Publicis Sapient Integrates Its Digital In-Venue – Also Known As Digital Signage – With BrightSign

December 2, 2020 by Dave Haynes

One of the larger media companies on the planet – Publicis Groupe – has started making marketplace noise about what it calls its digital in-venue platform, which is another way of saying its digital signage platform.

The digital business transformation side of Publicis Groupe – called Publicis Sapient – announces a tie-up that sees its Premise platform running on a couple of series of BrightSign’s little purple media play-out boxes.

Premise is described as “Publicis Sapient’s fully adaptable, in-venue experience enablement platform, delivering digital signage management capabilities with real-time analytics and A/B testing capabilities.”

Digital signage is not entirely new to Publicis. I can recall seeing projects emanating from Sapient Nitro going back 8-10 years, perhaps longer.

The company says as much:

For more than a decade, Premise has been enabling data-driven, immersive experiences on digital menu boards, self-service kiosks and endless aisle applications – helping organizations of all sizes deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time, every time.

“The brilliance of Premise lies in its flexibility to deliver data-driven, contextual and personalized customer experiences in real time,” says Jackie Walker, Capability Lead for Premise at Publicis Sapient. “To deliver these experiences seamlessly, we need the very best hardware. Optimizing our ecosystem on BrightSign’s media players ensures a high-quality customer experience and reliable, real-time content delivery.”

The integration puts a big focus on real-time data and data integration, which is smart and mindful of what makes content easily changed and consistently relevant.

Real-time data integration is a key element of how businesses such as quick-serve restaurants, hotels and retailers deliver personalized customer experiences. The Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated this requirement as businesses adapt to consumer behavioral changes and increased digital adoption. Premise uniquely addresses these needs, providing tools to build intelligence into every aspect of the in-venue customer experience. BrightSign’s media players simplify the distribution of content to various endpoints to ensure businesses deliver personalized customer experiences in real time.

“Premise sets a new standard for how businesses can synthesize data to enrich the customer experience,” says Jeff Hastings, CEO of BrightSign. “We’re pleased to cement our partnership with Publicis Sapient even further as the preferred media player provider for the Premise platform.”

BrightSign separately, but in the same PR, notes how it has also done a tie-up with  Global Display Solutions (GDS) for indoor and outdoor LCD screens, that sees its boxes and management software ready to be used things like drive-thru menu boards.

The Publicis thing is quite interesting. It’s another sign of a very large company – Publicis Sapient alone has 20,000 people – getting active in signage to a level that they have a product and business partnerships. Some of the large management consulting companies – like the Accentures, Cap Geminis and Deloittes –  also have tie-ups with CMS software firms.

Seeing very large companies getting involved in this sector is not entirely new, and we’ve seen everyone from Google, Cisco and HP to big telecoms coming in and then easing their way out because it is too small a business for them, and not a focus. But there are other companies that are sticking with it – from Adobe to Hughes.

The challenge for an agency-driven platform, coming out of the one of the big media holding companies, is price and complexity. The agency model for any kind of work usually involves dollar signs followed by a whole bunch of zeroes, so the pool of users/clients may be quite finite. Then again, let’s assume Publicis is more interested in multinational corporations than regional dry cleaning chains, and the big banks and brands are perhaps conditioned to agency budgets and agency workings.