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

Its been a crazy past many weeks for us here at advertise me. In the past 2 months gone, I’ve been hopping between different cities every week for digital signage installations and meetings.

It is interesting to see where each city is at with the influence of digital signage, and I have noticed that the usage of its application differs between different regions across the country. However one of the disappointing things that I have picked up is the management of downtime for systems going offline. In less populated cities, when a screen goes offline it can be left like that for days without anybody coming to its attention. In more populated cities, the screen will be back live again by the afternoon, or the next day at latest.

I’ve got a couple more places to go before the end of this month, and that should leave me with an open, but not easy December where I can get my feet back on the ground and plan for the next year. By gosh its mid November already and Christmas is just around the corner!

Telstra building in Melbourne

Offline Screen in Perth Domestic Airport

Has anybody found any other trends with digital signage applications across different regions of your country?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info

Several weeks ago I had relatives visiting from overseas, so being a host I decided to take them out sightseeing to the major “tourist” locations in Sydney. I must be honest with you, it’s been a while since I’ve done that so I was quite surprised to see a number of businesses using Digital Signage at the front of their stores in the main streets of Sydney. The majority of the stores were Mobile Phone companies such as Telstra and Optus (there was also a couple of banks as well).

Whilst walking around the Sydney Opera house, I was stopped by one of my relatives and he said “What is that?”. I turned around and I saw a large portrait plasma screen showing “What’s on” information and local advertisements. Here’s a couple of pictures of what we were looking at (click on the images to make them bigger):

“Ah!” I thought to myself, this is a great opportunity to talk about my business “Advertise Me“, so I started talking about digital signage (actually it was more like giving him a sales pitch). But before I could finish, he stopped me and he said, “No, that’s not what I meant. What’s that annoying text doing in the background”.

At that stage I didn’t really know what he was talking about, so I carefully looked at the screen again and I couldn’t believe that I didn’t notice it the first time. *Have a look at the images again and see if you can spot it* If you haven’t figured it out yet, click on these two images below:

He was basically referring to the burns on the plasma screen. Now, because I’ve seen this before on other plasma screens I started telling him how it could have potentially got there – the WHITE text was too bright and the text being displayed on the same area was too frequent.

This screen definitely needs to be “burnt” and replaced – no one likes looking at a screen with noticeable burns as it can distract the viewers from looking at the messages the business is trying to convey.

With the cost of LCD screens coming down, plasma screens are becoming obsolete, but if you’re still using plasma screens  you may want to our forum post called “Guidelines to prevent plasma burns” on the digital signage portal.

Our question:
Has your plasma screens ever experienced the burn in effect or have you ever seen any screens with noticable burns?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News