Worst digital signage demo … ever

May 24, 2010 by Dave Haynes

So I saw a Tweet about a company I knew, and it led me to a copy/paste “news” portal that had an excerpt, which exposed me to a big button that urged me to “Try our Digital Signage software now …”

So I did.

Guys, if you harbor even the faintest of hopes that your thing is going to go for you, in a market which has firms with REALLY good platforms and demos struggling to close deals, at least have a set of demos that don’t look like they were put together by a seven-year-old. This one (above) wasn’t even the worst.

Fonts too small. Wrong fonts. Lorem ipsum placeholder text. Scrolling and crawling text. Acres of wasted space. CPU usage that was pushing 90 per cent on undoubtedly crash-happy Flash elements. And on and on.

There is a pile, repeat PILE, of good information out there about the basics of screen presentation and content strategy. And that little thing called Basic Common Sense. Demos are supposed to make people want to know more, not mutter “WTF???”

And this is coming from people who steadily read and report about the industry.

No need to shame people here and name names, but oh man this was/is breathtakingly bad stuff.

  1. Adrian Weidmann, founder of StoreStream Metrics and a Digital Signage Expo advisory board member, just emailed me a comment relevant to your post. “Why, he asked, do people just getting into DOOH stumble into the same pitfalls?” Especially when there’s a body of knowledge out there that could help them avoid the no-nos, such as the content presentation you show above. And then, of course, people wonder why the medium doesn’t work.

  2. Dave Haynes says:

    The irony here is the people promoting this solution are by no means new to the industry. You see these mistakes all the time with total newbies, but these guys really, really, really should know.

  3. What a disaster—almost an example of what not to do.

    And poor Toyota, can’t get a break at all these days!

  4. Anon says:

    Maybe they’re hipsters and they did it to be ironic.

  5. This is a good post on what not to do for a digital signage ad. They may have well used a poster and given people about 10 mins to read it. I wonder if they heard of the 3 second rule.

  6. Gabe says:

    We are a company that is currently seeing many of these type of demos out there as we are getting ready to launch a network of digital signs… this type of content makes me think of when the internet was first launched. Can anyone recommend some great solutions for what to look at for finding professional quality digital signage solutions that are affordable (our market/audience is smaller than most other larger locations) and easy to use. Thanks

  7. Sean Milstead says:

    ‘@Gabe – There are a whole host of options available that focus on the market you describe. However, one question that I’m sure many would ask would be what does “affordable” mean to you, both in terms of bottom line price and long term value? There are many freeware and very low-cost options available in the marketplace, but they may be lacking in the specific feature sets that you need for your deployments.

    And yes, sadly, the digital signage industry often reminds me too of the early days of the mass-market Internet. Perhaps someone needs to do a digital signage version of the classic http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/?

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