Article

Digital signage on campus

Moving away from bulletin boards, taking a more digital approach.

September 16, 2007

On college campuses, a familiar scene is a cluttered bulletin board overflowing with flyers for club meetings, band promos, Greek life announcements and, probably buried under them all, messages from the university itself. Digital signage on campus is emerging as a way to not only clean up those billboards, but offer school officials a way to directly deliver their messages to students.

One of digital signage's greatest assets is its ability to place messages on screens within highly targeted locales. Universities, where tens of thousands of students are concentrated on several acres of campus, are emerging as favorable locales for screen deployments.

The model for on-campus digital signage is simple: Find places where the greatest amount of people are congregated at any one time and it becomes a hotspot for screen placement. On college campuses, building lobbies and student unions, which see the most student traffic, have become the most popular targets for digital messaging systems.

"Every government agency, as well as every college and university, should be using digital signage to communicate," said Ryan Cahoy, vice president of sales and marketing for Rise Vision Inc. "With thousands of students spread out across multiple buildings, universities need a visual way to communicate emergencies such as tornados, storm warnings or dangerous events."

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Emergency alerts are only one application that is turning up on the screens. Like the cluttered bulletin boards, the screens are providing a way for the universities to put their messages in front of students in a more direct way.

Digital signage at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University. (Photo courtesy ADFLOW Networks)

East Carolina University's College of Business recently deployed a digital signage network throughout its building, also with the help of Rise Vision. The college originally attempted to design its own digital signage system before using a provider.

"We did try to piece together a solution ourselves. It turned out to be very expensive, from both a dollar and, especially, a labor perspective," said ECU's associate dean for computer services, Richard Kerns.

The ECU deployment comprises eight LCD screens in custom wood enclosures; and like the other networks, gives the college faculty control over the content.

The networking capabilities of digital signage also bode well for universities looking to expand their on-campus messaging systems. A feature of most digital signage networks, remote management allows content to be updated on one computer and broadcast to all the screens across campus.

Students entering the Virginia Tech bookstore in Blacksburg, Va., are exposed to digital signs used for promotional advertising, but they're not on the wall. Instead, the signage is on the floor in the form of the IntelliMat — a display that supports dynamic digital signage content.

IntelliMat digital signage, installed at Virginia Tech. (Photo courtesy LevelVision)

Sales also went up for VT-branded merchandise, but the bookstore operators and LevelVision found that when the screens ran content containing Virginia Tech football clips, customers tended to stop and pay attention for longer amounts of time.

Czarnecki also says that thinking of digital signage as a movie-playback mechanism is the wrong approach. Students are not likely to watch a 30-second spot or wait for promotional messaging in a campus environment.

And digital signage has not been contained to just college campuses. Freeport High School in Freeport, Maine, is just one of many high schools using digital signage to provide information to students.

The Freeport deployment was carried out in conjunction with Aerva, a digital signage provider in Cambridge, Mass. Aerva's first move was to replace an LED ticker display in the school's main hall with a 42-inch plasma screen.

An RSS feed from the school's Web site automatically uploads school news to the screen, in addition to daily announcements and entertainment news. Guidance staff can post college-visit dates, SAT testing information, and promotional content from colleges and universities.