By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
3/4/2008
Last week I attended the Digital Signage Expo, celebrating its 5th year. It has come a long way from Navy Pier in Chicago, not just physically to Las Vegas, but “mentally” as well – in the topics covered and in the way attendees spoke about those topics. The move reflects an increasing maturity about the space. Gone from the expo hall were the scrollbar, LED, and “flashy” sign people, replaced instead by interactive software vendors, there to turn a plain old screen into something more.
The language used reflects the growth. “Digital signage” is making way for more comprehensive terms: “dynamic messaging”, “retail media networks” – a change that emphasizes networked communications, and leaves room for a role for interactivity. Attendees spoke of pull marketing, immersion, and managed communications to consumers, not just more ways to advertise. If I had one frustration about the sessions I attended, it was a lack of detail – while the attitude was right, the specifics of how to execute it were missing.
However, rather than a grown-up cocktail party, the event felt more like the kind of party teenagers throw when the parents aren’t at home. Sharing the Las Vegas Convention Center with the Nightclub & Bar Association’s big event didn’t help, but neither did Wireless Ronin’s “Robert Palmer girls”. For a down economy, there was rather a lot more business going on than I expected to see. The consensus among the attendees I spoke with focused on the need to be more targeted: that advertisers and brands recognize that the value of mass media advertising is declining, and so while advertising budgets may freeze or even be cut in a downturn, any advertising that is more targeted is going to get a bigger share of the pie.
There was still a lot whining from media buyer and ad agency types, who want a standard rate card for advertising in retail – something that I just don’t think is ever going to happen. If retailers won’t share their data with CPG manufacturers in order to sell more products – a win-win for both companies, and coincidentally, retail’s primary role – what makes an ad agency think that retailers will pool all of that data just to make it easier for media buyers to purchase ads? There are also still people who are overly focused on advertising as the primary business model, rather than defining specific value for both retailer and consumer. Not every installation will be suited to an advertising-based business model, but obsession with that model crowds out other considerations. And there was still a lot of complaining about measurements, or a lack thereof.
But there were grown-up moments as well: the arrival of serious infrastructure companies – not just the screen providers, like Planar, but heavy-duty broadcast and satellite types like Harris and Helios (a division of Hughes). SeeSaw Networks demonstrated maturity of a different kind: as an aggregator of networks, SeeSaw represents “infrastructure” on the buy-side of the business, by enabling a media buyer to purchase ad space across multiple networks, searchable by demographics or various other criteria. These infrastructure players are important because they both lend legitimacy to the space (for those holdouts who still doubt), and a stabilizing mechanism that makes it easier for business models to be defined and proved out, and risk mitigation for smaller networks with a well-defined niche.
So all-in-all, I think “teenage years” sums it up the best: overall, mature enough to stand on its own, but still prone to fits of immaturity that leave you shaking your head. I heard on more than one occasion cautions from industry participants on all sides: warnings to be pragmatic, lest the youthful exuberance about the space scare off the most important participant of all: the consumer. And that is the most compelling reason to believe that retail media networks will make it into adulthood.
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