Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
00:00:00 · Dave Haynes
[00:00:00] S0: This is Sixteen:Nine the Podcast. I'm Dave Haynes. Sixteen:Nine has been covering the digital signage industry since the dawn of man, first online and now as a podcast. The goal on here is to make listeners aware of interesting companies, smart people, and new technology developments, All of them meaningful in making digital signage projects happen. I try to help listeners understand sometimes complicated subjects and why they should care. The podcasts are free and I try to get a new one out weekly, but things happen now and then. The Sixteen:Nine podcast has been gratefully sponsored and supported since the start by Jeremy Gavin and the fine folks at Screenfeed, the digital signage content store. Screenfeed makes beautiful looking, totally automated content for signage and digital out of home networks. Check them out at screenfeed.com. Sixteen:Nine has been around since 2006, and the publication and podcast are now owned by SpectreO, which provides customer engagement solutions for business. You can find them at spectreo.com. Just prior to DSE, I was in Palm Springs to take part in an executive retreat for the Digital Signage Crowd that was organized by my friends at Invidis, the consultancy and publishing company based in Munich. They've done these events in Europe for a few years now, an invitation based two day gathering that is part networking, part knowledge sharing and part R and R, from golf to cocktails and dinner. I was along because they needed eye candy, obviously, and there was probably some mandate to include a senior citizen. But Florian and Stefan from Invidis also had me there to do some interviews with attendees. It was a bit like herding cats because of the size of the resort and schedules, but we managed to trap eight attendees in front of the camera and mics. There are video versions you can watch, but for those who like to listen to interviews as they walk or drive, I've even heard people saying they listen to podcasts as they swim. Here's the second of two roundups with four interviews in each. This one has Jeremy Gavin of Screenfeed, Shawn O'Connell, who recently joined Uniguest, Stan Richter of SignageOS, and Trey Courtney of Mood Media. Jeremy, can you introduce yourself?
00:02:00 · Jeremy Gavin, Dave Haynes
[00:02:00] S1: Yeah. I'm Jeremy Gavin, and I'm the CEO and founder of Screenfeed. We're a ready made content service company. [00:02:09] S2: Now what does that mean? You've been around for, what, a dozen years now? [00:02:13] S1: Yeah. 2008, so Sixteen guess more than years. Sixteen years. So yeah, we started out doing a lot of selling of licensed content. So news, weather, sports scores, pollen, information, financial. So we've been great at that. We serve over 200,000 screens with content every day. But more recently too, we've been helping people visualize their own data. So as we continue to offer license data, we've had a lot more customers asking us how can display their own data. And we've been working on how to accomplish that. We built a tool, it's a little mature now, it's been around for about a year and a half, called Connect. And Connect is built really to make projects that used to take us several weeks to do for a customer to create a data visualization of their data. Now we can do a project, we say, before lunch. It's a fantastic tool for that. So that's been a big focus for us lately. [00:03:16] S2: So at first pass, if people didn't really dig into it, they might think, Okay, well, this is just a templating tool. There's a lot more going on, isn't there?
00:03:16 · Dave Haynes, Jeremy Gavin
[00:03:16] S2: So at first pass, if people didn't really dig into it, they might think, Okay, well, this is just a templating tool. There's a lot more going on, isn't there? [00:03:24] S1: Yeah, it looks similar. You see it like Canva or, Hey, we can use this template and adjust it. And there's not a big need for that. We didn't need to create another one of those. What we created was a tool that, we like to say designs with data. So you can tap into Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, any REST API, any data source, and literally drag that data onto screen, create repeating regions of it, and make any type of app. So that's a directory or a personnel display, some that say happy birthday to this customer, that customer, sales leaderboards. But the beauty of it is you have control. It's not just a template. You can edit and touch everything, [00:04:10] S2: but [00:04:12] S1: the access to any... Using any data source. For a non programmer or a designer allows... It just enables our customers to get projects done. That's really what it's about. It's like, how do I get from A to B? Because most of the time when we were talking to customers about using their own data, they were just concerned about the cost and time, and their alternative was just to not do it. Right. And it wasn't we're competing with another solution. It was just like, how much effort is this gonna take? [00:04:39] S2: Right. [00:04:39] S1: So we've just taken that effort down to a small amount. Usually within a few hours, you can get a nice template.
00:04:39 · Jeremy Gavin, Dave Haynes
[00:04:39] S1: So we've just taken that effort down to a small amount. Usually within a few hours, you can get a nice template. [00:04:46] S2: Do you have like a poster child, a reference account that you always talk about? Like, these guys are using it this way. [00:04:52] S1: Yeah, I mean, we've had a few. One was Travel Centre in The UK. They wanted to do something to display birthdays for their employees. They also had some other metrics that they wanted to display, and they wanted to do it in a beautiful way. So they provided us amazing designs. We made that layout happen. They also wanted to include like the transit information around them and have that same exact template. And so we were able to tap into the local government's transit data and put that together. That was all accomplished within a week. Recently, had our realtor say, Hey, I just need to rotate my real estate listings. And we had that done within a half a day. So it's just nice to be able to say yes to a lot of customers. So yeah, those are just a few that come to mind. Is that kind of turning into a services based business for you or a new line of business? Yeah, we built it with the idea that it's user friendly, someone could just use it themselves, but most of our customers just want us to take care [00:05:54] S2: of They're busy. If you can do it for them, you're your happiest client. And we do.
00:05:54 · Dave Haynes, Jeremy Gavin, Trey Courtney
[00:05:54] S2: of They're busy. If you can do it for them, you're your happiest client. And we do. [00:05:57] S1: And the good thing is we can do it pretty quickly because it's an efficient tool. So yeah, it's definitely more of a service. So with Connect, most times people are saying, Hey, let's do this a one time setup fee. You take care of everything. Then it's a small monthly fee just to maintain the service. [00:06:12] S2: So back in 2008, integrating with CMS software partners, there were a lot fewer of them back then, but I suspect it was something of a chore. What is it like now and how do you work [00:06:23] S3: with them?
00:06:23 · Trey Courtney, Jeremy Gavin, Dave Haynes
[00:06:23] S3: with them? [00:06:24] S1: Yeah, that was interesting. Way back in the day, I remember we were just pounding the pavement saying, Hey, you gotta support Media RSS and trying to create some standards for CMSs to just work with our content. Luckily, the industry's grown and matured, and we have, but we're really still trying to say, how can we make it easiest for a customer to get content? And it's best if we can work with a CMS to make that happen. And a lot of CMSs, more recently, they're concerned about as the cost, they're having a little harder time justifying getting the money that they used to have customers spend per month. So they want to keep that spend up. So they're using us as a tool to get them to spend a little bit more. So some CMSs are like, Hey, we wanna increase our monthly recurring revenue. Hey, let's add Screenfeed as an option to get people to spend just a little bit more. Or they're using it as, Hey, we wanna get someone from a silver to a gold level of our software. And they'll get content from us at kind of an OEM pricing, throw it into that gold, and it helps move people up to just spend a little bit more for their services. [00:07:32] S2: And you resolutely stay the hell away from the CMS side of things. Like you're providing a service, but you're not trying to compete even though maybe some of them think you are.