The Digital Signage Insider

It's almost December, and that can mean only one thing... No, not the start of another crazy holiday shopping season (though it is a critical time for retailers, who may generate 40% of their year's revenues in the next four or five weeks). I'm talking about the end of the fiscal or planning year for many medium and large sized companies who may be prime targets for digital retailing systems like interactive kiosks and digital signage systems. Integrators and solutions providers who have been working on deals this quarter and want to get deployments ready for next year will start pushing hard to get their loose ends tied up and budgets solidified before December 31st. And internal champions who have been asked to assess the ROI potential of an internet kiosk project or narrowcasting network should also get their numbers ready.

While it's unlikely this late in the quarter that there will be enough unclaimed funds to do a full-scale roll out of kiosks or digital signs, there will probably be enough around to fund a pilot program of a few screens or kiosks in a few key locations. In many cases (for better or for worse) the department's spending this year will determine next year's budget, so there is often an incentive to spend those last few dollars experimenting with new techniques and technologies. Additionally, a cross-discipline digital retailing project requires expertise in both marketing and IT, so there are opportunities to build goodwill not only in a single department, but also across the company.

For those of you who aren't quite ready to start a pilot deployment, there are still things that you can do do get your project ready for next year, like putting together a deployment timeline (download it from the bottom of our whitepapers page), project plan (Project Scope for your Interactive Kiosks and Digital Signs: Avoid Feature Creep!), and budget estimate (Budgeting for a Digital Sign or Electronic Sign Network). Just keep in mind (especially if you're going after a retail client), that this is a very, very busy time of year, and even your best and most impressive efforts might fall by the wayside as the holidays draw nearer.

Finally, the holiday season is a great time to go out and do some reconnaissance. Big kiosk and signage projects that have been in the works the past year will start going live now, and even something as simple as a trip to your local mall could yield new leads (e.g. DVD-powered TV networks that could be converted to digital signage on plasmas), new deployment tricks (e.g. using VGA over Ethernet systems to split and deliver high-quality signals hundreds of feet apart), and new technologies (e.g. through-glass touchscreens and projected images on store windows).

And of course, we're always on the lookout for cool new digital retailing techniques, so if you have any other suggestions or encounter an application in the field that you think is unique, we'd love to hear about it.