Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
00:22:01 · Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[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. [00:22:08] S0: Well, mean, I primarily write about the North American market and that's the people who are coming to me with news and advice and everything else and I never hear anybody talking about that. The only time that I'll get a discussion around green signage will be in the area of energy costs, and that starts to raise some eyebrows. They don't... They're not concerned about saving the planet or anything else, but they're starting to understand that, yeah, their energy bill is kinda high. So if we did this thing and if we were able to bring it down by 30% or something, then they're interested. [00:22:43] S1: Relevant. Yeah. [00:22:44] S0: Yeah. But that's it. [00:22:45] S1: Good. We have to look at the time. Next one, where are the innovations?
00:22:45 · Florian Rotberg, Stefan Schieker
[00:22:45] S1: Good. We have to look at the time. Next one, where are the innovations? [00:22:49] S2: And we're not saying that this industry is not innovating, but it's a lot of pull innovation. So you're listening to your customers, and that's a good thing. But you're probably not listening close enough because what we see is that it's a lot of evolution. It's a lot of things being developed in customer projects. So custom... Developed for customers because they are used. But in other industries where they are more product driven, There are really companies trying to push the limits, and that's... We see too little of this. We see too little really step... Taking a step back from all your your customer projects, cutting across what you're hearing is like really listening to what's being said, not the words that are being said, but what's underlying this need. And then start to develop towards that need and not just on developing, okay, the customer asked for feature X, Y, Z, and we're gonna do that now and we're gonna do that prettier and a bit better, but really listen to the fundamental needs of the... That that the companies are voicing. It's it's like we want... We don't want to go through the hassle of online and digital signage and all of these things. But is there really... And do we see real innovation there from industry? That's something we struggle with. We'd like to see more kind of like, okay, we thought about this and we took a totally different approach to it, and that's how we would solve it.
00:24:28 · Dave Haynes, Stefan Schieker
[00:24:28] S0: To be fair, I mean, we're putting stuff on screens in an order and targeting them to specific screens and all that. I mean, there's a limit to how much innovation you can do on that. And I have a lot of time for companies that are always looking around the corner at what they can bolt on, what's emerging in other industries that they could apply to it. I think that's good, but how revamp do whole way this is done? [00:24:54] S2: There are some things that are generally accepted across the industry and one of them we all accept that we're using the operating system that sits on screen that comes from a manufacturer. Why doesn't anyone question that? Why don't you say, okay, we throw [00:25:10] S0: away I'll give you a name of somebody who questions it every day. Know that example. It's in Dayton, Ohio. [00:25:17] S2: I know somebody in Switzerland who does the same thing. It's raising these kinds of questions because if it's so hard to run mixed fleets of hardware, it's, can I take control? And it's companies like SignageOS looking at this problem and say, okay, then if nobody else solves it, we go ahead and solve it. And that's this kind of innovation that I'm thinking of. [00:25:44] S0: Fair enough.
00:25:44 · Dave Haynes, Stefan Schieker
[00:25:44] S0: Fair enough. [00:25:45] S2: Last but not least, disruption risk. I mean, it's basically summing up many of this. Be careful. There are companies taking new approaches. There are companies you don't have on your radar who are not here in this room today, most probably, but they are looking at this and say, it's okay, we're putting up pictures on this place. What's so hard about it? And there must be a clever way how we can do it. So it's really... If we don't move as an industry, if we don't innovate, if we don't do our homework in terms of all the topics that we discussed around green signage, about doing better, breaking up those silos. Somebody might be coming in and saying, well, might as well industry. We do things differently. [00:26:40] S0: Yeah. I often say that it's very difficult for a software company that let's say does digital signage in the QSR market. It would be extremely difficult for them to write a point of sale system like a credible one and compete with NCR and all those kinds of companies. But for the NCR's and all those kinds of companies to write a rudimentary digital science platform that puts a digital menu board display up pretty darn easy for them and we can all sit here and say yeah but it's garbage or it really doesn't do very much. Customer doesn't know that probably doesn't care if it's part of the overall software suite. They'll take it even if they just take it for three years and realize oh that was a bad mistake. But by that time, the company who had that deal before might be gone.
00:26:40 · Dave Haynes, Stefan Schieker, Florian Rotberg
[00:26:40] S0: Yeah. I often say that it's very difficult for a software company that let's say does digital signage in the QSR market. It would be extremely difficult for them to write a point of sale system like a credible one and compete with NCR and all those kinds of companies. But for the NCR's and all those kinds of companies to write a rudimentary digital science platform that puts a digital menu board display up pretty darn easy for them and we can all sit here and say yeah but it's garbage or it really doesn't do very much. Customer doesn't know that probably doesn't care if it's part of the overall software suite. They'll take it even if they just take it for three years and realize oh that was a bad mistake. But by that time, the company who had that deal before might be gone. [00:27:32] S2: And it's probably the one thing that saved this industry from big disruption so far. It's still too small. Because I mean big companies looking at it, it's like, well, yes, it's a couple of billion, nice little industry, but for us really to bother, mean, go and ask Adobe, go and ask Google looking at this industry, whether they think it's a big enough industry to bother. [00:27:56] S0: I think the Google thing is interesting because when Google first got into this in like 2013, 2014, something like that. [00:28:03] S1: It was a disaster by the way.
00:28:03 · Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[00:28:03] S1: It was a disaster by the way. [00:28:04] S0: Yeah, they had Sign Builder, which is extremely rudimentary play out application and they had the wrong attitude and everything else and they backed out of it, but now they're back into it and they're very, very credible and they found their lane. [00:28:18] S1: But the industry isn't too small. You just have to look at all the great reports we love from India, right? We forgot to put this on our chart. We love it, you know. And it seems to be, you know, you more research, you know, if the numbers are higher, right? I mean, and every time and you get it, we get it every week and we get like some Indian research institute says, Oh, the digital signage market is 50,000,000,000, it's 100,000,000,000, whatever. And then people ask us, Should I buy this research? Oh, please not. [00:28:45] S0: My favorite thing with that, with the Indian research factories is I will drill down and I will find their address of their office and then I'll go on Google Street maps and then get the street view. It's absolutely hysterical. Some of these places it's like a shack on a road or whatever or if they have a US office it's in like a strip mall or something like that. You see a report from India, if you see a report from some company you've never heard of, consider it to be garbage. Produce reports on everything on condoms, on silicone sealants and everything else one after another and they purport to be experts in digital signage, they're not.