Digital Signage Japan Wraps Up Near Tokyo, Pulling An Estimated 30,000 Attendees

June 17, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Here’s a video glimpse of Digital Signage Japan, which was running the last three days at an exhibition center in the general orbit of Tokyo.

The video was pulled together by an online publication focused on e-readers, so the commentary gets a little whiny about the absence of e-paper products at the exhibit stands. There’s even a suggestion that e-paper is one of the largest solutions in digital signage, so it SHOULD be there.

I’ve never been to Japan (want to go, though), so maybe there is much more use of e-paper there. In North America and Europe, I’d guess e-paper is used for less than 1% of the deployed screens … unless electronic shelf labels in grocery and big box stores are included. And they shouldn’t be.

What’s interesting is that the show pulls big crowds – owing in part to being co-located with two other events, but also to it operating in one of the most population-dense and electronics-aware cities on the planet. The show website suggests 23,000 walked the floor Wednesday and Thursday, so if Friday’s numbers are similar, total attendance will be north of 30,000.

One of the co-located shows is the long-running Interop web technology show. If I am reading the attendance counts right (it’s not terribly clear what is what), the aggregate show attendance is almost 60,000 for Wednesday and Thursday, with Friday numbers to come.

For comparison, InfoComm last week logged about 20,000 attendees, and the company re-booting DSE in November as Digital Signage Experience would be over the moon if it gets north of 4,000 people, which was roughly the pre-COVID average for the original version of that show.

I know it’s different in a whole bunch of ways, but a reminder when marketers and press talk about the biggest and busiest trade shows in the world, we sometimes use a pretty narrow lens.