The business with digital signage for advertising

The market for digital signage is growing at an accelerating pace for years. Initially, digital signage was considered as a one-to-one replacement for traditional paper signs, with the benefit of shortening the CDI (creation, distribution, installation) cycle and, thus, lead to major cost reductions. Soon, additional benefits of "going digital" were recognized and novel approaches - such as contextualization and interaction functionalities - were explored in research with the main goal to raise the audience's attention and further user engagement, as both factors are known to result in better advertising effects. However, the major types of digital signage currently in use have different requirements on the entire system, including the digital signage network, digital signage exchange, scheduling, and pricing. As a result, also challenges in implementation and performance measure are different as well as potential benefits of a digital signage system are of differing nature. The present paper discusses these issues and provides an overview of the essentials of doing business with digital signage.