Eric Henry, Carousel Digital Signage
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system. I had a really good chat, one that flew by, with Eric Henry, the president of Carousel, which is the digital signage side of a larger Minneapolis company called Tightrope Media Systems. The Tightrope side of the business focuses on broadcast. In our chat, Eric and I get into the opportunities and challenges of working with K-12 schools, what typically goes in, and the types of content that help create a sense of community. He has some interesting thoughts about taking marketer's approach to messaging in schools, and getting beyond the predictable. We also touch towards the end on the higher ed market, which has some core similarities in terms of need, but is also quite different. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Eric, thank you for joining me. Happy New Year. Eric Henry: Happy New Year. I've done a podcast in the past with your colleague, JJ, but it's been a few years. For those who don't know much about Carousel, can you give me the background? I know that you grew out of tightrope media systems. Some people will know that, but others won't. You've been around since 1997, maybe not you personally but the company. Eric Henry: Yeah, correct. Personally, I haven't been at the company since 97, but I've certainly been around since 1997. But yeah, Carousel started out as Tightrope Media Systems, actually still a division of Tightrope Media Systems. So there are two divisions of the company, Carousel, which is the digital signage group and then Cablecast, which is actually our community television broadcast, part of the company and so I actually run the Carousel business. We did start in 97. 1996-97, It's debatable in terms of paperwork and those types of things, but after a long time, it actually came out of the education space. So, our first customer was Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota for Carousel some 26 years ago, and we've been in that space for quite a long time. Obviously signage lends to many other vertical markets, so we are certainly in other verticals but our founder story is rooted in the education space And going way back to the late nineties, what was a school district looking for at that point? And is it pretty much what they're looking for today? Eric Henry: Quite a bit different today. So back in the late nineties, there were certainly much more tube televisions and we could update lunch menus and those types of things and that was really very early days of putting content on screens that wasn't broadcast. So that was really the early days where schools were looking for a solution that wasn't really hard because there were only a couple of things that could actually put content on screens but they were fairly prohibitive because a lot of them were designed for much more retail, graphic intensive folks and not necessarily teachers. Right. Yeah. I remember back to the mid to late nineties, there were early-stage quasi digital out of home companies that were in the business of going to school districts and schools in general and saying, Hey, we'll put a TV in the classrooms of your school and you can run school messaging on there. But by the way, there's going to be advertising there too, to pay for the technology. That's a model that didn't work. Eric Henry: No, it did not. And I think we've really been trying to find our way as an industry, for quite a long time. If you look at the early days, I remember being at a trade show and there were two higher eds from the same state. And I asked them why they wanted to do a digital signage project and the answer was basically because the other one was going to do it. So, that's not