I was reading an interesting survey conducted by Bill Gerba at Wirespring. Bill, through his blogging, is recognized as one of the eminent reporters on the digital signage industry. Bill conducted a digital signage costs survey. The second report on the survey, How Network Size Impacts Digital Signage Service Choices, delves into the impact of network size and service choices.

In this article the survey breaks down the differences between: Small Network Experience Only, Large Network Experience Only; Mixed Network Experience; and No Network Experience operators. The survey asked questions concerning: project management; logistics management; strategy consulting in-house; in-house project planning; content strategy consulting in-house; content production and management in-house; network operations management; and installation services.

The survey found there really wasn’t much variance in the responses from each of the experience groups, which was quite surprising. You may think that, large screen deployment of 5,000 screens on an advertising network is quite different from, say, a 2-screen employee break room application. The expectation was to see more distinction between those with only-large and only-small network experience, but those variances simply didn’t show up. Understandably, the group who admitted to having no experience working with digital signage did tend to have different answers than the folks who have done projects before. Whether this indicates a lack of understanding of the marketplace or just a different set of expectations based on some domain-specific knowledge is hard to say. Most of the time, even the no-experience people were within a few percentage points of those with some experience under their belts.

However, the survey did find a few areas where the groups displayed more diversity in their responses:

• Nearly 80% of those working with large digital signage networks handle their content management in-house, versus 74% of small networks and 70% of those who have done both.
• Those respondents who had only worked on large network projects were slightly more likely to outsource their project planning (11%), versus just 3.5% of those who had only worked on small network projects.
• Likewise, those handling large and mixed projects were more likely to outsource logistics management (35%), versus only 21% of those working exclusively on small network projects.
• While those with both large and small network experience generally tended to answer more similarly to those with large network experience only, one exception is in the network/operations area. Those with mixed experience were markedly more likely to take care of that service in-house (76%), versus just 63% of those exclusively working on large projects, and 64% of those exclusively working on small projects.
• Not surprisingly, small network managers were significantly more likely to handle installation services themselves (though it was still only 30% of them). Only 20% of large network managers handled such tasks in-house. Those with mixed experience were split between these two at about 24%.

This type of information is vital to the success of the industry and I applaud Bill Gerba for his efforts in evaluating the potential of the market and helping others understand the dynamics that drive the industry.