The other couple: DSA and CETW now BFFs

October 4, 2010 by Dave Haynes

The Digital Screenmedia Association (DSA) has – SURPRISE!!! – formally hooked up with Customer Engagement Technology World (CETW), the trade show formerly now as The Digital Signage Show, or even more so, as Kioskcom.

CETW is now officially the trade show of the DSA, with the first event (informally) set for next month in NYC, followed in the spring with a more official partnership and show in SFO, which I think will be GR8.

OK, that’s it for acronym-a-looza.

This was pretty much going to happen from the moment the DSA made it known it wanted a more active role in pulling together and benefiting from a sector-focused trade show. The DSA said it planned to RFP a show, which led to the resulting and ongoing tomato fight between Digital Signage Expo’s organizers and the DSA, and the birth of the DSE-backed Digital Signage Federation (DSF).

The DSE and DSF (which has independent, non-profit status) made their inevitably trade show partnership announcement a few weeks ago. Which left the DSA with no real options other than CETW. That said, CETW is hardly a bad show. It’s just smaller, and both packaged up and handled quite a bit differently from DSE.

I like both shows, but for very different reasons.

“We are extremely excited to align ourselves with and designate CETW as the official tradeshow of the Digital Screenmedia Association,” said Stuart Armstrong, President of EnQii North America and President of the DSA, in today’s announcement. “Since we began the effort to select an official trade show at the beginning of this year, we studied the industry environment closely before naming CETW the preferred event for our association. At every turn we found CETW’s focus aligned most closely with the goals and objectives of our association.”

Armstrong added that the event’s 15 years of consistency in providing the highest quality educational programs for all buyers of digital screenmedia technologies, makes it a strategic launch pad for organizations looking to understand and utilize these technologies in their customer engagement programs.

With the agreement, the DSA will be actively involved in the process of developing conference programming for CETW events in San Francisco and New York in 2011. This alliance will support the DSA charter around education, advocacy, and networking, with a portion of its members’ exhibition investments at CETW being allocated to assist the DSA in creating more global educational offerings.

“We are thrilled that the Digital Screenmedia Association has chosen Customer Engagement Technology World as their Official Trade Show. CETW welcomes the opportunity to align itself with organizations that truly understand how digital screenmedia and customer engagement technologies converge to affect the organizations deploying them. There is no question in our mind that DSA understands these intricacies and promotes these ideals,” said Lawrence Dvorchik, General Manager of CETW. “We look forward to working with the DSA and welcoming their members to our events.”

“CETW possesses an incredibly passionate devotion to ensuring each event is buyer-focused and covers the entire buying ecosystem which is critical for end-users, such as venue and network owners, brands and agencies to understand,” said Armstrong. “CETW’s focus on ROI, and the lengths they go to, to make sure the shows are filled with a genuine, pre-qualified buying audience, is astounding. The scope of the education and expo floor covers all points of digital screenmedia applications: digital signage, kiosks, mobile marketing and social/loyalty networks. CETW goes above and beyond what all other shows seem to do to ensure that exhibitors have opportunities to meet face-to-face with customers who not only have a need for their products, but the authority and budget to make the purchases.”

“In addition to being the official show of the DSA, this agreement allows CETW to further our mission of educating buyers of all customer engagement technologies throughout the year and around the world,” Dvorchik said. “The DSA’s focus on education will help provide buyers with information to further their deployments, allowing them to make smarter technology purchases from CETW exhibitors and ultimately gain ROI from their customer engagement technology programs.”