Well, the agenda for the Scala [1] Conference which I’ll be attending on Wednesday and Thursday in Austin, Texas, has arrived, and, while it is definitely Scala-centric, it is, after all, a Scala conference.
[2]Dan McAllister
Dan McAllister, senior vice-president and general manager of Scala Americas kicks off the conference on both days, with the Scala Partner Awards being presented on Thursday morning.
With the topic The Future Shopper: How Offline is the New Online, Bryan Eisenberg, Partner, Eisenberg Holdings LLC will give the keynote on Wednesday. Eisenberg is a best-selling author (Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing) so we’ll see what he has to say in relation to Digital Out-of-Home.
Following a Scala State of the Union address by, who else but Tom Nix, Scala CEO, our own DailyDOOH regular contributor Manolo Almagro, senior vice-president and managing director, TPN [3], will give a second keynote on The Future of Retail 2025. Wow! We know he wears the futuristic Google Glasses, but can he really see that far ahead?
Scala’s own Stefan Menger, vice-president analytics, and Amy Wilson, product manager will take us to lunchtime with the topic The Screens are Online. Now What?
During the afternoon, attendees will be able to choose from several different sessions on either the Sales track or the Tech track, depending on their interests.
[4]Peter Cherna
After the awards on Thursday morning, Peter Cherna, chief technology officer and an always interesting speaker, will give us the Scala Roadmap, followed by Scala’s Marc Rifkin, director of services
and Jorge Mira, creative director, who will speak on Mastering Digital Signage Design. (I like the title of that one!)
We’ll then be brought towards lunch with another Keynote, this on The New Customer Experience – How Mobile is Changing the Way Retailers are Engaging with Customers by Michael Hess, vice-president consulting services at Qualcomm [5].
And on Thursday afternoon, there’ll be three choices: more sessions on Sales and Tech again, as well as three sessions specifically in Spanish.
I only noticed two sessions (Thursday in the Sales track) with partner case studies, so I don’t know who will be featured. It was in one of these a couple of years ago in Philadelphia that I first discovered the talented Telecine [6] team of James Fine and Stéphane Bastien.
There will be, as usual at Scala conferences, a small exhibition area, so it will be interesting to see if there’s anyone there waiting to be discovered.