COVID-19 Effects On Our Digital Experience

At home, digital marketing becomes more important, of course. As for the digital signage industry, most still share a positive view of the application, even during this hard time. In an article on Digital Signage Today, the author explores the numerous benefits of digital signage to facilitate information dissemination and communication, which help to combat the virus. Most of our clients or partners are updating content related to COVID-19.

The direction of sales inquiries also goes a bit different after the COVID-19 outbreak. Besides projects that luckily went through during this while, I have received some regarding setting up such business, from those insightful professionals who are taking this opportunity to rethink about the business direction they’re going (and I’ve written How To Set up a Digital Signage Business to talk about this subject).

Another topic I discussed often with partners is the trend of touch-free applications such as mobile phones with the display or facial detection. My new connections on Linkedin also include some who are working on other touch-free solutions such as AR.

Will the touch screen be out of place? I have no idea. Here in Taiwan where we are rather safe from COVID-19, I still see a touch screen in use, with hand sanitizer by the side.

But no matter what kind of future touch screen will face, we probably have to keep thinking of a touch-free solution, at least during this while. I hope I can get more familiar with other ways to construct a touch-free digital signage interactive system, and share soon, but let’s see first how we construct touch-free interactive experience, through these two common ways.

You may let your client have the information on their mobiles wherever they go. The information could be about some products, promotion activities, coupons, or an online survey after the event.

To make it an interactive experience, after scanning the code, the phone will show a page that looks somehow like this. And if they click one of the advertisements they’re interested in, the display will play content accordingly.

How to set this up exactly?

1) Prepare content you’d like to display on the screen and store them in your media player.
2) Write an HTML page that you’d like to show on your audience’s mobile.
3) Consult the vendor on how their system trigger content (by HTTP command or other ways)
4) Implement your digital signage hardware and software

In this way, the audience won’t have to touch the screen; they interact through their mobile.

Facial detection could be used for counting views and analyzing your audience demographics (gender & age for example). To be interactive, the playlist content could be triggered according to the viewers.

There are multiple ways to work the solution out. Generally, you’d need a camera, a facial detection software, and hardware (sometimes bundled, sometimes not), a digital signage system (media player, software and monitor), and content. Here I use Cayin’s system structure diagram to illustrate this set-up.

The camera could be IP cam/USB Cam. After capturing the face, it sends a signal to the facial detection devices (NAS here). The facial detection system analyzes the face’s gender, age, etc, and sends data to the digital signage system (SMP player here). The digital signage system then triggers content designed according to the audience, and play it on display.

Anyways, let’s hope we could get over this very soon. There is certainly plenty of other excellent technology that can be integrated into digital signage and advertising, and we can’t wait to explore more in this prosperous industry.

Wish you all good health and best luck!

For any sales inquiry or partnership discussion, (or just to talk and make friends!) please contact me by [email protected], or message me on linkedin. I’d be glad to know people from tech, marketing, writing, and any other sector.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.