In her Year in Review, Mónica Fernández, Managing Director of Nsign, reflects on how the digital signage industry is evolving but not necessarily unifying - and how orchestration of the systems becomes essential.
Year in Review 2025/2026: Mónica Fernández | Nsign
2025 was not a year of spectacle for us. It was a year of definition.
Across the digital signage industry, 2025 will likely be remembered as the year when AI, retail media, analytics and DooH firmly entered every conversation. But from our perspective at Nsign, it was also the year when a deeper question emerged: not what technology can do, but how much complexity organisations are really willing — or able — to absorb.
For Nsign, 2025 was clearly a year of strategic redefinition. We deliberately focused less on launching “wow” features and more on reshaping our role in the ecosystem. We doubled down on a software-first, platform-driven vision: positioning Nsign not just as a CMS, but as a unified software layer for digital communication in physical spaces.
What we consistently saw in customers was not a lack of innovation, but fragmentation. Screens were multiplying, data sources were growing, and expectations were rising — yet systems remained siloed. CMS, device management, content operations, analytics and integrations often lived in different tools, owned by different teams. The operational cost of that fragmentation has become impossible to ignore.
More than a publishing tool
This is why we believe digital signage is no longer just a publishing tool. It is becoming a first-party communication channel — one that brands fully own and control, much like their website or their YouTube channel, but rooted in the physical world. Screens are no longer just for broadcasting messages; they are increasingly about listening, analysing, deciding and acting. And as hardware costs continue to decrease, the barriers to deploying this channel keep falling.
Looking ahead to 2026, we see digital signage evolving from a tool into an experience infrastructure. Brands are further along their digital transformation journeys, more mature in how they think about communication, and more demanding about measurable impact. They no longer ask whether screens should be connected — they ask how those screens connect to operations, to customer understanding and to decision-making.
Our ambition reflects this shift. Nsign aims to be one of the five leading digital signage platforms globally, and that requires becoming the single software platform for digital communication in physical environments. Not only in retail stores, but across restaurants, offices, schools, warehouses, airports, train stations, car parks and many other spaces where communication and operations intersect. We do not aim to replace core systems like POS or access control, but to orchestrate everything related to digital communication — from emission to reception, from content to operations.
Rise of Instore Retail Media
In terms of industry trends, 2025 also brought clarity. Retail media in-store is gaining traction, but adoption remains uneven. Many brands still see their signage networks as a protected owned communication channel in physical spaces and are cautious about “polluting” it — much as they once were with their websites. Retail media makes strong sense in specific contexts, such as multi-brand retailers or underutilised spaces like car parks, but it is not yet a universal model.
Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, is often discussed through the lens of content generation. While useful, we see this as table stakes. The real differentiation will come from operational AI: machine-to-machine communication, automation of complex workflows, and eventually human–system interaction that fundamentally changes how signage networks are managed. At some point, the question will no longer be whether a human should manually build playlists at all.
The next phase
Despite all this innovation, customers are still catching up. Many solutions the industry considers mature — video analytics, dynamic content, physical–digital interaction — are still used marginally. Curiosity and ambition are there, but investment justification remains difficult, and price sensitivity is real. What the industry is missing are those breathtaking use cases that shift perception overnight, much like digital-native companies once did for the web.
This is where we believe the next phase of digital signage will be defined: not by technology alone, but by clearer value, simpler systems and undeniable impact. In 2026, progress will be measured less by the number of layers we add, and more by how effectively we make complexity disappear.
