A month has passed since ISE 2024 – sufficient time for invidis to digest the latest trends shaping the digital signage industry: The real disruption is happening under the hood. While transparent screens, e-paper screens, and even finer pixel pitches dominated the ISE show floor, the real changes are strategy alignments and the move to more software at visual solution manufacturers, software developers, and integrators.
Welcome to our latest invidis confidential newsletter – this week compiled by Florian Rotberg. As the invidis team is busy researching market data for the upcoming yearbooks (to be published at DSS Europe 2024) and preparing our upcoming conferences in Beijing (17 April), Munich (22-23 May) and Las Vegas (11 June), the invidis editorial team is reporting daily on the latest developments in the industry. If you missed last weeks edition – here the link. My recommendations for this Signage Sunday:
invidis presented it’s annual ISE keynote at DSS ISE – a 20 minutes run-down of the latest trends and drivers, which is now available on our YouTube channel:
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We also discussed the current state of the digital signage industry in North America and MENA – the fastest growing digital signage market in 2024. I sat down with Dave Haynes / Sixteen-Nine and Nita Odedra / Blue Rhine Industries at DSS ISE in Barcelona:
As digital signage is moving to a “Software Defined Industry” roles in the established value chain are being challenged – some may even say disrupted. Major disruption is already happening and Retail and DooH, which are leading the transformation with the boom of Retail Media – a 140bn USD opportunity turning retailers into media owners. Amazon Retail is losing money selling goods, but the immense advertising revenues are more than enough compensation.
Another industry driver fueled by Amazon & Co is dynamic pricing – digital signage has, for instance, become business critical in QSR restaurants. To manage margin and to lure more consumers into restaurants outside of lunch hour, QSR chains like Wendy’s move to dynamic pricing and dynamic packaging. We have looked at Wendy’s to better understand why this year’s USD 30m investment into menu boards is a no brainer.
If we would need to define just one trend transforming the industry – no doubt it is AI. Open AI with Chat GPT is opening up a whole new universe of opportunities. Generative AI democratizes not only content creation (see Engaging Experience – the invidis content special) but also enabling new forms of interaction. German digital signage scale-up Ameria is moving into a new, much larger market as it presented the world’s first AI notebook to investors last week.
Tech investors love riding the latest tech wave, and the non-touch specialists of Ameria developed a keyboard-less notebook which even uses the Mistral LLM. The GDPR-compliant European Open GPT challenger runs also local and could therefore be an attractive GenAI engine for digital signage, as invidis reported this week.
The Art of Digital Signage Selling
Much of the focus in the digital signage industry is on retail, as the sector accounts for 50% of digital signage demand. But the other half of the market also offers fantastic potential, much of which still needs to be uncovered. A hidden champion in this other half of the market is B12 – an agency group with a headless CMS platform providing B2B Selling solutions for bluechip clients like Volkswagen, Audi, or Siemens. invidis met the largely unknown digital creatives at a roadshow event this week.
Divergence of the Industry
Bigger integrators are becoming much bigger and are extending their international footprint, while smaller market players have to reinvent themselves. Much of the attention is with the market leaders, but hundreds of smaller integrators are surprisingly successful in the niche.
But that is a topic for next weeks invidis confidential newsletter and for DSS Europe 2024 (22-23 May in Munich) – registration opens on Monday.
See you soon online, on video and onstage,
Yours Florian Rotberg