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Reflect Systems reflects on company history, predicts 2011

December 8, 2010 by Bill Yackey — Manager, West IP Communications

Reflect Systems, based out of Dallas, turned nine years old this year. And in this industry, that makes them one of the old guys. But moreover, Reflect has carved out its placed in the enterprise digital signage content deliver and management niche by doing what so many others have set out to do: Use their software to power the networks of big brands.

Reflect’s list of customers include Target, Best Buy, GameStop and Verizon Wireless.

With the New Year approaching, we caught up with Reflect CEO Matt Schmitt over the phone to take a look at how the company got to where it is, and what 2011 has in store for the him and the industry.

Digital Signage Today: What do you think is the biggest issue facing the industry today?

Matt Schmitt: The industry I think still has an identity problem when it comes to what is digital signage and what is out of home media, which is still taking shape. It seems to be getting a little bit more defined.

People realize you can’t be a horizontal business and can’t do everything digital signage related. You have to try to be good at something in particular to really carve out a niche. Digital signage is really a technology, not a business application.

DST: What were Reflect’s original goals as a company and how has that changed?

MS: When you look at when we started back in Sept. 2001, it was a crazy time in the economy. Another founder and I came out of Yahoo and Broadcast.com. We had built up a pretty big aggregator and distributor of streaming media for the internet. A big piece of our business was enterprise corporations that were trying to deliver media, particularly to desktops, within disparate networks. It was a neat platform that delivered rich media and had a lot of similarities to what we’re doing now.

We came out of Yahoo with the idea to develop a product for these companies that we knew they needed – a software solution that could be deployed within these networks that could distribute heavy duty media content. That’s what we set out to develop. We did that and it was successful, but it was more focused around corporate communications and employee training.

DST: You have an obvious focus on the retail sector. How did that develop?

MS: We had some clients that were retailers and they wanted to do stuff that was more consumer-facing. One of our clients was Virgin Megastores, who wanted to network their media to get away from using DVD players. It wasn’t a big stretch for us to adapt our existing platform to enable digital signage applications. What we found compelling, and why we ultimately decided to focus on the signage part of the market, was that the corporate communications and employee training stuff was a nice-to-have but not a must have compared to some of the consumer facing media apps that were starting to evolve.

When we got into 2005 and 2006, we started to hone our digital signage product and make it more of a priority – focusing on the big clients with network needs and started going after the big networks to deploy in-store digital media. We did networks for Target, Verizon Wireless, GameStop and Best Buy.  Methodically, we were specifically trying to go after networks with a lot of locations that are geographically dispersed. That was our sweet spot and still tends to be.

DST: What has been the most significant technology advancement for Reflect?

MS: Early on, one of the big value propositions for us was content distribution, that is, getting the media to different locations over various media types. It was what other people had trouble doing especially early on, although more and more people are doing it now. But that ability to do agile networking to get heavy HD media over network types successfully was our big technology leap initially.

DST: What has been the most significant deal for Reflect, in terms of one that has challenged you?

MS: One of the most gratifying to watch mature over the last couple of years has been Best Buy and what they have done from a scale perspective. Now it is turning into more of a multichannel thing that includes in-store, but people don’t realize how much they’ve gone through.

It’s been neat for us because they’ve done things with different devices in the store, from TV walls to end caps, to check out and in-store audio. It’s not just digital signage. It’s a good example of what our team refers to as a “rich media backbone” inside these retail networks. It becomes core to their store operations.

DST: What can we expect to see from Reflect in 2011?

MS: Getting retailers and brands working together is something that I think will continue to be a big push for us in 2011. I think the biggest thing that we’ll see is consumer product brands and the guys trying to collaborate with retail doing more networking at the store. We’ll also be pushing with our clients to apply lessons learned from deployments that we have done and have clear goals going in.

DST: What has been the biggest change in the industry in the past 10 years?

MS: I think it’s the education process that has been happening in the industry. I think people are starting to get where Digital Out-of-Home and advertising networks differ from informational displays. I think misidentification in the industry is still the biggest challenge – I hope some more definition gets there and some more common terms come about that everyone can identify with.

DST: Give one prediction for the digital signage industry in 2011.

MS: I think we’ll see more clear cut goals identified before these networks get deployed rather than after. I think some people have learned from measurement and the successes from early adopters. Some of that information is getting out even thought the people running these networks are reluctant to talk about it! I would say that we will see more purpose built media networks where there is a clear-cut key driver for the success criteria and the metrics. As people are defining what they want to get out of in store media, there won’t be as much experimentation.

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