ISE 2024 Sixteen:Nine Mixer Sponsor Profile: Meet The Dynamic Content People At Screenfeed

Q: Can you summarize what Screenfeed does and the main markets it serves?

We like to say we are the dynamic content people. We have been building dynamic digital signage content driven by data since 2007 and we’ve built several services and capabilities we make available to anyone in the industry, regardless of their hardware or software. We just do content and believe we can offer any dynamic content a customer needs. We serve as a tool in the toolbox of software companies, AV/Tech integrators, and end users.

Q: Your company is based in the U.S., but you have had an office for a while now in Amsterdam. Was having a footprint in Europe important to developing business in the region?

Before COVID, we established a business entity and office in Amsterdam to service our existing customers and expand our sales in Europe. We had a sales director lined up with an offer 3 days before COVID locked down, so we’ve had to that on pause. We are seeking a European sales director again so anyone interested should reach out.

Q: You recently added new data-driven content capabilities alongside your standard subscription content offers. How does that work and what has been the response from customers?

Thank you for asking. The service is called Screenfeed Connect and its entire purpose is to make content projects that are driven by data and logic much easier and thus cost-effective.

In the past, we have served our customers who wanted to display custom designs driven by their data such as sales, schedules, KPIs or employee or customer-submitted content with custom projects that took 4-6 weeks and lots of money. Many times customers would just decide not to do it. So we built Connect to allow us, or our customers to quickly connect to their data source and get a dynamically driven HTML content app running within minutes or a couple hours.

Use cases are displaying employee schedules, leaderboards, calendars, menu boards, directories, progress toward a goal, etc.  Anything they dream up as it allows them to build their own purpose.

What makes it cost-effective is we have ready-made connections to REST APIs, Calendars, Google Sheets, Excel, Sharepoint, JSON, CSV files and many others. Projects that used to take us three weeks with a designer and HTML developer now can be done by lunch. Seriously.

Q: What key trends are you seeing in the marketplace? Is content usage evolving?

I see customers getting smarter and more and more wanting things taken care of for them after they cast a vision. We’ve responded by adding content services where customers can simply share their needs and we’ll respond with a combination of our infotainment feeds, creating their Connect content app for them, and sometimes adding some additional custom content so that we can just take care of everything they need. They find it very convenient and since we’ve been doing this for so long they know they are getting smart content solutions.

Q: You have research that makes a direct connection between the use of subscription content, like news, and the retention of adjacent advertising and other messages. Can you go into a little detail about that?

I can share that in a third-party study run by one of the largest banks in America polled viewers on recall. They found that viewers reported that the most recalled content in the playlist was the weather graphics we provided. More importantly, the bank message that played directly after the weather was recalled at a 40% higher rate than any other bank marketing content in the playlist.

What this validated for our client was that showing the weather was much more valuable than simply informing their customers. It attracted attention to their screen (which makes it more valuable) and it then helped them amplify their marketing messages to their customers.

Too many people think news and weather are just there to fill time on playlists. I admit that many of our customers do subscribe just to keep their screens fresh – but there are more and more who understand that giving viewers something they are interested in helps the ROI, in several cases by driving more viewership – which makes all the investment in hardware and service more valuable to their company.

Q: Are there any other new products on the way?

Yes.

A major upgrade to our Social Media offering was launched in December 2023. New designs and functionality, plus Microsoft Teams as a brand-new platform offering, are now available. We are working on roadmaps for Linkedin, TikTok and Slack, in addition to the Instagram, Facebook and X (Twitter) content we already offer.

Transit was also launched through Screenfeed’s Connect platform, allowing folks to show arrival and departure schedules such for trams, light rails, busses, overground/underground trains, ferries, arrivals, departures, etc.

We are launching Content Services. With this service, a customer can ask us: “Can you just take care of all our content?” And we will! The service would provide a project manager, access to all of Screenfeed’s infotainment content, unlimited Connect apps designed and created by our team – as well as a set amount of custom content. We’ve been running this already with select clients and they love it!  We enjoy being closer to the final solution and our customers find our pricing better than they would pay agencies.

Conditions have also been added as a powerful new feature to Connect. Our customers can create simple or complex triggers to manipulate content on the screen based on data, time, day, weather or player variables.

Q: What do you see as the main reason to be at ISE?

We want to learn more about the needs of our European partners and meet new ones. We feel Europe is a strong area for growth for us.