High-quality, effective, and well-designed digital content is important, especially when the goal is to enhance the customer experience.
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Episode Transcript
Convenience Matters Intro:
[Music] You’re listening to Convenience Matters, brought to you by NACS. We’ll talk about what we see at stores and what the future may hold for our industry.
Carolyn Schnare:
How many times have you talked to your marketing department and asked them to just throw something together – a shiny flyer, digital ads, something because you need something quick? Well, every marketing professional listening just slapped their forehead and nodded. Today, we’re going to talk about why that first sentence needs to never happen. And we’re going to talk through how to rethink marketing as content.
I’m Carolyn Schnare with NACS and welcome to Convenience Matters. Now I’m certainly guilty of asking my marketing department to slap something together and they’ve been very kind of educated me why that shouldn’t happen. But I brought in real professionals to tell us more about that, which is why I would like to welcome back my old friend, Rick Sales, who is the president of Abierto and a new friend, Dan Smith, the U.S. vice president of business development with LG Electronics. Hey there, guys!
Rick Sales:
Good morning!
Carolyn Schnare:
So Rick, let me first troubleshoot my initial comment about slapping marketing together and making something shiny and beautiful. So why is that not the way to approach marketing and what are some, some ideas you have in terms of digital marketing and, and whatnot from your experience? Help me explain to those who like to do that slapping of that marketing together? Why we shouldn’t do that?
Rick Sales:
Well, uh, I think we shouldn’t have been doing that for a very, very long time. A lot of content out there that really shows the lack of thought or perhaps lack of direction because, you know, people who put content together really mean well, and they’re trying to deliver something that works. But, when it’s done in a unstructured way, like you described, it really most of the time fails to deliver the message and also fails to deliver it in an effective way. Now, today, why does that matter more today? It’s because technology has raised the bar on what’s possible. And if you’re wondering, what’s possible, all you have to do is look inside of your phone and you’ll see amazing content and things that are possible today. So technology has raised the bar for what’s possible and removed many of the limitations on creativity that may have existed before, or certainly not possible in printed media, but while it lifted the limitations, it also raised the requirements for skill and tools to be able to produce this new type of content. So you’re absolutely correct, this is true. It is the difference between creating content and producing content and for people to be able to create content, they require direction and strategy and purpose in addition to pretty pictures and words.
Carolyn Schnare:
Well, we love have pretty pictures and words, and that’s what I think catches your eye, when you’re talking …you know, we’re talking convenience stores, we’re talking about retail, we’re talking about people coming in maybe right off the street, they don’t exactly know what they want. They don’t even know necessarily where they want to stop. So yes, that does bring you in. But, I know you’ve talked to us before when we talked about like the whole enchilada – I always end up going back to food when I do this show – the whole enchilada…making everything match now, again, I’m not a marketer. I don’t claim to be one on TV or radio or podcast or whatever it is today. But, we’ve talked about…you were on about a year ago, we talked about paper and print versus, digital signage in-store. And I think you were even telling us about that cool….the one that goes in the window, you’re going to be able to tell me your exact name…
Rick Sales:
Open.LED digital film.
Carolyn Schnare:
That you could see right inside. So cool. So I remember looking that up afterwards. So we’ll go back to that later because if you didn’t listen to that episode, I’m going to put it in the show notes because it was really neat to just to hear that and hear all about that and see some of the imagery on there. But I guess it’s like you get a lot of executives that might come in and top-down go “make this happen, do this right away.” But then, you’ve got the designer, whether in-house or out of house, there has to be a conversation of some sort going on.
Rick Sales:
Right, right. So, good content is seamless. And I think that’s really where the executive is coming from. You know, it looks so easy. It’s so seamless, you know, but in its simplicity, there’s a lot of planning and there’s a lot of effort that goes into it. And, you know, I think of it…you know, great way to start in thinking about how you really need to think about digital content so you don’t ask for somebody to slap something together. When you look at that process you have to look at content creation as an investment, just like you look at the technology in the store because you’re investing on the rules of the road for your brand. Okay, what’s it going to look like? What does it stand for? What are the messages? You know, if you’re talking about food, you need to invest on really high quality food photography, right? You can’t tell people with words, how great this thing tastes. Dan and I were talking earlier about the whole concept of how video can convey not only the product, but the experience behind the product, which is something that people crave today. And in fact, we were – and I’m going to throw it over to Dan – because we were looking at this video of this company that makes this wonderful cookie and there’s not a single word in their app yet they convey everything they need to say through their photography and their video. So, things have changed and executives know it and they want it. And I think what I’m trying help them appreciate is that there’s real competence that goes behind those fantastic videos that you see on your phone and on the internet.
Carolyn Schnare:
Oh yeah, I would imagine. So Dan you’re with LG and we all know you make the devices that we’re using maybe to listen to this very podcast or watch it. If you’re watching, you’re listening through your computer, maybe you’ve got it hooked up to your big screen TV. So…but I know that’s one side of your company, but you work with a lot of retailers, you work with folks like Rick to really help produce that. So tell us just a little bit about yourself and LG and then you know, answer to what Rick was talking about about the technology that really makes that stuff pop.
Dan Smith:
Well, I tell you, as far as my personal role, I’ve had a couple of decades of the chance to really enjoy a couple of things that I geek out on. I really enjoy marketing. I really enjoy technology. I enjoy putting those two things together in order to create an effect. So it kind of a beginning point and an ending point. And how do we get from the beginning to the end? So I’ve had the opportunity to talk to the largest retailers in the country. Some of the greatest minds, I would say it was a, like a college education, but accelerated and magnified because I get to hear from so many people like Rick, as well as so many brands about what they do, why they do, how they plan to do it and how they’re going to use our technology. So I end up in a role where I can be consultative both in a marketing perspective, as well as the technology perspective.
Carolyn Schnare:
That’s awesome. I mean, like you said, you witness a lot of that, right? I don’t want to necessarily go like negative, but I find myself learning from mistakes. So, I’m going to throw this one out to both of you. What are some of the top mistakes made when requesting whether there’s digital advertising and some kind of marketing pieces and then turn it around. What would make that successful for – we’re talking mostly to retail operators here, retail marketers – what comes to mind when I throw that out? Now, I’m going to put that to either of you and Dan, why don’t you get started with that?
Dan Smith:
Well, let me break it into three categories. Ultimately this discussion is about how do they accomplish an effect that they want to accomplish. Let’s talk about the output and then we’ll work backwards to the input and the mechanics to make that happen. So, first of all, in a convenience store, or if you would talk about, I said retailers, any retailer – really the point of sale advertising is the most effective because most decisions aren’t made until they are there in the store. So that is a powerful place to be able to influence what a customer is thinking about in terms of decision. Now, when I talk to people that have not done digital before, they’re a little bit confused, a little bit intimidated about what do I do and how do I do it? So let’s talk about the content. So the content in the past, we would create a poster. We’d create something in print and we’d send it to the printer to print. Well, this is basically the same thing, except instead of sending it to the printer, you’re sending it to a display. So it’s really not that much different in terms of how you distribute it. But let’s think about what the content is. So static content now doesn’t really…it’s not as effective. It’s just a picture. Yes, it works. It helps, but it’s not nearly as effective as video. So one of the biggest changes in the content is how do we create that content? So we had discussions about social media, right? I think social media is kind of like an experimental platform of what works for advertising. ‘Cause we’ve had a chance over the past five or 10 years to see billions and billions of exposures to see what works and what doesn’t work.
Dan Smith:
So when you look at social media and you watch…I’ll look over my daughter’s shoulder, over my son’s shoulder and through my personal experiences, they’ll scroll through social media. And if it’s a picture of clothing and someone’s wearing it, they just scroll right past it, right? If it’s a picture of a sporting item and it’s not moving, they scroll right past it. But if all of a sudden they see motion and or they see some lifestyle involved, it’s like, oh, it’s an experience. Now I’m not just looking at a product. I’m looking at an experience. And it really transitions with video from just being a static picture to experience and what I might feel if I buy that product, to use that product, consume that product. So there is a large change in the content itself, going from just a static picture to a video picture.
Dan Smith:
So I was sharing with my friend earlier today, as Rick and I were talking about what’s really good content. Let me show you an example of what I just talked about. My daughter’s friend saw something on social media. I am not affiliated with this company at all. Never talked to him, never sold to them, never purchased except as a consumer, it’s called Crumbl Cookies, but there’s no E in it. So Crumbl Cookies. If you go look at their social media or their internet site, you will see amazing video. And they do this weekly. They have new cookies that they introduce every week. That’s what Rick was talking about. There is no words, there’s no narration. It’s just, you look at the cookies and you’ll look at the video and it’s like, I am hungry. So her friend shared it with her.
Dan Smith:
My daughter shared with a bunch of other people and within a half a day, a bunch of them piled in a car and drove 40 minutes just to go try these cookies. So that is really, I think, a great example of what is the experience of not just saying, ‘hey, I have a drink that you can buy for 99 cents.’ It’s like, wow, this is really cool experience. So part of it is transitioning the content to get the action you wanted. That is to get people to say, I want to be part of that experience. And I want to get something out of this. As I wasn’t expecting at that point of sale, I’m going to get something that I had never expected before. And I’ll continue just a little bit longer and stop. But, if you look at QSR and convenience stores are competing a lot, really they’re crossing over into each other’s space.
Dan Smith:
Let’s take a look at what QSRs are doing right now. It is really hard to walk into a QSR, look at the entire menu board and what know what’s new. Think about the parallel for convenience stores. You can’t walk into a convenience store and none of the thousand items that are in there know that there’s something new or there’s something you may want to try. QSRs have a separate promo board that say, here’s our new offer. They call them LTO, limited time offers. Here’s a new product we want to introduce you to, here’s something we want to drive you to for an experience. So taking what you really want to focus on is key in order to make that content work. In addition to when I talk to people who have never done digital advertising before they like, well, I don’t know where to start.
Dan Smith:
Don’t make a complex, whatever your strategy was before digital, it’s the exact same strategy with digital, just more effective because people like Rick deliver very effectively. So if you want to drive customers into a convenience store to warm foods, focus on the warm foods. If you want them to get a soda with the warm foods, focus on the soda with the warm foods. If you have the major brand of the CPGs that have an advertising track, and then you have a convenience store that has an agenda, you have two agendas that are happening in the store. You can drive both agendas through one platform with digital. You can even create channels where in the beer section, if you want to drive a message about beer, do it in the beer section. If you want to drive a message about warm food, you can drive that as a separate channel in the warm food section. If there’s a donut you want to drive, drive it in the doughnut section. If there’s a main message you want to deliver, as they walk into the store, deliver that as they walk in this store. So I covered a lot there. Really, it was about what is the content? How do you create the content? How do you physically position the content and really Rick and Abierto are experts at delivering that. So I’ll take a pause and let the maybe Rick throw in some comments as well.
Rick Sales:
Well, so I want to support everything that you said, because I think where you started is right, you have to start thinking about the output. You need to start thinking about the end in mind. And the end of the mind is to create a conversion. You try to influence that consumer to either reaffirm a purchase intent or to develop a new purchase intent or to associate with the brand. So again, Dan talked about purpose, right? So you have to define purpose. So to your question Carolyn, what makes good content and what makes it bad content. So if you lack purpose, you’re naturally going to end up with bad content because purpose provides lots of boundaries and bumper guards and guidelines for a content producer to give you a message that is on purpose. So, there’s a guy that we follow this guy, Jimmy Chin, he’s a great video designer for major brands. And in an interview that I saw a couple of months ago, he was talking about how brand designers hurt themselves. And again, to this point of what’s good content and bad content. And he said, well, there’s two things that you can do yourself that are really bad. One is to make amazing content, have no one see it. And the other is to make horrible content and have everyone see it.
Rick Sales:
So, Dan and I are the two halves of the apple or the orange, whatever fruit you want to pick. And the technology and the solution allows you to see it. You’re not in the closet.You’re using technology so everyone can see it. And we’re doing it in a way like Dan talked about where you can target zones. I mean, the technology has really exploded what you can do. And then there’s the content. It could be great, or it could be horrible. So great content is on purpose, horrible content lacks purpose. In digital content that is not so good has a lot of copy, a lot of text. There’s people that came from print media that struggle making the transition to digital media and particular to video, which does not require that much text. In fact, the less text, the better, uh, when it comes to digital media. So, what’s good, right? What makes it great? Like Dan said, simple, clear, easy to understand messaging on purpose on, on brand and on comment, right? But then large high quality photography. People sometimes don’t want to pay for this. And I know it can be pricey, but it’s an investment. Like anything else, it will last you for a long time and it makes all the difference in the world. When you go to the major players, their photography is amazing. When you go to this website that we’re talking about, the cookies photography is amazing, and that really drives everything. And the technology allows you to display amazing stuff today. So you can take advantage of that motion and animation. And I always tell the story that why did humans survive when we were evolving? Well, because they were able to figure out that if the bushes moving, you need to pay attention to it because either they eat you to react to motion and animation, that’s why we can ignore it.
Rick Sales:
And in once you’re caught, if the content grabs you, then you cannot look away. So animation is a natural way of dealing with a consumer in an environment like Dan was talking about. There’s a thousand things calling at you. And there’s one that’s moving. That’s the one that you’re going to pay attention to. And finally, I don’t want this one to get lost. It might seem like it’s not relevant or perhaps hard to quantify, but it’s super important. And it’s creativity and the creativity that you bring to the table through the discussion with either an outside designer or within your team with creative assets is something that your content producer needs. Okay. Ao your content producer is going to follow all your rules and they’re going to make you ads every month. They’re going to make you videos, they’re going to make everything that you need. But this whole creativity element…when we do work for Sheetz – and they talk about creating Sheetz fanatics – and in the creativity of Sheetz message embedded in there is, ‘are you a fanatic?’
Rick Sales:
This is how we defined a fanatic visually in the experiences, how they’re in the video, what they’re doing, you know, can you relate to this? And that creativity really doesn’t happen at the production stage. That creativity happens ahead of time and everybody kind of drinks that, and then good content flows from that. So this is really important and really an important responsibility for the senior executive to drive this because you understand the message, you understand the vision, you know, how you want your people to think about your company. You got to get your team, particularly those who are creating digital content to fully understand this. So they can take visual images and deliver what you’re looking for. So good content, bad content by Rick Sales. Get’s me all the time.
Carolyn Schnare:
Now you mentioned something, you both mentioned it separately..the motion, the video, just catching someone’s eye. And I have teenagers as well. And one is a preteen he’s only 12, but you know, I catch him scrolling through the phone, whatever, or I’ll even show him something like, ‘hey, look at this, read this.’ And he’ll look at the picture and come back and be like, read what? Like, do you not see words? You must read them. You know, they don’t read, they just glaze right over words, you know? And I’m talking social media or something like tiny on their phone. I mean, the same thing with my daughter I’ll see her scrolling through her phone and it does…it’s exactly what you said. They see something moving now. Same thing, I think, when you walk in a store and you think of some store, I think Sheetz, like you mentioned, you walk into… well, I’ve never been to Crumbl, but you’re not the first person this week that’s mentioned that. I’ve seen that on at least three people’s road trips/social media tour. So I have to go find one of these because I love myself some cookies. But I guess what I’m saying, we were talking about convenience stores and you have the nice big digital banners, digital menu boards, maybe it’s something out of the pump you’re watching. What is…we’re talking video. You’re not talking like a 30-second/minute and a half long video that someone has to stand there and watch. Right. You’re talking short clips, short things. Do you have recommendations?
Dan Smith:
What’s, what’s the attention span of your twelve-year-old?
Carolyn Schnare:
Three seconds.
Dan Smith:
That’s the exact number I was going to say.
Carolyn Schnare:
Yeah. You can do that with pictures too. I mean, shoot, even I can do it. I’m not that great at any kind of digital design, but, or, you know, using like Adobe Photoshop or something like that. You can, you can take a photo and zoom around on it and it looks like it’s moving. It might not. It’s just a still photo, but you know, things like that or do you think like investing in an actual video and cutting it up?
Rick Sales:
So let me answer your first question before we talk about the second question. So typically, if we’re doing forecourt advertising, now let’s talk about that because we were talking about the film and we really believe in that product as a way of priming the consumer for their purchases inside the store. So it takes six minutes to fill the average car. So that’s kind of outside boundary that if you go beyond six minutes, you’re wasting your time. Six minutes is a really long period of time. One and a half minutes to two and a half minute playlist is kind of the sweet spot for people outside. And within the, you want to have 10 second, 15 second vignettes. So crisp, clear, to the point. So for example, we did an ad for one of our customers where we were pouring a beer – it was for Budweiser – we’re pouring a beer into the glass and we extracted that from a TV 30-second spot that Budweiser has. But we went and cut that piece out, but we did not play the 30-second spot, we played a ten second spot that included the beer going into the glass and had a simple message about cold beer.
Carolyn Schnare:
What would happen if you poured that in three seconds, you have a big pile of foam.
Rick Sales:
Well, of course. In that in 10 seconds, you’re going to be watching the beer and know I want one. And if you were at Rutters, there will be a message next to that that says that the beer cave is at 29 degrees because that is part of their strategic message. My beer is cold. So when they put up, which we have an ad for their beer in an Open.LED at their stores right now, in addition to there being the beer, is the fact that the beer cave is at 29 degrees. And in 10 seconds we can let people know that that’s a choice.
Carolyn Schnare:
Nice. And it looks..and it’s clear and it looks good. I mean, I don’t know if it was a mistake or a learning moment, but I showed my kids…we were on vacation a couple of months ago and they had a big wall of VHS tapes and we…and I introduced them to a VCR and we showed one of these movies and they’re like, this is going to be terrible. I’m like, no, it’s the same thing you see at home it’s just on a different kind of thing. And I pop the VHS tape in there. Oh my God, the quality was horrendous. I was like, my husband and I looked at each other and said, is this how we used to digest TV? Oh my God.It feels like the stone ages. But you know, if you have a 4k TV, like one of the -and I’m saying it wrong – but one with the really good images. But in short, basically what I’m saying and Dan, you can certainly attest to this, you want it to look really, really good and clear because you know, you see that pixels or the bubbles in that beer coming out, other than just a big pile of foam, it makes you want it even more. So I think that Dan good quality…what’s the word..equipment is important as well as the photography and what’s going on.
Dan Smith:
Can I plug that technology a little bit for a moment? So I’m a technology geek. I said at the beginning. I’m a marketing geek, I’m a technology geek. And what most people don’t realize is that when we think of LCD TVs, that they’re all the same, but they’re not. We have…LG is proud of the fact that we’ve spent a lot of time engineering our colors to be very accurate. And that’s really important to advertisers. It needs to be the right color, the American cheese on the pizza needs to be the right yellow. We have LCD products. We have OLED products. We have LED products. We have stretch screens. We have regular screens. When it comes to the technology, if you have a chance to see really good video reproduction next to standard video production, you will see a difference.
Dan Smith:
So, my wife, my daughter, my customers, I talked to them about technology, but as soon as I pointed out to them, show them the image and what to look at, they can never unsee it after that. When my daughter was seven, I taught her about these things. When I met with some of the top executives in the companies, I talked about it and they’re like, well, but you’re just higher priced or whatever. I point out a few things, just look at the American cheese, look at the color, look at the texture, look at the sesame seeds, right? Look at the bubbles that are in the drink. Switch to the other displays, there is a difference, and it really has an emotional impact when it feels real to you. When the resolution’s good, the color’s good, when you look at videos of a cold beer, a good Coke, a good cookie, you get more hungry when it looks like the real thing.
Dan Smith:
And, and I guess, let me go back to what I said earlier. It’s about transitioning from product to experience, and I’m going to probably repeat many times over the next few years, lifestyle. So lifestyle is really kind of that experience thing. If you see someone wearing clothing, it’s different than if they’re jumping in the air at the beach and their hair is flowing back. And you know, if they’re drinking a drink…there’s a drink sitting there, or there’s someone drinking a drink at a party and they’re having a great time, or they’re on the beach, or they’re at a…it’s that lifestyle experience. So you don’t just transition from print to video. You want to make it a lifestyle experience as much as possible. So, like I said earlier in the podcast, they start to say, I can have that emotion if I engage with this product.
Dan Smith:
And that’s very important. So technology is part of what’s important in delivering that. And then I will continue to just a few more seconds on what LG has really done is they’ve tried to simplify also the physical deployment. So I said at the beginning, let’s start with the end goal in mind and work backwards towards really what you have to do in order to get there. You know, LG has spent a lot of time…displays used to be you a plug-in a display and display something. Now displays are extremely intelligent. There’s built-in computers, there’s built-in remote monitoring, there’s built-in remote management which sounds more complex, but it actually simplifies things for the end user. Now, we have a lot of displays where you plug in power and one network cable, and that’s it. You can send your content over the network cable. You can do the control over the network cable. You can do remote monitoring over the network cable. There’s a media player built into the display. So you can play your content right there. Some of the basics of the technology is let’s make this a lot simpler to deploy, let’s make it simpler to manage and let’s make it simpler to monitor so that you can focus on delivering that lifestyle experience.
Carolyn Schnare:
Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense too. And you know, you don’t have to be in that exact store or standing in front of it with like a TV remote and a keyboard to tell it what to do anymore. You can do that from anywhere, I would suppose, which a lot of us do these days. We’re remote we’re, we’re not in the stores. And, you know, I think that takes a little bit of time off things. And another thing that any retailer or any person generally is thinking is cost now, Rick, you and I have talked in the past and we talked a little bit in the beginning too, about paper, paper signs, paper, or cardboard or whatever they’re made of, you know, I imagine, you know, there’s, yes, there’s a little cost behind digital, but I would imagine it even pays itself off, you know, obviously, you know, just the expense of it all, but, you know, Dan, like you said the experience, the sales, the translation. Can you talk a little bit before we close.What’s the what’s the mistake behind printed stuff? Why is that not the way to go these days?
Rick Sales:
Well, you know, I think that maybe I don’t know that I would frame the question that way, because there’s always a role for paper. I just think that they’re diminishing and potentially niche roles in the future for these things because of cost and logistics and consumer expectation. But, I think you really cannot deliver an experience with paper and consumers are looking to embrace a brand and have that brand be part of their lifestyle definition. And by consequence of all of this, you’re looking to engage with the brand experientially, not just transactionally. So you want to be a Sheetz fanatic. You want to be part of the culture. And this is what our messaging needs to accomplish today. So we, we have a great relationship and a multi-year relationship with LG partly because of our desire to find the best partner in the industry. And also partly because they’re designed to find knowledgeable people in the industry that can deliver that last mile and then enable customer. So we’ve found in each other things that allow us together to give a better solution to our convenience store customers. And I have to tell you what Dan is talking about is true. The LG monitor in the way that it works colors and the way that it works black is a fantastic product and in the way that it has enhanced technology, it allows us to really bring our software to it and make it an easy to manage platform. Because at the end of the day, the convenience store executive has to ask themself this question is how are my creative people adding value to my company? And they’re not adding value by scheduling and running software. They’re adding value by creating the message and making sure that the story, the experience, makes sense.
Rick Sales:
And then there’s companies like us and companies like LG that will bring the technology to bear and make the experience easy to happen. Okay. And we add value from that standpoint. But the one thing that the retailer has is the most valuable, which is the goal, the message, the brand, and by taking away with technology and with integration, a lot of these execution steps and making them easier, the retailer can focus on the message. They can focus on the experience. They can invest in photography and they can really produce content that will get their consumers not only to engage with them, but to prefer them and embrace them as a brand that is part of their personal brand and definition. I think that’s the ultimate goal.
Carolyn Schnare:
Well that…you closed the episode. I mean, you said it all very perfectly. Thank you for doing that. I don’t even have to do a summary here. But before I do that, I want to make sure that we can help our listeners find you. This is why I keep going back to you, Rick, to say, tell us more. You help educate me, you teach me stuff every time and you make me think, so how can folks get ahold of you? Where can they find you? I know I can find you on LinkedIn and you always share some really great stuff. Are there some places they can go to see some of the cool stuff you talked about today?
Rick Sales:
Right. Right. So we are very active in LinkedIn. I am Rick Sales and on LinkedIn, Abierto has a page on LinkedIn and we post our content and we post comments from our contributors. And we’d love for you to engage with us and engage with brand there as well. We do have a webpage where we are hosting sample content that I’d love for you to see as something that we will continue to update. So it’s, I’m going to spell it out. It’s OPEN, the word, Open.AB – Apple Boy – the dash net, like network.us. That’s our URL, Open.AB-net.us, and you want to go to our sample content page by adding the forward slash and the words sample content together. So, Open.AB-net.us/samplecontent. We’ll get you to some real convenience stores and you’ll see some video in the forecourt. And you’ll see some of the things that we talked about, and we welcome your questions. At the end of that page. There’s a registration blank that you can register and I will get a message as part of the team and we’ll reach out to you and hear what your plans are and give you some thoughts and hopefully find a way to work together. So please visit our page, reach out to me on LinkedIn and I’d love to chat with you about your plans.
Carolyn Schnare:
I’m going to go ahead and put that in the show notes so, I know you guys that were out there doing your three mile run while you were listening to this or your drive home or to from work, so you don’t have to write that down. That’s in our show notes. And tell Rick that you really enjoyed him on the show too, he’ll know where he came from. And Dan, how do we find you? Where are you? Where are you located these days? Well, not literally. I’m not…we’re not, coming to your house.
Dan Smith:
Oh, I’d like to host you, however, our website, if you just Google LG business solutions, it’ll take you to our website. So instead of trying to remember all the syntax, LG Business Solutions, it’ll find that. So thank you for the opportunity to share that.
Carolyn Schnare:
Oh, very cool. So, you know, now we know we love a paper. If you want to, we’ll give you the address. You can mail everyone a letter. No, I’m just kidding. This has been really great. I appreciate learning .Next time you’re out in a store, take a look – or anywhere really – a business, a restaurant, take a look at those signs and take a look and see how many you see? I think someone told me once they went into a store and they said, how many signs can you count? And just stand there and just see how many signs you’re counting and then see if there’s a way to simplify that, so take that home with you too. Well, Dan, Rick, thank you so much for joining us today on the show, I really enjoyed this and thank you all for listening to Convenience Matters.
New Speaker:
Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.
About our Guests
Rick Sales, President, Abierto

Enrique (Rick) Sales has served as the President of Abierto since it was founded in 2005. He has an extensive background in the Convenience and Fueling industry, working as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Intelligent Controls before starting Abierto. As technology changes, Rick continues to evolve the company and adapt to new industry trends and problems. Rick has a black belt in Taekwondo, enjoys fishing, and is a rabid Celtics fan.
Abierto Networks is a Digital Engagement Solutions provider focused on the Convenience Store and Convenience Foodservice Retail industries. Their digital marketing solutions integrate in-store digital signage, digital menu, engagement kiosks, mobile coupons and mobile engagement technologies to help retailers increase sales by maximizing consumer upsell, cross-sell and revisit opportunities.
Dan Smith, U.S. Vice President of Business Development, LG Electronics.

Dan Smith is the U.S. vice president of business development for LG Electronics. Dan has led sales and engineering teams to develop new markets and customers by combining technical, academic and practical knowledge with decades of market knowledge.
Related Links
Abierto Sample Content
LG Business Solutions
Episode #248 The Future of Forecourt Communication is in Pixels

