About advertising machines, different people have a different understanding, this part mainly explains the scope of the advertising machine referred to in the article. Before we discuss it, let's distinguish a few concepts

Advertising Machine Industry Analysis (Market and Products)

Prologue

Advertising machines and digital signage

Digital signage is the abbreviation of digital signage, which refers to the display terminal of any information; an Advertising machine is a display terminal for advertising. Strictly speaking, digital signage is broader than advertising machines, but nuances are often ignored in the advertising machine industry, and the two are equated for accessible communication.

Advertising machine and commercial display

Commercial display refers to a broader range of educational all-in-one, whiteboard projection, digital signage, commercial TV (such as hotel machines), LCD splicing and laser projection are all commercial displays.

The relationship between advertising machines, digital signage, and commercial display is shown in the figure below:

In the bus station, often see a roller-type advertising machine, inside the roller rolling, dragging picture transformation, this kind of advertising machine is not the scope of this article. This paper discusses the advertising machine with an LCD display.

Market

Market Features

In the advertising machine market, there are many kinds of customers, many customized demand pages, and many small orders. Many customers only need a few or a dozen of them. An order of more than 100pcs is considered a large order, and an order of more than 1000PCS is considered a large order is rarely seen in ten years. The advertisement machine technology threshold is low, the manufacturer is special also. Big and small, good and bad. Some big companies are responsible for the purchase of advertising machines through the way of equity, partnership with friends to open a company, exclusive of the company’s orders, even if there is a public bidding link, other companies can not share the action.

Market Classification

The market is mainly divided into the following categories, as shown in the table below:

Special Market

Advertising machines, as the name suggests, specialize in displaying ads and are naturally suited for advertising operations. Its remote network management, and personalized advertising, so that it has special advantages in advertising operations, favored by media companies. Many sales will ignore this market, so it is listed separately from the above table to show its importance.

Product Type

Complete Machine

There are two important parts of the whole machine (the machine discussed here does not include application software), the appearance and function, and the development process. The former can be perceived by the customer. The latter is hard for customers to feel. The appearance and functions are customized according to customer requirements. Functions can be divided into general functions and accessory functions. Common features are those that all products have, such as display and sound; Add-ons are features that customers might use, such as touch, camera, and sound pickup. After the customer’s requirements were clear, product development began. The development process can be roughly divided into design, testing and improvement, and production. Large companies will be divided into more details, such as mass production is divided into trial production, small batch and batch, design into appearance design, structural design and electronic design, and so on. Small companies generally do not trial production, but direct production.

The next section will focus on testing, which will answer the question many people have asked about why products with the same features and the same configuration can be priced so differently. Some of it is the supply chain, but not all of it, because in the age of the Internet, a lot of component prices are pretty transparent, and it’s more about testing. Every manufacturer does tests, but the tests vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. The cost of testing mainly comes from three parts: testing manpower cost, testing equipment consumption cost, and time cost. (Some costs, such as the rental cost of the test room or the freight cost of the test outsourcing, will be ignored here for the sake of highlighting the focus and convenience of readers because they account for a small proportion).

Some small companies, such as newly established companies, due to limited funds, in order to survive, customers place orders on the direct purchase of components assembly, simple functional test on the delivery, a functional test is simple to what extent, customers use the function test, will not use the accident. These small companies respond quickly and deliver quickly, but they cannot guarantee the quality of their products or the safety of their customers.

Larger companies, with a certain amount of capital accumulation, will purchase some reliability test equipment, such as constant temperature and humidity boxes, and aging equipment, to do some reliability tests, to ensure the reliable use of products. Reliability test is as short as a week, as many as dozens of days, so the delivery time will be relatively slow, and time cost and labor cost will be higher.

Larger companies, in addition to reliability testing, will also do electrical performance testing, to ensure that the electrical performance parameters of each component meet the requirements of their specifications, so the company needs to buy oscilloscopes and other testing equipment, increase testing personnel, arrange time testing, the cost of the whole machine will be higher.

Worldwide, all products are required to do Compulsory Certification to ensure product safety. In Mainland China, it is called 3C Certification. The Certification cost of an advertising machine is about tens of thousands of yuan, and the specific cost is related to the specific machine. Because of the small single advertising machine, the company is generally unwilling to do 3C certification for a dozen orders, rather than be punished by the government, because the penalty cost will be relatively low. Listed companies generally do 3C certification (but dare not say absolutely here, every product of a listed company will do 3C certification), so many regular companies are not willing to accept more than ten small single.

Software

Advertising machine market software there are many, the most important two, one is the information release system, responsible for the display of information; The second is the remote equipment management system, responsible for the management of equipment. One or two AD machines don’t capture the importance of these two apps, but when users need to manage a hundred of them, scattered all over the country, they do.

A remote equipment management system can batch control the switch of the advertising machine, and detect the running state of the advertising machine. This software is very convenient to use when managing the switch of 100 advertising machines. An information distribution system is used to publish information, including pictures, texts, and videos. Imagine a scenario where you have to play a company video on 100 advertising machines. It’s a lot of manual work. The software only needs an administrator to upload a promotional video on the console, which is very convenient.

The two software introduced above is designed based on the display function of the advertising machine. Nowadays, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, various underlying technologies emerge endlessly, adding more images to the application of advertising machines. In the future, the advertising machine is not only a display terminal but also a big data collection terminal. The touch function of the AD machine can obtain the most popular information of users; Image recognition and voice recognition can capture data such as traffic, gender ratio, and viewing duration. Finally, in the background, the daily data such as weather, temperature, customer flow, male/female ratio, and the number of customers in the store are compared with the sales volume of the day to explore the potential operation rules.

Service

Some small companies only do business once, do not receive the money, the customer as a god for the product sold, received the money, ignore the customer. As for the service, that can push, this kind of self-destructive behavior is more common in many small companies. Nowadays, product homogenization is serious, some functions of li’s product and Zhang’s also have, which show the importance of service more and more. Good service can not only improve customer satisfaction and retention but also establish long-term cooperation with customers, which in turn helps to reduce transaction costs.

In addition to timely answers to customer feedback questions, we also need to summarize the questions and figure out which ones belong to product problems and which ones belong to customer understanding. Sometimes you hear developers say that the product is designed this way, the customer can not operate this way, such developers are conducting cognitive training, and such product design is also against humanity. For electronic products, in the non-destructive operation, all the customer’s use behavior is reasonable, and most of the problems should be solved from the perspective of product design and development so that the product can progress and improve. Not every customer who finds a problem reports it back to the manufacturer, so thank those who do, even if their feedback drives customer service and engineers crazy.

End