Article
The LinkedIn of digital signage?
We've already started talking about "the eBay of digital signage," so why not the "Facebook of digital signage," or the "LinkedIn of digital signage"?
August 4, 2010 by Christopher Hall — w, t
There's a loose network of digital signage software providers and ad agencies forming what could be described as "the eBay of digital signage," so why not the "Facebook of digital signage," or the "LinkedIn of digital signage"?
That's essentially the goal of Canada's ScreenScape Networks, which recently announced that it was coming to the United States with what it calls a "community-based" approach to digital signage — even though the company doesn't really consider itself just a digital signage company.
"We're a social network for businesses that happen to operate digital displays," ScreenScape founder and chief product officer Mark Hemphill said in a recent interview. "We have been called many times ‘the LinkedIn of digital signage,' and it's a pretty good simple way of characterizing us."
With the company's ScreenScape software-as-a-service platform, businesses using the platform can share digital signage content amongst themselves or create groups to sell ad space to external agencies — and ad agencies or brands also can create networks of businesses with displays to which they'll distribute their ad content.
A bar across the street from an arts center might use the platform to promote itself at the arts center and vice versa, or groups of golf courses across the country might form a network to share content and sell ad space on their joint network to outside agencies. Or a large retail franchisor might create a network for its franchisees to join, to make it easier to distribute consistent digital signage ad content among the disparate locations.
ScreenScape makes its money on the group licenses and licensing the software, Hemphill says, and what happens between the businesses on the networks is up to them, and between them.
"We sell the group license to the group operator and they do with it what they want," he said. "We don't take fees on advertising opportunities; we take fees on access to the technology, just like a salesforce.com or a software-as-a-service model. We offer a subscription to our platform, and they charge what they want to charge. Their business model is their business model. They pay up front for our licenses and go to it."
The company just announced that its platform was now available in the United States, but it's actually already started infiltrating across the border. The company already has hundreds of customers in the United States, Hemphill says. What's new is that the company now has a direct sales force in Canada's neighbor to the south, he says.
ScreenScape's "bread and butter" is still the small- and medium-sized business, Hemphill says, and the company is taking a more viral, bottom-to-top approach similar to popular location-based social networking app Foursquare.
"Our long-term goal is to have 100,000 venues or more using our platform … so we can easily offer group opportunities for every segment you can think of," he said. "And then we're going to create a marketplace and make it easy for ad hoc groups to form and for marketers for instance to walk up to the website and grow their own ScreenScape and then offer those venues a certain amount of money to run content in their screens in a given period of time."
Eventually the company hopes to have a platform that achieves a critical mass in all verticals and geographic regions, much like another well-known Web entity, he says.
"We see ourselves eventually becoming the Google AdSense of place-based media or location-based media or merging with a company that has assets there," he said. "That's where we want to be."
About Christopher Hall
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