I’m happy to report that traffic picked up at the show on Wednesday. I still think overall attendance will end up down for the show, but day 2 was much better than day 1. Thursday is a half day and typically has pretty light attendance.
Wednesday was also "Digital Signage" day at the show. Which included a conference track of six sessions on digital signage topics presented by digitalsignagetoday.com. The program kicked off at 8:30am with Bradly Walker and Brian Ardinger of Nanonation doing their usual great job of showcases some best of class customer experiences. Bradly and Brian are both business partners of mine, whom have become good friends that I really enjoying working with.
Other speakers included Alex Richardson, Chris Riege, Jeff Porter, John Melillo, and David Drain.
It sounds like most of the sessions were attended by 50-100 people which is a decent turn-out for this show.
The morning started out with a nice surprise for MTI as Display and Design Ideas came by to tell us that our trade show booth had been named the Best Booth in the digital store area. We’re in the running for Best of Show, but as you can imagine there’s a lot of great competition for best booth at a design show.
One interesting thing at this years show, is the presence of several turn key shelving systems from well respected fabricators that include built interactive digital signs.
Artisan Complete is a Canadian design/build firm that introduced nCap(tm), a turn key end-cap fixture with an integrated 24" monitor (can be portrait or landscape) and a set of soft menu buttons for interactivity. A PC embeded in the end-cap comes pre-loaded with Broadsign software and CongoVision audience measurement. Dave Haynes of sixteen:nine blog, was working in the booth and we got a chance to meet and chat for a bit. This industry is full of good people. You can read his recap of the Artisan display here.
Madix is one of the most popular providers of standard metal fixtures in the industry. They were showing their new Easel(tm) product, which includes a printed sign channel extension for the edge of their fixtures that can include an integrated small format touch screen and even a bar code reader. The screen appears to be driven by Symon software. Madix also announced their partnership with CBS Outernet. I was a bit surprised to see Madix get in bed with a particular vendor vs. developing a solution that could work with all the software vendors in the space.
The day ended with the 50 Anniversary OMA (outstanding merchandising achievements) awards gala. Both Nanonation and Scala were among the winners in the Digital Signage category. The RedBull Refill station display that won Display of the Year was very clever. Most humbling, MTI’s Verizon PDA Wall display won a Gold award and was named Digital Signage Display of the Year! I’m lucky to have great clients like Verizon, and a great team to execute projects like this.
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