Ayuda brings digital signage content to any HTML5-enabled browser

Ten years after it was founded by ex-Microsoft employees in an Old Montreal loft, Ayuda Media Systems is still making waves in Canada’s digital out-of-home (DOOH) signage sector.

The company’s line of cloud-based business software tools includes Juice, Zest, Splash, BMS, Cerebro and Alto. They’re all part of a platform designed to manage basically every process involved in running a DOOH business. That means invoicing, proposals, customer relationship management (CRM), scheduling, inventory and content management, financial reporting, payouts, mapping, business intelligence and network monitoring.

The field of companies making software to manage, schedule and play DOOH content is getting crowded. That’s why Ayuda is trying to go beyond that, says Daniel Fleischer, newly promoted to the position of vice-president of business development.

“This is what the majority of both the (DOOH) hardware and software players focus on. To be honest with you, that’s boring,” Fleischer says. “Nobody’s focusing on how to help businesses run their entire business from A to Z, on business processes. That’s what we do. We provide the software on which OOH companies run their businesses.”

Ayuda has been busy incorporating aspects of mobile, big data, analytics, location-based technology and cloud into its platform. Earlier this year the firm introduced Cerebro. It uses algorithms to help OOH operators match up real time audited data on their inventory with target goals such as reach, frequency, audience demographics and geographic location.

Those matches are used to create an OOH plan or proposal that maximizes the operator’s inventory.  The aim is higher occupancy rates and more strategic use of inventory space. For users who aren’t on the Ayuda platform, Cerebro is a web-services plug-in that works with any sales, charting or proposal tool, even an operator’s homegrown software.

In October Ayuda introduced Alto, a web-based portal that allows advertisers to control content directly on the screens where they’ve purchased air time. That includes uploading, scheduling and modifying screen content.

That ‘direct control’ concept gets pushed even further with Ayuda’s recently launched No-Player Player. It doesn’t require any proprietary player software to display digital signage content. Using Ayuda’s Splash content management system (CMS), digital signage content can be sent directly to any HTML5 enabled browser. That means any player device or TV with a built-in browser can display digital signage. There’s no need to install software or “pay the associated per-player fees that digital signage software makers typically charge,” the company’s marketing literature says.

Those sound like fightin’ words for a small company based in Montreal. But Ayuda has the kind of pedigree to back them up. All three co-founders worked for the Microsoft Research and .NET teams based in Redmond, Washington. Co-founder and CEO Andreas Soupliotis (“a hardcore computer science and math kind of guy,” says Fleischer) won several patents while at Microsoft and worked on the motion-based technology that later became Kinect.

In 2003 Soupliotis launched Ayuda with fellow Microsoft expats Pierre-Yves Troel and Joe Cotugno. The three launched Ayuda out of a loft in Old Montreal with just a few servers and laptops. Today there are over 30 employees working out of four global offices in Montreal, Madrid, London and Sydney. Troel is now chief software architect and Cotugno is senior V.P. of global client services. Clients include CBS Outdoor, Lamar Advertising, and Zoom Media and Marketing

“We keep banging out new products,” Fleischer says. “We look at Apple and tablets and mobile applications and we want to give (OOH people) the same kind of software experience they’re used to getting at home.”