It’s appropriate that our conversation with Garry Wicka took place while surrounded by OLED displays in LG Electronics USA‘s Innovation Center in Lincolnshire, Ill.
It was about two months after InfoComm 2016 where LG launched much-anticipated OLED products including its 55-inch Dual-View Flat OLED Display and 65-inch Dual-View Curved Tiling OLED Display.
Wicka, B2B senior director of marketing for commercial displays, warned integrators not to lump OLED solutions in with other display options. Instead, he challenged them to leverage the OLED products’ completely unique capabilities and expand customers’ possibilities. OLED, he said, gives integrators a chance to “do something iconic” with their system and space designs.
Tell us about your dealer program.
We have just completely redone our partner program. It’s called LG Pro … it’s a program that provides support for marketing , it provides incentives … it has a beautiful, brand new partner portal … In the end, it really will allow them to take LG and utilize the assets that will help them grow their business.
Hear more from LG’s Garry Wicka in this video or continue reading below.
A lot of the buzz at InfoComm 2016 was around LG’s OLED products, but now that the show is over how do you see integrators incorporating OLED into their business models?
First and foremost, don’t stress on the fact that it’s a new technology; really think about what it does and how it opens up new doors.
A great example is the technology itself allows you to go and put product in areas that you would have never been able to before … OLED is lighter and thinner than [a traditional LCD panel] so you can put it hanging from a ceiling, you can have it hang from a wall, you can have dual-sided … you can quickly change the game around what you’re doing with product, but more importantly it also really creates an opportunity for you to bring a higher end product into a portfolio.
We have all sorts of LCD sizes down to 10-inch [and up] to 98-inch … but OLED comes around now and provides an area where you can say, “Hey, I want to do something iconic. I’d like to have all the LCD panels that I was going to have originally, but I’d also like to have something that is freestanding in the middle of my environment with two different messages on both sides going at the same time and I want it to look like a piece of art.”
Well guess what, we’re standing in front of the Dual-View Curved OLED model; that’s exactly what that does. That is not something that you would have been able to do with a traditional display.
With digital signage expanding into most vertical markets, what opportunities are created for integrators?
It’s not just about a retail market anymore; it’s not just about a quick-serve restaurant. You’ve got to think about a library; you’ve got to think about government facilities, transportation; you’ve got many different verticals.
As an integrator, really start looking at not just the traditional areas where you go put a display on a wall in a lobby, but [think about] how to put displays in hallways in a corporate environment that are around corporate communication … You’ve got quite a different set of products that you can put into almost any vertical and we’re seeing high growth.
That’s the thing that we’re probably most excited by is all the new technology and new displays have only added to the growth within the market. We’ll continue to see that for the foreseeable future.
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