KioskCom and The Digital Signage Show: keynotes setting the tone

The KioskCom Self Service Expo and The Digital Signage Show is coming up in just a couple of weeks, and show organizers have coordinated a slate of keynote addresses and speakers at the event aimed at reinforcing the show's new focus on customer engagement.

In addition to the show's three keynote sessions, organizers have lined up educational sessions that dovetail with the points being made in the keynotes and, again, serve to reinforce the overall message of the show — that the technology is there to engage customers to achieve ROI — says show general manager Lawrence Dvorchik.

It's titled "Creating Outstanding Experiences & Content: Engage Customers By Winning Their Hearts" and delivered by William "Bill" Ratcliffe, senior vice president at BrainJuicer, which bills itself as "an innovative online insights agency."

According to the KioskCom Web site, Ratcliffe's talk will cover a great deal of ground:

"We think its going to be a killer kickoff to the whole concept that we have been stressing in terms of engagement, how to engage the customer to get to the ROI that you need," Dvorchik said, noting that the first keynote should get the whole show off to a rousing start and create quite a buzz on the show floor. "It sets the tone, it's a great out-of-the-box way of looking at customer engagement, and it takes everybody away from the tunnel vision that's been on the technology to do this and gets them to step back a little bit and talk about the whole engagement process."

The second keynote, which is Thursday, April 15, and also from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., will be delivered by a representative from the winner of last year's show's "Best in Show" award, the U.S. Library of Congress.

"Creating and Sustaining Innovative Interactive Experiences: Connecting the On-site and On-line Visit" by Jo Ann Jenkins, the COO at the Library of Congress, will give attendees a glimpse at the immersive experience created at the library through customer engagement technology.

The KioskCom Web site indicates the talk will explore how the library used tech to let its patrons engage with the library in the ways they wanted:

So, from a more theoretical beginning, the second gets more into the nuts and bolts of a customer engagement deployment, Dvorchik says.

"She's going to be talking about exactly what they did and how they used kiosks, digital signage, interactive and non-interactive to get their customers engaged," he said.

The third and final keynote is later the same day, from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.: "Insights, Tips & Tricks From Global Scale Industry Leaders: What Do They Really Think?" will be a panel discussion by Karl Joachim Veigel, co-CEO and executive vice president for sales services marketing at Friendlyway; Peter Wolf, vice president for marketing and business development at ParTech Inc.; and Russell Young, senior manager of strategic alliances for Samsung Electronics America's information technology division.

This last keynote session will allow attendees to get inside the heads of industry leaders and "gain insights on what it means to drive solutions to scale, as this discussion delves into the minds of global suppliers," according to the KioskCom site.

"The keynotes are designed to give and overall higher-level look at everything, while the educational sessions expand on those themes," Dvorchik said.

The more individualized sessions will cover themes ranging from "Understanding What Makes Out-of-Home Digital Signage a Viable Media Platform" to "Avoiding White Noise & Visual Spam," and will feature speakers from customer engagement leaders like Arbitron, BMW and the MGM Mirage resort and casino in Las Vegas.

And it all goes back to the central theme of the last KioskCom and The Digital Signage Show, which is changing its name to the Customer Engagement Technology World show, Dvorchik says:

"How do the deployers of customer engagement technology create relevant contextual either content or applications that their customers will use? How are they going to make that technology something that their customers will want to engage with to get to whatever that ROI metric might be?" he said. "It's understanding how to engage with your customers, and how to utilize the technology to engage with your customers to get them to do something…Otherwise, it's a combination of visual spam and just another piece of technology."