Mark Coxon, AVI-SPL’s Experience Technology Group

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT AVI-SPL is one of the largest pro AV integrators on the planet, but for the longest time, if I was asked if I knew anyone at that company specifically on the digital signage file, I'd say "Nope." As far as I knew, and the same for a lot of people involved in digital signage, AVI-SPL was much more focused on traditional pro AV work like unified communications and control rooms. While AVI-SPL delivered some digital signage projects, it wasn't a real focus. But that started to change a few years ago when the Tampa-based company spun up a new business unit called the Experience Technology Group, or XTG. Now it has some 30 people working on projects driven by the impact of visuals, and directly involving other architects, designers and creative shops. Now, that's 30 people in a company that has 3,700 other staff, but the group works with some 300 customer-facing sales people, and gets pulled in to opportunities and projects when clients start expressing interests or needs that are about more than just function, like whiteboards and conferencing systems. I had a great, very thoughtful talk with Mark Coxon, an industry veteran who joined the company about a year ago and is one of XTG's business development directors. We get into both the science and emotional sides of experiential projects, and how these kinds of projects work when they're guided by ideas and desired outcomes, and not just the Wow Factor of big screens. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Mark, what is your role at AVI-SPL?  Mark Coxon: I am a business development director in our XTG division, which is our Experience Technology Group, so what I do is work with our regional account managers as well as our partner ecosystem to identify opportunities to build amazing experiences.  So your regional people would come across an opportunity, let's say, it's a corporate workplace that says, “We want to put a big ass LED display in our lobby. We don't know what to do or what to put on or anything else. What do we do?” And your regional person might have a kind of deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction and call you or somebody on your team and say, okay, I need help here. Mark Coxon: Yeah. So a lot of our opportunities do arise within the regions themselves, right? Because AVI-SPL is a huge corporation. We have, I think, 300+ sellers out in the marketplace, across the world, talking to clients, managing accounts where they might do a lot more of the typical AV that you see out in the space: conference rooms and auditoriums, et cetera, and they'll come across customers saying, “Oh, I think we want to add a wow factor to this lobby” or “We're thinking about building an experience center to show off some of the new innovation that we came out with this year.” And so they'll engage our group, which is an overlay to the whole company, and bring us in, and we can really start to give, I guess, some form to that process and make sure they get what they want at the end of it.  So you have a BizDev role, but it sounds like there's a fair amount of sales, engineering, and front-end consulting involved in it. Mark Coxon: Yeah, it’s funny. AVI-SPL isn't really known in the market for experiential work, but we've done a lot of it. We've done a lot of it in pockets over the years for these customers, but it was never really organized under a division, and so that's why XTG exists. We've organized this portfolio of work in this division and assigned it to a team of people. We have about 30 people on our team now that overlay the country, and that team consists of people like me, business development directors, and we come from different backgrounds, some come from fabrication, some come from the consulting world, some like me come from all over the place within the industry from an integration perspective, and then we also have technologists on the team whose job is really exactly what