Article
The British are coming: The Screen Forum U.K. to land in NYC
The Screen Forum U.K. is bringing its unique blend of low-key networking and broad-spectrum educational sessions to these shores starting in June.
May 27, 2010
The British are coming, the British are coming. The United Kingdom's The Screen Forum U.K. — generally called just "The Screen" — is coming to America. The roughly 4-year-old digital signage industry group from the United Kingdom is set to hold its first U.S. event in New York City in June, hoping to translate its educational programming to this side of the Atlantic and to help the industry as a whole get a better composite perspective on what works and what doesn't in digital signage. The first event, a June 22 breakfast briefing at the Crosby Hotel in SoHo, will be patterned after The Screen's popular London breakfast briefings, focusing on a specific topic relating to digital signage. Called "Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Digital Signage Takes Transport," the program is focused on the role of digital out-of-home in the transportation sector, with speakers from CBS Outdoor, Kinetic Worldwide and Harris Corp., among others. "It's that sort of combination of educational content, quality speakers and a relaxed environment, so it's not a big sell, but it's by the industry, for the industry," said Richard Cobbold, director of The Screen. "We're always trying to look at a specific feature of the market and than take a view from the client, from the operator, from the buyer, from the booker, from the user, so we get a good overview of how everybody fits together to see the project through." Making an effort to get everyone's perspective will help the industry better tailor its solutions to fit, as well as helping potential clients better know what's possible in digital signage and what questions to ask, Cobbold says. "I think that sort of cross-education is absolutely critical to speeding up the adoption of all the exciting things that we can do now," he said. The Screen is making the move to come this way for several reasons, Cobbold says, but mostly just because it was invited in. When industry members from the United States have attended Screen events in London, they've told Cobbold how much they'd like to see similar low-key educational programming here in the states, he says. Magenta Research's Bob Michaels went to speak at one of the London Screen events last year, and came back more than a little impressed, he says. The first thing he noticed was that, during the networking portion of the event, people were actually networking, not just standing in clumps talking to people they knew well, he says. And then the talks were very informative, with "virtually none" of the sales pitches that creep into some educational forums, and the topics addressed real needs in the digital signage sector, he says. The speakers were knowledgeable and influential, Michaels says, and the event gave people the opportunity to "really communicate" and network in a small venue without the pressure of larger tradeshows. "When I participated in it, I looked and said, 'Gee, do we really have anything like this in the U.S., where people will really get together and really talk and communicate?'" he said. "So in speaking to Richard I told him I was impressed, and I said something like this is really missing in the U.S., or at least I haven't seen it in the U.S., and I think it would be great to be able to bring people together to really talk about a common topic." Now The Screen is planning to form a new, U.S. chapter with the backing of several digital signage companies and the newly formed Digital Screenmedia Association (created by the merger of the old Digital Signage and Self-Service & Kiosk Associations, which were owned and operated by DigitalSignageToday.com parent company Networld Alliance) as it tries to create a loose international association, Cobbold says. The organization has more events already planned for later this year: Much like the first, they'll be repeats of previous London events, but from a U.S. perspective. That should help provide the industry with the ability to compare what's been done here and there, and what works and doesn't in each, Cobbold says — and hopefully that will eventually spread even further afield. "The Proctor & Gambles and the Volkswagens and the Coors beers of this world want to be able to advertise internationally, and they want to see the same kind of metrics, the same kind of ideas of cost and how things are put together and use the same kind of systems and understand from a granular level how everything fits together," he said. "So I think the industry itself needs to understand that and needs to kind of come together in some way to provide some international standards or at least start talking in the same way about things, and I hope, again, that's another good outcome of what we're doing here."
