Internal Branding & Real-time Content Streaming: How the Embassy Group Aced It

Since its inception in 1993, the Embassy Group has been a household name in the real estate industry. The company has a foothold in both residential and commercial real estate businesses. It has a property portfolio of more than 1,000 acres throughout the Indian subcontinent.

The client maintains an excellent standard of creating a posh, world-class habitat in all its real estate designs. Keeping up with that eccentricity, the real estate giant Embassy group planned to deploy a corporate digital signage solution at all the Embassy Tech Parks in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi.

1. The client had 100+ screens across several Embassy properties. They wanted a centralized, non-physical platform that would allow the management to publish content discretely on individual screens.
2. The challenge at hand was to select a low-cost solution without incurring excessive expenses or requiring substantially long-term investments.
3. The client had also installed indoor air quality sensors at various sites within its tech-park campuses. They were specifically looking for a software partner who could custom-build a solution to show the data from these sensors on digital signage.

The Embassy representatives reached out to Pickcel after several trials with other digital signage vendors. The Pickcel cloud software was accessible remotely, which made it easier for the client to control the screens.

Right from the start of the project, the sites' architectural designs were also factored into the equation. Considering the complex requirement of the client, Pickcel brought in its best designers to develop the project.

Building a custom application

The developers designed an exclusive AQI App as part of the Embassy project. The Pickcel app was integrated with the client's internal servers through API integrations. The data flow was as follows:

Physical Indoor AQI Sensors > Embassy In-house Server > Pickcel Servers (AQI app) > Digital Signage Screens

The intelligent application routed location-specific indoor air quality data from a single source to 113 designated screens across multiple cities. This was achieved through logical location-based tagging of all the displays.

Each AQI sensor had a unique device ID. The Pickcel AQI app pulled data based on these device IDs. The technology ensured that the digital screens in Location A showed only the AQI data from the Location A sensors (and not the data from sensors installed at locations B, C, or D)

The Pickcel team added further layers of automation to define a time interval at which the Pickcel AQI app will collect data from the Embassy servers.

Deploying the software & training

The client repurposed its existing Smart TVs into digital signage. They also procured several Android media players from Pickcel to operate the video walls and other large-format displays.

The Pickcel team helped the client with the implementation of the software.

Following deployment, the Embassy staff were given hands-on training and instructional videos on independently operating the digital signage solution.

The client deployed the digital signage network across the office building receptions, entryways, employee break rooms, lobbies & waiting rooms. Once the Pickcel solution was up and running, people going in and out of the Embassy tech parks witnessed a noticeable change in their ambiance.

From welcome messages to the Embassy's own branding videos, the client could easily carry out all forms of communication with its target audience. The Marketing teams and HRs could make campus-wide announcements with the snap of a finger.

The management witnessed a significant jump in the visitor & employee engagement levels. People would stop on their way to read relevant content such as:

• Covid regulations
• Live news updates from BBC, CNN
• Real-time weather updates with visually attractive animated effects
• Digital clock
• RSS feeds from niche-specific websites
• Indoor air quality index data