This scenario sounds eerily similar to the kind of futuristic technology showcased in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi movie blockbuster Minority Report, where billboards and bus shelter posters talked directly to the movie’s protagonist. But it will soon be a reality played out in petrol forecourts and retail stores up and down the land if serial UK entrepreneur Lord Alan Sugar gets his way.

Lord Sugar’s Amscreen business has developed a technology called OptimEyes, which scans the eyes of customers to determine their age and gender and selects the most appropriate ads to show them. 

Screen grab

In November last year, UK super-market behemoth Tesco became the first major retailer to install the technology in more than 400 of its petrol stations. Now Amscreen is looking to take its digital screens inside larger stores.  

“Yes, it’s like something out of Minority Report, but this could change the face of British retail and our plans are to expand the screens into as many supermarkets as possible,” Simon Sugar, son of Alan and chief executive of Amscreen, told trade industry title The Grocer, last year.

In fact, take-up of all forms of digital/electronic signage is growing. During the period 2007 to 2011 the number of screens installed in the UK increased by 28%, according to the UK Digital Signage Survey, produced by POPAI. In the intervening years, digital signage experts say that we’ve witnessed similar levels of growth, which has lead to a landscape where, based on the findings of Epson’s 20/20 Vision survey on the future of instore marketing published in March 2013, 40% of UK POS activity is currently being delivered electronically compared to almost 60% via print. 

Not that printers should become too disheartened. 40% may sound like quite a high figure, but encouragingly the survey indicated that by 2020 print would still account for 39% of all POS activity.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that a shift is slowly but surely taking place from printed to digital signage. So to what extent can POS printers get a slice of the action?

Even though digital signage has been around for a number of years to date only a small number of printing companies have dipped their toe into the market, due to a variety of factors.

“Very few printers offer print and electronic signage because digital signage is predominantly supported by established audio-visual specialists with the technical knowledge of screens, media players, networking and content,” says Mark Bartlett, managing director of Surrey-based sign manufacturer Signbox. “Digital signage is a revenue stream often ignored by signmakers and printers due to the lack of this specialist knowledge.”

New opportunity

But that needn’t be the case. Printers shouldn’t see digital signs as a threat, argues Joseph Mergui, chief executive of Caldera, which offers a digital signage solution to the printing industry. They should see them as a potentially lucrative new revenue stream, thanks to the rapidly increasing number of businesses looking to use digital signage for their advertising and marketing campaigns. 

Bartlett concurs. “There is a growing demand from customers for these applications as they seek to disseminate their visual content across innovative channels that will further enhance their brand awareness and presence in striking new ways, wherever that may be,” he explains. “Customers want to express themselves in a more coherent and aspirational style, and digital signage provides that.”

But just because an opportunity exists it doesn’t necessarily mean printers are going to be able to cash in if they decide to branch out into this area, cautions a spokeswoman for one of the UK’s leading outdoor advertising agencies, which operates a number of electronic advertising screens nationwide. She says that at the moment creative agencies have a virtual lockdown on this burgeoning sector. 

“The problem is that digital and printing are different parts of the business so to speak,” she explains. “Whereas for traditional printing, creative agencies make the artwork, send it to the printer to be printed, who then sends it to us; for digital campaigns creative agencies create the artwork and send this digitally to us without involving a middle man.”

But though it may sound like the odds are stacked against printers gaining a foothold in this market, there are fewer barriers than you might think, according to Daniel Pattison, group sales director at Augustus Martin. 

He believes that printers need to look at this from the content creation perspective and view it as an extension of the in-store marketing support service that they currently provide.

“We already offer content creation and delivery systems for our clients,” says Pattison. “Content creation automation allows us to create or repurpose existing static 2D artwork and allows our clients to ‘play’ their print.”

Not all printers have the resources to offer content creation services of course, but that still doesn’t mean they can’t get a piece of the digital signage action, says Caldera’s Mergui. 

“I wouldn’t advise printers to compete with their customers at a creative or design level, except if that’s in their business model already. They should respect the ecosystem as it is today and be the one collecting the jobs, the content and the print, and displaying it [digitally].”

For Mergui the key to all this isn’t just about getting paid to create the work, but charging clients to display the work on screens that are owned by the printer. Although this bullish approach requires a significant initial financial outlay on digital screens, he argues that printers shouldn’t relinquish their share of revenue by paying to use other people’s hardware. 

“Printers are pioneers,” says Mergui. “They are hardworking people and smarter than some would think. If they have cut forests, levelled mountains and prepared the ground why should they let someone else plough their fields or even worse harvest the fruits of their hard work?” 

Prohibitive costs

Not everyone subscribes to this model. Pattison, for one, believes that due to the associated costs of making an investment of this nature it just doesn’t stack up for the majority of print businesses.

“The cost of installation and maintenance and the scale of screens required for large retailers make this a primary target for screen manufacturers who are all developing their B2B solutions for retailers,” he explains. “No individual printer is going to compete on hardware with billion-dollar electronics companies. However, delivering content is more aligned to the existing creative and printing process.”

And it’s clear from the potential costs involved that digital signage isn’t going to be right for everyone. The projected migration levels from printed to digital signs over the next five or so years suggest that this is going to be a business area in which printers can’t just dip their toe in the water as and when it suits them. 

“This is not merely an additional revenue stream – it can become a core driver in a visual communication provider’s business, but it has to be implemented and executed correctly,” cautions Signbox’s Bartlett. “Digital signage can integrate effectively with other communication channels in a company’s service offering – traditional signage, wide-format print, glass manifestations and so forth – to complement and empower a client’s project. However, it all depends on the print business and the markets that they operate in.”

The good news for those businesses interested in going down this route but also slightly risk averse, is that there’s always the possibility of striking an agreement with a company like Signbox, says Bartlett.

“By partnering with a digital signage expert such as ourselves it would enable them to broaden their service, consequently providing them with a profitable new revenue stream to help transform them into a one-stop shop,” he explains. 

This might be the most sensible approach to take for the vast majority of conventional printing businesses because even an ebullient Mergui concedes that it’s hard to build value in the cut-throat world of digital signage; and even harder to keep this value once you’ve created it.

Of course, regardless of how the printing industry feels about the growing threat of digital signs at the moment the bad news is that they’re not going away – indeed, they’re forecast to become ubiquitous. 

The growth we’ve already seen is set to accelerate in the future as businesses increasingly look to migrate from print to screens, report digital signage experts, with Epson’s 20/20 survey highlighting that FMCG groups anticipated 75% of their in-store POS would be electronic by 2020.  

The good news is that the market is still in its infancy so it’s not too late to start looking at how you might provide a Minority Report-style digital signage service to your clients. Whether this involves digital content creation, bullishly investing in pricey digital hardware or brokering an outsourcing partnership, printers could themselves start turning a science fiction fantasy into a lucrative modern-day reality.