DIGITAL SIGNAGE
advice and experience you’ll get from different quarters, it breaks down into four key elements: define, design, implement, and resource. You’ll notice that none of those elements is called
“screens”, or “network infrastructure”, or “software”, or anything else technical or product-oriented. That’s because implementing digital signage is not, at heart, a technology challenge: in fact, the underlying technology is pretty simple (if you’ve ever played a movie from your laptop through the TV, you’re halfway there already, although of course there’s rather more complexity to be dealt with once you scale that up to a whole casino). The challenges are not in making the digital signage
work...they lie in making it work for your business. And that’s where our four elements come in.
Define Clearly setting out your goals for a digital signage
project is even more critical than for many other undertakings in the business, for a number of reasons. First, it is easy to get led by the technology; you can go a long way toward avoiding this by forming a multi-disciplinary project team at an early stage, likely including representatives from marketing, customer relations, facilities, service delivery departments such as floor operations and food and beverage, and finance (who will need to understand where the payback on the project is expected), as well as IT.
Just as important, though, is to understand that although digital screenmedia can do many things, no single installation can achieve all of them well. Pick your goals; they could include any of the following. • Direct revenue generation by selling advertising,
for example to brands featured in your retail space. • Indirect revenue generation in a multitude of
ways, for example by upselling hotel customers, or promoting non-gaming activities such as dining and shows. • Increasing customer engagement with the casino
offer, for example by explaining the rules and benefits of new games, or by encouraging sign-up to loyalty schemes. • Increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing demands on staff by providing a way-finding system that helps visitors navigate your venue. • Entertaining customers waiting for service by
providing them with video content such as news and infotainment. • Reducing costs and maintaining regulatory compliance by replacing regularly-changed printed information with on-screen messaging. • Improving employee communications and
training (especially if you are installing a large public- facing network of screens throughout your premises, it’s worth considering that piggybacking on that a separate network of screens in employee areas may be a comparatively inexpensive addition). • Even, if regulators allow it or by structuring it as
free-to-play entertainment rather than gambling, offering gaming experiences directly through the
screens. After identifying your goals with digital signage and figuring out how you will measure their achievement, it’s time to move on to the nuts and bolts.
Design
At this point, you’ll almost certainly want to engage the services of a consultant or integrator, even if you consider it too early to commit to specific technology providers. For the difference between an effective digital signage network and a flop can lie in the details. Consider: • Having identified who you want to reach with
your screens, where in a large and complex venue is the best place to do that? The number of people who spend time in or pass by a specific location, the amount of time they spend there (“dwell time” in the jargon), and the possible distractions all play a part here. These may change at different times of day; the
ability to cope with this by altering what’s shown according to the hour (“day-parting”) is a major advantage of digital signage over conventional signage.
Also try to figure out, where you can, what stage on
the typical customer journey each location represents. For example, someone queuing at the hotel reception desk has very likely just arrived and needs basic information; someone sitting in a bar in mid-evening may well be winding down and wondering where to eat; and so on. • What kind of content, in the broadest sense, will
you need to show to achieve your goals? How-to-play videos lasting several minutes? Static, poster-like slides of restaurant special offers that can be understood in a couple of seconds? These considerations will help inform your choice of screen locations. • Having an idea of the content you’re offering will also enable you to decide whether there is a need for customers to interact with the screens: for example, scrolling through a map using a touch-sensitive
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