Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
I sat in on several sessions that were held each afternoon according to various partner interests at Scala Americas Partner Conference in Austin last week.
The ones I attended included: James Fine and Stéphane Bastien of Telecine, Montreal; Brian Russell of CTI Solutions, Kansas City; Bryan Nunes of Signet, Santa Clara; and Daniel Rubenstein, senior director of financial services at Scala.
James Fine and Stéphane Bastien of Telecine, combined, as they often do, a lot of interesting information interspersed with humour. They repeated their ‘bad content’ script acted out by two incredibly-good staffers cum actors that was first shown at the Video Walls Unplugged event during #dse2014 and talked about Footage2go, developed for people who don’t know what to put on their digital signage screens. It’s in the cloud, and you can search for whatever you want, including videos. Further, it works on any player or platform.
“Digital signage lets you constantly change your content,” said Fine. “It’s a living, breathing thing.”
He talked of Fidelity Investments where 500 people could put in good looking content because Telecine had provided templates and “were energized to put up their own content.”
Fine and Bastien emphasized that there is nothing more annoying than outdated content, the same content constantly repeating, or something that is up too long. They mentioned that budgeting and the length of time to do good content, especially interactive, come into play, as well as the architecture of different locations.
In another session, Brian Russell of CTI Solutions, talked of a new installation for Sprint using Scala throughout. These new installations with 60-to-70 screens per store (three stores so far with two more ready to launch) mean that there is no longer a girl behind the counter taking the customer’s name, why he is there, and putting him in a queue. Each screen, one for each device, is interactive.
Bryan Nunes of Signet, with clients like IBM, Dell, banks and more, talked of how the company has used Scala Content Manager and how, with using Scala, Signet builds customized experiences for its clients.
Daniel Rubenstein was the last speaker of the day at that series of sessions, and it’s a shame that more people didn’t hear him. There were only 12 people in the room including the speaker as Rubenstein, gave a good look at the banking industry and what it is doing in terms of digital signage. As Rubenstein put it, the aim from Scala’s point of view is re-energized thinking at the retail level and to “bring sexy back into banking.”
“Bank branches are now being used more for advisory services, giving concierge-type advice to help customers for whatever they need,” he said. “65% of customers go to the bank for advice that has to be handled in-bank.
“A lot of banks use a big sign with the same information at each branch, but a lot of branches are also going with hyper-local marketing, with messages such as ‘Meet our manager’ or ‘Small business loans’ or ‘We sponsor…’
“What does meta-data mean to a bank? And day-parting? These can help the branches. They can use gesture, or Scala’s Fling that integrates with mobile devices to create compelling in-branch experiences.
“Banks need to get back the trust of customers, especially in the U.S., and digital signage showing banks in a local advisory role can help.”
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