This week has been extremely busy here at invidis HQ which is collocated with ISE HQ. ISE2024 is less than ten days away and on track to become a record show. But before we focus on ISE and Barcelona, let’s cross the Atlantic to NRF.
I visited NRF in New York and attended Stratacache’s excellently curated and well received Retail Media Network conference on Saturday. More than 400 retail, media and digital signage experts spent a full day discussing the potential of retail media.
According to McKinsey, the global potential for Retail Media Networks is USD 100bn+. We need to be realistic: probably less than 5% of the 100bn are instore at the moment, the rest is online and mobile. But instore retail media is picking up pace very fast and the digital signage and DooH industry is ready to help. What it all means to Europe, DooH, and digital signage will be discussed at our two conferences at ISE on January 31st (DSS ISE and ISE Retail Summit). For our readers, we offer a 30% discount (M8RIQLVD) – book your tickets today as they are selling out fast.
Retail Analytics may also get a second chance. The NRF this week brought a surge of optimism for retail analytics providers, including Advertima, Quividi, Xovis, Axis, and Cisco. This comes after a long period in which data privacy concerns, high investment costs, and a lack of data analysis knowledge had prevented retailers from investing in their technologies. Now, the emerging retail media boom could lead to a breakthrough.
Talking about DooH meets retail media – we met Dimitri Gärtner, CEO and co-founder of Berlin start-up Framen for an interview. The DooH newcomer is majority owned by Europe’s largest newspaper publisher Axel Springer and disrupting the European market with an asset-light strategy, premium content, and a free CMS platform. Dimitri will join invidis at the ISE Retail Conference on 31st of January at ISE.
Another disruptor, albeit on a smaller scale, is Swiss-based Cingerine. The digital signage software company is the go-to vertical specialist for the cinema industry and now expanding to retail media. In a conversation with invidis, CEO Andy Bohli explained why Cingerine 4.0 is “perhaps the most future-proof platform.”
Germany’s largest digital signage integrator is usually quite shy talking about themselves. Cancom acquired Austrian Kapsch Business Com last year and integrated both integrators into the DACH-regions leading digital signage provider. We got the rare chance to look behind the scenes and met Steffen Ludwig for an interview.
On a personal note – Bernd Eberhardt (Mr. NEC Europe) decided to step down as president and CEO after 30 years with NEC which has become Sharp/NEC. He will be succeeded by Christof Böhm, another three decade long senior manager at NEC. An industry veteran is leaving the stage.
Otherwise, we’re ready to head to Barcelona next week and will be back with a special invidis confidential ISE issue.
And here is what else you can read on the weekend:
- Stratacache Launches “Scala Commerce”
- Samsung Launches VXT
- Downtown Projection Mapping is Back
- Barcelona “permanent host” of ISE
Previous invidis confidential weekly round-ups: