Interview: Digital Signage Advice and Considerations from David Wible

David Wible is the CEO of Industry Weapon, a digital media company specializing in the advancement of digital signage applications. TechDecisions sat down with David to talk about tips and advice for companies that are considering digital signage solutions.

TD: When should a company begin to think about incorporating digital signage solutions into its offices? What do these solutions accomplish?

DW: It’s going to come down to the target audience that the company wants to focus on. For us, corporate communication typically begins with the employees. It’s not so much replacing those magnetic signs in lobbies, although that eventually becomes something they go after. What we find is using digital media in front of employees gives them a way to consume corporate information similarly to how they consume social information – whether it comes off of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat – we’re giving them a way to consume socially relevant content, but we also pepper in that corporate communication.

With that said, we typically see companies that have more than 30 employees that are starting to look at digital signage. It seems that anything under 30 is still a small enough company to have that type of communication, which can potentially be a bit overkill.

TD: When is it appropriate to install a video wall versus single displays, or interactive versus static screens?

DW: First and foremost, it all comes down to the physical size of the facility. You obviously don’t want to put up a video wall if you have a building with eight foot ceilings. It doesn’t make sense. The size of your facility is going to dictate the size of digital screen that you’re going to want to hang up.

Now, when it comes to whether I want interactivity or I don’t want interactivity, it really comes down, at that point, to the type of content you’re displaying to your employees or target audience. If I’m accessing information and I want to learn about wayfinding or folks within the organization itself, and there’s some decisions for that target audience person to make, interactivity makes a whole lot of sense.

We use a product that we call StoreConnect, which connects retail employees to the mothership and gives them everything from accessing schedules to reading about loss prevention to all sorts of different information. In manufacturing, it would be taking material safety data sheets and giving the employees the ability to easily search and find those bits of information they would typically thumb through a three ring binder and take forever to find.