Why Screens Are Becoming a Modern Workplace Essential

Key Takeaways

• Consumers are increasingly becoming screen expectant as digital displays appear across everyday environments.
• Effective digital signage depends on seamless playback, strong content and clear workflows, not just having screens installed.
• AI is making content generation easier, giving organisations a stronger reason to build screen-based communication strategies now.

Topics

• Digital Signage
• Communications
• AI & Machine Learning
• Business Strategy

Transcript

Welcome to a day in the life of me. Well, every day pretty much starts the same, about half past six. Fergus wakes up wanting his breakfast and going to the loo. So it's a pretty simple start to the day, packing a bag, getting ready, and working our way up to Old Street to the office. Let's go. We're filming this towards the end of September, so it's the end of the quarter, and actually this end of quarter is actually the end of our financial year. So it's quite a significant period of time. Thankfully, we've kind of dealt with this quarter better than others in the past, so we're not going right up to the line with some of the big deals we were closing. They're already closed, so it's slightly less stressful than before. That's the right way to do it. Most of my thinking now is we've got ScreenCloud Together coming up in Morocco in about a week and a half. So I'm thinking about the speeches that we'll be giving in our conference sessions, which I'll be giving, but also my leadership and various teams will be presenting on stage. And we're trying to give a quite a joined-up narrative as to what 2025 will mean for ScreenCloud. So screens are everywhere, coming to every station near you. Everyone's seeing this every single day. Just gets a massive association that a modern environment is an environment with these things, and a non-modern environment is a paper stuck to it. It just, you're going to have that. So my thesis really is that this is training consumers, and they're all consumers, to basically become screen expectant. And like even that, now that's a poster, it just, it feels dated, and yet that feels modern, and it's— You know, it just feels like it's a job half done, right? All right, so Kloster's obviously got all of their screens, and the content's actually pretty good. Like, it's well designed, it's, like, done. But what you'll see is, like, in between the transitions, it kind of goes to black for, like, two seconds. And, like, this is just images and videos. There's nothing sophisticated going on here, so it shouldn't have that transition. It should just go straight to the next content. It should be preloaded. And, like, I don't know why. Like, this doesn't make sense. It doesn't need to do that. So for me, like, that's a kind of tell of just, like, it works, but it's not quite working. You know, we're guilty of it sometimes as well, but for me, that experience, it should be an animation, it should load in perfectly, it should be seamless, just like television would be. All right, so we're on Old Street. This is where my office is based. But first, we're going to go to the best cafe in the world and get the sandwich you have to have here. The usual, please, if you like egg and bacon sandwiches. This is the best one. Cheers. Thank you. Take care. Hello. Hey. Going to first meeting with the data team to align a bit more on data and get that sorted. Quite important stuff. Got to know what's going on inside the business. Reflecting a little bit on what we saw this morning. So just literally on the 10-minute walk from my flat to the tube station, and then the five-minute walk from the tube station to ScreenCloud office, like how many screens that we saw. You know, it's probably more than you might realise. Screens really are in our consumer lives; they're everywhere. And we also saw some issues with that. We saw some stuff that was broken, some content that wasn't quite right, some examples of really good content being used, and then the inevitable change of one train station with literally bits of paper stuck to the wall, and then another one where that's all screens, and it just felt like the future. And it's just going to be rolled out. Like, they're not going to not roll that out any further. It's going to be screens everywhere. You shouldn't really be sleeping on that because suddenly, if you reflect on your own working environment and you see bits of paper stuck on notice boards or whatever it might be, or just screens looping around the same old stuff, or maybe you've got a screen up and it's just got the news on mute, you're not using screens. Like, you've got screens, but you're not using them. And I think most companies aren't, right? So we want to change that, right? We want to make screens useful. And I think companies need to get on board with this really sooner rather than later because technology shifts are very gradual and then very sudden. And we have one almighty great big technology shift already around us right now in AI, which means content generation is going to be, like, super easy and super efficient. And that's always been a bit of an issue with screens. It's like, don't have enough content, don't have ways of getting content up there. Well, between AI-enhanced services and everything that we've talked about that ScreenCloud can do, we've sort of figured that out now. So now companies need to start thinking about this more strategically and think, if I'm going to use screens as a communication channel, then, well, firstly, I need screens in all my locations. Actually, just getting that rolled out, that can take like a year or two years. Beyond that, then you need to think, well, what do I want to achieve with these screens? And, like, what are the workflows needed in order to get that going? I would start building that muscle today because when it's, like, completely expected, for many companies it will be a bit late, and then you're kind of playing catch-up, and that's never fun. So obviously it's in my best interest to pitch that you should all be doing this now. But genuinely, I think you should be doing this now. Whether it's with ScreenCloud or someone else, I think you should be doing it now because consumers are having their brains rewired to consider screens as a modern element of any modern environment. Why wouldn't they consider that in their workplace too, right? So that's kind of the two big things that we've been talking about today, and they're joined up. Not screens. At the gym, we're wrapping up for the day. Here's a screen which is working well. It's powered by ScreenCloud, which is good news because it's the gym I go to during the week. And yeah, it's been a fun day. First day of Behind the Screens kind of reboot. Used to be our old podcast. And yeah, it's been fun. I hope you've enjoyed it, and see you soon. Off you go.