My thoughts on the Building Your Digital Signage Business summit

First, I have to give my thanks to Christie, Himani, Rachel and Keith for all their hard work (and anyone else I'm not thinking of at the moment) it was a great summit with a lot of good information.

If you're looking for a detailed summary of the conference...sorry I'm not providing that...just my thoughts as a whole. If you want to see what exactly happened go here.

As far as the conference itself...I really wouldn't have called it a conference, but more a symposium or summit. We all gathered in a large room and heard from different people about the industry and their part in it and followed that up with some Q&A and some discussion. Great opportunities for networking -- I liked that they only set out enough tables for everyone to sit at.

Richard Fisher at PRN did a great job kicking off the summit, I appreciated his insight into the world of retail digital signage and his thoughts on the industry as a whole. A great panel with some of the folks from a VA hospital...they put in their own system without knowing there was an industry or people already doing it! And they did a pretty good job too!

Day two held a great interactive panel in which two digital signage companies pitched to two ad buyers...and they gave their critiques. Interesting to hear the information that they wanted, one guy wants real statistics and if you couldn't provide them he would shut you off. The other recognized that it is a pain in the @ss to get real statistics that mean anything at the moment and so he was more open to listening.

We spoke in the afternoon to about 24 people...I was pretty disappointed that so many left so early...I would wager a guess that 1/3 of the attendees were gone after the 1st day and another third left after lunch. Derek and I reflected on the event and both agreed, that we'd prefer an earlier speaking time.

Overall...it was a good time. Kudos to the Strategy Institute team! We're looking forward to next year!