Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Scala Conferences are always good and always very well organized, and the one at the Timber Lodge in the Olympic Park last week, as part of London Digital Signage Week was certainly excellent as usual.
Tom Nix used much of the same material that he gave at the Scala Americas Conference in Austin in April, stressing the ‘Tsunami’ of data that’s available and that Scala wants to help its partners deal with that and obtain a good ROI for maximized, optimized campaigns.
After a short introduction to Scala ‘Next’, the Connected Store, Peter Cherna got down to laying out Scala’s Roadmap for the future. This included firming up and building out proof of concept; gesture control; content management integration; building APIs for data and touchpoint integration; and building out SDKs to support application development. Short, sweet and to-the-point! – no Open Source initiatives then huh?, Ed.
Nikk Smith, technical director of Pixel Inspiration was next up, saying that the company – currently celebrating its 10th anniversary – had started out in concept design for DOOH and is now full service. Smith gave an excellent example of work done with UK retailer ARGOS which is surely a a DailyDOOH Gala Award finalist later in the year. This deployment includes a welcome wall carrying staff information, weather and more; and Golden and Inspire Bays with screens promoting products. He said that they are looking at integrating music, as well.
Steen Mertz, director of communications and technology at Jyske Bank, gave what was to me the most interesting story of the day. Our own tech guru, Andrew Neale, has already written about it here. Since the TV channel’s launching, the bank has cut its communication budget in half, doing away with its quarterly magazine and other communications vehicles, to concentrate solely on the TV channel. Mertz said that 80% of the content on the bank’s TV also shows up elsewhere. He also expects to install new screens with Twitter and other social media to see what’s going on and what people are thinking.
Adrian Exton spoke on behalf of BlueSight Systems and its work with sensors and other measurement to determine not only, as others do, the age and sex of DOOH viewers, but also things like dwell time, attention, opportunity to see, and other factors. Using visual methods, once the video signals have been processed by the software, no images are retained by the system. No personal privacy or personal data protection issues are encountered as video sources are only used to create data to determine consumer behavior.
Amigo’s co-founder Alex Hughes talked about content to build relationships with customers, giving examples of the London Stock Exchange, Embankment Place, (a winner at The 2013 DailyDOOH Gala Awards), and the RMG Networks Briefing Centre. Scala’s flexibility and its ability to manipulate external data and work with shapes were some of the reasons he said Scala was used for these major projects.
Peter Critchley, managing director of the Beaver Group digital agency spoke of EAT with its 100-plus stores in London. The company uses menu manager developed by Beaver Group to handle EAT’s thousands of menu and price changes. EAT was very open to new concepts and didn’t want to be reflected as a QSR. In most locations three 47” LED Philips screens were used.
Christian Lie, head of wealth management investments at Danske Bank (DNB) spoke of rebranding Norway’s largest financial institution with digital signage. It was a real corporate redesign project for the new headquarters location and involved four buildings linked together, with screens all through. There are 90 in the cafeteria alone. In addition, there are screens in the 150 small bank branches.
James Fine, president, Telecine, mentioned his new offering to footage2go and then showed examples of some of his work using Scala, including Fidelity Investments, Bloomberg and CBC Radio-Canada. He used a variation of his staff film to contrast good content and bad, and mentioned OnSite Pro – a web-based turnkey solution (used by Bloomberg) that delivers powerful content for signage networks everywhere. He said, “With Scala, we can do almost anything!”
And bringing up the last session of the day was Peter Livesey, co-founder and managing director, Esprit Digital, manufacturer of robust media screen products, showed examples of various projects in which it had been involved, including the London Underground, the Oslo and Vienna metros, Heathrow airport, Virgin Media stores, Marks & Spencer Food, and the Commonwealth Games Park in Glasgow. He then zeroed in on Westfield-Stratford City – which many of the audience toured after the conference. The shopping mall, full of digital signage and a city showpiece for same, includes a 102 screen double-sided video wall outside the John Lewis store, believed to be the largest video wall in Europe. Westfield – Stratford City now accounts for about 33% of the retail and leisure DOOH market in the U.K..
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