Best Practices Webinar

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TRANSCRIPT

Alright, everyone. Thank you for coming to the digital signage best practices webinar from Carousel Digital Signage.

I'm Colin Gross. I'm a sales engineer over here at Carousel Digital Signage.

If you've been to webinar that I've hosted, I used to do the spotlights. Those are pretty quick. This is gonna be a little bit longer and pretty feature dense. We're gonna be talking about a lot of stuff. We are recording this, so, if you have to come back and view it later if you're busy, that's totally cool. We're gonna be, talking about seven best practices to consider, with visual signage, and that can be if you're designing a project, if you own a project, if you're an IT person in a project, or, you know, help manage, you know, the system you might already have.

Some housekeeping things first. As I progress throughout the presentation, we'll be kinda stopping between the sections to answer some questions in chat. Mitch will be here with us today kind of watching those and, you know, asking questions as we go. There'll be a QA session at the very end, which won't be recorded. We'll be able to unmute you if you prefer to ask questions verbally. We can do that as well.

And then also like we are Carousel Digital Signage, right? We offer Carousel Cloud, which is a signage CMS. But I wanna mention that this presentation really comes down, really comes from experience that I have working with like many projects, some that did fit with us and some didn't.

I've made an effort to make this not a quote unquote carousels the best practice or best practices with carousel presentation. I may use some features and as examples, but this is really sort of meant to be a general conversation.

It's kinda casual on digital signage as a whole.

So then with that, I will begin.

So sort of out of the seven best practices we have, we'll start with the first one, which is choosing the right CMS.

Now, CMS is content management software, the system you're using to manage your content for your digital signage screens. Now there are a lot of options in this space. None of them are one size fits all. Our competitors love their kids too, right? There's a lot to offer throughout different offerings. But what you have to really consider is your initial scope and your long term plans and not get kinda wrapped up in features on this step, right?

When we're looking at CMSs, we should be asking these questions and sort of considering a few things. The first one is, you know, this is a later best practice as well, but the media players, right? Ensuring that your CMS is gonna support the correct hardware and is leveraging that hardware effectively.

I think the big thing here is that support does not always equal success, right? You can kind of look at a feature map and see that this device is supported, but like, will that be successful? Is does do they have a lot of experience deploying that hardware? Does it meet all your feature goals? Is it something that you can support? We'll talk about that some more, but that's sort of a big a big part when it comes to working and being the right fit for you.

And having an appropriate learning curve. And I say appropriate because this is where fit comes in. If you have a small system, say like a screen or two in one room that requires occupancy sensors, custom programming, you know, room control systems, stuff like that, the appropriate learning curve may be something that is fairly complex, right? And does require a lot of technical skill, like that might be right for that situation, right?

In other situations, you may have many screens and have non technical users, you know, making content in many physical locations, right? That learning curve should be minimal, right? And more of a drag and drop experience. When you're considering your CMS, I think you should sort of back up a little bit and kind of look at sort of the lay of the land and kind of ask some of these questions.

And if you do have a lot of users, right? What kind of control is needed for those users? Do screens or locations need to be segmented out? Do you have departments that within those departments, you need different roles for different content creators?

I would say that this and the one before it are kind of the most important questions to ask even before listing out CMS options or booking a demo. Right? So you have the white right frame of mind going into those conversations. Right?

And then, you know, is that CMS easy to deploy and expand?

The M in CMS is management and that management will have different, you know, levels of work needed to set it up and function. And the scale of that, you know, needs to be considered, right? If I'm going to go from ten players to ten thousand, is that something that's gonna scale with me? Or is that something that's gonna be exponential work?

Like if these devices need to be manually configured, Is that got something that can be expanded? Or does the CMS auto deploy or help self deploy options? Right? Asking these four questions before you even Google digital time CMS will help you sort of weed out what's gonna be best for your sort of situation.

And again, all of these are sort of points that when you review and look at, when you put them all together, that's gonna have like really narrow your focus. And I think that's where success comes in. Right? So step one here is asking these questions and making sure that your CMS fits those goals.

If there's any questions, you are able to of course type them in the chat. I don't see any now. So I'm gonna continue to the next best practice, which is stop thinking about digital signage, right? Like you typically would and start thinking about communication.

I bring this up a lot because when people hear digital signage, they instantly think stuff on screens, right? They think of black squares on the walls or they think I have a new building that has power and ethernet and a screen here, I need to put something on there. I think when you approach it from that perspective, signage can kinda seem like a solution looking for a problem.

And I can think it can get pretty easy to get caught up in like the design and presentation of things.

And sometimes there's some large communication opportunities that get missed.

So if we do have a signage system, right? I think if we back up and we ask, you know, who, what, and where, we're much more focused on like what we're actually trying to achieve with signage and it becomes, you know, much more of a solution than it would be a problem looking for, or an answer looking for a problem. So I think when we are looking at these things, the who is really your audience, right? Who are you trying to reach?

You know, before diving into a project, right, it's important to determine who's actually going to be communicated with, who's gonna physically be there, what problems you're trying to solve with that audience, right? The where is pretty easy, it's the location. Sometimes you can choose this, sometimes it's predetermined for you based on the layout of the building and how it's wired, but that audience that you've kind of focused on is gonna be in different locations, and those different locations might have different topics or different content that you want to communicate, right? So if we pull all these things together, we get a much clearer picture of what the overall system should look like and having that clear vision and expected outcomes starts to actually drive the value of signage, right?

So practical example here, if my audience, right, is internal employees, that'll greatly determine my content policies and goals, right? Maybe I have employees in a setting in their department where they need to know like stats and have dashboards and being praised for their accomplishments, right? When I kind of realize that together, it's very easy to say that's what the screen's going to do.

Maybe those same employees and other employees congregate in a break room or cafeteria. That might be a place where I can do wider calls to action such as, you know, open enrollment for services or updating passwords, security measures, etcetera, right?

You basically have this wall, right? When it comes to signage, you have this wall that can display almost anything, but like any mathematical equation, you have to kind of turn around and look at the other side of the problem. In this case, one side of the problem is the screen and the other side of it is looking at your people and your space.

I think if you consider those, you have what you're trying to solve and then you can use Carousel to communicate the information to solve those problems.

The next best practice is dynamic content, right?

And I'll explain kind of what that is, but in my opinion, right? The biggest killer of a signage system is stale content, right? Many times I hear that there was a previous signage system. It worked really well for a while, but then the keys changed hands or there was a reorganization, someone left.

And then after a while, they ended up just turning off the screens, and now they're coming to us to relaunch it. Right? The root cause of that system sort of falling off, was the decision to turn off those screens, right? And the screen that digital signage that just displays a black square obviously has no value, right?

What ends up happening here is the content didn't get updated because it was so dependent on the content creator. So over time, as people aren't updating it, people are seeing happy new year's images in July, right? Workerverse re announcements for people who haven't been there for years. When that stuff starts showing up on the screen, then the value starts to deteriorate pretty quickly, right?

So when it comes to dynamic content, this is a way to sort of update your screens both automatically and based on workflows people already do in your organization or in the organization that you might be working with, even if they haven't had a digital signer system before. Right?

The content creators are still important for sure, but being able to connect to your metrics, something like Power BI or Gecko Board or Domo or something like that, so that, you know, where that data is already being fed, that that goes up on the screen automatically and it's updated without human interaction.

It's gonna be like a It's gonna be both more useful for the viewers and not be so reliant on a content creator, right? Being able to pull videos or images from places that people are already posting them, such as YouTube, right? If someone's already experienced putting videos on YouTube and you use like a YouTube compatible CMS, that's one less step someone has to do, right? And they're already updating that, they never log into Carousel, right? Being able to display the events or your internal news or date, time and weather, these are all things that if they're on the screen, that content's always going to be current and the viewers are always gonna find value. And that'll sort of extend the life in case someone has to go on leave or, you know, something happens.

I would say that, particularly, we've had customers of ours that have run ancient versions of Carousel, like circa two thousand fourteen. We're talking ten years. And even after all of our end of life announcements and warnings, they didn't even know how to access the system. And it wasn't until, you know, Microsoft changed authentication for exchange calendars, which is what they were kind of using, that the value started to diminish, like that change, that broke, and now the screens weren't getting updated.

That's when people kind of realized that there was a kind of a problem, which you could take it as a double edged sword, but we're talking people that had less logins of years in some cases, but the power of dynamic content is even when, you know, whoever managed it left, that screen was still operational, still automatic, and the extended really extended the life cycle of that signage system. So I would just say that when you're thinking about implementing signage, a good mix of fresh content that's dynamic will really, extend the life and then, of course, reduce the work needed for your, content creators.

Best practice number four is kinda using the best hardware. Now we won't be talking about like screens and panels. Right? There's a that's a whole another conversation.

Right? We have a lot of resellers and partners and organizations that kinda have that kinda lockdown. Luckily, nowadays, you really just need an HDMI connection and you're good to go. We're gonna be talking mostly about the media players that are actually running that software.

Right? And that isn't one size fit all.

Unlike, you know, ten years ago, right?

We do have a lot more choices available to us now when it comes to devices that can play signage. So picking the right one out of that list is, pretty important.

Now the devices I've listed here are just ones that Carousel Cloud supports, just not to confuse anyone who is looking at or uses Carousel. Obviously, there are more options available in this space. Right? But this is just kind of what we what we support.

I would say that like back in the day, the only option was Windows devices, right? And there's nothing wrong with using Windows as a digital signage platform. I think we've all seen images or real life examples of a Windows desktop or update notification in place of where your message should be. Right?

The problem isn't that Windows is bad for signage. The problem is that it isn't probably wasn't the best fit for that client. Right? Windows device, for example, may be appropriate for a client who has standardized Windows images.

They're really familiar with that OS. They have a deep understanding of device policies and manage Windows devices at scale, but it might not be the best fit for an IT team that's Apple centric or a small to medium business that isn't familiar with those sort of management policies, right? And I think that's where we end up seeing more of those situations.

For any IT professionals that are on the call, you might have, I mean, you do have a lot of leverage to dictate what hardware you want on your network and if you're familiar with those devices, the added work of a digital signage system kind of becomes minimal for you. So a sustainable approach, you know, to device management for the IT team is important to ensure the devices are updated, working and running digital signage, which is very important to help avoid those digital signage failures we've kinda seen in the wild. Right? So I'm just gonna take, you know, two examples that we at Carousel like kinda love and see the most, Right? By by no means am I kinda pitching these to you, but I kinda wanna show you how these two fit in different scenarios and what those outcomes are and kinda what I'm considering when we're talking to organizations for what hardware they should use. Right?

So to respect our time, we'll just do these two, right? And then here's some management load for IT and some practical examples of their uses. First, wanna talk about Apple devices, specifically Apple TV.

Has really like lowered the cost floor for organizations wanting a powerful device that they can still manage, lock down and still allow screen sharing in the conference room setting. There's a lot to love about the hardware, but if an organization doesn't already have experience using Apple devices or they don't already use an MDM like Jamf, like it might not be the right fit. On the flip side, if an organization already has these devices and they manage iOS and they manage macOS already, then the IT team will start with a much higher level of confidence hearing that this is what's gonna be powering their signage, right?

The IT team gets the tickets at the end of the day, right? A lot of us CMS vendors, course, provide support. We have resellers and partners that also provide support as well. But at the end of the day, that tickets kinda start with the IT team and the more comfortable they are, right?

The less friction you're gonna have with those devices, right? RightSign is an example of, you know, on the flip side is a example of signage specific hardware. It does one thing and it does it well, and their success and proliferation in the digital signage space is sort of a testament to this. These devices have no desktop.

You can't just connect a mouse and keyboard to them to take down the signage. The device management control cloud is provided for free.

The features it supports are developed specifically for the hardware that they've created to make like kind of the best experience for those features. Now, both of these options, right? And just kind of very small pie of the overall options you have sort of achieve the same end goal, right? They can be deployed, managed at scale and have roughly the same feature base, but the IT lift for these devices can vary greatly between organizations, right?

So here are just some some examples. So from a from a viewer, from a person who's gonna see the signage. Right? What's going on behind it isn't really that impactful.

Right? We have a student here with an iPad that's kinda having a one on one have a one on one initiative with iPads per student. We have a video wall. We have a break room, and then we have a interactive touch way finding screen.

Right? On the front, public facing side of it. Right? The different hardware isn't displayed here really.

Right? So this can kind of be anything.

But if an organization already has one to one iPads, and they're looking to do signage in their lobby with Apple TV, this is a very easy thing to sort of blend into, right? They can have the Carousel app or, you know, whatever CMS you're using, leverage the hardware they're already using, right? So it's a less work for the IT team and it can easily proliferate and achieve sort of that goal of getting a message to their audience with hardware they're already supporting, Right? In the kind of video wall example, right, that could be a BrightSign and a Scalar or nine different BrightSigns in sync.

Right? In this case, this is an office where, you know, a reseller kinda helps set this up, and it's pretty automated. Right? It turns on in the morning.

It plays the video playlist that they have. Turns off at night. No one has to use a remote to turn on and off. No one has to really do much more than manage a playlist.

The IT team can see that everything is updated and and successful. Right? So that that can make this wall last one year or last ten years. Right?

So picking the right hardware with the IT team in mind can really expand that life cycle.

Obviously, kind of with the way finding, in that case, it's a bright sign with an interactive touch panel, right? That might be the best experience for that use case, even if the rest of the organization is all standardized on Apple TV, for example. So I think it's kind of easy to look at all of the devices that are available to us and sort of like get caught up in like the flashiness of the features, but you kinda back up again and say, you know, who is gonna be managing these devices? Who's gonna be getting those support tickets? Asking them what's important to them can really extend the life cycle of your titer system.

We're over halfway done, probably, three fourths actually. And these last topics will be a little bit quicker.

But best practice number five is accessibility.

When we mention accessibility, we're coming at it from two perspectives, right? Everyone, one is to make sure that everyone in my audience is able to consume my messages and that the and the second is that the platform for the content creators is meeting their needs. Right? I like to say that's capital a accessible and then lowercase a accessible.

On the kind of capital a accessible, this is a sort of a carousel specific feature, but you can kind of expand it out to solving this problem. Right?

If I have an audience, right, that might include this happens a lot in higher ed. It might include people that have visual impairments, right? Either students or faculty, right? Any reason why like a screen on a wall might not be the best way to get that information. We have, for example, what we call the accessibility site, which allows, you know, visually impaired people to take advantage of visual communications with the help of assisted technologies like screen readers. So we can take that content with a click of a button, you can publish it to the site, and they can still experience that content, even if they could not interact with the screen, right?

And then from the screen itself, like the actual screen that's out there, there's some things to consider such as, you know, how far away is the screen from the person viewing it? That's gonna consider your fonts. Are the colors you're using contracting enough so that someone that has a color blindness can actually read something that's like green on brown, for instance, right?

Are you gonna have audio? And if you do, do you have an employee that's gonna be sitting behind the screen eight hours a day? Right? Well, that kinda drive them nuts. I think a lot of these things are kind of things that get noticed or experienced like later after kind of like after signage is deployed. And it can sometimes be harder to address later than it is to make it part of your goals before you start that journey.

Now on the flip side, right, the kind of lowercase a accessible, when we're kinda talking about the creator side and sort of the CMS, within the UI, we should sort of ask like, does it have multi language support? Right?

Like Careful, for instance, can see what your primary language is set to in your browser, right? And we support English, French, German, Spanish, right? But if you're gonna have a office in Brazil that uses Portuguese, we might not be the best fit for that. But looking at your larger scale and saying like, I'm gonna be in these different areas and those content creators are gonna be on their own.

Like, is this UI going to support them? Like that sort of questions you should ask too. And then two is the UI itself, is that following any sort of accessibility standards, right? We do kind of follow and try to improve our WCAG.

I think we're two point zero AA compatible, but basically is your CMS providing the basics of accessibility for contrast, how links are shown, how using tab navigates around, that the links are different and explain where they are. These are questions that don't seem as sort of fun to look at when you're designing a science system, but are nonetheless just as important.

Perfect.

Number six, and this is the second to the end.

This is very likely the least exciting, but especially today, probably the most vital. Right? Digital signage is a highly visible, sort of platform and compromises to that system can be at minimum embarrassing and at most damaging. Right?

Now, of course, there are some on premise only options out there, but a majority of scalable CMS providers for signage are based off SaaS models. So they're sort of web based and function over the Internet.

This is what we would call a shared responsibility model. Right? The provider has some responsibilities and so do you.

So from the CMS side of that equation, it should at least, you know, provide these three things. Right? They have to make sure that, you know, that CMS provider is committed to regular updates and audits. Right?

So how often when does the product life cycle how often are those updates being applied to those updates automatic? Right? That's something to consider from their security standpoint, right? Are they doing yearly or at least a reoccurring audits on their own system?

Are they committed to or engaging in any sort of standardized audits like SOC two type two? Do they have a third party firm? Like, if if your signage becomes so vital to your organization that you kinda can't live without it, you have to make sure that that is protected because compromises to it is gonna be huge.

Part of that, this is kind of a shared responsibility part here, is the users that you have in the system, right? Obviously, if this is needed, need to be able to have rights and roles provided to them so that a certain user can access another space, right? Or if they leave the organization, they automatically can't, you know, they automatically get removed from access to the system, right? Things like that.

Making sure that we leverage like, single sign on through a provider like Okta or Intra ID or things like that.

These are kind of check boxes you need to make sure you check because if signage becomes important, these things are gonna be kind of vital to make sure that you're not embarrassed later.

And then two, like data. Data is huge. Like, we all know how important and how valuable data can be. I mean, even if you're gonna be putting things on screens that are just publicly available, maybe you have just like your hours or an advertisement or something like that.

It's important to know like who's gonna be owning that data, where that data is gonna live. Is that data encrypted all the way through the system from when you publish it to when it's on the server to when it's on the device. It's important that the CMS provider has that approach to security, regardless if you have a dashboard coming from Power BI that's using the C suite, or you're just putting a sign outside lobby that says, you know, we close the day at three, right? In any case, all that content should be treated with the same level of security in mind.

And sort of the last, this is sort of a bonus best practice. Right?

And historically hasn't really applied to digital signage in the past, but we believe that this is, continually becoming more important as time goes on. And sort of the idea here is putting the signage on more than just that rectangle on the wall. Right? Multi use devices or even personal devices.

Right? For example, and again, I'm using carousel features just to kind of explain, like, how this can be done. Like we have this idea of express players where you can have that same content that you have up on your screens be available in web screensavers, right? Or embedded options for web pages, either public or private, right?

Or just be URLs that people can access directly. This really ties into the where people are from earlier, where that is sort of asking where they are physically. This is asking where they are digitally, right? Where are my users and how can I reach them if they're not physically in front of that screen?

And this is really the best practice is to expand your signage beyond rectangles on walls and embrace that communication challenge from earlier.

Just kind of an example of us practicing what we preach, right, and the idea of continual improvement. We do have a new feature that's coming out at the end of the month, which we call the carousel daily.

And I'm not kinda selling this, but I'm trying to showing you kinda where signage might be going. The carousel daily is a unique initiative that was sort of created to cut through the noise of a workplace or learning environments, where you might have some very essential communications that might be overlooked or forgotten, either because people, you know, don't always have a screen that they can see or that that screen has so much content that it takes it through.

Delivered to iOS devices, the Carousel daily provides bulletins that are accessible through an app that can be installed on organization issued or personal devices. And what it basically allows you to do is have your three most important messages on a widget. So, you know, teachers or students or parents can, like, opt in. They can just get the three most important messages for that school. Right? Or if you're an organization and open enrollment's happening, you can have an app that they can click that says click here to enroll, URL that brings them to that enrollment site that logs them in through their regular or, you know, credentials, things like that.

This is still signage. Right? It's in a smaller form factor, but it's still getting your message to your users and sort of making sure that that is proliferated out.

Some some other examples would be, you know, retail operate operators being able to send internal updates to store managers. Right? K twelve customers having the flexibility to create feeds for students and parents, like I mentioned. Corporate customers going straight to the employers to announce training or remind them to sign up for new benefits, things like that.

The beauty is that nothing fundamentally changes on the content creator side. They're still making their slides. What's different is that now, it can be targeted to users directly. And currently, this is sort of an opt in, but the challenge here is I I have all my best practices sort of set up in a row, right?

I'm finding the right CMS. I'm thinking about communication. I have dynamic content as backup. The hardware I pick is gonna be manageable by my IT team.

Any people who do have accessibility issues can be, you know, reached, it's all secure. And then with all that together, I can say, where else can I do this, right? Best practice seven is really where can I take this beyond here, right?

And that's gonna be targeting things that you wouldn't typically think of as digital signage.

So those are the best practices. This really kinda came from as my role as a sales engineer, conversations I've had with customers that were good fits for us and weren't good fits for us. Sometimes they have CMS needs that we don't, you know, achieve. Sometimes they use hardware that we don't support.

That is totally fine. But I think from a reseller, IT, or a partner perspective, or even someone just interested in signage or who's just part of a signage system, when you ask these questions, the longevity, the value, and sort of the reliability of that system is gonna be exponentially, you know, improved. Right? I think these together is gonna change if that system lasts six months or if that system lasts six years.

So that is that is the presentation. I have a little QR code here that, I believe brings us to the website. We also have our website down there. So if you do wanna talk to us about any projects, you totally can. We can kinda walk that through with you. We're gonna kind of stop the recording right now and then open it up to the q and a session.

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