Trending Digital Signage Concepts in the Retail Industry

Shazil Merchant is an innovative business leader who aspires to create wow experiences for clients with new and trendy digital signage solutions. He graduated Electrical & Electronics Engineering from the University of Manchester, UK. Being 3rd generation in the signage business, he has brought many interesting digital signage concepts which have helped in adding more value to their clients’ signage requirements.

SHAZIL MERCHANT

DIRECTOR CHAMPION DIGITAL A MEMBER OF CHAMPION GROUP

After graduating and working in the United Kingdom, I decided to move back to the UAE. Having lived here my entire life, I felt this was a great platform to continue our legacy in the signage industry and explore all the opportunities this growing market has to offer. When I moved back, digital signage barely existed. Many clients did not even know the different solutions that were available at the time. A few had ideas from foreign markets and were eager to replicate concepts in this region. This gave me a lot of confidence in jumping into the digital signage world as I could foresee a rapidly growing demand for these solutions. Looking back today and how the digital signage industry has grown exponentially in the last 5 years, one of our best decisions was to launch Champion Digital as a separate entity rather than just an extra product an advertising company can offer. With dedicated resources and a different structure in place for managing digital signage projects, we as a group can now work on larger and more challenging requirements seamlessly. Champion Group now offers its clients both static and digital signage solutions for indoor and outdoor applications which make their client’s life easier since they only have to deal with one expert regarding how nice their brand physically looks in the market.

The retail industry has been the quickest to adopt digital signage and indeed, clients within the retail industry are our biggest customers today. Most, if not all, retail brands are implementing digital LED screens within their stores to uplift the overall ambience of the shop and create a more engaging environment for its consumers. These displays allow our clients to better communicate with their clients by regularly changing the content of the LED screens without worrying about additional costs. Malls are also adapting to this change very quickly as many retailers today also consider advertising opportunities within the mall – which is a great revenue generation stream for mall management. While at university, I took up robotics as part of my degree purely out of interest. Fortunately, I have been able to bring robotics into the advertising industry with a core focus on uplifting a brand’s marketing through innovation. We are currently working with various F&B clients on concepts where their food is delivered to their customers by autonomous robots within the restaurants creating a huge buzz. Some of these solutions also have embedded digital signage displays which allow our clients to display dynamic and engaging content.