Report: Digital Signage Summit Europe 2015

The Digital Signage Summit Europe 2015 saw a large rise in delegates this year, and covered a myriad of Dooh technologies in a range of presentations and panel sessions. This year saw 470 delegates visit the Hilton Munich Airport for the two-day event, up from 260 last year.

On the Thursday the organisers, OVAB Europe and ISE, ran a tour of digital signage points of interest within the German city, and the day ended with an awards ceremony in the evening.

The Friday began with a keynote from indivis consulting called ‘Digital Signage 2020 – Shifting Balance of Power’ which looked at the new entrants to the market (Acer, BenQ) and the possible disruptors (Google launching Chrome OS digital signage in EMEA, Adobe’s experience manager CMS software) there could be in the market.

It touched on various Dooh trends it has seen, one being companies such as NEC, who had recently established a global sales structure.    It also looked at the increasing use of iBeacons in retail to help brands connect with customers. In 2014 50% of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. had used them, that figure was 30% outside the U.S. It is expected to reach a penetration rate of 85% globally by 2016.

Invidis said that digital signage projects were becoming more international, much larger in size and more complex.

The presentation looked at ‘bricks and clicks’ (in-store and online), and spoke of how customers are now being recognised and traced during their in-store shopping journey. That information is then returned to a central system which collects and analyses communications at the PoS. What needs to happen now says invidis is that marketers need to be in control from a central point (one CMS rather than several) to reduce the effort and to synchronise between the different channels.

Following that was a discussion on ‘The evolution of digital signage: from instore TV to customer engagement.’   Damian Rodgett from Pilot Screentime said that sales weren’t driving the digital signage experience, and that it was all about creating a brand experience. "The brand is driving digital signage right now."

Joachim Bader from SapientNitro didn’t think that most clients were prepared for a digital transformation, "You have to think about what needs to happen in change management first."

Clients wanted two things from a Dooh campaign said Rodgett, reach and interaction. "How do you quantify customer engagement? It’s hard. Projects tend to fall on one side of the fence, either you have high engagement or great reach."

Later on that day a panel discussion was held called ‘what digital signage technologies will impact Dooh in the future?’ Amit Chatterjee from Samsung said his company was looking to bring mirror displays, more flexible displays, transparent displays and even OLED to digital signage projects in the next few years. Maarten Dollevoet from BroadSign said the biggest three trends he saw right now were mobile, programmatic buying and more complex projects.   Daniel Gasser from Relevance Analytics felt that the biggest trend in Dooh right now was audience measurement.

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