Digital Signage Today
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.
00:17:06 · Daniel Brown
[00:17:06] S1: I've been hearing so many C level folks and consultants and researchers talk about the physidigital or the phygital, and making your brand identity, your brand story kind of straddle both, you know, the physical and the digital. Make your make your physical digital. And it sounds like that's tracking very well. And I also love how you mentioned retail media, exploding. We saw Amazon, Walmart, Kroger. There's so many brands jumping onto this. And we talked to Ori Moore of YCharge, who globally, they're they're expanding in retail media because at the point of sale, that's the point of decision and research is really showing impact. And what I also love in this industry is that folks are starting to say, oh, database decision making is not just for IT. Well, let's look at the data. What does the data say? And it's showing amazing things about the ROI of these digital signs. On a personal aesthetic level, what's one of your favorite ads or contents or examples that you saw? And you said they nailed it. I
00:18:00 · Chris Grosso
[00:18:00] S2: think outside... Leaving aside our stuff, you know, just as an industry observer, I think a lot of the large format work in in three d in places like Times Square has been very, very impression... Impressive aesthetically and really, really good, like hat tip to the folks doing many of those campaigns. Going back to some of the stuff that we do, the things I like best are our ability with products like Link to take over a city at scale at a moment in time. So, you know, in New York, there's this thing called Manhattanhenge, where the sun lines up with the street grid. And, you know, we sold a sponsorship for someone to sponsor and take over the entire city at that moment. And the ability to have all the screens basically with an ad referencing Manhattanhenge with the sun, like, you know, lined up right on the street grid was really cool. And I think the ability... As I said, I think these... The ability with our medium and in our media to be able to take over a city at scale very quickly at a moment in time and really bring a city together in a way that is very hard to do, as the thing I like best on what we do. But, you know, as I look at, you know, when I think about our, some of our competitors, because we're not in the billboard space, I think what folks are doing with these big, format screens in some of these places is also really, really impressive. And, you know, I think what's great about our medium is these products really work together in in in tandem in a pretty compelling way.
00:19:38 · Daniel Brown
[00:19:38] S1: And by the way, the public safety benefits, that's growing as well. So that's a great benefit. And I think it ties into one thing. What are your thoughts on making your digital out of home, whether it's football, smart city, retail, beyond, sustainable, making it privacy friendly? And can you do that and also be super successful? What's the mix?