DailyDOOH

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

Well, #DSinvestor is over for another year, as mentioned in a brief earlier post, the venue could have been better (it wasn’t as nice a venue as last year by a long way) but everything else about the conference was pretty much great.

Garry McGuire who has been CEO, RMG Networks for just over 14 months now gave a truly fantastic keynote which set the bar very high for the other speakers and panelists to aspire to. Even before I had sat down with Garry at BLT Steak, a truly wonderful steak house, our NA Editor Gail Chiasson had the main points of his keynote up here which hopefully just goes to show how seriously we take coverage of important events like this.

• I won’t re-iterate all those points here but just to say, Garry was very bullish about the industry – many of those who were reporting the event out on twitter picked up on his statement “I cannot think of a better time to be working in this industry”, he also made mention that he would be announcing two acquisitions within the next couple of weeks; and no, we don’t expect one of them to be PRN – just yet anyway 😉
• He also said a lot, about himself and his business, by what he didn’t say. The presentation wasn’t about him or wholly about RMG, it was about the industry in general and what he saw happening going forward. I think he could have made more of Yahoo!’s Elisa Steele joining RMG’s Board (that says so much) and the fact that previous CEO Aileen Lee, who is now chairman of the board and is back in her position with Kleiner Perkins has not had one unsuccessful investment that she has been involved in.
• Garry was incredibly bullish and I think he has every right to be. Along with folks like Zoom Media and perhaps to a lesser extent Captivate Network, it’s networks like this that are emerging as the new driving force for digital in North America. Whilst we wouldn’t expect Zoom to IPO we do expect them to make some more serious announcements shortly BUT RMG for sure will be doing an IPO in 18 – 24 months.

There were too many good presentations for me to give them any justice here. Personally I thought it was great that Posterscope and Horizon Media took the time to attend and present – Connie and Jill’s presentation was typically good.

Two people who had those awful time-slots (late in the day, after lunch or keeping people away from food) who did particularly well I thought were Vincent Létang, Senior Analyst, Head of Advertising, Screen Digest who presented ‘Outdoor advertising in perspective: Forecasts and Trends‘. BTW, Vincent is also presenting at #DOOHBizKonf in Munich in a few weeks time (and it is worth the trip to Munich for the data in this presentation alone I feel) and Kevin Covert, back presenting for the THIRD time who took the last day after lunch slot to present ‘How to Avoid Mistakes of the Past so the Industry Can Grow, Mature and Advance‘.

The twitter over and above the conference, using the hashtag #DSinvestor was fun and literally added another dimension to the event. Ourselves, @daviddrain, @stephenrandall (top 3) and 40 others contributed 271 tweets during the conference.

Two examples I particularly liked: –

• Whilst Connie from Posterscope was speaking and made mention of the fabulous OOHGLE initiative that they did in London back in late 2008 we were able to tweet “#DSInvestor Connie talking about the OOHGLE campaign done in the UK, see http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/5750” for folks to take a look at some of the creative.
• We had our first question to a presenter that came in via twitter – @dhuelsermann who of course is President, OVAB Europe tweeted “#DSinvestor can I ask Alan High, where does the majority of revenues for DOOH in yr malls come from?”

David Weinfeld also wrote a nice blog post during the event ‘#DSInvestor – Follow Tweets from the Digital Signage Investor Conference‘ which is well worth a read.

This event is I think one of the highlights of the conference calendar – it’s definitely the jewel in The Strategy Institute’s series of digital signage industry events and perhaps they need to take a little more care of it. Attendees probably expect a 4 star experience – hotel, conference venue, projection equipment etc.

New York is damned expensive also and it might be time to move away. With RMG going great guns and the likes of Kleiner Perkins in the region my vote for next year is that we move the event to San Francisco.

Either way, if you weren’t there, even if you were following proceedings via twitter you missed something. Make sure you are there in 2011.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 00:46 @074 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.