Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
‘Engagement’ and ‘Experiences’ are two words that we’re sure you’re going to hear from Paul Rawlings during the Strategy Institute’s Digital Signage Investor Conference in New York next week.
Rawlings, founder and CEO of ScreenReach Interactive, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, who will be speaking on the panel The Stories Behind the Million-Dollar Funding Deals, along with Dave Courtney, CEO, JiWire, San Francisco, and Ajay Chowdhury, CEO, ComQi. New York, is on a mission to turn all DOOH network screens into two-way interactive screens.
“Our Screach product can build an interactive layer onto screens to engage consumers and give them great experiences,” says Rawlings, who will be showing examples from clients such as Ocean Outdoor and JC Decaux that his company has worked with. “It’s such an interesting proposition. You don’t need additional hardware or software. It’s phenomenal! It’s awesome!”
That word ‘awesome’ permeates Rawlings’ conversation as he discusses interactivity.
“Screens should not be passive,” says Rawlings, whose background is in digital signage. “They’re crying out for interactivity. Interactive screens turn the users into controllers. The screens can understand and connect with their audience. Engaged users can be rewarded in real time.”
And, he says, the fact that interactive screens can also be measured so that advertisers know just how engaged the users are, “is awesome.”
We have no doubt that Rawlings’ talk will be awesome, as well.
October 12th, 2011 at 12:00 @541
I am fascinated to hear how you can add functionality (interactivity) to a screen without using either hardware or software. Please enlighten us on this thread after the talk?
October 12th, 2011 at 12:56 @580
The Screach platform works without the need of any “additional” hardware or software or doesn’t require the signage software to be changed in anyway so i think they key word should be additional. You basically take content that you would distribute to the screen and then add the Screach Content hooks into it which then makes the content interactive. You can learn more at http://dev.screach.com or mail me and happy to answer any questions
October 12th, 2011 at 13:09 @589
What’s the hashtag for this event?
October 12th, 2011 at 13:13 @592
The hashtag is in the POST BANNER header at the top of the post BUT it is probably hard to see and slanted diagonally (our bad)
The pre-agreed hashtag for Monday / Tuesday is #DSinvestor and for Wednesday’s DPAA event we are just going to use #DPAAMediaSummit
October 12th, 2011 at 14:05 @628
The dev site looks really nice and it’s an interesting idea. But to quote the site:
“Content can be written in a language that you’re comfortable with as we have client libraries for Flash, Silverlight, .NET, Java and JavaScript.”
– that sounds like additional software to me. You’re providing libraries to people building apps and content in order to provide interactivity – so it’s a very long stretch to say that no additional software is required.
The problem here is that companies like mine are asked to come in to build these experiences for customers. When they hear from you that no additional software is required it makes it very hard for us to persuade them that they need to pay for the additional software that is required!