Cleverdis - Information Intelligence


		• Market Insight – Interview with Nancy Radermecher, President • Avoiding the Pitfalls – ScreenRed Survey • Developing a System that Works – Interview with Brian J. Douglas, Director of Business Development & Marketing • Digital Signage: From Humble Beginnings to an Exciting Future! – Gary Madgwick, Chief Technical Officer • Vertical Markets: Developing New Communication Solutions – Interview with Stephen Fernandez, Product Director • Success Breeds Success… – Case Studies • Strength Through Great Partnerships • Conclusion by Gérard Lefebvre, President & Founder – Cleverdis

Cleverdis has, for a number of years now, been tracking the path of the market for Out of Home Digital Media. Today, the sector is starting to mature, and while some “fly-by-nights” drop in and out and most major display manufacturers are “smelling blood”, very few companies have become really firmly established in the market. To this end, when looking for a service provider that is solid and can advise on an installation based on past experience, the choice is pretty narrow…

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	STEPHEN FERNANDEZ Product Director SCREENRED Stephen is responsible for products and services at John Ryan and ScreenRed. Prior to joining the company he worked for Cable & Wireless where he was responsible for an international team dealing with all European connectivity products. Having worked on the integration of acquired companies and major programmes to rationalise the company’s footprint, Stephen brings extensive Product Management, Development and Change Management skills to the team. Stephen has a degree in Computer Science.

ScreenRed is developing what are in fact application-specific developments, not just simple digital signage. Tell us more about this.

At ScreenRed, our Out of Home Digital Media solutions have evolved to fit specific needs whether it is enticing more people into a building or simply increasing sales... not just simply delivering messages per se. Digital signage has the potential to be so much more than just pushing out adverts or announcements. The idea has been to develop particular applications and solutions where digital signage is the methodology used in order to deliver content, but where the content is part of a much broader marketing plan.

Could you give us some examples?

Of course... For any real estate agent for example, the shop front is all-important. Most of them already have screens showing some of the properties they have on board, and it is this shop front that is probably their major asset. So the idea is to create new shop fronts in different locations to increase their reach without necessarily investing in new premises and new staff. You could, for example, install a digital display in another local shop, which doesn't have to be related in any way to the estate agents. Via an interactive screen, people can search for a property through a series of questions, following which a printer prints out the information then and there. The shop where you put it, the local Coop or 7/11 for example, receives an incentive fee from the estate agent.

So here, the key comes from the interactivity…

Yes, there is absolutely no point in having just a loop in another location simply showing the properties that you may have on the market and saying, "Come and see us on the high street". Why on earth would a Coop or a local 7/11 put your screens in their premises unless there was some way of rewarding them for every lead or sale they generate? There has to be some sort of interactivity – a way of registering the interest. At the same time, if you put a printer on the back of the screen, you would not necessarily print out the full details of the house, because you would still want to encourage people to go back into the estate agent's main premises. Instead, you would print out a summary of the details, which would also specify the origin of the lead; for example the local shop. By doing so, the estate agent knows where it was generated and can appropriately reward its partner shop if it turns into a sale.

What other kinds of activity or domain can use this type of application?

The whole idea is to get away from digital signage in the way that it is currently understood and perceived. You can see examples like interactive sales people in technological retail stores for example, where staff members do not always have the technical knowledge to address all the consumers' questions. By using digital signage, you can have an in-house expert in the form of an interactive screen giving you the facts, the details, or the technical specifications of the equipment that you are interested in. If you are a white goods retailer and you are selling a particular range of fridges that come in different colours, they are huge things to stock.

With a digital signage system, you would only need to stock one, because you could view the different colours and different looks and forms from the screen. Another interesting application is that of interactive systems for the DIY trade. Today, we have a situation where most of them have leaflets on "how to". That's a perfect example for print-on-demand. Instead of having all this literature, why not take it a little bit further and just turn to digital signage, allowing people to go in and type in the size of their room on an interactive screen. The screen would then answer, "You need ten litres of paint to cover a wall this size" and at the same time "By the way have you bought thinners? ... You can find them in aisle X” or “Purchase your paint brushes now and earn a 10% discount". I personally never know how much paint to buy when I go in there! For fast food or coffee shop chains, why not have a loyalty card system where when you come in, you swipe your card on the screen and a message comes up on the screen like "Welcome back, do you want the usual?" Or if it's little Johnny's birthday it knows that it is and the screen says "Happy birthday Johnny" because he's part of the loyalty program. Again you can even mix the content on the screens with messages aimed at the community to give them something back.

As the background of the company comes from the banking sector, are there any new specific applications similar to those that we talked about for real estate?

One of the issues that everyone has is to drive customers into their premises. Banks in particular have that problem... probably even more so than retailers, partly because you can do so much of your banking operations online these days. To remedy this, an application we use with one particular bank is putting screens and merchandising not just in the bank but in other shops in the same area. All the local shops are in a kind of league table, competing with each other to drive their customers into the bank. The shop hands the customer a leaflet so the bank can identify where the lead came from.

They go up and scan it in the local shop and if the customer wins, a message will flash on screen saying "Run around the corner into the bank and pick up your prize!"

So interactivity and originality in marketing are becoming increasingly important?

Yes... Even if it is something as simple as asking four or five questions to clients walking into a bank like "What are you interested in?" and people just have to touch the screen, the marketing department can see in real time from a web browser what interactions are happening in which banks at what time. Interactivity also allows management to know what type of clientele is in the premises at different times of the day. You can then tailor your play-lists to match those different clientele. In the end, marketing people shouldn't be thinking "Oh dear we’d better do digital signage because everyone else is doing digital signage" but rather "What issues do I need to address"... otherwise you will end up just putting up a few screens, that might work for adding a little bit of visual effect to the shop, but will not actually deliver huge value.

So that's where we are at the moment, and this is obviously something ScreenRed is actively working on…

It is. We are actively working on a whole new suite of applications. Some of them are physical bundles in terms of the screen and built-in PC at the back so that it is an all-in-one self-contained unit, while some solutions may just need software designs. The whole idea has been to develop a suite of applications that businesses will be able to simply pick off the shelf. All this will be rolling out progressively as we test-market the ideas.