I explore how to enhance hotel guest experiences by appropriately upselling services. By tapping into guests' needs at the right time, we can create more personalised and effective service offerings.

Enhancing Hotel Guest Experiences Through Upselling

So in a previous video about a hotel guest experience, I talked about what would make an impression on a guest as they arrived, but we can also continue this journey as they stay with you. I was also asked about how can you upsell services without seeming too salesy? The best way to do it is to make it appropriate. So after a few days staying at the hotel, you may have used all of the regular facilities. And at that point, you might be thinking, you know what? Actually, a massage sounds good if it's towards the end of the week or the weekend or something like that. Likewise, if you are running, say, a breakfast service, you could advertise that you could take a coffee to go on your way to the meeting or on with your day. And actually, that is more informing that you've got a takeaway service, but also that is upselling. So mostly we create products and services because people want them. We just have to tap into when they want them. The good news with a screen is, you know, the time of day. You know the location. And so you can be appropriate. When would you be making this suggestion as a human being? Just codify that and turn that into a digital signage content. And I think you'll start to see some great results.

In this video, I explore the innovative use of screens paired with kiosks in retail environments, such as KFC. These screens display high-definition videos of products, enhancing the purchase decision process and potentially increasing sales. I discuss the commercial and technical benefits of this integration, predicting a rise in kiosk usage over the coming years.

The Future of Kiosk and Screen Integration in Retail

Please, please don't lick the screens. So I was recently given a video. It wasn't taken by myself in KFC showing a panel of screens above some ordering kiosks which were tantalizing to say the least. They're showing pretty high definition good videos of their products and bundles right above the point of sale. This is a good time to actually catch someone. This is right at the purchase decision moment and therefore as they gaze their eyes up and then come back down to the kiosk they're much more likely to spend more money. So from a commercial point of view, this makes loads of sense. They're already inside the KFC so they've obviously made some decision to come in. I think over the next few years we're going to see a big uptick in the use of kiosks for making purchases and also for finding out more information. Pairing a kiosk up like this with a main screen just giving you supporting information whilst you make those decisions I think is a really smart move. Commercially it makes a load of sense. Just from a technical point of view I'm going to give this a four out of five. I think it is a sign of genius and a sign of things to come.

I discuss innovative ways to enhance digital signage in hotel lobbies by focusing on guest needs. By stepping into the shoes of a new guest, we can provide valuable information through simple tools like QR codes, enhancing the visitor experience.

Improving Digital Signage in Hotel Lobbies

I was speaking to someone recently from the hotel industry about ways in which they could improve digital signage. Typically when you go into a hotel lobby and do see screens, it's normally really just advertising and self-promotion. But if you wanted to make that really useful, just put yourself into the shoes of a new guest who might not be familiar with the local area, of the amenities of the hotel and maybe put up a simple QR code to a guide or show recommendations locally that they could easily get to on foot, maybe some transport information and things like that. I think often we obsess too much about content that we create and actually some of the best content and most helpful content is all around you. And that reflects back on you as being helpful. So if you really want to know what a guest might like to see, just put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself the basic questions. And I think you'd be surprised just how much you could put up on a screen and how much goodwill you would get as a result.

I explore the mixed reactions to an innovative screen display by the seaside. Whilst many found it invasive, I see the potential for screens to be a powerful medium when used thoughtfully. My aim is to promote healthy screen usage rather than provoke negative sentiments.

The Impact of Screens on Holiday Experiences

It was kind of funny and kind of weird, right? They're all for over a week. I just kept seeing people moaning about how much they hate to see a screen on holiday. I had a hit post on LinkedIn. It was a recent post. It was actually someone else's content. I'd seen a video of screen floating on a boat by the seaside advertising. For me, it was quite interesting because just as an engineering feat, putting a screen on the sea is actually quite difficult. So I was kind of impressed with it and didn't really think much more about it. I stuck up the post, and then the views started to get through the roof. But more importantly, the comments came in thick and fast. The vast majority of the comments were negative. People did not like the idea of seeing a screen at the seaside, and I kind of get that, although I must admit some seaside views are not that beautiful, if you ask me. People were interpreting it as something that was invasive to a moment of relaxation, which being on the beach with your family or friends really should be. Anyway, I suppose if you look at my data on LinkedIn, this is one of the most successful posts I've ever had. However, this is not really what my mission is. I want to promote the use of screens in a healthy way. I want screens to be understood as a medium that can be really powerful and useful rather than annoying people. So I'm gonna resist the urge to show you screens flying with drones. Okay, maybe this little bit. Have a look at that, it's quite fun. But my job is not to divide people's opinions and make them hate screens. I want to educate people. I want to promote really healthy screen usage, and I think they can be a real force for good. So I'm not gonna do many more videos like this, even if the statistics show me that it was a hit post. Doesn't matter.

I explore the potential of using AI in digital signage to prevent health and safety incidents. By responsibly analysing CCTV data, we can dynamically adjust content to address emerging issues. This innovative approach could become standard in the coming years.

AI and Digital Signage: Enhancing Health and Safety

I was asked recently if AI could help in digital signage prevent health and safety incidents from happening. This one is a little tricky because inevitably, we would need to be processing footage of the environment and recording what's actually going on there if we were gonna try and prevent things. It's possible that we could do this through data. So if we start to see the speed of tasks being done at a unusual rate, it may be that someone's cutting a corner and we want to influence that by changing the content. But in reality, it's probably gonna come from some form of camera feed. Now, almost every manufacturing plant, for example, is using CCTV already. So we are monitoring that environment. And I think so long as we do this responsibly and we are not picking on people specifically unless they're doing something really wrong, then actually, I think we can use this information to start to influence the content dynamically using AI to help prevent and inform when we can see that things are starting to go wrong. This has to be handled very, very sensitively. We've not ever done this before, but the technology is in place to do it. So I think it's a really interesting thing to keep considering. And I would imagine that within the next couple of years, this will be commonplace.

I discuss how AI technology is revolutionising the way we communicate across different languages. By using AI for translations, we can ensure messages are understood in various local dialects, enhancing clarity and effectiveness.

Enhancing Communication with AI-Driven Translations

Like many of us, I have been abroad this summer on holiday, and one of the issues I've always faced is when I'm in a country where I don't speak the local language, which is most of them, I don't really know what to order at the restaurant. Thankfully now, with my phone and AI, I can just take a photo of the menu and have a perfect translation. This can also be used on digital signage in environments where the people working there do not speak English as a first language. Historically, getting the nuance of translation right was really difficult. With AI, this is extremely simple, and we can even go towards local dialect. For example, regular Spanish is not the same as Mexican Spanish. And so we can be much more subtle and nuanced in the way that we communicate back to people in a way that they understand. Now, even if the business language is English, we have to be realistic. If you want your message to land, you're much more likely to do it in a language that people genuinely speak rather than speak a fair amount of, or maybe a bit of. So I think that we should be leading into this and acknowledging the reality of the workplace. Because it's no real extra effort, we should be translating content so that the message is landing clearer.

Explore how passive communication enhances understanding by leveraging subconscious cognition. Discover the impact of digital signage on our mental space without active engagement.

The Power of Passive Communication in Cognition

boil down to the fact that passive communication improved cognition or understanding of even quite complex topics. And passive, we talk a lot about mental space, passive communication. And what do we mean by that? We mean our subconscious being aware of what's on digital signage without us necessarily stopping to have a look at it. It's that passive communication that we're not even really thinking about. Our subconscious accounts for a very large percentage of our cognition of how we work things out. The final thought I just would raise around the passive nature of this communication is something I think we all experience as well. We all know what it's like to not really be listening to someone because we're sitting waiting about waiting, figuring out what we're going to say next. And actually, that's actually the power of passive communication is that the screen is not requiring you to act. You'll see it maybe seven times a day. You'll maybe over the course of a week, see that message maybe eight, nine, 10, 12 times. And it's not requiring you to act. So actually your brain relaxes into listen mode, not respond mode. And actually that's where the cognition is improved.

A visual commentary on the state of digital signage reliability in public spaces. This video captures 10 broken advertising screens on the escalator at Old Street tube station in London, set to Benny Hill music. It highlights the widespread issue of screen failures in high-traffic environments and the importance of proper maintenance and reliable digital signage solutions.

10 Broken Screens at Old Street Station

[No voiceover - visual content only with Benny Hill music showing multiple broken advertising screens on tube station escalator]

I reflect on the portrayal of AI and futuristic technology in the new Jennifer Lopez movie, Atlas. The film illustrates our growing reliance on interactive screens and envisions a future where digital displays are integral to everyday life. This depiction aligns with ScreenCloud's mission to bring such innovative concepts to reality.

Exploring AI and Futuristic Interactions in Film

So at the weekend, I was relaxing, watching TV with my dog, and I watched the new Jennifer Lopez movie, Atlas, on Netflix, which is all about the future and AI and whether we should or shouldn't trust AI. It's quite topical at the moment. And inevitably, there was an opening scene where news is breaking in her apartment, which is this modern, futuristic place, and I could predict three, two, one. There is a load of screens, right, virtually on the wall, and she's going up and interacting with them. It kind of felt like a reboot of Minority Report in many ways. And it just proves, yet again, what we always see is that any depiction of the future comes with screens involved and a degree of interactivity and more reliance on those screens in our everyday life. We are all envisioning this, and actually, even the external scenes, there was projections of advertising to show that the buildings were more futuristic. It's not just film directors that are coming up with these ideas. I think they are using them in their art and their creativity because it's a vision of a future that we've all subscribed to. It's just a case of trying to get there, and that's what ScreenCloud's here to help you all do. ScreenCloud is a proud sponsor of Second Opinion.

I delve into the evolving landscape of digital signage and its market potential. With traditional notice boards being replaced by screens, we discuss the vast opportunities and the need for education in this growing sector.

Exploring the Future of Digital Signage

One of the biggest question marks around digital signage from an investment point of view has been the addressable market. So if you actually size digital signage today, I think it comes up at a $30 billion market and only $1 billion of software spend, which is relatively small considering what it should be. Personally, I think the market is much, much larger than that. And I know that there's certain large investment firms also share that thesis. If you think about it, in the next five to 10 years, will there really be notice boards with bits of paper hanging on them anymore? I don't think so. That doesn't feel right. What's that going to be replaced with? Screens or a version of screens. The hardware landscape is evolving, but the need is not. The need is there. So we have a big greenfield opportunity. Generally speaking with customers, we're not replacing and churning out one of our closer competitors. Maybe we're taking something that's really outdated, on premise or even homegrown. And mostly this is a greenfield opportunity. So I think that the market size is infinite, which sounds a bit scary and strange. But we need to educate everyone on why we should be dropping the paper, putting a screen up and using that instead. Thank you.

Almost every large company we work with has tried digital signage before, but reliability remains the big issue. I heard of an IT engineer doing a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in. The huge ROI saving with modern cloud-based signage is remote management—troubleshooting from afar without sending already-busy IT teams on costly road trips.

Enhancing Communication with Reliable Digital Signage

Almost every large company that we work with at ScreenCloud has tried to use digital signage before or is currently using digital signage. Very, very few people have never put screens up and tried to use them to communicate. When we talk to IT managers and administrators, one of the big issues is reliability. Screens go in every single location, but IT tends to be quite centrally managed or in hubs and not necessarily on the ground everywhere. I heard one story of an IT engineer having to do a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in a little bit further. This is extremely costly, and sometimes it's done with contractors. And so a huge ROI saving when using modern cloud-based digital signage like ScreenCloud is in the reliability. The ability to remotely manage all of those devices, to know what's going on and to troubleshoot from afar and not have to send your IT team, who are already really far too busy and should be doing better things, out on the road just to push cables in and turn screens on and off.

A recent ROI development: integrating with existing systems to pull content feeds that already live inside your business—FirstUp, Unily, OneDrive—and repurposing them to screens automatically based on rules and logic. Your comms team doesn't have to redesign content for each channel. This gives them back enormous amounts of time for more valuable work.

Enhancing Digital Signage with Seamless Integration

A more recent ROI development for digital signage is when we can integrate with existing systems and take feeds of content which already lives inside the business and repurpose that to screens. And that's one of the key parts of the ScreenCloud architecture. So let's say you're using a communications platform like FirstUp or Unily, or even just integrating with things like OneDrive, we can pull those files and those messages which you're already pushing out on those other channels and then repurpose them up onto screen based on rules or logic and filtering and tagging and things like that. So your comms team isn't having to take information from one source and then redesign it and push it out again on another, which often we are finding they have had to do historically. This really just gives them back a huge amount more time to focus on the more nuanced work that's more valuable.

Beyond immediate ROI from print savings, the elephant in the room is measuring productivity impact. A US communications company tested ScreenCloud on alternate floors for three months, then surveyed recall rates. Results were remarkable: recall jumped from 25-30% to 70-80%—but only for snackable content like events and deadlines, not complex storytelling like merger details.

Driving Productivity with Digital Signage Innovations

So I've talked extensively about immediate ROI of using modern digital signage. We've talked about reducing print costs and the time it takes to change those signs on the notice board. We've talked about reducing the burden on IT and automating more content up on the screens for the comms team. But the elephant in the room is clearly the impact of digital signage on driving change and productivity inside of a business. Now, unfortunately, as an industry, we don't really have standard ways of measuring this. Most people are doing it through pulse surveys, employee surveys, and looking for sentiment changes or any anecdotal evidence. We're trying to change that. And actually, I am hearing that there may even be a Google Analytics for Screens coming from the team at Google themselves. But obviously, we work very closely with our customers. We've heard multiple anecdotes of how screens are really driving change. So a very large US communications company was using ScreenCloud in their HQ and decided to initially install it on alternate floors. So some floors had ScreenCloud, some floors just had the notice boards as usual. And after three months, they did a survey based on the types of content that they had shown to see what the improvement on recall rates had been. The results were amazing. So recall rates were averaging, or most of this information, around 25% to 30% by default. When content was then shown on screen, it went up to 70% and 80%. But only for certain types of content. Some content had no impact at all. It was generally content that was more snackable and easy to remember. So it may be a big event or deadline coming up, or an announcement, or a bit of people updates and things like that. When it came to more nuanced storytelling about a recent merger, for example, it hadn't really improved things because probably that content was too complicated for people to pick up in that snackable way. We also worked with another customer recently who was using screens

Almost every large company we work with has tried digital signage before, but reliability is the recurring issue. I heard of an IT engineer doing a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in further. The huge ROI saving with modern cloud-based digital signage is remote management—troubleshooting from afar without sending overstretched IT teams on the road.

Enhancing Reliability with Cloud-Based Digital Signage

A recent ROI development is integrating with existing business systems to pull content that already lives inside the organisation—FirstUp, Unily, OneDrive—and repurposing it to screens automatically. Your comms team isn't redesigning the same content for multiple channels. It gives them back significant time to focus on more valuable, nuanced work.

Optimising Digital Signage with Integration

A more recent ROI development for digital signage is when we can integrate with existing systems and take feeds of content which already lives inside the business and repurpose that to screens. And that's one of the key parts of the ScreenCloud architecture. So let's say you're using a communications platform like FirstUp or Unily, or even just integrating with things like OneDrive, we can pull those files and those messages which you're already pushing out on those other channels and then repurpose them up onto screen based on rules or logic and filtering and tagging and things like that. So your comms team isn't having to take information from one source and then redesign it and push it out again on another, which often we are finding they have had to do historically. This really just gives them back a huge amount more time to focus on the more nuanced work that's more valuable. ScreenCloud is a production of the Center for Digital Transformation and the Center for Digital Transformation and the Center for Digital Transformation for the U.S. Department of State. www.sccd.gov

Digital signage delivers immediate ROI by replacing print communication. Organisations save on print costs whilst eliminating the physical labour of updating 100+ noticeboards - a process that can take four hours for a single message change. You can push messages centrally, know they've been delivered, and manage everything from one person.

Optimising Communication with Digital Signage

So, when customers utilize digital science for their communication, they'll often see a correlating drop in print costs. Most of the communication going out historically has been printouts going up on notice boards. So this alone can be quite costly if they're doing it, you know, using a proper print company, or even just really spending loads of paper going out to all of their many, many locations. The other aspect of this is just the physical time. So if you have a large facility, some facilities have upwards of 100 notice boards, someone needs to go around and remove a piece of paper and add in a new one. And if there's any mistakes, they have to go back and do it all again. And we've heard that process taking upwards of four hours just to change one message. And then, of course, you're never quite sure when that's been completed, or if it's even been done at all, or if any have been missed. So there is a big ROI saving immediately by able to just push those messages out onto a screen, know that they've gone out, and have them all managed centrally by just one person.

Digital signage in large enterprises is run by surprisingly small teams—even in 100,000-person companies, just 5-10 people manage thousands of screens. We need to give them super admin powers. If they're managing hundreds of locations, they can't update screens one by one—they need to create perfect templates and roll them out at scale instantly.

Empowering Digital Signage Teams at Scale

So we know that digital signage is really run by a small team inside of even a very large enterprise company. And that team will be comprised of both members of the IT team who are running that network and rolling out all those screens and keeping them updated and patched and managed, and also the content team as well. Now, for both of those user groups, we need to give them super admin powers. If they've got thousands of screens and hundreds of locations, they just cannot run through a system updating each screen one by one. They need to be able to create their perfect example of content or security policies or whatever it might be, and then roll them out at the click of a button at scale. So giving them really that power status, which enables them to run the network at scale without being a huge burden. Now, we're constantly releasing features in our remote device management console and in our CMS to keep making this process easier and more secure. And it's a continual journey. So if you are a ScreenCloud customer, and you'd like to know more about that, and if you have any more feedback, please let us know in the comments below.

During a customer listening tour, I discovered the biggest digital signage challenges weren't software - they were physical. People unplugging HDMI cables, changing inputs, powering screens down. This changed our roadmap. We're now launching HDMI CEC integration to enable remote power cycling and input locking, eliminating the need for on-site engineer visits.

Revolutionising Digital Signage with Remote Management

So in the spring of last year, I went on a listening tour with some of our biggest customers in America and the UK. And I was walking around multiple facilities, particularly in manufacturing logistics environments, talking to the IT teams and people on the ground about what were their biggest challenges with digital signage. And repeatedly, it was a physical challenge, which is weird for a software developer to hear like me. This was people changing the source of the screen, unplugging the HDMI cable, even powering down the screen itself and showing something else. It changed our roadmap, actually, and we have decided to prioritize more assistance and monitoring around physical changes that go on in that environment. This month, we're launching HDMI CEC integration with a ScreenCloud OS platform, which enables customers to power cycle the screen remotely, but also lock that screen to certain sources and inputs. So after a period of time, it will push its way back to the digital signage and you don't need to send an engineer out to go and fix it in person.

Luke and I were shocked by the poor web experience on TV screens when we entered digital signage in 2014. ScreenCloud's founding principle is bringing modern web standards to screens, enabling the global army of web developers to build screen apps without learning new skills. We're opening up this small category to a massive software market.

Revolutionising Web Development for Digital Screens

So Luke and I have been developing products for the web for well over 20 years, despite appearances. And when we came across the digital signage category back in 2014, we were pretty shocked at the quality of the web experience natively on TV screens. And to be honest, it hasn't improved much. When you're actually trying to run a modern, fast, secure web environment, most of the screens don't work that way. And you'd actually have to build back several years, which is both insecure, but also very difficult for modern web developers to build their products. So if you do ask a web developer, how do I build a product for screen? Normally they'll just shrug their shoulders and say, we don't know. The founding principle of ScreenCloud is to try and bring a modern web experience to screen to enable this army of web developers around the world to start building their own products for screens. We're still on that journey. And I think we've now got to a point where utilizing our product, most web developers could now build an app for screen without having to learn something new. We want to keep on opening this up and bring in this huge part of the software market into our small little category, because when that happens, we can start to solve so many more problems using screens. Thank you.

Want to see how difficult digital signage is at scale? Walk through an airport past security and count the broken screens. Engineers need extensive security clearance to get airside, so failed screens just stay broken. It's the perfect manifestation of our industry's reliability challenges - fragmented hardware, different operating systems, and connectivity issues everywhere.

Challenges in Managing Digital Signage Networks at Airports

I often say to people, if you want to see how difficult it is to run a digital signage network at scale, just walk around the airport when you're past security. You'll see so many black screens, broken screens, error messages all around. In any other environment, you would never see this many broken screens. Why? Because it's really difficult to get engineers airside. They have to go through a lot of security protocols in order for them to go and visit. So you're seeing just the number of screens that fail and need some kind of physical assistance. It's a really good manifestation of the problem that we're trying to solve. Screens need to be way more reliable, but they're not. It's a hugely fragmented hardware landscape, all running different operating systems, and connectivity issues are also rife. The airport is a really good example of this, but it's actually true for every environment we work in. So next time you're in the airport, have a look around, see all those broken screens, and think there needs to be a better way, because there really does.

Employees see communication screens 20-30 times daily, so static playlists become stale incredibly quickly. We've built automation through our feeds platform and Bob (our design language) to pull content from business systems via API, categorise it, adapt it for screens, and apply on-brand design automatically. This keeps content fresh whilst empowering small teams.

Revolutionising Screen Content Management for Businesses

When we consider screens that communicate rather than screens that sell in retail or McDonald's-type restaurants, we're thinking about employee-facing or student-facing screens that the people in front of them may see 20, 30 times a day, every day of the week. Now, that is a lot of exposure to screens. If the screen is just showing a playlist of images and videos rotating around, they are going to become out-of-date and over-saturated very, very quickly. So we need content to be more automated in terms of how it's delivered up to screen. In addition, the people who are responsible for screens, even in really large companies, 100,000 people, might only be 5 to 10 people. So there's not a huge number of them, and normally they're not really designers, they're communicators. And finally, most of the content people want to see on a screen already exists. It just lives inside of business systems, siloed behind IT logins and accessible to only a few. So what we try to do at ScreenCloud is bring all of that automation together through our feeds platform and Bob, Bob the Builder, which is our design language for screens. What we do is we take those systems and hook it up via API, farming out the information, categorizing and sorting, and sometimes changing it slightly so it's screen-adapted, then pushing it out to the relevant screen and audience, but also giving it an on-brand design look and feel that's automatically applied, so you don't need to worry that it's not going to look good on a screen. This means we can automate most of the content so it stays fresh, that we can support that little team and give them superpowers, and that we can also reutilize the great content that lives inside of the business and now get that onto a screen so that everyone gets to see it and it has maximum exposure.

Canva integration was one of our most requested features, and it's brilliantly simple. You can now create or update designs in Canva and have them instantly replicate to ScreenCloud. Canva is actually a customer of ours too, which makes the partnership even better.

Streamlining Content Creation with Canva Integration

One of our most popular requests for an app integration was, unsurprisingly, Canva, one of the biggest platforms in the world that enables marketers and content creators to easily create beautiful-looking graphics. Usually, that's for social media or print, but now it's also for screen. So we've partnered with them. Canva's actually also a customer of ours, and we have done an integration, which means you can just change your content inside of Canva and have that replicated straight to ScreenCloud. It's nice and simple and works really beautifully.

Digital signage is vital during emergencies - chemical leaks, extreme weather, imminent danger. We've integrated with CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) and emergency providers to ensure fail-safe screen takeovers. Our Stream Deck integration even lets security teams broadcast alerts with a single button press.

Enhancing Safety with Digital Signage Solutions

So an extremely serious use case for digital signage is when there is an emergency situation. So that could be an imminent danger, extreme weather, or could be like a chemical leak, like a gas leak or something like that. So you need to take over those screens, warn the people in that environment what's going on, and then provide them information so that they can get to safety. This needs to be fail-safe. This needs to work all the time, every time. And so as a result, we've partnered with multiple emergency alert providers, because it won't just be the screens that are being utilized here. It will also be going over SMS and other alarm systems. There's an international standard called CAP, which is the Common Alerting Protocol, which we have integrated with and all of these other providers use as well, so that we can make sure that we're receiving the right information and pushing that out to screens quickly. In addition, we've also done integrations with things like a Stream Deck, which allows security teams to just hit a button and do a full cast takeover of ScreenCloud as well, which is quite an interesting innovation on top of our API. But yeah, sadly, this is one of the very important utilizations of screens. But because they're very big and very prominent in public spaces, it's an important part of getting out of an emergency situation, hopefully with everyone safe.

QuickPost lets comms teams publish messages to screens instantly without pre-planning. Just add a title, summary, image and link, and it automatically formats everything with company branding and QR codes. We're adding AI features soon to make this even faster and more powerful.

Effortless Messaging with QuickPost App

So comms teams usually have a content calendar and have planned out all of their creative work, but sometimes they just want to put a message up on the screen quickly. This is especially true if that content manager is local and maybe is running the facility and just wants to get a message out to colleagues that day. So the QuickPost app is a simple way to achieve that. You put just a title, summary, an image or video, a link, and it will repurpose into a really strong, screen-friendly format using the company's branding and turning links into QR codes and things like that. So it makes it very, very fast to publish content. And then that can be managed inside of ScreenCloud with expiry dates, et cetera. This is just the first version, and soon we'll be applying more AI-enhancing features to make this even easier and more powerful in the future. But now you can just get your message up to screen nice and easily.

Emergency alerting is one of the most serious use cases for digital signage. We've integrated with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and emergency alert providers to enable fail-safe screen takeovers during crises. When seconds matter, screens are vital for getting people to safety.

Ensuring Safety with Emergency Digital Signage

Digital signage lives in public spaces where you're competing for attention, so you need to earn the eyeballs. Think about what your audience needs - practical information that helps them excel - then balance that with your company messages. Get this right and your communications become genuinely effective.

Balancing Content for Effective Digital Signage

So when you're thinking about your content calendar for digital signage, most comms teams will think about what the company objectives are and the information the company wants its employees and teams to see. So that is very much company objectives. However, this is a form of entertainment, and it is in a public space where people could look and do other things rather than look at the screen. So you need to earn the eyeballs. You need to think about the audience needs and what's the information that they want to see. Now, it might not necessarily just be entertainment, although, again, there's nothing wrong with that if it's in a break room, for example. But it might be information that is specifically useful to them. So examples would be more information about maybe management training or job opportunities, or how to change rotor shift schedules, or who's even running the shift. Information which is practical and useful for them to get their job done better and also to excel at the company. And then you need to balance that out with the needs of what the company wants its team to understand and see. If you get that balance right, you earn the eyeballs, and you will get your message across in a much more meaningful way. We call this internally broccoli and ice cream. So you want to eat the broccoli, you've got to give it an ice cream incentive. Some of our product team hate that analogy, but it kind of seems to land. So, you know, if you're giving out lots of broccoli, don't forget to also reward some ice cream too.

When planning digital signage content, you need to balance company objectives with what your audience actually wants to see. I call this 'broccoli and ice cream' - if you're serving up lots of corporate messages, you've got to reward people with content they genuinely find useful or entertaining.

Optimising Digital Signage Content for Employee Engagement

So when you're thinking about your content calendar for digital signage, most comms teams will think about what the company objectives are and the information the company wants its employees and teams to see. So that is very much company objectives. However, this is a form of entertainment, and it is in a public space where people could look and do other things rather than look at the screen. So you need to earn the eyeballs. You need to think about the audience needs and what's the information that they want to see. Now, it might not necessarily just be entertainment, although, again, there's nothing wrong with that if it's in a break room, for example. But it might be information that is specifically useful to them. So examples would be more information about maybe management training or job opportunities, or how to change rotor shift schedules, or who's even running the shift. Information which is practical and useful for them to get their job done better and also to excel at the company. And then you need to balance that out with the needs of what the company wants its team to understand and see. If you get that balance right, you earn the eyeballs, and you will get your message across in a much more meaningful way. We call this internally broccoli and ice cream. So you kind of want to eat the broccoli, you've got to give it an ice cream incentive. Some of our product team hate that analogy, but it kind of seems to land. So, you know, if you're giving out lots of broccoli, don't forget to also reward some ice cream too.

I used ScreenCloud at my dad's 80th birthday, and whilst setup was brilliantly simple, it reminded me how much work we still have to do on usability. Watching family members engage with old photos on screen was magical, but I was still fiddling with too many buttons. This is where AI will really help.

Reflections on ScreenCloud at a Family Event

So I've seen influencers do videos in their car as they're driving along it's probably a bit of a flex because they've got a nice car but this one's from 2007 and it's full of junk and dog hair from Fergus. Anyway I'm just driving from back from my dad's 80th birthday party where obviously I used ScreenCloud as part of the party and it was really good it worked really well a few really good observations came from it firstly setting it up was dead easy ScreenCloud OS I use ScreenCloud OS and it really was just so simple so we've done a great job there you know doing that I think also shout out to Casey on our success team he built a really nice little workflow and you'll see examples of that where people could upload images on a Google form with a message and that pushed out to the screen using OneDrive which was really nice so people like that that was fun and then I think probably the biggest thing as well was just the impact it had and I'll put a video in here as well you can see like members of my family looking at old pictures from my mum and dad's wedding day when they were growing up as kids you know holidays memories of my grandparents who've passed now and it was incredible to see the power of the screen for triggering memories and thoughts and that was really beautiful so they're really proud to be able to use a product to kind of make these little moments happen where it didn't go so well is I still think if I'm honest and as much as I love our product it's still too difficult to use I was fiddling away with my laptop you know at the end of the table trying to get just quite basic things really just trying to get a gallery of images up there that people could add to and things like that and I think we've done a good job with ScreenCloud Studio and things like that overall but it's still too fiddly there's still too many buttons to click and I imagine there's the same for everyone in our industry too so yeah I think this is where you know AI is definitely g

I share insights from a decade in digital signage about the surprising reality of corporate communications teams. Even in 100,000-person organisations, comms teams are typically just 5-7 people managing all channels. Understanding their resource constraints is crucial - we focus on content repurposing and automation to make digital signage effortless rather than another burden.

Streamlining Digital Signage in Large Organisations

So one of the observations that I've made working over the last decade in digital signage is that almost irregardless of how big a company is, the communications team is usually centralized and very small. I've very rarely seen a communications team bigger than, say, five, seven people. And they are responsible for all communication across every channel, all across the business. So they're usually very under-resourced. They don't often have design resource in-house. They may have agencies that they can use. And they're usually flat out, trying to put everything out from whatever the C-level is asking them to do to whatever else they need to do in their content calendar. And so I find that because digital signage is normally a new communication channel for them, that one of their fears is, oh, we're already so busy, can we actually take on this challenge as well, which is a really reasonable thing for them to be worried about. And so we go out of our way to show that, actually, we can repurpose a ton of the content they're already making and just try and make it as automated as possible for them. But yeah, sometimes 100,000-person company still has a comms team of only five. And we need to remember that as an industry when we're talking about screens that communicate.

I explore the zones versus full-screen debate in digital signage design. Whilst single messages work best for crucial communications, zoned layouts excel at attracting attention with peripheral information like weather or safety notices. ScreenCloud's flexibility allows both approaches - zoned layouts for ambient content with priority messages that pop to full-screen when needed.

Effective Digital Signage Strategies: Zones vs Full Screen

So there's a big debate amongst digital science experts about whether you should zone up a screen or just use a full screen. So for zones, just think of kind of like a 24-hour news or sports news where you have ticker tapes and information down the side, and then you've got the main panel would be the presenters and things like that. And obviously, full screen is full screen. Now, the argument is that if you really want to get a message across, you should just have one message at one time up on that screen. And I would broadly agree with that. And I think, generally speaking, because digital signage is running so often, actually having one message and then moving on to something else is fine. However, I do quite like zoned content for attracting attention to the main zone with the content that you would normally want to attract, but then having peripheral information to the side, which could be something as basic as weather or a clock as well, or just something useful that maybe wouldn't have necessarily attracted attention in the first place. It could be something to do with health and safety, for example, which people tend to start to block out over time. So I think done well, zones can be really powerful. But when there is a crucial message, it's better to move full screen. And the way we designed ScreenCloud was actually to allow for both. So you can have a zoned layout. And then if you have priority content that can pop up full screen, and then when that's done, go back down again. And that seems to work really well for customers. It also adds a bit of variety into the layout of the screen as well.

I think consumer screens and USB sticks get unfairly criticised in the digital signage community. They're actually brilliant for testing use cases cheaply and getting content up quickly to see what works. Yes, you'll hit scaling challenges eventually, but you're proving the concept first and winning over internal sceptics.

Exploring Digital Signage with Consumer Screens

The professional digital signage community tends to frown upon the use of consumer screens or even USB sticks stuck into the back of those screens playing a playlist of images. I actually think they're fine. Here's why. Customers are trying out the use case. They're experimenting very cheap and excessively, getting their content up onto screen and seeing if that has actually got the impact on their customers or their employees or their students. And there is nothing wrong with that. They will soon hit a stumbling block in terms of scaling out that network, making it easy to swap out the content. But what they're really doing is showing that the screen can work in the first place and maybe winning over some of the naysayers in their own business to show that screens is actually a great communication platform.

I reflect on 10 years since David and I first publicly discussed ScreenCloud. What started as a simple prototype has grown into a platform serving over 10,000 customers with a team of 100+ people. Whilst building the product was far harder than imagined, it's been incredibly fulfilling to see our vision of screens that communicate come to life.

Celebrating a Decade of Digital Signage Innovation

So, an exciting milestone. It was exactly 10 years today that my co-founder, David, and I first publicly spoke about ScreenCloud, a prototype digital signage product that Luke, our other co-founder, and the team were building. Let's take a look. It's a cloud trying to make it better or easier to connect up multiple screens and push content to them. So, in this case, we're looking to push HTML5 content because that gives us the greatest variety of things we could then do with said screens. And really looking at a whole range of devices from phones and tablets, computer screens, to just smart, inverted commas because they're really not that smart when you get under the hood, TVs. And we think that there might be something interesting here probably for retailers, large offices with multiple screens, and even small offices as well. I mean, just really any kind of company or retailer that's trying to get messages out there and wants to maybe control them from a central point and then try and do some clever things about it. It's pretty early, but we'll probably have some kind of demo by the beginning of next week or just after Easter. So, definitely looking a little bit older and certainly a bit wiser when it comes to digital signage. Building that product was way harder than we could ever have imagined, but it's also been incredibly fulfilling. We have over 10,000 customers, a fantastic team of over 100 people. And every single day, we get up and continue to innovate the platform and try and bring that vision to life. We're focused these days more on screens that communicate. This is a huge passion. And this year, we want to educate our customers even more so they can get the most of those screens in their environment. So, excited for the next 10 years. Start thinking about what the next 10 is going to bring. With that in mind, have a nice Easter.

I explain how ScreenCloud partners with employee communication platforms rather than competing with them. We extend their content to digital screens, reaching deskless and frontline workers who lack access to email and apps. By 'second-lifing' content and using QR codes to drive engagement, we amplify the reach and effectiveness of existing communication tools.

Enhancing Communication with Digital Signage

Does ScreenCloud compete with employee communication platforms? The answer is no. We partner with them. They're producing content and pushing out to digital channels like email and employee apps, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We add the digital signage component to that platform. So we're taking feeds of it, and we're pushing it up to screen so everyone can see it, like those deskless and frontline workers who might not have access to those other channels. But we're also second-lifing that content, giving it more exposure so people are understanding that message, and then we're driving traffic back into those products via QR codes so people can consume the whole thing. So we're very much a partner and definitely not a competitor.

I explore how we're leveraging AI at ScreenCloud to transform existing content into screen-friendly formats. From automatic summarisation and translation to generating custom dashboards from spreadsheets, these AI features are designed to make digital signage more accessible and powerful for everyone.

AI-Driven Content Transformation in Digital Signage

We are embracing AI at ScreenCloud. First and foremost, it's about content transformation. Most of the content people want to put on a screen already exists, but not in a screen-friendly format. So AI can easily understand that content and reformat that up the screen. In addition to that, we can summarize content, so we can condense it so it's easier to understand. We can also do things like translation as well, and even upscale and create images to associate with that content if there isn't any available. Finally, we're actually looking at ways in which we can generate code and screen apps automatically for those screens. So that could be taking a spreadsheet and dynamically building a dashboard of those numbers ready up onto a screen. So stay on the lookout for loads of AI features coming from the ScreenCloud product team.

I discuss why digital signage matters for office-based knowledge workers. Whilst laptop and phone screens dominate their attention, internal communications often gets lost in the noise. Environmental screens can increase information recall rates by 3-4 times, cutting through digital clutter to ensure key messages land effectively.

Boosting Office Communication with Digital Signage

For office-based desk workers or knowledge workers, screens on the walls are simply not as important as the screens in front of them, their laptop or their phone. However, the communication channels on those devices are pretty noisy, and internal communications often gets lost in the mix. So having content pushed out onto screens in their environment is a great way of cutting through the noise and making sure that these key messages are heard and understood. We've seen that recall rates of information can go up three or four times when also amplified on screens and not solely left to platforms on their laptop or on their phone.

I discuss how digital screens can transform event spaces beyond traditional methods like lighting and furniture. Event-specific content on screens can completely change the atmosphere and function of a workspace, creating immersive experiences that engage attendees in new ways.

Transform Event Spaces with Dynamic Digital Signage

Have you ever hosted an event in your workspace? The answer is probably yes. So how do you change the mood and function of that setting? Well, you probably changed the lighting, maybe moved the furniture, and maybe even played some music. But what about screens as well? If you do have screens in that environment, you can push content out, which is relevant to the event that you're running, and completely change the atmosphere and function of the room. Give it a try. www.microsoft.com