Last week I was at my local shopping centre and noticed that they installed digital signage. The setup was as follows:

• There were two 47″ LG screens hanging from the ceiling.
• There was an LG player the back of the first screen
• Connected to the player there was a Telstra USB 3G modem – I’m assuming this was needed for Internet connectivity
• There was also a VGA splitter that connected the Video output to the second screen

Now, in terms of content and what was displayed on the screen seemed quite disappointing. There was only two ads displayed on the screen. One was the company’s own advertisement and the other was just an image.

My initial thoughts were, “How is the company making money?” and “Are the network owners already struggling to find advertisers?”

I believe this is a common issue for digital signage network startups. Most believe that having a network means that they can easily generate advertising revenue but that’s not always the case. Finding advertisers is the biggest challange easpecially if the network only has a handful of screens. Its a numbers game -most of the advertisers want exposure and they are willing to pay for it if the exposure is high.

So before jumping at the chance of setting up a digital signage network make sure you have advertisers ready to buy your advertising space…. and good luck.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info

Looks like the Japanese has done it again – this time in the toilets.  Sega has just launched a trial for this  month at four male bathrooms in pubs and game arcades. Basically, you can play games using your urine. I while ago I blogged about Digital Signage: Location, location, location and how important it is to target the right audience and mentioned how toilets was an example of targeting a specific gender. I’m glad someone thought about this. continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

I stumbled across this job advertisement on elance.com and it appears a company is planning to development their own digital signage player/system. Based on the description below it looks ordinary – ie. there’s already quite a number of players that does exactly what they want so why spend more time developing your own?

I guess the main reason why anyone would develop their own system would be for flexability and satisfaction. By developing your own custom application you can design and build it the way you want it and eventually customise parts that need improvements. There’s also the satisfaction factor, knowing people are using your application gives you joy and satisfaction. Below is the job that was advertised on the elance website:

Network Distributed Media Player

The SIGNWAVE DIGITAL MEDIA PLAYER will be able to playback full screen 1920 x 1080 compressed video in the .MOV/M4V format. The user-friendly playlists can be managed by any web browser on the network. The playlist duration will be 24 hours. Scheduled spots will have the ability to playback at pre-defined times within the 24 hour schedule. All playlists are based on a 1 hour schedule. For instance if a specific spot needs to play back at 9:50am the base schedule can be interrupted to play the unique scheduled spot. Once the spot has played the original playlist will resume normal playback. Playlists can be auto-populated by selecting how many times per hour a spot will play. When a schedule is getting close to 1 hour the remaining time can be filled with content from a fill directory that contains appropriate fill content until the next hour starts. A system may consist of many playback devices (Mac Mini). The management software will have the…

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Inside-Retailing-Magazine-Digital-Signage

This week the Retail Expo was held in Sydney Australia from the 20 – 22 September 2010. Unfortunately we were not able to exhibit this year due to various projects and the workload, but we did decide to spend a bit of money on advertising in the inside retailing magazine which gets distributed at the expo and also to retailers all over the country.

Here’s a picture of our advertisement… it was right on the first page as soon as you open up the technology section.

It was also great to see our company name being mentioned in one of the articles in the magazine.

Hopefully through this ad we’ll generate more leads and sales.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

This weekend my son my playing on my brothers Iphone and guess what I saw… a blackberry advertisement for the app world. I found it strange and funny that the Iphone application doodle was actually displaying an advertisement for it’s competitor Research In Motion. I decided to take a photo of it on my Blackberry just to share it with everyone since it was quite amusing.

blackberry advertisement

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

It’s another weekend and for this particular post we’re going to look at a fun and innovative digital signage solution in Taoyuan Airport. Basically, as you’re waling down the duty free alley in the Taoyuan airport Terminal 2, you will notice that an advertisement follows you. I’m not sure whether the ads as targeted specifically based on the gender or characteristics of the person walking past but do you find this too intrusive? Have a look at the video:

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Polls, Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This month, we completed a digital signage install at newsXpress. Here’s a couple of images of the digital signage solution using the latest Cayin product:

A case study will be posted shortly.

If you have any images of digital signage solutions, feel free to post them in the digital signage portal (registration is required). The digital signage portal allows your business to showcase your digital signage case studies, photos, advertisement templates and examples all in one location.

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