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Courtesy of Adobe Stock.
Folks, we need to stop already with the doom-scrolling and clickbait headlines about AI and emerging technologies bringing a hypothetical doomsday. While we need to study new technologies and regulate them carefully to protect businesses and consumers, humanity is simply inventing more efficient ways to get work done and connect with each other. The secret to success, as always, involves sincerely listening to and meeting the needs of your customers, and crafting a unique and memorable experience that they will remember.
I was recently in dialogue with an industry leader and the spirit moved me to write down, in the briefest essence possible, what I have learned from almost a year of nonstop, around-the-clock study of digital signage and marketing, business and technology.
Insight, not hysteria
I’ve been to events around the country over the past year, and every week I’m talking to an army of international business and technology luminaries to help keep our readers in touch with the lightning pace of tech and business evolution. And I hear a lot of folks saying the same things; they see news about AI and Chat GPT, and they’re afraid. What’s going to happen to our jobs? Will this damage society? And on and on it goes.
My feeds across professional and personal social media are rife with clickbait on the subject; whether it’s fearmongering or simply bad advice on gimmicky ways to use new tech to make a fast buck. But this is usually far from useful analysis and strategy; folks are trying to play into the fear and hysteria to get some web traffic. (This is why we’ve launched detailed expert interviews like my recent AI-focused conversation with Luke Hubbard).
Look! I get it. Our human brains are wired to fear change. It’s part of our DNA, and 10,000 years of spirituality, psychology and culture have tried to grapple with this human trait. But the fact is, we’ve been dealing with innovation and change from the beginning, since the first cave people kindled flame and built wheels (before fashioning clubs to bean each other over the head more efficiently).
For example, we have cuneiform tablets from ancient Sumeria recording the gripes of village elders over this new invention called writing thing that the kids are crazy about! Writing will ruin the youth, they said; nobody will be able to remember anything because they’re writing stuff down — and so on.
Well, it turns out that this technology ended up making the world infinitely better over time, like the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone and almost every other innovation does in the long run.
Digital Signage Today, well, today
So, what’s all this mean for our industry?
Digital signage and marketing, like other tech categories, are merging as silos disappear.
Thanks to web 4.0, metaverse, IoT, and other trends, it is more important than ever to use technology as a means, not an end; success belongs to those who can adapt any technology or economic condition to forge genuine connections with customers, regardless of their product or service. People, particularly in new generations of consumers, want authentic connections, and they want experiences. How does your brand, product, and service make people FEEL? That is the great question on which hinges success (or failure), regardless of changing times. As a viral TED talk recently said, stop trying to SELL THINGS; instead, I tell folks, become an experience engineer.
Yes, you need to be tech savvy and leverage the best tools; but this won’t help you unless you are forging authentic connections with your users. You need to be in sincere dialogue with them as human beings. That’s why it’s vital to build a robust internal and external culture; to attend to DEI, accessibility, and ESG issues (which are paramount to Gen Z, by the way); and so much more that we’ve been covering in our rapidly evolving body of work at Digital Signage Today. You know, we started a whole topic on sustainability, which faced initial skepticism from some industry folks, just as hologram coverage did — but both have become staples of our traffic.
We’re big on emerging tech like augmented reality and holograms, as our readers know! But we are obsessed with preaching the gospel of content as king and of “the human side of digital transformation,” to use Kamales Lardi’s excellent phrase.
I always tell folks: digital signage isn’t screens on a wall anymore, but what you put on those screens (and how you craft that content!)
Whether you’re an ancient Sumerian grain merchant, a modern business owner, or a cybernetic entrepreneur in the metaverse in a hundred years, I’ll tell you what I told banking expert Brad Cooper recently: if you can remember the timeless principles of success, if you can learn to be an “engineer of experiences,” you’re going to be more than okay.
Daniel Brown is the editor of Digital Signage Today. He is an accomplished technology writer whose experience includes creating knowledge base content for a major university’s computing services department. His previous experience also includes IT project management, technical support and education. He can usually be found in a coffee shop near a large pile of books.
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