Digital Media Description, Scope and Trends
Digital Signage is the fastest growing media in the world. Its evolution was born from the ease of use and adaptability of recordable content. When I first started in Digital Signage in the spring of 1989, I recorded content on a VHS tape and played the content. The seed was planted. Around that time other companies were making in-roads to this unnamed Digital Media. We were all trying to find our way to define effective processes within this new media.
As a result of increasing costs in conventional media and messages being lost in the media clutter, advertisers are now looking for other opportunities to access their target audience. Advertisers are migrating away from conventional forms of advertising and re-directing budgets to include Digital Media at Point of Purchase. The digital signage market is the fastest growing advertising medium because it reaches the customer out of home and at the point of sale enabling advertisers to affect brand decisions at the time it counts most, purchase time.
Digital signage offers a superior return on investment compared to traditional printed signs. The flexibility of content adaptation and distribution compared to print is the driving force of our burgeoning industry. The traditional form of advertising at Point of Purchase has been print. Print is expensive to create, deliver and dispose of which makes Digital Media a very attractive green alternative. Messages can now be delivered world wide in minutes, not weeks.
Our industry is expected to grow at the rate of 18% per year from the current one Billion spent on Digital advertising.
According to NSR, an international market consulting firm specializing in the telecommunications industry, "the industry, which has the majority of deployments and revenues globally from retail, hospitality, health care and transportation verticals, is poised to grow from an estimated installed base of about 210,000 sites in 2007 to more than 850,000 sites during the period from 2008 to 2013. Though North America and Europe remain leaders in deployments, countries such as China, Australia and India in the Asia Pacific are witnessing tremendous growth and are estimated to reach the scale of their early-adoptive counterparts over a five-year period. The most effective ROI found in Digital Media is at Point of Purchase which is the complete focus of this business plan."
Jim Hickman
Articles
Digital Signage Industry Has Reached the Tipping Point (June 2008)
Signs literally indicate that the digital signage industry has reached the
tipping point, according to several presenters at the Display Search inaugural
Flat Panel Digital Signage Conference, which took place last week in Chicago.
Specifically,
many companies agreed that this market segment has transitioned from "perpetual pilot programs" to a business segment that is finally
positioned to take off. For example, JC Decaux, one of the world’s largest
out-of-home media companies, has been actively working for over a decade to
find alternate solutions to its typical printed poster boards, principally
dynamic digital signs. They are now finally featuring digital signage roll
outs from LAX to JFK to London’s Heathrow. Yet another sign that the
market is beginning to mature, Omnivex, a worldwide leader of software content
management administering the content displayed on the screen noted that they
are seeing their partner-companies now actually generating revenue through
advertising on their various digital signage networks. Typically, these companies
might have entered into the digital signage space simply as a “branding” technique
or as a more eye-catching form of point of purchase (POP) in an effort to simply
achieve up-lift in sales of a particular product being promoted. But, they
are now finding that the “real estate” space on the screen can
be used for so much more and are thus finding new and sustainable business
models through the sales of advertising.
"All the indications are there that the digital signage industry is finally
starting to emerge from an indefinable market to one where high-level partnerships
are being formed and sustainable revenue flows are being realized," noted
Chris Connery, Conference Moderator for Display Searches Digital Signage Conference. "Continued
collaboration is still needed throughout the digital signage industry, with
the $100B display industry quite possibly at the heart of it, in order to build
upon the momentum profitably."