Question from Richard Rippe

[mjstrand]

OK! Here's the deal...I've been half-assed keeping up with some of Mike's emails the past couple of years. Seven years ago I chose to walk away from more than 35 years in advertising sales for newspapers and magazine publishing with direct mail and several other types of communications. I moved to my rural American small town to take care of my parents rather than subject them to an Old Folks Home.I've played with PowerPoint using local color pix to make some pretty good ads and content. What I want to do is sell that to the banks, and everyone else I can in the rural area I'm in and control content and function much the way I did as a print publisher. I've played a lot to create commercial messages that look pretty darn good in PowerPoint. Now I want to make money selling and serving advertising/messageing and more here in a 9-15 county area. What are your words of wisdom for me?

[mjstrand]

Hi Richard (and Happy Holidays)

It sounds like you have a great perspective on life and also had some wonderful experiences. Obviously with your talent, you could go lots of different ways to continue to make a nice living. In the digital signage arena, content seems to be one of the most important keys. And since our core business is software, I feel that the other important part is the distribution method.

As you have experienced, PowerPoint is one way to distribute content, although it is difficult to update it (you must have someone physically there), it can get repetitive (no scheduling or dynamic content), and it eventually locks up after a week or so.

I can see three best scenarios for your future path (although I know there are hundreds of options). One would be to take your content and build a powerpoint standalone slide show. That keeps your profit higher since you would not need to buy PowerPoint at each location. It would require someone to physically update the content whenever you update it and it would be repetitive and not very entertaining. It also does not give much control over the screen environment nor does it provide any playback tracking.

Another is to sell your content to a generic ad house. Although none are very popular now, I suspect that since you were in the ad industry, you know which ones are up and coming.

A third is to work with an Internet based digital signage company (hopefully us). You could offer our product to your customers and manage their account. You can also create user logins for your customers to update some of their own content, but not impact those ads that you want secure. It offers less than 1 minute updating, so if your customer wants something on the screen right away, you can create the new content and upload it immediately. Best of all, our technology is proven with 6 years of continuous operation (we had two outages - one from a server crash and one from a bug that slipped by). It auto-updates and just keeps on working (or should I say playing...). It takes about a minute to get it installed with no firewall configuration. All in all, it is easy to use and very well suited (and priced) for mass distributions like this.

Another option of working with us would be to additionally offer your content through us. We would offer your content to our customers and you would get paid 80% when they buy through our automated purchasing system.