By Sanjay Manandhar

By all counts, the current recession is bad. It might even be prolonged, prompting people to utter arcane words like stagflation and even the D word. But in the coming years, looking back, it may prove that these times were actually an inflection point for a sustained growth in digital signage.

First, the real fuel for large digital signage networks, ads and sponsorships, is actually moving beyond a token amount to something meaningful. Ironically, the shift of ads to digital signage can happen even as the broad ad market is seeing a serious downturn. Anecdotally, I’m seeing some digital signage advertisers get a significant uptick in ad revenues during this downturn, albeit coming from a small base. Why is digital signage benefiting when the broad ad business is off by 20% to 60% (depending on where you look and whom you ask)? (more…)