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Monterey Bay Aquarium dives into digital signage

The Aquarium's technical coordinator talks about how digital signage has become central to the exhibit design process.

May 2, 2013 by Christopher Hall

Solid-state digital signage media player provider BrightSign LLC recently announced its collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, Calif., to modernize signage throughout the facility. The digital signage overhaul achieved cost-savings and energy efficiencies, according to BrightSign, while simultaneously delivering a more immersive, educational and interactive experience for the nearly 2 million visitors who come to the MBA each year.

Digital signage and the media players also have simply become central to the creative process in developing the MBA's exhibits, according to Paul Cain, the Aquarium's technical coordinator.

"It's a great creative tool for us," he said in an interview. "We have a whole department here called Interpretive Media who've just latched on to these appliances, and they're really kind of central to our design processes now when we want to do a new exhibit."

Cain discussed how digital signage can be particularly useful in an interpretive facility such as an aquarium or museum. For example, the Aquarium's auditorium, used for conservation programming and messaging, has seen its attendance triple just from using a digital signage kiosk out front to promote and preview programming, Cain said.

Conserving and protecting the oceans are a critical part of the MBA's mission, Cain said, so one of the facility's biggest challenges is finding ways to get people who don't like being preached to, to sit still and get preached to for a bit about conservation.

"First and foremost, people watch TV ... And a lot of what we do here is try and package our conservation messages in easy-to-swallow chunks and make it as fun as possible," he said. "Driving attendance to these conservation message opportunities is important to us, and people watch TV so they kind of gravitate like moths to the flame to digital signage. Anytime we want to highlight a particular area or a particular message, we can get people there with a big beautiful display."

The MBA has extensively integrated interactive video and even social media opportunitiesinto its exhibits via digital signage technology, but it's also put digital signage to work in its restaurant. That update presented its own challenges, but the adaptability and ease-of-use of the technology ultimately won though, Cain said.

The MBA recently updated its restaurant and put in all digital menu boards on about 20 displays, Cain said, "and so we had to figure out some back end way for the restaurant's non-technical staff to keep their prices current or maybe add or delete items" — which they did by creating a simple RSS feed for the restaurant employees to update.

The MBA regularly fields calls from other similar organizations seeking advice on deploying digital signage, Cain said. ("That happens quite a bit," he said. "Everyone is riding the digital signage wave, and people are always calling up and asking us, 'What are you using?'")

The advice he gives them, he said, is that the MBA is transitioning as much as possible from PC- and Mac-driven displays to mostly using standalone devices. While there are still more complex applications that require the computing power of a PC or Mac, the overwhelming majority can be handled by standalone media players, he said.

"They never seem to want to update themselves," he said. "I mean, of course they get updates all the time, but once you launch a system, once you have an exhibit open, it's not going to crash because its wants to update McAfee or ActiveX is out of date. There are so many things that can crash a PC or even a Mac, just standard maintenance items, and if you have 150 exhibits or experiences in your facility it's a full-time job for several people to maintain that many PCs."

All of which ties into the other big piece of advice Cain said he gives: Keep it as simple as possible, because you can't afford downtime.

"As low-maintenance as possible equates to as little downtime as possible," he said. "So you have to keep it simple and keep it robust."

Learn more about digital signage integration.