Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
00:15:49 · Dave Haynes, Stefan Schieker
[00:15:49] S0: I I won't say the name of the company, but I I I... Well, no. It's actually a good thing. This is a company that only started in, like, 2014, something like that. And I know the CEO and he called me about three four years into his operations and said just want to kind of walk this by. I'm tearing up the platform that we wrote and we're starting over. I And said why are you doing that? And he said well we want to use the most modern tools. We want to stay current. We can see where things are going and we want to be ahead of it as opposed to reactive. And that company has done that twice now. They've completely re architected their platform twice to stay current. That's the only company that I know of that does that. There are some other ones that are you know quite modern and they stay on top of things and use the tool sets that are available, but there's so many of them that are just on version 7.2.1.B, it's just on and on and on. And some of them are working off a platform, not really a platform, but software stack that started in the nineties. [00:17:00] S2: Yeah, of course. Yeah. It still works. That's the reason. Somehow it still works. [00:17:06] S0: You can wear the hammer, it'll work. [00:17:09] S2: So next one is silos everywhere. It's the silo industry, right? What kind of silos do we see? [00:17:18] S0: I'll let you take that one, Florian.
00:17:18 · Dave Haynes, Florian Rotberg
[00:17:18] S0: I'll let you take that one, Florian. [00:17:20] S1: Oh, we see tech silos, we take mindset silos. It's so frustrating. I did a presentation in front of end users last week in UK and they were like 30 or 50, 50 I think more, universities and big corporations. And they were exactly reflecting what their integrators told them for the past twenty years, you know. Oh, you know, we cannot connect it and we prefer our silos and we don't have to update it and everything. It's just unbelievable in the year 2024, you know, universities in UK, big corporations are still thinking in silos and this is just unacceptable I think.
00:17:20 · Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[00:17:20] S1: Oh, we see tech silos, we take mindset silos. It's so frustrating. I did a presentation in front of end users last week in UK and they were like 30 or 50, 50 I think more, universities and big corporations. And they were exactly reflecting what their integrators told them for the past twenty years, you know. Oh, you know, we cannot connect it and we prefer our silos and we don't have to update it and everything. It's just unbelievable in the year 2024, you know, universities in UK, big corporations are still thinking in silos and this is just unacceptable I think. [00:17:56] S0: One encouraging thing though, in the early days of digital signage, would have... When I was on the vendor side, I would have marketers come to me and say we would like to put something in stores for six weeks and I'd say okay great we can do that and these are the displays you use this is the software and so on and they'd say yeah can we rent it because we only want it for those six weeks and I would say You're a big ass consumer packaged goods brand with all kinds of different products. Why don't you share this around all of them? And they said, We are so siloed. We don't even talk to those people. And I had a conversation recently where this company was saying, Yeah, that's broken down. We're actually doing that. We're taking technology and this company's particular for in store retail media using it for those six or eight weeks and then it's going to be used by a beauty product that's in the same company. So at least that silo is broken down, which I think is intriguing.
00:18:55 · Stefan Schieker, Dave Haynes
[00:18:55] S2: And just coming off of a panel talking about standards in visual designer software, and that became so apparent. It's like there's a hardware silo and even between the different hardware manufacturers all operating on their own or creating their own operating systems or branches of operating systems. Then you go from there, you go to the software CMS silos, you go to the RDM, so remote device management silos. Those guys are not talking to the content guys within the same integrated company. So we still thinking a lot in separate entities and even within companies and different tasks and different, yeah, things to do, ways to do things. So it really goes all the way across and where it hurts a lot is the whole thing of sustainability, There things need to play together. So if a hardware manufacturer offers something, a software company has to support that feature in their software and the integrator and the customer have to actually use it when turning off the screen again. [00:20:14] S0: Yeah, earlier today you talked a little bit about solutions and how important that is and it's something I say to a lot of companies on the software side is, guys, you need to start to develop a solution stack. You can't just be the software part of this thing because the larger companies in particular don't want to buy your thing and have a separate login to do your stuff. It's got to be part of a larger picture and you get out of that silo.
00:20:14 · Dave Haynes, Stefan Schieker
[00:20:14] S0: Yeah, earlier today you talked a little bit about solutions and how important that is and it's something I say to a lot of companies on the software side is, guys, you need to start to develop a solution stack. You can't just be the software part of this thing because the larger companies in particular don't want to buy your thing and have a separate login to do your stuff. It's got to be part of a larger picture and you get out of that silo. [00:20:42] S2: That's again silo and it's not only within the industry, it's also this industry has created high walls. It's online, offline integration. How hard is it to run the same campaign on a mobile device and on a digital sign in screen? It's incredibly hard still. And does it really have to be that way? [00:21:02] S0: Hence the idea of platforms, right? [00:21:04] S2: So no love for green signage, Florian, that's yours.
00:21:04 · Stefan Schieker, Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[00:21:04] S2: So no love for green signage, Florian, that's yours. [00:21:07] S1: Yeah, it's my topic. You know that I told you already this morning, it was so frustrating at ISE. Like last year, everyone was showcasing their green sludge product, you know, lower energy consumption and recycled materials. And this year, there was almost nothing there. And people were hiding it. Last year was on Vogue, you know, everyone was proud of it. And this year many people said, oh, we are developing something, we have nothing to show and I think it's not acceptable. We have to... It's here to stay and especially in Europe, very different to North America by the way. But even at InfoComm and even now, as I said, I returned from InfoComm China, even there, you saw the first product with the green label on it or so. So there's rising awareness around the world, but we need to lead it. We here in Europe need to lead the market because if we don't do it, nobody else does it and that's really important. [00:21:55] S0: Wait till you go to InfoComm in Las Vegas. You'll walk around, you won't see a mention of it. [00:22:01] S1: Yeah, this year InfoComm will be anyway very difficult because it's two separate halls, far away. It will be a disaster, but it's a different story. Yeah, that's true, yeah.