Cataloging the Canadian digital signage industry

Hot on the heels of the creation of Canada’s first digital signage trade body (CNM, July 20/05) comes a project to catalogue all providers of products and services in Canada. Lloyd Bunn, director of digital display and rich media at Mississauga ON interactive digital display network provider BTV+, is organizing a meeting of digital signage providers on September 16th with partner Kelly McGillivray, president of Brampton ON-based advertising metrics firm Transearch Group. One of the projects the two have undertaken is the creation of a directory of all digital signage providers and associated service firms in Canada. With the fledgling industry starting to gather steam here, a comprehensive listing of available products and services will help spur growth, Bunn says. "We see some of the more advanced projects happening in Canada – the TTC is the largest public space deployment of a digital signage network," he notes. Toronto-based OneStop Media Group, with partners CHUM Television, Fourth Wall Media (which owns OneStop), Viacom and Bell Mobility, inked a deal earlier this year with Toronto’s Transit Commission that will see large LCD signboards placed in as many as 30 subway stations by the end of 2005. The seven-year deal could provide the TTC with as much as $5 million in shared advertising revenues. Earlier adopters such as the TTC are leading Bunn and others to speculate that the potential present worth of the digital signage market in Canada is approximately $400 million. However, Bunn says, Canadian businesses are conservative when they spend money, and they do it with just cause. "There’s a lot of concern that digital signage is complex – the other concern is that it appears to be expensive," he says. The potential for growth – and the need to educate businesses before they open their pocketbooks – is what spawned the creation of a national industry body, the Canadian Digital Signage Association, earlier this summer. "The principal owners of the networks are getting together – this does not happen anywhere else in the world," Bunn claims. "I speak with people , and they’re having a hard time. Maybe it’s part of the Canadian mentality, wanting to collaborate in supply, and in assuring we get the benefits out of this communications tool." Bunn is also the head of the education committee at Point of Purchase Advertising International (POPAI), a global retail marketing industry association, and says retail installations have been driving the market to date. "The high-growth area is in shelf-level display: small seven-, nine-, or 10-inch displays, on a revolving loop, reflecting the merits of a particular product or how to use it." Such applications make sense when you consider the famous Pareto principle is at work in the advertising industry, Bunn says: "Eighty percent of the ad spending on television, in fact 80% of the purchase decisions are made in stores." Retail applications notwithstanding, digital signage as a medium for out-of-home advertising has caught a bit of a tailwind, thanks to developments in other advertising media: television advertising, for instance, is in somewhat of a slump according to industry figures, partly due to oversaturation of advertising and branding on the TV airwaves, but also because of the advent of such devices as personal video recorders, which allow viewers to skip commercial breaks altogether. Given that, the technology is starting to get buy-in from some major players in the advertising industry, including Millward Brown, the multinational market strategy consulting arm of WPP, an advertising agency that buys and places one in every four ads worldwide. " recognizing out of home display and digital signage as key to this equation is, I think, quite important," Bunn says. Aside from the marketing potential of such installations, Bunn says there are also "soft" benefits, such as customers in a bank being entertained by the displays while waiting in line to see a teller, resulting in a perceived reduction in wait time. Blair Makin, VP of industry solutions at Bell Canada’s Bell Enterprise Group, echoes Bunn’s sentiment about cost-consciousness here, saying that "people are very concerned in particular around the capital investment" in Canada. The big three industries to date for Bell Digital Signage, he says, have been the retail, transportation and financial services sectors. Makin also agrees with Bunn that the less apparent benefits of the technology should not be underestimated: the perception of shorter waiting times in the financial services industry is "absolutely a big bonus," he says. Makin also backs up the assertion that digital signage is filling an advertising need with the diminishing effectiveness of TV ads. "TV is no longer the number one dominant form of media or entertainment in the home anymore – it’s moving more towards the Internet," he says. And, digital signage offers an Internet-like experience in a retail environment, at the point-of-purchase. "People may know that they’re going to land at a specific retailer because they’re interested in a specific type of product but they may not have decided on that product, and being able to influence that at the point of purchase is very powerful," he says. Bell is the exclusive Canadian distributor of the products and services of Sony of Canada Ltd. (for display technology) and Alpharetta GA’s Convergent Media Systems Corp. (for content creation) in the digital signage space, and also partners with several smaller content providers, especially in Quebec. Makin is guarded about the number of present customers for Bell Digital Signage, but will say that in the past year "we’ve grown from moving forward with only a couple of clients to now having a very large list of either trials or implementations underway, in the neighborhood of 40-plus." The medium can also be used for training: BTV+ recently won a five-year contract from General Motors to provide additional capacity for the automaker’s distance learning studios. "This is quite a key direction in digital signage: it’s not just display," Bunn says. "Using that display device for other business communications is a key leverage point." Makin says Bell Enterprise has also been keeping an eye on the potential for its digital signage solution in the learning space. Aside from the purely commercial aspects of the medium, however, there are more altruistic uses. Both Bunn and Makin agree that one application of digital signage technology that has yet to be capitalized on in Canada is the public information aspect, including Amber Alerts for missing children and delivering instant instructions in case of a disaster or terrorist attack. Bunn references the September 11, 2001 attack on New York’s World Trade Center as a case in point. "If there had been stairwell displays indicating to people they were going in the wrong direction to be saved, maybe fewer people would have died. In a disaster situation. there’s a need to get instructions to people that’s visible or audible to them, this market has not yet really come forward for digital signage."

Cataloging the Canadian digital signage industry

News | 09/02/2005 4:00 am EDT

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