Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
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.
00:10:17 · Balthasar Mayer, Dave Haynes, Antonia Hamberger
[00:10:17] S1: Oh, good. [00:10:18] S0: From Google ads. But then I started getting questions saying, hey, can we advertise on this? And so I would just get inbound and that just built up and built up to... You know, it took a while, but I... It it was all kind of inbound as opposed to me shaking trees. It took a while and it was like making real money and it was something that would, you know, be a proper income for me, at which point I was able to kinda back off doing much in the way of consulting or writing for hire and just mostly do Sixteen:Nine. [00:10:49] S2: Yeah, well cool. So for somebody who's been in the industry only a few years, I'm wondering what was the industry like when you first came into it and and what did you hope to contribute? [00:11:03] S0: It was very embryonic. Few people understood it. I I... When people would ask what I did, would tell them digital signage and they would just give me the, you know, the sort of tilted head. [00:11:16] S2: Well, I I still have to explain it on a weekly basis to people outside the industry, so I can imagine about fifteen years ago.
00:11:24 · Dave Haynes, Antonia Hamberger
[00:11:24] S0: But there's so many more reference cases cases now, whereas before you would have to say, might be in a store and you might see this now, it's like everywhere. So I just say, you know, the digital menus you see in any quick service restaurant, that's digital signage. You know, ad posters that you see on sidewalks, that's digital our home slash digital signage. Okay, I I get it. So in those days, it was very expensive. Few people understood it. There were far fewer vendors. A lot of the companies that were providing software in particular were companies that had, a lot of cases, adapted that software from other purposes like broadcast and, you know, turned that into something that would also work on as as sometimes described as narrowcast, just like narrowly defined network as opposed to something sent out everywhere. So, yeah, it was in those days not well known, not well understood, and I just felt that the writing that was available back in 2006 was a lot of buzzword bingo stuff, you know, crossing the chasm, shift, all these nonsense phrases out of business books. And I just thought, you know, somebody's just gotta, you know, write something that says, here's this thing, here's why they're doing it, here's what's good about it, here's what's I think problematic and and how it could be done better. So I... It was a little bit of my... I don't wanna say bully pulpit, but it was a way to kind of express my advice without being mean or anything else. [00:13:01] S2: Yeah. And were there any trends you predicted really early on that then became true or didn't?
00:13:08 · Dave Haynes, Antonia Hamberger
[00:13:08] S0: Oh, I saw everything. I don't know. I would say more than anything else just that you could see that whereas in the early stages it was something that was nice to do. I clearly saw that this was going to be something that was a need to do for a company. It was gonna be mission critical. It was just gonna be fundamental to how retailers and other businesses, when they designed a space, in the same way that they're thinking about their furnishings, thinking about their lighting, their HVAC system, everything else, they're gonna start thinking about, okay, where does the digital fit? And in the early days, was build a space and then look look for empty space on a wall. Okay. We'll put the screens there. Even though in a lot of cases, it wasn't the appropriate place to put it. I'd say the other thing was pretty obvious, and I started writing about this in, two thousand eleven ish, I don't know when, but I could see LED was gonna come and come hard and and start to supplant flat panel displays just because of all the benefits and the flexibility that it had. So I invested a lot of time in Pershoeka in the last few years. I've gone to Taiwan and China and everything else to visit factories and really fully understand what it is as opposed to just writing about it and taking what the manufacturers are saying because manufacturers, as is their way, their marketing people tend to fudge the facts and click pretty fast and loose with what something is versus what it really is. [00:14:44] S2: Well, in a lot of cases, they don't even know what it really is.