Vegas. Were you there too?

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

We were told by someone in the know that pre-registered audience figures for Digital Signage Expo, Las Vegas were 2,500 – if that is true and we are interested in seeing if the actual figures are published then that would make it only just a little bit larger than Screen Expo Europe (the London Expo of course shared its floor with the Retail event that ran alongside, making it feel bigger but still the published audience figures for London were just under 3,000 registered with only 1,000 of those NOT turning up over the two days).

Two people we spoke to early this week about the show in Vegas told us that they sensed “that there was about 75% to 2x as many exhibitors than Screen Expo Europe”, someone else commented “from an attendance perspective, it was definitely larger”.

Someone else said that in Vegas “the media track was slightly better represented and attended versus London”, another mentioned that the “content was a bit more engaging”.

Our take is that at both shows the turnout of media-centric people was VERY low in comparison to vendors and whilst we would expect this ratio to improve next year at both events, it is a BIG ISSUE that needs to be addressed by the industry.

DailyDOOH has the biggest media buying, planning and ad agency readership of any of the industry blogs or news sites and we know how difficult they are to engage and keep happy (busy people and all!!) and will be pulling out all the stops to get these folks to shows in 2009!

Hans Theisen, evp, emerging media at Centro told us that “there was strong buzz circling around the entire event. The displays were well done, everyone was excited about the industry, and there is lots of positive momentum” – which of course was nice to hear.

As regular readers will know, especially as Bill’s blog and his work in the industry pre-dates us by many years, Bill Gerba is CEO of WireSpring and “maintains an active role in the digital signage and self-service kiosk industries. An industry advocate since 2000, Bill is the chairman of POPAI’s Digital Signage Awards and a member of the group’s Education and Advocacy Committees. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences (including the Digital Signage Expo) and has been featured in numerous publications”

Yesterday on his blog he covered “Digital Signage Expo 2008: A speaker’s take on the show” which is well worth a read.

For us, the next big show that we will be covering in detail is ‘Kiosk Expo Europe and Digital Signage Expo 2008’ as we are official Media Partners for the event to be held at Messe Essen, Essen (near Düsseldorf), Germany during 6th to 8th May 2008.

The impetus for that event seems to be building; on the Digital Signage side of things, representatives both big and small will be present, from Scala (the big) to old friends (small) like folks at Disignage who will be demonstrating their Disignage Panamint Planner among other things.


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