MADRID, Spain — John Ryan convened a panel of retail and digital signage gurus Monday for a discussion on the future of digital signage in banking.

The webinar, titled "Digital Signage in Retail Financial Services: What John Ryan’s European Survey Means for Your Bank," featured Paco Underhill, Envirosell founder and CEO, and best-selling author of "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping," Mike Hiatt, former director of Wal-Mart's "SMART" digital media network, and Bob Steele, vice chairman of John Ryan.

Each presenter offered ideas for how banks could be successful in adopting digital signage within the bank environment.

Bob Steele kicked off the event by recapping the results of John Ryan's survey of 64 European and South African banks, which found that although adoption of digital signage is skyrocketing, banks are having difficulty exploiting the medium. Limitations in software and difficulties in generating content have hindered banks from being able to "localize" content to the extent that they would like.

"Early adopters are facing real challenges in creating, localizing, and managing content," Steele said. "Realizing the enormous promise of this new medium," which is the ability to target messages to specific branches and screens, "has turned out to be far more laborious than anyone expected," he said.

In the discussion that followed, all three panelists fielded questions from the audience, offering advice on a range of issues from sign placement to mobile technology to employee training. One theme that emerged was the need for banks to master content strategy, planning and management, with the goal of making content more relevant for customers and more efficient for the banks to produce.

"Relevance is king. Content is the way we approach relevance. The messages are more actionable when they are relevant," Underhill said.