As professionals in the technology infrastructure space, it’s important for us to keep our hand firmly on the pulse of the industry. Part of what goes into that is providing our team members with opportunities for learning and professional development. We recently sent our employees to DSE 2019, billed as a “Global gathering place for digital signage solutions.” Known as the world’s only comprehensive international event dedicated to digital signage solutions, DSE 2019 brought together experts from all over the world for four days of conferences and exhibits aimed at touting the next generation of business communication, customer engagement, and brand experience innovations through the lens of digital signage.
Here’s our take:
Smart Technology
During the conference, our team saw a variety of digital signage solutions. One emerging trend was the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things in the retail sector. As Don Iriye, Director of Professional Services at Worldlink, explains, “There was a growing presence of AI driven recognition packages that analyze various demographic parameters (age, gender, emotion, etc.). This technology enables companies to capture more data about the type of audience the content being displayed is attracting, and more broadly provides valuable insight into how the shelving tags/displays are performing overall.” Looking to the future, it seems that creating a unique experience for customers is just the tipping point. Finding ways to use tech to further analyze an audience using real-time metrics to refine content will be at the forefront of retail technology.
Brett Busconi, Worldlink’s Vice President of Sales, echoes the same sentiment, “Like Don, I found the proliferation of systems working to put to use what they can learn through AI/IoT to drive the correct messaging to the most interested parties within locations. Fascinating to see what is learned, and how it is used. These are concepts we saw in the past, but now appear to be ready to be implemented.”
Technology Infrastructure
As we’ve written in past blogs, experiential shopping is quickly taking over our industry. More than ever before, customers are looking for added value during the buyer journey, giving preference to retail locations that provide memorable experiences to their visitors. The Digital Signage Expo has mirrored that trend, and storeowners are being pushed to build their technology infrastructure to a point where they can support these new industry innovations. To date, many brick and mortar locations aren’t equipped to handle such advances, and will soon fall behind the curve unless something is done to address the future of retail. As Busconi puts it, “I still believe that a large percentage of retail locations are without the infrastructure to support this tech. Great technology, but we need to continue to see brands getting aggressive to yield the results some brands are enjoying.”
Altogether, our team feels that this conference sparked some great ideas for conversations with our clients. The exhibit hall was full of useful takeaways that Worldlink is eager to implement in the coming months. If you would like to connect with us regarding improving your IT infrastructure in order to deploy some of the ideas in this article, we encourage you to use our scheduler in the upper right-hand corner of this page.