Ep # 134: Turning Screens into Strategic Assets ft. Mark McDermott (CEO, ScreenCloud)

Adil Saleh [0:37] Hey, greetings, everybody. This is hyper engage podcast. And again, frequently we've been, we've been doing these episodes with a lot of founders from centre Europe and UK, and today we have the CEO and co founder of screen cloud, that is a revolutionary platform operating since 2015, I think, more than 10 years, almost 10 years, they're in the space, and they're helping organizations build content and distribute content and information by applying digital screens across their workspace. It's a mix of software and hardware, and let's explore with Mark that how they've made this huge impact in the last 10 years. Thank you very much. Mark for taking the time. Mark McDermott [1:19] Well, thank you for having me on the show. Adil Saleh [1:21] Absolutely. So, you know, I've seen a lot of these, these, these core like hardware, software tech companies. They're operating in the Central Europe and in the UK region. A lot of them in North America as well, helping organization build their you know, digital footprint in house outside for their customers. A lot of trucking companies, they are, you know, doing a lot of screening within, like, their vehicles and fleets and all with the combination of some login devices that they're using. I know that they're, you're operating in, like, various industries. I know that you've got, like, more than 10,000 organizations using the platform for the last 10 years, including like hospitality, from food and beverage, like Coca Colas to, you know, hotels like Marriott, and also in manufacturing oil and gas. So could you tell us a little bit more like, how did you like, did it all come along in the beginning, when you started back in 20, 2015, and how big of this problem is, and what kind of industries you were looking at first off, like, while building this, this, this platform, and how did you actually think of having it like, giving it a global outlook, and making it a digital outlook, than just hardware screens, you know, like most companies been using back In the years, in old times? Mark McDermott [2:36] Cool. Yeah. Well, it reminded me of this famous quote by Alan Kay, which is, people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. And I think we're sort of seeing that now, if you, especially if you look at kind of like, you know, the the some of the really preeminent sort of tech companies coming through, you know, our people who are who are dabbling in both hardware and software in order to take advantage of things like AI, but in the future, you know, self driving cars and all of these things. I mean, our hardware by comparison, looks pretty straightforward. It's just screens, but it's not where it started from. So our heritage is really very much in the software world. We were building technology for the web. So we were basically web designers and programmers who then transitioned into digital signage, rightly, just over about 10 years ago. I mean, we started looking at it just a bit before that. So we incorporated the company in 2015 but actually, we were looking into this industry and this space a little bit before that, and what we kind of identified back then was there was a hardware revolution starting, which now is pretty commonplace. So back then you were seeing like Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, and also smart TVs, which weren't really that smart were becoming a little bit smarter today. A lot of them have, say, Android embedded in them, and it's quite normal now. So we saw this kind of consumer wave happening, and the main reason for that was that streaming services were becoming much more popular, so networks, prime, Hulu, et cetera. And we looked at these devices, and we're like, actually, these devices are capable of a business purpose as well. It doesn't just have to be a consumer. The nice thing about them being a consumer device was they were cheap and they were also readily available to normal people. You didn't have to go to some reseller or channel, so you could buy it on Amazon or Best Buy, and you could get a stick, you know, to deliver to you the next day for like, 40 bucks. And actually we thought this might be an opening to smaller companies initially, that's where we were mainly targeting. At the beginning, smaller companies to use screens in a more meaningful way, whereas previously, the digital signage industry was born out of the audio visual industry, and because they make most of their money from selling hardware and services, like installation services, they were only really interested in big ticket projects, so 50 screens or above, or like, a very, very fancy installation. And we were like, well, what if we look at this through the through the software first lens, and be like, what you know, in the software, to be honest, for screens was terrible. I think most people have seen some of it. It's like really, really bad, because it was hardware. People making software. It would just be a little bit like me making hardware. We don't actually, although we do manufacture and hardware, we use hardware partners to do that. We don't do it ourselves. We know what our DNA is. Our DNA is software. So if you start to look at digital silage through a software first lens, you. Existing hardware that was on the market then, and then, more recently, hardware that we've actually designed ourselves and put out to market. Could you, could you actually start to make screens useful for most businesses in the world? That was really the hypothesis, and the answer was yes, and that's why we came at it, direct to customer through the internet, self service initially, although we have an enterprise offering that we built up over the last few years, and then just, yeah, utilizing cheaper hardware, and not trying to make money out of the hardware side, but make make money actually, through the sale of software and services on top. So that was kind of where it really began from. Adil Saleh [6:12] Interesting, interesting. And by listening to this, I was realizing that, you know, it was like, I have around seven right here in my office, my executive office. I have around seven screens. I'm counting them all on the table, because this is where some of them are, like, used for training, but a lot of them are like shoes less. And, you know, of course, I'm sitting here in 2025, you imagine, like, back in, like, 15 years, back, like, there it was even a bigger problem and a bigger use case. So are you also working with the existing hardware of these organizations? Because that's also a touch bigger, you know, use case than, you know, them ordering new hardware for some some, some company to, you know, onboard a platform like screen cloud. How does that work with existing hardware? Mark McDermott [6:59] Well, that's a really good point you've made there. So So quite often companies will say, Oh, we don't do digital signage. And they're right, right? They don't have a line item for digital signage where they're using screens extensively to promote, whether it's commercial or internal messaging. And we can get into the different use cases later in terms of content. But actually, I push back and go. I have yet to meet a company that doesn't use screens. I'm yet to walk into any commercial environment, maybe apart from, like, think of like a kind of a hipster cafe where they've got a chalk, you know, Blackboard for the menu, or whatever. So maybe, like, a very heavy example, yeah, like very few examples where it's kind of part of the aesthetic, but, but any commercial environment, like any office, anywhere I've ever been, any gym, anything, there's screens on a wall. We put screens on a wall naturally, but we don't know what to do with them. The reason we put them up in the first place, like you said, it's maybe for one off presentations, maybe for like, dialling in on a meeting, but otherwise, you know, or maybe even watching the football when it's the World Cup, or the tennis when Wimbledon's on, that's some UK references, really. But I'm sure people, they put these screens on a wall with an intent, and then they were like, Oh, I don't know how to make this work properly. Or I'll do it. I'll use it when we need it. Otherwise, they're just going to sit there blank, or often you see, like, cable news on mute, that's the worst thing you could ever show. You want to make your you want to make your environment feel really, really bad. Let's put news on let's go and let's go and watch all the problems of the world in this commercial space. That's an awful idea. Or it just loops around an old, like, list of images and videos that hasn't been changed on like a USB stick or something like that. And we were like, look, there's so much underutilized real estate, but if you can control the message going on screens inside of commercial environments, you can massively influence what goes on in there, whether that be customer facing or employee facing. And we really think people are sleeping on the employee facing benefits. I've got a screen in my office here where I have loops, looping dashboards. I have, like, project updates from slack. I have Salesforce on there. I basically get to see a lot of what's going on in the business on my screen, and it's just ambiently working there, all the way whilst I'm whilst I'm in here doing my other work. And the reality is, people will look at screens because they're luminous boxes right. Your eye is attracted towards the light right. So the simple fact is that you will see it if the message is delivered in a coherent, legible way that makes some degree of sense, like, why am I seeing this? Then your brain will you know, you'll have a Cognizant moment with that message, and also you'll probably see that message repeated number of times, and that will start to get into your subconscious memory. So as a medium, people are not thinking about screens enough. You've already highlighted you've got screens on your walls with not much extra investment. And that's what we always want to do. We don't want to have people spend loads more. We want people to start utilizing screens, and if you do it well, you're going to do it more, and if you do it more, then we're going to benefit. But the key is we got to get it meaningful and important in your in your environment. Adil Saleh [10:06] Yeah, absolutely. And this kind of leads me to my next part of the conversation was, which was, like, customer education, like a lot of this goes hand in hand, like, how you're investing and driving customer education, because a lot of these folks there, I remember, like, back in the days we had like, one screen on our office, on the entire screen there was, like, the scoreboard and the KPIs for the entire team, like it came flashing, like, time to time. And we used to see, hey, this. This week, like we're pretty much behind on the target, and that that was once in a while, like once in a week we tend to realize, but it was not like kind of personalized and personable to to the specific teams or individuals, per se, so how you're driving your efforts to, as an executive officer, and, of course, a marketing team and towards the customer education, because a lot of this goes in a in big organization. It's not as big of a form, like, if you just talk about the mid market or early, early enterprise businesses, this is, this is a problem like the education product, they don't know, like, what then, how they can leverage these, these screens, and what kind of messaging and information or content, advertising or marketing that they can, they can do. Back in the US, there's a lot of billboards and TV ads and all of that on the roads, on the train stations. I've been to central London, the train station, beautiful, but it's still old school, like, to be very honest, like posters and, you know, billboards on the train station, but it could go digital and have a slightly a touch more, bigger impact on the consumer. How do you see it? Mark McDermott [11:39] Yeah, well, there's a few things there. So actually one thing I would say is I think that when it comes to screens that are commercial, so by that, I mean screens in retail, screens in like hospitality, like bars, screens outdoor advertising, screens in quick serve restaurants like McDonald's, I actually think they are becoming quite sophisticated. So even central London, the tube is now, you know, I would say it's now over 50% screens rather than posters now. And actually, those, the people behind that, I think, actually do have a pretty good sense of of the best way of using screens. I recently did a quick video on my LinkedIn. I put a lot of content out on LinkedIn. I'll come to that more in a minute, because it's about education, but I did a bit of a breakdown as to how effective in terms of revenue uplift, it has been for McDonald's to go to kiosks and screens instead of sort of the previous way. It's like a billion dollar uplift. It's insane, right? And there's some psychological reasons for that, the main one being that people order more food because they feel less shame doing it on a kiosk and talking to a person where they order a second hamburger and you look like a greedy but on the kiosk, no one knows, right? So this is what's going on. So actually, I think in the commercial world, people are doing quite well with these things, and I think that's moving along quite nicely. Where I think it is doing is going to need more help, is these employee facing screens, especially for deskless and frontline workers. So this is one of our key audiences. So deskless and frontline workers are actually the majority of the global workforce. We are the minority the people that sit here at computers all day, right? We have loads of communication tools, but the desk list workers, you know, what they're seeing is notice boards on the wall with bits of paper stuck to it, which might be completely out of date and useless, or it's word of mouth updates from a manager, which, you know, again, can be brilliant or not, or inconsistent. So we've got a lot of communication problems over there, but your point that you were making there was, the customer needs to be educated in order to know what to do. And also, I think it's more than education. They need confidence. So education and the idea, I think a lot of people have the idea, because we're not stupid. Like you look at a screen and you see it black on the wall, you think, Oh, that could be so much more useful, but I don't think they know how. And I think this is really where screen cloud, okay, in our marketing, we need to put out that we are the people who will help guide you through that our product will be intuitive enough so we'll give you superpowers within the product without you having to become some kind of screen expert, that we can do a lot of the heavy lifting for ourselves on our technology. But actually at our mid market enterprise customers, I call it software and a service, right? So a bit cheesy, Software as a Service, software and a service, but actually it makes a huge difference. So when our bigger customers engage with us, we have an onboarding team. We do things like project management of rollout like, let's get these screens activated and on the network, that if it's many, many locations where it doesn't even exist on the ground. The project management and delivery of all of those things and set up is actually a really big deal. The second thing we do is we take their account and we shape the account look and feel exactly to their business, so we may map in all of their locations. So we'll use like our API to set up the account so it reflects their business structure and their own rules. And we'll have admin users, but we'll also have local users who are a bit more restricted. We'll actually often remove a lot of features that aren't going to be beneficial. You don't need to see the templates for hamburger menus if you're talking to dessert workers in logistics, for example. So it simplifies the product down by reducing the scope of what it can do. And then we'll also add in things like design and branding and our solutions engineering team may even do a bespoke or, if you're in the US, you'd call it custom integration into a data source of truth that matters. So it's something that's going to be really powerful on the screen that when people see it, they go, this is useful. I need to refer to this screen as part of my working life. And. Now you've earned the eyeball. Beyond that, you can then also do corporate messaging, health and safety, employee engagement, job opportunities, training. I mean, there's a whole list of things that you'd probably want to cover, but you've got to earn the eyeball first with something really powerful, and then our team is really here to help guide and influence what people will actually do there. And then, fundamentally, the last thing we do is we do custom training packages. So we go in and we train the customer, but not just on screen cloud in general, on the way screen cloud is going to work for them. And as much of that training is things like they may not have considered a content calendar before, about when should you expire content? When is content repeated too much? When you know, how do we kind of think about scheduling during the week? It's you're basically become like a kind of TV producer of like 24/7 news, and you're taking on a whole new medium, and you've got to understand what you're taking on, otherwise the chances of it succeeding are quite low. But ultimately, it's down to the customer themselves to do that, but with our a lot of our support, and in the first six months of the relationship, we'll be talking maybe multiple times, multiple different threads a day, but we set them up for success, and what we've seen is the customers who start well always end well, so they expand, they grow. You quite often will see innovation awards for some of the things they'll do, you'll see an increase and an uptick in employee engagement surveys, where people feel they're seeing more information generally the environment, which, as I said, might have had bits of paper stuck to a wall before, will feel more modern. So suddenly the people are feeling different about the business like I work for a modern company that uses modern digital technology to communicate, rather than just sticks on bits of paper on a wall that might not even be relevant or useful or even in date. So there's a whole lot to this, and I think screen cloud, if we're going to become the number one in the market, which I believe this is my mission right, is to make us the number one brand. We have to earn that right, and we earn that right by helping people and guiding people in this way, we cannot just assume that they're going to figure out themselves, because they simply won’t. Adil Saleh [17:40] Mmm. Interesting, very interesting, like you, you mentioned the delivering the value, catching the eyeball the soonest possible. And that is super important. And any software, even software as a service or software and a service. I like that term that you made. It is super important to deliver the value, the sooner, the better. So, like, I mean, just wanted to explore, like, how long it takes for some organization to get onboarded and see their first customized, let's say, call it an integration or a dashboard by your solution, solution engineer team, engineering team, plus the implementation team that's working on that account. What's what sort of time are we looking at? Mark McDermott [18:25] I'm a big believer in the power of momentum. Normally, what we'll find is there'll be someone internal at the customer, maybe not that senior, but like relatively senior kind of director level, who has, who is a champion of screens, who, this is their project. Because, as I said, the line item isn't already there. So they're going to make that line item happen. And they believe in screens as a medium, and they're looking for a partner who's going to, like, make that, like that happen. When that champion comes in, we, we are all over it. So when the opportunity, we qualify the opportunity. But you can do that very quick. That very quickly in a call, and just make sure that this is what we think it is. And then what we do internally is we create something called a win team. So we will bring individuals from various different teams, whoever's available, maybe relevant experience, et cetera, not a huge team, maybe like four or five people, some exec sponsor will be in there. I'm often in there right for our bigger opportunities. And we will go into we make a Slack channel, and then we get into a huddle and we we use AI extensively internally. So we'll take the transcripts on the gong call and any supporting information. We'll also go out and do some research. That's because a lot of these public companies are all their communication goals, and even the systems they use are publicly knowledgeable. They've been they've been talked about inside of annual reports that used to be really difficult to source. Now it's very that's a two second job with with any of the AI tools I'm teaching people my competitors how to do this now. So you have to be selective who this podcast goes to anyway, we pull all of this information together, and we form a huddle, and in like 20 minutes, we develop a quick strategy. And the first, the first thing we do is we focus on one thing. So I call it nudge a number, right? So again, I like to come up with these little phrases, because they stick in the brain, right? This is like communication matters, but you got to, you've got to communicate in a simple way. So I say, right, what number are we going to nudge now, for every customer, they're coming in with a different number, right? If they've got a health and safety problem, they're looking to reduce the number of slip drip and falls in a month. You know? If it's a productivity issue, they're looking for the number of successful, completed. Shifts with the amount going out, whatever it might be. Sometimes it's benefit enrollment. So you've got to find out what's the number that I can meaningfully nudge probably in the next eight to 12 weeks, where we know what the number is today, and if we run a campaign on screen. So it won't just be that, but it will be like the centerpiece content. Let's pick maybe two, three venues. Probably one of them be HQ, because they're going to want to see it, and normally they're based in HQ of some kind. But let's take two normal venues that are not the headquarters, because that's not normal life, right? Normal life exists outside of the office, right? And then let's nudge that number. Let's prove that we can do this. And then let's check in with the people who are on the ground there, maybe do a pulse survey, something simple to just ascertain whether this has worked. And once we've proven that, we tend to get the buy in of leadership, and then the POC tends to become full rollout. So that's broadly how we do it, but mainly we do it very quickly. So the question you asked is, How long we recently a very, very large tech company that's well known, very well known, on everyone's lips, came to us with this sort of problem, which is kind of ironic, because they're a big tech company, right? But they don't have time to build this stuff. That's why they partner with people like us. We had a very tight deadline, and we went to full, full rollout in their main headquarters in nine days, including a custom integration. So we went from zero to that in nine days. To be honest, we probably could even gone a bit quicker. Nine days is pretty good. Adil Saleh [22:11] Amazing. That's That's like just wildfire, because I know tech quite closely, and all these, you know, enterprises with, like, these legendary old technologies, like in place when it comes to, you know, technology and the way they operate, because it's like they're globally divided, and it's, it's so hard for them to transition into the new age, AI, The way, like, be small, like myself. I call it A, B to B startup, SaaS startup. So we tend to like pivot and change management is too small, as opposed to, you know, these big companies. So I can understand, like, nine days is insane, quite honestly. So now what kind of tech company would do? Like. Mark McDermott [22:52] Yeah. I was just saying that the they were, they were Ahmed with the data. So if we'd have to go through a whole security review, and it would have been longer, but they were ready and willing with the data. So once we got the endpoints, the rest was on us, and we've got, like, pretty good, pretty good ways of deploying quickly. Sorry, you know, I cut you off. Adil Saleh [23:10] Amazing, amazing. So Mark, I was, I was about to, you know, talk about, like, one of the customer journeys that you had in the tech space, because a lot of these, these audience, these audiences, they will more relate to it. So I'm glad you brought this up. So like, what kind of tech organization it is by by trade, I'm not talking about the product or technology or or even name by trade, and how, like, what kind of use cases they had in place, because a lot of these, these folks listening to this episode will wonder, like, Hey, we are like, you know, we're sitting in the office, or maybe remotely like, we have like, different teams, like project managers, like, we have product teams, we have solution engineering team, we have implementation team, success team. We have like, then we have top tier, you know, CTO, and then software engineering team, and all of this. So how organizationally? Like, what kind of use cases this playbook had? Mark McDermott [24:01] Yeah, so, so, how would I use screens for those kind of environments? You mean, like, so, basically, I suppose the answer would be, how does screen cloud use its own screens? Because we're a tech company, funnily enough, I actually think the the most prolific users of screen cloud are indeed our engineering team. So we store a huge amount of information and data about the platform in Datadog, and we have secure Datadog dashboards up in our screens, either near our QA team, or we're basically tracking loads of different things, like which operating systems are being used tracking error rates, any spikes against kind of unusual, unusual patterns of behavior, basically on the platform. I've recently changed how we do OKRs here, so we've moved to the kind of 37 signal style, eight week cycles, which is six weeks on, two weeks off, which is working really well for us. So we have betting tables, and then we'll know, and then we have check ins and things like that. All of our notes and our project objectives are documented in notion, and we're using the notion API to build a screen app which then shows all of those objectives up on the screen. Who are the key members of the team, how we're tracking against progress, against budget, against quality of work, and against budget and timeline, of course. So we're using, we're using notion as a really good source of truth up on the screens. We are, like many companies, we're security compliant. We're not. Just sock to buy a tick box exercise. We're actually pretty serious about security, because the companies we work for, you know, really insist on that. So often we are we use strata for our um compliance and stuff. So often there are new things people need to check in and show so we basically have dashboards and information about the latest thing you need to do, whether it's training or an adjustment to a policy that you need to go and acknowledge. We're really strict about getting that right, because we need to be audited. Then obviously there's the commercial side of it, which is, you know, the Salesforce dashboards, the tableau dashboards about how we're performing. We try to be quite transparent on our commercial objectives. We have leader boards of the prospects and things like that. And we also then use a lot of it, because we're in five hubs across the world, so we're in Thailand, the UK and in USA. And we've also got people joining the team all the time. So we use the screens to introduce those new people and also to introduce them to the various other teams we have in the business. So we've got a combination of cultural things. We have a Slack channel which gets pulled straight up to screen. So we've got a praise channel, for example, and that gets piled up to screen. We've got a winning channel, and we've won new deals that gets up on the screen. So basically, the list goes on. And actually, what I'd really encourage people, if you're if you're in inside of a technical business, build your own apps for screens like the best thing you're going to do is build and configure some of the connections that we already have, and that means that the screen information is going to be dynamic. It's not going to be images and videos looping all the time. That's That's the worst way of doing it, because it's quite a lot of workflow to change it, but hook up to Slack, hook up to teams, hook up to notion, hook up to, you know, if you're on Google, Google workspace, if you're on Microsoft, hook up to all of those apps. Get your dashboards on a screen. And trust me, people will be more familiar with what's going on by having it ambiently around them. You know, now, inside of that business, the screen will never be the first thing they'll check. They'll always check slack or email first. But actually they're quite noisy channels, so having the screen kind of also taking that content on means that it will cut through the noise, especially for things like security training, which quite often people will ignore. But we have to get to 100% compliance, so that show that on a screen and show how far we're tracking. So that's what I would that's what I would emphasize. Have some fun with it. Like, go and build web apps for screens and get them up there. Like you can, it's a medium that most people don't use enough. And I'm like, go for it. Come on. You can inside a screen card. You can host your own applications. Go for it. Adil Saleh [28:12] Absolutely. I love the integrations. The first thing I did, you know, while I was sitting on the website, I saw the integration, like how they're going about integrations like how you can work, how screen cloud can work with your workflow that is super important. Like living in your your workflow is super important. So now thinking about go to market and, of course, increasing the lifetime value of the customer. Will just talk about your existing customers, like, how you're going about tracking the utilization of the platform and, of course, indicating opportunities. I know you're, you know sales, you know you're using Salesforce as a CRM. There's lot of ways you can track data utilization, licenses, of course, even the health of the customer. A lot of these companies, they they do like custom objects within Salesforce. Are not sure how you're doing that. So how are you going about increasing lifetime value of the customer, indicating risk and opportunities across the account, Data Wise? Like how data driven it is? Mark McDermott [29:10] Yeah, well, that's a big, big one, because we've got over 10,000 customers. Now, when you've got that, that number of customers, and we're only 130 people, so it's not like we're a huge army of people. A lot of those customers are quite small a CVS, even though the logos are quite big. We, you know, we might have like, a L'Oreal in there, but they're only spending like, you know, a couple of $1,000 a year or something, but really just using it more as a project, because you can obviously self serve. So when it comes to our enterprise customers, like we have, we have strong relationships with our sort of, you know, several 100 enterprise customers where we're tracking that one, not manually. Of course, we're still using data there, but we know those customers. We're working on rollout plans, we're doing QBRs, we're, you know, we're in there, and we should have no surprises about you know, if there's a threat to churn, for example, or a contraction or anything like that, we should know about it first, rather than the data telling us. But for the 9000 plus other ones, it's impossible. And one of the things which is difficult is, I think the best customers shouldn't be logging into screen cloud that frequently, because we're not a per seat license, right? We're a per screen license. And actually, if you've set this up correctly with all those integrations that we were just talking about, then the administrators shouldn't need to go into the platform that much, but the platform should still be delivering value, because we're pulling content from the sources of truth and we're getting it out there. On a screen. And actually, if you were logging in every day, just swapping out images and videos, you'd probably be kind of hating it. So the problem you've got is that the there may, what may look like a power user is actually someone who's really, like, not using it properly, and then the one who's gone in and actually made this thing really, like, finely tuned may only need to log in once a month. So So you don't necessarily get really good insights from that. We have a huge amount of data in our data lake. You know, it's like a red shift thing. I think that's what it's called, not my thing, but we have vast amounts of data in there. And to be honest, making sense of it is difficult because it's not, I suppose it's not like ordinary SaaS, but we're getting better. We're actually using a tool now called hook, which is a kind of success Ahmed had. Adil Saleh [31:23] Oh yeah. Most of the team, yeah, yeah, most of the team in UK. So, amazing team, amazing product. And love the way they're delivering messaging, and now they're trying to penetrate more in the in the North America as well. So, great product for tracking the usage and making sure you make the right decisions for the next big sections across the health of the customer. All of this is super. So using hook. Mark McDermott [31:53] Yeah, we, yeah, we, I mean, they're still in the implementation and UAT phase, but I like the way that the team have approached doing this, right? It's not like we were using Gainsight before, but to be honest, it wasn't delivering health scores with any value, really. And I think partly because I said it's not typical SAS. Well, obviously, we're very much a SaaS company, but maybe, maybe those other platforms are just like, assume pursuit licenses or whatever it might be, where for us, that just isn't the definition of success. And actually, one of the things, I mean, I'll tell you what, I can tell you if a customer is going to be successful or not, very, very quickly, just visually, right? Because when I see the content and I see the quality of the content. I mean, you'd be surprised, but even if it's just legible on a screen, people will upload things where there's no way you could read it from 10 feet away. And often screens go high on a wall and, you know, you're just glancing at it, and they've put like, 50 lines of text on there. I'm like, that's never going to work, right? So the real health of the customer is in the quality of the content, the quality of the are we pulling from a source of truth, or are we uploading a screenshot? Because I tell you what, the data integrity is going to be way better from a direct integration than from a screenshot. And so actually, success is not measured in the classic way, and I'm still figuring that out, and hopefully the hook team can can help get a nice shout out on your podcast for that one. Adil Saleh [33:17] Yeah, I have one question to you as well regarding the content that you mentioned. So are you in some way tracking that content that they're putting out? Are you guys capturing within your system? Of course, you're not like that's not available for other customers, but for just for that customer to make sure that you monitor that what kind of content like you have, some success metrics for the content, right for every account, or maybe every industry and everything. So if you have a standardized success metrics for those accounts, your system, even using hook or any other technology, you know, you'll be able to get triggers. Hey, this, this customer, has been like 30% to what what they should do when it comes to content information, whatever be the use case. And this is what you need to do as a Customer Success Manager. This is what you should need to do in a kickoff, maybe, sorry, a cadence or QBR, or a view call or regular follow up. So data applies a lot in this when it comes to content and monitoring, like what should go and what's not going on, and this just leaves a Success Manager with the triggers to communicate. I know there's a lot of this goes with the qualitative data, like with calls, like going calls that you mentioned, with the meeting transcripts and AI and data can do all of this. And I'm sure like the team at Hoca are also looking at it? Mark McDermott [34:35] Well, I think this is where we go from zero to hero, really, in the next 12 months. So the one problem you've got with well, there's many problems with screens, but one of the issues with screens is it doesn't itself generate any data, really. We generate proof of play logs, so we can show you what, but the screen itself often doesn't know if anyone's in front of the screen or not, because screens are kind of dumb, they don't really do much. And if you think about other digital channels, most other digital channels will give you some form of data back, like whether it's a click, an open or right, like there is a there's kind of even tick tock is just even pausing. Counts as a view because you paused and then you moved like that means your eyeball was probably on it, whereas, with a screen, we don't have any of that. So we're actually quite data poor when it comes to actual impact in the in the real world. But there's a lot where, this is where we can use AI hugely, right? So right now, people are uploading, you know, 1000s and 1000s of documents into screen cloud. Every day with AI, we can basically start to figure out, Is this document likely to work on a screen or not? Just from a very quick analysis of, like, even the character count, okay, they've got 20 bullet points on here that should be broken down into multiple slides, not one slide, right? Is there's no way you're going to be legible. You may even want to build pull some of the colors, like, it's gray on a white background that's going to that's just going to wash out on a screen and become basically just flared. The other thing you could say is, like in the account, you could state an intention. So the intention of these screens, you might say, our intention is to engage our employees with job opportunities, training opportunities, and celebrations of the great work they do. We could go, well, actually, in the last month, 70% of the content you uploaded was to do with health and safety, right? And that isn't that that means that you are not tracking against your stated goal, right? It's because someone's got hold of it and just uploaded a ton of health and safety information without you realizing, because it is normally a team effort. So we can use AI, I think, quite extensively here to really help and guide the customer, and even to start to kind of be a bit smarter about hey, some of this content is looking a little old now, like, Can Do you want me to go through and just, you know, flag, flag, all the items that maybe we want to expire, or consider expiring, or whatever it might be. So I think also scheduling is a big part of this. So rather than asking them, What time of day do you want to show this, we should just say, Look, you want to see your entire workforce wants to see this message at least four times a week? Okay, we'll figure that out for you, like and we'll start to use maybe some kind of pilot data from maybe we put some cameras into a couple of the screens and start to work out traffic flows. And then we can start to figure out when things are and aren't busy. Might not even need a camera. You could even just detect it with the device. You could probably just detect like Mac, you know, basically pings off a phone or Wi Fi signal style to get a sense of when a room is occupied and when it's not so. So I think the the the there's almost no limitation on what we can do. And I think AI was the missing piece of the pie for this industry, because we can now at massive scale. We can do simple things at scale which are really hard. Simple things at scale is hard, but with AI, we know that we can easily categorize content, we can easily figure out what is and isn't good practice, and we can report back to the user a lot more information than they've ever, ever had before. So I think it's pretty exciting. But, yeah, it's coming from a very, very low bar. Adil Saleh [38:04] Yeah. And also, because the fact that you mentioned that I was also looking at your how you're actually doing the go to market frameworks, like pricing is one example, like packaging and everything, of course, proceed is doesn't make sense for smaller customers, for you to, you know, go and have, like, pretty much like, webcams along with your screens and monitor all of this, that's a lot of work, until you find a way, a very cost effective way, to monitor some of the stats that will give you a signal, you know, for for your team to, you know, expand them and you, you know, Then get, get them to the higher plans, or maybe enterprise plans as they grow. Because, of course, the growth is dependent on various, you know, parameters, various factors, not just about, you know, increasing the team or, you know, a lot of these factors, they are, what I what I get from, from the looking at the packaging, a lot of the expansion opportunities, looking at your products, are reliant on numbers that are not easy to achieve. In terms of, like, let's say, when I as a company, a small company, will get more screens when I have more team members, you know. So the growth is not like that frequent in most companies, you know. This is one example. Like, not, not every company hires like, more than 30 or 40 people every year, you know, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's something that, you know, you have to play more on the enterprise side of things. And, you know, big, you know, helping these big organization with this data, like full fetch, you know, white club data service, where you'll help them educate and get the best content, best information. This will go out this. These are the best practice and you can use AI. There's a lot of CO pilots that you can use. We are building one as well. I'll let you know when, once we are done with it, there's like four, four months of more work. We are building a really, really intelligent, customized, specialized co pilot for Customer Success teams. So there's so much, as you mentioned, to do when it comes to AI, simpler thing at scale is super important. So how, what makes you so excited about, about the product in the year 2025, by the way? Mark McDermott [40:03] Yeah, well, well, I think, I mean, you made a good point. Like, for the smaller customers, I mean, you know, for us, like, what's the unit? The unit for us is locations. So, you know, screencloud has five offices, and, you know, maybe there'll be a sixth in a year. But once you've got, sort of, I don't know, 10 screens on a wall, we also do meeting room screens, so you can do the meeting rooms as well. So maybe, like, 1012, screens per office, and then then you've maxed the customer out, right? Whereas, on these enterprises, you're talking hundreds of locations, you know, and some of those locations. I mean, might be a massive manufacturing plant. Are huge. You know, there could be 1000 screens just in one location. So the opportunity to take the enterprise on properly. And I mean, I think most enterprises, if they are not running at least three 400 screens, then they haven't really maxed out their capabilities. Because I bet you there's more than three or 100, 400 notice boards, and I bet you there's enough screens. I mean, even in meeting rooms alone, we're seeing numbers coming back from some of our customers, where they have 1000 meeting rooms running Microsoft Teams rooms. Now, obviously we can be the screen. We can be on the screen when it's idle, you know. So it's not just a black screen or just some kind of, you know, just a holding image or whatever. It can actually be useful. So there's massive capacity of what we could do. And really it's what's exciting to me is, is really championing the medium, championing the movement, which is almost almost all companies are not using screens well enough today, like almost all of them, right? And a lot of that is, is on us as an industry. We overpriced the hardware. We haven't been reliable enough in terms of the delivery of service. And, you know, we let people put terrible content on a screen that's not going to change anything. And then we wonder why they the customer's not expanded, you know, to be over the half a million. Arr, it's like, yeah, because it's not worth it. So, so it's basically, it's like, the whole job here is prove to me that this is valuable, and then you unlock the money. That's just how life works, right? You've got to lead with value. And I'm such a passionate believer in the medium, because I know it works, right? I've seen it, but it has to be done correctly. But once it's done correctly, it can really transform, like it can be so impactful because it's visual, right? You know how much software lives behind a login that most people don't even know. They even know what software they're using. People see this every single day. You can't, not unless you close your eyes or you work completely remotely. I suppose it's not a good use case for us. But again, in the real world, most people don't work from home all the time. They go in. And if we're in those buildings, you will see that content, and if you see that content, you will have been communicated to. So I'm excited to unlock the potential of this medium on the wave of AI, because I think it's genuinely useful, not because I think it's just to add dollars to my valuation, or just like, say that we do AI. I think AI actually changes the game for the for the medium, but AI isn't a threat to us because we also work in the physical space with these hardware players, which AI isn't really coming for a huge part of our of our product is not even to do with content at all. It's just purely managing the screens, keeping them up to date, keeping them alive, fixing them when they're not, and then releasing over the updates and patches to the firmware, to the browser, to security, whatever it might be. That's a big, big part. Fleet Management is a major part of this. And AI isn't really coming for that right now. I think most of AI is focused on content. And to be honest, content was the big problem was one of the big problems. So if ao can help solve that problem, we'll be over here solving this one. I think it's quite a beautiful marriage, personally. So I'm excited. Adil Saleh [43:42] Very interesting. Like, you know, when it comes to conversational AI, things have changed massively, and in the hardware space, like, how are you going about your your hardware combination with the software. I know that lot of lot of these devices that you can build that actually communicate with the screen, then you can remotely manage, or is, could you? Could you walk us through the like, what is the best combination, what kind of tech you're using with that is comparable to the hardware? Mark McDermott [44:08] Yeah, absolutely so. So when we started screen cloud, we were focused on just using third party hardware, and we didn't have the capabilities to do it in house anyway, so we were just basically building on top of the hardware. What we thought was, well, if people are buying the hardware separately, then, like, that's that's up to them. What we realized is, whatever hardware we recommend, we're on the hook for either way. So about five years ago, we decided to build our own hardware because we need to take more control. And some of these big tech companies were releasing updates which were really harming digital signage. They weren't doing it on purpose, but it was, you know, inadvertently help, you know, causing problems. So like, look, we need to take control of the full stack. Do more of an apple on it, right? So Apple controls its full stack very, very, very rigidly. And I think that is probably the best approach for us in the future. So we built our first product, which was a custom built Linux, Linux distribution called Screen Cloud OS. And so we basically just taken Linux, we removed all the stuff we didn't need, and we've optimized the settings for what we did, and then we threw that onto a really good, robust, fanless metal box called the station, p1 Pro, which was an existing box, and then we just flashed our hardware, our software, on at the factory level, and it meant that it would boot straight to screen cloud. It was much simpler to set up. It was more secure by design, because it could do less and we had full control. All of the updates, we weren't at the mercy of whatever the other guys were doing. Actually, by the time this goes out, our second hardware offering will have gone up. It's called the pixie. Actually, I can show you, if anyone's watching the video, they go, there's the pixie. You heard it here first we and that's just a nice little it's a little Android, really compact. It's going to retail for about $60 was cheap. It's running Android 14, a really modern chip, good storage. It runs runs really nicely, and it's cheap, and that will be kind of more of our entry level offering. Again, both of the devices will have full remote device management, the screen card OS supports, like enterprise networks, like security certificates and things like that. This is more basic than that, but generally pretty robust for everything that we do. And then I think that those two, I mean screen code, OS devices are most popular now this will, this will become our most popular pretty soon. And then we will still support third party operating systems and hardware, because people will have their own fleet already, and we don't want people to have to change that. It's a waste of money, it's a waste of time, and we can easily run on other devices too. So we'll be agnostic in the sense that all I really want for the customer is the best option for them. If it's our hardware, fine. We actually don't make any money on it. We don't mark it up. So to be honest, I don't really care. It probably saved me a bit of hassle. But actually, on our own hardware, I can probably guarantee a better experience, which means you're more likely to expand and stay with me, because I'm offering you a more guaranteed service. But in terms of buying it, honestly, it doesn't make any difference to me. The only thing is, like we're just trying to give people as many options as possible. I think over time, most customers seem to want to just kind of have one throat to choke, as they say, which is us, and that's looking like but they also don't want to pay other license fees. Because, I mean, if you're running on a Windows you still got to pay the Windows license, whereas with this, it's all in one so you don't have to pay anything extra. So, yeah, that's, that's the way it's going. And I think most customers appreciate that. Yeah. Adil Saleh [47:38] Yeah, that's a no brainer. You get, you actually get rid of the cost of the windows and everything, and you, you actually indicate the same stack, using the same product, making it the experience seamless, and giving you a control over, over the tech stack, which is super important for you to do your job and deliver the value in a short period of time, compared to fighting through third party hardware. That perfect, perfect. So, I mean, can you just give me one experience before we I set you free, one experience that you've seen that is exceptional when it comes to digital screen signing and, you know, anywhere like, be it a store, be it a coffee shop, be it a bar, beat a pub, be it a club, anything that you've experienced in the in your experience, I know you're extremely passionate about this problem, and you must have seen something really like that. Give you a goose. This is the experience more. Mark McDermott [48:32] I tend not, you know, I tend not to be drawn to the really flashy stuff, like the sphere or whatever, because it's kind of cool. Like, there's a really good building in London called the Outer Net, which actually has really amazing screens and stuff like that. But it's kind of, it's unaffordable to most people. So I, what I tend to do is, like, focus on like, kind of things that might not necessarily blow your mind on first look. But like, a really, really smart. So actually, on my LinkedIn, so I publish a lot on LinkedIn. I'm doing a series called Signs of genius. Get it? That's signs of genius. So I've done five of them so far. And actually, there was one the other week, which was, which is, it's a single pub in London which does exceptional food. It's called The Devonshire, and it's like one of the one of the best for the roasts and meat. I've been there and you've been there. It's good, good. So these guys have put screens in their kitchen, and what they did is they, effectively, they did it. It was a custom solution. It's not a screen cloud thing. So it's just me just giving praise to people doing great job. They basically designed their exact process, but they're very particular about, like, the timing, because, I mean, the key to all of this is the timing of the food. You can't have something perfectly sat there, like otherwise it'll overcook or go cold or whatever. So they managed to get all and they're very, very busy. So they got all their screens lined up, and they they took their own knowledge and programmed in a custom solution that basically made the whole kitchen run off that, instead of bits of paper and people shouting to each other, which is how it used to be done. And from what I can ascertain from from seeing it, it's worked exceptionally well. And I just really like that, because, like, they're not digital signage experts, like at all, but they had a vision, and they had great expertise, and they were like, we can codify this using screens, and screens is the right thing in that environment, people can't be touching phones and stuff. They're cooking, right? They're preparing food. So it needs to be visual and not to be something that they're they're touching. And this is the best thing. And it looks like it's worked really well. So people look on my LinkedIn. And there's a post recently about that. And I do loads more on LinkedIn as well. So if they want to learn more about screens, I'm posting every single day. Adil Saleh [50:39] Perfect, perfect. Mark, it was really, really nice talking to you and getting to know your screen cloud and exceptional passion that you have for this problem, and I love the energy that's infectious. Thank you very much for taking the time, and, you know, giving this knowledge the audience. Mark McDermott [50:57] My pleasure well. Thank you for letting me share, share the knowledge. Appreciate it. Adil Saleh [51:01] Perfect. Good luck for the launch of the next product. And you know, I know that it's going to blow people's mind. Mark McDermott [51:07] Thank you.