Brown Advisory—a global and independent investment management and strategic advisory firm with offices spread across three continents—has more than 850 staff members across 15 international locations. To say keeping everyone abreast of company news and policy is a challenge is an understatement. Brown Advisory has now addressed that challenge through digital signage, selecting Carousel Cloud to support its global communications strategy while maintaining a regional focus for each office on the network.
With a legacy digital signage system already in place, the company already had a wish list to strengthen its internal communications infrastructure. A lack of dedicated IT resources across the company’s multiple sites meant that a move away from its existing hardware model was a top priority.
“Our legacy system was designed around on-prem servers and required constant maintenance,” said Brown Advisory’s senior desktop support analyst Chris Blanchard, who played a key role in the specification and implementation of the company’s new Carousel Cloud infrastructure. “It required someone to manually connect each piece of hardware to our domain to get it on the network, and maintaining was a huge overhead. Since switching to Carousel Cloud, we no longer encounter any of the server or network challenges that accompany on-prem infrastructures. Instead, we have access to dedicated support staff who manage the software on our behalf, which means we can offload a lot of those responsibilities. The only hardware we manage now are the players and the TVs themselves. The simplicity of being able to just ship an Apple TV, connect it to the internet and have it working as a player was very enticing.”
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Carousel Digital Signage provides device management through JAMF, which seamlessly converts every Apple TV device into a digital signage media player. It enables Brown Advisory to configure all its content on JAMF’s user interface, streamlining deployment and simplifying content creation across all its regional offices.
Today the company uses Carousel Cloud to feed 28 screens across every U.S. office in its network as well as in London, sharing company-wide information throughout the group as well as providing the ability to generate localized content.
“We use the system to focus on company achievements, promote upcoming events and highlight previous events, but what’s really great about Carousel is its ease of configurability,” added Blanchard. “We have a central messaging team located in our Baltimore and London offices that sources company-wide content from the people working in those regional offices who know what's really important to their colleagues who work there. Carousel makes it easy for them to create local content which really connects with people in that location.
“The user interface is so easy to learn that we didn't need any formal training. I was able to train content creators in every office on how to use the system, create permissions and set up the players. The simplicity of the interface makes it very easy to deploy very quickly.”
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An additional benefit of transitioning content to the cloud is the degree of flexibility to not only democratize the creation of content, but to manage how that content is distributed. Although the majority of screens are located in communal areas, Brown Advisory’s office in Baltimore also uses the system in customer-facing locations. Carousel adapts content to its location, so content that clients are exposed to in public areas can be different to the content which speaks to its internal staff. It enables Brown Advisory to focus on company culture, goals and values on client-facing screens, while keeping staff informed of company initiatives elsewhere.
Brown Advisory’s deployment of Carousel Cloud is already paying dividends, with better engagement and faster deployment, but Blanchard is already exploring opportunities to expand reach into conference rooms and huddle spaces.
“If we add a new office, setting up a new system is as easy as adding a license and deploying an Apple TV; the workflow is so simple that it's almost an afterthought,” he said. “But we’ve also seen opportunities to incorporate it in our conference rooms, using Carousel’s digital signage output. It’s something we are definitely looking at implementing next year, but even just having a way to quickly provide information to users in a variety of places makes life a lot easier. It gives people the ability to digest information in an entirely new and informal way.”
