AKA.TV Talks To Simon Sugar
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Back on 22nd January 2010 AKA.TV talked to Simon Sugar, CEO of AMSCREEN in an interview entitled ‘Bringing Wireless Digital Signage To The Masses‘
When asked “Who are your competitors?” Simon (or his PR advisers) obviously couldn’t think of anyone and he answered “None directly, as no other company offers the same technology or the same ‘one stop shop’” – though he did concede that “there are one or two other players in the same space”.
Amscreen are keen on making bold statements, rarely back them up with facts and amateur wannabee journalists seem too scared to question the bleedin’ obvious.
A quick look at the Amscreen Healthcare Network web site shows the statement “Amscreen Healthcare is the market leader and registered supplier to the Health Service for digital screen network broadcasting. We provide real time patient information to GP Surgeries and Hospital waiting rooms for effective communications to patients, visitors and staff”
- Is there really a ‘registered supplier to the Health Service for digital screen network broadcasting‘? Seriously is there? We’d love to see it, so come on Simon point us at this list?
- Here in the office we also obviously need to look into the definition of ‘Market Leader‘ as one would assume that means the largest network?
Last time we looked The Life Channel (TLC) had over ten times as many Health Locations installed as Amscreen.
Anyway, we think the industry could learn a thing or two from one of the new OVAB Europe members.
Friday sees us do our very own COPY and PASTE, following the AKA.TV style and in fact ask the exact same questions – not to Simon but to Phil Austin, CEO CAN Media (owners of The Life Channel).
It’s gonna be good and it’s going to be controversial so watch this space.
February 12th, 2010 at 13:18 @596
this is great news – when the head of one of our competition doesn’t do his homework – they can be kicked down very quickly 🙂
only two competition in the 3G wifi marketplace – let me see
1) Us with Wallflowerglobal,
2) Mediatile
3) …. mmm – that it nobody else sorry guys pack up and go home 🙂
Ah – sorry must of misunderstood the context of the question – sorry Im wrong we don’t do a cheap and tacky 19″ monitor solution – our solution is a full blown DS solution with full facial recognition and analytics – oh and we invented remote scheduling so clients can update themselves (ok – we didn’t really!)
Our complete 22″ solution with everything included starts from as little as £1595 + GSM Data
so that right AMSCREEN are unique in the marketplace… 100% confirmed
Happy fridays 🙂
February 12th, 2010 at 14:37 @650
No one should ever give a straight answer to the question “Who are your competitors?” until the context of the question is defined. In this case, Simon tried to qualify his response although I don’t think he qualified it enough.
Each reader could have a different definition of the competitive market or landscape. Since our product crosses multiple vertical markets, my competitors in the retail space are different than those in the airport market. So my response would (and has) depend on industry. Many people would consider a SaaS model as competition to our (Omnivex) software, but we sell software to SaaS operators to run their networks. Those guys are my customers (although some of them just don’t know it yet).
If you operate a digital signage network, your competition might be television, radio and print media who command advertising revenues that you feel would be better served by a digital network. Not other people operating digital signage networks.
The right response to the question is to ask a question back to interviewer to qualify what they mean. When you are the spokesperson for your company, you don’t want to antagonize the press because they own the pulpit and always have the last word, so you need to be really careful in the way you phrase your response. Ultimately, it isn’t a fair question and you shouldn’t read too much into the answer.