Digital Signage Today
00:10:26 · Chris Grosso
[00:10:26] S2: of our signage? Yeah. You know, I think, look, there's two big buckets. Right? I mean, we'll do traditional LEDs that could be both small format or large format. LEDs is is kind of our... You know, that's kind of the bread and butter of our digital business. But there's also just the traditional static printed advertising that also works well. But, you know, what we've been able to do and what the industry has been able to do is overlay digital technology on the printed ads so that, you know, we have a sense based on the digital mobile devices that data that you can get from third parties in a privacy friendly way to understand who's actually seeing the ad and what they do afterwards. What's really interesting, and again, I think this is the medium and the locations more than anything, is that every time we looked at whether or not people who've seen ads and interacted with the ads and what they've done afterwards, these ads have huge performance in terms of driving online behavior. People see the ad, they might see the ad digitally, they might see the ad static, but then they will take an online action afterwards. So it's a very valuable way for brands to acquire customers, build relationships with customers and acquire customers as well. And that goes beyond both the digital sign for sure, but also even the traditional printed sign as well.
00:11:43 · Daniel Brown
[00:11:43] S1: We've talked about sort of the collapse of the silo where digital signage and digital advertising is becoming this huge interconnected entity. It's almost like the metaverse in a sense where even a printed ad is part of the metaverse because of the QR code and because of the mobile interactivity. Exactly. Do you have a word to say to folks about the power, advertisers about the power of, hey, you need to embrace this sort of metaverse mobile interactive world? Well, yeah.
00:12:10 · Chris Grosso, Daniel Brown
[00:12:10] S2: I mean, there's no, look, there's no substitute for real life. We learned this during COVID. We learned this after COVID. You know, the ability to interact with people when they're living their real lives is hugely, hugely valuable. And I think that there's no substitute for it. So you can get a lot of the benefits that you have from your digital advertising, but you also get all this way higher engagement by interacting, you know, putting your ads in front of people in physical space where they can't skip it, where they're, you know, people are tired of looking at screens and looking at their down at the screen, so they're seeing things in physical space. You really can cut through the clutter in a way the digital advertising can't, but you get all the metrics and data and goodness that you can from your digital ads, plus all the benefits of being in physical space. So I think it's a very much, a very, the value that can be created from the out of home advertising, I think you're gonna see a ton of growth over the next three or four years because there's a lot of untapped opportunity for marketers to to leverage this medium for sure. [00:13:20] S1: What kind of creative, what kind of content, what kind of things should you do in this crowded landscape to stand out from the competition? Is it should you have... Is it the seven second rule? Is it the motion rule? Like, what kind of stuff are you seeing?
00:13:33 · Chris Grosso
[00:13:33] S2: I think it's the useful rule. I think you want to have screens that provide value to the the the consumer and the person walking down the street. And if you provide value, they're gonna pay attention. And value can come in different ways. It can come what time my train is coming. It could be the weather. It could be the sports scores. It could be art. It could be a fun fact. But what we've seen time and time again is that you can condition people to look up to get a little piece of information or a little piece of happiness about their day, and then you can put the ads in as well. So I think, you know, having engaging content on the screens is always job one. I mean, more important than anything else, if you've got great content that people are gonna engage with, they're gonna look at your screens. And that's part one. Part two is location, right? If you put the screen in the right place, they can't help but see it. And one of the reasons I spent much of my career in digital media, and one of the things I always loved about the out of home space is from an audience development perspective, if you put the placement right, you you... You've gotten half the battle. There's no... You you can't get disintermediated by one of the online platform companies. It's there. You walk down the street and you see it. And that goes back to where we started, which is you wanna be where places where people are convening at mass and at scale. And, you know, a place like Penn Station, that's every day. A place like Times Square, that's every day. But almost every weekend, that's that's one of these stadiums, and and that could be a football game or, you know, what we really saw, you know, this summer was Taylor Swift and and the the massive impact that she and her concerts had on on the economy and on on these cities was was huge. And and, you know, that doesn't happen online. That only happens in real life.
00:15:13 · Daniel Brown
[00:15:13] S1: Are there any mistakes people are making that you think, hey. Avoid this. And are there any untapped opportunities that you're like, man, you know, smart businesses should really be jumping in here quick?
00:15:24 · Chris Grosso
[00:15:24] S2: I think the biggest untapped opportunity is retail media. I think the amount of digital signage that is close to adjacent to retail locations is is is large. I think every anecdotal piece of data I've seen is when you see an ad for something outside of a store to go buy the thing, you buy the thing. And, you know, retail media is growing at massive rates. And I do think a large... A a chunk of that ought to go to out of home because you can get a lot of that same... Just like you're buying, you know, retargeting on the Internet for retail media, buy the ad outside the store. It's just... It it... It's not rocket science. It will have huge impact on the business. That's a massive untapped opportunity for people. In terms of things people to look out for, I do think thinking about when to transition from a printed sign to a digital sign and making that transition at the right time and in the right places is hugely important. You get three, four, five times as many ad impressions from a digital sign than a printed sign based on the flips. And you gotta make sure that the math pencils out to spend the money on a good digital sign because, you know, it's expensive to put one of these in, it's expensive to operate these things. So you want to make sure it's there in the right locations and at the right scale that makes sense. I think when I got into this job, when I started in out of home eight years ago, my view was digitize everything. And reality is you can get a lot of the benefits in your printed ads by putting things like QR codes and the digital data that you can pull together from the printed ad. So you want to do a lot of digital, but you want to do the right amount of digital in the right places. I think getting that balance right is one of the most important determinants on whether a business model is going to be successful in this space.