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8 Business Technology November 2011 an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the daily telegraph Audio visual communications Sign of the times Digital signage is revolutionising billboards and other public promotional displays By Paul Bray and Gemma Stroud Billboards that come alive before our eyes, menus that change by the minute and special offers that instantaneously tailor themselves to the customer. Once mere twinkles in the marketeer’s eye, they’re fast becoming the must-have technology for shopping malls, transport hubs, restaurants, even doctors’ surgeries. But while they’ll splash their offers across six-foot screens, many retailers are keener to keep the marketing science behind digital signage under wraps. It’s still new enough to offer a competitive advantage and they aren’t keen to share. Digital signage uses a network of computer screens to display ever-changing content that may include video, still images and text. What’s shown where is usually controlled from a central point, but the output of individual screens can be tailored according to location, audience and even time of day. Alternatively, the network may have just a couple of screens: to impress visitors in a corporate reception area, say, or keep patients quiet in the dentist’s waiting room. Screens may show a single stream of content, such as posters or video commercials, or several things at once. The latter might consist of a live news feed; tailored advertising (for the venue’s own products or paid for by third-party advertisers); and specific data (“next patient please”, “the 10.16 to Inverness is running late”, and so on). Size is no object. The new Westfield Stratford City shopping centre in east London features 17 huge video walls, each containing up to 51 screens operating as a single display. London Underground and CBS Outdoor are using cross-track projectors to display giant images on the walls of tube stations. But many digital signs consist of single TV-sized screens, 10-inch digital photo frames (sometimes inset into kiosks or store mannequins), or tiny shelf-edge displays a couple of inches high. The sheer eye-bludgeoning potential of a giant video wall is hard to beat. Outdoor clothing retailer Timberland has a 36-screen, 6.2 x 3.5m wall aimed at “bringing the Wall of sound Debut: UK’s first interactive digital billboard at Westfield. Right, Cadbury Creme Egg interactive game outdoors indoors” at its new Westfield store. “With more than 300 retailers at Westfield there’s a lot of competition, so it’s primarily designed to encourage customers into the store,” says Rod Pallister, managing director of AV specialist 53 Degrees, which installed it. But the opportunity for precision marketing can be equally attractive. Phone company O2 is installing two or three modestsized NEC displays in each of its retail stores. “It means O2 can react to offers very fast and with central control,” says Guy Phelps, corporate sales manager at NEC Display Solutions which provides the service. “Managed from head office, messaging can be updated quickly to react to local market conditions, with different messaging at different times of day and across different geographical locations.” But companies are cautious about revealing the corporate secret that’s keeping the tills ringing. Several major retailers were unwilling to provide comment on their advertisement technology initiatives, with one well-known high street store concerned any information provided could be leaked to a retail rival. And when the potential for industry expansion is explored, it’s little wonder. By linking digital signage to a store’s stock system, content and messaging can be changed in line with availability. And by linking signage to the products on display, the stock can start interacting directly with the customer. “Imagine a consumer picking up an item from a shelf and triggering instant product information and product comparisons on an adjacent screen,” says Jonathan Mangnall, sales director at control systems vendor AMX. “This is possible now, although the market’s only just realising it.” “Creating a one-to-one experience is the Holy Grail of marketing, and interactivity in digital signage is a massive trend, with touch being the obvious application,” says Mike Fisher, senior consultant at analyst firm Futuresource. It can be something simple like entering a shopping centre and finding the nearest chemist, or an interactive game like the highly successful one that Posterscope ran on bus shelters for Cadbury Creme Eggs (inset). Still in its infancy, digital signage is creating as much secrecy as it is excitement among marketing moguls and many are choosing to play their cards close to their chest. The grand unveiling is just as powerful as the technology itself. The real breakthrough will happen when NFC (near field communications) and QR (quick response) codes become widely implemented in mobile phones, Fisher believes. Users could walk up to a digital poster and download a coupon for the product it advertises or buy a ticket for the event it promotes. Technology is now becoming available that uses built-in cameras and clever analytics software to enable digital signage to watch the people watching it. Advertisers could be told exactly how many people have viewed a particular piece of content and for how long, and be charged accordingly – another Holy Grail for the advertisement industry. It’s even possible to work out the watcher’s age, sex and mood, and tailor the on-screen content to match. Try doing that with a roll of posters and a bucket of paste. Having fabulous displays when communicating with a target audience is useless if no one can hear what’s being said By Paul Bray It’s shooting yourself in the foot to have stunning visuals with lousy sound, so the advent of HD video has necessitated similar enhancements in audio. “Video alone can seem rather flat (imagine a movie without the music). Video may capture someone’s attention, but it’s audio that retains it and draws them into the emotional experience you’re trying to get across,” says Chris Havell, director for audio at technology specialists Cambridge Silicon Radio. One technique is to use sophisticated audio processing that can subtly influence what the listener hears by altering the balance between different frequencies. It can lift speech out of the background soundtrack to make it more intelligible. Latency (the time gap between sound and video) can be a major issue. If a speaker’s mouth and voice are more than 45 milliseconds adrift the viewer’s concentration can be affected. Wireless speakers are becoming more popular because of their flexibility, but this can exacerbate latency issues as the sound must be digitised. A technology called Aptx can help, by ensuring audio quality is maintained and the audio and video signals remain in step when they reach screens and loudspeakers. One downside of increased audio performance is that background noise is easily captured by the latest microphones, so echo cancellation and noise suppression technology have had to improve significantly in recent years. Sound: frequency, balance and latency are important
an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the daily telegraph November 2011 Business Technology Audio visual communications 9 Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle Video’s potential in business is so much broader than simply replacing meetings with faceto-face conferencing links By Tracey Caldwell Video has enormous potential to enrich communications with employees and customers, especially with the proliferation of high-speed networks and affordable video technology. So it’s somewhat puzzling that videoconferencing – a straightforward replacement for physical meetings – seems to have hogged the limelight for so long. Now that the quality of video and audio is of a good standard, smart businesses are exploiting the facilities more widely – in their business presentations, at events, on the web and beyond. So much so that technology vendors have begun to talk about the videoready business – an organisation that is video-enabled to the point that it can apply the medium wherever it has the potential to add value. Any business that isn’t video-ready is vulnerable competitively, they argue. Richard Oliver, director of marketing strategy at <strong>BT</strong> <strong>iNet</strong>, identifies culture as one of the biggest barriers to broader video adoption until now. “Skills around making video usable can be brought to bear by a good supplier,” he notes. “What can’t be brought is the realisation that a company can’t keep doing what it has always done once it has reached a certain size.” Video can have a powerful impact within a company certainly, for keeping a highly dispersed workforce engaged and aligned to company messaging. A succinct weekly broadcast by the CEO can be much more powerful and effective than a company newsletter or email circular. Once the business has experimented with the medium internally, it can turn its attention outwards. Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets uses a service provided by Kulu Valley to deliver on-demand video-based presentations with a twist to its business customers. The proposition differs from straightforward video in that it blends video content with standard presentation features to deliver a succinct yet rounded message to the target audience. Via the web, viewers see a video of the bank’s chief economist Trevor Williams speaking, while the slides or graphs he refers to change in line with what he is saying. “It is getting our commentary on to a wider platform,” Williams explains. “There are people who don’t typically look at our material who may well look at it now because it is on platforms they’re used to.” For Williams, the Kulu-based presentation Taking stock of video As further evidence that video is becoming a mainstream communications vehicle for business, stock video (pre-recorded content that businesses can reuse in their own communications) is growing in popularity. iStockphoto’s video arm is already five years old and its library contains some 400,000 files, which are used in everything from national news programmes, documentaries and films to web-based advertising. According to Jim Goertz, director of video content development at the company, demand is currently particularly strong for authentic reality TV-styled scenes and fully edited mini films. Meanwhile, content is being uploaded increasingly from modern DSLR cameras (often with stills and video shot simultaneously), and from large-format high-definition video cameras. has a higher impact than a fixed-time teleconference, a medium the bank used previously. “With the video, people can open it at their convenience or listen to it at their convenience. Whereas we used to get 20 or 30 people dialling in each month, now it’s more like 270 people opening the video and watching it,” he says. Video can transform the impact and feel of events, too. Take the example of a major ball hosted by the British Olympic Association recently. Video technology was used to add the wow factor to what chief commercial officer Hugh Chambers describes as “the biggest and the most ambitious Olympic ball in this country”. The organisation relies entirely on commercial funding to field Team GB; in 2012 this will amount to 550 athletes at a cost of £10m. “As well as raising money, of equal importance is to reflect the Olympic values and the quality of the Olympic brand. We needed to put on a show that was really going to dazzle people,” he says. The BOA used technology from Crystal CG to mount an enormous, high-impact video display all around the Grand Hall Olympia in London. The video culminated in the British team’s symbolic lion racing around the venue’s video screens before roaring onto a main screen that was the size of those providing the backdrop to major festivals like Glastonbury. In a retail environment, video is being used as a means of interacting with customers at the point of sale, via video chat with product experts on websites or using in-store kiosks. This has been found to encourage sales conversion, especially for high-value items. In future, IPTV (internet protocol television) viewers will be able to click through from Wow factor: video used at the Olympic ball adverts to a video link to a sales assistant. A major driver in using video is the need to respond to heightened customer expectations. Today, consumers will settle for nothing less than high-quality, compelling communications on demand. ”In the same way that businesses have accepted social media, they are going to need to accept some level of video as part of that conversation,” says Simon Hathaway, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi X, which specialises in shopper marketing. “Video personalises the shopping experience. The technology is there – the big barrier is pinpointing the cost, and the return.” One company that has done the maths and sees real benefit in video is Renault in the UK. This month the company launched its futuristic range of zero emissions (ZE) electric vehicles. In parallel it is piloting an online video-based customer service channel for customers and for dealers that take on the new range. The video technology is provided by Vee24. Renault can now explain the technology behind its ZE range by showing it to customers during video conversations over the web with product experts. Noting that telephone contact to Renault is in decline, Peter Tilbury, front-office customer relations manager at Renault UK, says: “Customers are on our website; let’s talk to them.” Hathaway: barrier is pinpointing cost and return
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