In an announcement this evening I would describe as, ummm, quirky … the Digital Signage Federation (DSF) has rather grandly named Digital Signage Expo (DSE) its official trade show, and in turn the DSF is the exclusive trade association sponsor of DSE, the industry’s largest annual gathering.

The agreement is described as historic, but I’d venture the only thing that would have been historic here is if that arrangement had not happened.

The DSF is effectively the spawn of the company that created, manages and owns the DSE show. While the new organization has taken considerable pains to stress and demonstrate its independent, non-profit and at-large status, the ties were and are very close. The DSF exists, for the most part, because the DSE folks were not seeing eye to eye with what had been the de facto industry organization until this winter, the Digital Screenmedia Association (which also has close ties to a for-profit company).

So I’m thinking Vegas oddsmakers weren’t even taking bets on the DSE hooking up with the DSA.

Reads the press release:

John Johnson, President & CEO of the DSF said, “This Agreement is historic because it is the first of its kind in our industry and will not only provide financial resources with which to underwrite programmatic efforts that will help our association expand and grow our industry, but will also create educational, advocacy and membership recruitment synergies and opportunities that will benefit our membership in a very real way.” He added, “We are proud to be associated with DSE, Angelo Varrone, and the entire management team at Exponation, LLC, who have been thoroughly professional and supportive from our organization’s inception.”

Mr. John, he nice man, but he speakee funny. “Programmatic efforts?” “Recruitment synergies?”

Anyway … if making this arrangement formal releases some budget and resources to make what is a really good, very polished and expansive show and conference even better, that’s terrific. All for it.

It’s out this morning as a polished-looking insert in the National Post, one of Canada’s two nationally distributed English-language newspapers.

Lyle asked me to knock out a piece about the Canadian industry, which is included. The word count was very limited so I did what I could, and if your firm is not mentioned, I either forgot or ran out of room or you were mean to me when I was a child. Phhht.

There are some nods and evident ties between subject matter and advertisers, but the thing would not exist without that arrangement. As a section that gets people unfamiliar with the space up the learning curve, it looks like it does a good job.

If you have extraordinary patience you can use the Post’s e-viewer thing to navigate around the pages and see what is what (thing made me crazy).  Look for Media Planet in the menu: http://digital.nationalpost.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

LG is by far the largest sponsor of the supplement, but DDC, EK3, BroadSign NEC and X20 also bought ad space.

Thanks for reading and the little notes I get here and there from people telling me they appreciate the snarkiness and occasionally useful information.

Biggish news, probably, maybe, sometime this week if the technical crap gets sorted and we know it works. Stay tuned for that.

The Screen USA is holding another one of its morning breakfast briefings in New York later this month, this one focused on creative. The event is being held in cooperation with the global creative agency Ogilvy & Mather – with a morning briefing to be held at Ogilvy’s Manhattan headquarters on Tuesday the 21st, followed by a guided tour of the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Labs.

Attendees will get the chance to tour Ogilvy’s Digital Innovation Lab, part of a global network of Labs that showcase the agency’s range of digital activities. Designed to educate and inspire – the Lab serves to demonstrate how digital services can combine across multiple media to deliver uniquely creative campaigns. Particularly relevant to the digital signage industry – the Lab positions digital out-of-home as a key building block around which other digital channels, mobile and interactivity can all work to enhance media value.

The lab tour would be enough to get me there (were I not in the wrong city), but the speaker line-up also looks pretty good.

Hosted by John Boese, Associate Director, Digital Innovation at Ogilvy New York – the morning event will showcase how two of this year’s most exciting digital out-of-home campaigns were conceived, measured and executed. This invaluable insight into the entirety of a digital signage campaign will bring together the media agency, the creative team and the digital out-of-home network owner behind IBM’s interactive campaign in JFK and NIKE’s realtime World Cup campaign across 400 DOOH sites in the UK.

An informal meeting with brief presentations, the session will provide invaluable insight into the creative process and offer an opportunity to network and discuss the opportunities raised.

Speakers Inc :

Bob Cilia : Executive VP Sales & Marketing at JCDecaux North America. Bob will present the strategy behind the implementation of IBM’s interactive campaign within JCDecaux’s JFK portfolio and its execution.

Matt Huntingdon : Senior Interactive Project Manager at Ogilvy One World. Matt will describe the creative process and how Ogilvy worked with IBM to conceive and plan the campaign from idea to reality.

Chris Beauchamp : CEO at leading US DOOH creative agency, Monster Media. Chris will discuss the creative process, the evolution of the content, how it was measured and how it developed across the duration of the campaign.

Neil Morris : CEO at the leading European DOOH production company, Grand Visual. Neil will talk about the planning, creation and execution of NIKE’s ‘Write the Future’ campaign for the Soccer World Cup which was the first major, tactical and dynamic campaign to run across multiple digital out-of-home platforms in the UK

The Details …

Date: Tuesday 21st September 2010

Time: 8:30am – 12:30pm

Venue: 3rd Floor, 636 11th Avenue, (between 46th & 47th Street), New York, NY 10036

Cost including Breakfast is:

Screen Members : FREE Click Here to Register

Non-Screen Members : $150 Click Here to Pay

DSA Members : $135 Click Here to Pay

Note: There are very limited places for this breakfast briefing, so please register as soon as possible.

Lisa Goldstein - lisa.goldstein@thescreen.org

Danaher sat on the old OVAB board for a couple of years when she was president of Reactrix.

Don’t know a whole lot about here. OK, don’t know anything, other than that Reactrix (interactive projections on floors) did not end well.

Its RoninCast software has been selected by Snap Fitness, a fast-growing franchisor of 24/7 fitness centers that says it will do 1,000 sites before the end of this year.

“We selected Wireless Ronin Technologies’ (WRT) RoninCast software after conducting an extensive search and due diligence to find the best solution for our franchisees,” explains Peter Taunton, CEO of Snap Fitness. “The ease of use of the online management system combined with their 24/7 network operations center (NOC) provided the best in class solution to best support our brand and the needs of our franchise owners.”

Wireless Ronin will provide software and hosting to all 2,000 plus franchisee locations across the United States. Snap Fitness and WRT plan to deploy RoninCast software to 1,000 locations by January 1, 2011 with another 500 locations anticipated by June 1, 2011.

The network that will be hosted and maintained by Wireless Ronin will be designed to meet the specific needs and demographic challenges of Snap Fitness. This includes satisfying the requirements of two different stakeholder groups, both franchisee and corporate, who will leverage the network for both internal and external advertisements. Corporate will manage and distribute external advertisements from key brands that appeal to Snap Fitness Customers’ demographics while franchisees will manage internal advertising that will include club promotions, amenities and announcements.

Scott Koller, president and chief operating officer of Wireless Ronin said, “We are excited to be working with Snap Fitness and are thrilled to support the digital signage needs of such a fast growing company. We look forward to providing Snap Fitness with world class support for its network.”

First, congratulations to the sales team that got Snap to show extraordinary faith. Snap, also based in the Twin Cities area, is signing up despite a lot of troubling financials that scream caution.

Second, 1,000 sites over the next 15-16 weeks? Good luck with that.

Third, that big round 1,000 number always gets experienced industry people skeptical. If this is like KFC, the franchisees have to be won over on this, one by one by one … tough slogging.

That stated, deals are good and rollouts better. So well done and I’m sure spirits are a little lifted around the offices in Minneapolis.

Suburban Montreal-based Viva Group has completed a nice deal to roll out digital display networks for Canada’s biggest sports retailer, Calgary-based The Forzani Group Ltd.

The deal is described in a press release as a long-term agreement binding the company in a digital display project across the Forzani Group’s franchised banners.

The project includes digital displays and sync’d audio around the stores and covers French and English.

With regards to the success of the pilot deployed in Calgary last year, The Forzani Group’s top executives formerly proposed the Sports Experts TV project to their franchises. For now, the agreement covers the Sports Experts and Hockey Experts banners.

At The Forzani Group, we take great care of the atmosphere and the experience offered in store. “Our clientele is made up of active families and requires dynamic and attractive environments. In addition to meeting this objective, these screens and their contents are considerably improving our in-store communications and supporting our national merchandizing plan” says Mr Marc Poirier, Marketing director for the Forzani Group.

The entire mandate for this project was granted to Viva Group, a firm specializing in point of sale digital marketing, from deployment to programming and content development to daily management of the network. “This is a great challenge for our company. This type of project propels us amongst the great players of our industry. It has been a long process but we are very proud to assist Forzani in a deployment of this magnitude” says Mr Pierre Gendron, Chief executive officer at Viva Group.

The deal is for the Sports Experts and Hockey Experts stores and not yet across all the Forzani banners – the biggest being SportChek. But Forzani  HQ is driving this and the rollout will take about two years to complete. In all, there are about 110 stores.

Whatever the arrangements, it is a nice deal nonetheless. From direct experience, I know companies have been talking with Forzani since at least 2002 about doing digital in their stores. The retailer was among the many, many sports shops that had TVs hanging from the ceiling or on back walls, inexplicably playing music videos with no context to the store.

With great brands like Nike, Reebok, Adidas and others steadily releasing new product and marketing their butts off , sports retailing is a perfect environment for this sort of thing.

From Digital Signage Universe comes word that Garland, Texas-based CE Labs has jumped into the digital signage waters with its own solution.

Don’t know it. Haven’t see it (though I am a theoretical fan of solid state solutions). It comes with software (with templates) and there are two different networked players, by the looks of it. They remind of the defunct (I think) AGN Pro players that were around for a few years.

The offer adds to the pile of as many as 400 solutions already out there, but the company does have the advantage of a well established client base of AV resellers and integrators who buy all kinds of other gear from them and undoubtedly get calls for digital signage solutions.

CE labs has announced that they will debut a simplified Plug-and-Play Digital Signage system at CEDIA 2010 aimed at small business. The Plug-and-Play Digital Signage will include the MP500, a digital signage media player that is compact and durable and capable of true high definition 1080p playback. QuickSign Pro, a simple and flexible software tool made to manage content to multiple media players will also be included.

At CEDIA, Eric McCready, Vice President of Sales, will host live demonstrations throughout the event and will be available to answer any digital signage questions. The goal of CE labs Plug-and-Play Digital Signage is to make it accessible for small to mid-size companies without the substantial cost of other digital signage providers. This will in turn make the Plug-and-Play Digital Signage easy for the reseller to offer to their customers. CEDIA is scheduled for September 22-26, 2010 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA.

Focus group for Managers or Directors of DS companies 9-9-10, 5:30-7:30PM paying $250.00 Cash, taking place in Manhattan, N.Y. Call Sharon 718-222-5600X215.

The number traces back to a boutique market research firm and judging by the company’s Facebook presence, they do lots of focus group work. They seem to be angling for people who work in sales of deployment, and the area appears to be restaurants and bars.

If I lived in Manhattan and had a couple of hours after work on a Thursday, $250 would pretty much cover dinner for two at a nice place in the city. I assume they need to dangle a decent-sized carrot to attract the opinions of people actually worth valuing.

LG managed to whip up a fair amount of hoohah this week when it announced it would be showing (quoting LG UK) a “staggering 180-inch plasma 3D TV prototype” at this week’s IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin.

Wow. That would be one big piece of TV. I don’t think the floor joists in my house could even support something that big – though I probably wouldn’t be living in this money-pit if I could afford a wall-sized TV.

Turns out, LG was s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the description just a wee bit. It was a three by three wall of nine plasmas, which is hardly a prototype of anything. So the PR people should get wrist-slaps.

However, what’s interesting and really hard to find detail on is the plasmas that are stitched together.

Engadget says the seams are just 1.5 mm,which is getting into MicroTiles territory. I am not sure if that means a 1.5mm seam, period. Or 3mm when two are butted together. Either way, that’s getting close to making those grid lines insignificant.  I have seen nearly bezel-free plasmas for two or three years at shows, but always from little companies. I think this is the first time one of the big boys has marketed one.