Joe Giebel, Poppulo

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When I was buzzing around the InfoComm trade show earlier this year, I stopped at one stand for a chat, looked at the next stand over, and saw some familiar faces from Poppulo - the rebranded name for a company long known in digital signage industry circles as Four Winds Interactive.

I went over and got caught up on what the company was up to and why it was showing at InfoComm, as I had grown in recent years to regard Poppulo - right or wrong - as being primarily focused on omnichannel workplace communications.

I was mostly wrong, though I think it is fair to say that in the wake of a private-equity backed merger of Four Winds with an Irish company that did employee communications, there was marketing more noise for at least a while on the workplace side.

David Levin, the co-founder and longtime CEO of Four Winds, stepped back from that role almost a year ago now, and I had been wanting to do a podcast with new CEO Ruth Fornell, whose background was well  outside the signage and workplace comms industries. After a preliminary chat, and me saying I'd poke away at her about digital signage stuff, she suggested I'd be in better hands with Joe Giebel, who has been with the company almost 20 years and is its Senior VP of Digital Signage.

Joe and I get into a bunch of things in our chat, including the journey of blending technologies and culture, and the shifting needs and profiles of customers.

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TRANSCRIPT

Joe, nice to catch up with you. It's been a while. Can you tell me what your role is at Poppulo? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, absolutely. My current role is Senior Vice President of Digital Signage, which is a fresh title for me. I'm coming out as a vice president of sales for America's role, where I've been fortunate to lead a number of our sales teams.

For those who don't know Poppulo, there, a lot of the digital signage folks will probably know you or know the company more as Four Winds Interactive, but that changed, what about five, six years ago now? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. I think we did that in 2021. So not too long ago, but, yeah, let me give a little bit of a history.  Four Winds Interactive was founded in 2005 as a digital signage company and remains so, but right around 2020, we started looking at different opportunities to enhance our offering, and made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was a company called Poppulo, which was the best-in-class enterprise, internal communications tool. So we brought them into the mix and when we did that, we started to look at the names, like how do we go to market and how do we want to do business as, and so we started doing market studies and it turns out that the name Poppulo, which loosely comes from a Latin term for the term “people” resonated and we decided to change the name to Poppulo.

Four Winds Interactive serves as a parent company. We do business as Poppulo and the name Four Winds Interactive was always interesting and people wanted to know what's the origin of that name and its significance, and there wasn't a big story there. So I think we were open to considering a new brand and look and feel, and that's the story, Dave. 

Yeah, if we go way, way back to almost 20 years ago, Four Winds kind of got its start with those little semi-electronic touch panels that you would play back samples of music, right?

Joe Giebel: That is correct, and they were dealing with specialty media. So there was a company called, Four Winds Trading. That company was dealing with specialty media and a lot of it had to do with native tribes. So the Four Winds related there a little bit more. During that business, they started to think about how do we get loyalty around the distribution of our media titles and different things that we're distributing, and of course, screens were new at the time and media in an interactive format is very engaging, and so they were looking at how we merchandise this with technology? 

And out of that was born the concept of digital signage and Four Winds Interactive.

You go back, I believe right to the beginning to the rented mansion house in downtown Denver, right? 

Joe Giebel: I actually predated the mansion where we had a corner of the warehouse, for our sister company, in Arvada, Colorado, and, yeah, that was in 2005. I think I was certainly a single digit, I think I was the fifth employee in the company and I got to be there from the beginning and started to see what markets will digital signage be valuable in and, where should we target people and it was an incredible time. 

So if we go to today, I bumped into the Poppulo stand at Infocomm, and admittedly, and I said it at the time, I was kind of surprised to see the folks there because you being a little bit absent, I would say from the trade show circuit, or at least from the circuit that a lot of the other CMS software companies show at, so it struck me as almost like the company was getting back into digital signage a little more seriously, but I was told, and I suspect you'll say the same thing that no, we never left. 

It's just that, maybe we're kind of amping up marketing again. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I would agree with that, we never left. When we went through our acquisition period, we had a lot of great new tools and we were looking at how do we adjust what we're putting to the market and what are the right arenas to play in. Distracted is not the right word, but it's probably close. We were dealing with a lot of things and not to lie about trade shows following the pandemic. We're a little bit quieter and I think potentially we were being smart with our budget and certainly had some areas to apply it. 

We missed the trade show circuit, and this year, we're jumping back into it and it feels good. 

My impression, and you can correct me was post-acquisition of Poppulo and kind of merging the companies. It seemed reflected in part in online marketing and so on, or what I would hit on the website that you were focusing more on workplace experience and, maybe not making as much noise around digital signage, perhaps because that was established.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we brought in these new channels. We started to look at the workplace and the way we communicate with employees in a broader sense, and I think you could look at one of our major focus areas is the workplace and employee experience, and we started to say: as the world moves to remote work, and then we've kind of swung back to hybrid, and it looks like, there have been some big splashes in a full return to office by some major organizations, digital signage was a channel that we think is extremely effective in pushing a message, but we wanted to be able to reach people in more ways, and we do that now through a multi-channel approach, which includes the ability to reach employees by email, the ability to land messaging and collaboration tools, and still maintain the scale and governance that you want from an enterprise tool.

So I'd say we're multi-channel. Digital signage is near and dear to my heart, and I think we're about to see a major pushback into how we drive that employee experience through digital displays, as more and more people come back to the office, it becomes a mandate. 

Was it a little worrisome because of the whole idea of, okay, everybody's just going to work, from home from now on and I saw lots of software companies doing the equivalent of desktop screensavers, ways to push messaging to people who are now working at home instead of coming into an office. 

So did you guys have to kind of look at things and go, okay, this could be a problem if we're not kind of broadening our offer?

Joe Giebel: I think we saw an opportunity and, one, we saw an opportunity to make the digital signage for those frontline workers and the people that didn't have that option to go home even stronger, and at the same time we always had that question. How do we better engage people who aren't in the offices where we are putting our displays, maybe their field workers, maybe they travel constantly, or maybe they work from home?

I think that really brought it to the forefront. Luckily, we were in the process of figuring out how to extend or create extensibility within the platform, ahead of everybody leaving office buildings. So we felt like we had a good foot forward, and we're all in on how to provide the best possible platform to reach your audience now. I struggle to say we're entirely workplace-focused because we also have a lot of people doing customer-facing things.

So it truly is understanding your audience, what are the things you want to enable or shape their behavior with and what's the best way to reach them, we really want to be that platform for our clients and it's about value, you know, what is it you hope to affect or inform and what's the best way to do it. 

When you say customer-facing, how do you define that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, I need to get information in front of people who may purchase from me or interact with my solution. So I look at my clients and you know the classic use case is a retail environment. Obviously, you've got customers coming through a retail environment.

What I don't think always gets thought of is that lobby of big headquarters. Many of our clients are bringing customers and. partners through their spaces that are customer-facing as well or major delivery centers. If you've got people building very expensive items, they often have delivery centers where they bring clients in both pre-sale and post-sale, to understand here's that product you're going to invest in over the next two, three, ten years, through that partnership, and then you look at things like executive briefing centers, very similar. 

How do I bring my client base and prospects into an environment where I can show off what we do? In the market, I want to be able to show that in a number of ways. Digital, obviously, is an outstanding way to show use cases and product information, and really shape an experience when you have your customers in your space. Tell me if that was a good answer for what you were hoping to define.

You did fine. Since more and more in the marketplace, larger customers, whether you want to call them enterprise or choose a name, are looking to slim down the number of vendors that they have, and they would like one vendor to do multiple things. Have you found that with some of your established clients that maybe you started with the workplace communications piece that they've then asked about doing large video walls, things like that, and on the flip side, maybe, whether it's an airline or an automaker, I'm thinking of some of your clients, more established clients. Have they said, yeah, we'd now like to also do workplace communications. Do you do that? 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. First of all, if we make our clients successful, naturally, those teams that manage whatever solution they're implementing are getting questions from their peers on, how do I do that? You know, can you help me, and, who's your partner making this possible?

So we see expansion across the products they own and new use cases. As you mentioned, maybe they're doing employee comms on screens and then it becomes large video walls and experiential things, maybe it's facilities related to meeting room signs, wayfinding, et cetera. 

To the other element of your question, they're also saying if that partner is making us successful, where else can we use them? They do want to consolidate solutions to one vendor that they have success with. That's the biggest question that comes up with my clients. If I invest in you, how are you going to guarantee this solution is successful? And my team sees an ROI and it's not another tool that goes unused. So without a doubt, there's a desire, I believe, by Finance and IT to consolidate technology and vendors, as much as possible, especially if there's a track record of driving a return on the investment and making teams successful.

I'm guessing the conversations are very different than they were, 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, in terms of. I would say in the past, in the history of this digital signage was sold and people were interested in, from the idea of the kind of the sizzle of the screens, the visual elements of it and these days, instead of talking to marketing people, you're talking to IT people and they care about security and they care about data integration, things like that, is that accurate? 

Joe Giebel: That is 100 percent accurate and I think you highlight in 2005, when we started the screen had such a sizzle, most homes didn't have flat-screen TVs. We were talking about plasmas back then. The iPhone didn't exist. So the concept of a touch screen and a large flat screen display, made life a real fun for digital signage. 

Now the screens are more common. security and value, are kind of the table stakes to get into the game and where you really start to differentiate, you you understand the use case and how that is going to benefit a company, whether you're increasing productivity, reducing risk, and is that apparent? And do they understand how you're going to deliver that? And then on the security side, you almost don't get to pass go if you don't have a security posture that can scale globally, and, provide a safe feeling.

I don't even think they have worries, right? You just don't do business with a vendor that's going to create worry, they've either got the security you need or you move on. 

Yeah, and I mean, at least historically, I'm not sure where you're at right now, but historically you had a very large casino group and you had a very large Airline and those are two companies that have to be like, everybody has to be concerned about security, but they really care about security. 

Joe Giebel: They do. It's paramount, obviously it presents a ton of risk. If you don't have that secure environment that matches their standard and those two examples, especially within the gaming world, those are tremendous partners of ours that kind of walked us through: Here's where you need to be, and we're so fortunate to have worked with them, and been able to develop that security posture with them in real world scenarios. 

If you haven't set up gaming integrations and received gaming licenses. That is an in depth process that most of your leadership gets to go through and they get into personal stuff, they do a great job of remaining secure 

So if you're going to work with those kinds of whale clients, you got to be prepared for a lot of hand holding and a long process? 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. They're going to look at everything. I mean, they will find if you've got an NFL pick thing going on internally and you somehow put that interface onto a website, they're going to find that and they're going to ask you questions on why you're running a gambling ring. It goes that in-depth.

They will see your resumes, they're going to do background checks on most of your team. So, there is a process to it. it takes some time and they leave no stone unturned. 

It's been a few years now. Was the process of blending two companies, and I believe it's actually three companies that were kind of blended together, was that a bit of a journey?

Joe Giebel: It is absolutely. Our company for the early history, we bootstrapped it. We had a visionary CEO that founded the company with one partner and we were a tight-knit family that didn't have outside investors. Taking on outside investment was a journey, and an experience, and then as we acquire, these are new experiences for our teams and so it is a bit of a journey. 

There's the whole business operations side of things and how do you get multiple systems to speak to each other? How do we blend processes and then you've got the cultural elements of bringing organizations together, and you have to balance all of that? The people need to remain happy, the systems have to work. So it was a process and if I look at my resume and time with these organizations, what an education it's been for the last 19 years. 

Are there kinds of tribes, so to speak? I'm curious if the operation in Cork, Ireland, which was where Poppulo, came from. Is that the workplace side and are the people in Denver more focused on digital signage? 

Joe Giebel: You know, that's part of the journey and the early stages of the journey you definitely have. I'll stick with your term tribes and people that have knowledge and quite honestly, comfortability with a certain way of doing business.

Along that journey, you start to see that tribal element go away, and you start to see the company mesh and become one organization that grows, and so early on, Denver had to be the hub for digital signage. It’s a, I don't want to say complex, but if you're used to selling a pure SaaS solution, and then you start to add in hardware and the different elements of digital signage, it's more than you're used to and without a doubt, I hadn't talked about email and corporate communications in that sense prior to the acquisition. So it took me time to understand it.

 I would say now, our entire company is so excited about a multi-channel tool, that everybody's leaned into it at this point and we work cross functionally quite well. It extends the workday quite a bit. 

I'm sure there was also a bit of a journey kind of massaging and figuring out the right message, because going to target customers and saying, we do this and we do this, and we also do this must've potentially left them a little cross eyed.

Joe Giebel: Without a doubt. I think we've learned along the way, when to talk about. the channel for a client and when to focus on a specific offering, and that's a delicate dance as well to feel that out. Because not every customer understands our vision quickly, and they certainly don't share the excitement that we have over new stuff because it's not at the forefront of what they do every day. So you can absolutely create a ton of confusion, and we probably did that, in the early process of coming together as Poppulo. 

It probably feels like you're trying to sell them more stuff. 

Joe Giebel: You know, as a sales guy, I'm probably insensitive to that, but, yeah, absolutely. You kind of get that sense when someone's sniffing out a salesperson coming into the room, and I bet we did pass that as well. 

At the end of the day, we are trying to sell more stuff, but if we can't illustrate what the value is and why it makes sense to buy more solutions from us, we haven't done our job and we're probably not going to win that. So at the end of the day, we really do want to try to enhance the offerings and drive value to our client base. 

You also have an office now in Bangalore, India. Is that a Dev team or a remote Dev team? 

Joe Giebel: You know, we've got a number of functions, including development in Bangalore and that's an exciting market. I just saw endless content about how important digital signage is in India, and so we were excited to open that office up. I think it's been open for several months. We held our grand opening last week, but we've got a great team there, including a lot of technical folks and so we're very excited about that expansion. 

But it's sales as well? It's not just purely, what would be perceived at least as being lower-cost, software development than what you would pay in North America. 

Joe Giebel: Correct. It's not purely an offshoring effort. We see some strategic elements there. We've always provided technical experts to support our clients 24/7. That certainly helps the effort. We used to do that from Denver and have people working through the night. We now have folks in support as well in Bangalore. 

The work culture in India, I think opens up a ton of possibilities for any digital signage vendor. That's looking at how do I enhance the workplace and employee experience within an office. I think that's going to be a tremendous market. 

Yeah. I mean, it's a vast market. I suspect the challenge is based on the emails and pitches I get from people that the expectations on cost for SaaS licensing, software, and so on are somewhat lower than they are in North America.

Joe Giebel: It's interesting, and some of the organizations there, that's a tough game if you don't have scale in what we're talking about, oftentimes though, if an organization is looking at this correctly, they're looking to roll out at scale and obviously we can build in better commercials that way, to better understand that, but without a doubt, as we look at a number of our clients are truly global, you do feel that pressure, as you go region to region, and that's an interesting thing you've got to handle, and try to solve for. 

Do you have a client who you're allowed to talk about, because often the larger ones, it's difficult to get any permissions, that kind of really reflects the full meal deal of what you can do in terms of workplace, venue-based, customer-facing digital signage, maybe staff facing digital signage, like the whole shoot and match? 

Joe Giebel: You know, I think Delta Airlines is a great client that takes advantage of most of our solutions, and then especially within digital signage, they've got so many use cases that they deploy both employee-facing, above wing for the passengers and below wing for the employees.

So I think that's a good client that, we're fortunate does a lot of speaking about the solutions and is someone we can discuss. 

Yeah, you've had them for a long time, right? Like, at least a decade. 

Joe Giebel: That is correct. Long-term client. They started out with employee comms, and they've won a number of awards in the industry for some of the innovations that they do. I believe last year we started rolling out passenger-facing applications broadly for flight information displays. 

Yeah. I did a podcast with Ryan Taylor going back about three years or something, and I've been seriously impressed by what Delta is doing.

Because they totally get it, you can use screens really help inform the passenger journey and from the moment you walk into the check-in area all the way post-security. What was really intriguing was what they were doing, as you said, below the wing with, ramp information screens that are talking to the guys who are heaving bags into the planes and everything.

Joe Giebel: Yeah, that's right. It's heartwarming when you see them roll out, one Ryan, leads a team that focuses on a number of things. Digital signage is a large part of it and they all understand what use cases and applications we can leverage digital screens for to help our customers and our employees.

But when you see images of a 30-year pilot pulling up to a gate, and the ramp information display is saying, thanks for your work and dedication to Delta, and you know, that pilot's retiring it. That's a cool use of the technology, and it feels good that they think that's helping them build their culture and recognize people. It's awesome to see that in use, and in context like that. 

The industry obviously has evolved quite a bit over 20 years. I'm curious about what you're seeing these days that you're seeing more and more customer demand for, I suspect it's things like data integration. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah. I think data integration is the key and trying to understand, how do we make these things real? 

The industry is asking for, it's odd when I hear it, I want consumer grade. Because I think 15 years ago you wanted everything to be the commercial grade which seemed to mean Strength quality, you know now they're thinking about the experience and consumer-grade is the goal. Consumer grade meaning I want it to react and be as simple As you know, maybe a social media app, and what I experienced on my personal devices need to be intuitive and need to be smooth.

There can't be a need for training on how to interact with this thing. So, part of that is data integration. Is the data automated? Is it near real-time, and accurate? And are we putting the right data in front of people that they want? And you've got to have flexibility on that integration side because oftentimes, we'll see things get deployed and we see behaviors driven and it's like, wow, we didn't predict our clients and us and our project teams will say, we didn't predict those results. Let's tweak this and this to get back towards what we were driving and that flexibility and data integration, I think is the cornerstone of being able to deliver that experience.

You have a platform you call Harmony. Is that the piece that kind of stitches together the different components versus, yeah, I just want the digital signage thing or I just want the email marketing thing? 

Joe Giebel: That's right. So as you start to think about all these channels coming together, we call that platform harmony and it is a multi-channel, omnichannel approach to putting content really, I want to say communications, but, let's say getting content in front of the right people at the right time, and it gives you that ability to broadcast across every channel, or maybe you're using our analytics to say, “Look, we know these disconnected workers are not looking at the email, so we don't need to address them with email, that's creating too much noise.” So that concept or that name of Harmony, is the concept of all these channels coming together in harmony within an organization. 

Without giving away business details, I'm curious, what percentage of customers are using Harmony versus those who still just want the traditional workplace comm stuff and those who just want digital signage for their retail environment or whatever it may be?

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we've got a massive client base. So I would say about 10 percent of them are taking advantage of multi-channel, and on what I would just define as the Harmony platform, and I would say we've probably had serious conversations with about 80 percent and are working with them on plans for which channels might make sense.

Oftentimes you've sold one solution to a team in the past, and that team's not going to necessarily handle that full digital strategy. So then it becomes a process of meeting the other stakeholders, showing them the value, and then planning how we roll this out. Because these are so highly visible, both digital signs, email, what we call feeds, putting messaging into collaboration tools, it's so visible that you have to be thoughtful on how you roll that out, how you plan it. So it takes a little bit of time. 

I'd say 10 percent are the early adopters and taking advantage right now and it's certainly something we evangelize across the client base. 

I suspect the leadership team likes that situation because there's a lot of growth potential there. 

Joe Giebel: Yeah, we absolutely love it.

The question then becomes, and what we've been working through quite honestly, for the last two years. How hard do you push on a platform play? And then how hard do you focus on nurturing the existing solutions and making sure that the teams that originally bought them aren't getting flooded with, “Hey, here's a shiny new toy.” And they're getting the adequate focus from us on how we make you most successful, within what you own and what are your expansion plans for that singular solution. 

So there is a balance and, honestly, it might come across as a little disrespectful, if you don't pick up on what the client needs in the moment and we don't mean it that way. But you got to have your ears open, and stay customer centric, as you kind of navigate those waters. 

All right. This is great. Good to catch up. if people want to know more, they'll find you just at poppulo.com? 

Joe Giebel: Poppulo.com is the best place to reach us and you'll start to see all those solutions, both from an individual, description and promotion, as well as here's how all these channels play together.

All right, Joe. Thanks again! 

Joe Giebel: Dave, great catching up. Thank you.