DailyDOOH

Gail Chiasson, North American Editor

It hasn’t taken long for Dan McAllister, new vice-president sales – Americas, at Scala to get a pretty good handle on what his own and Scala’s priorities are, although he has only been in place four weeks.

We caught up with McAllister, who was just back from his first-ever attendance at #InfoComm13 where he had met a number of distributor partners and had a good look at the hardware on the floor – and before he heads to Norway for Scala’s upcoming Board meeting.

“It’s not every day where you get a chance to work for a global company like Scala,” McAllister says. “Scala is truly a pioneer. Of course, at the beginning, it was only a figment of what it is today. Last year, it gained 1,100 new customers. And it handles five of the 10 largest Quick Service Restaurant chains in the world.”

McAllister says that his background is in building high touch channels and a strong sales force.

“I’m lucky in that coming into this job, I’ve inherited a good sales force,” he says. “So I’ll be paying a lot of attention to the channels. Scala has a real focus on retail so it’s important to keep those things going up.

“Since January, Scala has had three sales teams with three vertical focuses: 1) retail; 2) financial services, government and transportation; and 3) the channel partners plus hospitality, education and healthcare. They are constantly working with product management. And retail is also on the up tick with corporate communications.”

The launch of Scala Enterprise, available as of June 18, is keeping everyone at Scala busy.

“It’s not just enhancements, it’s a totally new platform,” McAllister says. “It offers a lot of flexibility and opportunities for integration. And we’re now supporting Android devices, too.

“I feel that our challenge is to understand the consumer, not just in-store, but in airports or wherever they are and whoever they are – even employees. They’ll tell us how they want to be engaged, and we have to be ready to make that engagement rich for them. We have to stay ahead of them, but there’s a fine line. It’s important not to encroach on people’s personal freedom.”

McAllister says that predictive analytics have become very important.

“We are looking at this,” he says. “We are looking at custom data and how to encompass it with demographics for better targeting. The data can be used with digital strategies. Our new customers are really happy with this.”

We asked McAllister a few questions about the DOOH industry in general, but McAllister isn’t ready to answer them yet.

“I’ve only been here four weeks,” he says. “Ask me again in six months, and I’ll be happy to answer them.”

Don’t worry, we will!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 17th, 2013 at 17:00 @750 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.