Show Me The Digital Signage Money Summit Back On
May 24, 2010 by Dave Haynes
One of the more popular and successful Strategy Institute conferences the company does on this sector is the one on investors, probably because raising money is anything but easy.
The 5th annual Digital Signage Investor Conference has been announced for Oct. 5-6 in New York, this time moving up from the Wall Street area and more into midtown, at a hotel located near the Theater District and Times Square.
The event is billed as “an opportunity for key players to source funding, facilitate deal making and maximize return-on-investment. In an exclusive setting, senior executives in the media and finance community can connect face-to-face and lay the seeds for the next deal. Exclusive and innovative speed networking session and structured breaks mean more time to make the right connections.”
Stu Armstrong from EnQii and fellow blogger Adrian Cotterill of DailyDOOH, who does a fair amount of investment advisory work, are the co-chairs – Stu doing Day One and Adrian Day Two.
You can find the agenda here, a mix of CEOs from DOOH and technology companies and people from the VC community. There is no sign of the smug, disinterested twits who dropped in from Wall Street at last fall’s event, thankfully.
There’s a good mix of topics but I think the co-chairs will have a steady challenge of keeping some of these folks staying on topic and interesting. Some of the people getting mike time have been known to pitch and beat their company chests rather than discuss the topic of the hour.
This was a good event last fall despite a bit of that, and I hope to make it down – though at $244 a night for a room that will probably be more costly than the flight down and back on JetBlue from Buffalo. Ouch. A guy can get spoiled by Las Vegas room rates.
I was at this conference last year and decided then that I wanted to participate this year. There are few media sectors now with the kind of trajectory that DOOH has. My impression from last year was that the entrepreneurs had done what historically was needed to reach the next round of financing, i.e. launch, develop a product/market match, attract customers and produce credible projections for future growth. They were ready to cut in partners, the problem was no one was there with the money to finance the next stage. I remember one panel with fund managers getting defensive about having run the numbers and not coming up with the confidence to invest. The audience members were not pleased. Those were unusual times. What couldn’t be disputed was the success of many of the players and the potential of the future. Truly strategic investors should be there this year.