By Mark R. Smith, Contributing Writer
While the COVID-19 pandemic stymied or even killed many a business, especially in certain industries – food service, hotels, airlines, and sports/entertainment first come to mind – there are others that rose from the abyss to not only move forward, but gain momentum.
One industry in the latter category is digital media. That’s especially true given the need for businesses to deliver marketing impactful marketing messages as various sectors of the economy, including those others aforementioned, continue their march back towards pre-pandemic revenues.
Need proof? Just ask an executive whose work concerns facilitating the creativity of the digital world.
“The [digital media] industry is doing much better from the days of the COVID-19 shutdown. In fact, it’s expanding,” said Stephen Gottlich, senior vice president of innovation and strategy for Baltimore-based Gable. “It’s technology-based, which is a double-sided sword; that’s because people tell the story, not the technology, which we create.”
Tech Notes
The genesis of the digital media story harkens back to the days of simplicity that today’s younger consumers can hardly imagine. “Many years ago, technology displays mainly consisted of the time and temperature being posted on a bank sign. But those signs always stayed in place, with the same minimal content, and people became numb to it,” said Gottlich.
It was about 15 years ago that the evolution began. “That’s when displays evolved to three- or four-color outdoor displays,” he said.
But the real key moment came about 10 years ago, when resolution was honed from 16mm to 10mm within a year. “That revolutionized our industry, because then you could post video on these boards of varying (and often very large) sizes and see condensation on a soda bottle or the ketchup dripping off of a burger,” said Gottlich.
That era continued until those outdoor displays evolved into indoor boards with the same resolutions as the TV in one’s home, which is 0.9mm.
So today’s consumers, he said, live “in two worlds: storytelling and technology. So our work is based on the three ‘I’s,’” Gottlich said. “Inspire, Inform and Influence. Those three words explain why this industry is expanding, with the desire to affect a consumer’s choice via effective visual communication.”
Key to that expansion was the demand for content. “Now, those 24/7 screens need to be filled with content, so there is demand for storytellers,” Gottlich said. “It’s not dissimilar to what you see on your smartphone; it’s just bigger. And the creatives have between 8-15 seconds to tell a story.”
As for the cost, boards can range from $5,000 to the millions of dollars, he said, “The new signs at Resorts World, in Las Vegas, for instance, cost tens of millions of dollars.”
And how to pay for it? “It’s like any other media. Eyeballs attract ad revenue, just like a newspaper or a magazine,” he said. “This is just another branch of media in our evolving world.”
Making Entry
Digital dynamic media has grown during that span to be a key sector of Gable’s business, which now has its own specialized unit of more than 30 professionals.
“We provide solutions for cities, resorts, shopping centers, etc., to inform people, often in various languages,” said Gottlich. “The digital screens are very versatile, as a stagnant billboard may advertise something that is miles away from it; but with dynamic digital screens, we work with clients that are often much closer to the sign and can influence more people to enter nearby businesses. We’re even starting to put smaller screens (of 10 feet by 4 feet) in convenience store windows that still allow the customers to see outside while they’re inside.”
Gable is expanding that approach to other storefronts for various retailers, which provide an image for the given store –such as an entry constructed of digital screens – to heighten the sense of fashion and attract more shoppers. “The customization is about anything you want,” he said. “We’re already building such entry portals for one of our clients, Psycho Bunny, at about 20 of their stores.”
But the big recent technological advancement “is in the software, which includes the ability to control the screens with playlists that are dynamic with programmatic advertising,” Gottlich said. “Users can shuffle the ads as desired remotely, be if from the office, their home, the beaches or anywhere else, via the Internet.”
$700K Boost
Speaking of Sin City, if anyone wants to see the latest and possibly greatest, take a trip to Vegas and stroll up and down The Strip. Of recent note is the new $5 million, 10,000-square-foot board in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s new $1 billion West Hall.
The size and scale of the board, “when combined with the natural light in the spacious atrium, is a great benefit to the hall,” said Chief Operating Office Brian Yost, “and of course, we intended to monetize it.”
That’s being done via different avenues, he said. “Some of our clients who book the shows buy the time, then sell it to their clients,” Yost said, “while others use it themselves.”
Some of the LVCC’s clients have bought time on the big board as well as the other “approximately 100 other smaller video installs in the 600,000-square-foot West Hall,” he said. They’re found “on the kiosks, the big overhead boards that rest by the escalator landings, and other signs and TVs throughout the new building that are often used simply for place-making and wayfinding.”
So far, the return has been promising. “The big board has been up for just more than a year and we’ve sold more than $700,000 worth of inventory during approximately 30 events,” said Yost.
But there’s more to this installation than gross revenues.
“We’re also measuring the qualitative feedback from our clients,” he said. “That’s just as important to us regarding attendees and the overall show efforts for all concerned. When you add the rest of the digital infrastructure, it provides a holistic messaging platform that show organizers love.”
For Art’s Sake
Allison Dollar was quick to support Yost’s early results with Gottlich’s point about people telling the stories, not the technology. “When discussing next generation exhibits and multimedia experiences, people often focus on the enabling technology,” said Dollar, CEO of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based ITV Alliance. “This is a mistake.”
“They also often conflate immersion with interactivity. That is also a mistake,” she said. “Good planning starts with the baseline objective, content resources and narrative flow to yield an outcome. It’s immaterial whether we’re talking about a location-based entertainment pop-up, a new way to display an art collection, a team-building exercise for a corporate retreat or a brand activation to drive retail sales: the fundamentals in strategic planning and tactics apply.”
“Full immersion can be great for exploring both a workaday product like a new auto design or for playing a game,” Dollar said. “A touch screen’s interactivity can be enough to engage someone to request a coupon or follow a timeline with branching options. Not everything can and should be virtual reality or even augmented reality.”
“The wisdom,” she said, “is to know the difference starts at the planning stage. And conversely, sometimes the overall effect of digital bells and whistles is so evocative and beautiful that it’s worth piling them on.”
As Dollar noted, the digital media effect has also long been felt in the art world. In contrast to the edgy video installations that have been a staple of modern art for years, immersive video has emerged “as a crowd-pleasing, multi-sensory movement,” said Carol Spieckerman, president of Spieckerman Retail, Bentonville, Ark, who noted the example of the immersive Van Gogh experience.
“It’s one of the buzzier exhibitions making the rounds, yet many more are popping up or in development,” said Spieckerman, who called the immersive digital video experiences “a natural convergence of consumers’ fascination with social media and the democratization of sophisticated technology.”
Safe Gazing
As the pandemic accelerated demand for transformational experiences that don’t require travel, this “art stack” concept “is gaining traction in this space,” she said, “as it deliberately bypasses the art establishment, including the gallery system that commercializes art. In that sense, it’s just another example of the direct-to-consumer movement that is accelerating in retail, entertainment, and other industries.”
So it’s no wonder, said Spieckerman, “that leading galleries like Pace,” in New York, “are launching their own experiential art projects and spaces to stay ahead of the trend. Organizations such as Random International, Refik Anadol Studio and teamLab are taking unique approaches and forming various partnerships that ensure ownership of the process and in some cases, exhibition spaces.”
Museums are “under constant pressure” to expand outreach and sell tickets, she said. “Immersive digital experiences offer a unique combination of room-filling scale, social-media-worthy engagement and product-friendly extensions that bring in the cash.”
And that infusion of cash is the result of that “double-edged sword,” as Gottlich called it, of technology. Robert Detwiler, director of LED products for Planar, a manufacturer in the professional audio-visual display market, has also seen the heightened technology lead to increases not only in the company’s bottom line, but in opportunities for clients.
“We’re seeing growth,” said Detwiler, pointing to a July OMDIA report noting 6.7 percent quarter-on-quarter and 26.8 percent year-over-year growth for LED video displays in North America in the first quarter of 2022. “Even in the last year, despite the complications of the pandemic.”
The LED display market has grown to the point that not only are video boards being used for typical applications, such as corporate environments, command centers, monitoring utilities and traffic systems, and retail in order to share large amounts of data, “but there are also some creative new applications,” Detwiler said, also pointing to the museum market.
Key to that trend are two factors. “Not only are prices of the maturing technology coming down, the resolution, as well as the pitch, of the boards is improving,” said Detwiler.
How stark in the difference in price? “When I started this job about five years ago, a 136-inch video wall cost more than $100,000,” he said. “Today, an LED video wall can cost less than half that much, making the price more comparable to a tiled LCD video wall. So while we have higher-end models, we also have more economical offerings for various markets like health care, higher education and houses of worship.”
Future Visions
While critics may sniff that these exhibits are too easy and comfortable, and are intentionally designed for the sake of commerce, “the various art and technical collaboratives creating these experiences will no doubt find plenty of work,” said Spieckerman, in retail, entertainment and real estate development – particularly as a flood of immersive devices, such as headsets, brain machine interfaces, biowearables, XR contact lenses and more hit the market during the next few years.
While such new accessories continue to accentuate the market, the future of actual digital signage “is not necessarily in size, it is in the way the boards stimulate an interaction with the person viewing it,” said Oliver Schlake, director of the Business, Society & the Economy Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.
“When a barn-sized display becomes a personal message board, people might pay attention,” said Schlake. “Technology already exists to have directed sound to people in the proximity so that a specific message can only be heard if you are in a targeted area close to the sign.”
Likewise, new signage technology allows new dimensions to communication.
“Digital boards display a message that can only be read within a specific angle towards the board, so the viewer can be located via a digital device and only that viewer can see a customized message,” he said.
“The movie Minority Report painted us a vision of hyper-personalized signage boards 20 years ago and technology has finally caught up with that vision,” Schlake said, “but hopefully, for a less-scary future of advertising.”
