When big corporate software and hardware vendors start looking at the digital signage and digital out of home space it’s usually the anally retentiv [1]e MBA types on board who look for an ‘ecosystem’ to support whatever products they want to bring to the market.
For the likes of 3M and Cisco a few years ago such a (required) ecosystem would have been many years too early and without investment from them on their part something that would not have happened sooner. Today however is a different story. We are starting to see a really strong ecosystem grow up around the industry and not a week seems to go by without some announcement from somebody or other who wants to sell into this sector.
Content is king or so people have said and we now have a plethora of high quality bespoke content agencies (Amigo Digital, Arsenal Media, Dagobert and Grand Visual are just some of our favourites) as well as many off-the-shelf content companies – folks like buyDScontent [2] who launched this week (and full disclaimer, advertised with us in order to help their launch) joined BlueFox (see their special offer of free content for two months [3]) here, Iconic Images [4] and many others supplying the needs of both the OOH and the DOOH world.
In the aggregated ad world we have the likes of Adcentricity, BookingDooH and SeeSaw networks being joined by newbie wannabees such as ADstruc, HotspotDS, Panels United [5] and others.
Even the folks at adBlocks Inc [6] would like to get involved and sell media owners on ‘the science of advertising sales’ i.e their adSails product.
We have written at length about shows and events (bottom line there are far too many, many of which are poor) but again a big show like IBC, Infocomm or NAB (and next year we reckon CeBIT) is not allowed to go past without an announcement of a new digital signage zone or pavilion!
And of course there are the industry watchers like ourselves – many sites mind you simply repost press releases; few have the staff, journalists, contributors or industry experience necessary to intelligently comment globally on what we are all about.
What is certain mind you, is that as our industry grows further still and becomes even more mature, new products and services will be developed and new and exciting businesses will be formed.
We’d like to think that as usual we’d be the first to tell you about them!!