This will be our last post for 2008.

This year has been an exciting and challenging year… we have achieved quite a number of business goals (including revamping this website) and our main aim is to continue to grow in the digital signage industry.

In order to grow, we believe that we need to connect more with our readers and therefore would like to hear your feedback. You have probably noticed that the bottom right hand corner we have added a feedback button. So if you have some spare time, we would love to hear your feedback about our site. We constantly want to improve all of our websites and will need your help in doing so.

Wishing everyone the best for 2009 and look forward to another exciting year. We have bigger plans for 2009 so come back, bookmark this page, or subscribe to our RSS feeds.

All the best,

The advertise me Team.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Just before the Christmas period, Advertise Me and Visual Sounds successfully installed a digital signage solution at the Go Vita Narrellan store.

The main objectives for installing digital signage were to:

1. Replace the static lightbox which didn’t really serve its purpose

Go Vita Narellan Lightbox

2. Capture the attention of people passing by or sitting down

3. Promote healthy products

4. Promote Go Vita specials

5. Promote manufacturer products

Below are a couple of images of the installed solution:

Advertise Me: Digital Signage Solution for Go Vita Narellan

Here’s a video of the template that we developed to showcase the Go Vita products and services.

About Go Vita

Go Vita was established in the early eighties and brings together under one brand the unique talents and skills of the individual owners and their staff to ensure a personal approach with all customers. This combines with the strength of the group to provide networking and substantial buying power to offer better prices and more services to all customers. Go Vita has over 110 stores across Australia, making them easily accessible for most people.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Case Study

In this current day and age, quite a number of technologies are now using touch screens.  For example, gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS, Mobile phones (iphone, blackberry storm, various PDA’s) are all using some form of touch screen technology to further increase the interaction between the user and the device.

Why interact with digital signage?

The main reason why businesses would want to interact with their customers through digital signage are:

• To provide targeted and specific information to the viewer e.g. Medical surveys whilst conducting eye sight tests.

• Traffic analytics – to understand how many people interact with the system. One system that I could think of is a Health Checking system. A weight scale connected to a digital signage system could potentially be setup to perform the following:

- The system will request for the persons age and then it will measure and display their weight

- Based on the information gathered, the system will then display the recommended weight and potential health related problems associated to the persons weight.

- Obviously at the same time, there will be an area for advertising and this space can be sold to businesses in the health industry.

• Any form of relationship requires a two way communication – to connect and build a strong relationship with your customers or clients you need to basically involve them in the decision making process. So if it’s to buy a new car, a digital signage signage solution at the car dealership should have the ability for the potential buyer to modify the colour or shape of the car as this can influence their purchasing decision.

So now the question is whether you should use touch screens in your current digital signage deployments. We cannot provide you with the answer to this question but what is important is to understand what the clients requirements are and then to assess whether a touch screen meets these requirements, but most importantly if you are planning to use touch screen technology in your digital signage solution, make sure you thoroughly look into the system usability i.e how can people interact with the system. Here are some examples from a youtube user that shows unusable touch screen systems – she refers to them as the “Usability Hall of Shame”:

For more Digital Signage videos visit the Digital Signage Portal.

My prediction is that touch screens will become part of the standard deployment for any future digital signage projects as we have seen touch screens mainly used for way finding, product catalogs, directories and gaming but is this all digital signage touch screens can be used for?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Video

This is a gentle reminder that the digital signage case study competition will be ending soon (31st December 2008 @ 5pm) . I know most of you are currently on holidays but its never to late to enter the competition.

For full details of the competition click here.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Case Study

Today, we came across an interesting digital signage powerpoint presentation from NEC titled “A digital signage solution for every business”.

The presentation contains quantifiable information and the aim of the case study was to analyse the effects of a retail signage system on sale figures in a medium sized supermarket. We were not surprised with the results as it showed that the supermarket with a DS had higher sales figures.

To view the complete presentation click the following link: http://www.nec.com.au/ramzy.pdf

Have you entered the digital signage case study competition?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Case Study, Featured Post

The Advertise Me team wishes all our readers, partners, and clients a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

We look forward to posting up more blog entries in 2009 and don’t forget that our digital signage competition will end on the 31st of December 2008.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Back in June 2008, we posted a blog entry of the top 10 search terms people are using which are landing to our digital signage blog from search engines. We have noticed that things haven’t changed much, most people are landing to our website with the most popular search terms.

Below is the updated list:

1.  digital signage blog

2. digital

3. digital signage

4. signage blog

5. digital signage blogs

6. blog digital signage

7. cellular digital signage

8. how does digital signage work

9. signage

10. what is rs232

The most noticeable difference is that more people are actually searching for blogs relating to digital signage. The great thing about our site is that its generally on the first page of google for the search term digital signage blog.

Now this is also a great opportunity to start another poll and we want to ask our readers whether their business has a blog website.

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If you do have one feel free to share it with the online community by posting a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Polls, Digital Signage Techie

Just recently, I was involved in a discussion with a couple of friends about whether one of them should install network cabling throughout his new home.  We started brainstorming reasons why he should do it:

1. You’re able to connect to your Local Area Network with faster and more reliable speeds than wireless

2. It will be more secure than wireless

3. Cheaper to install the cabling before the walls go up

4. You’re able to use the network cabling to extend video and sound

Now, whilst we were talking about point 4, we ended up having a heated debate whether you degrade video quality when extending a DIGITAL video signal. One my friends raised a good question which was ”If you send 0 & 1′s down the ethernet cable, you would expect those 0 & 1′s to come out the other end. So why would you loose video quality if it’s digital?” – that was a really good question and I was quite reluctant to answer because I didn’t have an answer.

So for those techies out there, how would you have responded to this question?

Feel free to respond to this question by adding a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Techie

A video captured by a youtube user in Tenjin Station (Fukuoka – Japan) of a digital signage screen.

For more Digital Signage videos visit the Digital Signage Portal.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog Video, Featured Post

It has been almost over a year since we had the intention of buying the domain name http://www.advertiseme.tv and we finally got it.

If I recall correctly, sometime last year we started receving promotional material about the availability of the .tv domains, so we did a search for advertiseme.tv and the domain name was available. We decided that we should include an agenda item in the next team meeting so that we could discuss whether to buy this domain name or not and determine how we were going to use this domain name.

During the meeting we all decided that it would be beneficial for us to have this domain name so we decided to purchase it but within a week someone else ended up buying that domain name. We were quite dissapointed and somehow I had this subconscious feeling that the domain search records for domain names were being tracked – big brother was watching.

But this year luck was on our side, the domain name expired and without hesitation we ended up purchasing this domain.  We intend to use this domain name for our digital signage online TV channel and potentially use it for syndicating content. This basically means that we want to enhance our clients digital signage signs by having more content available e.g. news, trivia, music clips, sports, stocks, weather and anything that people might be interested in watching.

We will hopefully launch our online services in 2009… so watch this space.

If you’re a content provider and would like to add your content or services to our porfolio just send us an email to info@advertiseme.tv

Have you ever let your domain name expire and regretted it?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Today, we are introducting Polls to our digital signage blog.

Our aim is to find out what our readers think of a particular issue or question and share this information with the online digital signage community.

So to start of our first poll, we thought we’d ask our readers which screen manufacturers do they use in their digital signage deployments.

Hope you can participate in this and future polls.

NOTE: If you select other, feel free to add a comment with the company name.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Polls

We all know who (Sir) Alan Sugar is, and the role he plays on The Apprentice, but did we know that he has a Digital Signage company?

The company is called Amscreen with Lee McQueen (winner of this year’s The Apprentice) as the development director. Amscreen plans to roll out 15-inch LCD screens (carrying ads and customer information) across pharmacies in Birmingham and Oxford, UK.

We believe digital signage has great potential to create additional revenue streams for a range of brands and retailers. Customers can now control their own media in real-time. This makes it the most easy-to-manage, cost-effective digital signage solution on the market, said Alan.

Information and quotes sourced from printweek.com.

I myself have not seen any of Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice series, so I’m curious to find out whether or not any part of this digital signage company was aired in any of the episodes.

Did Alan Sugar’s digital signage company get any airtime on The Apprentice?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Featured Post

Have you ever walked into a shop and incidentally spotted an LCD or plasma screen hanging near the back corner of the shop and you’ve asked yourself whether that’s the best location for the screen?

I’ve experienced this too many times and I often wonder whether there was any time spent by the installer to strategically position the screens in the most effective locations.

Our thoughts: Retail businesses with shop fronts need to come to a realisation that if the initial intention of installing digital signage was to engage and drive more customers into the shop, then installing the screen inside the shop will not achieve this. Our recommendation would be to install screens at the front of the shop were people passing by can actually see the specials your business is running, then with engaging content drive them into the shop. When they enter the shop, increase the chances of the visitor buying your products by using large screens with product videos and information.

We have also seen businesses installing and positioning small screens at “hot spots” for manufacturers to showcase and advertise their products. What we mean by “hot spots” is locations where the most traffic would pass at any given time – generally this could be in an area where the special or on sale products are located or at the front of the product iles.

Just as an example, here’s a couple of pictures of an install we completed for a Newsagency based in Sydney. We had two screens located right in front of the entrance to catch the attention of people passing by in both directions. Then inside the store, we had a large LCD screen located right at the magazine stand – this was a “hot spot” because people tended to hang around to read the magazines and pickup the newspaper.

Sometimes, you may also need to think “outside the square” and find locations where you think you can target a specific audience, e.g toilets – you can target your audience by gender (male or female).

Our question: Have you seen any screens installed in any interesting locations/areas?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Today is the start to the digital signage case study competition. We and the digital signage community are excited to see what digital signage case studies businesses will be submitting.
So far we have already received positive feedback and we invite all digital signage businesses to participate and spice up the competition.

The competition will end on the 31st December 2008 so don’t wait till the very end and participate now. For the complete details of this competition, click here.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News