Robert Johnson, PAM

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There's been a steady stream of announcements in the past couple of years about new sports and entertainment venues going up in the US and elsewhere, and one of the notable attributes about these developments is that they are not just stadiums and arenas - they're big commercial developments anchored by that kind of building but surrounded by retail, residential and infrastructure. They're sprawling, at times, and with that, not necessarily easy to navigate and use. An Australian software company called PAM has a tag line about transforming complex spaces into loved places, and it does that mainly through what people in digital signage would call wayfinding. But there's more going on with PAM than just maps. The company blends that base capability with a digital signage CMS, mobile, analytics, and integrations with business systems, including Ticketmaster. It also intertwines all these components so that they're reactive, with data from one component informing another. The company already has some big name, high profile clients and venues to reference, including SoFi Stadium in LA and the F1 circuit for Las Vegas. Robert Johnson is VP Sales for North America for the company, and he has a deep background in both wayfinding and digital signage. He got into the sector years ago, in the early days of Four Winds Interactive, and I've known him for ages now. So it was great to learn about PAM, but also just great to catch up. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Robert, great to catch up with you. I haven't seen you in years.  Robert Johnson: Likewise, Dave, it has been a while, and we go way back and it's great to reconnect with you.  I knew you from your time at Four Winds Interactive, where we were involved in a couple of pretty big deals. I was on the consulting side, and you were on the sales side when you were doing sales for that company. Could you give a background on your journey in digital signage?  Robert Johnson: Yeah, happy to, and you nailed it right there. You and I had a really exciting, fun opportunity to work on a couple of very large enterprise projects with some big names, great folks, and great clients and yeah, you and I cut our teeth together. That's where our relationship really spawned, but yeah, I was really fortunate, I got to start working with Four Winds Interactive when they were very quite small. I think when I started, there were somewhere between 25, and no more than 45 employees there. Were they still in the house or had they moved out by then?  Robert Johnson: Yeah, I was in the original mansion, the Parkside Mansion, right off of City Park in Denver, Colorado, and that was a trip. They had weddings on the weekends and we sold software during the weekdays in there until we had to break down our desks. But that was a startup life right there.  Looking back is interesting because that was 16 years ago when I took that job with them and looking back, there's a piece of me that says that you can make a Netflix story about the rise of the software company because the economy was crap, it was 2007-2009, and the housing market crashed. I remember my parents asking me like, how do you have a job? How was the company doing?  What on earth is digital signage?  Robert Johnson: Why are people spending money on digital signage? And I remember telling my parents, I was young, I was in my 20s and I was like, mom, dad, this is amazing. People are buying this left and right. It was the kind of product that if you could just demo it and talk about it, you were selling it.  I was fortunate that I got to move up in the ranks and work on a lot of large enterprise deals, selling very complex digital signage solutions with incredible integrations to Delta Airlines and JetBlue Airlines, Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Staples, just massive digital signage implementations and yeah, we had lots of integrators and hardware involve