After 19 years of building up and running this blog, Sixteen:Nine founder Dave Haynes retired in May – and handed the torch to his long-standing content partners from Europe, as in: us, the invidis team.
We had our fingers crossed that Dave would miss the blog enough to come back and give us some of his signature snark every now and then. The universe listened and we’re excited to bring you the first edition of the Haynes Column.
Antonia Hamberger
When I stepped back in May from the day-to-day of knocking out Sixteen:Nine, after almost 20 years, I had no end of people just flat-out say, “Yeah, you’re not retiring …”
They were right, but only kinda sorta.
I had a glorious few months from late May until now staying well away from my working desk. I even decommissioned my home office so I wouldn’t be tempted to just sit down and do working stuff when I was in the vicinity. That area is now a fitness room – my wife Joy uses it for streaming TV workout classes, me for stretching out muscles atrophied from nearly a half-century hunched over keyboards. I now do about an hour a day of stretching and lifting, and feel way less, as I describe it, creaky. The grass is always mowed. The bike and kayak get used. And I took up golf again after a neighbour said she needed a new Tuesday partner. Decades removed from regular play, I’m terrible. But we have fun and usually get paired up with people we’d never met … which is USUALLY fun.
It’s now mid-October and the big maples and oaks around us are turning crimson and gold, and my outside distractions are diminishing. Coastal Nova Scotia definitely gets snow here and there, but that’s often followed by rain. So doing stuff like cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are, at best, hit and miss pursuits. I have my big orange snowblower, but that gets fired up maybe three times a season.
So … until spring comes along, I have time … and when I let it be known I had that time, the emails started coming in, asking about my availability and interest in side-gigs and one-off jobs.
One of those was from my friends at Invidis, who took over Sixteen:Nine when I signed off to ride off into the sunset on my lawn mower. They’re doing a great job of keeping up with industry news, and providing insights. But … they wanted some cheek. Some snark. Some Dave, they said.
So … I’ve agreed to start knocking out a column, here and there, though the cadence may well slow next summer – when the spring rains stop and the clouds of black flies (little bastards that swarm like aphids, but bite) dissipate after two or three weeks. Then I’m back to mostly retired.
Mentally checking out has been great, and while I have been adding my point of view here and there these last few months on Linkedin, I’m not nearly as wired in to the ecosystem as I was … forever. It’s going to take a while to get back to speed.
Here, though, is what has struck me these past few months …
Selling is getting more targeted. I’m impressed and encouraged by the way more and more software AND hardware vendors have tossed the industry playbook and broadened their trade show and conference reach beyond the big, catch-all trade shows like ISE, Infocomm and NRF. When I scroll through Linkedin posts from companies and their lead business development people, I like how many are at very targeted shows I’d never heard of. I understand the marketing need to be at the big, big shows to plant a flag and benefit from the efficiency of seeing a lot of partners at once and the sheer volume of attendees. But I also think being the ONE or maybe handful of vendors that have a solution geared to a tightly defined vertical market can do very well. Go where the buyers might be, not just where your competitors will be.
Are we approaching networking overload? Industry get-togethers are important and I was directly involved in organizing and promoting social events going back to at least 2009, when we were doing near-monthly mixer/meet-ups in downtown Toronto. I’ve always thought the industry needs focused events when people can get together and meet each other, to swap cards and build both awareness and relationships. But I’ve been struck by how many networking events are now on the calendar. When I see the group selfie photos that inevitably follow these gatherings, I tend to see the same, fairly tight circle of people smiling for the camera. Do I need all the costs to go to somewhere as expensive as New York to see the same crew yet again?
If I was a CFO (and my God that would be a bad situation), I’d want to start understanding the ROI of the costs vs benefits of meet-ups. I think what the Digital Signage Federation does is a good model, because it moves around from region to region, and even country (one of the last ones was in Montreal). There is a core group at all of those, but they’re on the DSF board, which syncs mixers to its quarterly.moveable board meetings.
The now totally rebooted Digital Signage Experience is currently happening in San Diego, finally removed from Las Vegas and flipped from a trade show that also has a conference, to a conference that also has a small trade show. It was a necessary call, as the trade show component was very obviously in rapid decline (see my first point about targeted selling). The revamped event borrows on what Invidis does very successfully in Munich each May – a conference that sees almost all the attendees on something of an island for 2-3 days. In Vegas, people go to the LVCC for the show but scatter in a hundred directions at night. At this sort of thing, people can have breakfast at the same hotel and close that hotel’s bar at 2.
The organizers kindly offered to bring me out, but I’m not there. Getting all the way to San Diego is a long, long day of travel from where I live, but the much bigger reason is U.S. travel in general … as in I refuse. Tourist destinations like Vegas, Orlando and Arizona are in a world of pain because Canadians stopped coming, after the guy in the White House started musing about Canada being the 51st state of America. It doesn’t help that it keeps coming up in his meandering speeches. So … I’ll miss my industry friends, but perhaps I’ll see you at ISE in Barcelona.
I’m not, by the way, doing a mixer tied to ISE. Now I’m just going to these things, eating the tapas and guzzling cava and tempranillo.
In terms of big industry news, I haven’t seen much that was eyebrow-raising. Among the happenings notable to me …
Now private equity-backed Navori acquiring and folding in Signagelive was and is interesting. The long history of Navori meant the Swiss company, almost by default, was regarded as something of a legacy product and platform. Now it has the IP and people behind a platform that was among the most relentlessly modern. And has always had very good product marketing. I always liked the description of UK-based Signagelive punching well above its weight class, in terms of awareness and success vs marketing budget and headcount. Very happy for that team up near Cambridge, though corporate marriages also tend to have their challenges.
E paper displays were buzzy as hell in late 2024-early 2025. Maybe they will be again at ISE. But unit cost is still a huge barrier to widespread adoption, as are things like color reproduction and, even, product stability. I heard that directly from a guy whose company markets the things. It will come, but the larger format versions of this tech are in many ways more relevant to the print industry than to the digital signage ecosystem. This stuff will not supplant 4K video supporting flat panel screens. But it may well, as prices drop, replace millions of printed posters in retail windows and in mass transport settings.
It is intriguing to see companies like Switzerland’s Spinetix becoming much more of a software company, given its roots are squarely in producing media players that came with installed software. They recently announced a SaaS and cloud Hub platform. Meanwhile, in the past months I’ve seen a bunch of software companies announce dedicated media players – in many cases to get some control over what customers use and what the developers, therefore, need to support.
While the main integrators in North America maybe tweak their names (like AVI Systems becoming Forté), the ones involved in digital signage and ProAV have changed little in recent years. In Europe, however, there seems to be a lot happening. The biggest AV focused integrator – Spain’s Trison – has expanded into North America. But the biggest move has involved the Belgian IT giant Econocom, which in the last few months went on an M&A binge, saying ProAV is a huge focus and looking to grow sector-specific revenue to 500M EU by 2028.
Lastly, as I plug back in I am hearing wildly different things about the state of business amidst all the tariff tumult and general nuttiness of the world. I have chatted recently with a couple of LED vendors who describe best years ever. But I have also heard of companies cutting people, or just generally lost in space. And there is the data. Research firm Omdia dribbles out little bits of information from its quarterly public display shipments tracker and the most recent ones suggests business was flat globally, and down almost 16% in North America. The touch market is really hurting, for some reason (perhaps owing a bit to crappy user experiences when food services companies added self-service?).
We are starting to sneak up on the new year, which means consumer and pro display announcements for CES and ISE. So we should all expect to see some product innovation announcements in the next few weeks.