BroadSign Forms Consortium To Chase In-Retail Software And Ad Opportunities

September 21, 2021 by Dave Haynes

Something of a consortium of familiar vendors and service providers in the digital signage sector have linked up to go after the retail market with a model that could include monetization through third-party and endemic advertising.
Broadsign has announced what it calls a “joint effort” with visual solutions company Gable, managed network services and solutions provider SageNet, and PC maker Seneca (part of Arrow Electronics) to provide an end-to-end in-store digital marketing platform for multi-brand retailers.

Says the PR:

The combination of Broadsign’s OOH marketing technology with Gable’s visual communications, SageNet’s digital signage expertise, and Seneca’s displays and media players, provides a comprehensive offering to help retailers improve the shopper experience and unlock new revenue from omnichannel advertisers eager to extend audience messaging to the point of purchase.

Retailers can harness the solution’s robust toolset to automate the delivery of tailored messaging across in-store displays, extend omnichannel messages into the store, and use customer loyalty and other data to inform contextual storytelling that influences consumer purchases. Localized content and stock-level triggering are supported, as well as personalization on a per-screen basis to serve ads at the point of sale. Integrated programmatic advertising technology opens up new monetization opportunities by making in-store display inventory easily accessible to brands and CPG companies via a broad range of supported global demand-side platforms (DSPs).

The custom solution involves:

• The complete Broadsign OOH marketing platform – including the Broadsign Control CMS, Broadsign Direct sales tool, and Broadsign Reach supply-side-platform (SSP);
• Design, fabrication, and project management by Gable Services;
• SageNet’s SageVIEW for design, deployment, connectivity, content management, 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, and support;
• Seneca’s displays and media players.

“Retailers often have untapped in-store space that’s prime for digital displays and access to customer data that can be used to make the shopping experience more dynamic. At the same time, in-store marketing networks have become increasingly attractive to brands looking to extend omnichannel messaging to the point of purchase,” says Karim Kanji, the Broadsign Sales Director driving the initiative. “We’ve teamed with Gable, SageNet, and Seneca to deliver an in-store marketing platform that’s easy to deploy and manage. Retailers can use it to drive more innovative shopping experiences and new revenue, while brands can take advantage of in-store display inventory to reach their core audiences.”

“Retail brands today are constantly looking for ways to create a seamless integration of digital during the purchase process in the aisle. Together, Broadsign, Seneca, and Gable create a sustainable and maintainable solution while allowing retailers and brands to focus on the outcome, not on the individual pieces or how to support the technology,” says IV Dickson, VP of Digital Experience for SageNet. “Brands want and need to focus on their business objectives, and this ecosystem provides them with a deployment-ready arrow in their quiver, to create immediate value for the end customer.”

The Gable and SageNet guys will execute and Seneca will supply, but this is interesting mainly from the lens of Broadsign, which has been heavily focused and very successful at building up a footprint for its CMS and ad technologies among media companies of all shapes and stripes. The company has always had some clients in non-ad sectors, but there is a lot about Broadsign’s approach that would seem foreign to retailers who just want to sell their own stuff and communicate with shoppers.

It’s the monetization model that may be attractive to companies like mass merchandise retailers who see the opportunity to do cost recovery on their screen networks by allowing place-based third party ads, or who might want to support brands that are endemic to their store – like a furniture warehouse running ads for appliance manufacturers who have product sold there. This is the path Dallas-based Reflect went down a few years ago with its Ad Logic software. The CMS company does not do ad networks, but has software that is all about endemic advertising in retail.