The Two Sides of Digital Signage

A retail store in Berlin has devised a new way to attract shoppers (particularly of the male variety) by using rear projector technologies to broadcast lifelike digital images of women modeling lingerie in its storefront windows.

In neighboring France, meanwhile, Adidas has opened a high-tech retail center on Paris' Champs-Elysees, where consumers can digitally custom-build their own running shoes and then model their digital kicks in a virtual mirror.

To the south, in Madrid, Spain, a billboard enables nearby cellphone users to broadcast their own SMS messages for public viewing.

Those are just a few examples of the emerging and diverse digital-signage applications highlighted at this month's digital signage summit at NEC Display Solutions of America's headquarters in Itasca, Ill.

The event attracted a mix of companies involved in digital signage, including VARs (of both the AV and IT ilk), systems integrators, display-mounting companies, software vendors, networking companies and advertising agencies--a group that collectively illustrated the complexities of creating, deploying and selling advanced digital-signage systems.

While the virtual lingerie models, by far, turned the most heads at the event, it was the discussions about the business models for digital-signage solution providers that stole the show.

Behind all the glitz and glam of futuristic digital-signage systems, attendees were talking about the deployments that are gaining traction today and about the challenges they're facing in acquiring the right skills--or the right partners--to deploy such systems.

While sexy illustrations of retail signage typically get most of the publicity, other uses of digital signs promise more growth. For example, while the market for retail signage is expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2006 to $2.8 billion in 2011, indoor signage is expected to skyrocket from $704 million in 2006 to $7.2 billion in 2011, according to market-research firm DisplaySearch.

"Someone is going to sell, deploy and service all that," said Alan Brawn, principal of Brawn Consulting, at the event.

Corporate communication and education are two areas, in particular, where digital signage is making inroads, he said.

NEXT: Technical and collaborative hurdles.

Among the barriers to entry, however, are high installation costs; lack of understanding about system capabilities; ROI skepticism; scalability issues; and long sales cycles of 15 to 18 months, Brawn said.

In fact, one of the biggest challenges in selling digital signage is coordinating efforts among all the different groups required for deployments, attendees agreed.

"I'm not wanting to build networks and manage them on my own," said Chris Cicmanec, technical director for Chicago-based advertising agency DraftCB, which has started deploying digital signage to its clients. Therefore, the ad agency must partner up with VARs to provide the networking.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the room, AV VARs were discussing how to provide digital-signage systems to their customers without getting into the content-creation business.

"We know we don't want to sell advertising," said Strib Meares with CCS Presentation Systems, an audio-visual VAR in Elkridge, Md.

Yet the VAR, which sells digital-signage systems into the education market as informational tools for students, says some of the universities it serves are looking at ways they can recoup their investments through advertising.

In addition to gaining cooperation among all the people needed to create, deploy and manage the systems, it's also a challenge to get collaboration among disparate departments within end-user companies.

"The biggest challenge I've seen in digital signage is getting the IT and marketing departments to work together because neither can do it on their own," Cicmanec said.

But technical challenges are often vexing.

"The challenge is also in the investment for both the physical hardware with maintenance and developing content for one platform that doesn't work on another platform. Then tracking and measuring it is difficult," Cicmanec added.

Some solution providers are trying to do it all. Case in point: AVT Communiqué, a division of Hospitality Partners in Arlington Heights, Ill., which provided a digital-signage system for Chicago's largest hotel, the Chicago Hyatt Regency. The hotel, which boasts more than 2,000 guest rooms and 200,000 square feet of meeting space, hosts more than 1,500 conventions, meetings and events a year. As such, the hotel wanted to move away from paper signage, so it employed AVT as its integrator to deploy a large digital-signage system throughout the facility.

AVT conducted traffic studies to determine the best placement for the signage, ensured the cabinetry for the systems matched the aesthetics of the hotel and deployed a system that used NEC displays, content software from Omnivex and media players from multiple hardware vendors. But since then, the project has grown and provided an ongoing revenue stream for AVT, which creates and manages the content on the hotel's displays.

"It's evolved into all kinds of things, and on a daily basis they ask us for different things they can do," says Bob Tomko, president of AVT Communiqué.

While such implementations are encouraging, they reveal the commitment involved: from scope to deployment, the project took six months and involved 10 employees at AVT.