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 Screen Feed, the digital signage content store. Screen Feed 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. This podcast is a bit different as I'm on the other side of the interview table answering questions instead of asking them. That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost twenty years and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it's time to slow the hell down. I'm not leaving the industry entirely, just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work. Working more when the weather cold in my part of the world, and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a little bit. Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich and Invidis, who have been long time content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this industry.
00:01:46 · Balthasar Mayer, Antonia Hamberger, Dave Haynes
[00:01:46] S1: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer and... [00:01:51] S2: This is Antonia Hamberger. [00:01:53] S1: And we have a very, very, very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart and driving force of Behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time. He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixers at trade show, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind. And now he's retiring and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. [00:02:26] S0: Welcome. Yes. I was I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving your company. [00:02:32] S2: It is the exit interview. And we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine and we're now doing the Nine sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career. Then you'll get 16 questions where you'll give us rapid fire answers. All [00:02:54] S0: right. Well, I'm drinking Weissbier because I'm in Munich, so this could get salty by the [00:02:58] S1: end of it. [00:02:58] S2: And it is That is second [00:02:59] S1: our goal, to make it salty interesting at the same time. [00:03:04] S2: So, yeah, Dave, I guess, well, you've been now doing this blog for twenty years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into
00:03:04 · Antonia Hamberger, Dave Haynes
[00:03:04] S2: So, yeah, Dave, I guess, well, you've been now doing this blog for twenty years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into [00:03:18] S0: the I first was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press and my first job out of school working for a newspaper was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands. I interviewed, like, Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, like, you name it back in the early eighties, late seventies. Just about anybody who was big at that time, I I did an interview with him, was quite interesting at times. You would get lovely, lovely people. You'd get absolute a holes. [00:03:58] S2: Everything also love rock A lot of what? Drunk people, drunk rock stars.
00:04:03 · Dave Haynes
[00:04:03] S0: Well, Ozzy Osbourne definitely was impaired. And Billy Joel, he he was... He stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in, like, 1981 or something. And he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band. And they had a a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg. And he was like very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. That was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews. So anyways, I I did that. Then I I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor and got bored with being an editor in a in a market where not a lot bad happened. And as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than, you know, calm, stable situation. When the newspapers started talking about doing new media, getting into digital, I stuck my hand up and said, I'll do it. So I took the the newspaper online in 1995, one of the first North American papers to go online, and did that for four years and reported directly to the publisher. And nobody on the executive team, including the publisher, bought into my concerns that this was going to be a problem for newspapers. They just tended to think this was a passing fancy. It wasn't really gonna happen. So I I just got frustrated and left. And weirdly went to work for a company called Elevator News Network that was putting digital screens, LCD panels in elevators, office tower elevators in 1999. Very complicated, very expensive. I started out as the GM for Western Canada, but pretty quickly became vice president of operations for the whole shot. So I was putting screens in 70 story office towers in the elevator shafts while in the in the cabs and running all the cabling in the elevator shafts. Very expensive, very complicated, very frustrating because you're dealing with unionized labor with elevator companies where they wanted to charge you $250 to stand there and watch you, that sort of thing. So I did that. There was a shotgun merger with another company in The US that was doing that, and I got walked off the plank with the rest of the Canadian management team and found myself looking around going, okay. Now what do I do? And I ended up starting my own digital out of home media company, put screens in public walkways in the underground walkways of Downtown Toronto.
00:06:37 · Dave Haynes
Was a great idea, but probably ten years too early because I would go to advertising agencies and say I'm doing this and they would look at me like what? It was digital at home was just not a thing back then. So I was, you know, the dreaded pioneer with laying in a field with arrows in my back having done that. So didn't make a lot of money out of that. And my wife, bless her, said it would be great if we had an income. So so I I started working for what is now known as ComQi. At the time, it was called Digital View, and then it became EnQi, and then it became ComQi. And I was a business development person, so I was doing sales and looking around going, how how did a guy who used to interview rock bands become a sales guy for a software company? But I did. I did that, went over to Broadsign because they offered me more money. And then the other... The great recession hit in 2008, 2009, and that was the... That was it for salespeople of that company. Broadsign ran into deep, deep problems problems at that point. They they they totally rose back up like a phoenix on your powerhouse now, but at the time, they were in trouble. So that was 2009, and I decided, okay. Do I wanna work for somebody else or do... Like, what am I gonna do? And I just decided to go out on my own and start just doing writing and some consulting, things like that. But early on with... When I was still with Digital View, I decided just looking at the industry and the level of quote unquote thought leadership that was available at the time wasn't very good. A lot of it was just nonsensical or badly written. I thought, okay. Well, I understand this space at this point. I've been doing it for seven years. I know how to write. So I just... As for the hell of it, I just started '25. And never thinking that this would be something that would define my career, my, like, latter stage career for many, many years and be, like, a full time job and, you know, generate real money. So it just kinda happened.
00:08:46 · Antonia Hamberger, Dave Haynes, Balthasar Mayer
[00:08:46] S2: But we're all glad it took that turn for you, Dave, because I don't think anybody would take you for a good salesperson. I think we're much better off, and you're much better off as an editor and publisher. You would just say the truth and would probably offend a lot of people. [00:09:06] S0: Yeah. That was one of my problems when I was doing business development. If if we lost a deal, if I could understand why the the company... The target company went in a different direction, I was fine with it. And I think to be a really good business development person or quote unquote salesperson, you've you've gotta just wanna... You wanna be a killer. Like, you just wanna win every deal. And it doesn't matter whether you're the right solution, you just wanna win the deal. Yeah. And I've just... My mind doesn't work that way. Yeah. So I probably wasn't best suited to it. Yeah. [00:09:40] S1: So you... Just to make... Just to understand this, you founded Sixteen:Nine two thousand six Yes. And then you went full time on it 2009. [00:09:51] S0: Yes. I wouldn't say by 2009 was full time, but I was, like, doing it every day. Okay. But I... It wasn't necessarily something... It wasn't my main thing. It was just something that I'd been doing, and I kinda kept on doing because I felt so at at that point, I had a following and it felt something of an obligation to do it. I... In the first few years, I would have, like, a Google ad on there and every quarter I would get, like, $37 or something [00:10:17] S1: Oh, good.