Digital Signage: The Real Minority Report

Well, in case you didn’t know, Cowley is branching out into the future of advertising like never before.  We’ve taken on digital signage, which, like it sounds, is creating digital (i.e. look like and are big TV screens) advertising signs.

Welcome to Digital Signage

You’ve seen them at McDonald’s: those cool menus that move and show you stuff and make you hungry (I’ve always been a sucker for advertising).  You see them at the DMV, playing some stock reel of movie trivia, etc. controlled by a web connection so they can show something different everyday.  Or perhaps on the highway, instead of a stoic billboard, something jumped, moved, ran, or exploded in front of your face.  Think Times Square.  Digital signage is the way of the future.

Why?

Video is where it’s at.  Pictures are still the most prominent type of post on Facebook (taking in 95% of all engagement on the social network), but as the web gets faster and creating, sharing, and streaming video gets easier (Instagram and Vine, compared to YouTube), video is taking over.  Soon every ad will move, talk, jump, dance, even fly over you and try to “get you to buy that thing!”

Spielberg

I’m a huge Steven Spielberg fan.  Who isn’t?  (Don’t answer that.)  One of my all-time fav’s is his Minority Report – the action thriller that was called “his best since Raiders of the Lost Ark” – my all-time favorite movie, by the way (Raiders, to be clear).

I liked the movie so much (M. Report), I bought the DVD (we didn’t have Blue-rays back then) and watched all the “Bonus Features” like the movie nerd I was/am/whatever.  Something really interesting caught my attention.  It was the way Spielberg transformed the short story into a seemingly real version of the future.

According to the documentary, Steve got together some of the top scientific minds and put them in the same room together for a few days back to back and asked them one question: “What will the future hold?”

And then wrote it down.

They came up with all sorts of stuff, including the outbreak and personalization of digital signage!  In the film, this is ingeniously portrayed a Tom Cruise’s character enters the shopping mall and is called by name (well, I won’t spoil it for you) due to the eye recognition software that triggers the person in the sign’s ad to “remember” and say: “Would you like to try on another pair of XYZ jeans?”  Pretty cool, aye?

The film employs various usages of video technology in the future that are extremely interesting and point at the fact that digital signage is really coming of age and opening a window into the future of advertising.

Spoiler!

So, I don’t want to steal the guys’s thunder but I will pave the way by complimenting the great job our creative team, mainly Chris and Zach did on the promo video we are producing on digital signage.

The ad features the contrast between waiting rooms with and without digital signage.  The result is night and day: one of them engages your audience in the waiting room with whatever you want to communicate; the other doesn’t.  It’s that simple.

“Your walls can talk,” is the best way I’ve heard it put, a direct quote from our Creative Director, Paul Cowley.

That’s right folks.  It’s time to communicate what you want to your customers without you saying a word, wherever you want.

To find out more about our digital signage product, visit our services page here and “Contact Us” today.