How Adding Digital Signage Increases Opportunities For VARs

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

While digital signage may be prominent in areas like New York’s Times Square, it’s also used in markets and niches including education, hospitality, shopping malls and retail stores, hospitals, gyms and spas, houses of worship, and financial institutions.  

Digital signage has a wide range of applications upon which VARs can capitalize. As David Wible, president and CEO of Industry Weapon, explained at BSM’s Retail IT VAR of the Future Conference, “We are actually in fifteen core verticals and right now, and we’re just seeing the migration to digital signage. It's everywhere.”

In retail, for example, Wible says Industry Weapon provides video walls, kiosks, and endless aisle solutions. Another example is digital signage use in casinos. “Every slot bank, every convention hall that's digital, all of the events, as they are changing, the integration is done.”

Cory Lindersmith, co-founder and director of technical services at Dakota Retail technologies, who joined Wible on a panel at the conference, added, “We’ve done a sports arena where we put in eight, digital signage menu boards behind each of their four concession stands, so that they could get rid of what we call the ‘Coke-style’ menu boards. It’s integrated with the POS that we sell, so when they update a price inside the POS, it updates all their menu boards without them having to physically go out to all four of their concession stands and start popping little letters and numbers out.”

Digital signage can help tie into customer loyalty and the customer experience, as Randy Roe, founder and president of Retail Technology Services explained. He said, “You really have to understand the desired outcome with the flow of the experience for that consumer, so you really need to visualize walking into this retail store, what that experience might need to be, and how it might be enhanced.”

“We feel that’s one of our largest opportunities now with the client base that we have,” Roe said. “With digital signage, it’s very open-ended, even more open-ended than loyalty. You are talking blank slate: ‘Where do I go with this?’  It requires heavy involvement with your partners to gain a grasp of what you can do and what you can’t do.”