Here Are The DSE 2019 Apex Award Winners

April 1, 2019 by Dave Haynes

The 15th Annual APEX Awards were handed out last week in Las Vegas –  judged and presented by the Digital Signage Federation, during Digital Signage Expo.

I am on the board of the DSF, but was not involved in the judging. I also have a bit of a conflict, in that 16:9 is the main sponsor of the global Digital Signage Awards, which is entirely unrelated and presented during ISE in Europe.

With that out of the way, there was a nice mix of impressive projects and winners, but for something that’s been around as long as it has, and is driven by the substantial marketing muscle and contact list of DSE, it sure doesn’t get many entries. There were 112 and some categories, like DOOH campaigns, had all of three submissions – resulting in the bronze going to a piece of media player hardware???

Hospitality had five???

I also thought some of the winners, like last year, were head-scratchers. But then that happened, to some degree, with the awards I am directly involved in. Apparently not everyone thinks like me! Jeez.

The big award – the APEX Installation of the Year award – went to Revel Media Group for its work on the Hale Centre Theater, which was highly impressive as a  pro AV job, but would never be the project I’d point to and say, “That one. THAT’S the one to look at and learn from as to what digital signage is all about.”

One of the reasons companies like Publicis Sapient win awards is that they take the time and spend the modest money to make submissions. I see and write about projects all the time that should be subject to award submission and review, but no one puts them in. Yes, big agencies have more resources than small solutions providers, but there is not that much involved in entry submissions.

The other problem is that the larger the client, the harder it can be to get permission to say anything about the work done. But T-Mobile said OK, as did a  big cruise line and some NFL teams.

There’s an argument to be made that a jury of peers should just watch the global marketplace and select their own nominations, but this is not the movie business. Something amazing could be done in Peru or Slovenia, and who would know?

Bottom line – these guys entered, and they’ll rightly mine the benefits of being able to say award-winning. The paucity of entries is not the fault of the DSE people, or the DSF. Vendors and end-users need to get off their butts and enter!

Here’s the rest of what was handed out

The APEX Content of the Year award went to Magic Innovations for its work on the Saudi Airlines Multimedia Solutions.

Dimensional Innovations was named Integrator of the Year for its work for the Minnesota Vikings’ Museum.

By category:

Corporate Environments (10 entries)

Digital Out-of-Home Campaigns (3 entries)

Educational Environments (11 entries)

Entertainment & Recreation (13 entries)

Experiential Design & Planning (11 entries)

Healthcare Environments (6 entries)

Hospitality (5 entries)

The silver went to a wedding in Armenia. World gone mad.

Public Spaces (10 entries)

Restaurants, Bars & Foodservice (7 entries)

Retail Environments (22 entries)

Transportation (9 entries)

Venues (5 Entries)

You can see vids of all the Gold, Silver and Bronze winners here …

  1. Dave

    Thanks for the shutout on the DSE Apex Awards.

    Couldn’t agree more with your sentiment about entries. As a judge, I would have liked to have seen more, especially in DOOH. We worked hard on this looking at all of the entries — reviewing 112 was no small order — not just for whiz-bang technology but for clearly stated objectives as well as explanations on ROI or ROO.

    So to those who may have read your post and said “We did better than that!” my response is: Show Us. Grab Your APEX Moment in 2020.

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