Retail Digital Signage Rollout: Five Rivian Showrooms, One Repeatable Kit

One signage kit, five cities, fourteen days from purchase order to installed panels.

The situation

Rivian publishes a tiered store standard for its sales-and-service locations, and the tier-two retrofit package includes a front-of-house fixture called Electric Adventure — a millwork wall panel of about 112 square feet carrying a single 43-inch touchscreen with charging education and trip-planning content. The client's AV guidelines fix the panel dimensions, the blocking behind the wall, the power and data locations relative to the panel centerline, and the height to the top of the monitor at five feet. Line IT-316 in that drawing set reads "43 inch touchscreen, IT vendor procured and installed." Creation Networks was that vendor.

The request for quote covered eight locations across the United States and Canada, one Electric Adventure kit each, with the installation dates already filled in. Five of them came to us. Nothing was failing. What was wrong was the calendar. Our account executive wrote to the mount distributor on 5 March 2025: "This is a fast turn around project so we'd need to order equipment over the next week if I get it and have it land onsite by 3/18." Purchase orders followed on 7 March with a 21 March need-by — two weeks from paper to four installed panels in three states, as a piece of retail and hospitality AV work where the brand standard has to look identical in every city.

What made it hard

A digital signage rollout fails in ways a single install does not. The parts are easy; the repetition is hard.

• Fourteen days from purchase order to need-by, across three time zones, with four displays to order, ship, commission and ship again.
• Nobody on the design team visited any of the five buildings. The only drawing in the package was the client's guideline sheet.
• The hands on site were third-party technicians, on a one-technician, two-hour minimum. The Salt Lake City scope is explicit that the equipment must arrive "pre-programmed, plug-n-play ready." A player that was not ready turned that visit into a wasted trip.
• Every site is a working showroom and service center. Crews cannot camp out for a week.
• Supply was moving. The wall mount showed "call for availability" at the distributor the week we quoted, and every proposal carried a tariff line footnoted "subject to change per order date."

How we designed one kit for five showrooms

Creation Networks quoted the four initial sites together off a single equipment list on one revision date, then ran each as its own project with its own number, pick list and closeout. Franklin came later as a separate project on the same kit. The design and integration approach here was deliberately boring, which is the correct instinct on a rollout: decide once, then repeat.

The kit is short on purpose — a 43-inch 4K touch display, a wall mount rated for it, a media player with a content management license, a memory card, an HDMI cable and a Cat6A patch cable. No rack, no control processor, no local server. The whole panel runs on one power drop and one data drop, placed by the electrical contractor to the client's dimensions. Three choices are worth naming, because two of them changed during the job.

Touchscreen, not a passive panel

The wall carries charging education and trip planning, which a customer navigates rather than watches. That put a 20-point projected capacitive panel from the commercial interactive display category on the list instead of a cheaper passive screen, and it drove the mount and blocking specification behind it.

A perpetual content license, not a subscription

Every proposal and every pick list on this program specifies a perpetual Mvix Core license for BrightSign, one per player. No subscription option was quoted. A fleet of BrightSign players will sit in showrooms for years, and nobody wants a renewal that can lapse and take a wall dark.

Two things that changed mid-scope

Franklin's first two proposal revisions carried an Epson PowerLite L690SU short-throw laser projector as a line item. The final revision took the projector off our equipment proposal and kept the rest — the Chief mount kit, the projection player and the second license — and an Epson EB-L630SU went up on that mount on install day. The supply moved; the mount, the player and the installation did not. Separately, a one-year service agreement — telephone support, RMA facilitation, two service visits a year — appeared on the 7 March labor proposal and was gone from the 10 March revision. Neither is a design failure; both are what a scope looks like while it is still moving.

What made the program work happened before anything shipped. The bill of materials carries an instruction against the media player line in plain words: configure and activate ahead of delivery. Every player was commissioned in-house, so installation on site became mounting, cabling and power-on rather than provisioning.

Equipment by room type

Every showroom received the same wall panel. Franklin is the only variation, and the variation is small.

The same specification as a parts list. Models already linked above are plain text here:

Four items have no exact product page on this site and stay unlinked: the B-Tech mount, the Mvix license, the Cat6A patch cable, and the projector, which came off our equipment proposal at the final revision even though it still went up on our mount.

Network and IT

The infrastructure was by others and specified by the client. At the Electric Adventure panel, Rivian's guidelines call for one duplex outlet and one single data port, centered below the screen, a NEMA L6-20R receptacle in the wall, and blocking behind the millwork rated for a fixture weighing roughly 450 pounds without the display. At Franklin's projection position the guideline calls for a 15-amp outlet and two data ports at the ceiling, next to the Unistrut center, with the bottom of the projector at twelve feet nine inches.

The player side is deliberately plain: both BrightSign models are PoE-capable, wired Ethernet only, no wireless. Each unit was commissioned on a wired network in our shop — DHCP left as found, publishing set to standalone, production firmware, time zone set for the destination city. Rivian mandated the naming convention before the first player shipped — RIV- followed by the device serial number, no spaces — with the destination street address in the device description, so a player can be identified from the management console without a site list. Activation meant sending the player name, serial number, MAC address and on-screen device ID to the content platform, which returned the license inside a business day. The commissioning guide sets the final step: give the client's AV engineer the player name and network parameters for each player location.

No certificate, VLAN or allowlist requirement was issued — the client's guideline lists security as not applicable at both the panel and the projector, and the only outside host a player reaches is its content service. Where a security review does apply, that is configuration and programming work we scope before the first player is imaged.

The rollout

Four purchase orders were issued on 7 March 2025, all with a 21 March need-by. Displays left the manufacturer between 11 and 13 March, each invoice recording the serial number of the panel bound for each city. Players were licensed, loaded, named and labeled in-house before shipping. The installation labor scope was approved on 14 March.

One contractor visit in the week of 17 March covered both California sites, installed on 20 and 21 March; Salt Lake City and San Antonio were scheduled for 21 March. Franklin ran on its own clock — quoted 10 April, equipment invoiced 14 and 15 April on two-day air, in service from 18 April.

The work per site is short, which is the whole point. The Salt Lake City scope describes it end to end: install the 43-inch display on a low-profile pull-out mount, bottom of display no higher than 60 inches above finished floor on steel-stud drywall, install the preconfigured player behind it, connect the patch and HDMI cables, test that both are working. No programming, no commissioning, no content loading in the store. Handover went to the client's AV engineer rather than store staff, because the screen has no controls for a salesperson to learn. Our wider AV services team held the vendor coordination, the shipping and the per-site paperwork.

Results

Five showrooms run the same front-of-house panel. A customer at the Electric Adventure wall in Van Nuys touches the same interface, at the same height, showing the same content as a customer in San Antonio or Salt Lake City, scheduled through one platform rather than site by site.

• One equipment list with the same part numbers at every location, readable by a buyer, an installer and a facilities manager.
• A display serial number recorded against each of the five cities, and at Franklin the serial number and MAC address of both media players.
• Players provisioned before shipment, so site labor was mounting and cabling rather than configuration.
• A per-site pick list, so each location has a record of what was installed where.
• A kit the next site inherits. The original request for quote listed eight locations; the sixth does not need a new design, because the design already exists.

That is the shape a signage rollout should have, and it is the same discipline we apply to multi-site corporate AV programs: centralized design, distributed delivery, one document set per building.

Support from here

Creation Networks guarantees its workmanship for 90 days from the date of first use, at no charge, and brokers the manufacturer's equipment warranty — usually one to five years — inside that window. The Franklin package carries a warranty start date of 18 April 2025. The exclusions matter on a signage panel: cables, LCD panels, projection lamps and batteries are consumables, as are operator error and third-party firmware changes. Service is raised as a ticket in the support portal before a technician is dispatched, and an electronic report follows every repair.

Past that, managed AV support is a contract rather than a favor. We target a first response inside two hours and guarantee one within four. Coverage tiers run from a four-hour to a one-hour first phone response, two-business-day to next-day on-site attendance, four to twelve included site visits a year, and quarterly to monthly sweeps, on a one-year minimum term. Buying up to three years with the original system extends the warranty by a further year, and every ticket runs through the same support help desk regardless of which site raised it.

The scheduled sweep is the part that earns its keep on a distributed fleet. A player falls behind on firmware, a license lapses, a playlist goes stale, a panel gets knocked out of level by a delivery cart — and none of it announces itself, because a screen shows the last thing it cached and looks healthy doing it. Signage drifts out of spec if nobody is watching it, and the people standing next to it all day are the least likely to notice.

Technology partners on this project

Next step

If you are rolling signage into more than three locations, the work worth doing up front is the kit and the pre-configuration process, not the first install. Get those right and every site after the first is a delivery problem rather than an engineering problem — in showrooms, bank branches, clinic waiting areas, dealership service lanes and any lobby or reception space where the brand standard has to look the same in twenty cities. Send us your site list and we will walk one location with you, or assess the panels you already have, before anything is specified.

Creation Networks, Inc. — nationwide commercial AV integrator, CTS-D certified, based in Concord, CA and Incline Village, NV. Design, engineering, programming, installation, and support from a single point of contact since 2006. Call 888-230-3661 or email sales@creationnetworks.net.