got accepted into a very prestigious US accelerator called Tiny Seed. We were the first company from the Balkans to get in there. So they obviously saw something in us, but we were growing as a team, growing the customer base. We are so lucky to be working with some of the largest agencies and names that you would recognize from both Europe and the US, and we're just trying to make them happy and create a product that makes their lives better. 

I realized you're serving a whole bunch of different vertical markets and use cases, digital signage, just being one of them is, that a substantial noticeable or a friend of mine uses the term consequential part of your business or kind of an interesting sort of side aspect to what you do.

Neb Savicic: I'm not sure how big digital signage is with our agency customers. I would imagine that a good portion of the content they do is for digital signage, but as for us working directly with digital signage companies, we're just getting into that industry. With the SignageLive integration, we might announce more integrations soon. That's a new industry for us. We see that there are a lot of benefits for the users in the digital signage industry we're just trying to get into. 

We chatted at the digital signage summit in Munich. So, obviously, you were there to network and meet some people, and I had some beers. Would you also be at ISE? 

Neb Savicic: Yes, of course, and then Munich next year and possibly Intelcom. 

I assume this product will always evolve. Over the next year, are there new wrinkles you'll be rolling out that you can tell me about without alerting your competitors? 

Neb Savicic: Honestly, the good thing is that I'm so happy to have a technical team that's really fast, and the product improvement cycle is insane. We are putting out new features on a bi-monthly basis. So I don't know. One year from here, who knows what will be added? Definitely, the AI features are greater than everybody.

So all the normal stuff: faster, better, easier. 

Neb Savicic: Exactly. The stuff that doesn't change. 

Yes. All right, Neb. That was great. Very interesting. Thank you. 

Neb Savicic: Yeah. Thank you too, Dave.

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

I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh.

It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects.

I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or  mobile data networks.

That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like satellite content distribution, but different. When I found out Ryarc was the company that was doing proof of concept trials in the U.S., I reached out to Fergal - now based in Seattle - and we had this chat.

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TRANSCRIPT

Fergal, thank you for joining me. I've been aware of your company for a long time, but we've never actually spoken. For those people who don't know what you do, what the company does. Could you give me the elevator pitch? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Thanks for inviting me on. RYARC was founded as a digital signage application, with the starting point of their need for a digital signage platform that combined enterprise capabilities with knowledge worker-level skills by the operator. So this was in an era when digital signage was moving from what was a highly specialized and fairly rare thing, to something where at least from our perspective, the requirement was going to be that digital signage was just going to be another tool in the armory of an enterprise and, as such, it would require rather than a specialized team to operate at a knowledge worker level. 

This goes back 20 years, right? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it does. We divert a little bit into kind of my backstory. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s in Dublin and I had a fantastic time there.

It was Microsoft where the Nvidia of the day, Windows 95 was coming out. So it was a fantastic place to work, and I couldn't have asked for a better start in my career, but I had an itch to try and start something of my own, and I happened upon digital signage. I could see the way trajectories were going in terms of connectivity. If you combine connectivity, availability, and cost & display, availability, and cost, two lines on a graph are going down and to the right and human labor is going up, and to the right. So those three factors combined to make it apparent to me that digital signage was going to be a thing.

If it was going to be a thing, it needed software to go with it. So I quit Microsoft, and I did my Asian Odyssey backpack and thing, and I was actually writing the code for version one. I got so bored sitting on the beach in Thailand that I took to actually writing code. I'm serious.

That is dysfunctional. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I guess. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I'm not a beach guy, which is, another strange story for someone who ended up in Sydney for as long as he did, but, yeah, so it was with that desire to have a go with that. 

Coming out of Microsoft, I felt I had a decent handle on usability and what's needed for a knowledge worker-level software product, by which I mean a product that it became. It seemed obvious to me that digital signage was going to become a bigger thing and as a result, it needed to be a kind of a productivity-type app rather than some highly specialized thing that you'd need a broadcast engineer. I think the early software that was available did come out of broadcast if I'm not mistaken. I think that was Scala's backstory. 

So, I managed to get my hands on one of those. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but I was like, oh, okay, I can see how this works, but you're not going to be able to give this to Joe in marketing and ask him to start operating it. So that was the kind of genesis of why I chose that particular route and why I started writing code to get there. But it took a few years, from building the thing in my apartment to actually launching the company. 

When did the business start, like when you were out there selling licenses and everything? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I think the first license we sold was in 2006 but I had gone full-time about two years before that. 

So you're pretty happy to start selling. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, I was. But it's funny. I was working for a company that was bought by Match.com in Sydney, and that was an interesting place to work at the age I was at the time.

But then, I met some folks there who are independently wealthy folks and the particular gentleman I approached is named Neil Gamble, a very well-known Grandi in the Australian business scene, South African guy, lovely man. But, a serious business guy who is running one of the largest software companies in Australia, such as they were back then. But he was chairman of the company I was working for, which was acquired by Match, and I pitched him my idea. I turned up in the boardroom office of this large software company at seven o'clock in the morning in Sydney. So I think it was 2003 or maybe 2004, it doesn't matter, but I pitched him the idea, and he said, “Fergal, that's brilliant, but fuck off and come back when you’ve got some customers.” 

So, I duly fucked off and I think he ruminated on the idea for a while and came back to me a couple of months later. I was still working as a contractor at the time so I was fine. He said, “You know what? I've met some other people who are doing certain things in the retail space, and what you said clicked even more. So I'm going to take a swing on this”, and so he put in just enough money to basically pay for me and some other young guy to take the code from what was something I could, demonstrate to something that we could actually sell and the first customer was Zimmer if you've ever heard of Zimmer Frame? 

No. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The Zimmer frame is kind of like that. It's a mobility tool for people with generally older people. It's like a walking frame. 

Unfortunately, maybe I'll learn about that soon enough, but not yet. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Not yet. May it be many more years, but we put the website up and boom, that was the first one, and then, out-of-home started to take off in Australia and had a pretty decent clip, compared to other markets, and Neil was very well connected in the Sydney business scene. 

He started to open doors into places like I could get meetings now with people, and my experience of that, and again, maybe it's reflected in our website and our kind of general low-key profile, generally, I found it, if I could get in front of a customer and showed them the product, we tended to do well. It was the getting the customers part, which was the trickier part for us, but Neil was instrumental in that, and that's how we started. 

Back then it was trickier for everybody. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it was. Coming from an engineering background, I found it quite interesting, the whole scene at the time. What you had was advertising guys who were in the billboards business and suddenly there was, foist upon them this need to transform into an IT company, and that created a particular set of issues at the time, I think, where you had companies that whose experience and interaction with IT was about, “fix the printer” and “why is my email not working?” So they weren't tech companies in their DNA, they were marketing companies, and I tend to think of those years as like the cowboy years, by which I mean, there were an awful lot of platforms out there.

What I tended to see, although not uniformly, was a thing I noticed is that oftentimes, the decision makers because they didn't have a mature IT section within their company, it wasn't a traditional thing for them. It wasn't integral to their business in the way it is now, you often had people making software decisions who didn't really have the experience and wherewithal to assess software and what that led to properly, and I think this is partly what led to the massive proliferation of solutions out there was that the thing with digital signage is that it's fairly straightforward to get a piece of software that will reliably get a flash file or a JPEG or a video from A to B.

And when the software assessments were being done by people who didn't really have experience in enterprise software or edge management or remote device management, stuff like that, it was very easy for the smoke and mirrors guys to do well quickly, because no one was asking the boring questions about the plumbing. So that was something that took some adjustment for me with my background. 

I think it's maybe part of what led to the proliferation of often these things. I don't want to denigrate or be down on the industry or anything, but there were a lot of solutions out there that were really something that someone had put together in response to a request from someone and then they came up with a logo, and said, we're a digital signage company, and often these solutions, if you ever got to peek behind, to look under the hood, as they say in North America, you'd be shocked at what was there, and I had several experiences in those early times of being Gesamt or someone with a fantastic sales pitch, which is something that no one would ever accuse us of. 

I was thinking these guys don't know what they're doing anyway. Anyway, I think that's calmed down a good bit because you have to be sustainable and, eventually, if your stuff keeps falling over, that's going to, with the best sales pitch in the world, that's not going to last forever. 

Yeah. I think there were a lot of companies, for a whole bunch of years, who signed on with a service provider, some sort of software company, and then three years later moved on to another one after they learned what they really needed and learned about things like device management and scalability and all that stuff. But first go around, they were attracted by the pretty pictures and the WYSIWYG UX and all that stuff, and as a consultant, I saw it first hand where I would say this thing is boring and ugly, like a Subaru, sorry, Subaru owners, but they're not the sexiest cars, but they just work, versus a Range Rover that looks sexy as hell, but it's going to be a nightmare. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, that was it. And I guess it was inevitable. If you looked at the factors feeding into that, you had an industry that was being dragged, kicking, and streaming into the world of it and you had a lot of people who saw an opportunity and needed to go quickly, but I couldn't believe some of the stuff that I saw pass muster, and I was because sometimes I get a peek under the hood and it was literally, The wizard of Oz, they're furiously pulling levers to keep the thing up.

But we learned, I think, that the company that was the first major out-of-home company we thought was iCorp. 

Australian company. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: That's right, and they were also based in Sydney, and so we, very quickly, felt their pain when things would go wrong and that was an excellent kind of learning curve for us. But what helped embed in the company was this engineering mantra that we had, which was, if it can be avoided, never have the software operate In a manner where if a truck roll can be avoided, it's not avoided. 

There's this focus for us on remote manageability so it's different. I know some people in the early days tried to use browsers for digital signage, but that failed for reasons that we don't need to get into, but when there's a huge difference between an application and this even goes all the way up to major, big sticker stuff like Microsoft, an application which leaks memory or does something like that and, yeah, it's annoying when you have to kill the browser and restart it, after a few hours, which used to be the case a while ago, but that kind of level of tolerance for unattended execution, you could see it didn't exist. 

It's different if the program falls over and you ring Mark in IT, and he says, yeah, just reboot the machine. But if you've got three-quarters of a million-dollar screen in an airport, that's a really expensive proposition and the failure is immediately public and embarrassing. That helps embed for us that learning experience we had with out-of-home, of the importance of just reliability at the edge and going on from reliability to manageability. So we spent a lot of time finding bugs in Microsoft Core DLLs, that's just through the usage scenarios we had, they just weren't common enough even for Microsoft to have identified some of these issues with things that will leak a little bit every time they're used. It's a software term. If the software isn't carefully crafted every time it runs through a certain given set of routines, it can capture a bit of memory and then fail to release it, which isn't a problem if you're closing your laptop at the end of the day but if you're wanting to run 24/7 in twenty feet up in airside and an airport, it's a different proposition. So anyway, that was all a learning curve, but it helps embed for us this fanatical focus on stability and manageability. 

You talked about the people in the meetings in the early days, the visual merchandisers and people from the marketing department, business communicators, those kinds of people, but that's changed, right? The people across the table now, quite often, are IT people. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, they are, and I think that's just an inevitable consequence of the pain of failure to not do that. It was like Mad Man so the whole focus was on the flashiness of the advertising and the creativity and all that, whether it's on a billboard or TV or whatever. But now they were in a new world where boring stuff like Enterprise IT management was crucial, a factor in their ability to succeed.

It was cruel as well because of any failures they had. If you're even running a service and your website goes down, maybe some people would notice, maybe someone won't, but if you've got a big screen downtown, and then your customer is there showing his friends or their customers, say, look, check out our ad down in some public place when it goes wrong, it's really bad because it's so visible, so those two things are combined. So I guess they had to learn quickly and yes, I think it's certainly, it's no longer the situation where you've got someone from Marketing making IT decisions. 

So describing your product mix or suite now, what would it be, and is there a particular market that you focus on?

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. I remember before I started the company I read how to write a business plan, and one of the things was identifying your customer, and I thought, wow, there are so many, anybody who wants to display a message somewhere publicly…

Anybody with money. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. That was the prerequisite. Going back to what I was referring to with the learning curve in the early days, it became apparent to me that there's only so much gilding of the lily you can do in terms of the content management side. I sometimes bristle when we get described as a CMS, because really most of the value of what we do is it's fuller than that.

Content management is its raison d'etre, but it needs to do an awful lot of other stuff, and I always believed that for us, that was a strength of ours in our kind of relentless focus on manageability and Edge device management. I saw it just again, through the growing pains of helping an out-of-home company get through the early days of it. That's really where we needed to focus on managing the device and just being absolutely bomb-proof when it came to reliability. 

What that has led to, I would say organically is: so are we a digital signage company? We are, but we're other things too. So what this hundred of man years of effort, of the device management side and the remote manageability side of things, we have customers now, who don't use us for digital signage at all. They're using us as a remote management platform for devices, and that has led us, over more recent years, probably since the time I moved from Sydney to the West Coast here into IoT, into Edge AI, into sensor management, and device management. 

So I guess what I'm trying to say is what started as an organic reaction to needing remote manageability and not saying to your customer, yeah, you have to fork out an extra 15 bucks a month brand point for some other tool that's going to help you manage the device. That led to that side of the application becoming so developed that it could stand on its own even for folks who didn't need digital signage. So we're on lots and lots of things, where we're not controlling the screen, but rather they're using us as the plumbing, right?

For example, for AI and stuff like that. It can identify a Coke can versus a Pepsi can or whatever it might be. But how do you deploy that model to 16,000 different endpoints and how do you collect information at the edge about how you do AB testing? How do you manage the versioning of AI models at the edge? All that kind of stuff. So there's lots of sleep-inducing, boring, but absolutely critical stuff where the product focuses. And yeah, that's on device management, and we're also used to deploying other kiosk-style applications. So the person interacting with the device could be a piece of software running there. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's RYARC that is forming the plumbing that enables all that to work and go together. 

Back at Infocomm, a few weeks ago, I hosted a little discussion panel where we talked with three people, both attendees, and executives, about what they saw and everything else, and I asked one of the guys who is actually from an LED company. What he saw that he thought was interesting, I thought he would talk about some other LED product or whatever, but he started going on about this idea that you could use datacasting to distribute content, and he bumped into a company that was doing that, and described it, and I thought, that's interesting but I'm not sure who he's talking about. So I asked him after the fact, who was that company? Eventually came around that it was RYARK. I thought, oh, interesting!!!

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Those guys are still around? 

There was that too because I don't bump into your name very often, but can you explain what he was talking about this whole idea of ATSC and using datacasting to move content around? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, sure. The ATSC thing, so the whole TV industry is they've gotten together and they're pushing the ability of the traditional broadcast channels to be able to carry data. The ability to push data across has been around for quite a while. 

Yeah, it happened when when TVs went from analog to digital, right?

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Right, but the ATSC 3. 0 upgrade, which was the thing that was being marketed and pushed, just greatly expanded the ability and the bandwidth available to push data across. Again, I think this is likely to be limited in some respects globally because of the ubiquity and cheapness of being able to push data across cellular, right? So in other areas, cellular is the cheapest chip, right? If you go to places like Korea or India or Singapore or countries that have recently developed, they tend to get saturated with cellular very quickly.

The situation in the United States is that cellular data is significantly expensive compared to the rest of the world. Canada, it's the same story, right? What pertains in North America is a situation where it is so expensive that alternatives are becoming more attractive. Anyway, that's not really a signal to what ATSC three is all about, but essentially, working with some of the hardware and software providers in the broadcast industry. We've been able to plug into the broadcasting software and hardware side of things such that in addition to using our software, you can use our cloud service or install our software on your own infrastructure if you want to do that.

But in this case, in addition to publishing it to the cloud, which is what happens when you create campaigns and do that kind of thing, we can also add another pipe to the mix, and that pipe is the broadcasting station. So when someone clicks the publish button, it's seamless from the user's perspective. But if it's set up in such a way, in addition to pushing stuff to the cloud and having it dribble down over cellular that way, we can also have these files broadcast. So that's a kind of one-to-many, very effective way of getting data across that doesn't require large bandwidth bills.

We've worked with some companies with large numbers of devices. It was another example of us learning by doing, where their cellular data bills were a huge factor. So, we worked pretty intensely to make the handshake and everything else in our software super parsimonious. I think with 20 megs a month, I think what the chatter that our software has in maintaining connectivity with the server. So we worked relentlessly and got that down. 

But anyway, that's all to show how much of a factor the data cost is, and that's that was the impetus that led to wanting to see if we can offer customers a much cheaper way of getting data across and it works seamlessly. We had a working example at that show at Infocomm. I wasn't there, but I think it was an EV station or something like that, which would allow them to do all the heavy lifting so that they've got video and stuff like that. You can push that over the air.

So what's at the far end of it? Is there a receiver or special hardware? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, TV tuner. 

It's like a cable box. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: What we've been working on over the past year is ensuring that our software can run on these tuners. So you've got the prospect now of not having to buy an ARM or an X86 chip and put it in a computer running Windows in the back at the back of the TV, but we can squeeze our stuff now onto many of these tuner devices. So you have a small but capable box, that started life as a tuner, but we can have our software running on there. That's a big step in terms of cost-per-unit reduction. 

For customers, the main difficulty, I think, with the ATSC 3.0 thing is that it's very easy to go to a Verizon or whomever and be able to estimate what your data cost is going to be. If I need to push across three gigs a month to 11,000 devices. I can work out how much that's gonna cost me. The data cost element in the broadcast space isn't quite as commoditized yet. So there's still some ambiguity there and, perhaps, lack of clarity, and I think the cellular companies are awake to this too. It has the potential to eat into or take up a lot of the enterprise pushing off large amounts of data, and there are many industries that can use that, but digital signage is certainly one of them.

This is reminiscent of the late 2000s or mid-to-late 2000s with satellite and multicasting through satellite. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, yes, I remember that. 

Is this the same idea, or is this different? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The similarity I suppose would be in its one-way communications and you need a back channel to be able to do the other stuff.

So you still do with this? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: You can deploy with just broadcast, so we could get the software running so that there's zero coming back. The obvious thing with that is that you don't know if a meteor struck the sign, right? But it is similar to satellites in that it's one-way.

One of the things that we do actually—I don't know if we know—is we do a lot of in-store music. So we use the CMS side of our product suite to organize what is essentially a radio station template and the thing about audio is you can get away with having six ads running for a week on a sign, right?

But if you play three Alton John and five others in a retail environment, the staff in the shop, they'll climb ladders to rip the speakers out of the roof because it'll drive them crazy and that's understandable. So ironically, MP3s are fairly small, but you need thousands and thousands of them.

So we often found, for the in-store audio deployments we were doing, we had to work with that. We did Woolworths in Australia, which was the largest retailer, I'm not sure if they are anymore, but they're one of the big two there, and we did all their in-store music for years and that was all via satellite, which was really painful actually. But this seems to be working. It's a lot easier and it's a lot better as you would expect, it's nearly 20 years down the line from that. 

So is it the same feed, so to speak, the same set of files that you're sending to everybody, or can it be addressable by location, setting different things?

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, we've done some work on that. I can't get too deep into the way our product works because most people won't be familiar with it, but essentially, in our software, we've got this concept called a channel and a channel is an abstract entity that represents an endpoint somewhere or multiple endpoints. We have an engine that will categorize those things. 

Let's say you want a national rollout. Now like a lot of other things in the United States, the broadcast market is really quite fragmented. It's not like the UK or Europe, where you've got a single national broadcast or a few commercials and you can go live everywhere. You've got a real kind of mix right across the country. 

So obviously you don't want to be pushing, essentially what I'm getting into here is that we know where the data needs to get up. So there's a layer in the software that will go, okay, you need to go to station X, you need to go to station Y and I guess broadcast, but once it just gets pushed out, right? And it's the same kind of files, and again, from the user's perspective, when they're using our software, if it's being set up and configured in the back, in the backend to utilize ATSC 3.0 broadcasts that all happen seamlessly under the hood. So they're just clicking a publish button, and in the case of where they use an ATSC 3.0, instead of it just going to the cloud, it's also going to the broadcast station where we work with the some of the ATSC 3.0 technology companies, goes into their queue and then gets broadcast out and then it goes down to the tuner and then we're sitting on the tuner too, so we can watch the files come in and do whatever assembly and decryption that we need to do, at the edge and playback.

So is this something that could be done or are you supporting active networks that are now using this? 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: They are all at the POC stage. I alluded earlier to it being early days as well from the people wanting to utilize this, I think the industry is still working out how to package this and sell it.

If they're successful at that and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be, it'll be great for North American enterprise because there's finally a competitor out there to cellular. I don't know what the word is, a triopoly? But yeah, the situation, that a reason why data is so expensive in North America.

We could talk for a very long time. We'll probably have to do this again at some point, but that was super interesting and great to finally meet you. 

Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, I'm happy to talk, and I'm happy to do it again if you think there's more interesting stuff we can chat about. I am probably at risk there doing a lot of reminiscing, but, I feel entitled to that now. I've been in the industry for a while. 

Exactly. All right. Thank you. 

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

One of the things I noticed bombing around the two exhibit halls at InfoComm in June was how most of the digital signage software companies were located in one hall, and some of them not looking all that busy, while there were at least a couple of others in the other hall, and they were packed with people.

One of those companies was Appspace, and it was clear to me why the company was there with a very prominent stand. They were with their people, so to speak.

While Appspace may have started years ago as another digital signage CMS software option, it now refers to itself as a unified workplace experience platform. That's why it was nested in with a bunch of other tech companies that provide the kinds of technologies - like collaboration tools - that drive contemporary workplaces.

The company started out small, but now has 450 staff, offices all over the planet, and about 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers.

I had a chat with Chief Innovation Officer Thomas Philippart de Foy back in 2022, and I wanted to do a catch-up with him because I was intrigued by what the company is up to. I also wanted to know more about how Appspace products have steadily been stitched into the fabric of how a lot of companies communicate, and tied in with many or most of the core tools now used around modern workplaces.

I also wanted to better understand the company's recent announcement of developing native support for its software within Microsoft's Teams. Lots of CMS software companies have tie-ins these days  with video conferencing tools, but Thomas explains in our chat how this is different.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thomas, nice to chat again. We've done a podcast in the past, but for people who maybe don't know much about Appspace and didn't listen to the last one, the fools, could you give me a rundown of what Appspace is all about? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Hi Dave. Thanks for having me on this podcast again. Appspace has changed a lot over the last 15 or 20 years.

It was a digital signage vendor company many years ago. We are now considering ourselves as more of a unified workplace experience platform, delivering a lot of services to large enterprise customers, whether it's digital signage, which is one of the communication channels that we have, or an app, an intranet, or a whole workplace management suite of products.

So the company has changed. We have around 450 people globally with offices around the world and really focused on the enterprise market, although we do a lot in the education space as well. Around 200 of the Fortune 500 companies use Appspace today. 

Where is the company based? Is it in Dallas? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Well, originally, the company was based in Dallas. Today, a lot of the leadership team is based in Tampa, Florida. So, I would say there is probably a split of headquarters between Dallas and Tampa. Both offices are very important for us in the US. 

In the early days, you can correct me, but I think a lot of the development was done in Malaysia, right?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes. We still have a very large product engineering organization in Malaysia. Our Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Stan Stephens is still based over there. So that hasn't changed, but obviously, we acquired a company in the US, The Marlin company, a few years back. So we have additional resources elsewhere in the US and then we acquired Beezy, which is an Intranet company out of Barcelona in Spain. So we now have a big dev team out of Barcelona and some dev people out of Porto in Portugal as well.

I was at Infocomm recently and found my way over to the Central Hall. Most of the digital signage stuff was in the West Hall, but, if you could take a bus over to the Central Hall because of all the construction, I walked through there and saw the Appspace booth and saw it was very large and very, very busy. And you guys were just in the midst of an announcement.

So I thought, well, okay, this would be a good time to kind of catch up on the company and what it's up to that announcement was around Teams integration, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I thought you were already integrated with Teams and it sounds like a lot of companies have done that, but what you're doing was distinct. 

Could you explain to me and the listeners what's different about the integration you've done with Teams and with the other platforms? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Sure. I remember having that conversation with you years back about digital signage on devices in meeting rooms and the benefits it would have for large organizations. Obviously, the pandemic increased the value of content on screens in meeting rooms, whether it's for safety purposes or education on how to use the technology in the room.

We've natively integrated with several platforms, first with Cisco, integrating directly into their Control Hub platform. This allows you to enable signage from their backend. We also integrated Poly with Logitech. Today, we're especially excited because we're natively integrated into Microsoft Teams Rooms, the leading video conferencing platform in the industry, and being integrated directly into Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) makes it extremely easy for large organizations to scale signage services to all those devices from MTR directly. 

This means that when you enter a room, you're greeted with content on the screen. That content could be a welcome message, instructions on how to use the meeting space, or how to keep it clean after your meeting.  It could be corporate messaging, but it can also include Microsoft Teams Rooms instructions, helping users navigate the technology in the room. 

We're very excited about the reception we received at Infocomm from customers. I was actually locked into a little meeting room under NDA; it was focused solely on Microsoft, and customers could come in to discover not only what we're doing with MTR but also our integration with Microsoft Teams through our embedded app and our SharePoint integration, essentially everything we're doing with Microsoft.

And what's the difference between when other software companies say they're integrated with Teams and when you say there's a native integration? What's the difference there? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: The first and the most important one is that we're the only vendor that’s certified with Microsoft Teams Rooms. So if you have an issue with your MTR endpoint and you're running a noncertified digital signage solution on it, Microsoft is likely to say, “Hey, you're not using the product as it was designed. Therefore, it's not supported.” Because many large companies are using MTR, you would expect those companies to want to standardize on something certified by Microsoft. So certainly there is that aspect. 

The other one is how you deploy it. A lot of companies have so-called digital signage levering a web URL. We're running our app on an MTR endpoint, and it's deployed through MTR. So from a deployment standpoint, from a monitoring,  it is a true digital signage endpoint, like any of the other apps-based digital signage endpoint. That gives you many additional capabilities around the narrowcasting of content, broadcasting in case of emergency, and so forth. So I think those two are really critical. 

There are other benefits to managing Appspace from MTR. But I would say just first, make sure you're using a Microsoft Certified solution so that you're fully supported and then the second is being able to deploy this at scale and have an MTR endpoint behave as a true digital signage endpoint and not just a web URL inside Microsoft, which is what some companies do with Zoom. That is not true digital signage as you know. 

So because it's just a web URL, it's just showing a web page like any other web page versus what you're saying is because it's natively integrated, it's a true endpoint and you, you have the ability to know what's going on with it and manage it as well? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. You're able to monitor exactly what content is displaying. You're able to cache content and not stream everything. I mean, it's our full Appspace app that's running on the device.

Okay. So with that, is it a kind of a push situation where your customer-facing salespeople and your business partners are saying to companies: You have this collaboration display in a bunch of your rooms, and it's sitting dark a lot of the time, you could do things with it? 

Or are the end-user customers saying, “Hey, we have this collaboration display that's sitting dark a lot of the time, can we do something with it?”

Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it's a combination of the requests. What we're seeing is there's a lot of digital real estate deployed in companies that is not used all the time, whether because there's no video conferencing happening or there's no call, no meeting happening in the meeting space, but those meeting space are still visible from outside, either because there's a window that opens up to the meeting space or because it's one of those new types of Huddle meeting spaces, which are open. 

So there's a request from internal comms and facilities to use as much digital real estate as possible they have to communicate to employees around the workplace and comms and safety. and there's less and less appetite for companies to print. So they're looking for every digital real estate they can leverage. So I think there's certainly that, and we're getting asked constantly by big companies saying, “Hey, we're rolling out AppSpace. We want to target the meeting group.” That's very, very important to us. 

But we're also starting to see the teams that are using the technology for their day-to-day operations saying, "Hey, can I actually put my content on those screens as well? It's my meeting room in my neighborhood, where I have my team. I want to be able to use that screen when someone enters the room to talk about our team's performance and really narrowcast to their team.” So that's why they want full control of the device and not just a web URL streaming generic.

Now, do they have to go into the Appspace application to produce that content or to load it in, or is it somewhat headless in that they can produce something in whatever toolset they use and it's, and because of the hooks that are set up, it'll show up there? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Both are possible. One of our most popular integrations is with SharePoint. If the comms team is producing content on SharePoint, we have a connector that allows us to fetch that content and repurpose it for digital signs so that it automatically populates. 

I mean, that's been a very old story, right? We heard about the need for repurposing existing content from third-party tools. SharePoint is super popular in the Microsoft ecosystem. but it's not only that. But so you could imagine having a playlist of content playing on an MTR endpoint that's just fetching. Microsoft Content from SharePoint that is potentially related to a team or related even to the IT team that operates the MTR endpoint.

So now, what you're seeing on the digital sign is the how-to instructions that were actually created in SharePoint. 

There seems to be a real distinction between companies that have decided to make their workplace their core vertical market and, let's say, other digital signage companies, whether they offer software solutions that include workplaces as one of their capabilities. 

Looking through the Appspace website, it strikes me that this is all you do, and you realized or have learned through the years that you can't just offer a digital signage solution. You've got to be making a space reservation, booking, assignment, and all kinds of other things like that. So what is the range of services? 

And, also, is that what you found that guys have said, look, if we're going to work with you, this has to be just more than something that's going to put messages on screens?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I mean, if I go back, I think we were one of the very first digital signage companies to say our focus is going to be the workplace and not retail and transportation and others and we were very early there. So we focused on building our product to address the needs of the corporate market and corporate communications. 

When we acquired Marlin, we were acquiring a company that was focused on frontline workers, and communication on digital signs. So again, staying very much in our focus area of workplace communication versus retail or other channels. When the pandemic hit, we had a lot of customers who reached out to us and said, our workers are now back home, we need to continue to deliver the message that they were used to seeing on digital signs, but we need to deliver it on their personal devices. That's really when we focused and started focusing on personal devices, released our employee app, and did an intranet acquisition and suddenly, all of this started to make sense for customers. One single platform to deliver across multiple communication channels, but all natively integrated, not something where you're trying to put solutions together. 

So we do email publishing, publish to Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and Slack, publish on digital signs, publish into an employee app, publish on an intranet, and all of those are native features of the app-based platform. They're not point products that we're plugging one into the other. That means that from a core comm standpoint or facilities when you're creating content, you know you have the ability to amplify your message to all those communication channels and that all of that is going to be automated. 

Now, while we were doing this and focusing on the comms aspect, there was a real need for a new weight for users to plan their journey into the office. You were no longer going and sitting at a desk and just booking a meeting room through Outlook. You needed to book a building pass to access the building. You need to reserve a hot desk or a hotel desk to be able to book other resources like a smart lock or a parking place, all those resources that are needed for you to have a productive user journey. And so we delivered the features In the apps that we had, so it was easy to do it on the signage front for scheduling panels because it's the same app that runs on the digital sign that actually runs on the scheduling panel. The same thing for the wayfinding kiosks, the interactive kiosks that we were doing years ago now also support wayfinding services, and then because we launched a mobile app for employee communication, all we had to do was enable those workplace services in that same employee app, so employees have only one app, one app to receive the latest company news, to be connected to the workplace, but also to manage their journey into the office. 

Today, it's a whole suite. That's why we call ourselves a unified workplace experience platform. We have one app that team members use on their personal devices, phones, desktops, and tablets. Then, we have one app that runs in the physical workplace, on digital signs, on an MTR endpoint, on a scheduling panel, on a wayfinding kiosk, and on a desk bar. And then, at the core, you have Appspace. 

How do companies get their employees to use that? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's probably the biggest challenge for any organization in launching a new app is user adoption for different reasons. You may have frontline workers who don't have a company email. So we had to support one-time password and digital signage plays a key role there in getting users to activate their one-time password. 

Use digital signage, say there's a new app available for you. Scan the QR code. It asks you to enter your employee's unique identifier, your personal email address or phone number. You get a one-time password, and you're then able to log into the app and have access. So that's number one. You need to make sure that everyone is a first citizen of the modern workplace—your front-line worker, or desk worker, whether you have an email address or not.

The second thing is a lot of people use their personal devices and if you're like me, I'm not in favor of using my personal device to use a company-needed app. So I want options. One of the options is to have a fully responsive web app, a PWA. So, if you access Appspace on your Safari or Chrome browser, it behaves exactly like a native app. The first time you log in, you can actually pin it on your home screen. Next time you go in, there is no address bar, you have the full app experience, but it's a web app. You didn't download it from an app store. Makes it easier. 

And then finally, For IT, the biggest challenge is certifying an iOS or an Android app on mobile devices. That takes a lot of time, sometimes 6 months, 12 months, even, to get the certification. So what we did is we embedded our app in Microsoft Teams, and because it is now the number one app used on desktops and mobile devices in the corporate space, you just, as an IT organization, need to enable the Appspace app in the admin console of Microsoft Teams, and one morning the user wakes up and they have on the sidebar next to do a call, your meetings, you now have the Appspace app and all the capabilities embedded in Microsoft Teams. 

That from a user adoption point is game-changing, because now you don't need to certify an app, you don't need your users to download a new app, you don't need your users to remember a web URL, the app is just there living in Microsoft Teams.

So you don't have people going, okay, what is this weird thing? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. 

I'm curious, you mentioned the pandemic and COVID and there was endless writing about how this is going to change workplaces, everything's different. Will people ever go back to the office and so on? 

I work from home and haven't worked in an office for a very, very long time, so I don't see it, but I'm curious, did it genuinely change, or did it just kind of sort of change?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it really changed. I think employees will go back into the office, and most companies want that for cultural reasons, productivity reasons, and so forth, but the way we will go back into the office will never be the same. The physical workplace has changed. There are fewer desks than there were before, more meeting spaces of all sorts, huddle spaces, meeting rooms, conference rooms, a lot more, and so the way a user is going to operate in the physical workplace is never going to be the same as it was before. I think that's huge. 

Also, we're still learning, and companies are still learning, changing, and adjusting. And so the core, the heartbeat of the workplace, in our case, Appspace needs to be super flexible to be able to implement new rules and new workflows to enable the user to plan their journey into the office and also to drive the behavior of a user. We have a huge services organization that implemented hot desking and hotelling, and when they opened their office, all the consultants and partners rushed into the office, and they had a huge capacity issue. People didn't book their workspace, so they expected they were going to find one, and there was no workplace available, so they got super frustrated.

So, the company implemented managed power outlets at the desk, and power is only enabled if you reserve your desk and check in on arrival. The following day, people who came into the office without reserving a workspace and trying to hijack a desk didn't have power, and that never happened twice. When you run out of power, you always figure out how to reserve your power for the next time you go around.

So I think those behaviors are changing, and technology is there to help the behaviors change, supporting the behaviors. And I think that's huge. So it's not telling an employee you have to reserve is telling the employee that if you reserve, you get all those incremental benefits, 

Are you also able to support a lot of the devices that I saw in walking around Infocomm, and some of them I was already aware of like very small displays or even just little LED light things that communicate that this space is available, or maybe a display that says the space is available between these times and it's booked these other times or whatever? 

I find those things very interesting in terms of office hoteling and so on. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, the number of new devices released in the last two years has been crazy.

Both you and I come from the signage world, and adding a new device and running content on the new devices is native to a digital signage provider. That's what we've always done. So whether you display calendaring data or turn on an LED or not, it's not different from any type of content in general.

I think that's where companies who did reservation software are struggling because they don't understand the physical workplace device side of the experience. But coming from the digital signage space in our case, we understand that. So, a scheduling panel back in the day, it was Crestron. Now it's Logitech and iADA and there are so many of those, the Cisco Navigator, and there are so many devices. 

And because we're completely OS and hardware-agnostic, you run our app on it, and you deliver the scheduling experience and then the desk plugs are the same, whether you take the Crestron desk plug, the iADA desk plug, or the nPlug, they're all small desk plugs that allow you to run an app on it and display the experience on those devices. So for us, it's very native. What's interesting is what incremental device content we are putting on it and that's the other devices we don't see, all those IoT devices in the ceiling that track air quality, room temperature, humidity level, and occupancy. And being able to display that data back on the scheduling panel or on a wayfinding kiosk or a digital sign in the lobby when you enter the building, knowing where's the traffic, what's the occupancy rate, what's the current air quality. I think that's bringing another level of value. And as we always used to say in the digital signage world, content is king.

I assume you do analytics of some kind and how are they used? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: So analytics has always been a big part of administrative users of the Appspace platform to monitor the success of the communication campaign, being able to track which content plays at which time of the day and then when you combine it with tools such as audience measurements, cameras that try eyeball dwell time, then analytics becomes much richer because it's now a communication channel that you can really monitor and track the engagement level, but analytics on the workplace management is as important. 

How many users came to the office? What's the average use of a workspace or type of workspace? Whether a meeting room is underutilized or overutilized with regard to the number of attendees? All of that data is extremely important. So we've built a lot of analytics and reporting capabilities in the Appspace Admin platform, so you can actually pull your reports, export all the data and view it live into Tableau or Power BI, correlate it with IoT sensor data, so you can now start to see Not only scheduled based data but also live data.

So I know this room was booked for six, but my live data tells me only four people are in the meeting room. I'm, therefore, underutilizing the workspace, or I'm running this communication campaign in the lobby, and I currently have 40 people standing in the lobby. That's useful data that you can have.

Now, when you add AI to it, AI starts to give us insights and recommendations. It will tell the facilities team whether or not you're about to run out of a certain type of resource. We're seeing a trend of desks with two monitors in the docking station, and we expect that within the next 30 days, you're going to run out of capacity, which will allow facilities to adjust their workplace and anticipate. And the same thing is true with the workplace. We've just released this week. The ability to create content on the signage and to auto-generate a QR code on the digital sign that will link to the origin of the content, whether it was SharePoint, your Appspace intranet, or the employee app.

So when you view the content, you scan the QR code, you're redirected. That analytic is captured and now you have true engagement on whether or not the communication campaign is successful. 

Do you find that all these insights, are inherently actionable, but are your end user customers doing things with it? Or are they just kind of seeing and going, “Okay, this is what's going on?” 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, on the facility side, it's huge because that environment is changing constantly, and they're looking at the best ways to optimize their workplace. So analytics is one of the most important things they want to get out of the Appspace platform. 

From comms, now that we've re we really have true multi-communication channels, iit is becoming increasingly important for them to monitor their communication campaign. “Hey, I posted a story in the employee app. It was broadcasted on the digital sign in the Microsoft Teams channel in an email newsletter. I can track where users are getting access to that story. Is it directly from the app through an app notification? Is it because they saw it on the digital sign and scanned the QR code? Is it because they saw it in their email inbox and clicked on it?” 

Most importantly, we allow reactions and comments and shares, and that provides additional analytics and so now that also provides additional value in understanding how people are reacting. But what's exciting with AI is that based on how content is trending, you can actually change the playlist on your digital sign to display content that is trending up or trending down to make sure you're getting the right message out to the user and you're promoting the right message and I think everyone is becoming more hungry for more of that.

A lot of what I see on the Appspace site and what we've talked about seems oriented to. white collar spaces to offices. Are you doing much in the so-called back of the house, production facilities, warehouses, factories, that sort of thing? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: A lot. I always start all my presentations to customers saying that we treat everyone as a first citizen of the modern workplace, and that's not just marketing. It's true. We want to make sure everyone benefits from the services that the organization's putting in place. 

Signage for frontline workers is huge in warehouses. It's massive. When we acquired the Marlin company, it was because their number one focus was people in warehouses and manufacturing plants, making sure they were provided with the right safety information, education, material, and so forth. So I think we will continue to focus there. We're just now expanding the user to go beyond just the digital signage in the warehouse to their phone in their pocket. And if you're an employee or frontline worker in the store, you're not in all the time in the back office, you're often in the front office or in the front of the store, helping your customers to still be able to get that information, those important notifications on your phone are important and I think we do a lot there.

Again, unlike most of the signage vendors, we don't focus as much on the screen in the store, talking to the consumers. We're focusing more on the screen in the back office or the screen in the pocket of the user, but we, of course, do digital signage for retail as well.

What would happen if a retail chain came to Appspace and said, “Hey, we'd love to work with you guys on digital signage for inside our stores, not for employee comps, but to sell sweaters and shoes and so on.” Would you just say, I'm sorry, we don't do that? 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, actually, the two largest retailers in Europe use Appspace in the store and in the back office.

The project started in the back store and eventually, customers saw, well, why can't I use that in the front store as well? We even integrated, I can't remember the name, with a little company out of the Netherlands who built an integration with Appspace to allow the sale of airtime in the store. We didn't build this natively in Appspace because that's not our focus. But by partnering with companies who have that expertise, we're able to deliver that. 

The largest sports brand in the world uses Appspace in all its stores around the world. So we never say no to customers. But what we're very clear about is that we're not building a product just for retail. We're building a product for the workplace and if the features meet your needs, you're more than welcome to use it in the stores. I think we have a lot more than we expected using it. 

Interesting. Last question. I get a sense from this discussion and previous chats that if you're a company lurking, looking at workspace as a vertical market, you really need to understand that it's a unique ecosystem and all of the different technology companies that feed into it.

You can't just say, “Hey, we can put stuff on your dormant screens and you can talk to your employees through our software.” You really need to stitch yourself in with all of the collaboration companies and all the other technologies that feed into it. Is that a pretty accurate statement?

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I think so. So I think companies are looking to consolidate, that's one thing. They're looking at replacing point products with a platform that delivers all those use cases through features and not point products for use cases like visitor management, room booking, and all.

So one login into one app, whether it's a physical workplace app or an employee app on your phone, you have one app, and you do everything from one place. That's for sure. It also needs to be truly integrated with the physical workplace because companies are looking to build up their ROI with the technology they're investing in. So, since the pandemic, everyone has rolled out more video conferencing rooms than before, but they need to justify ROI. ROI is by use of technology for its main purpose. But on top of that, when it's not in use, you can use it to better communicate and engage your audience and provide a better employee experience. There's incremental ROI to the technology. And so we can't be successful without integrating with all the players that exist in the physical workplace, whether they are access control systems to enter the building, how do I know if I have access into the building? When you scan your badge, your badge queries Appspace and confirms that you have a valid reservation and that you're granted access. It starts there, and it goes throughout the journey. 

The menu boards of your restaurants, the menu needs to be on your personal device before you even get in the office. You could potentially book your lunch using the app. But when you arrive at the restaurant, the menu board reflects the same information As they have always been, but now you are aware you have that link between, “Hey, I saw that there was this on the menu and I can now see it on the digital sign.” And you have that continuity in the experience. 

All right, Thomas. Thank you very much. I once again, learned stuff, which is what this is all about. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, thanks a lot for having me. It's exciting. I remember the first time we met. I think we had a table at ISE, and now we have a bigger booth I'm glad it caught your attention, but we're super happy, and I'm looking forward to continuing to talk with you over the next few years.

All right. Thanks again, and safe travels. 

Thomas Philippart de Foy: Thanks. Take care!

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

When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup.

I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people.

Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation.

I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Gideon, thank you for joining me. I think the first thing to do is tell me about your company. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Dave, it’s great to talk with you. Gideon D'Arcangelo, I joined Arup five years ago. I just reached my five-year anniversary of joining. Arup is a global design and engineering firm, 20,000 people strong, with over 90 offices. So, we work at a global scale. We're really joined up globally, and we do all aspects of design. We are a very multidisciplinary firm. We started out as structural engineers. We are a firm that has major projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Center Pompidou. 

Arup is a cooperative. It became a cooperative in the 1970s, and so we have members that work globally, and we pride ourselves on our interdisciplinary design and practice something called Total Design, which is the more integrated, the more different disciplines working together, the better the outcomes in the built environment. Our main focus is on sustainable development, and in fact, the United Nations' sustainable development goals are our mission statement for the company and we feel that we can really move the needle since we touched so many projects in the built environment globally, every year, we can really move the needle in that direction. 

Interesting. So, I'm curious about the sustainable development part of it. Is that a pivot that the company has made seeing where things are going, or is that kind of always been in the DNA or has been for some time? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I'm really happy to say that sustainable development has always been in the DNA. Arup's been a leader in this place and has been leading in these concepts of sustainable development for 30+ years, if not longer. There are certain professionals here, Joe De Silva, for example, in the UK, who have been leading in sustainable design and development thinking for over 30 years, and really, we are happy to see that the sustainable advice practice that we have as the world is caught up to really understanding that this is a priority and a necessity. So not a pivot at all. In fact, something that we're just really happy to see is that everyone is focusing on it and prioritizing it as much as the firm is.

I was recently at a conference in Europe about digital signage. One of the major discussion points was what they coined as green signage and the whole idea of sustainability. I led a number of panels, one focused on the North American market, and I told the audience and confirmed it with the North American panelists.

While green signage is a big deal, and there's a lot of discussion around sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world, it's barely on the radar in the US and Canada, perhaps to a lesser degree, with a notable exception, maybe very large corporations, but most businesses really aren't talking about it yet.

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I think that's right that America tends to be and in Canada, North America tends to be a bit behind on this, and you get the leadership from Europe, from the UK, other parts of the world, I think, because resources are more constrained over there, frankly, and they're getting to understand the limitations of resources.

They're better than we do here yet, but everyone has come to terms with that quickly. So we tend to learn a lot from what's happening in Europe and bring it to the Americas because we know it's what's coming next. 

Yeah. Some of the European guys were saying just about any RFP or tender that you get that's right up top, they want to know about your sustainability point of view and practices as well. One of the American guys said that in the last three years, we've never seen it in a tender; it's not even stipulated. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, it'll get there. It'll get there. It reminds me just of a project that I did at ESI back in 2015 for PNC Bank. PNC Bank, you may know, has just been a leader in the sustainable development of their real estate fleet for years, and there was a wonderful man named Gary Salson at the time, who was the director of real estate and commissioned the PNC Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, which at the time was the greenest sky riser and among the top 5 greenest sky rises on earth really pushed the envelope in terms of green design of a building.

I was at ESI at the time, and we were commissioned to create a digital display component, the sculpture component is part of the lobby experience. That was intended to give the building a voice and have it talk about how it was using resources or how it was saving resources really ahead of its time, fantastic project, and for that, we had to design our own canvas, our own display, because we couldn't put a big energy hog in the building to tell the story of the building. It was an interesting design challenge. 

So you were at ESI for a whole bunch of years, right? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I was at ESI for 24 years, so yeah, a long time. That's where I grew up in my career. 

Fantastic experience. What was your role there by the time you moved on? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: I was in the organization's leadership by the time I moved on. I also led our business development and marketing. In the end, there, I became a multidisciplinary creative director on some of our projects, for example, leading the design lead on this PNC Beacon Project.

I joined the firm as a UX designer. We called it an interactive media designer in the mid-90s when I joined the firm. 

Almost pre-digital. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, it was right at the cusp of all that stuff, and ESI was always leading edge in that regard, and we had a team of people that did interactive design when there were very few people in New York City at least the very few firms doing that at the time.

So that's how I grew up doing UX/UI designs for Museum interfaces. I was always into working in the built environment, creating some interesting museums and corporate programs. But over time, being there as long as I could, I was able to move into the position of design lead, where I could speak to the different disciplines required to deliver these experiences.

So we have physical designers, technology designers, hardware folks, software designers in both front and backend software design, visual design, graphic design, both static and motion, and content people as well as writers who are in practice. Directing that whole team together, is how you get these comprehensive experiences, and so that was what I was doing at ESI by the end of my career. 

And it's the kind of company that while it's substantially in that particular space, in comparison to a rep or those kinds of companies quite small and you would have been contracted into projects like PNC and so on, as opposed to leading them versus I assume now with the rep that you guys are largely leading these projects. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: That's right. It's a different dynamic. When I moved to Arup, it was really about making a jump in scale and so from working in a 50-person boutique pioneering innovative firm in New York for a couple of decades, going to a global firm that's operating at a whole different level of scale, really excited me, and I thought this was a really interesting place to experience design because it was being recognized in the marketplace in different ways.

Various architecture firms were building up their experience in design practices. Arup was really interesting to me because it's primarily an engineering firm and so brings the deep technical acumen that no architecture firm could really bring to the table. So, I was attracted to a firm like Arup that could push into the next generation of experience design at much larger scales than we've ever seen it before. 

So would you be competing for jobs with the populaces of the world in Gensler, or are they a different element of it? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Again, it all just depends on the context. We work with the populace. We work with Gensler all the time in various capacities on very big projects. There are ways to carve out scope for an Arup alongside our partners like populace and Gensler.

In some cases, we might find ourselves going up against each other for a certain piece of scope. All you know is that just happens in the course of business, depending on the client's situation and the way the scope has been described. 

I'm guessing massive projects, but, at the end of the day, it's still a fairly small community, like the folks that at Populous and Gensler are some of the other companies? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, for sure. It's a tightly-knit world. We have a lot of respect for each other and we cross paths a lot at various, professional crossroads and conferences, that sort of thing. 

So how was it to go from a company where you knew what everybody else was doing, and you're of the same mindset to ending up in meetings with civil engineers and people who were experts in water treatment facilities and so on? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, great question. I think that it was, first of all, exhilarating and inspiring, and invigorating. All of those things were really great. They were a catalyst for my thinking and what I wanted to do with my practice. I feel that the real part of being a good experience designer is being a good integrator of disciplines and being able to speak the language of multiple disciplines really fluently and so even at ESI, five different disciplines, it was not unusual, but a special mix of different expertise that were brought together. You had hardware people, you had people that knew about onsite construction and physical constructability, but you had people working on UX and UI design, and you had to be able to speak all those different languages, and dropped into Arup, suddenly 50 other languages to learn quickly, and, to really get, but there were many people that were interested in working with these integrated projects. So we have a fantastic lighting design here. We have acousticians of the highest order. We have fantastic AV designers but also even on the engineering side, we'll bring in folks that are working on urban planning.

It was really interesting for me to find which folks resonated with what we were talking about. Actually, we did a project in Providence, Rhode Island, where Arup, led the master plan for what was called the unified vision for Downtown Providence. It was one of the early projects that I did here, supporting one of my colleagues in the Boston office, where we took an experienced design approach to planning how to renovate and reinvigorate Downtown, and for that, we were working on a larger scale than I'd ever worked before. It was a whole Downtown district. We're putting experience design interventions into this plan, but we're also looking at the engineering of the site and how to make it ready for public use in a variety of ways.

So we worked both on the front end and on the back end, and all the infrastructure was as much a part of our design as the front-end experience pieces. That's what I was looking to do when I came here, and in fact, we did that, and it was a really interesting part of the design. It was so fascinating. We realized after a while that, after our Flood Modelers from the water team took a look at this and saw that the site was really going to be compromised in 50 years. We started to come up with a different design, building bridges, rather than digging tunnels, and a variety of things were done to actually shape the architecture of the site to anticipate the next 100 years and so I was like, that's the kind of thing we can do at Arup with this really highly integrated set of disciplines all under one roof. 

Yeah, and that integration, I assume, is absolutely essential that you cannot operate in silos. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly, and I think that's been my skill, Dave, over the years: I'm a horizontally oriented person, and I'm a good interlocutor or translator. I can quickly pick up a language enough to understand what's critical in that one group and, make sure that constraint maybe is understood by another group that can't quite see it, and that's how I think you get to highly integrated design and make sure basically keep people talking to each other and keep working with each other, because every organization fights with silos because it's just the nature of larger organizations.

It can be deadly if that happens, though, right? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly. It's mission-critical, So Arup is, I think, smart in the fact that we have people that cut across as well, like myself, and I'm not the only one who cut across as well as we have deep expertise in our disciplines. 

You can go into an engineering meeting and not be bored to tears or completely confused by what's going on.

Gideon D’Arcangelo: No, It's fascinating. It was just wonderful, always intellectually stimulating, and a really, really amazing group of talent here. 

I have to say Arup came on my radar because of a post I wrote several weeks ago about JFK and one of the new terminals. I saw that your company was involved in that. Even though you're huge, I'm old and stupid, and I was completely unaware that you guys existed. That was intriguing to me. What were you doing there? And is that a typical project? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: That is a project that I am leading so I can really give you a good view into that, and I think it's an expression of all the things we have just been talking about the integration of multiple parts of a project that might in the past have been thought about as disparate or separate, and since the middle of 2022, Arup has been leading what the client calls the Art Branding and Digital Experience program of JFK New Terminal One and it came about because the Terminal has aspirations to be in the top terminals in the world when it opens in 2026, and it's known that these elements: a proper art program, a proper branding and storytelling program, and digital experience installations are all part of creating a true 21st-century Airport Terminal, and also, this is part of the larger context of the overall upgrade that's happening to all 3 of New York's airports, LaGuardia, JFK and Newark, and some of those new terminals are already online. You may have seen what happened at LaGuardia Terminal B was fantastic, right? I'm a lifelong New Yorker, so I'm benefiting from this. 

Arup was deeply involved with Delta LaGuardia Terminal C. In fact, I did some work on that and Newark Terminal A just came online, so a lot of great stuff is happening from here. It's a good time for that, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is leading that effort to really upgrade. And so as part of that, there's a real demand for this art branding and digital experience piece and the idea was that while the architect was making the base building, and Gensler is the base building architect, a fantastic team from Gensler is leading that, the client was looking for one team to give a very integrated passenger experience for you of what that layer was that storytelling and a sense of placemaking was going to be on the architecture and that was going to be delivered through art branding as they called it and digital experience, and so we took on that role at the time, and so we've been leading the vision for that layer and for that storytelling and placemaking piece.

Since we started in 2022, we've gone through the strategy and design phases, and as you can imagine, 2026 isn't that far away. We're starting to move from design into production, and it was really key for that to make a strong narrative of what it meant to be coming into the New York airport and what's great about new Terminal One, Dave is, it's the only international terminal at JFK. People who are going to foreign lands are coming from foreign countries. So it's that kind of population coming through, and we had to create an experience really could only happen in New York. It couldn't be that this airport felt like something that was in Orlando or some other place it had to be for people coming from, coming, or New Yorkers departing or coming that it had to be something that could only happen in New York, and it's good that I'm a native New Yorker and I've lived here my whole life. I have a good sense of that. I like to think and we were really helping craft that narrative.

We then put together a team to work with us, and so we brought onto our team, Eddie Opara from Pentagram is leading the branding effort. We brought on a wonderful art curator team called CultureCore, who we've worked with in the past, at Arup that is leading the art curation, and then Arup is leading the digital experience design aspect of that, creating a whole set of digital canvases that are integrated into the architecture and a real media architecture style way throughout the terminal experience, both on departures and arrivals, and then a company that you know about we brought on, just last year after about a year into the process we brought Gentilhomme out of Montreal to develop the digital content for those digital canvases. We have a really amazing team that we're working with. 

Another cool part of this project is that the client asked us to collaborate with the advertising partner for the terminal, Clear Channel to have this art branding and digital experience program complement what they were doing and work hand in glove, like one experience.

I'm happy that our client had the vision to do that, and the teams worked really well together to make something that was really passenger-centric and focused on what passengers needed every step of the way so that they worked together. It's they don't, there's no cacophony or competing for eyeballs and imagery. Instead, they work together because we work together and crafted the program. 

How practically would that work in terms of, when you say they're working together, the digital at a home and the experiential art pieces? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, there are many examples of that.

Simply, we would work through each space and say, where are some of the high-value places where Clear Channel will do what they were doing and take that area, and then right next to that, we might put something that brings you into a New York sense of place, creating a moment, and so we went area by area and again, working together, it was going to really compose it together, I would say, and saying, hey, this area is good for that, and that area is good for that, and so one program came out of that. So that's what I mean. 

Okay. So it means you're not running into conflicts around things like sight lines and you can design this in a way that makes sense as opposed to designing a terminal and designing where the experiential digital pieces go and then Chird Channel comes in and say, okay, what's left? Where can I put stuff? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly, because you know, everyone's important in this program and we did it. What’s cool about it, I think, was we took a human-centric or passenger-centric approach to make those decisions and just thought, how can we make a great experience for passengers, and meet all the needs of the advertising program, meet all the needs of the experience design program, and keep it all organized that way.

I'm just always curious how companies such as yours invest a lot of time and have a lot of deep conversations with their customers. How do you define experience? Because when I think of an airport, my idea of experience is perhaps different from some others.

I'm intrigued by the big experiential art things and LED video walls and so on, because that's what I do. But for me, a great experience is wayfinding and status boards to tell me, “Am I late?” “Am I early?” “Where do I go?” All those sorts of things. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Those are also critical foundational parts of a quality experience. So that's a great question. I just gave a talk last week to an aviation group, and that's one of the things I said is wayfinding is the foundation of passenger experience design. 

It’s boring, but it's incredibly important. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: It's critical, and for a geek like myself, it's not even boring and it's just so key, and it's not easy, and it's always being innovated, and in fact, there's a lot of innovation happening with digital in wayfinding now that we’re quite involved in, actually, not so much on New Terminal 1 project, but other airport terminals and other places. 

The functional experience design has to be right, and that’s critical things. I'll just use an aviation example in a terminal. It's crystal clear where you need to go. It's crystal clear how much time it's going to take you and how much time you may have. You might want features on a mobile device that help you understand how you can get on tethered from your gate and roam and shop and eat and do a variety of things before you get on your plane. Those are key, and then there's the more ambient placemaking, sense of place environmental work also. 

In this case, what we're doing with the New Terminal 1 is really that second category: creating that sense of place, telling that story, doing something that's all only in New York and doing that through a variety of means. It is that a whole other program is, in fact, happening for New Terminal 1 and one of the things I didn't mention. We also looked really hard at the wayfinding program to make sure that everything we were doing built off of that, too. There's a whole other because you have to pay attention to that functional side.

We do work, though, in other environments where our team will get into the functional side as well as the ambient environmental side, because they really need to work together as one. 

I guess it changes with every project, but I'm curious, most typically, where does your team start and stop? Or where does Arup start and stop on a typical project? Or is there no such thing as typical? 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: There's no such thing as typical, but of course, that's a broad answer because every project is really interesting and unique. No, but we start early. We're a whole life cycle company and we work with our clients that way because we are strategists. Still, we're also builders wearing hard hats on site, making sure that everything got installed according to the strategy and the design, and the big movement right now, in my opinion, Dave, what's happening in the built environment world is the shift from design and construction into operations is getting increasingly smoothed over and thought through in a different way.

So, a building was finished, and then people moved in, and there were various tasks like adding other things. “Add” is a term from air operational readiness that air airports used to shift from construction into operations because it has to work on day one; you can't take a few days to get it right. It has to work the moment it opens, you open the door. So there's a whole process, and Arup has that team. We can bring that to our clients as well, because our understanding of the design and construction process and the commissioning process at the very end, as it shifts into operations, gives us expertise in a way to make that as smooth as possible.

But beyond that, there is a whole movement of using the tools, the digital tools that you create and design and construction as models that then can be brought through into operations and putting sensors into the building and putting a variety of things into the design of the building, so as you move out of design and construction, you have a digital model of the building that you can help use to operate and maintain and work with facilities management and other teams that are helping that building to operate more efficiently once it's opened. So, the long answer to your question is that we really will start when there's a blank sheet of paper with our clients and help strategize what needs even to happen all the way through. Of course design is our main bread and butter. Of course, we stay on during construction to oversee construction to ensure it's delivered as designed and then increasingly into operations in that whole life cycle.

I'm guessing that when your career started, digital was something that was perhaps added on, thought about later in the game, and I'm wondering now, is the visual digital components of big projects are now fundamental to the overall thinking? 

Like it's not something that's added on later. They're talking about it right from inception. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Definitely. It's a good insight, and I've seen that over the course of my now 30-year career to see the shift in that where initially we would have to work hard to convince the clients, even to consider some of these things, and then over time, about 10 years in, you started to see them showing up in a variety of ways and then increasingly they just become, as you say, just part of the program and assumed part of the program. But there's still such a long way to go on that front. And I've always thought that this idea of digital and physical being separate is a design problem of our age. 

In a hundred years' time, people will just see that we got through that design problem and just digital permeates everything you do because it's, why wouldn't it? It's a smart way to go, and it's an innovation and human ingenuity and history. So right now there's a lot of work for bringing the digital mindset into every aspect of life, and particularly into the built environment. The built environment has been slow to pick up on this. So construction is really now in this kind of really exciting phase, the virtual design and construction where these digital tools are coming in and taking off, but there's a long way to go. I like to think of Arup as a leader in digital-physical integration, that's a task of our day, digital-physical integration.

It's not like digital something off on the side, but then you do it at the end or do it in a box. Instead, you think of it from the very beginning and build it into every aspect of how you design, deliver, and operate the project. 

Yeah. I think it's exciting that we're getting very close to a level that LED displays, both physical ones and ones that are embedded in glass, and things like that can now be thought about as building materials that you can use as a wall. Is it necessarily going to be mahogany or travertine tile or whatever. It can be like LEDs that can be changeable when as much as they need to be changeable. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Absolutely. I worked with Michael Schneider when he was at ESI, with me. We often talked about that as we talked about media architecture as that was an emerging term in the field. One of the things I really am grateful for working with ESI was the idea that media wasn't something that you attach to an environment in creating an interactive environment, you actually were working with this audio-visual material as you say, that becomes part of the architecture, and what's interesting about that though is then the client for that gets confusing because if you're putting in travertine or mahogany, you're talking to one side of the client, the design and construction folks. As soon as you put a dynamic piece of media in, who are you talking to? You're talking to that same client who's responsible for building that space. But suddenly you're also talking to the director of communications and the director of marketing and the storytelling people of the company.

And that was something that I've always seen about this field. You needed to be able to talk to storytellers. That would be your CMOs, your directors of communications, your chief communication officers, as much as you could talk to the the head of real estate, that's building something.

Where it worked well, you got leadership from both sides on the client that really understood what you were doing. As you put this material into the building, there's still the question of what it's doing. What story is it telling? Who's maintaining it over time? What's the content strategy? And that's what made it really exciting because it's different from putting a static tile on the wall.

As soon as you put a media, an LED tile on the wall, it has a whole different governance aspect to it that is very modern, and I think now it is becoming standard. People expect that in their buildings. 

All right. That was terrific. I know a lot more about Arup than I certainly did half an hour ago, and I suspect it'll be the same for a lot of listeners.

Gideon D’Arcangelo: That's great. Thank you, Dave. 

I appreciate your time. 

Gideon D’Arcangelo: Likewise. Great to talk with you.