Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
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.
00:07:32 · Dave Haynes, Jeremy Gavin
[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. [00:07:42] S1: Yeah. And there's some CMSs who really do focus on content and try to build those widgets themselves. And great for them. But there's a lot that have a lot of other things on their roadmap that they wanna take care of. And we just wanna be that partner that says, Hey, we've already done all this work. We're pretty darn good at it. We've done it for a long time. Let us provide all of our feeds and widgets to you, integrate it into your software, nice and easy for the customer so you can just do your thing. [00:08:11] S2: Yeah. I suspect there's a difference between getting something to work and sixteen years' worth of experience doing it. [00:08:17] S1: Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine that, you know, it's kind of crazy doing this for sixteen years that we're currently working on how can we make our news better and our weather better. After sixteen years, you would think we could have done that. [00:08:30] S2: Yeah, Jeremy. [00:08:31] S1: But no, we have, but there's always ways to do it and spending time. And if CMS tries to do that, they really takes them away from other things. We've got a lot we're working on. And certainly AI is one thing that's helping us with that. It's a fun new technology that really lends itself well to content creation and data driven content. So Is [00:08:54] S2: there any risk of taking you guys out? Like, it'll just replace what you're doing?
00:08:54 · Dave Haynes, Jeremy Gavin, Shawn O'Connell
[00:08:54] S2: there any risk of taking you guys out? Like, it'll just replace what you're doing? [00:08:58] S1: Yeah. I mean, I suppose everyone's gotta be aware of that risk. And so that's something we think about, but we see it as an enabler. At the end of the day, most recently we're working on news right now and how do we use it as a moderation service? And we recently came out with something called community events that finds farmer's markets or library readings, that type of events that banks love, credit unions love. [00:09:24] S4: It would [00:09:25] S2: take a hell of a lot time to find all that. [00:09:27] S1: Can't moderate for 1,300 locations or how many you have. So we've trained AI bots to make those selections for us by giving it great prompts, the results are amazing. So it certainly helped us deliver for our customers. And so I think as long as we stay focused on leveraging it, maybe we'll stay ahead of it and we'll still have our jobs. [00:09:50] S2: All right, thank you. [00:09:50] S1: Yeah, you bet. Thank you. [00:09:52] S4: Hi, I'm Shawn O'Connell, I'm the Executive Vice President of Sales at Uniguest covering the Americas market. I have revenue responsibility for all verticals and all channels within the organization. So Shawn, can [00:10:06] S2: you tell me what Uniguest is all into? Because I have this idea that you're primarily working in hospitality, but I'm thinking I have kind of a narrow idea.
00:10:06 · Dave Haynes, Shawn O'Connell
[00:10:06] S2: you tell me what Uniguest is all into? Because I have this idea that you're primarily working in hospitality, but I'm thinking I have kind of a narrow idea. [00:10:15] S4: Yeah, absolutely. We started out as a hospitality organization, but what we've seen happen over the last five years as technology converged and the need for content management solutions comes together, we're starting to see a pretty more robust revenue stream across many, many verticals. So we're not just focused on hospitality anymore, it's all verticals including stadium and corporate and senior living and healthcare. So we've got [00:10:41] S2: our finger on the pulse of many, many verticals nowadays versus where we were five years ago. Now is that because it kind of organically went that way or was this a strategic decision that, yeah, we need to look at these other markets as well? [00:10:54] S4: Yeah, very strategic in the sense that we've been in the acquisition mode for the last five years. So we're very strategic, we're acquiring companies that were hitting sweet spots where we weren't to help us gain some market share and some footprint in certain verticals. And then we grew organically from there. And as we converge our software and technology, it's relevant in all these different verticals. So it was very strategic through acquisition. Now we're organically growing within each of those spaces.
00:10:54 · Shawn O'Connell, Dave Haynes, Trey Courtney
[00:10:54] S4: Yeah, very strategic in the sense that we've been in the acquisition mode for the last five years. So we're very strategic, we're acquiring companies that were hitting sweet spots where we weren't to help us gain some market share and some footprint in certain verticals. And then we grew organically from there. And as we converge our software and technology, it's relevant in all these different verticals. So it was very strategic through acquisition. Now we're organically growing within each of those spaces. [00:11:20] S2: Acquisitions are an interesting thing. A lot of times when there's a company doing a roll up of other companies, they pick up a lot of software and a lot of capabilities, and then they have to figure out, okay, what do we do with these things? I found it interesting with Uniguest in that you were able to kind of mix up what you have, particularly when it comes to IPTV and then venue based stuff. [00:11:42] S4: Right, right, I mean, absolutely. I think what's happening for us as we converge those legacy systems and very deliberately move to what we're branded as Hub, which is a cloud based CMS software package, it's to basically end of life some of those legacy products that were really heavy on the hardware side, moved to a cloud based solution and converted it, so under one unified ecosystem, branded Uniguest via a cloud CMS called Hub. [00:12:06] S2: Okay. A lot of people use the term digital engagement. [00:12:11] S3: Yes. [00:12:12] S2: A lot of people have used the term. I'm curious how you guys define digital engagement.