See Adrian’s original story on how Clear Channel are bringing Madonna’s new single and video ‘Give Me All Your Luvin‘ to the attention of 100 million people!

Brawn, who at 66 says that he intends to help educate the digital signage industry “until I’m taken off to that big place in the sky”, has been a member of DSF since it’s founding two years ago and recently moved up from his position as vice-chairman as per DSF election rules.

Education is a natural to this former college professor whose Vista, California-based Brawn Consulting has been instrumental in developing courses in many business areas involving the audiovisual industry.

For the digital signage industry, Brawn has created the Digital Signage Certified Experts Group course; the Digital Signage Display Experts certification; the Digital Networks Experts certification; and later this year will launch the Digital Signage Media Content certification and the Digital Signage Installation and Integration certification, all offered to DSF members.

DSF members include manufacturers, distributors, consultants, integrators, netwrk operators, content creators, advertising agencies, content aggregators, and end users – and Brawn wants them all to be at the top of their game.

“I have two aims: to take care of my family (which includes son Jonathan, who also gives DS industry courses.) and to take care of the digital signage industry,” Brawn says. “I spend 50% of my time working with clients and 50% volunteering in various ways to help help the industry.”

Volunteer, he does. In fact, he was given the Harald Thiel Volunteer of the Year Award last year by InfoComm International, the professional audiovisual trade association.

After having taught for several years at Southern Illinois University and two junior colleges, Brawn spent two decades working with the A/V industry, initially at Hughes-JVC and then in the positions of national business development manager and head of national products marketing at the Pro AV Group at Samsung Electronics, and as president of Telanetix before founding Brawn Consulting. (He’ s still very keen on Samsung and says the he “can’t wait to get my hands on the new Samsung Galaxy Note. with its larger screen than the iPhone but smaller than a tablet. It will be better for my eyes and has better sound for my hearing. I think it’s going to go far in the market.”)

While A/V holds a big place in his heart, digital signage is definitely his focus today.

“Digital Signage is fun, it’s a hoot,” he says. “And volunteering in it is my hobby.”

The impetus behind his development of learning courses: “I got tired of going to hear speeches to learn something, and the speakers were spending 80% to 90% of their time giving company sales pitches and only 10% or 20% of their time giving nuggets of real information that people could learn from. And I got tired of hearing about the seven key elements of digital signage.”

Brawn has not only set up the certification courses, but also was instrumental in developing DSF’s numerous webinars for learning. And his involvement in the academic sector hasn’t wained. He wants to see courses in the digital signage sector at all colleges and universities and has already got that ball rolling at Texas State Technical College which already has a DSF chapter and graduated 11 people this year. (Students get scholarships to cover their membership in DSF.)

“I hope to see the set up and establishment of National Educational Standards with solid course outlines and then talk to all the educational accreditation organizations in all the states across the U.S.,” he says. ‘We have to get the message out and make it a reality. We have to make this an industry with solid fundamentals. We have to create standards. The DSF is focusing on education, on standards, on certification.”

Brawn is also excited about DSF working with members of the International Sign Association whose members are more and more getting involved in digital signs for their clients.

“We have a name for that: Dynamic Digital Signage,” says Brawn. “If the DSF can help ISA members in that regard, it will be good for all.”

“Knowledge is strength,” he says. DSF is the official industry association of Digital Signage Expo and vice-versa: DSE is the official trade show and conferences of the DSF. “When the Digital Retail Expo evolved into the DSE, I saw what it could be in terms of education, information sharing and conduct.”

“Alan is selfless and sharing,” says Geri Wolff, the DSF head of marketing and communication. “In our first year, Rich Cooley was the right chairman for formulating the organization. Last year, Bob Stowe (now past-chairman) was the right person to help us get all our ducks in a row. And Alan is the right person this year for what we’ve become and what we want to be.”

“DSE has evolved,” says Brawn. “The first years we were creating committees and gradually developed privacy standards, ethical standards. Now, fortunately, we’re at the stage where we can drill down into the details, with more certifications and national educational offerings.”

We asked Brawn if the huge attention being paid to mobile these days is drawing attention away from digital signage.

“No way,” he says. “Mobile and social will extend what we do. We need interactivity, touch screens, walls. Mobile adds to it sll.”

We also discussed something fairy new on the DSF website: the VIP Service, ie. the Vendor Information Proposal Service that allows anyone considering putting in or needing advice on digital signage to fill out some basic questions such as ‘Which of the following best describes your project’s needs?’, ‘Do you have a budget?’, ‘What time frame are you looking for?’ and the information will go out to either all members or those specific to the person’s requirements. (eg. There’s no use sending installers information from someone looking for creative content,)

“It’s being used but we really have to publicize it as a basic service,” says Brawn. “It’s an opportunity to share information” – and presumably also for members of the industry to gain new business.

“We don’t want to be an organization up in the clouds,” he says. “We’re open to all, and we do a gut check at every Board of directors meeting to be sure we’re following what we set out to do. We’re constantly making improvements but the big issue is getting the word out about things like the VIP Service.”

And no clouds, “I’ll never retire. I want see solid National Educational Standards set before I take off for the sky.”

Cherry Hill will remain the home of LEGACY’s central operations headquarters for installation and field service.

Ron Cain, Chairman and CEO of LEGACY told us “As members of the LEGACY team, we share the belief that sustainability comes from a culture that sees beyond balance sheets and budget numbers, and that a successful culture is as tangible as any business system. As we enter into a new chapter in our company’s story, it is those shared beliefs and values that will allow us to achieve even greater growth and performance levels for our customers as LEGACY Retail Services.”

Thomas Rouen Jr., President and COO of LEGACY, stated “Although the name change and rebrand of the business is extremely exciting and important, we are remaining focused on the fact that our customers come first. Service is always critical, and we will ultimately be judged by how well we execute and serve our partners throughout this transition. Our executive leadership team is prepared to ensure continuity of service as TMSi and Rhombus make this critical transition to LEGACY Retail Services.”

Pic courtesy of jpbiamby@dailydooh.com

At the same time, her new music video ran on Clear Channel’s spectacular digital billboards in Times Square in New York City, Las Vegas, Piccadilly Circus in London, La Defense in Paris, Oslo Central Station in Norway, and Helsinki, Finland.

In addition to New York, Vegas, Paris, Oslo and Helsinki, more than 1,600 Clear Channel Outdoor digital billboards around the world — including those in Singapore, Spain, Belgium and Sweden will shortly end up featuring Madonna (in subways, malls, railway stations and bars),

Clear Channel are quick to point out that in total, more than 100 million people will be exposed to the lady in question’s new single and video through Clear Channel Outdoor’s spectacular billboards.

What with her half time Superbowl appearance on Sunday Madge is sure going to get some exposure in the next few days.

We knew the show was going to be big – with 153,000 attendees milling around Las Vegas it was nearly twice the size of the biggest industry shows we’ve looked at in the past. The difference with this one – it being consumer focused and not mainly business to business – was the widespread attention, especially from mainstream media, and especially from media in the tech world.

Among the large number of users who tweeted (nearly 112,000), there was quite a variation in the activity seen from them. In the chart we can see that 80% of people only tweeted one or twice during the show, with only the top 9% (the light blue segment) really active, tweeting 5 times or more.

With that level of activity came a lot of spam, largely from users (human or otherwise) tweeting the same message over and over in the hope of winning some give-away competition or other.

This made it more difficult to follow the main stream without being inundated. Two well-known tech blogs, TechCrunch and Engadget, adopted a different strategy, as both used their own show-related hashtags and didn’t use the official one (#CES) at all apart from once in a retweet from someone else.

As well as the differences, there were some interesting similarities in the way #CES unfolded compared to shows we’ve looked at previously.

The full report can be downloaded from the Amazon Kindle Store in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

Remember that if you don’t have an actual Kindle device, Kindle reader apps can be downloaded for Android, iPhone/iPad, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry in the US and for PC and Mac on Desktops.

It was, surprisingly, the Belgians (and not the French) that caused the first travel disruption of the week – a strike of some sort mean that the Thalys high speed train could not come from Paris through to Amsterdam, meaning some disruption to Monday’s #AOpenForum and various day zero stand building.

The largest snowstorm in 27 years hit Northern Italy and I don’t think any of our friends or acquaintances from the region made it to the show.

Mind you, none of this affected the show numbers. A mind boggling 40,000+ people descended onto the RAI for the 9th ever show (yep, it all started nine years ago in Geneva).

Who knows what the organisers will have to do for the tenth show in 2013 in order to top this one?

So what were our impressions?

• 3D is becoming increasingly marginalised. Whilst some folks were talking it up, it had none of the hype or excitement of years gone by
• There are plenty of walking dead digital signage vendors around at the moment but UK, Cambridge based Camvine became the first OFFICIALLY dead one. There will be plenty more as the year progresses
• If Samsung can ‘get’ software the next decade could belong to them and not to Apple
• The organisers of the InAVation Awards 2012 claimed that they “Recognise ProAV Excellence” and they sure did. It’s nice for once to see awards that are truly impartial. The finalists and the winners were all incredibly well deserved
• Content is getting better (I don’t think we saw one James Bond or PIXAR movie) and better still exhibitors are learning to put their products and solutions in a proper context
• Shape is here. Several years after coining the phrase “Shape is the new king” it has finally come to reality and we saw lots of innovative use of shape. 16:9 video walls looked ‘square’ (pun intended) against those who had put thought into how shape can make a bigger impact
• With the exception of AOpen and Scala there was however a huge gap in the quality of stands between the big boys (NEC, Samsung, Christie etc) and the smaller vendors. This we think will actually be played out in the market as well during 2012
• Harris Broadcast is a spent force. With their military divisions not making as much money as they hoped / expected these guys don’t seem to have any money to spend in DOOH. Their stand lacked lustre and we cannot see them ‘buying’ any more business like DDN/7-Eleven (or even Harrods) in 2012
• Where were the twitter walls? We counted two in all of the halls put together AND one of those was ours in the InAVate stand – the best though by far was Scala’s Twitter Column
• The DiSCO conference is dead and if the organisers cannot see that yet then they need to wake up and smell the coffee. If a so-called industry conference the day before a major event that itself garners 40,000 people cannot attract a hundred paying people (heaven knows how few of the 70 that attended on Monday actually paid) then there is something seriously wrong
• NEC’s VUKUNET has been re-launched. It got a hell of a lot of press. So much press in fact that we figured we couldn’t do it any justice covering it ourselves. We will do, but we will let the dust settle first

Let’s just finish up by saying that the bar has been set very high, both by ISE itself and by many of the corporate exhibitors. The corporates are starting to understand digital signage, digital signage and retail, the ad based market and corporate communications.

It’s going to be difficult for many of those vendors in our #DSTop10 to differentiate themselves (BroadSign of course has DOOH Ad Networks, ComQi has mobile / social in the retail space etc) but in 2012 it will be interesting to see just how they go about marketing themselves.

With the big corporates really starting to get to grips with this space it’s going to be an interesting year to say the least.

The company says that although the outdoor advertising market was up by an estimated 3.0% year over year overall in 2011 to $6.31 billion, it has not managed to claw back the roughly $1.4 billion of revenue it lost between 2007 and 2009. it notes that, although none of the three major public outdoor/out of home groups escaped the recent financial crisis, the trio of CBS Outdoor, Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc. and Lamar Advertising Co. has seen some upswing since, managing to grow total revenues over each of the past seven quarters.

These companies have been riding a positive trend since the beginning of 2010, with combined revenues for the first nine months of 2011 up 6.8% to $4.41 billion from $4.13 billion in the prior-year period. The gains have not been able to cover the $1 billion decline between 2007 and 2010, however, when combined revenues for the top three operators dipped from $6.70 billion to $5.71 billion.

While SNL Kagan expects the outdoor/out of home ad industry to continue its mid-single-digit revenue growth over the 10-year projections period, it says that operators will need to remain versatile in delivering low-cost and effective ways to reach both mass and targeted audiences, even as other media platforms become more niche-oriented and fragmented.

SNL Kagan, a division of SNL Financial LC, is a comprehensive resource for financial intelligence in the media and communications sector, including the broadcasting, cable, entertainment, motion picture, telecom, wireless, satellite, publishing and new media industries. The SNL Kagan suite of products integrates breaking news, comprehensive data and expert analysis into an electronic database available online and updated around the clock.

Here’s the top ten by number of tweets (the full report complete with number of ‘impressions’ will follow later) and we compare the top ten in 2012 and those in 2011…

The total number of tweets up until late last night was 4,500.

Adspace Networks, in 137 class A malls and reaching more than 31 million individual shoppers each month, conducts this study every two years, as part of the mandate to be included in the Nielsen 4th Screen Report – which is the standard of audience measurement for the place-based digital video category, and is directly comparable to television audience metrics.

Adspace saw the ‘notice’ of its screens increase from 54.8% in 2007, to 69% in 2009 to 70.7% in 2011. Dwell time in the screen zones increased from 19.4 minutes in 2009 to 22.2 minutes in 2011. Impressions per visit rose from 4.85 to 5.55 between 2009 and 2011. Mean minutes in the mall increased from 84.7 in 2007 to 89.9 in 2009 to 102.6 in 2011.

“The net impact of our stronger ‘notice” and ‘dwell time’ measures is an 18% increase in gross impressions,” says Bill Ketcham, executive vice- president and CMO, Adspace Networks. “It’s very encouraging to see a steady increase in consumers’ engagement with our Smart Screens, no doubt driven by our high quality content. This extends our lead as the number one digital place-based network in monthly gross impressions.”

In other Nielsen related news, Adspace is now included in the Nielsen IMS’ agency media planning system, ‘Clear Decisions’, providing improved measurement of Adspace’s reach and frequency of the network.

Nielsen IMS has created an audience ‘simulation’ of Adspace Mall Shoppers on the MRI 2011 Doublebase and TwelvePlus Studies. The MRI simulation provides agency media planners, buyers, and researchers with the best metrics available. With the MRI data, agency media planners will now be able to directly compare Adspace’s audience reach and frequency metrics to other traditional media on a gross monthly ad exposure basis. Media Planners will also have access to all measured media, demographics, product/brand usage, lifestyle, and attitudinal data – providing direct comparison of all measured media on a teen and adult basis.

“The availability of Adspace in the Nielsen IMS’ planning system helps planners more easily measure the impact of adding Adspace to their broadcast and cable plans,” says Ketcham. “By delivering lighter TV viewers at a significantly lower cost, we are a great complement to these plans near the top of the TV reach curve.”

Earlier this year, Telmar introduced its Adspace prototype for agencies. Now media planners have yet another tool to access MRI data – through Nielsen IMS as well as the data through Telmar TNT.

The award recognizes innovators and business leaders in the Chicago area who have demonstrated the entrepreneurial spirit by founding and growing their respective businesses.

Drakoulis is an accomplished executive leader, successful serial entrepreneur, five-time patent holder, and investor who has raised more than $95 million during his career to found and lead innovative, high-growth companies at the forefront of media and technology.

Most recently, as founder and CEO of Akoo International, Drakoulis has transformed his vision into an interactive technology that has been recognized for its innovative nature and awarded patents in major global markets, including the United States, China, and Japan.

The interactive technology first envisioned by Drakoulis currently powers Akoo International’s flagship out-of-home television network, AkooTV, rated by the Nielsen Co. as the largest audience of any out-of-home television network in the U.S.

As of January 2012, AkooTV is available in 165 Akoo Pavilions, which attract 64 million consumers each month in the most highly trafficked seating environments across the nation’s premier shopping malls. In addition to making on-demand content selections on AkooTV with their mobile devices – via free mobile app or text messaging – Akoo Pavilion visitors can connect with friends via Facebook and Twitter, download mobile coupons, and participate in special promotions during an average 20 minutes of seated dwell time. As a result, an on-demand consumer transaction occurs on the network every four seconds.

Recognized for his leadership and growth of Akoo, Drakoulis has been honored by the Illinois Technology Association (ITA) as a CEO of the Year nominee and finalist for two consecutive years, in 2010 and 2011. He has also been recognized as a global change maker by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as a delegate to the Kellogg Innovation Network in 2010.

Prior to founding Akoo International, Drakoulis founded and led a Chicago-based technology company that was awarded multiple patents for its proprietary technology. There, he led the successful commercialization of a consumer digital music product; a proprietary RF wireless technology for home entertainment applications; and an online interactive technology for end-user personalization of Internet radio and digital music. For his pioneering efforts, he was named one of the “50 Hottest People in Streaming” in 2001 by leading industry publication Streaming Magazine. He sold his interest in the company to a shareholder group in 2001.

Drakoulis began his career in the wireless industry at the dawn of the mobile era. He built one of the most successful consumer retail and business-to-business distribution networks for Ameritech Mobile Communications, becoming one of the Top 15 dealers in the Midwest and serving on Ameritech’s prestigious Dealer’s Council, the youngest board member ever to serve in this capacity. Drakoulis honed his business and technical skills at a young age, working at local ethnic media companies owned by his grandfather, Peter Koutsopanagos, which included television, radio, print and cinema.

Drakoulis will be inducted into the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in February and recognized during the annual Hall of Fame Dinner on March 15 at the Chicago Hilton.