In any business, every task has a champion: the person who takes charge and makes sure the job gets done. Digital signage is no different – if you don’t have a champion to take care of it in your company, you’re in trouble.
You’re probably aware of the importance of digital signage or else you wouldn’t be reading this article. And you probably know that not all signage is created equally – there’s the good, the bad and the astonishingly ugly. Making sure you’re in the first category, not the last, is where your Champ comes in.
She or he is the person responsible for campaigns from start to finish. They own it. They coordinate with marketing to determine what the campaign looks like, the content strategy, and they make sure the design team pulls it together. The Champ will manage the approvals process and ensure media files are loaded to the Content Management System correctly and on time. They also make sure that the display units are running properly and show the right files on the right screens at the right time to the right audience. They’ll collate any run-data, oversee reporting and ensure all stakeholders get the information they need in a timely fashion. Then they’ll repeat the process for the next campaign.
If that sounds arduous and all a bit unnecessary – perhaps you’ve only got two screens on a single site – think again. No matter how small or how big your company may be, to do digital signage correctly you need to do all of those things. Chances are you’re doing them already and don’t even realise.
In a small company the Champ is going to be multi-tasking and probably wears several of those hats. She or he could be the owner and the marketing person who also designs the artwork in Powerpoint, exports a few JPG’s and loads them to the screen via a USB. They’re in touch with their customers every day, so they know what works, and what doesn’t work. Using that feedback, they amend their files and rerun them until they get the results – the Return On Investment – that they’re looking for. A multi-national corporation will have more people involved but the process is exactly the same. And keeping it all together is the job of the Champ.
Consequently, digital signage is only as effective as the person running it. How good they’ll be comes down to training. You wouldn’t let someone who can’t drive behind the wheel of your car, so don’t let an untrained colleague drive the digital signage. Make sure your Champ understands the customer, knows how to build a campaign, how to design effective artwork, understands how your technology and software works, how to read the results. Training is critical, as is retraining. It shouldn’t be a one-time lesson but something that evolves along with the business.
Above all, the Champ must become your digital signage expert. They need to find an answer for any and all questions put to them by customers, clients, internal and external stakeholders. Because if they can’t do that, they can’t do their job. Digital signage turns into a wasted opportunity, your ROI goes through the floor and your once valuable network becomes a pointless, and expensive, group of TVs on the wall.
You don’t want that. You want results. So. Who’s your digital signage champ?
