One of the first things a display person is likely to learn at the Signage and Graphics Summit - an executive-level conference for the sign industry being held at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson this week - is that a digital sign is not what you think it is.  For most of the attendees at SGS, a digital sign is one that’s digitally printed on paper or vinyl instead of being silk-screened.  The kind of sign that would interest us in the display industry is an “electronic digital sign” or EDS.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

That little semantic difficulty indicates both the challenges and the opportunities the sign industry offers the display industry.  For many executives in the sign industry, their product is a sheet of something with print on it, rather than a way of helping their customers deliver a message by the most appropriate means.  To revive a distinction once made by Nicholas Negroponte, most of the sign industry is selling molecules rather than bits.

For digital signs - digitally printed, that is - the design is created with graphic design software such as that offered by Adobe and Corel.  The digital file could just as well be sent to an electronic display as to a digital printer, but the delivery mechanism is so different that most traditional sign companies don’t see it as a possible part of their business.

There are exceptions.  Some local sign companies and franchises are creating simple turn-key systems for customers such as restaurants and retailers.   They may be buying standard desktop computer monitors to serve as inexpensive, pre-integrated electronic digital signs for interior use.

Thus far, such companies are a small minority and they are often buying displays (or monitors) in distributor quantities.  In the aggregate though, there is a large market to be developed.  Small, medium, and even large sign companies require support and initially simple systems to which they can add value.

What is very clear, and what a few display companies (such as Planar) have already discovered, is that an electronic digital signage system must consist of the display hardware, a network or other means of delivering content, and content creation, delivery, and updating.  If members of the display industry can deliver such systems to sign companies, who know their markets and the needs of their customers, a large new display market can be developed much more quickly than would otherwise be the case.  But to develop that market, we need to support and educate our new customers.  That won’t happen if we think we can serve them adequately by doing business as usual.