Article
Taking digital signage to the bank
Marketing firm John Ryan recently inked a digital signage deal with BBVA bank. Is it a sign of more bank deployments to come?
February 1, 2012 by Christopher Hall — writer, self
Bank branches were among the first places where the earliest forms of digital signage started popping up, with digital displays showing CNN or C-SPAN and running a stock ticker.
Surprisingly, though, banks are now seen by some as one of the big areas for potential digital signage growth in the near future.
Spain-based BBVA, a top-20 global retail banks recently inked a digital signage partnership with John Ryan, a global provider of retail marketing solutions for major financial institutions, for its approximately 3,000 retail branches in Spain and Portugal.
In talking about the new deal with BBVA, John Ryan EVP of Market Development Rich Mezaros called now "an exciting time" for bank digital signage, saying that John Ryan sees the adoption of digital signage in banks "really exploding."
While there were some early pioneers in bank digital signage, Mezaros said, he sees digital signage becoming "even more common in banks around the world."
"It's a great way to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time," he said in a recent interview. "Banks are always looking at ways to get a message in front of both customers and prospects that might be within their locations, and I think it's a great way to be able to leverage all of the visits that they have within their branches every single day, every month, every year."
Alan Brawn, principal at A/V consultants Brawn Consulting and a leading digital signage expert, agreed that, while banks may have seen some early adoption of a limited form of digital signage, they will continue to be a high-growth area for digital signage.
"First of all, it has been historically recognized for its growth potential but relatively few institutions have actually utilized digital signage to its full potential," Brawn wrote in an email. "What we will see moving forward is a more pervasive approach to digital signage in banks and financial institutions, moving from testing the waters to full deployments in major institutions, more creative uses of digital signage inside the institutions, and more small banks and regional institutions joining the proverbial fray."
The multinational BBVA, or Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria S.A., entered into a five-year agreement with John Ryan after a POPAI award-winning joint pilot deployment.
Programming is produced by John Ryan in five languages and incorporates news, trivia, weather and local real estate listings, as well as specially selected product offers appropriate to each branch's customer base. And staff-facing content incorporates current bank news, incentive updates, lifestyle features and other information pertinent to employees.
The messaging is controlled by John Ryan's Messaging Manager content management platform and distributed to branches and selected BBVA work sites using the bank's LAN. John Ryan said the network's content updates are based on a rules-based programming structure capable of providing highly-relevant messaging with minimal manual intervention.
The most important thing is to develop messaging that is relevant to the customers visiting each branch, Mezaros said. Creating that relevance can be accomplished through tailoring - creating different versions of the same message to adopt to local branch conditions or day parts - or through targeting - achieved by assembling different playlists for different branches.
Content is tailored to each branch's customer base, dominant language or languages and servicing capabilities, according to Mezaros. A queue-management system is integrated into the same media player device with real-time alerts displayed alongside digital messaging.
BBVA operates both customer- and staff-facing channels on three-screen video walls and other large-format projection and LED screens, he said.
The continued advance of digital signage adoption in banks to digital signage does still face some hurdles, Mezaros acknowledged – hurdles that may help account for banks' previous hesitation to move more fully into digital signage messaging – but it is on its way.
Read more about bank digital signage.
