Walk into almost any business today and you'll see screens. Menu boards at the counter. TVs in the waiting room. Promotional displays at the entrance. But if you peer behind the curtain, what you often find is a tangle: one vendor for music, another for TV, a third for signage—none of them talking to each other, all of them expensive to manage.

That's the problem Amazon Signage and Rockbot set out to solve together. And it's a bigger problem than most people realize.

The fragmentation problem in digital signage

This fragmentation issue is only growing as organizations of all sizes and types are incorporating digital signage into their on-site experiences.  Imagine having screens everywhere in your business. Some screens show promotions. Others display menus. A separate system controls music. Yet another manages TV content. What should be a simple way to engage customers often becomes a patchwork of disconnected technology that's difficult to manage, expensive to maintain, and nearly impossible to coordinate. 

"Historically, big-box stores used a variety of different digital signage, music, and TV vendors," says Jon Cassell, COO of Rockbot. "None of these products worked together or were designed to even detect that the others existed."

The consequences are real. Imagine a grocery store where the retail media screens at the front door run on a different solution from the deli screens, and the background music comes from a third-party vendor with no connection to either. “If a brand like Poppi wants to run a coordinated campaign—syncing audio and video for a 360-degree in-store experience—that fragmented infrastructure simply can't deliver it,” Cassell explains.

Beyond the experience gap, there's the procurement problem. “For years digital signage was harder than it needed to be. Businesses had to navigate specialized hardware, complex procurement processes, and multiple vendors just to get a screen up and running,” added Ed Jimenez, head of partner and industry product marketing at Amazon Signage.

That’s what this partnership intends to solve.

Amazon Signage and Rockbot–two companies, one shared vision

What if digital signage worked more like the rest of modern technology? Buy the hardware where you already shop, plug it in, and manage everything from one place.

That's the vision behind the partnership between Amazon Signage and Rockbot–making digital signage simpler to buy, easier to deploy, and more powerful to use. Together, they are helping businesses turn ordinary screens into connected experiences that inform, entertain, and engage customers—without the complexity that has traditionally come with digital signage. 

Amazon Signage provides the Amazon Signage Stick–an affordable, easy-to-deploy media player that any business can plug into the back of an existing display. But great technology doesn't help if it's difficult to get into customers' hands. “One of the advantages Amazon brings to digital signage is that it simplifies procurement,“ Jimenez explains. 

The Amazon Signage Stick is available through Amazon.com and Amazon Business—the same procurement portal that schools, hospitals, and are already approved to use to buy everything from office supplies to lab equipment. “By simplifying procurement, we're helping organizations spend less time on process and more time focusing on the experience they want to create," he added. 

Rockbot brings the unified software that turns hardware into a full-featured business platform. Cassell explains, “where traditional content management systems (CMS) handle one job, Rockbot combines digital signage, business TV, audio, and interactive features into a single unified ecosystem—with content creation tools and an AI studio built-in.”

"Our mantra is that we put everything together inside our platform," says Nick Bolton, Rockbot's SVP of operations. "We built content creation tools and an AI studio to solve the content problem. Within one location, you can communicate effectively across multiple screens and sync it with audio."

Get started with a unified experience, made simple

Digital signage is a fragmented, noisy space, and a unified solution from Amazon signage and Rockbot offers ease of use, reliability, flexibility, and multi-application handling. Cassell explains, “as a business owner, you might come looking for a point solution today, but you'll eventually want a solution where applications work together and are managed uniformly.” 

Bringing it all into one solution makes that possible. He points out that, “you can run audio and video together and pull centralized advertising reports across different mediums. We view ourselves as a unifying platform, and the Amazon Signage Stick is the perfect media player because of its price point, and ease of purchase and deployment.”

Jimenez agreed adding, “our goal with Amazon Signage is simple–remove barriers–by making digital signage easy to buy, deploy, and scale, we're helping organizations focus less on the technology and more on the experiences they want to create,”

Bolton concluded, “when you look at our partnership with Amazon Signage, the unique differentiator is helping businesses think about what else they can do with that screen down the line. And it instantly enables a portfolio of services and solutions accessible on the Amazon Signage Stick–all centrally managed from Rockbot's unified dashboard.”  

Here are a few of the solutions you can quickly deploy right from the Amazon Signage Stick, with complete control and visibility through the Rockbot Dashboard and Rockbot Remote App: 

• Rockbot Digital Signage
• Rockbot Menu Boards
• Rockbot TV (streaming TV for for business)
• Rockbot Interactive Retail (in-store experiences)
• Rockbot Retail Media (in-store ad networks)

By combining easy procurement, streamlined deployment, and a solution designed to unify screens, audio, TV, and content, the partnership is helping organizations get more value from every screen they own—and discover new possibilities for the screens they'll add tomorrow. 

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