Screenmedia Expo: The future of digital signage is now

Think, LocaModa CEO Stephen Randall says, of digital signage screens as websites on walls.

That's the future of the industry, he says: being connected to, and interacting with, other screens/websites and the people viewing them — and reaching as well the people those people are connected to.

"The screens in your network should have a reach measured in miles, not feet," he said.

Randall's a bit of a digital signage visionary, and his keynote address on yesterday's second day of Screenmedia Expo Europe 2010 in London, "The future is now," looked at some of the problems the digital signage industry has and continues to face, and offered a glimpse into what Randall sees as a very connected future for the industry.

"We have to join the real world here, which is the Web, which is interactive," he said.

Now living in the United States, Randall originally came from England, and part of the purpose of his talk yesterday was to try to help European companies avoid some of the "war wounds" suffered by their American counterparts. The U.S. digital signage market is a few years ahead of Europe's, he says, and there are lessons to be learned from what happened in the United States.

He warned against the "hang 'em and bang 'em" mentality that was prevalent early on in the States, saying that if deployers just hang screens where there are people and think the advertisers will come, they're in for a rude awakening.

As optimistic as he says he his about the industry, Randall also says it's time for a better look at what's really happening in the industry, for more transparency and better measurements. The numbers can look good, he says, but if you take out the numbers for movie theaters, the picture isn't as bright as some are painting.

"I'm a huge optimist about this industry," he said. "But I'd like to have a frank discussion about what the realities are."

As he is often wont to do, Randall also took time to take a swipe at the almost clichéd "holy grail" of the industry, "Minority Report," which he likes to say has it exactly "180 degrees wrong."

Not only is the kind of push marketing envisioned in the movie currently illegal in most places, that kind of one-to-one marketing simply isn't a best and highest use of the technology, he says. That screen in the mall can still be seen by 5, 10 or 100 people; why would you want to use it to talk to just one person?

"A one-to-one experience like that is of far too limited utility for that distance," he said. "The reality is that using the technology in that one-to-one kind of way doesn't actually make sense."

Another big problem, he says, is that too many digital signage owners are still trying to make and market their networks like a broadcast platform, like TV — but advertisers are leaving broadcast in droves.

And while it may not happen in his lifetime, he says, TV is dying — so why try to be TV? It's just not a good model for the future.

One way it does need to mirror broadcast though, he says, is in standardization and becoming "a frictionless media." In the TV world, advertisers don't have to change formats for their ads to run across platforms: An ad on FOX works the same as it does on NBC, he says, and the digital signage industry needs to follow suit and for now at least put the cannibalization on hold.

"You cannot today advertise across networks in an effortless way, and that will hold the industry back," he said. "You have to think of these competing networks, for the time being at least, as your friends."

And advertisers want to talk about real-time content, social media and mobile, he says. They don't want Nielsen ratings from six weeks ago; they want click rates from six seconds ago.

"They're talking about it because they're in panic mode," he said.

The real and future value of digital signage networks isn't going to be in the number of impressions they get, but in expressions, connectedness and engagement. Randall cites "Metcalfe's Law," which suggests that the real "value of a network is the square of its connected users."

While a sign can reach the people who see it, if the signs in a network are connected to each other, and each sign is interactive with its audience and then gains traction in the viewer's online life, particularly in his social media sphere, then the brand message suddenly has a reach that dwarfs merely the number of people who see it directly.

As a case study, Randall points to a campaign his company did for the shoe company Vans. Vans wanted a campaign for a planned Times Square promotion, but Randall suggested expanding the campaign to its Facebook network. The campaign drew a great deal of interest and interaction from Vans' Facebook friends, who sent in pictures of themselves that were then displayed in Times Square and then on Facebook as well.

So the reach of the promotion wasn't just the hundreds of thousands of people passing through Times Square, it also was the social networks of the company's 3,000 Facebook friends, each of whom had, on average, about 120 connections — and potentially, on from there.

"Digital shouldn't just mean not-analog, digital should mean connected," he said. "All screens are and will be connected. We should be thinking of that automatically."

Randall also offered examples of how screens could be connected to each other and use tags to pick up tweets from people in the immediate area, then broadcast them across the screen network, sparking more interaction between the people viewing the screens in disparate locations — just like the Web. Then advertisers can see the interactions, or clicks, and the expressions by people in the network, and see just how effective the medium is.

"Then there's a pulse, and if your network doesn't have a pulse, then your business soon won't have a pulse," he said. "That's the way they buy adverts on the Web, do you really think they won't be buying adverts that way in out-of-home?"