Digital Signage Connection

Information is king. Most everyone does some sort of research on the Internet before making a large purchase. From handbags to homes, the brand that gives the customer the most information usually gets the sale. The information has to be easy to find, and easy to understand.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, the demand for fresh content is insatiable. Very few E-tailers can keep up with that demand.

A Content Conduit
Enter SellPoint. SellPoint is one of a few services that supply the latest product content to online merchants, on behalf of manufacturers. One might call the company a content conduit. Manufacturers supply the latest content to SellPoint on a specific product. SellPoint takes the raw data and turns it into a rich media product tour. The tour is completely interactive and updated several times daily. SellPoint stores the content on its server, and integrates it into the E-tail sites via a JavaScript link. When customers visit a website that is connected to SellPoint, they are able to take the product tour on their computer at their own pace. The E-tailer does nothing more than allow that link onto their website.

The manufacturer pays for the cost of content creating, updating and hosting. SellPoint maintains the relationship with the E-tailers and feeds the data to as many websites as it can. Each tour is skinned to look as if it is a custom presentation on each individual site. Metrics of how many tours are viewed and the average view time is registered and shared with the manufacturers, who know how many views the tour gets, how long the tours last, which types of product information were viewed and what sites were visited.

It would be very difficult for manufacturers to reach all of these websites on their own. The E-tailer could never manage this much content from so many vendors. SellPoint serves as the middleman, a sort of “cloud” service, publishing content for thousands of products. And best of all, the tours sell product. Information is king!

What does this have to do with digital signage? The SellPoint model is easily adapted to digital signage, especially in the on-the-shelf small screen application. The content is developed for the small computer screen. It is fed through the network, and it is interactive, though it could be a passive slide show as well.

Chicken or Egg
The content and hardware conflict is like the chicken and egg syndrome. No one is willing to invest in hardware unless there is content available. The content creators are not going to invest their funds unless there are screens to play it on.

Large retailers are in a position to request content from the manufacturers. They have enough traffic to offer the manufacturer, and they can sell enough product to create positive ROI. Content for them is easy to obtain. They also have the resources to staff a digital signage department.

But the small and medium dealer is the critical mass of the industry. In an age where the large retailers are squeezing out the small and medium chains, these businesses need to employ the most current marketing tools to stay competitive, and that is digital signage at the point of sale. They just don’t have the muscle to require the manufacturers to pay for the creation of the content. So where will they get the content?

This is where the SellPoint model comes in. The company has product content, optimized for the point-of-sale, that can easily be repurposed for digital signage and fed to the retailers, in the same way that it is fed to the E-tailers. There are all kinds of metrics that can be culled from the interaction of the touch screen. Since the content is already created for the small monitor, there will be very little additional expense. And what is best is that the content designed for the Internet gets to work overtime, making it even more cost effective for the manufacturer.  

A central library of content already exists in the Internet world. It’s what the digital signage industry needs to kick start it. It creates an economy of scale for retailers and manufacturers. With that, it creates work for all of the small and medium businesses serving the digital signage industry.

Perry Goldstein is a veteran of the electronics industry. After spending 30 years in consumer electronics, he has transitioned into the Pro AV industry. Currently, he is sales & marketing manager with El Segundo, Calif.-based Marshall Electronics, where he heads the company’s Digital Signage and MXL Pro Audio division. Goldstein will be hosting an On-Floor Workshop at DSE 2012 titled “Digital Signage Content Creation for Use in Retail Stores.” To contact for questions regarding the information in this article, email perry.goldstein@gmail.com.