Here’s The Winner List For 2025 Global Digital Signage Awards

February 18, 2025 by Dave Haynes

I don’t have an overly useful file that lists all the winners from the global Digital Signage Awards from, wow, a couple of weeks back in Barcelona, so I will point you instead at a set of slides from the awards site that shows the various winners with images of the projects. Sixteen:Nine helps guide and promote the annual awards and event.

The big winner was very deservedly a project done for a retailer in the teeny principality of Andorra, in the Pyrenees that borders France and Spain. This is how I described it last fall …

This is a fantastically well-conceived, engineered and executed digital media facade on the front of a perfume company’s flagship store and HQ in Andorra. A set of vertical LED fins enable views from people walking toward the building, even though the pedestrian-only high street is very narrow.

Barcelona-based creative technology studio Instronic did the job for Perfumerías Julia – coming up with and delivering a plan for a facade that fits on the street and reflects the brand’s character and personality.

“As Julia’s most iconic location, the design needed to be unique, singular, and memorable,” says Instronic in a detailed online case study. “Additionally, the building’s position posed a visibility issue due to the limited frontal view, so we had to create new vantage points to address this. Moreover, being a commercial store, it was essential that the facade stand out from its surroundings and attract customers.”

A lot of brands that want to use big digital display on their signature locations can just work in some sort of LED structure – conventional, mesh or on glass. But that only really works if there are long and open sightlines to the building, and in this case, the street is more like a lane and the Perfumerías Julia building faces another building, maybe 30 feet away across the concourse.

If a conventional LED display was on the face of that building, pedestrians quite possibly wouldn’t even notice it, but whoever had the building across the lane would DEFINITELY notice it, and would probably be thinking about relocating after a few weeks with a big old wall of bright lights flooding the windows.

So Instronic studied foot traffic patterns along the high street and came up with a plan that made the media visible to pedestrians as they walked towards the building, with the LED fins making carefully-conceived creative visible from a severely off-angle. The fins only face in one direction, based on studies that indicated most people came from one direction.

Spanish digital signage solutions firm Trison and its subsidiary Trison NECSUM were also big winners for a variety of different jobs.

The company of the year was Zeta Display, which does most but not all of its work in Scandinavia.

And the Outstanding Individual – which as head judge I’m asked to select – was a hugely-deserving Stan Richter, who runs SignageOS and has worked his butt off in recent years to realize huge growth with software services intended to make networks easier to run and manage. When I was at ISE he gave me a sneak-peek at something new that’s in beta tests that is VERY impressive, but that’s all I can say at the moment.

This is what I said at the presentation that night, though I wandered off script a bit out of fatigue and vino tinto.

In an industry that’s invariably excited by shiny objects and buzz phrases, you wouldn’t place a big wager on a company that’s known for developing boring stuff like middleware and device management tools being successful, and developing serious levels of top-of-mind awareness.

In an industry that’s invariably excited by shiny objects and buzz phrases, you wouldn’t place a big wager on a company that’s known for developing boring stuff like middleware and device management tools being successful, and developing serious levels of top-of-mind awareness.

But SignageOS has done that in a little more than seven years – first by offering a platform and tools that made most of the different hardware and operation system options out there interoperable, and then doing much the same for device management.

These days, the company describes itself as offering a way to unify digital signage hardware through a single API.

Success has happened because of a team, of course, but the guy leading that team – Stan Richter – has put a huge amount of time and airplane miles traveling the world to sell the idea and build partners. While the company’s main office and home is Prague, Richter has developed most of his business in the United States – without consistent, full-time sales over there.

I’ve watched Stan and his co-founder Lukas Danek grow this from a scrappy little crew that had a tiny stand in a hallway at ISE years ago, to a much bigger, thriving company that is also, now, a huge supporter of the social and business events that drive community in this industry.

Stan is driven and insanely smart – he has a Ph.D in international economics – but most important, he’s a terrific person, and well deserving of this honor.

But SignageOS has done that in a little more than seven years – first by offering a platform and tools that made most of the different hardware and operation system options out there interoperable, and then doing much the same for device management.

These days, the company describes itself as offering a way to unify digital signage hardware through a single API.

Success has happened because of a team, of course, but the guy leading that team – Stan Richter – has put a huge amount of time and airplane miles traveling the world to sell the idea and build partners. While the company’s main office and home is Prague, Richter has developed most of his business in the United States – without consistent, full-time sales over there.

I’ve watched Stan and his co-founder Lukas Danek grow this from a scrappy little crew that had a tiny stand in a hallway at ISE years ago, to a much bigger, thriving company that is also, now, a huge supporter of the social and business events that drive community in this industry.

Stan is driven and insanely smart – he has a Ph.D in international economics – but most important, he’s a terrific person, and well deserving of this honor.

Good event, as always, though I a, told the very nice venue up in park overlooking Barcelona is not available next year (it’s not going to open in the cold months).

They don’t know cold, but …

There is no shortage of alt venues in that city, so stay tuned for plans as they come together. Sixteen:Nine doesn’t get involved on that side of things.

Here’s a video from the night …