I am off to Copenhagen for a few days from Thursday and will be visiting a couple of network operators and content providers.
One of the companies I am most looking forward to meeting is ScreenVisuals. I quite like their company history and how they have become involved in digital OOH.
They started life as “Unplugged” back in 1999. Unplugged are / were a below the line agency – focusing on large companies who needed to adapt their marketing and advertising from (usually) larger / primary advertising agencies.
They focused on traditional methods of advertising and marketing such as print and POS material and even radio.
They had a lot of success and quickly grew from 4 to 16 employees. Larger corporate customers now include the likes of Carlsberg and Pfizer.
In 2002 they started to look at the digital sector although they found that none of their existing customers were really ready for the leap of faith required for Digital Signage.
As I have reported previously the year 2005 saw a mini Digital Signage revolution happen across Northern Europe – not least in Denmark.
All of a sudden a lot of the key retailers started to look at the possibility of communicating to their customers via in-store Digital Signage.
At this time and similar to other companies that “test the water” in new markets, Unplugged started to sell content and advertising to this (emerging) market sector under a (new) name of “ScreenVisuals”.
In January 2006, ScreenVisuals became a company in its own right and seems to have gone from strength to strength (I will know more by the weekend!).
ScreenVisuals is probably best described as a Digital agency – focusing on Digital Signage of course and offering such things as Content creation, Animations, 3D, motion graphics etc. as well as helping companies come up with a Signage strategy.
In content terms then very similar to Dagobert in Paris or say Grand Visual in London.
I’m going to Copenhagen actually to see the work that they have done for Q8 (the Kuwait petroleum / petrol station operator). This is a 60+ filling station rollout.
ScreenVisuals have also been chosen by Pergo (if you have been doing your house up recently you may know who Pergo are – THE inventors of laminate flooring).
ScreenVisuals are helping Pergo with their Digital Signage strategy; supplier selection, content, deployment etc.
Pergo will trial screens in various Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) in the beginning of September.
They are using 7″ screens on the shelves.
Similar to the JML network in the UK (the largest anywhere in Europe) the systems are off-line and will be using Flash Memory Cards for data distribution (and before you all shout, let me assure you, I have been involved in this – in the right environment it works extremely well).
See www.screenvisuals.com [1]