Digital signage solutions for the 22nd century

As of today, I started working in a media agency in London, a BIG worldwide media agency.

Traditional marketing

In all honesty, I would have never imagined this to become possible, but that is what I was pursuing with my relocation to the UK: an interesting job opportunity.

At lunch time I met some of my new colleagues working with digital signate and offline marketing. As I won’t collaborate with them, chances are I will forget about what they said, hence I decided to write a short post for my future reference.

Digital signage in few words (and as I understood it)

There are two types of digital signage, one for indoor use and the other is for outdoor applications, within these two categories they can be split further, so let us look at the solutions available.

Indoor digital signage

These electronic signs are used in reception areas, restaurants as digital menu boards and in colleges providing information to students.

Digital posters

These are the most cost effective solution being an actual High Definition screen with an inbuilt media player that plays the content loaded on a memory card. These are readily available and have almost no deployment cost as there is no need to install a network, this has one drawback they have to be updated manually using a USB flash drive. These are also referred to as an all-in-one digital display.

Digital Menu Boards

These comprise of an LCD display and a media player linked to a network, which can be wireless, GPS or hard wired thus allowing remote updates such as in large networks where content constantly change – e.g. restaurants and bars.

Outdoor Digital Signage

These normally comprises of LCD screens, media player and an LCD screen enclosure and are placed in areas outdoors that are open to the elements, potential vandalism an theft.

The benefit over any other advertising medium is that the content can be changed within seconds and the signage updated, promoting your product. For example, the weather changes and a store has an overstock of umbrellas; the outdoor signage can be used to push the bargain of the day – your umbrellas. Certainly more expensive than a leaflet, but the size of the opportunity if far better when compared to print advertising that would never reach the right audience at the right time (by the time the leaflet is ready, the weather would have changed).