IBL Banca: effective, flexible and advanced digital signage

IBL Banca operates in the consumer-credit sector. It ranks among the market leaders for salary- and pension-backed loans (the Italian cessione del quinto) and is one of the most competitive banks in the offer of interest-bearing accounts.

For several years the bank has been on a journey to renew its digital signage control systems, in order to manage as effectively as possible the increasingly carefully designed and targeted content and campaigns that animate the more than 110 monitors distributed across its branches. The objectives were twofold: to increase communication effectiveness, and to optimise time so that every publication could be set up and activated quickly and easily.

The answer was WallSign, a Content Management System (CMS) for Digital Signage able to meet these requirements. Telling us more about it are Simone Lancioni, Marketing & Advertising Manager at IBL Banca, with insights from Maurizio Vacca, Sales Director at 3G Electronics (which coordinated the supply and services project), and Alessandro Messineo, Co-Founder of Wallin.

The challenge: communicating news and services immediately and effectively

“In recent years the importance of visual merchandising has grown,” Lancioni explains. “For us, branches are a significant local presence nationwide: a point of advice and direct contact with customers that, for certain product categories, remains fundamental. We have a multichannel approach that combines digital and physical to deliver a complete, 360-degree service. We therefore decided to enhance our image and communication with tools able to convey information about news and services immediately, to spark customers' curiosity and to guarantee the ability to vary and personalise messages according to need.”

In 2015 the bank launched a test phase in major cities such as Milan and Naples, installing the first monitors in branch windows — the first step in a gradual process of renewing in-branch communication. Today this allows the bank to promote advertising campaigns at their best and to turn windows and interior spaces into a communication touchpoint with a high degree of control and strong effectiveness.

“Over the last few years we have expanded the number of monitors installed, which today exceed 110 and are present in more than half of our branches. They are positioned mainly in the windows facing the street and in the customer-welcome lounges, to create continuity of content between the inside and the outside of the branches,” says Lancioni. “Monitors capture people's attention and have a greater visual impact than traditional paper-based tools, thanks to their brightness and the variety of messages that can be alternated. Investing in this direction was an obligatory path for us, and it became necessary to find a content-control system that would let us operate effectively and quickly, in a centralised way, on the campaigns running on the monitors in our branches.”

The solution: a new cloud CMS for new needs

The previous setup could offer a good service but would not have been able to cope with the new needs the customer was developing:

1) Dynamic content. The aim was to give impetus to the launch of new marketing campaigns presenting the range of offers, from loans such as RataBassotta to interest-bearing accounts such as ControCorrente and the new services introduced over time. The bank wanted to target a specific customer segment with a high level of timeliness, through a dynamic content panel conceived in a more sophisticated way than in the past — which required a tool that made content management particularly simple.

2) Scalability: more than 110 players to manage. IBL Banca increasingly wanted a unified system to centrally manage all the players in branches scattered across the country, to optimise resources and raise the level of digital communication everywhere — an aspect it was progressively refining by increasing publication frequency.

After assessing the cloud platforms on the market, WallSign proved the most convincing. Its strengths: extreme simplicity, distinctive intuitive operation and the high degree of control it offers over content through features extremely valuable to marketing, enabling them to work quickly and effectively. Given the need to make frequent updates across a high number of players, WallSign proved to be the most suitable solution.

A fundamental point is that it is a cloud platform — it could not be otherwise, given the objective of managing all the players located throughout the country. To grasp the 'step change', picture IBL's move from management software such as BrightAuthor installed on a single Windows PC controlling branch monitors individually, to a system that, thanks to its cloud nature, embraces all branches and can be accessed from any smartphone, tablet or PC.

Channels: the heart of the system

Among the features that allow WallSign to deliver digital signage at this level, the first — which sets the platform apart from the competition — is Channels. “In many more basic content-management platforms,” Messineo explains, “each player has its own layout with the relevant content. With WallSign, thematic content and advertising campaigns are loaded into the channel and then assigned to players without needing to redesign the entire schedule. Content is uploaded into the channel and there the user chooses which players it should play on — which happens for all the selected monitors simultaneously.”

With organisations like IBL Banca, which has a substantial fleet of displays, the channel removes the need to manage updates manually player by player. “It becomes easy to create dynamic campaigns,” says Maurizio Vacca, “because channels can become marketing campaigns scheduled for specific periods on specific players. You can also pair several channels with a single player, each with its own content system, and so diversify and control communication to the maximum while reducing the time spent. In short, you can do more advanced things in less time.”

Targets, social content and future developments

1) Targets. “When you have a lot of content, it is important to organise it so you can recall and manage it easily,” explains Maurizio Vacca. “WallSign allows unlimited tagging of content. You can assign each item labels describing the campaign, the city it is intended for — e.g. Milan — or the people who created it — e.g. Team A. This way you can easily recall all uploaded materials as needed and work with even greater speed.”

2) Role management. “Typically several actors interact around content: the agency puts it on the platform, marketing puts it on air, then IT oversees publication,” Messineo explains. “The platform creates roles and profiles that govern access at the various stages, ensuring each person can or cannot access content according to their role. Access can be granted simply via Single Sign-On, using, for example, corporate email credentials.”

3) Social content. “WallSign integrates with corporate social channels,” Messineo explains, “and allows posts to be re-broadcast as content. Being able to leverage user-generated content is a strong advantage for marketing, which can also draw — beyond social media — on other automatically created content such as news and weather.”

The platform's future development

A series of features will expand WallSign's capabilities for managing large networks. The tools for monitoring and controlling the correct operation of players and of the whole network are growing, through a control interface with analytics. Reporting is being expanded with a dedicated module that will make it possible to obtain data such as the number of plays of each multimedia item for individual players or groups of players — for example, how many times a video or image has played on a given monitor and/or in a particular branch. The interactivity front is also being strengthened: it will be possible to create interactive experiences with dynamic screens that change at the touch of a hand.