From “Word docs on screens” to context-based messaging: Spectrio's Shannon Baker explains how the company's new Studio turns digital signage content production into a scalable service model – with dedicated producers, AI-assisted workflows, and measurable business goals.
Spectrio Studio: “Digital Signage Is a Different Audience”
Shannon Baker has been with Spectrio for nearly two decades – and has witnessed the evolution of digital signage from its early, experimental phase to today’s mature, service-driven ecosystem. As Senior Director of Production, she’s also witnessed one too many purposeless screens and knows what digital signage needs to show to have an impact.
“Content needs to have a purpose because your digital signage should be working for you,” Baker said in a recent Sixteen:Nine interview. “We see so many times people just putting Word docs on their screens, not taking into consideration that this is a different audience.” While most digital signage professionals would agree with Baker, the problem most often is clients either not understanding the value of content or budgets being capped at hardware and software.
How to Close the Conversion Gap – Join the Webinar
On 12 May 2026, Spectrio’s Shannon Baker and Emily McCue will host the free Avixa webinar “Closing the Gap Between External Marketing and In-Store Reality”.
Scheduled from 1:00pm – 2:00pm EST, the session reveals how to unify your brand’s voice under one roof with a strategy-first approach. Find more detail’s on the Avixa website.
Spectrio has long had its own creative team to help clients make strategic use of their screens. Because amongst the millions of creative agencies, the ones knowing the intricacies of digital signage were few back in the day. Now, Spectrio is restructuring its creative work into a standardized “Content-as- a-Service” (CaaS) offering, Spectrio Studio.
This video visualizes the new service:
This new model is a shift away from traditional project- or hourly-based pricing toward a subscription system built on credits. Clients purchase a monthly or term-based allocation of credits that roll over month to month but expire at the end of the term. These credits can be exchanged for a wide range of creative outputs – including motion graphics, animations, layouts, ads, and editable templates.
Credits are tied to a predefined menu of services, each with a fixed cost, allowing clients to plan content production over months without repeated scoping or contracting cycles.
Production via Dedicated Teams
Once onboarded, clients are assigned a dedicated producer. “The producer is their conduit to all of the creative teams,” explained Baker. This includes scriptwriters, designers, animators, audio engineers, and content strategists distributed across the U.S.
Requests can be submitted either directly through the producer or via an online form, which triggers immediate intake and production workflows. In urgent cases, work can begin the same day, depending on scope and readiness.
AI as Support, not Substitute
Artificial intelligence also plays a supporting role in the production pipeline. However, Baker emphasizes that client-facing creative work remains fully custom and human-led. Generative AI is not used to produce final creative outputs. “Anything we make is going to be custom and is copyrightable,” she noted,
Instead, Baker’s creative team uses AI primarily to reduce repetitive work and accelerate production timelines. It assists in analyzing project data, improving administrative workflows, and supporting quality control.
Ultimately, the new approach reflects a broader industry trend: digital signage is shifting from infrastructure ownership to managed content ecosystems. For Spectrio, the goal is not only to produce content, but to ensure it is strategically designed, continuously delivered, and directly tied to business performance.