Digital Signage in the Cloud?! Part III

        Okay, now you have a basic understanding of cloud computing. So why cloud computing? Why digital signage can benefit from cloud computing?

        Let's start from what an electronic digital signage is capable of doing. I will use an example to illustrate. Let's say that at 9 a.m. you want to show the current weather report next to an advertisement of for the local retailer. But what if you need to manage more than 1,000 displays across multiple time zones? It will be tedious to create, manage, and schedule simple content more than 1,000 times. Given the help of advanced and intelligent digital signage system, you can design your content on a data server for just one time and let the system take care of the rest of the tasks, such as time scheduling for different time zones, language selection and local weather information obtaining.

        In past, to accomplish those works the you need to prepare a standalone data storage and operating server to storage and design the content. You also need to build up stable network connections from the data server to each display around the world. After setting all those up, you then have to spend time and money on maintaining and purchasing equipments, as well as enhancing the security level of your data server to avoid hackers.

Source: http://www.jads.co.uk/digital-signage

        By outsourcing your data server to the cloud computing service provider, you will have more flexibility to manage content from anywhere in which has a stable Internet access. Due to the pay-per-use feature of cloud computing service, you can considerably lower your operating and maintaining costs.

Digital Signage in the Cloud?! Part II

        Since the main topic of this blog is digital signage impact, I will not go too deep into cloud computing. However, in order to let you know how digital signage can be linked to cloud computing, a basic understanding is still necessary. Here is an interesting video for cloud computing 101:

Digital Signage in the Cloud?! Part I

        I am currently working on a project related to cloud computing technology and happened to find this video talking about digital signage SaaS, which prompted me to go further into this topic. 

How digital signage can impact more on industries by utilizing cloud computing technology? Let's talk about it further!

Content Design - Richness and Reach

Digital signage is an effective way to deliver content that is targeted at specific audience. However, without good content, digital signage is just a waste of hardware investment. Strong content can create effective marketing impact on targeted customers, which might change audience behavior, prompt  impulse purchase, enhance brand image, attract potential customers, and create many other benefits to the organization. Thus, how to make strong and effective content is essential.

Regarding the title, "Richness and Reach." I just learned this concept from one of my MBA courses and I feel like it is very suitable for the topic today, digital signage content design. So I just adopt it as the title.

So what is richness and reach? From what I learned in that course, richness is a concept related to the following questions:

- How much of information is transmitted?
- How is it transmitted?
- How is it reached?
- How secure and reliable is it?
- When is it transmitted?
- How relevant is to the receiver(s)?

And reach is the number of people who exchange information.

When talk about information richness, we can also disaggregate it into six elements: Bandwidth, customizability, interactivity, reliability, security, and currency. I would like to go deeper into these six elements to discuss about how to monitor and control the extent of richness and reach.

1. Bandwidth: Because of the capability of dynamic display and almost unlimited storage space(You can install as many hard-drive as you can), digital signage is always considered a media of huge amount content delivery, like TV. However, digital signage users should control the amount of content based on the surroundings and targeted audience.





For example, patient self-service kiosk. The content in this digital signage would only have clinical related information.

However, since the target audience is various. hospitality digital signage can have a variety of content, such as weather broadcast, TV programs, current exchange, event list, map, even Internet browser.







2. Customizability: To a certain extent, the content for digital signage needs to be customized. However, content designer should have a deep understanding of which information is customizable and to what extent the information can be customized, to have maximum outcome.

3. Interactivity: As the invention of touch panel, digital signage has ability to provide interactive content to the audience, enhances the owners' ability to not only broadcast message but also exchange information with audience/users. The owners can receive great value if interactivity is manipulated properly. In spite of the competition of interactive content, non-interactive content is still important when broadcast can create better outcome than interaction.

This digital signage is placed at the entrance of subway. Broadcast is the best way to present the content. It is unlikely to use interactive content here.

In transportation station, such as airport or train station, digital signage can be used to either broadcast or exchange information.

This is a window touch digital signage that used to attract potential customers who want more real estate information but don't wanna be bothered by sales person. With backbone database integration, customers can input their contact information for further details, even after business hours of the stores. Digital signage help stores virtually extend their business hours and reach more potential customer.

4. Reliability: In some cases, the reliability of the content provided in digital signage needs to be reliable. More reliable the information is, more often people would refer to that content, and more people would start using that digital signage. Sometimes, the information needs to be updated instantly in order to get credit.

This digital signage is mounted in the lobby of my school lobby, providing class schedule on a daily basis. I would refer to it to get the information about the room number and time of each course or event as I think the information it provides is accurate always. However, once it provides wrong information and let me go to wrong classroom or miss an event, it will lose my trust and I will become rarely use it afterward.


5. Security: Some kinds of digital signage have been used as a private information entrances. For this kind of digital signage, content designer should put more attention on the security of private information. If the digital signage is connected to Internet or Intranet (private computer network) to access to the personal information database, the infrastructure designer should ensure the info would not be disclosed or hacked. In some sensitive cases, the user interface should provide high screen security and be user-friendly that users can easily access to their private information without being peeped. During the content approval process, authentication management is important as well since the inaccurate or inappropriate content would probably damage the company once it's being displayed.

6. Currency: Given Internet access ability, digital signage solution can provide real-time content for its audience. It makes huge impacts on many industries. For example, hotel can provide real-time currency exchange rate to its clients, airport can update the flight info instantly on digital signage, and so on. Further, most of the errors can be modified and updated instantly since the content is digitalized. Last but not least, the Internet access ability extend the reach of digital content and dramatically facilitate internal message delivery process; therefore, same content can be displayed in each global branch office almost simultaneously.

Digital signage in fast food chains. The headquarter can easily control and monitor the display content in each store.

Digital Signage in Hospitality Industry

Here are some photos I took few days ago when I was visiting Marriott Hotel Harber East (Sorry for my poor shooting skill):

This small digital signage is embedded outside every meeting room in Marriott. When there is a meeting schedule, the signage would display the agenda, the info of the speakers, etc; otherwise, it would display the ads and some activities hold by Marriott itself.

This signage is embedded in a wall near hotel lobby, showing some tourist information, such as weather, local events, hotel activites, etc. It is a pity that it is not a touch panel, otherwise it would be more interactive. As I recall, some hotels even provide digital wayfinder and digital notice board showing the information of the meetings or weddings that are going to be hold today in hotel.

Given the capabilities of dynamic image/video display and Internet information integration, digital signage provides hospitality industry a total premium customer service solution, such as self check-in kiosk, digital billboard, tourist information kiosk, even the digital integrated room-service kiosk, social media display and so on, which can enhance the brand image of the hotel, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduce the costs of paper advertisement, as well as decrease the work load of receptionists.

Here are some other examples:

Resource: http://www.fourwindsinteractive.com/

Here is a youtube video demonstrating the applications of a variety of digital signages in hospitality industry:

How Digital Signage Impacts on Retail Industry

What is the most important and challenging thing for a retailer in terms of increase sales revenue?

My answer is "Increase the time customers shop and the size customers purchase." One strategy commonly used by retailers is "Point-of-Sale(POS) Marketing," known as point of purchase advertising, attracts customers at the point of a purchase and increase impulsive purchases. In other words, POS marketing prompts shoppers to purchase more items and services at checkout and decrease the timeline from promotion to purchase. With the help of digital signage, POS marketing is capable of deliverying more timely content that is dynamic enough to attract the attention of your target customer in store. Further, by integrating with network backbone, retail chains can control the display schedule of each advertisement in each digital signage installed in each store, which would allow stores to efficiently deliver valuable promotion content at the right time and right place. Moreover, by integrating with other technologies, such as bluetooth, RFID, Bar code reader, etc, digital signage can provide various additional services, which can increase customer satisfaction and purchase chance. I am going to give you some examples.

In the upper left side of this photo there is a medium size shelf digital signage platform installed in a Taiwanese retailer, utilized to promote a new flip flop with a certain magic design that can absorb shock, reduce joint strain, improve posture, and even can help you lose weight. To introduce so many appealing features, traditional static signage is not enough. Therefore, this retailer has introduced this new desighed digital signage, which with touch panel, HD display, Internet access, and key button features. Along with built-in flash media player, this digital signage provides a very interactive customer experience and promotion services, which effectively increase the sales volume of this flip flop for the store. The following are some screenshots of the interactive flash media played in the digital signage.

Here is another example:

In the middle of the photo, there is an internet-integrated customer self-service kiosk installed in the entrance of the store, which provides a variety of customer services, such as discount items inquiry, member bonus point inquiry, wayfinder, price inquiry, etc. Instead of waiting in line to find assistiance from information desk, customers can use this self-service kiosk to fulfill their needs, which not only can improve shopping experience of the customers but also can decrease the work load and efficiency of info desk staff.

Instead of providing interactive customer service, digital signage can also be simply used for one-way advertising:



The impact of digital signage technology on retail industry are considerable. However, the key factor of a successful retail digital signage application is "content." No matter how innovative the hardware is, it is not successful if the content fails in attracting people to continuely use it. Therefore, the next post I  will  talk about the content design of digital signage and how it would affect customer behavior.

What is digital signage?

Since it is going to be the first serious post in my digital signage impact blog, I would like to briefly introduce digital signage technology for those of whom first time hear about it.

    

A simple definition of digital signage is:

    "A form of electronic display that shows information, advertising and other messages" - wikipedia

Rather than static signs, digital signage provides users the ability to display dynamic signs, which enables them put much more contents and interactive features into "one" sign. 

The basic digital signage installation can just consist of a LCD, LED or plasma display screen, a media player, and a basic PC as content management server (CMS). To fulfill a complex application, we may choose one or more industrial grade computers as CMS, alone with robust network equipments, such as routers, switches, fiber optic cables. The following picture is an example of complex digital signage network.

Below is also an introduction of digital signage I found on Youtube: