Digital Signage: Green for the environment and for your bottom line.

Finally, there is a way to be good to the environment and to your bottom line at the same time.  It's called Digital Signage.

Too often we have to choose between what is right for the environment and what is right for our company.  Many "green initiative" have both financial consequences as well as unintended consequences that can actually promote other non-green activities.  

Solutions like Inspired Signage and Inspired-2-Go by AMX allow you to have your cake and eat it too.  They provides a much simpler, more cost effective, and less human resource intensive way to get your message out to both customers and employees.

More cost-effective than traditional print.

Think about the time, effort, people, and cost you consume from the time you think of your message until it gets in front of the audience:

• You have to design and layout your message.  What dimensions does it need to be again?
• You print it, tweek it, print it, tweek it, and print it until it's just right.  
• Depending on where your audience is, do you need to mass produce it?
  
• Then something changes on the fly (product/announcement/pricing) and you start over.
• Then you have to get it out there.  Is it displayed properly (if at all)?
• Finally you're done.
• Then something changes........

With Digital Signage you can design and revise until your heart's content (or until the marketing department is content) without killing a single tree or wasting any ink.  Product's like RMS let you manage it remotely and automate events and Inspired Composer lets you schedule it as if you were there.  RMS also has several pre-packaged solutions like MeetingManager, VenueManager, and others tailored to specific environments.

Did I mention that in many cases, these AMX solutions pay for themselves within the first 18 months because of the savings?  After that, you keep saving and the green goes into your wallet.  What other green projects can say that?

More dynamic and realtime.

In today's business world, situations can change before you're done rolling out your messaging.  What then?  You either wind up with outdated and/or no messaging, a fire drill, or both.  We see this in the consumer and retail space all of the time.  With all of the unpredictability in the market these days, you can expect things to be even more fluid.

Digital Signage can be updated in the fly.  Management can be distributed so that corporate gets their high-level messages out while the local GM can craft localized content and respond to regional opportunities.  Both can see what the other is up to and they can collaborate.

Digital Signage can also respond to it's surroundings.  The content can change when the audience interacts with a piece of merchandise or when they interact with the sign as well.  Since you can incorporate all sorts of digital content in near-infinite ways, it's like have a virtual product expert/sales person/internet built into every sign.  If you are monitoring it with RMS, you can also capture a ton of metrics about your customer's product interactions in the store.

It's just plain cooler

Ok, I said it.  I've been thinking about it the whole time, but in trying to sound all responsible and adult-like, I left it for last.  I don't need to explain this.  If it's digital, and moves, and responds to you, it's cool.  Period.  Think about the coolest stores, venues, hotels, etc, that you know.  It's likely that they have digital media well integrated into the experience.  Traditional printed or cyclical DVD videos pale in comparison to a digital sign that just seems, well, alive.

Why settle for the 1,000 words that you get from a picture when you can have "the experience" of a digital sign?

Note to Corporate Communications and HR people:

The Rainforest called.  They asked that you stop printing up paper signs and flyers that advertise all of the ways that your company is being green.  :)

Learn more at InfoComm '09

If this in any way piques your interest, you can see it in action and learn more at Infocomm '09 in Orlando next week.  I'll be hanging by the AMX booth, but you probably already figured that out.  Either way, introduce yourself if you attend.

Go digital or go home.