Article

NEC Summit hits on advertising

The fourth annual conference went beyond screens.

August 28, 2008

NEC's Display Solutions Summit attendee list read like a who's who of the digital signage industry. However, one new face took the conference by surprise.

The face was that of Shelly Palmer, and although he may not be familiar in the digital signage, he is no stranger to the digital television industry. As an author, composer and commentator on broadcast TV trends, Palmer's advice for the digital signage industry was simple: It's all about message management.

"The question is, when is my media going to be empowered by me?" Palmer said. "If I take a piece of content and put it out there, who is going to make the technology that is going to tell it what its supposed to and get it in front of the right people? That's a question that digital signage answers readily."

Click to view a slideshow from the NEC Display Solutions Summit.

His keynote address opened a morning of discussions about emerging advertising technologies with digital signage, including a presentation from Pat Hellberg of Nike, on improving brand messaging using digital signage.

Elsewhere at the Summit, the focus was digital signage hardware and software. A small tradeshow area featured 32 of NEC's Display Solutions Partners, including a sprawling booth for the host company.

Hear Jeff Blankensop describe NEC's Display Solutions Partner Program and the culmination of technologies at the Summit.

The Rahal BMW as part of NEC's interactive auto showroom.

"We really feel that large big box retailers can benefit tremendously from digital signage in their environments for merchandising purposes," said Jeff Blankensop, business development manager for NEC Display Solutions. "That kind of signage can also help improve the customer experience in the store itself."

This was NEC's fourth Display Solutions Summit, although Blankensop said the first one was so small, some didn't even consider it to be the actual event.

"I think we had 14 vendors and about 70 people at that time," he said. "We've come a long way."

One company that has been there since the beginning is Omnivex, a Canadian digital signage software provider specializing in corporate communications and hospitality.

In keeping with Palmer's "message management" theme, Omnivex president Jeff Collard demonstrated features of the company's Moxie software that automatically highlights the most important messages on the screen. Through live data feeds, time-sensitive content appears bolder or in a larger font.

Collard said this could be particularly useful for FIDS (flight information display systems), where flights that are approaching departure become bigger on the screen.

"If you're flight is in big letters, you know to start running," he said.

The Moxie feature could also be beneficial for stock trading floors, Collard said.

Jack Boyczuk of RidgeLogic, center, speaks during a software panel.

Collard was also part of a conference panel on "Demystifying digital signage software," moderated by Lyle Bunn, strategy architect, and featuring representatives from Scala, Rise Vision, RidgeLogic and AlivePromo. Finishing up the session schedule was a similar panel discussion on digital signage hardware, also hosted by Bunn, that offered up the opinions of reps from Ttuff Technolgies, NowMicro, Peerless, Gefen, NextWindow and ICG.