[Sound Mic]

At the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas, Mike Hiatt, the director of media networks for Wal Mart, spoke at one of the breakfast 'lunch and learns.' He had a lot of interesting things to say and everyone was glued to him the entire time. In fact, sometimes you could barely see the screen or him from all of the cameras, camera phones and video recorders being held up in the air to record him. Hopefully next year the Expo folks will make podcasts or vodcasts available after the show so folks won't be compelled to shove cameras in his face for an hour.

One thing he said that caught my attention was about audio and digital signage. When Wal Mart first deployed their digital signage project they conducted interviews of customers to get their impressions and he said that "we had reports of the digital signage audio being too low in customer interviews, directional audio would solve that issue." Further, he went on to say "any audio included with digital signage must be directional"

Do you think this is true? What experiences have you had with audio and digital signage being deployed together. What are the pitfalls? What about the ROI of the entire solution. I have heard some people say that they look at digital signage sometimes waiting for the audio loop to start and when it doesn't, walk away. Have you ever seen this?