EPISODE 182 | Sean Matthews, president & CEO of Visix, Inc.
Digital signage has evolved far beyond decorative displays and electronic posters – it’s now a critical business system that directly impacts productivity, operational efficiency, and bottom-line results.
This episode challenges outdated perceptions of digital signage as merely a creative or facilities concern, revealing how modern implementations integrate with enterprise systems to deliver real-time data, performance metrics, and strategic communications across entire organizations. From manufacturing floors displaying live production KPIs to hospital wayfinding systems that guide patients via mobile devices, today’s digital signage requires C-suite attention and cross-departmental collaboration.
You’ll learn why treating digital signage as strategic infrastructure rather than an expense delivers measurable returns through improved employee engagement, enhanced visitor experiences, and real-time operational visibility.
- Understand how digital signage integrates with business systems to influence the bottom line in real time.
- Learn why C-suite buy-in and cross-departmental collaboration are essential for successful deployment.
- Discover three red flags of underutilized systems: poor design, lack of integration, and insufficient saturation.
- Explore how displaying KPIs and leaderboards drives measurable productivity improvements and morale.
- Hear practical ROI insights and how cloud-based systems transformed signage into affordable investments.
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Transcript
Derek DeWitt: You ever been in a situation where a critical piece of information just didn’t land? Maybe an important policy change got lost in a company-wide email, or maybe a vital safety announcement wasn’t seen by everybody who needed to see it and that led to some costly mistakes or, even worse, a safety hazard.
Well, today we’re talking with Sean Matthews, president and CEO of Visix, who has seen firsthand how effective communication or the lack of effective communication can sometimes make or break business initiatives. Stay with us as we explore why digital signage deserves a seat at the executive table right alongside your CRM and your accounting software. Thanks for talking to me today, Sean.
Sean Matthews: It’s good to be here, Derek. I appreciate it as always, having me on the podcast. Thank you.
Derek DeWitt: Thank you. And thank you everybody out there for listening to this episode of Digital Signage Done Right: “Why Digital Signage Is Mission Critical”. Don’t forget, you can subscribe and share and review, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website, which ought to also have some helpful links as well.
Okay, so the real purpose of this episode today is really to debunk what I think is a common misconception. I think a lot of people still view digital signage as just a creative endeavor. You know, it’s something like crafting a visually appealing PowerPoint or designing a marketing graphic. That’s all it really is.
Sean Matthews: Well, that’s not really the case, Derek. I mean, for those of us that have been at this a long time, 25 years, let’s say, for example, you know, these displays were historically used for public service announcements, things that you would see in a student center on a college campus. That’s really kind of where it came from, at least for us in the organizational communication business. But the reality is today, it is a real-time information sharing platform, right, that distributes important, relevant, timely information out to any number of targeted audiences, right?
And so, these pieces of information, these data analytics, this data construct that’s been transformed into information that has a meaningful impact, that is being delivered in real time throughout college campuses, organizations, manufacturing plants, and affecting the workplace experience, the visitor experience, the student experience, you name it, right? It’s having a profound impact there.
And its integration with any number of business systems, whether it be event management systems or entire platforms based on that, hoteling systems for booking spaces in real time and conveying who is sitting where on a particular day. And even real-time production metrics that are affecting assembly line and shipping decisions are all being influenced by this real-time messaging.
Derek DeWitt: I do think there are still some executives out there who maybe just kind of think it’s just kind of a facilities problem or a marketing problem. Like you said, it was originally announcements. They kind of replaced posters. And I think maybe for some of the more old-fashioned folks out there, or people who haven’t really been in an environment where there’s a major digital signage presence, they might still think of it in this way. But this is a completely inaccurate perception.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. And I think that those folks have not really been exposed to the power of what these displays have within, if there’s not been a lot of integration to other data sources within the enterprise, right? And so, I think, you know, production metrics is a great example. When those types of metrics are affecting assembly line productivity, which could affect the bottom line for an organization, that’s where you begin to see the power of these displays. And it’s not just a feel-good message about someone’s anniversary or their birthday
Derek DeWitt: Right. Like this is a scalable thing now.
Sean Matthews: Oh, yeah. I mean, you’re talking about, you know, thousands of endpoints, whether it be, you know, large form factor displays, video walls in a huge shipping environment, right? Where tractor trailer drivers, shippers, forklift drivers, they’re all seeing this data in real time, all the way down to the mobile device, right? Particularly when you’re thinking about booking a space, and you want to confirm that that space is gonna have your name on it when you get there.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. So, let’s kinda get into the core of why this is really should be a primary mission-critical consideration for organizations, certainly medium-size and up, but I think even smaller organizations. How does it directly impact internal comms?
Sean Matthews: Well, the impact is, really, it’s multifaceted because it does have an impact on overall morale because you do have the Orwellian effect of putting people on TV, right? And so, you know, it’s your birthday, it’s your anniversary. It’s a huge success that your team delivered, right, to the organization, which affected the industry, which impacted the bottom line, right?
So, there is this cultural communication piece of the offering, which then of course does bleed into more informative things about what’s going on in a building, in a room, in a team meeting, right? You see these event management type of infrastructure that is not only affecting general awareness of what’s happening, but it’s also affecting how facilities managers manage spaces because the data that they pull from these meeting platform systems helps them understand what technology needs to be in those rooms and why certain rooms are being used over others.
And then, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, you know, the idea of impacting productivity with quota, you know, metrics and performance against certain strategic objectives. I mean, it’s really, you know, impacting the overall, you know, culture at large.
Derek DeWitt: And it really does reach into pretty much almost every aspect: operational efficiency, sales, even customer experience can, you know, if you have public-facing digital signage.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. I mean, particularly if you’re promoting a new service or product offering to visitors that, you know, pass by, they’re not in your facility every day. But they learn about, you know, what’s going on in the organization without, you know, 120 PowerPoint slides in a deck, right? You know, they can see, you know, real time, high-end production, you know, type messaging.
It can often be AI augmented using other tools to produce that sort of material quickly and efficiently. But it does impact that visitor experience because it’s not stuff that they get to see or maybe read about your organization daily. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporate environment or even a campus environment. Who knew that this particular school had the number one equestrian team in the country, for example, right? Yeah, that’s where you’re seeing its impact.
Derek DeWitt: And I think, for people who go on to a campus or to the hospital or any physical location, too, obviously, and we talk about this a lot on here, wayfinding. Wayfinding is digital now, and it’s much more powerful, it’s much more flexible. There are a lot more things you can do with it, and it’s kind of more efficient than printed signs. It just is.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. You know, a hospital is a great example. We’ve all been to, you know, a hospital environment. They’re campuses that are built over time and they’ve grown exponentially. Buildings that were one story are now seven stories, right? And there’s lots of, you know, follow the blue line to the yellow line to the red line to get to radiology, right? Like, that’s how they work.
And you know, back in the day, you could certainly, you know, even take a photograph of one of these static signs, but now you can take the entire journey with you on your phone. You scan a QR code, it’s a universal platform, HTML, you take it with you. And in many cases, the little blue dot will follow you wherever you go and help guide you to your destination. So, I mean, the wayfinding thing is just, it’s amazing. It’s no longer just a simple kiosk that you look up the Cinnabon in the airport, right? Like now you can, you can be led to Cinnabon without having to smell your way there.
Derek DeWitt: That’d be a great tagline: Digital signage wayfinding – better than a nose.
Now for, you know, C-Suite people who are also focused on ROI, I think that’s another place where digital signage has a lot of power. I think we can frame digital signage less as an expense and more like a strategic investment, because there are measurable returns.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. And you know, I’ll start with first, digital signage used to be a very expensive endeavor. It did. The cost of displays were quite high, the media players, the licensing, it was very expensive. But as the adoption curve progresses over time, there’s been much more commoditization. And of course, there’s not been as much of a requirement for capital expenditure versus operational expenditure now that everyone has gone to the cloud, right? So, the cost to employ this technology is far less than what it used to be, right? And it fits into the operating budget.
And when you think about that operating budget and it affecting productivity and organizational culture on a daily basis, when you just do the math, you can see that, wow, this is having an effect on our enterprise. Now, you might ask, huh, how is he measuring that? Well, it is actually a good deal more difficult in operational environments, like manufacturing, without tying the delivery of those messages back to the metrics, right? You have to be logical and sensible about how you make those connections.
And you will see, just for comparison’s sake, in the retail world, there’s a lot of tie back to point-of-sale transactions. You know, back to the ads that were delivered at the time, right? And that’s a good deal more, maybe compelling for some of those enterprises. And they use retinal scans to prove how many people looked at a particular display, right? And how many ads ran in that period of time, and what was the boost or the bump in sales in that same window? Not quite the same in the productivity realm that that we live in, but creating messaging and tying back things like QR codes to the success of particular campaigns and having planned campaigns, that’s all tied to the measurable success of this sort of technology.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And you know, like you said, the metrics, there are tons and tons of metrics now that can sort of hangout in the backend. You can kind of pick and choose which ones you want. And, I think of like KPIs, you know, key performance indicators. We often talk about how you can display them, and they can update in real time. You know, they’re tied to some kind of a system as even something as simple as a spreadsheet. When that’s updated, the information on the screens is also updated, but it’s much prettier than a spreadsheet.
And yet at the same time, it occurs to me that, so while say the managers or the, the plant production folks, or even the people on the floor, they’re seeing these KPIs and this real-time stuff going on, it’s actually doing dual duty because the C-suite and the managers are also seeing that information unfold in real time, and they have a record of it. It’s really a one-stop shop now. Everybody’s getting the same information at the same time as it occurs. Let’s go!
Sean Matthews: You see in the C-suite individuals looking at, you know, real time dashboards, charts, graphs, all that kind of stuff related to productivity. But those charts aren’t always shared, you know, throughout the enterprise. And when you think about those charts, you know, not everybody, not every employee is into the bars and charts and graphs and all that kind of stuff, right? Like, I’ve delivered my fair share of those charts over time. And, you know, some people just kind of roll their eyes at them because it’s just not compelling to them. It doesn’t really maybe have an effect on them.
But what does have an effect on them are using these displays for things like leaderboards, right? And leaderboards can be about individual performance and or team or group performance, right? And, you know, when you think about, you know, the basic level of, you know, individuals against quotas and sales, for example, right? So not only did Derek perform well this day, this week, this month, this quarter, but the entire team did. And the CFO sees Derek’s name and Sean’s name and other names, right? And they start to associate performance with those people. And ultimately, they get introduced to Derek in a very large organization, they’re like, oh man, I’ve seen your name on the leaderboard. And they would, that conversation would’ve never happened. It just wouldn’t have happened, right? And same at the team level, you know, sort of pitting teams against each other, shift one versus two versus three, for example, right? It does create competition that bodes well for performance.
Derek DeWitt: So, if we look at, say, a robust digital signage system compared to, you know, earlier more traditional communication methods, it seems like the digital signage is far more impactful and far more efficient, ’cause you can just do so much more with it. Real-time updates is obviously one of them, but just even the way you parcel out the information.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. And, you know, one of the big things of course is we, you know, talked about this sort of television Orwellian thing, right? You can do so much more, visually, on a large form factor display than you can on a small mobile device, right? Yes, you can deliver a lot of tailored content, and you can subscribe to certain things on your mobile device, your feeds, right? But you’re buying into just what’s being algorithmically delivered to you, right? It’s much more difficult to just receive, you know, en masse communication about what’s going on in the business that you work in, right, and find that interesting and compelling.
So, using these large form factor displays to create this, you know, really robust visual and interactive content, man, that just has like such an effect on those passing by. And yeah, we can go down to the individual tied through Teams and delivering me the same messaging that you see on these displays and reinforcing it through a Team’s channel or a Teams feed. You can do all of that, right? But, you know, still the fundamental most compelling impact is on the large form factor display.
Derek DeWitt: Sure, sure. Okay. So, let’s say we agree, yeah, this is mission critical. We, you really should have digital signage in some capacity. So, what does that mean practically for how organizations should approach it in terms of investment and management and integration?
Sean Matthews: Well, practically it has to start, I don’t want to say at the very top, but certainly at the C-suite level. There has to be some buy-in at the top and push it down to the organization, because you’re going to need facilities to integrate this technology into the walls of the of the building itself, right?
You’re gonna need IT to incorporate whatever policies and procedures that need to be in place in order for media players or signs to connect to the internet to get news and weather data, right? Data that might be coming from other sources. You’re gonna need the right APIs to exist on the back end, so that we can pull data from event management schedules or facility management schedules.
You’re gonna need buy-in from marketing to create a look and a feel that is commensurate with the organization itself, right? It’s gotta look like the brand and feel like the brand. And you’re gonna need some HR components in there to help contribute to the cultural reinforcement in that environment, right?
And so it’s obviously best that you have a CMS or content management system that is cloud-based. They almost all are these days with rights and roles that allow people to contribute to the process and don’t stymie that contribution with a bunch of layers of approval, but yet instill enough discipline in approval layers so that incorrect information doesn’t end up on those screens.
So, it’s a multi-layered process that involves a lot of people. But if you’re expected to have a really profound impact, then you’re gonna need to involve all of those folks and build a culture of contributing to that content delivery across the entire organization.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I’d almost say it sounds like you have to get all these stakeholders and all the people who are gonna be in some way, shape, or form involved with this system. Like they have to also get into the mindset of like, this is an important thing. This isn’t just a side thing to do when I have a little extra time. This is a key mission-critical thing that this organization needs to survive and thrive as we approach the, you know, second quarter, Q2, of the 21st century.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. And you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re on a college campus and you’re working remotely and you don’t walk in the building every day and see these messages. It’s important to know that there are others, maybe not you, because with so many people working in hybrid environments, it’s easy to forget that students, for example, they go to buildings every day. Yes, there are lots of online classes and, you know, components to that hybrid education environment, but there are students on that campus every day, and they’re passing by these signs.
And what better way than to reach out and touch them with this message, you know, from these large displays and augment that, you know, on the smaller displays? So, when they log into their academic management system, like Blackboard or something like that, they see the same messages being delivered there that they see in these buildings. It’s like taking roadside billboards and, you know, delivering the same message inside your car, you know, as you pass by the billboard, right? Like you wanna double tap, you know, the message, you know, all the way across the spectrum if you can.
Derek DeWitt: I mean, I could see billboard people would be like, that would be the best. As a car drives by, some kind of device RF transmitter on the billboard and on the car, like the car grabs it and then they just take the billboard with them. Except that, you know, like in Atlanta, you’ve got billboards up the wazoo. By the time you, you’ve gone 20 miles, you’d have, I don’t know, 30 billboards in your car.
Sean Matthews: Well, and of course I think about that, you know, the monetization of that would get to be, you know, so competitive that like if you really wanted your billboard to stand out, you’d be paying a premium, right, versus the, the, the other billboards, right? So….
Derek DeWitt: My billboard supersedes all other billboards.
Sean Matthews: Correct. Right. And the law firm that is the biggest will get the most billboard, yeah, stuff.
Derek DeWitt: The big get bigger, as always.
So, what would be some red flags that might tell us that an organization is not treating digital signage with maybe the seriousness that it deserves?
Sean Matthews: Yeah, I think the very first big red flag, and I see this often in client deployments, and it doesn’t matter if I go to their facility or I just take a look at some playlists, it is poorly designed content. That is number one, that’s the biggest red flag, number one.
Number two would be a lack of integration with any other, you know, data source within the enterprise that’s delivering either real-time event information, which is incredibly popular, any type of realtime directory information, any sort of real-time anniversary, birthday productivity, KPI-type information, any of those things. If they’re not connecting to sources where the data and information already exist, you’re putting a work task back on someone where the task has already been completed, right?
So, design is number one, integration is number two. Those would be my first two big red flags.
Number three would be any sort of lack of saturation, whether they don’t have enough displays in key areas, or they’ve not taken that same display information and delivered it to other parts of their infrastructure. Something like a Teams feed, for example, or a Teams channel. Or they’re not making it mobile through, you know, HTML5 connection or QR scan. I mean, those are the three big red flags, easy ones for me.
Derek DeWitt: And I would add, honestly having old stuff. Your hardware’s not up to date. Your driver’s not up to date. You’re using, you know, whatever AxisTV version one. But even the hardware. Like, you gotta make sure that hardware is up to date and the drivers are up to date or else it’s just not gonna work. You know, you do it for your car.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. And unfortunately, I will say this, being in the world of hardware, and particularly even in the integration of audiovisual and IT, and that whole convergence that exists there, you know, hardware is something that costs money. It’s typically a capital expense. You know, it ends up on the balance sheet, it gets depreciated.
And, you know, people make these investments and you lose sight of the fact that technology by and large, it might have a five-year lifespan at best. But the best way to look at that is from a CFO’s perspective, which is what does the depreciation schedule look like? And almost all of these things, you know, Derek, depreciate in a 36-month schedule, so it’s only three years. And when you look at displays, you can’t even put them on a depreciation schedule because they cost less than $3,000 or whatever your schedule looks like, they all vary. But most, if it’s more than $500, it might make a schedule, it might not. But you know, for many people, their phones last two to three years tops, you know, ’cause they drop or they’re subject to abuse and they just degrade over time from a technology perspective.
Derek DeWitt: True, true. And yet, like, try and imagine I’m a, I don’t know, I’m a lower upper-class parent. I’ve got my kids; they want to go to this school. One of them is interested in computer stuff. I walk onto campus kind of, we’re gonna go check out this school. And they’ve got digital signage, but it’s not even flatscreen TVs. It’s old, you know, cathode ray TVs. Like, I just turn right around and walk out the door and get in the car and go someplace else. ‘Cause I would be like, these guys aren’t serious. They’re not being serious at all.
Sean Matthews: Yeah, there is definitely a component to that. I mean, I hate to say that sort of keeping up with the Jones’s approach, but it does exist. And, you know, if you’ve been on a college campus in the past five years, for example, you know, often these tours start off at student centers, and there are fitness centers that rival the biggest chains in the world, right? Like, I mean, amazing facilities, right? And so, you know, coupled with that you’ll see a lot of televisions, and I’m just calling it a television, you know, flatscreen displays, but you’ll see flashy technology everywhere, and it’s a compelling component to their investment in the student experience on that campus.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve seen over the years, and you’ve certainly seen since all this began way back when, how this whole space has changed radically. And it’s changing, really, all the time now. We’re seeing more and more stuff getting integrated, new technologies, new clever ways to use messaging in a digital way.
You know, 10 years ago there were smartphones, but there was really no way to get that stuff on your smartphone easily. Now it’s easy. So, we’re seeing all these changes occur more. I’d say every 18 months or so, there’s some new like, oh wow! thing that comes along. What do you think are some of the emerging trends or future things that are coming? I know in the past, you and others have mentioned voice-operated signage. You really think that’s gonna take off? You think there’ll be other things?
Sean Matthews: You know, I do think that one’s pretty tough, Derek. I mean, you know, everyone is so accustomed to things like Alexa and Siri, right? They just wanna talk to devices. And it’s still the biggest challenge in public spaces, there’s so much ambient noise, you know, surrounding those displays, it’s difficult. You know, we pioneered some of that work almost a decade ago and, you know, certainly tried to pull it out of the closet again during the pandemic, right? It’s still difficult. You know, using parabolic tools help, but that one’s pretty tough.
I do think that one of the emerging things, and it’s not that it’s an emerging technology, it’s the elimination of a certain technology. And that is, you know, the avoidance of apps and building stuff into your message delivery that goes to ubiquitous things like the browser, which can take HTML5 from anywhere and almost anything and allows you to take it with you. You know, the idea of app management and app updates and the requirement to download an app, authenticate against the app. You know, a lot of businesspeople like the idea of apps, because there’s so much analytic data that resides, you know, in app utilization, but the user can’t stand the app.
Let’s say you took a train, I don’t know, once every two months, right? You lived in an environment where that’s, it’s a good example. Lots of people take trains every day. But if you lived in a place where you only did it once every two months and everything was run by the app, right? Where when you got to the train station, you had to download the update, then you had to authenticate, you might have to authenticate first against the app. You forgot your password, you don’t know any of this stuff, right? So, it becomes a huge inconvenience for you. You’re desperately looking around you for the same information, which is on those digital signs about arrivals and departures, et cetera, right?
So, you know, the elimination of apps and making accessibility more ubiquitous via other tools, I do believe is an emerging, you know, technology. Because you can focus on integration, retinal scans, all that kind of stuff. And those may be very future oriented things. But if you look at real-time stuff today, you can see that even people that we partner with want to enable wayfinding without an app. They want to enable room booking without an app. They want to, you know, enable delivery of messages without an app. That’s definitely a trend.
Derek DeWitt: I’m with you. I mean, I look at my phone, and I have a ton of apps on there, and I use them once every, you know, year. Like, oh, in order to get a good deal, I had to sign up for the, you know, the Marriott Club. I stay at a Marriott hotel sometimes, you know, sorry, I mean, sometimes I don’t wanna stay at a Marriott or where I’m going, there isn’t one or what have you. So now I’ve got, I don’t even know, 15 different hotel chain apps. Some of them, I can’t even remember what they are. And like you said, I gotta, oh, now I have to update it, and that’s gonna take a whole thing and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, that’s, I’m with you, I’m absolutely with you.
Some companies are trying to force use of the app. Ryanair, which is a European low-cost air carrier, they just said, we don’t do paper tickets anymore. It’s all on the app. If you don’t have the app, you can’t fly. You can still buy, still buy a ticket, but you’re not getting on the plane unless you have our app. And I kind of think, wow, I’m not really a big fan of that.
Sean Matthews: Yeah. And I think unfortunately, to reinforce that, there are generational differences in how people treat and respond to certain technologies. And certainly, there are generations that are not very adept at app management and password management and all those things. So, you know, you’re really making it difficult for those folks to really participate in the message delivery because you’ve just made it hard.
And I hate to say that. I’m not saying that it’s easy for certain demographics to also understand it’s scanning a QR code and taking it with you, what that means, right? So, I don’t have a super easy answer here, other than the easier you can make it, in the process of delivering messaging, the better off you are in gaining adoption and viewership of those messages.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Absolutely. I think so. I think that’s all really interesting stuff. Any final thoughts for any CEOs, CIOs, CFOs out there who are starting to really seriously think about the strategic role of digital signage within their organizations?
Sean Matthews: Well, I think if you’re a C-suite person and you’re not thinking about the wall space that you currently have in your environment and you know, you’re going back to fine art and printed posters and those kinds of things, right, you’re making a huge mistake. There’s an opportunity for you to integrate all of your messaging, all of your metrics, all of your performance indicators, and all of the things that you might use to motivate and encourage people. You can deliver it real time without extra work anywhere throughout your organization, right? From walls to desktops to mobile devices.
And as time progresses, you’re gonna be able to do it with electronic paper in a manner that is so cost effective and so energy efficient that you know you’re gonna have even a more profound effect. ‘Cause you can put it almost anywhere without power or wifi connectivity. You can just slap it on a wall with 3M command strips.
Derek DeWitt: So, I think you can tell digital signage has become way more than just displays with basically electronic versions of posters. It’s now a critical system for communication engagement, and real-world business outcomes. It deserves strategic attention and investment. So, start doing that everybody.
I’d like to thank my guest today, Sean Matthews, president and CEO of Visix, for talking to me about why digital signage really is mission critical for just about every kind of organization. Thank you, Sean, as always, your insights, ’cause you’re kind of right there on the front lines, are always very stimulating and very interesting.
Sean Matthews: Well, good, Derek, thanks for having me. I always enjoy being here. You do a fantastic job of this and, you know, I’m glad that it reaches so many people. And look forward to talking to you soon.
Derek DeWitt: And of course, I’d like to thank everybody out there for listening.