Meet the Waterloo firm that’s transforming digital out-of-home signage

WestonExpressions, the company behind Linkett, is actively aiming to change the digital out-of-home signage market. The Linkett device connects to any display through an HDMI cable, turning it into an interactive advertising platform.

“We built a device that turns average TVs into motion and mobile compatible units, and therefore what we really do is engagement advertising,” says CEO, Douglas Lusted. For any type of digital advertising you do now, there aren’t many metrics to see how your ads are performing on digital screens, billboards, or in-store televisions. What Linkett does is real-time engagement monitoring with the ability to schedule ads with the click of a button from Linkett’s online platform.

Using near field communication (NFC) to pull data from users, Linkett can monitor how all your ads are performing, and play only those ads per location or display that are returning the best results. It makes ads much more efficient to monitor and easy to update in real-time. As well, Linkett’s platform offers the ability to individually schedule ads per-screen, or even per-user depending on how they interact.

Apart from mobile and motion detection, what sets Linkett apart is first and foremost its mobile capability. “We can tell, not only when someone walks by, but when someone stops in front of a screen. And we notice when someone taps their mobile device to a screen,” says Lusted, “We can do custom-tailored, exclusive ads.” There’s also the possibility of ad optimization through mobile interactivity. “You can receive two-way communication through your phone of that ad content.” Or your phone can push content to the ad system.

Linkett has also entered the market via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. So, instead of buying media players and licensing software to run ads on unresponsive TVs, Linkett’s software and units are offered on a monthly basis. “We charge $99 per month per device or $399 per month for unlimited devices for an entire venue,” says Lusted.

The 20-year-old CEO adds that Linkett is different from anything else in the market right now. “It’s quick, it’s easy. You tap your phone, you grab the information you want, and you keep on walking.” As well, there’s actionable information pulled from that brief interaction. For example, if you tap one of their screens six separate times, but only when Nike ads are displayed, the next time you interact with their device, you’ll be shown a Nike ad.

“It’s quite a big opening for the future of advertising,” says Lusted. With the same technology that you use for making mobile payments – NFC – you’ll soon be able to make payments right from a screen. If a customer has 1,000 screens that they’re running an ad network on, they can turn all those screens into individual points of sale – for cheaper than what they’re currently paying – and collect data and analytics on their ads.

Linkett is now filling their pre-orders on units as well as gaining some interesting insights on user interactions and digital signage advertising in general. Lusted says they’ve noticed that when running QR codes alongside NFC capability, NFC interaction occurs 500% more often than QR code scans. Lusted chalks that up to people finally starting to understand NFC devices and accept how it works. It’s a huge market that’s still in the early stages, and Lusted feels that they have the potential to truly capture it as an early adopter.