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Look into the future of digital signage

The fifth edition of the Digital Signage Future Trends report analyzes wide-ranging survey data and mines industry insights for actionable intelligence about the industry.

August 19, 2014 by Christopher Hall — w, t

The future is coming — whether or not you or your company are ready for it.

And the business landscape is littered with the carcasses of companies that thought they were, but were not. The key, of course, is making certain your company doesn't join them.

But how?

There are plenty of good Sun Tzu or von Clausewitz quotes about intelligence leading to victory in battle, but this one from former Commandant of the Marine Corps General David M. Shoup is succinct and to the point: "To lack intelligence is to be in the ring blindfolded."

The key to surviving the future is being ready for it by having intelligence about what's coming down the road. And while the future is by definition unknowable and to a large extent unpredictable, there are ways we can gather intelligence on what the trends shaping it may look like.

One simple but effective tactic to gather intelligence is just asking for it. In the annual future trends reports we ask for it in two ways: First, we ask a few people for general information, and second, we ask lots of people for specific information. We ask people who are experts in their field what they think will be the key trends shaping the future of the digital signage industry. We also survey hundreds of people who either make or sell the technology, or buy and use it, what they think will happen or what they plan to do with it in the future. In other words, we ask the people selling what they think will be important, and we ask the people buying what they think is important and what their intentions are with regards to the sector.

Digital Signage Today parent Networld Media Group recently released the fifth edition of the Digital Signage Future Trends Report, and it's the second edition to feature an even more intensive set of survey questions, which allows us to compare information from specific end-user and deployer verticals and see how it changes from year to year. And we also think it's the beginning of a potentially massive vault of information we'll keep gathering in future years for even more long-term comparison.

Again this year, the Future Trends survey featured a smarter, more reactive set of questions that adapted to the survey taker, offering a different set of questions to certain respondents based on how they answered certain questions. These questions are designed to offer digital signage solution providers more insight into the plans of the end-users and potential end-users who are, or might be, their clients.

For instance, end-users saw a different set of questions than solution providers. And among the end-users, respondents who responded as representatives of restaurants or food service providers saw different questions than those who responded as a representative of a bank or financial institution.

In an effort to drill down even further for valuable nuggets of actionable intelligence, those restaurateurs who identified as already having deployed digital signage would get different questions than those who said they had not yet.

And so on for hotels and colleges and retailers and more.

The survey unearthed a wealth of insights and data nuggets such as these:

• Only 11.4 percent of restaurants surveyed use digital signage for drive-thru digital menu boards (and that's up from only 7.7 percent last year).
• Only 10 percent of this year’s retail respondents said they have already deployed digital signage (down from 16.7 last year).
• Of the minority faction of educational institutions that don't already have digital signage, two-thirds (66.7 percent) said they planned to deploy it in the next few years.
• Across all verticals, a fifth (20.8 percent) said they anticipated spending less than $5,000 on digital signage next year – but that means the rest and most (almost 80 percent) anticipate spending anywhere from more than $5,000 to "More than $1 million" in the next year.

The report also features insights from industry leaders and figures from industry associations, analysts and solution providers, from display manufacturers to software providers, from the International Sign Association to the Digital Screenmedia Association, and from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia — all of them offering their unique take on what's coming in the next few years for digital signage.

Click here to purchase your copy of this year's Digital Signage Future Trends report.

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