#ibc2010 – The Digital Useless Zone
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
One of the good things we been hearing from the Digital SIgnage Association (DSA) for a couple of months now (from a certain two people to be more precise) is their belief that the industry needs to get behind those shows and conferences which are good and start losing those that ain’t!
Have you ever been to IBC?
We couldn’t agree more. The problem is always going to be who’s good, who’s not and who says so?
We are not known of course for sitting on the fence and have always made our thoughts clear – a couple of cases in point, in Europe specifically;
- Kiosk Europe Expo 2010 in Essen in June is wasting its time with anything to do with Digital Signage. It might even be wasting its time full stop. Even Stephen Platt’s business conference running alongside it this year will not save it from being the utmost disaster.
- IBC 2010 should concentrate on its core strengths, aiming to be a European equivalent of NAB if at all possible at the very least. Its digital signage zone the past two years has been awful – last year in fact it looked so much like a ghost town with something like 10 exhibitors we dubbed it the “I’ve Been Conned” event
Here’s where industry associations can really help. As a committee they can agree on what shows to support and what shows to ignore (that goes for conferences as well – more of which in a later post) – we guess in fact that this sort of approach from the DSA might well have been one of the root causes of the dispute between them and Exponation / DSE / DSF but that’s strange cos’ DSE would definitely be a ‘keeper’.
And the definition of big is what exactly?
What industry associations can also do is help events plan which (calendar) window they can live in – we have already seen over the past couple of years a number of prominent events move in the calendar (Screen Media Expo Europe cleverly moved after its 2008 event to later in the year; first April in 2009 and now May in 2010 to avoid the collision with ISE – the event in 2008 was also in February of course).
In the US the east coast / west coast divide also needs to be taken into consideration (for some reason we got to love InfoComm in Orlando, Florida in 2009 but that’s another story) and the more we attend KioskCom the more we like the Las Vegas on the west coast and New York on the east coast approach.
So, come on industry let’s get real about certain events, IBC’s Digital Signage Zone was rubbish last year and a disaster the year before that so seriously, even though we have the instant expert @digitalsigncom on twitter (who has probably never, ever been to the event – let alone been to Amsterdam) lauding the event what the hell is gonna make it any different this year?
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