Next We Take Manhattan
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Leonard Cohen wrote “First we take Manhattan” and it’s been part of our office iTunes playlist of all songs with the word ‘Manhattan’ in for weeks now – though Kings of Leon and Prefab Sprout remain our firm favourites – tomorrow however (Saturday) sees the start of our team’s arrival in Manhattan in preparation for next week’s Strategy Institute event.
It’s been a busy week with shows in Europe vying for everyone’s attention; Total Media in Spain, KioskCom in London and Viscom Düsseldorf and all of those seemingly hot on the heels of Viscom Paris and IBC in Amsterdam.
Total Media was a fantastic event and a great success, KioskComm in our eyes not so though of course the organisers plead different (and it’s only fair to bring to your attention Lawrence Dvorchik’s response to our criticism). For us also a lot of the Viscom events are still open to debate as to how useful they are to digital signage and digital out of home folks.
We feel that Viscom Paris, at least from an exhibitor point of view, lost a lot of focus on DOOH and Digital SIgnage this year and seemed to return almost to very much becoming a sign makers’ show. It remains a favourite though because of the locale and the people and we will be giving it another try next year (our 3rd year visiting the show).
The organisers of Viscom Spain were probably daft to have the event so close to Total Media or indeed do something TOGETHER – now wouldn’t that be a novelty!!
Maybe next year some of the disastrous shows we have had to put up with will either be cancelled – please no more digital signage zones at IBC (you have had two years to get it right now and no-one is interested really in bolting on another industry sector to an already bloated show) or may merge or work together (Spain are you listening? We said “work together”).
As you know we have carefully planned the events that we think will be around and be successful in 2010 and published here and that post also shows where you can find us for the rest of this year.
We wait to hear reports from Düsseldorf but for now it’s time to start packing our bags, Manhattan here we come!!!
October 2nd, 2009 at 13:43 @613
Kings of Leon…. very nice choice.
October 2nd, 2009 at 15:02 @668
Adrian- Responding to invitation to the strategy institute web site for the event taking place NY next week was very difficult.No cost for attendance was posted as far as i could see. RE your comments various shows, It is my experience that the professional event and show organizers often do a poor job because they are not in the business they are promoting and they use cookie cutter techniques for promotion of each event.