António Câmara, YDreams’ CEO, and I headed out to Vegas for some gambling and a couple of speaking engagements at the Digital Signage Expo starting on February 24th.

Day One started with the Seminar Revolutionizing Interactive Marketing in Public Spaces - the Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage Imperative. It was great to have a whole seminar dedicated to new types of interaction in Digital Signage. The list of speakers was a who’s who of the interactive world – Razorfish, Gesturetek, Total Immersion – and the discussion was lively and significant.

The clear point made by all participants was that digital signage networks need to be relevant to consumers and offer something more, in order to be effective. Consumers are not interested in watching the same 30 second ads that they skip on TV, at the store. The quote of the day went to Sanjay Manandhar, Founder & CTO of Aerva, a Boston-based digital signage technology company focused on real-time interaction between mobile applications and digital display networks, when commenting that “You can buy reach, but you can’t buy engagement”.

António Câmara spoke about Generating Brand Power with Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage and how digital signage networks can expect a much more interactive future. Among other things, he shared our augmented children’s playground concept featuring Flapi (YDreams’ well known mascot) and explained the potential of a technology where users will be able to interact with virtual characters in real time. Just watching TV will be a thing of the past, in the near future!:)

Speaking about New Content Models for Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage, I focused my talk on YDreams’ experience in creating interactive experiences for public spaces, and shared our 5 key success factors for designing adequate and exciting content. Check out Digital Signage Expo’s 5 Keys to Great Gesture-based Interactive Content for a summary of my session.

Day Two was all about the Exhibition Floor. Audience Measurement Technology was the most talked about thing around. Both CognoVision and TruMedia showed their technology, which allows network managers and advertisers to know how many people walked by, how many watched the ad, for how long, as well as detailed demographics of the public. Another interesting concept was that of changing broadcasted content depending on the demographic of the public watching, automatically. Last but not least, the ability to prove ROI of Digital Signage Networks, creates the conditions for the market to grow and evolve.

And there is plenty of innovation out there to invest in – giant super bright screens, interactive kiosks, multi-platform campaign solutions, 3D screens, interactive street furniture that can withstand all types of weather conditions and vandalism. The future of Digital Signage appears brilliant indeed.

Tags: digital signage, event, exhibition, las vegas

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 17:53 and is filed under Business & Management, Events, Humor, Interactive Environments, Marketing & Advertising, in the media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.