News

DSA responds to Exponation's launch of DSF with letter to membership

February 17, 2010

The Digital Signage Association has sent a letter to its members explaining its reaction to the launch of the Digital Signage Federation and its plans moving forward. The DSF was introduced yesterday by Exponation, producers of the Digital Signage Expo tradeshow, which is being held next week in Las Vegas.

The full text of the letter is reprinted below:

Yesterday, Digital Signage Expo announced its intent to create a new association for the industry. Many of you may have seen news and blog posts about the proposed launch, and understand the competition to DSA by what DSE is calling The Digital Signage Federation.

As members of your Board, please allow us to share some background details as well as plans for the immediate future.

We perceive the announcement to be tied directly to initiatives undertaken by the DSA Advisory Board at its meeting in New York City in November. There, the Board made recommendations tied to the overall goal of the Association to become an independent, member-owned, non-profit 501(c)(6) organization, and to address the ongoing need to financially support the resulting new organization.

Specifically, the Board recommended to organize a Strategic Planning Team of 19 members representing all elements of our membership. The Strategic Planning Team then recommended we solicit bids from for-profit tradeshow organizations to see how they might work with us to fund the initiatives that are important to our membership and the industry as a whole.

In addition, the Strategic Planning Team is laying out a specific, comprehensive three-year plan for the Association. This plan will lay out a complete set of activities and benefits in line with the desires of our members.

We fully expect to receive some highly constructive proposals regarding the tradeshows, which will help fund the recommendations of the Strategic Planning Team. Other associations have gone down this path and report great success.

We are disappointed to see that rather than responding with a strong proposal to work with our group on the tradeshow initiative, DSE has chosen to try to preserve its commercial interest via exclusive ownership of their tradeshow and to propose a new association that in essence would duplicate many of the existing and planned programs of DSA.

The Digital Signage Association has been on a roll since its inception just over two years ago. We have more than 420 members, representing industry leaders of all types, including vendor companies, user companies and individual professionals. We recently launched a smart new website. Active committees are conducting important work in several categories. We continue to publish helpful guides and webinars, and are building a library of useful publications. We are confident that our momentum, our plans and the exceptionally high quality of our membership will preserve our dominance as the association of the digital signage industry.

If you have any questions that we can answer for you, please give one of us a call. We look forward to seeing everyone at the DSA Membership Meeting in Las Vegas on Tuesday at 4:30 pm in Room N258. Don't forget the member reception immediately following in Room N260 and stop by our Booth #1113 during the show.

Best regards,

Stu Armstrong signature