MADRID, Spain — John Ryan convened a panel this week of retail and digital signage gurus to discuss the future of digital signage in banking.
In a webinar titled "Digital Signage in Retail Financial Services: What John Ryan's European Survey Means for Your Bank," three industry leaders recapped the results of a John Ryan survey of 65 European and South African banks.
The webinar included Paco Underhill, Envirosell's founder and chief executive as well as best-selling author of "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping;" Mike Hiatt, former director of Walmart's "SMART" digital media network; and Bob Steele, vice chairman of John Ryan. Each presenter offered ideas for how banks could be successful in adopting digital signage within the branch environments.
Bob Steele kicked off the event by recapping the results of the survey, which found that although adoption of digital signage is skyrocketing, banks are having difficulty exploiting the medium. Limitations in software and difficulties in generating content have hindered banks from localizing content to the extent that they would like.
"Early adopters are facing real challenges in creating, localizing and managing content," Steele said. "Realizing the enormous promise of this new medium," which has the ability to target messages to specific branches and screens, "has turned out to be far more laborious than anyone expected," he said.
In the discussion that followed, all three panelists fielded questions from the audience, offering advice on a range of issues from sign placement to mobile technology to employee training. One theme that emerged was the need for banks to master content strategy, planning and management, with the goal of making content more relevant for customers and more efficient for the banks to produce.
"Relevance is king. Content is the way we approach relevance. The messages are more actionable when they are relevant," Underhill said.
