Matt Cole, founder of LED content specialist Entice Studio, tells us why and how content must become an important part of LED display projects.
When I speak to Matt Cole, who has just launched a new LED content creation studio brand, it is only a couple of days since he took part in the Paris session of a European technical dvLED roadshow.
Cole took part in the UK and French legs of the travelling educational workshop as the content creation expert. This was alongside speakers with LED display installation expertise from Peerless-AV, Absen, NovaStar, and 7thSense, with support from Midwich Group companies and AVIXA.
I am interested in the presentation that Cole gave at this roadshow entitled The Power of Content for LED: Why it should be a Forethought and not an Afterthought.
But first Cole tells me about his background. He started in the digital signage industry 18 years ago, working for the UK division of Dallas-based Symon Communications, which became Symon Dacon. The company then became a part of RMG Networks and is now known as Korbyt, after its digital signage platform.
“I was very much a designer, with a multimedia background and it became the perfect fit,” he says.
Cole became part of the management team, heading up marketing as well as the creative studio. He then worked for an integrator, using the Navori platform, before setting up the Visualab Media agency nine years ago.
“Initially we were very much a digital agency with experience in screen technology,” he says.
The agency works behind the scenes for system integrators, many of them very successful and well-known, which often can’t be named. “Some people mention us, and some people don’t,” says Cole.
It has also grown the scope of its work from design for digital signage to undertaking marketing for its clients. An example might be case studies for Samsung.
Look at the company’s website and you can see many examples of work with named companies. These range from Bristol Airport, to the Hippodrome nightclub, and Change Group currency exchanges. The LadBible online publishing group, soft drinks company Britvic, iiyama, Dr Martens, Hermes, Chelsea Football Club and Rolls Royce are among other names that are meaningful to me.
Things seem to be going well at Visualab, so I wonder why, as Cole begins his presentation, he is talking about a new sub-brand: Entice Studio. This is a dedicated LED content production house for integrators, consultants and manufacturers whose formal launch takes place a couple of weeks after we speak.
The reason for the name, Entice Studio, has something to do with the extreme impact of LED content.
“My whole thought process is that this type of content is so overpowering that it takes over and everybody thinks you only do that,” says Cole. “They don’t necessarily realise that you’re a marketing agency as well as an LED production studio.”
In his presentation, Cole explains that Entice Studio, as the LED production house of Visualab Media, will have three pillars to its work.
There will be commercial work that is brand-centric or focused on a product. There will be digital art that changes the mood of people in spaces. And then data-driven content, which includes user-controlled content, which can be moved around by touch or actions, and content triggered by data such as weather information.
Cole describes four main points that Entice Studio will look at in a brief, beginning with the objective before moving on to the audience and environment. Next, a section of the presentation about how you capture an audience’s attention is particularly interesting to me.
“There’s so much digital content out there at the moment,” says Cole. “There are so many more screens, and everybody has got a mobile phone in their hands. Content is everywhere so how do we get through all of that and make our content seen?”
One answer is to make something unique and clever. Another is to introduce an element of surprise.
Balanced playlists are helpful too. “If you’ve got hard-hitting advertising going on all the time, people will just turn off,” says Cole. Instead, think about how to make it stand out.
Then there is the point that live data creates trust in an audience, which helps the content around it.
“Even just adding the time, or weather, to your piece of content will ultimately make it feel alive, make it feel more real, and therefore more desirable to the audience,” Cole says.
There is talk of how to make content more relevant to audiences through changes in response to the time of day or the environment. This might mean adding travel information to a screen in a corporate environment from 4pm onwards, as people are leaving the office. Or it could be switching from promoting in-store purchases to encouraging online shopping on screens in a store when it closes.
Cole talks about three phases of a project, running from discovery, through creation, to delivery and testing in digital environments and the real world.
I am interested in the technicalities of testing, and we get on to how you overcome the problems that compression can create, such as artifacts on screen that are visible at particular viewing distances.
“I find that a lot of CMSs will only allow you to upload MP4s, or sometimes MOVs, and some of them even convert files on upload,” says Cole.
Working with 7thSense on the recent dvLED education roadshow, which was playing back image sequences using uncompressed files, was ideal. “The quality is just excellent,” says Cole.
Finally we touch upon the value of bespoke content. “LED gears itself to bespoke content, as it isn’t 16:9. It isn’t the same ratio as a TV, and ultimately that makes it stand out better than any standard screen you see,” says Cole.
People used to say that portrait screens stood out more than landscape screens because they are unlike a TV at home. “I think LED takes that to the next level where it can integrate perfectly into a space,” Cole says.
But while bespoke content can be very valuable, it is also important to restructure and reformat existing visual assets for digital screens, such as digital signage on the high street.
“Content creation from scratch isn’t cheap and we do this for quite a lot of different clients,” says Cole.
As the presentation ends, and I ask about the biggest mistakes that can affect an end user, Cole starts talking about a trade-off between the extraordinary impact you can have with screens of all different shapes and sizes and the cost challenges that come when they are not all a standard size.
If the client has the budget, screens of unusual sizes work well and there are some notable big advertising boards that are grabbing attention with unusual shapes. But if the client doesn’t have the budget for this, they need to think about how they can reuse content and make a campaign work across different LED displays using a standard format.
Having a studio that understands the technology is something else Cole mentions. This might mean understanding the value of pixel mapping content on to displays, or an understanding of how displays deal with colour and light.
Ultimately, though, the biggest common mistake that affects end users is putting up a big LED screen without a clear objective.
I wonder whether Cole is familiar with some names that have worked on LED or digital signage content in other countries, and the one that he admires is d’strict, famous for its public digital art, including a Wave installation on a giant 8K LED screen in South Korea.
Talking about opportunities in the UK, he mentions the advantage of the relationships he has after working in the digital signage industry for such a long time. This is what has allowed Entice Studio’s parent brand Visualab Media to work behind the scenes for integrators, software providers and manufacturers over the years.
Another advantage that Entice Studio will have is an understanding of the whole AV industry beyond digital signage, as it grows out of a parent brand which has, for instance, created content that shows how you use technology in a meeting room.
“We have great relationships with integrators because we can talk to them and understand the technologies at that level,” Cole says.