How We Help With All Your Branding Signage and Technology needs

How much time does your team spend managing multiple vendors for printed branding assets in your locations? Let’s break it down. Your team (or your creative agency) creates the assets in coordination with your operations, franchise development, and culinary teams.

1. If you have a team of graphic designers, asset creation is part of their day-to-day work. This may be a great solution—your team knows your brand and is privy to the short—and long-term company objectives. A talented in-house team will faithfully depict your brand identity in the assets they create. It is also probably the most efficient method for asset creation. But, pressure to reduce overall payroll and frequent turnover may make having an internal graphic design team untenable and using an agency more attractive.
2. If you are using an agency to create the assets, hopefully, you have one that has served you for some time, so they are an extension of your marketing efforts. This is also great—long-term relationships with vendors, especially those helping you grow your brand through branding assets, are very beneficial. However, efficiency drops significantly when using an outside agency to create assets, and costs increase. Every meeting is a billable event. Your marketing team must coordinate the development of the assets, review proofs, and in many organizations, get input from other departments for the creative before the final approval. At $100 - $150 per hour, every project represents a hit to the bottom line.
3. Whether you are utilizing an internal team or an agency, although they may be trained graphic designers, are they versed in how to set up a menu board for maximum revenue generation? They may be able to make beautiful designs, but do they know how to make beautiful designs that attract guests’ eyes to your highest margin items? Do they have tools to evaluate menus to take advantage of typical eye movements?
4. how much does your marketing team spend managing every new project if you use an agency? How much back-and-forth is there? How many emails and phone calls are there? If you have tiered pricing or offer different items regionally, you have to do this for every new store opening.
5. Does one agency do all your branding assets? Every location probably needs window graphics, indoor and outdoor posters, LTO graphics, table tents, indoor and outdoor menu boards, and even printed décor items. On a bigger scale, they need monument signs and building signs.
6. When the agency and/or your internal team finishes the artwork for the new location, what happens then? How many vendors must your marketing team coordinate with to produce those graphics? In most cases, it is at least three – one for the smaller things like the posters and LTOs, another for the menu boards, and another for the exterior signs. Each vendor has different requirements for:
   • How do you deliver art files (email, web portal, Box or WeTransfer)?
   • What type of files they need (editable pdf, Illustrator, InDesign files, jpgs, Photoshop files)?
   • Are the assets sized properly for their printer requirements with the correct cut lines and die lines, or does the vendor have to resize, reformat them, and add these elements? Do they charge for this?
   • What are each entity’s typical timelines? How do you manage multiple unique schedules and get everything done on schedule so you do not delay new restaurant openings?
   • How do they handle revisions and approvals, and is there a charge for revisions?
   • Are you working with a dedicated member of their team or an anonymous online self-service print company?
7. Once you have approvals from all the vendors, you must ship the finished products to the locations. Packages are sent separately from each vendor, increasing shipping costs. Tracking the shipments takes time for your team and the on-site team. Also, smaller packages can be misplaced in the chaos of a restaurant opening, requiring expensive reprints.

If you have digital menu boards, many of the things mentioned above still apply—communication with your agency, timelines, and knowledge of how to set up menu boards for maximum revenue generation. But digital menu boards add a couple of additional dimensions of complexity. Here are some things to consider:

1. Does your graphic design team or agency know how to use your content management software, so it does what it does best, such as day-parting, using motion and other design elements to draw the eye to high-margin items, and scheduling LTOs?
2. Does your screen vendor also provide your content management software, or are you purchasing it separately? If separately, who is loading the software? Does your team know how to do that? Are they also loading monitoring software like TeamViewer so you can have remote access to the screens from Corporate?
3. When there is an outage, do you know who to call for help– the screen vendor or the software provider?
4. Are your indoor and outdoor menu boards running on the same software? Wouldn’t updating menu items in only one CMS rather than two be much more efficient if they aren't?
5. Does your vendor train your team in using the CMS? Do they even give you the choice of managing the content yourself, or do they require you to have them manage it? What do they charge for content management, and what is their timeline for updating screens?

1. Our graphic designers are highly skilled artists and extremely adept at content management and setting up the CMS to achieve your objectives. In most cases, the person you are working with for graphic design is the person you will be working with for content management. Since they know so much about building menus for maximum revenue generation, they are a great partner for content management, with deep knowledge of best practices.
2. We provide the digital screens, produce and manage the content. Before the screens leave our building, we load the content management and monitoring software, giving you and your team complete access to both.
3. If there is a problem, call us. We’ll diagnose if it is the screen itself, a problem with the software, or perhaps a mistake in scheduling. Sometimes there is a warranty claim, when you’ll likely work directly with the screen manufacturer, but we’ll be there to guide you through that process.
4. To keep costs down, many restaurants use different providers for indoor and outdoor screens, often opting to use big-box store monitors indoors. Although this may save money in the short term, it will add cost (because the screens have a significantly shorter lifespan) and hassle (each location having to use jump drives to update the screens with JPGs, one by one, climbing up on a ladder or chair, trying to reach the USB port on the back of the monitors) and probably lead to different-looking menus inside and outside. Big-box store screens do not have sufficiently robust onboard computers to be able to run content management software, and they most certainly won’t have remote monitoring software, meaning the corporate team has no control over what’s on the screens.
5. Your content belongs to you, and your team is best equipped to understand what should be displayed and when. That’s why we encourage you to learn to use the software so you can manage it yourself, with our team as your backup support. After we set it up just the way you want, you can take the reins. However, as mentioned above, with shrinking payrolls, you may prefer to have us manage the content. Our rates are below market at around $75-$100. We offer buckets of hours that can be used for content management or graphic design – the more hours you purchase, the lower the price.
6. When there is a change to the art, pricing, or LTOs, having digital menu boards means you don’t have to coordinate with multiple vendors for the print and digital assets. It all goes to the same person.

1. Do you want Order Confirmation on your drive-thru menu boards? If so, who is providing the software? Many operators take the package deal from their POS provider, which may seem like a good deal, but there are downsides. Most POS providers consider order confirmation functionality a small value add to the package they sell you. Their business is not generally customer-facing, and because of that, their solutions can be clunky.
2. Are you considering using VoiceAI in the drive-thru? Does the Order Confirmation software from the POS company integrate with any Voice AI solutions?