Marian Sandberg & David Drain, Digital Signage Experience

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital Signage Experience is coming up in four weeks and I suspect a lot of people are very curious about how the long-running show will be rebooted by its new owners Questex. I certainly am, as I had long thought the old DSE was a dead trade show walking, and that something different was needed. Is this it? I dunno, and I guess the industry will find out in a few weeks in Las Vegas. I asked Marian Sandberg, who runs several shows for Questex, and David Drain, who was brought on by Questex to build the programming side of the event, to join me for a chat about what people can expect from a new and different DSE. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Hello, thank you for joining me. Maybe the first thing to do is: Marion and David, explain what your roles are at Questex and DSE.  Marian Sandberg: Sure. Thanks so much for having us, Dave. It's really an honor to be with you and your audience and to have an opportunity to talk about this.  I'm Marian. I am the Vice President and market leader for Questex. I oversee the DSE show, which we acquired last year, and we have not presented yet. It'll be presented in November, which is what we're gonna talk about, and I also oversee a show called LDI, which I know you'll have questions about. And market leaders tend at Questex tend to have two or three or whatever number of shows that they have under their portfolio?  Marian Sandberg: Sure, yeah, that's exactly right, and tend to be in verticals that make sense together, if you will. So I oversee a couple of brands that have to do in some way with technology. We have verticals in hospitality, bars and restaurants so they're clumped together.  Okay, and David?  David Drain: David Drain. I'm the director of event programs for DSE. So DSE is my sole focus at Questex.  And a lot of industry people would know you from your dark past with Net World Alliance and The Digital Signage Association? David Drain: Yeah, it changed the name to Digital Screen Media Association for a while. So you've been around the industry forever?  David Drain: Yeah, I have. I attended the first DSE in 2007.  Yeah, that's early. I think the first one was in 2005 or something like that or maybe in 2004. David Drain: 2004, but I wasn't there.  Yeah. I started in 2005, so I've been going even longer than you.  David Drain: Yeah, you win! Marian Sandberg: I can beat you both, but not in the digital signage area with our LDI show. I've been with that brand since 2004, so a little one-upsmanship there.  There you go. You must be so proud. Alright. So how is planning going? As we're speaking, it's about four and a half weeks out.  Marian Sandberg: It's going great. We're super excited and when we get to this part of the year, frankly, because this has been more than a year in the making we're just ready to get out there and produce the show. We definitely have in the weeks rolling up still sales to do, and still registrations to bring in. But in terms of producing the show and the things that we know we're gonna offer that's mostly set, right? So we have all these great networking experiences we're excited to put forth, and as we're right across the hall from our LDI show, we're really excited to see the synergies there. When we acquired this brand, we did a lot of due diligence. We spoke to tons of customers and tons of attendees, so those customers as well, to see what we should keep from the old show and what we should bring back, and I think the number one thing that we heard from people was maintaining the sense of community for the digital signage industry, that it's a dedicated show and that people still wanna come together in that community that maybe isn't addressed by other events. So that's been our number one focus, and we're in the home stretch now.  Yeah, I'd certainly got that impression as well when DSE went down. I thought that it was a show that for