Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
What Happens When Every Screen Knows Your Name?
From static images to personalized experiences that greet you by name, digital signage has undergone a remarkable transformation. BrightSign's Vice President of Sales for the Americas, Misty Chalk, takes us deep into how this technology is revolutionizing customer connections across every industry.
The conversation reveals how BrightSign's purpose-built media players—those "purple boxes" behind screens everywhere—have become the backbone of sophisticated digital signage solutions. Chalk explains their unique ecosystem approach, where they've opened their APIs to over 170 content management software partners, creating a collaborative environment that delivers consistent, seamless experiences for end users. The newly established Bright Alliance program formalizes these partnerships, ensuring quality standards and simplifying what can be an overwhelming landscape for customers.
What's particularly fascinating is the evolution of retail media networks (RMNs) over the past four years. Accelerated by the pandemic, these networks have transformed from experimental initiatives to essential revenue streams that retailers "cannot afford not to do." BrightSign's technology serves as the crucial bridge connecting in-store displays, websites, apps, and streaming services—creating a cohesive experience that reaches consumers wherever they are.
Hyper-personalization emerges as the dominant trend shaping the future of digital signage. When a hotel room screen welcomes you by name or an end-cap display shows content relevant to your interests, that emotional connection drives brand loyalty. With a staggering 78% of marketers already using AI for content creation in 2024, the technology is rapidly advancing to deliver increasingly personalized experiences at scale.
Ready to transform how your brand connects with customers? Discover how digital signage can create the emotional engagement that drives loyalty across all touchpoints in today's omnichannel world.
Customerland is a podcast about Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.
So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
It bridges the gap of appeasing and having value to the brands that are actually paying for those ads and giving them the audience that they're looking for and driving that emotional connection that they need in order to create brand loyalty. I mean, that really is what it is about. Like, that really is where it is going, because that is what the consumer, that's what they want. They also want that emotional connection.
Speaker 2:Misty Chalk is vice president of sales for the Americas for Bright Sign. So Misty and I had a. It felt like a really quick conversation, but as I was looking back at my notes, we actually talked about a lot of stuff at NRF about a month ago, but here we are looking forward to a continuation of the conversation. Misty, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course, and I do talk fast, so we probably did have a short time. I filled it with a lot of information.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of stuff there, yeah. So a lot of backtracking and kind of filling in the gaps here. So filling in the gaps here. So, um, we've been trying to coordinate this conversation for a couple of weeks now. I'm glad we finally figured it out and got together. Um, your team and and I have been trading some notes back and forth some interesting happenings in the bright sign world. But maybe just to set context for this whole thing, for people who may not know, tell us a little bit about bright sign, what you guys do your role there. And then people who may not know, tell us a little bit about BrightSign, what you guys do your role there, and then I think you know how'd you get here?
Speaker 1:All right, so again. Vice President of Sales for the Americas at BrightSign. I've been here for seven years, just almost seven years now. And so BrightSign for those that don't know, we are in the digital signage space and we've been here for quite some time, and so what we do is we build purpose-built media players for the digital signage world, and when we started doing this, our goal really was to build hardware and media players that were extremely reliable but affordable, and then have an entire scale of product that could do a multitude of things and expand and scale as people were growing their signage businesses. And so it is who we are at our core.
Speaker 1:Again, we build reliable hardware. We have software solutions for digital signage. We're really well known for our wide range of media players. We manage content, we manage our players remotely, so, again, it's about easy to deploy, which makes us a very crucial player in this space. Our ecosystem is incredibly important to us, and so our strategy has been somewhat different than others, where we actually opened up our APIs, which is just a way for people to run their content management software on our hardware, which has just made us a really integral part of the entire digital signage ecosystem. So what that allows you to do is kind of personalize your entire experience, while really focusing on the best-in-class media players, which is what we're known for.
Speaker 2:And I know clearly you do a lot of work in the retail space because we met at NRF after all. But where else does BrightSign operate? What are the verticals?
Speaker 1:Well, if you look at digital signage and kind of the history and the evolution of signage, right Like signage was just something that was very static back in the 90s when it started becoming popular, it was very static, it was very just image oriented, it was more about information sharing and it's evolved so much just because of the technology advancements, because of the cloud connectivity, because of the connectivity options and how we can engage and actually interact with each other, and so what that has done is it's put digital signage across every single vertical. So there is no industry and there is no vertical that is not doing some form of digital signage, whether it be simplistic or experiential or extremely dynamic and complicated it is. It's literally everywhere.
Speaker 1:I would challenge anyone to go even to your doctor's office. There's digital signage in the waiting room, they're in the patient rooms, now they're at the grocery stores, it's everywhere. So we cover all verticals. It really is horizontal. For us, retail has been an incredibly important vertical. For us. It's kind of where we cut our teeth, but we do have teams that cover all of these different verticals and span.
Speaker 2:So that's a lot of stuff, so let's break it down for listeners here. If you cover that many verticals, if you you know, with that many it really does look horizontal, I would say, does that mean that you're selling into these verticals through distributors and partners, or does BrightSign have those kind of sales vehicles, space by space, industry by industry?
Speaker 1:So we have a hybrid approach and it does depend a little bit regionally right. So our international business is 100% through distribution, because it's incredibly important for them to source their entire solution by country, and so we acknowledge that and we make sure that we are aligned with. How people want to do business In the Americas is a little bit different. It is a hybrid. So we do sell through a reseller community, so we want to make sure that we have we have the right partners that can go and do these integrations and provide the right level of experience and expertise to our end customers.
Speaker 1:But, because digital signage can be extremely overwhelming, we do have a very consultative team and that's why we have our teams broken out the way that we do, so that we make sure that we have subject matter experts when we're talking about our commercial side of the business, which is going to do some of the higher ed and the corporate and the healthcare, versus our retail, which is going to do more of the retailers and the brands and the QSRs and C-stores and groceries and things like that, because it is a completely different skill set and how we go to market. We do that based on region and vertical. So that's how we structure it, because we want to make sure we're doing business the way that people want to do business, but that we also make sure that we have the right partners in place to support that, because we don't want our end users having a bad customer experience.
Speaker 2:I noticed in some of your materials there was an announcement, I think fairly recently, that you've kind of formalized a partnership structure. I'm struggling to remember the name of it right now.
Speaker 1:Bright Alliance.
Speaker 2:There you go. Bright Alliance it's a great name, I love it, yeah, so I'm guessing that that's a full ecosystem approach to partnerships, from system integrators and distributors to everything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so our partnerships we use that word it's almost interchangeable for a lot of different things, right? And so one thing that we're trying to do at BrightSign is really break this down for our customers, because digital signage can be extremely overwhelming. I mean, you have companies that will put a thumb drive and a display and say that they're digital signage, but that's not really the intent or the spirit of what we're doing, right? So it can be really difficult to break all of that down. And so what we've done is we look at our partnerships and we have over 170 now, I think, content management software companies that run on BrightSign hardware, and although that is a really great selling point to an end customer, that can be extremely overwhelming. And so what we try to do is break that down and say, okay, we want to make sure that we're giving a consistent customer experience to our mutual customers and that we are understanding kind of what that CMS partnerships look like and what it means. And so we started Bright Alliance, and right now Bright Alliance is only a year old and we are focused just predominantly on our CMS partners. We plan on expanding that in the future in 26 and 27 to include our technology partners, which are the ones that are doing the IoT, like the USB, the different ways to do interactivity and things that plug into our players. Also our BrightSign built-in partners, because BrightSign also powers displays as well for an all-in-one solution. And then we have our integrators and our distributors as well. So eventually we'll include all of those into it.
Speaker 1:But right now, the Bright Alliance is really geared around CMS and the idea about that is so that you can look at our Bright Alliance partners and it means something. So we have elite partners, premier partners and advanced partners and there's criteria that's met in order to be considered that. So, as an end customer, I can look at this and I know I can have a specific expectation of the experience I'm going to have if I choose one of these partners and that we have a consistent support right. We want to make sure that we have consistent support across all of it and that we kind of break down the barriers of how to choose a partner and what that actually means, because it is difficult to manage 170 different CMS partners, and so Bright Alliance is something we plan on growing. Right now it's very elite we only have 28 that are in that program but we plan on growing that as we get more and more people and driving specific types of behavior that we want to see for again, that consistent customer experience.
Speaker 2:There are two big topics I want to address while we're here and not spinning off into some other topic that I know will end up happening anyways. One of those is retail media networks, the work you do there with them, your perspectives on what's working, what's not, how BrightSign enables those kinds of experiences. But then the other thing is uniquely in our conversations you end up talking about the customer experience more than almost anybody else I've spoken with in this space, which means that it's probably a real value. And, um, you know I don't want to put words in your mouth, but but everybody says we're about the customers, customer centricity, customer first. Yet you know the number of organizations who really put the customer first is probably minimal.
Speaker 2:Having said that, you talk about customer experience a lot. So in your world you have the end users, you have your partners. In the middle you have the CMSs. Can we just talk a little bit kind of broadly about how you view the customer experience, how you're trying to optimize for it, some of the ways you think about making life easier for your partners and the users themselves?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when you have a model like we do, where we have this ecosystem that we're all kind of frenemies but we work together and it really does work, one thing that we don't want to see is we don't want the finger pointing, right, and I think that's what makes people a little bit nervous. So what I've noticed in the seven years I've been here so I talk about customer experience because it's incredibly important to me personally but one thing I've noticed since I've been here is that you know, if you're using a software partner on BrightSign hardware, once the BrightSign hardware is connected to the network and you have visibility and can push content, we're kind of out of that support. At that point it kind of shifts over to a CMS, and I think one of the things that people are fearful of when you talk about having this kind of hybrid model is they don't want the finger pointing. They don't want that. Well, this is a bright sign problem versus a CMS problem, right? They want to have a very consistent experience and so a lot of times they'll end up going with a solution that is an all-in-one solution, that's all-inclusive, because it just feels like that's more of a mitigation of risk on their part for the support side of it. So that's really something that we try to focus on.
Speaker 1:So we make sure that we have a completely different pathway for our partner support. So if we do have an end customer that's using a CMS with a BrightSign hardware, that's a completely different support team. So we make sure that, again, we have staff that understands those CMSs. We actually have something called Bright Alliance Lab so we have basically a test bench so we can make sure that we can do POCs for our partners that we can run if they're having issues with their content, that we can actually recreate that.
Speaker 1:So, again, it's about having a very consistent experience, regardless of what CMS you choose and BrightSign hardware, because what's visible is a lot of times it's BrightSign. They look behind the screen and they say, well, that's a purple box that says bright sign, and they call us and the last thing we want is for us to say, well, that's not a bright sign thing, that's somebody else's issue, right? So we want to make sure that we're providing a very consistent experience, which is what we're striving for with Bright Alliance and that's what some of the criteria to be in that program, because it is important, because it, like I said I've said this a couple of times it's overwhelming. So it is important, and it's very important to us that we're supporting our partners the way they need to be supported and that we're providing a very consistent experience to our mutual customers.
Speaker 2:So there's no, there's no easy segue here because we're just going to roll right into a giant topic retail media networks. All right, if you've been at BrightSign for seven years, you've been there long enough to know when retail media networks weren't even really a thing they were barely a thing seven years ago, maybe not even, but over the past maybe I'm going to call it four years it's grown into a beast of an industry that's growing leaps and bounds. Money's being thrown at that space in ways that I've really never seen and I'm pretty old and lots of success stories, but also lots of problems. I think you know the growth, the just just the. The pace of the growth and expansion with RMNs has created a lot of unforeseen scenarios with, you know, solutions that are still being worked out. But bright sign is is the last mile in a lot of those cases.
Speaker 2:For retail media networks you are the actual interface between the brand and the customer. So I think you're probably going to have an interesting perspective. I would love to hear and I'll try hard to no forget it. We'll just let this conversation go where we want it to. But over that period of time since retail media networks became a thing, since BrightSign first started engaging with them. What does that look like? Because you've probably seen problems arise get solved, new problems arise get solved, and you're probably in the midst of some of those right now, as a matter of fact, just because of who BrightSign is. So what's your perspective?
Speaker 1:So it's interesting that you mentioned over the last four years it's become a thing, and if and if you go back four years ago and the timing of all of that, we were still just kind of in COVID and coming out of COVID. So I feel like that was a catalyst, right, because we retailers had to figure out a way to reach audiences differently and keep in their customer base that they're trying to focus on, but they also have the brands that they are also trying to focus on, Right, and so it's bringing all of that together and adding value. Then, at that same time, you had some publicity coming out around one of the larger big box retailers and what they were doing in ad revenue, and that got everybody's attention, and so I think it was a little bit of a scramble at first that we should be doing this, and I think that's where we got it. It's grown so much and we've learned a lot over the last four years, but now it's actually turned into something where it's just table stakes. There's so many statistics and studies out there right now about how many brands are looking at, and retailers are looking at, the retail media network, and it's almost one of those things that you cannot afford not to do it, and one of the reasons is because, if you understand what an RMN network actually does and when it provides, it allows you to target and advertise to people across all these different mediums right, which is what happened during COVID you now have to be able to reach people in the store.
Speaker 1:I have to be able to reach people at home. I have to be able to reach people in the store. I have to be able to reach people at home. I have to be able to reach people through apps and websites, and that's what Retail Media Network does is it brings it all together. And so a product like BrightSign where again we're at that very core of that we bridge all that together through the cloud services, so all the content is the same on the website, through the app, through the local displays in store.
Speaker 1:And then, if you take into consideration, too, just the streaming, the in-home streaming, and what the ads have done for social media, what they've done for the online streaming services like Roku and Netflix, and all of that, I mean, unless you have a specific subscription, you're getting commercials, right, you're getting ads Like is absolutely everywhere.
Speaker 1:And what BrightSign does? It really bridges that all together so you can have your retail media network that will span then across all these different mediums. And that's what we do, is we bring all that ecosystem together. Now, the reason why our partners are so important to us is because the software to actually do that and run that and have the simplicity and ease of use of dropping in ads and getting your proof of play and getting all of that that happens at the CMS level. So we have partners that have very robust retail media network and programmatic ads and endemic ads that they have built into their programs now and we provide the best in class hardware that's incredibly reliable, and then they provide that software piece then put that content across all the different mediums.
Speaker 2:What's that evolution been like? Because I, you know, I look at the kind of state of maturity of RMNs right now and I see I see a lot of sophistication out there that wasn't even there last year, frankly, Right.
Speaker 1:Well, and that's where you start looking at. So retail media network is one thing right, and it's it's still evolving, and what makes it evolve and what is part of that is, for instance, ai. Ai has been, it's been huge actually for the digital signage industry, just in 2024 alone. I saw an article the other day that was quoting some surveys that were taken. It was 78% of marketers in 2024 used AI for some kind of content. So content being completely driven in digital signage, that's a huge adoption rate for us with just the AI world. Then you have AI that you can use for the data and analytics side, which is incredibly important because you have to understand how your content's performing, how your ads are performing, because that's the value you're giving to your brands and so the AI will give that to you real time, where you don't have to wait for that information anymore, so you can pivot and you can make adjustments based on the interactivity of the content. And then you look at just the way that marketing in itself has evolved, where one-to-one marketing or some people now I think that kind of the trendy term is the hyper-personalization of marketing and where that has taken us. And so now it's this individual experience that everybody is looking for. And again, statistics will show that if you give somebody a personalized experience, they're more likely to buy from you and they're more likely to repurchase from you, right? And so the personalization of all of that also is driving again this retail media network. Because how do you personalize it if you don't have a way to reach people at their at their own leisure? Right, I may be someone that doesn't want to go to a brick and mortar store. Maybe I'm going to do all my online shopping. You have to be able to reach me, but then you might actually want to go into every store. You have to be able to reach you as well. And so retail media would network really brings that all together. That's been the evolution and tying all these mediums together.
Speaker 1:And then you look at social media like social media ads actually don't do as well as they used to. And then you bring AI into the social media conversation and people actually don't believe the content that you see on social media, so digital signage actually allows them to get some of that same content but out to their audience in a different method, whereas the ingestion of social media and the content on social media is less, especially when you look at people moving more toward the tick tock and the Instagram and less Facebook, less X, a lot of corporations. They don't have the ability to make those short little, cute little TikTok videos or whatnot. But you can still get the same effect by doing video within your retail media network. Right, you can still get that.
Speaker 1:And, again, you're reaching all these different brands. And the other thing I think, too, that kind of drives some of that also is that video content is incredibly important and, again, if you're not going to reach your audience through social media, you're going to be able to do it through digital signage. And the reason that video content is so important is because the other little trend that we see is everybody wants increased dwell time. Right, that means they want people to sit and interact with this content. You're not going to do that with just a single image, so the video content becomes incredibly important as well.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to ask you but you, you kind of opened the door to it already Trends that you're seeing out there, that that, let's just say, people who are, who are operating in the digital signage space or have their own RMNs or are considering deploying an RMN you're in a unique position because you kind of see that space from up here. You see a lot of goings on, whereas people down here at street level, where I am, just see the effects of it. So I'd love to hear you know you know you mentioned dwell time huge deal. People are talking about incrementality and you know how to prove it out but you know what are some of the things you see from your perch, as it were, up there at Bright Song that you think the industry or industries could benefit from?
Speaker 1:So, again, it's all about the personalization. And I mean you walk into your hotel room, right, and your screen says welcome, misty chalk, we're happy you're here Right. That instantly gives you this little gratification. So it's like it's that the personalization is everything right now. That's what gets people engaged, because what retailers and brands are looking for is an emotional connection, and so that's what digital signage and the retail media network will do for them. And again, it bridges the gap of appeasing and having value to the brands that are actually paying for those ads and giving them the audience that they're looking for and driving that emotional connection that they need in order to create brand loyalty.
Speaker 1:I mean, that really is what it is about. That really is where it is going, because that is what the consumer, that's what they want. They also want that emotional connection when you're sitting in a doctor's office and you've got personalized content up on the screen about health and things that might actually pertain to you. Like it is about it. And again, the trend right now is the hyper personalization. But that really is where we're at right now and the retail media networks allow you to do that from all sorts of different mediums, which is incredibly important. You talk about, like big box retailers, for instance. They'll break it down, even down to the end caps.
Speaker 1:There's the content that's at the end caps. They want to understand am I just walking by it? Am I stopping? Am I looking at it? Am I emotional about it? What is happening? So that that is the value that they give the brand, so that the brand pays for the advertising. Then they also want to build that loyalty with their customers, and so it just bridges all of that together.
Speaker 2:And and customer expectations are only growing. You know it's okay to call it a want I desire that but it takes on a whole new level of importance when it becomes an expectation, and if one retailer is doing it over here, suddenly that becomes the expectation for all the other retailers, or whatever that space is.
Speaker 1:Well, you, again, the advertising revenue alone, which is again, there's been a lot of articles written about this on some of the big box retailers that have actually said what they make in a year on advertising alone. You cannot afford not to do it. You can't afford not to do it. And brands that's what they're looking for now, right, they're looking for that and they want to know how the how they're looking for now, right, they're looking for that. And they want to know how they're performing. They want to know the engagement levels of that content. They want that proof of play. They want to know if people are engaging or not.
Speaker 1:And again, the dwell time that's why that's so important is that will tell you if somebody's just interacting and moving on versus is spending a little, a few, even a few seconds with the content is incredibly valuable information. So you cannot provide what the brands are looking for if you don't have that, and then you'll, you get left behind because the ad revenue is is legitimate. And if you, everybody, everybody is going to have to have some version of that retail media network, everybody is going to have to have some version of that retail media network. And again, it's about reaching people at all the different mediums, which is this is the expectation in this day and age. That is the expectation that I'm going to have a very similar experience if I'm shopping online versus in store.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I don't know how well I did trying to contain this giant conversation into something sensible, because there still is so much more that we should be talking about. But maybe we save all that for version two of this, maybe later in the year.
Speaker 1:Maybe we do an unplugged version. We just put it all out there.
Speaker 2:And leave it to the editing guys to figure out how to make it make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's their problem. I agree with that. I think that's the way we should do this, but maybe later in the year, once the Bright Alliance has kind of taken more shape and more entities are part of it. It's doing different things I think it'd be fascinating to talk about. I know that, as you mentioned, AI's effect on the retail media networks is astonishing. It's taken this colossal concept and accelerated it faster than anybody ever thought it could go, and you're right in the middle of all that. So I think there's going to be a lot to talk about. Well, I mean, we could do it today, but let's just be kind to everybody who's listening in our own schedules and let the editor.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I agree it, but yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it is something we look at too. Ai is incredibly like whether you like it or not, or whether you're afraid of it or not, it's not going anywhere, and so it's how do we utilize it? And so, even with what we do at BrightSign, we we look at this and say how do we bring AI to our partners? How do we bring it to the masses? So we definitely have some things that we can discuss in a future episode.
Speaker 2:All right. Well then, we'll have our people. Talk to your people Sounds good. That implies I have people. Well, misty Chalk thanks so much for the time for the thinking. It's a pleasure. Just to reiterate, misty is Vice President of Sales for the Americas at BrightSign and thank you for this.
