Digital Signage Central

as seen in StarTribune:

Digital signs are popping up on billboards, at gas pumps, at the Mall of America — and a group of Twin Cities companies selling software that remotely controls the digital signs is hoping to cash in on the new advertising medium.

BroadSign International of Minnetonka, Wireless Ronin Technologies of Minnetonka, Telentice Global of Golden Valley and 3M Digital Signage, a unit of the Maplewood firm based in Bainbridge Island, Wash., provide software that ensures digital signs display the right information or advertising at the right place and time.

The market for such software is still relatively small — no more than $100 million worldwide, analysts say. But digital sign advertising has become a $500 million-a-year business as an alternative to traditional broadcast and print mass media.

Are we really watching? Nobody knows. But market researchers are working feverishly to find out.

“The major factor holding back the growth of digital signage at this point is that its effectiveness isn’t proven,” said Aravindh Vanchesan, an analyst for California-based research firm Frost & Sullivan. “But new studies by the Nielsen Co. and others are trying to correlate product sales with the exposure people have to all these advertising screens.”

BroadSign, which said this week its software will control a 44-by-31-foot information screen above the entrance of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, is a sort of computerized middleman. The firm doesn’t sell advertising or own digital signs, but it does license its software to the firms that do. BroadSign’s software controls the flow of information to and from the signs through its Canadian data center.

“We control 150 different digital sign networks around the world, and we know what content and what ads are being run on them at any time,” said Rick Engels, BroadSign’s CEO.