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Keys to successful digital signage installations

How do digital signage vendors help their clients — whether they be the end-users themselves or the value-added resellers doing the work — make sure their digital signage installation is successful? What are the keys to a successful digital signage installation?

March 11, 2016 by Digital Signage Today

While it's likely we've all been told at some point what happens when you assume, it's probably safe to assume that anyone who starts a digital signage project wants it to succeed. There's too much invested — in terms of both time and money — for anyone deploying digital signage to actually want it to fail.

But deployments fail all the time. So how do digital signage vendors help their clients — whether they be the end-users themselves or the value-added resellers doing to the work — make sure their digital signage installation is successful? What are the keys to a successful digital signage installation?

Even Plato knew the answer. As he said in "The Republic": "The beginning of the work is the most important part of any work."

Or as Jeffrey Martin, president and CEO of digital signage provider Right Media Solutions, said in a recent interview, "It's really sitting down and talking about what the client wants to do with it from the very beginning so you can start designing it, because designing it correctly from day one is critical."

According to Mr. Martin, the beginning is crucial to a project's success — talking about what the client wants and what their objective is for the installation. Figuring out what they need to do what they want; coming up with a content strategy that does what they want it to; all of those things should be figured out next. Then what hardware, software, displays, connectivity and control systems are needed to make it happen. "All those up front become a part of the design," he said. "And that leads us the first steps of that successful installation."

That's a sentiment echoed by Brian Rhatigan, the director of business development for digital signage and AV distributor Almo Professional A/V. "If we're talking about not just the physical installation but the project as a whole, to me the absolute most important thing would be to have a clear objective of what you're looking to accomplish from the sign itself," Mr. Rhatigan said in an interview. "Is it meant to sell product? Is it meant to recognize employees? Whatever you have, you want to clearly define whatever the objective is for the sign and work closely with whatever partner that you're dealing with from a content standpoint to make sure that those objectives are met."

For Mr. Rhatigan, the next step — or rather, still part of that first step — involves putting a strategy in place to make sure that the content on the solution that's been developed to meet those objectives stays fresh. "Second to that, or kind of tied into that, is having an effective strategy for making updates to the content, especially if it's something that’s dynamic like a menu board or a donor wall or waiting list, or something where the data is going to change on a regular basis," he said. "So that you're not constantly going back to your designer and having to incur all of these kind of redesign fees."

And then comes the hardware and software — displays, a CMS, mounting solutions and media players, for example. "The media player is driven by content," Mr. Rhatigan said. "You choose your content first then your media player second. And that decision on which media player to be used is going to be based on the type of content you're using. Is it HTML5? Is it mostly JPEG? Is it going to be touch-enabled? Really the content is going to determine the choice of media player, not vice versa."

And your choice of display is going to be determined by where it's placed and what it's showing. And so on down the list.

Then, according to Mr. Martin, you test it. And then retest it. And test it some more.

"The next stage from understanding that [objective] is testing one or two versions of what we understood to be that solution we just heard and designed with the clients and the parties involved, and if they have facilities, mirror that in their facility and vet it out," he said.

The idea is to make sure the system designed can handle the stress, whether it's heat or cold or power surges or some other condition, that it will find itself in. "We test a lot of that in artificial environments and try to understand ahead of time what we might be running into given whatever type of space this is going in, so the lab testing becomes a critical element of after design, to really test it and kick the tires on it before it ends up in any place where it would be live."

After testing in a controlled environment, the real test comes when the solution is piloted in a live location, Mr. Martin said.

"We learn as much as we can in the lab, but the pilot's usually where most of the learning occurs," he said, "because it's now not in a controlled area in your lab but in a live location."

Then you take what you've learned in those tests, make it repeatable and scalable, and roll it out, Mr. Martin said.

But that's a successful install on day one, or maybe even week one. How do you make sure the installation remains successful six months, a year, two years down the road? For Mr. Martin, that means the vendor or integrator most likely will need to stay involved and provide ongoing support.

"The biggest part we try to do is fit ourselves in, in that ongoing monitoring and support bucket," he said. If his firm set it up, they're likely to be the ones best suited to monitor it and keep it running — and to be able to do so for less than even the deployer could themselves. "We tend not to just hand it over because our costs are lower than they can typically hire internally to support a network because we're supporting so many units out there. For us it's just adding another layer and another client into the same group of technicians who have been doing this for well over a decade, most of them."