Episode #371
Dave Haynes - The Exit Interview With Invidis
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT This podcast is a bit different, as I am on the other side of the interview table - answering questions instead of asking them. That's because this is the last Sixteen:Nine podcast with me as the host. I've been doing Sixteen:Nine for almost 20 years, and the podcast version for the last nine. I'm retiring. I'm 67 and it is time to slow the hell down. I'm not leaving the industry, entirely. Just dialing back to a few side hustle gigs and other work, working more when the weather gets cold in my part of the world and I'm looking for distractions and extra money that will get Joy and I away from that cold weather for a bit. Think of this as my exit interview, done with my friends in Munich at invidis, who have been longtime content partners and will now edit and manage Sixteen:Nine. This makes me happy, as I didn't want to just stop what I think is a valued part of this business. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Balthasar Mayer: Welcome to the Sixteen:Nine podcast. This is Balthasar Mayer. Antonia Hamberger: This is Antonia Hamberger. Balthasar Mayer: We have a very special guest today. He is the bullshit filter of the digital signage industry. He's the head, heart, and driving force behind Sixteen:Nine, one of the rare people who manages to produce a trade publication that makes you laugh and gives you something to learn at the same time. He also keeps the digital signage industry with his beloved industry mixes at trade shows, and he's never afraid to cut through marketing fluff and speak his mind and now he's retiring, and we are very happy to have him here on the podcast. Welcome, Dave Haynes. Thank you. Dave Haynes: Yes, I was joking. This is the exit interview. It's like leaving a company. Antonia Hamberger: It is the exit interview, and we were thinking about just turning things around. Your blog is called Sixteen:Nine, and we're now doing the Nine:Sixteen edition. You'll get nine questions where we just let you ramble on a bit about your career, and then you'll get sixteen questions where you'll give us rapid-fire answers. Dave Haynes: Alright, I'm drinking Vice beer because I'm in Munich so this could get salty by the end of it. Balthasar Mayer: That is our goal to make it salty, and interesting at the same time. Antonia Hamberger: Dave, you've been doing this blog for 20 years. You've been in the industry for even longer than that. So I guess I'm wondering what made you go into digital signage? How did this happen in the first place? Dave Haynes: I was in the newspaper industry. I was a daily newspaper reporter. I started in 1979 at the Winnipeg Free Press, and my first job out of school, working for a newspaper, was covering the rock music scene. So my first three years in the newspaper, I was interviewing rock bands like Billy Joel, Ozzy Osbourne, you name it, back in the early 80s, late 70s, just about anybody who was big at that time. I did an interview with them, which was quite interesting. At times, you would get lovely people and sometimes you'd get absolute a-holes, and everything in between. Antonia Hamberger: Probably also a lot of drunk people, drunk rock stars? Dave Haynes: Ozzy definitely was impaired, and Billy Joel, he stopped in Winnipeg on the first stop on his North American tour back in 1981 or something and he was just off a plane from New York, he and his band, and they had a press event at a Holiday Inn in Winnipeg, and he was very tipsy. He'd been having cocktails all the way from New York. So that was pretty interesting. I've had a number of those kinds of interviews. So anyways, then I continued in newspapers for several years, became an editor, and got bored with being an editor in a market where not a lot of bad things happened, and as a journalist, you're not praying for bad things to happen, but they're much more interesting to write about than calm, stable situation. When the newspaper started talking about doing new media, getting into digital, I stuck my hand up and said, I'll do it. So I took the newspaper online in 1995, one of the first North American papers to go online, and did that for four years and reported directly to the publisher and nobody on the executive team, including the publisher, bought into my concerns that this was going to be a problem for newspapers. They just tended to think this was a passing fancy. It wasn't really gonna happen. So, I just got frustrated and left and weirdly went to work for a company called Elevator News Network that was putting digital screens, LCD panels in elevators, office tower elevators in 1999. Very complicated, very expensive. I started out as the GM for Western Canada, but pretty quickly became Vice President of Operations for the whole show. So I was putting screens in 70-story office towers in the elevator shops, in the shafts, and running all the cabling in the elevator shafts, and very expensive, very complicated, and very frustrating because you're dealing with unionized labor. With elevator companies, where they wanted to charge you $250 to stand there and watch you, that sort of thing. So I did that. There was a shotgun merger with another company in the US that was doing that, and I walked off the plank with the rest of the Canadian management team and found myself looking around, going, okay, now what do I do? And I ended up starting my own digital out-of-home media company, putting screens in. Public walkways in the underground walkways at downtown Toronto which was a great idea, but probably ten years too early because I would go to advertising agencies and say, I'm doing this, and they would look at me like… What? Digital out-of-home was just not a thing back then. So I was the dreaded pioneer lying in a field with arrows in my back, having done that. So I didn't make a lot of money out of that, and my wife, bless her, said it would be great if we had an income. So I started working for what is now known as ComQi. At the time, it was called Digital View, and then it became EnQi, and then it became ComQi, and I was a business development person. So I was doing sales and looking around going, how did a guy who used to interview Rock bands become a sales guy for a software company? But I did that and went over to Broadsign because they offered me more money and then the Great Recession hit in 2008-2009, and that was that was it for salespeople. That company, Broadsign, ran into deep problems at that point. They totally rose back up like a phoenix, and they are a powerhouse now, but at the time, they were in trouble. So that was 2009, and I decided, okay, do I wanna work for somebody else or do what am I gonna do? And I just decided to go out on my own and start just doing writing and some consulting, things like that. But early on, when I was still with Digital View, I decided to just look at the industry and the level of “thought leadership” that was available at the time. It wasn't very good. A lot of it was just nonsensical or badly written, and I thought, okay, I understand this space at this point. I've been doing it for seven years. I know how to write. So I just, for the hell of it, I just started Sixteen:Nine, and never thought that this would be something that would define my career, my later-stage career for many years, and be like a full-time job, and generate real money. So it just happened. Antonia Hamberger: But we're all glad it took that turn for you, Dave, because I don't think anybody would take you for a good salesperson. I think you're much better off as an editor and publisher. Because you would just say the truth and would probably offend a lot of people. Dave Haynes: That was one of my problems when I was doing business development. If we lost a deal, if I could understand why the target company went in a different direction, I would be fine with it, and I think to be a really good business development person or “salesperson”, you've gotta just want to be a killer. You just wanna win every deal, and it doesn't matter whether you're the right solution, you just wanna win the deal and my mind doesn't work that way. I probably wasn't best suited to it. Balthasar Mayer: So just to understand, you founded Sixteen:Nine in 2006, and then you went full-time on it in 2009? Dave Haynes: I wouldn't say by 2009, I was full-time, but I liked doing it every day. But it wasn't necessarily my main thing. It was just something that I'd been doing, and I kept on doing it because I felt, so I had, at that point, I had a following, and it felt something of an obligation to do it. In the first few years, I would have a Google ad on there, and every quarter, I would get like $37 or something from Google ads. But then I started getting questions saying, “Hey, can we advertise on this?” And so I would just get inbound, and that just built up and built up to become inbound. It took a while, but it was all inbound as opposed to me shaking trees. It took a while, and it was like making real money, and it was something that would be a proper income for me. At which point, I was able to back off doing much in the way of consulting or writing for hire and just mostly do Sixteen:Nine. Antonia Hamberger: For somebody who's been in the industry only a few years, I'm wondering what the industry was like when you first came into it, and what you hoped to contribute? Dave Haynes: It was very embryonic. A few people understood it. When people would ask what I did, and I would tell them digital signage, they would just have to give me a sort of tilted head and say… Huh? Antonia Hamberger: I still have to explain it on a weekly basis to people outside the industry. So I can't imagine what it was like 15 years ago. Dave Haynes: There are so many more reference cases now, whereas before you would have to say, you might be in a store, and you might see this. Now it's like everywhere. So I just have the digital menus in any quick service restaurant that's digital signage, and posters that you see on the sidewalks that's digital out-of-home/digital signage, and they go, okay, I get it. In those days, it was very expensive. Few people understood it. There were far fewer vendors. A lot of the companies that were providing software in particular were companies that had, in a lot of cases adapted that software from other purposes like broadcast and turned that into something that would also work on as sometimes described a narrow cast, just like narrowly defined network as opposed to something sent out everywhere. It was in those days not well known, not well understood, and I just felt that the writing that was available back in 2006 was a lot of buzzword bingo stuff, crossing the chasm, paradigm shift, all these nonsense phrases out of business books, and I just thought, if somebody's just gotta write something that says, here's this thing, here's why they're doing it, here's what's good about it, here's what I think is problematic and how it could be done better. So, it was a little bit of my, I don't wanna say bully pulpit, but it was a way to express my advice without being mean or anything else.. Antonia Hamberger: Were there any trends you predicted really early on that then became true or didn't? Dave Haynes: Oh, I saw everything. I would say more than anything else, you could see that whereas in the early stages, it was something that was nice to do, I clearly saw that this was going to be something that was needed to do for a company. It was going to be mission-critical. It was just going to be fundamental to how retailers and other businesses designed a space in the same way that they're thinking about their furnishings, thinking about their lighting, their HVAC system and everything else, they're gonna start thinking about, okay, where does the digital fit? And in the early days, it was to build a space and then look for empty space on a wall and go, okay, we'll put the screens there, even though in a lot of cases it wasn't the appropriate place to put it. I'd say the other thing was pretty obvious, and I started writing about this in 2011 but I could see LED was gonna come and come hard and start to supplant flat panel displays just because of all the benefits and the flexibility that I have. I invested a lot of time in in the last few years, went to Taiwan and China and everything else to visit factories and really fully understand what it is as opposed to just writing about it and taking what the manufacturers are saying because manufacturers as is their way, their marketing people tend to fledge the facts and play pretty fast and loose with what something is versus what it really is. Antonia Hamberger: In a lot of cases, they don't even know what it really is. Dave Haynes: This is true. It's the thing about the digital science industry. A lot of the companies still are run by technical people, engineers, electrical engineers, software developers, and everything else. They're not good marketers. Then they hire people to do their marketing for them, and those people with some notable exceptions, don't understand a damn thing about the space. So they just parrot what their executives say, which is far too technical and people don't understand it, and I always try to bang on people that if you're going to market your product, for God's sake, provide some relevance and context and to use my Canadian term, give me an explanation as to why I should give a crap about this and why should I care? Antonia Hamberger: I guess that's a thing that a lot of companies in the digital signage space struggle with. Finding those people who want to understand their product on a technical level. But we don't just wanna bash in the digital signage industry because there's a lot of great things in the industry, and. So what's your favorite thing about the industry? Dave Haynes: If we're talking in technical terms, I am impressed and encouraged and excited by how LED in particular is opening up all kinds of new possibilities to start to think in terms of displays being a building material, being a finish, being the curtain wall glass, being something that's a full exterior of a building. That gets way beyond just this idea of a screen on a wall, which is how this industry was defined for a whole bunch of years. Thinking about the industry, it's a relatively small industry. Even though we tend to think that it's giant and it's booming and everything else, in pure terms, it's very small compared to most technology industries. But that means you get to know a lot of people all over the world, and there's no shortage of knuckleheads, but I would say by and large, it's full of really great people, and because it's a small industry and it gets together two or three times a year at different events, I've got to know people all over the world and develop friendships with people all over the world that I never do at all in doing other work, which is fantastic. I'm friends with the Invidis folks, and here I am in Munich having a beer. Antonia Hamberger: Yeah, and we're always glad to have you. But you've also done a lot of trips over the years, right? You went to Taiwan. You visited some display manufacturers last year. Dave Haynes: Yeah, I spent a week in Taiwan in October. Antonia Hamberger: So what was the best work trip you had during all that time? Dave Haynes: The best trip I had. I did an extended consulting gig on digital signage for a mobile carrier, a telecoms company in South Africa, and I went down there three times. I never would've gone to South Africa. It's very expensive. It's a long flight and everything else, but I was there for, I think, six or eight weeks, I forget now, and so I spent a lot of time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and that was absolutely fantastic, and it was just something I never would've done otherwise. I would say the most interesting stuff has been going to Asia just because that's where it all emanates, and I think the second time I went to Hong Kong was when LEDs were really starting to come out. It was kind of a big moment for me in that I don't like to go to tourist places, although all of Hong Kong is really a tourist place, but I like to go off the beaten track, where you don't see all the people with their cameras and everything else and I was just walking in this district and saw over a nightclub entrance, a very large billboard, a LED billboard, that in North America would be a press release. There'd be all kinds of buzz about it, because look at the signs of that. Antonia Hamberger: In Germany, let me tell you that will be the breaking news, the news of the year. Balthasar Mayer: Talk of the digital signage town. Dave Haynes: But there, it was just there, and it really told me that, okay, this is where this is gonna go where it just becomes commonplace. Because it was already there, and when you go to Asia, it's way over the top from what I've seen from a distance in China. I've been to China, but I haven't been in several years now, pre-COVID covid where you see entire skylines that've got LED lighting. Whether it's mesh lighting or they've got larger lighting that's illuminating the whole building, but entire skylines that are synchronized. I don't really want that in whatever city I live in with all the light pollution. It looks amazing, but it's not appealing in another way, but China, Taiwan. Hong Kong and Seoul, all those areas really are instructive as to the possibilities, as well as Dubai. But Dubai's just insane. I don't think that's a marker or an instruction of anything. It's just a crazy place. Antonia Hamberger: No, it just also has tons of money in that place. Dave Haynes: The building tires skyscrapers on a change order. Antonia Hamberger: Dave, was there ever a particular moment when you realized that your blog really has influence, because I know almost everybody in the North American proAV and digital signage industry knows you and reads you. But that has taken a while. So was there a moment when you? Dave Haynes: Oh, it was immediate. Antonia Hamberger: Yeah? Oh. Dave Haynes: No. There were a couple of moments. Early on, I said I'd gone from one company, with Broadsign, and I went up to Montreal to do the interview. They'd approached me, and I was walking the hallways, and one guy came around the corner and said, “Oh, Dave Haynes, I read your stuff” and I went, oh, really? Antonia Hamberger: This is something we still have to achieve still. Balthasar Mayer: Yes, this is a big goal for us. Did you ever sign an autograph? Dave Haynes: I have signed autographs which is absolutely bizarre. I was asked, can you sign your business card because there's somebody back in the office that'll just be thrilled and I go, really? I don't want to see what's gone wrong in your life, but the big thing that has always stuck with me is the number of times that companies have told me that part of their onboarding process now for new employees is, there's the parking lot, here's your parking assignment, here's this, that's your desk, here's your wifi password, and so on, here are the instructions for healthcare and this and that, but here's what you need to do on a daily basis, you need to subscribe to this thing, and you need to be reading it every day to stay current in this industry. I've had dozens of people tell me that I'm just kind of part of their workplace operations that they've told people as part of learning this business, you need to be reading this every day, and yeah, that's always been really heartening and nice to hear. Antonia Hamberger: So apart from reading Sixteen:Nine every day, which is an obvious thing to do as part of your daily routine, what advice would you give to someone just entering the industry? Dave Haynes: Learn it. The flip side of what I was just saying is I'm always astonished at how many people I run into who've been in this industry for ten years or more, and they had no idea a
