Sixteen:Nine: The Digital Signage Blog

POPAI released a report today that adds some calm, measured thoughts and recommendations around the issue of technology that can count and potentially track people as they shop or go about their day in public, particularly as it relates to biometrics-based audience counting software and cameras.

Called Best Practices: Recommended Code of Conduct for Consumer Tracking Research, the report is the result of a lot of work put in by Wirespring's Bill Gerba and other volunteer members of POPAI'a digital signage advocacy group, as well as the larger community. That led to deeper work, draft guidelines, and reviews that went to the POPAI board and government in the US. The end result was a set of guidelines now released.

Says Gerba:  In general, we tried to focus on the four or five things most likely to get you in trouble with your local, state or federal government, your customers, or both. If you are planning to collect, store, process or use any kind of surveillance-like data gathering ..

Bill has a post up on his always excellent blog about the history of the research and guidelines, and his point of view.

My personal feeling is little that is being done by audience tracking vendors or retailers would elicit more than a shrug from shoppers, unless they were being wound up and poked at by reporters looking to generate some alarm or manufactured indignity. However, I thoroughly agree guidelines make sense and the industry owes Gerba and the others who put the work in their considerable gratitude.

It is refreshing to see something clear, measured and free of the ludicrous, loaded reports like that of the World Privacy Forum, which manage to equate using Tru-Media or CognoVision to count shoppers and viewers as a privacy Chernobyl.

If you want to really talk about privacy, you ought to be thinking and fretting much more about what you search for every day on Google and what you are doing when you are out and about with your smart phone and checking in with geo-location services. That stuff isn't generally tracking people. It's tracking you, and the stuff does get stored.

Not my area of knowledge, but my guess is that there's a lot more there to fret about than cameras that count how many faces look at screens in shops, and for how long. But it's a much easier thing to fret about than the massive complexities of what's happening with Web technologies.

The entry of big companies like HP, NCR and Intel into the sector gets a lot of attention, but there are some other companies more quietly making some moves that are really interesting.

Consider Creative Realities, also known as CRI.

The New Jersey-based "experiential branding and marketing firm" has been active in the sector for a while now, in a range of areas that includes designing retail experiences and handling project management and rollout.

The company came on the radar for me when its investors acquired the digital signage side of CoolSign and brought Lou Giacalone back on board. CRI and CoolSign are in the same "family" so to speak.

Then CRI hired on Laura Davis-Taylor, one of the better known advertising and retail experts in the sector.

Now CRI has acquired DOOHit Digital, the Atlanta-based content solutions shop founded by Davis-Taylor and business partner Lisa Katz.

Reports Digital Signage Universe:

DOOHit Digital, founded by Katz and industry veteran Laura Davis-Taylor, produces digital content for the web, mobile applications, in-store signage, interactive kiosks, and digital storefronts. The company creates what it calls "creative with accountability," meaning all content is tracked and optimized to ensure it achieves targeted business results.

"Creative content greatly enhances the brand experience, but it has to be relevant from a business and customer experience standpoint," says Creative Realities' Founder and CEO, Jason Friedman. "We are excited to have digital and in-store experts, Lisa and Steve, join our team. And, we are excited that the acquisition further expands our creative and digital content offerings for clients."

Before forming DOOHit Digital, Katz and Steve Brooks spent 15 combined years working for the Atlanta-based interactive agency, MaxMedia Design. There, Katz was a VP of Business Development, serving clients such as AT&T, NCR, and Siemens. "Throughout my career, I have always championed my clients and done whatever I could to serve them," says Katz. "By joining Creative Realities, I will be able to offer clients more infrastructure, services, and possibilities to further develop brand activations in this exciting media space." 

Katz will serve as VP of Business Development, and Brooks will become Director of Digital Design. I met them in NYC, along with Davis-Taylor, last fall. Nice, smart people, and I'd been wondering why the DOOHit website never got beyond a placeholder page. It's alllll making sense now. 

Scala announced at ISE today that it now has its own version of an simplified software solution for small digital signage networks. Anyone left who doesn't???

Well, yes, but man there are a lot of them now. Off the top of my head:

Nanonation, Wirespring, BroadSign, EK3, and Scala (there are others, but that would involve thinking) that join platforms that started as easy and are sold that way, like RedPost, ScreenScape, SceneStudio, BrightSign and probably several others who started with a simple proposition and don't do industrial strength work. Then there are all the guys with more sophisticated stuff that isn't too terribly hard to learn.

So ... coming to the market with something that's easy out of the box is hardly compelling, the one difference with Scala being they have a PILE of resellers who have undoubtedly been asking for this ... and maybe this will keep them looking elsewhere.

Says the release: 

Scala, a provider of end-to-end software solutions for digital signage and advertising management, has announced Scala QuickStart at Integrated Systems Europe 2010. Built on the basis of Scala’s SaaS offering, Scala QuickStart provides Scala digital signage software for companies seeking a solution for a few single-channel media players.

Targeted for end-users who want an easily managed digital signage network with minimal setup time, Scala QuickStart is designed for corporate reception areas, educational institutions, independent retailers and many other users who do not want to be concerned with complex network management, without compromising on content quality and delivery reliability.

Scala QuickStart supports the following features:

• Simple, straightforward graphics user interface

• Scheduling of content to single output player device

• All major Scala supported content types; including video, images, Flash, interactive content and Scala scripts

• RSS, metadata and message templates

• User levels and concurrent multi-user support

• Landscape and portrait orientation

• Multi-language support

“Scala QuickStart delivers best in class digital signage with great looking digital content to customers with limited marketing resources and budgets” said Robert Koolen, president of Scala. “Scala QuickStart is designed to empower organizations around the world through the benefits of digital signage by providing an easy-to-use interface, a number of ready-to-use templates, as well as a portal where users can obtain high-quality content.”

I've known Ryan Cruise for a few years and seen him run into a speed bump here and there in his plans to aggressively build out a health media network in Canada and internationally. But he now has the backing, plans, partners and agreements in place to double the footprint of his medical waiting room DOOH footprint in Canada this year.

Anyone who follows the DOOH industry has cause for skepticism when operators announce big expansions, but Cruise was pretty careful about putting this out there. I know because <insert disclaimer here> I wrote the release and it was held up until the felt comfy to put it out there. Lord knows we've all seen and heard stuff from people who were going to do 1,000s of sites and still haven't got into double figures.

The release's details:  

The Mommentum Health Network (MHN), owned and operated by Toronto-based Cruise Media Group, plans to have patient education and information systems in place in some 400 physician office waiting areas by the end of 2010, covering Canada's largest markets and connecting with more than 2,000,000 health conscious consumers every month.

MHN's digital out of home network installed base is now heavily focused on Montreal and the Greater Toronto Area, but expansion will open up and grow new markets in Vancouver, Calgary and Winnipeg, creating a national footprint attractive to key advertising accounts. 

MHN flat-panel video information systems are provided free of charge to qualified medical clinic operators, offering credible health and wellness programming - such as nutrition tips, disease awareness and prevention, and women's health issues - that entertains, educates and engages waiting room audiences. Clinic operators also get tools that let them run location-specific messages, such as office hours and special clinic notices. The MHN system offers the combined benefits of improving patient communications and education efforts, reducing perceived waiting times, and enhancing the overall patient experience.

MHN's program is supported by advertisers, attracted by the opportunity to communicate directly with Canadians when they are focused on personal and family health. MHN's smart media distribution technology allows for granular targeting of advertising and promotion campaigns - from network-wide national programs to local and hyper-local ad clusters that enable health services companies, such as physiotherapists, to market only to patients visiting clinics in the same general geographic area.

"We've been operating for three years now, and we've learned so much about the needs of both our clinic partners, and the brands and service companies who really get the media opportunity that we can offer, " says Ryan Cruise, President and CEO of Cruise Media Group. "Getting national coverage is really important to our plans, and the pieces are now in place to do that." 

Getting to 400 and multiple markets makes the network more interesting to media planners, but Cruise says where there is really encouraging activity is in hyper-local sales and tapping into non-traditional advertisers like medical services. Medical is also an area that has its own challenges, but on balance, is one of the best DOOH environments because of the venue dynamics and the ad budgets available.

Good to read of a network that is growing and appears to be thriving.