Our Top Takeaways from DSSE 2022

One week one from DSSE 2022, we caught up with Business Development Director Joan Aixa about his top takeaways from the summit and the main priorities for digital signage over the next 12 months..

Digital Signage has become business critical and not an isolated solution in addition to company operations.

From retail and hospitality to medical facilities, transportation and even manufacturing plants, digital displays have become essential in day-to-day operation and an integral part of the customer and employee journey.

The industry has seen a double digit growth of 11%, with even mature technologies like LFD growing by 14% in Europe. When the screens go black and businesses come to a halt, we quickly see how much our content embracing industry has become reliant on this no longer ‘luxury’ commodity.

It was clear from the opening discussions of DSSE, that digital signage has become business-critical in almost every feasible industry and although business critical IT systems are far from revolutionary, the move for digital signage from silo applications to business critical functions is. But with higher adoption rates of digital signage, new questions are beginning to appear around the direct impact digital signage has on the environment..

Green signage continues to be a key strategy for more and more vendors, from manufacturing to distribution and recycling.

Climate change, sustainability and rising energy costs are driving an increase in customer requirements for greener signage. Green Signage offers great potential for the digital signage industry to engage more businesses who are prioritising reducing their carbon footprint.

Lifecycle carbon emission of displays is one of the most relevant green signage topics. LG has published detailed carbon emission splits for its displays, concluding that over 80% of emissions are produced while screens are in use. This showcases that although manufacturing, distribution and disposal offer much potential for improvement, green signage strategies should focus predominantly on how to operate screens more effectively. This includes energy efficient hardware, remote management infrastructure and optimising content.

Content and content management is key, but with the amount of CMS hardware available, remote management of the devices is critical to keep the network safe, maintained and updated.

Finally, a conclusion for the SoC Vs dedicated player debate! SoC reigns supreme having reached a technology level that meets these next generation digital signage requirements.

Dynamic data and the need to instantly update content in real-time is essential for the new functioning business critical signage and on-premise content management systems simply weren’t designed to accommodate that kind of flexibility. Companies had to rapidly adapt to remote-first, distributed workflows. From lack of ability to access the solutions while businesses worked from home, the CMS player quickly fell short under the less-than-ideal working conditions. Critical infrastructure and content became inaccessible and the threat of business critical communications being cut off became a worrying reality.

Unlike a SaaS CMS, the scalability of an on-premise CMS depends entirely on the underlying infrastructure. Maintaining in-house infrastructure can adversely impact scalability, especially if you don’t take advantage of the cloud and AI technologies offered.

Having said that, players still have a place and will be required for more powerful applications and integrations with applications such as interactivity, AI and Edge computing.

AI-powered Digital Signage enhances the customer experience by providing accurate personalisation. This combination of data collection with powerful AI platforms is a powerful value proposition and a step closer to hyper customization.

Artificial intelligence engines that automatically learn from end-user preferences, demographic data, sales and inventory are, among other parameters, key ways to optimise content management. These have become increasingly important for targeting and functionality. Understanding more about customer and employee behaviour has become essential at the business decision point for all types of businesses.

Within retail and DOOH settings, businesses are able to improve their displays performance and overall campaign efficiency, as displays are able to automatically target the right audience demographic and can even adjust content based on location and time.

These data-driven solutions mean that companies no longer need to guess how, when and where to broadcast content, but provide businesses with precise predictions and recommendations for effective use. This extends the capabilities of omnichannel digital signage. But as technology and services continue to commoditize, interoperability with other areas will be critical for integrators to offer value propositions in the AV Market.

The metaverse just got real…

Whether you believe it will be the next big thing or is just a passing phase, you can’t overlook the topic of the metaverse when talking about smart spaces.

At the moment, this is mostly being driven by retail brands who want to be first to market with ground-breaking activations. Questions however remain around how to make the metaverse accessible, interoperable and who is making the rules around governance.