DSE confirms attendance down, but not too bad

March 6, 2009 by Dave Haynes

The Digital Signage Expo people have released some stats about the show last week, confirming via Digital Signage Today that the crowd went from about 3,500 last year to just over 3,000 this time around.

The dip is described as slight, but my high school math suggest that’s something like 13-14 per cent. In this wild economy, I guess that’s the new “slight”.

The story also said the number of exhibitors was up, as was total floor space.

In some understandable spin-doctoring, the DSE people are also quoting exhibitors who said the show generated a worthwhile number of qualified leads. As a sales monkey, I can confirm that while the foot traffic was definitely down from the waves of people hitting me last year, just about anyone I spoke with had genuine plans and asked useful, reasonable questions.

The DSE East show this fall in Washington is now being pushed, with the idea that DC will bring in a ton of government opportunities. I don’t have any government account experience, but my suspicion is there is a lot of paper to complete and hoops to hump through to win any business in that sector. There’s no exhibitor list up yet and while I have nothing to substantiate this, I wonder if that show is really viable in these market conditions. Guess we’ll see.