Wes Nicol, Videri

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you've spent any time in bars and pubs - not me, but I've been told - there have always been signs of walls promoting beverage brands. They were neon, or backlit plastic, and they were there to perhaps be the last thing someone sees before a server asks, "What'll you have?" Imagine if you could do that instead with digital displays that were changeable and had the kinds of motion graphics or video that drew eyeballs and influenced decisions. That's what a New York-based company called Videri offers up. Very quietly, guided by a whale client it can't talk about publicly, Videri has almost 100,000 networked displays operating around the globe - driving brand awareness and delivering a consistent 30% sales lift, month to month, on promoted products. That means an ROI on the investment for the brands who put them in that's measured in months, not years. The big reasons why it works? It's a turnkey solution based on super-thin, super-light custom-manufactured all-in-one flat panels that a beverage brand's field staffers can install and activate in a matter of minutes. If they can hang a picture on a wall, they can put these in. I had a great chat with Wes Nicol, who came on as CEO about a year ago and is busily bringing Videri out of a somewhat stealthy period, and making some broader marketplace noise. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Wes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what Videri is all about?  Wes Nicol: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. I am excited to be on the podcast. I've been a longtime listener, first-time interviewee. But yeah, the history of Videri, it's been around for about ten years, in 2013, we started with digital out-of-home, ruggedized products working with Outfront, which was CBS Outdoor at the time, and then subsequent to that, maybe a few years later, developed a series of thinner indoor displays, Videri Canvas that we built hand in hand actually with one of our large customers And then continue to expand that globally.  We're typically more of a white-label shop. You don't really hear much about vi I think when we talked before you mentioned, “I have never heard of you guys.” That was probably on purpose. We can talk about that later but we have a complete end-to-end solution: we build hardware, CMS & device management software, and I’m happy to get into the details.  I had heard vaguely of you in the past, I think one of the jobs that Videri was doing, you mentioned Outfront was on the MTA in New York?  Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly. So anything that you see on the MTA is our product.  Oh, okay. Now, do you still do that sort of work, or was the move to these thin canvas displays something of a pivot for the company?  Wes Nicol: We're still doing that. We are still actively deploying right now at the MTA, and there's gonna be a refresh cycle that we're hoping to participate in. But I think strategically we want to become more of a software company and there's a lot of green space in the indoor product. As you know obviously in the industry, there's a lot of opportunity there. So that's kinda where we're focusing most of our efforts right now. You have been very quiet. I would say almost stealthy, but in the past year, you started to make some noise in the market, right? Wes Nicol: Yeah I'm new to the company, so I joined about a year ago… So you're the noisy guy?  Wes Nicol: Exactly, and I'm Canadian. So typically we're pretty humble folks, but it's funny. We were at the ISE show. I think we saw you there at your event, at the actual show itself, people are saying, “Hey, we've been trying to find you guys like. We've seen this product somewhere, we just didn't know who made it”, and there's nothing written on the actual display that actually says, Videri on it. You have to kinda pull it off the wall, look at some serial numbers and do some Googling to figure it out. And th