Why Internal Champions Matter for Digital Signage
I discuss why digital signage still needs internal champions to earn its place alongside established IT budget items. The focus is on the intrapreneurs inside organisations who recognise poor communication scores and actively push screens as a valuable employee communication channel.
Key Takeaways
- Digital signage is not yet a standard IT budget line item, so it often needs active internal advocacy.
- Internal champions act as intrapreneurs, identifying communication challenges and pushing for better screen-based engagement.
- Customer advocates are essential to proving the value of digital signage within large organisations.
Topics
- Digital Signage
- Communications
- Leadership
Transcript
We are nothing without our internal champions, right? The reality is that in an IT budget, most IT budgets do not come with a digital signage line item, like pre-baked in, in the same way that they might have for firewalls, networking, security, email, Outlook, Microsoft Excel. That budget gets pre-written pretty much. Digital signage is something that needs to be fought for because screen communication, as much as I am an advocate for it, and this is the reason I'm so publicly advocating for it, it isn't a natural line item yet. And I want screens to be considered as important as email as a communication channel, in the right environment, of course, where it's appropriate, of which is very appropriate in most environments, if I'm honest. Now, I am nothing without my customers, and so we have this persona, right? Internally, he's called Richard. It's actually based on one of my first customers, who actually was called Richard, who's a CIO, who basically champions screens internally and becomes the intrapreneur. I don't know if you've come across that term before. It's kind of an old term. That entrepreneurial spirit inside of organisations, basically that person who says, You know what? I looked at our employee engagement scores and communication sucked, and we were, like, getting 10% score. I want to make that better. I'm going to use screens. And that person finds ScreenCloud, typically. And so that is, you know, Johnny at Werner Enterprises. That is Neil at SLB, or Schlumberger as they used to be called. That is, like, I mean, there's basically another 50 of them. In fact, we've got them all coming to Sharp next week. So we love these people, and we basically don't exist without them because without them fighting the corner for the medium, we can't do anything.