Running a Synchronized Digital Signage Campaign

With so many people installing and utilizing digital signage as part of their marketing strategy, standing out from the crowd is becoming increasingly difficult.

There is now seemingly nowhere left that digital signage hasn’t yet been implemented, with it finding its way in shopping malls, schools, colleges, gas stations, and even outside with outdoor digital signage springing up on high streets up and down the nation.

But there are still areas in the digital signage industry that can be exploited to allow your campaign to stand out from the rest. One such method is synchronising multiple screens together and running a scheduled and timed campaign.

A synchronized digital signage campaign allows you to run campaigns on different screens that are timed to maximise their impact. For instance, a campaign could be synchronized and timed so a person will see one part of the campaign as they enter a building and further parts of the campaign as they continue through the building.

You can also create really dynamic content with screens hooked up together playing synchronized content, have a look at this content from EuroCIS 2009, to get a graspo of the basic concept.

To achieve synchronicity with a digital signage campaign, then a NTP time server (Network Time Protocol is going to be the way forward. This type of synchronization can be completed without a time synchronisation device but a dedicated NTP server will make life so much easier by allowing all devices to synchronise to a single time ensuring any scheduled content will be synchronised to within a few milliseconds.