I have been involved in the digital signage sector for more than a decade, in a whole pile of different capacities. I’ve found myself selling software, pitching venture capitalists, yelling at tradespeople. Now and then, I’ve stopped and wondered, how did I get here???

That’s because I spent the first 20 years of my working life as a journalist, or at least in a journalist environment. I went from newspaper reporter to editor, and then on to new media guy.

But at my core, I am still a writer and it is what I am, at least, told I am good at. Some 10 years on from jumping into the digital signage sector, I find myself writing for a living once again. More weird little twists and turns got me to this point, but I am very happy with where I ended up.

I now run my own company, called pressDOOH. Pronounce it like the magician phrase, “Presto!”

It was set up for two reasons:

1 – I really didn’t want another boss, other than myself.

2 – Lots of people in this industry know I have writer in my dark past, so they’ve asked me to give them a hand on things like press releases and white papers because they were pretty much incapable of stringing words together into coherent paragraphs. They even offered to pay me!

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So here I am, and it is evident from the short time I have been at it directly that there is indeed a need. This blog is not intended to peddle my services. The main Website is for that. I’m writing this blog because there is such a crying need in our young industry to get a little more professional in what comes across in our marketing materials and press releases.

A lot, an awful lot, of the material that gets issued day to day by companies is riddled with cliches and nonsense phrases, or so weighed down by technical jargon even the propeller-heads would be confused. And there is SO much hype and so little substance to what is being put out there in attempts to get a little attention and love.

I am not the last word on this stuff, but I spent a bunch of years filtering out the noise of press releases and PR as a newspaper editor at a big daily. And through my other blog, Sixteen:Nine, I read a ton of press releases each day. So I have a pretty good sense of what’s gonna work and what probably does the opposite.

My hope is this will be interactive and I get some feedback from people.

More than anything else, I hope we’ll all start to read less hype, fewer buzzwaords and jargon, and put up with less noise, in this very promising, very fast evolving industry. The hype and the cliches are by no means unique, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something about it.

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