Digital signage, I’ve written here before, cannot be ignored if you’re in the staging or rental business. NewBay Media and InfoComm have partnered together to launch Digital Signage 2010, an innovative virtual conference for digital signage professionals. The event will feature a program of conference sessions with live Q&A, keynotes, vendor presentations, exhibitor booths with supplier/buyer interaction, downloadable reference material, a lounge for idea exchange, and social networking.
Digital Signage 2010 is a one-day event that will take place on April 28, 2010 from 10 am EDT to 6 pm EDT. It will be conducted exclusively online, and is free of charge to all attendees who register and supply their demographic information. It will also be available for post-event attendance. To register, log onto: www.digitalsignage2010.com/
The event will also include a virtual lounge that serves as the place to connect with colleagues to discuss the latest developments in the industry. Plus, there will be a series of scheduled live chats on pertinent topics led by InfoComm educators and the editors of Rental & Staging Systems, Digital Signage Magazine, AV Technology, Systems Contractor News, and Tech & Learning.
Digital signage and DOOH (Digital Out of Home — the more strictly ad-based kind of digital signage) is all about the big Fortune 500 technology and content providers, wanting to take audio-video technology out of the boardroom, classroom, and living room (where after all we’ve had sophisticated technology for decades) out to where people commute, shop, and are entertained. It’s happening faster than anyone would have predicted.
And as Tom Stimson has pointed out in these pages many times, if you’re in this industry, you really should be positioning your company as a media company and an events company. You need to show clients that you are about delivering communication solutions (unless you want to just live in the gear-schlepping, low-margin world of just renting out products).
Tom also points out in his Roadshow seminars that consumers are now the first to get new technology, and this new technology — smartphones, for example — combined with viral marketing and social networking is now propelling digital signage, DOOH, and mobile content in general to new levels. Even if you do not plan specific product and service offerings this year, you need to stay ahead of this curve. It is changing the world of AV as you know it, both on the demand and supply side.
Note: The entire day’s offerings at Digital Signage 2010 will be highly relevant to this market, but one session in particular stagers will find intriguing: Digital Signage Content Primer. Presenter: Lyle Bunn. “To succeed in the digital signage market, integrators and design consultants must move beyond the simple gear-spec’ing or gear-installing business model, and understand — if not get involved — in the content side. No matter how good the gear, if a digital signage rollout does not put up good content, it will fail. Learn how to protect your investment, and understand the content creation process.”
Content creation is of increasing concern in all the traditional AV markets where providers used to just install or stage up gear. If you met Lyle Bunn at the Rental & Staging Roadshow in Toronto last fall, you know he’s well out in front of trends, and he’s working directly with InfoComm on a variety of AV market crossover issues. Don’t miss him on April 28.
