Enterprise signage is infrastructure, not AV
Last week at InfoComm, we sat in on a panel with four of the industry’s most seasoned vets, digging into a problem that’s wrecked deals for decades. Steve Glancey of Diversified moderated, and he kept his panel — Tom Percich (VP of Sales, Diversified), Misty Chalk (VP of Sales, Americas, BrightSign), and Jay Leedy (SVP of Strategic Alliances) — honest about why deals stall, why pilots die on the vine, and why our industry still insists on selling a hardware box like it’s a business.
Most of what the panel shared looked familiar, but it did point out one real shift. In a lot of markets, digital signage is no longer a nice-to-have CAPEX project. It’s become infrastructure and therefore needs both CAPEX and OPEX budgets to actually work.
This is core to why deals often stall. The industry keeps selling them as AV projects, but our buyers already think of them as infrastructure. That gap decides who funds the project, who has authority over it, and, frankly, what gets talked about first.
Great content can’t rescue a deal that was mis-sold at the budget level, and it can’t sit outside the problem either. Content, and the people running it, live in that same infrastructure budget.
Let’s dig in a little more…
1. Deals don’t stall because sales blew it; they stall because the deal wasn’t structured to convert all potential stakeholders.
Steve opened with the oldest question in enterprise: “When a deal dies, is that a sales problem or a structure problem?”
It turns out to be both, and the order matters more than you’d think. If the deal isn’t structured properly up front — who’s funding it, CAPEX or OPEX, which stakeholder needs what and when — then it was always going to fall apart eventually.
Tom Percich told a story about a deal that only flipped once the buyer changed: it stopped being a facilities line item and became something a CFO and a Chief Customer Officer cared about. The lesson? You don’t rescue a stalled deal by pushing harder. You rescue it by walking the buyer down a path they can actually follow, one gate at a time.
Our favorite line of the hour came from Steve, dressed up as a question: “Who’s not in the room that should be?” It’s a question worth asking even when you’re the champion, and honestly, especially then.
The move: Before you chase the deal harder, reframe who owns it. If your only contacts are in Facilities or IT, you’re selling an AV project. Find the person who’d benefit from the business outcome — revenue, customer experience, risk — and get them in the room as well. That single move can change the budget the project gets funded from.
2. Enterprise Digital Signage networks are orchestras, not a solo act.
Here’s the trap that every person on that panel admitted to falling into at least once. Marketing and Communications teams center on content because its novel and an easy extension of their current roles, so they pack early meetings with creative teams to start riffing on concepts before anything else is settled. Conversely, technical and procurement teams fixate on hardware and software discussions early, because the solutions are tangible, easily priced for and familiar to these teams’ lines of work.
Both groups bypass IT hoping for downstream alignment so powerful the executive champion will force adoption, assuming InfoSec reviews will be a quick checkbox en route to deployment. Relying on a solo act vs. identifying and conducting an orchestra of stakeholders can lead to disastrous results.
Misty Chalk made the case that the real fix is sequence: the right people in the room at the right time, with security and IT brought in early and treated like genuine partners rather than a box you check on your way out the door.
Jay Leedy backed her up with a war story about watching IT, deliberately left out of the early conversation, quietly sink a deployment that already had money attached to it. The fallout, he said, was “significant,” and he let that word sit there long enough for the whole room to feel it.
The move: Sequence your stakeholders like a dependency chart, not a guest list. Security and network access come before creative, every time — because content is the reward for getting the plumbing right, never the opening move.
3. A pilot of 50 is where the project goes to die.
When a customer needs 4,000 locations but can only fund 50, Tom’s advice was blunt: tell them to keep their money. Fifty screens won’t prove anything, move anything, or unlock the next round of budget. They will likely sit there like wallpaper until everybody quietly forgets they exist and the renewal conversation never happens.
The difference between a pilot that dies and a pilot that scales isn’t the technology — it’s how the pilot was framed in the contract. A pilot sold as “proof of concept” is already on life support. A pilot sold as phase one, with governance, standards, and content velocity locked in from day one, is the start of a program.
Misty added on with a zinger: ask the people running a live signage network what they’re actually measuring, and a startling number go quiet. Not the wrong answer — no answer. If “success” just means the screens didn’t get hacked this quarter, that isn’t a program; it’s a heartbeat monitor.
The move: Never sell a “proof of concept.” Sell phase one of a defined rollout, and write the success metric into the pilot before it starts — ideally one a CMO and a CFO can both point to, like a change in basket size, conversion, or dwell. A pilot with no agreed scoreboard has already lost.
4. “Build vs. Buy” is the wrong fight. Ongoing support is the real one.
This was the moment the room leaned in, as the entire panel debated it with their personal survival stories. Misty argued the open-ecosystem line: a good buyer should be able to compose their own stack from best-of-breed parts and swap any layer that lets them down.
Jay elaborated further, using a quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in the film Jurassic Park: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – citing multiple examples of well-funded organizations who allowed internal teams to build bespoke solutions, usually turning into a twenty-four-month detour dressed up as a savings plan.
Tom closed it from the integrator’s chair, and his line was the one that stuck: “The build-it-yourself projects almost always come back in eighteen months asking for help.”
If your reason to build is financially motivated, it’s the wrong reason — savings on SaaS fees are quickly overshadowed by feature gaps and ongoing maintenance costs, not to mention hardware maintenance, device management, network operations and Day 2 support, much of which is usually balanced on one ket resource and a typically ambivalent IT Support organization with divergent priorities. When that key resource moves on, the investment inevitably crumbles.
What’s really driving most customer-built networks is the need for flexibility and interoperability. The fear sitting in every enterprise buyer’s chest is being tied to a single vendor for good, or worse, eating the cost of switching providers down the line. But that fear points the wrong way: the trap isn’t a closed stack, it’s a stack nobody’s accountable for. A system built in-house can lock you in harder than any vendor, except now you’re the one holding the keys, and the ransom is your own roadmap.
The move: Don’t argue build versus buy on price — you’ll lose, because “free” always sounds cheaper. Argue it on flexibility, interoperability, and longevity. Ask the buyer who maintains it in year three, and what happens when one layer fails: is someone accountable for fixing it, or are they the one up at 2 a.m. holding the whole thing together? That reframe wins the deals the spreadsheet was losing.
5. AI in signage is real in exactly one place right now. Everywhere else, it’s mostly overwhelm.
The most honest moment of the hour came when Steve dropped the booth-pitch voice entirely and asked, for real, where AI is working today versus where it’s still just hype.
Nobody reached for a roadmap fantasy. The answer was measurement. Real-time data straight off the screens, so you can act in the moment when the ad isn’t landing or the cart behavior is off, instead of finding out next quarter.
Jay added the piece that made many nod — anomaly detection, the black-screen alerts and networks smart enough to interpret what’s wrong and heal themselves, rather than waiting on some poor human to go digging at two in the morning.
Generative content got the side-eye, and rightly so: it’s promising, but nobody on that stage would prompt-and-pray across a live Enterprise fleet at the moment.
The quiet revelation underneath all of it is that AI is finally what turns signage from a cost line into a measurable revenue channel — which is exactly the language that gets a rollout funded.
The move: Use AI where it’s already credible — attribution, optimization, anomaly detection — and let that be your ROI story, not the generative razzle-dazzle on the banner. “This network measures whether it changed behavior” is the sentence that survives a CFO’s scrutiny.
What we keep coming back to
The panel diagnosed many disease, and many laddered up to assembled complexity. The vendor sprawl, the three-way blame game, the stranded fifty-screen pilot, the “we don’t really measure it” shrug. Every failure they described traces back to the same root — a stack nobody owns end to end, sold as AV to a buyer who needed infrastructure.
So, if you’re an integrator or a signage operator reading this, here’s the whole hour in one breath -– change who’s in the room. Sequence the plumbing before the content. Sell phase one, never a proof of concept, with a scoreboard agreed up front. Win build-versus-buy on support & flexibility, not price. And let measurement — not the AI banner — carry your ROI story.
None of it is about more screens as much as deciding to own the whole picture so that when the lights go out, nobody’s left in the room pointing fingers.
