Dynamic digital signage is popping up everywhere. Retailers such as Best Buy use signage to coordinate the weekly specials from the newspaper with the on-screen messaging in the store. Wal-Mart has a network of in-store TVs to promote its "what's new" messaging. Movie theater owners such as Regal Cinemedia use a satellite network of digital projectors to entertain and advertise before the feature film starts.

Fast food operators such as McDonald's have experimented with digital menuboards to motivate sales. Grocery stores such as ShopRite use plasma screens behind the deli counter to inform customers of daily specials, and entertain customers while waiting. Even relatively quiet locations, such as your local bank or your doctor's waiting room, may have a digital display network to inform, educate, entertain, and promote products and services relevant to that environment.

What does it take to make this all work? Getting the traditional advertising or visual merchandising people, who have the lion's share of clients, together with the IT and display specialists can be challenging. It's not normal for these two camps to speak with each other. And even when they do, have they considered all of the elements necessary to have a successful deployment? Many times, the software that drives the network is not even considered, as everyone is focused on big-ticket items like plasma screens or satellite networks.

It's been said before, but many people are still missing the boat on content. Signage content must be lively, relevant, and appealing. It's not TV; it's not the Web; it's signage. You can't have the same advertising 24 hours a day. And, the message needs to be targeted to the sales environment in a very direct way. For a home-improvement store, selling snowblowers in winter might work well in Minneapolis, but definitely won't in New Orleans.

You must have a system that is able to generate individualized content easily and cost effectively. If your system is only able to play MPEGs, how can you afford to create unique videos for each store? And if all of your content is MPEG, how can you afford to send the content? Five hundred stores needing 1 GB of MPEG video each month causes 500 GB of traffic on your network. Few retailers have this amount of spare bandwidth. You might want to consider a satellite multicast network. You also might want to look carefully at your software in order to efficiently produce lower-bandwidth content more easily.

If your content looks like TV, people will tune it out. Your employees will hate the loop's repetitive nature. It just won't work. You might want to consider a system that allows you to interface your signage easily to your point-of-sale system, inventory management system, online store, etc. This way your screens can automatically adjust their price with little or no manual intervention. This allows you to directly advertise the same products in different stores for different prices to maximize your profits. If your signage network doesn't have a call to action -- "buy this now for this price" -- it might not be that effective in retail.

Let's take another example. A convenience store has a promotion on Sprite®, a very effective campaign with a call to action. Everyone is incredibly happy with the results -- or are they? On day two, sales fall to zero. What happened? The store has run out of Sprite, and the Coca-Cola® driver isn't scheduled to restock for another two days. Major problem. What if your system was instead attached to the POS system, where it could substitute another product automatically when one product was sold out? It's not that difficult, but will require the right software solution and a plan to deal with that possibility.

Providing national, regional and local content can also be a way to make your system more interesting. This sounds simple, but is your system capable? What impact does this have on your production costs? Can you make changes without re-encoding your MPEG files? What impact does that have on the bandwidth requirements when you need national, regional, and local insertion?

With a system that can handle national, regional, and local insertion, a term borrowed from cable TV, we're now able to have participation at a store-by-store level. For instance, take a grocery store. Imagine being able to have the store manager's picture on the screen welcoming you to his store, or perhaps Betty from the deli department greeting your stop to her counter.

The manager can also add an unadvertised special for product he needs to move. Perhaps the bananas are looking a bit ripe, and he's not looking to have a sale on banana bread. How can he push products at a local level? Will the signage system that you choose empower the local staff to work with you, rather than against you? If the employees are part of the network, it provides a sense on ownership and pride to your staff, and, more importantly to you, they won't try to sabotage the network.

Imagine a system in the same grocery store where the screens are at the checkouts -- with a really short loop time, because your customers have a short dwell time in line -- but the audio with that system is so obnoxious that it drives checkout clerks mad. They'll find a way to cut the speaker wires or, worse yet, pull the plug on the entire system. On top of that, I'm guessing that you've inserted whatever TV commercials you happen to have lying around, and the content would not work without audio. Again, a major problem.

And, let's not forget Rule Number One; what's your content? Are people going to get out of line to go back and pick up the item you're advertising? Guess again. The products better be within arm's reach at the checkout. Chewing gum and breath mints might be good sponsors for this screen, but you'd better create specialized content that works without audio, and, better yet, provides some other localized content that might be of interest to your shoppers. Maybe there's a community bulletin board announcement on the system, or the store manager's picture thanking you for shopping at his store today. All of these things can make a huge difference in the success of your network. This is not to say that you can't reuse any b-roll from your TV ads. Please do, but remember where the content is going and how the viewer will perceive it.

This sounds simple enough, but unless there's a reason to look at the screen, no one will look at the screen. You need a hook, a reason to look at the screen. It could be as simple as, "Now serving ticket number 25 at counter number three", or as sophisticated as a customized CNN feed from Turner Private Networks, blasting in over satellite, the news, weather, sports, and stock headline news four times a day. This can be interspersed with your venue-specific content and advertising. How easily does your system integrate with these sorts of hooks? Guess what? The answer reverts back to what software you chose (that little annoyance that no one thinks about until it is too late).

And, let's not forget the famous real estate saying, "location, location, location." This is absolutely true in signage networks today. Proper screen placement with appropriate content is absolutely critical. No one is going to strain his or her neck to look 12 ft. in the air at a cheap TV set. Screens by the checkout lane are too late unless you're selling chewing gum or breath mints. Find a location where people need to visit or have a natural waiting time and, hopefully, your content will be able to influence last-minute purchasing decision at the last minute while improving the overall customer experience. Are small updates easy?

Everyone can do a big update; this just entails sending hundreds of MPEGs to each location. Brute force and ignorance can make this happen, although perhaps not as easily as you might have originally thought.

But, what if you need to just update the price of something at the last minute? How hard is that? How long does that take to make the change? And how many megabytes (or, better yet, kilobytes) do you need to send in order to make this change? And if we're talking megabytes, how long will it take to transmit, for instance, 100 MB to 500 stores for a simple price change? Choosing the right architecture can make the difference between a system that's easily workable and a system that looks to your IT department like a denial-of-service attack. Obviously, having a system that can do small updates with small file sizes makes this a breeze.

One of the key drivers in terms of a network of advertising-based displays is the revenue you can expect to get from the ads. This is measured in CPM (cost per thousand viewers). Some signage networks have failed in the past because they were not able to get a high enough CPM to cover their costs. Obviously, having a cost-effective network is key, but don't forget that this should not jeopardize your CPMs.

The best way to achieve higher CPMs with advertisers is to be able to prove to them with affidavits that the ads actually ran as scheduled, with full ability to drill down to a specific ad in a specific location. In order to support this, you'll need a two-way network to return those billing logs and to roll that up into a report that can be sliced and diced by the advertiser.

Having a cheaper one-way satellite network with no return might sound good to your CFO, but it may have an adverse impact on your ability to charge a premium CPM because you can't prove that any ads ran. And you will need the back office system to keep track of this for billing purposes as well. Make sure you look into this aspect when choosing a system. Having a full two-way network also brings the possibility of continuous monitoring of your network. Your network operations people can then proactively respond to a fault in the network instead of waiting for the phone to ring (if anyone bothers to call at all with a one-way network).

A large number of signage deployments today are actually done by mailing VHS tapes and DVDs in the mail. It's the problem mentioned at the opening of this article; no one wants to talk with the IT department because they always say no. So the merchandisers and advertisers alike think, "No problem, I'll just use a DVD," I can honestly say that this is a mistake.

It is extremely prone to human error (getting the right disc or tape in at the right time and pressing play) and very expensive to feed. I've seen situations where companies have switched from sending out monthly DVDs to biweekly updates with a full-featured network, where their costs were lowered substantially by moving away from DVDs. Plus, they are able to update their screens more easily and more often (for less money). It's a win-win proposition. So, it's probably a good idea to talk to your IT group and show them a solution that will not be a denial-of-service attack on their network, and they'll thank you for thinking of them up front.

With a DVD or VHS network you have what is called a "SneakerNet," which is very prone to human errors. Plus, because the system is not connected, you have no billing affidavits, so your CPMs are very low. Making the content in the first place is very expensive (burning DVDs), and you can really only afford to do this once per month. If you run weekly specials, it's impossible to advertise those on your screens because you're running the same loop every week for a month. With a networked system, you'll be able to change this on the fly easily and have completely synchronized media campaigns, both in-store and in-home.

Let's hope that your creative team doesn't make a typo with your DVDs, because re-burning hundreds of DVDs and sending them out is time consuming and expensive. On top of that, your average cheap consumer DVD player is only rated for about 2000 hours of operation. So, plan on swapping out burned out DVD players every 3 or 4 months - not a pretty sight. And for the final nail in the coffin, consider the video quality. If you're driving a plasma screen with a DVD player over composite video, the picture is going to look unbelievably fuzzy. This is true for even many networked MPEG players. If you're driving your screens in a one-to-one pixel ratio from a VGA based PC, the clarity of the resulting image is going to be night and day better.

Bottom line: Don't use a DVD player, and if you're still using VHS, get into the 21st century.

As long as you're deploying a signage network for your customers, why not consider using the same infrastructure for employee information or employee training? This is a biggie. A number of deployments that I've been involved with have found that the employee-facing screens have done a more significant job of influencing purchasing decisions than the customer-facing screens.

Think about it. You have a high turnover of staff. A customer needs to ask an employee a question. Even modest amounts of subliminal training from your signage network can educate your staff enough to be a genius in the eyes of your customer. With an even more proactive training initiative using the same infrastructure, you can track exactly who has, and who has not, watched the training videos, which are now digital, so the tapes don't get lost.

So, don't forget the employee angle of a signage network. Maybe it's just an hour before the store opens. Maybe it's interspersed throughout the day. Maybe the CEO wants to do a live broadcast to all the employees in each store before it opens.

You could even have live events shown in stores. A few years ago, Wal-Mart broadcast a Faith Hill concert live in all of their stores. Reportedly, this was the single largest take in Wal-Mart's history. This was a major event, and was only possible because they were able to reuse their existing signage network. Perhaps you were looking at doing some interactive kiosks. Or, perhaps you'd like to speed up your credit card transactions. Instead of dial-up phone lines, why not hook them into the same infrastructure? Your signage network can be the catalyst for many powerful things, which all help offset the investment.

Retailers often get a significant amount of revenue from their vendors in terms of co-op, market development funds, spiffs and other incentives to the channel. You'd like to have a good position in the store for your product, Mr. Manufacturer? No problem. It costs an extra $5000 per month per store for that. That's big money, and retailers guard it heavily.

In-store signage should be sold the same way. This has a dual benefit. Not only will the retailer be able to extract more funds from the manufacturers, but, because of the effects of the signage display, more products will be moving through the store on an average day. Uplift in sales of advertised products have been measured anywhere in the 20 to 40% range. This also generates more turns on inventory; everybody wins.

Some are fearful that this new medium will rob Peter to pay Paul from the precious co-op dollars. This has not been my experience. New money is actually found for these new opportunities. In public networks, such as a shopping mall or electronic outdoor billboards, it may be necessary to have a more sophisticated system in place to keep track of the "avails", or available slots open for advertising, and managing the deployment of ads to the network.

In all likelihood, no two screens would be playing the same sequence of ads in this scenario, so it is very important to make sure you have a software system that can keep track of all of these things. Of course, the same system can help you slice and dice the network into demographic and geographic regions to aid the sales process for a particular campaign.

I'm a big believer in industry-standard technology. It's absolutely amazing what multimedia power is built into the average $500 PC today, which seems to get cheaper each day.

Don't fight it. Go with the flow. Locking yourself into a proprietary design will only lead to heartburn down the road. Maybe the proprietary system that you've selected is perfect for the one thing you need today. What happens tomorrow when you have a new requirement that you hadn't thought about before? Do you end up scrapping the entire infrastructure? That can get expensive.

A programmable system on industry-standard hardware has the flexibility to grow and adapt to the changing requirements, without having to swap out the hardware. As one senior IT manager of a Fortune 500 company once told me, "I already manage a network of 12,000 PCs. What's another couple thousand?" Chances are these companies have a 4-hour onsite maintenance contract with IBM, HP, or Dell, and they have pallets loaded with these standard PCs in the warehouse today. Use them. Even with a new requirement such as high definition, video support can be easily done with a PC today with the right choice of hardware and software. Anyone can pilot, but can it scale?

There are plenty of suppliers doing small pilot projects with brute force and ignorance, and sometimes SneakerNet, but what happens when you have to scale for real? Does the system really handle that well? What are the limitations? How many 1000-unit deployments has the prospective supplier handled? These are tough questions that have to be asked.

Are the systems reliable? Do they operate 24/7? What happens if you only have dial-up connections? Does the system still scale? Can the system work in a hybrid of high- and low-speed networks? What are the implications in terms of content to support this? Is it reasonable to assume that your chosen network can support this content in a reasonable fashion? There are lots of tough questions to ask your future suppliers. They're all very critical to the overall success of your network.