DSE: Day I – General Impressions

March 12, 2015 by Dave Haynes

day1booth

Daylight is breaking here and it’s Day 2 of the trade show hall at Digital Signage Expo. This is the day I run around and really see stuff,I hope. Day 1 was meetings and catching up with people.

The place looked busy – certainly not jammed, but busy. Exhibitors I asked said they thought traffic was good. I know the show got a record bump in sign-ups in the days leading up to this week, the roundtable sessions turned into square table sessions to fit more people, and the pre-show bus tour added extra wheels.

There are some empty spots at the back and I saw at least one Asian company scrambling to put up brochures on curtains because whatever got shipped over wasn’t there.

Some companies like Scala are there only in a Google micro-booth and a meeting room in the back, whereas Scala had a big booth presence at the National Retail Federation show. On the other hand, companies like Rise Vision that don’t tend to exhibit had a full booth.

Every year I get questions about what I saw and was impressed by. And every year I tend to say it’s the same old stuff – just bigger, brighter, thinner, faster, cheaper, etc.

You don’t tend to see stuff that blows you away, but I saw lots of tweaks, enhancements and new approaches to things. There’s only so much innovation you can do with displays, media play-out boxes and especially software that’s designed to play sets of files based on time and place instructions.

I also saw lots of crap and a number of companies who miss the basics on booth marketing. Tell me what you do!!!

On the flip side, Convergent has a very nice booth and a set of statements in print graphics that say they create, design, install, manage and so on. Right. Got it. We need to talk. Or not.

I just walk by booths that force me to think through what they are all about. It’s only at really slow shows that I will stop out of boredom and ask “So, what do you guys do?”

I’ll post separately on some things I did notice on day one, though I already have a post up about the big news: Google.

 

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