While the wonderful Mr. Berlin certainly didn’t have digital technology in mind when he penned the aforementioned classic back in 1946, the folks that are driving the Dynamic Digital Signage (DDS) market might want to look into the timeless show tune as their slogan over the next 5 to 10 years.

We promised you coverage of this emerging technology in a column earlier this year and in this issue we have delivered. If you attended the ISA Show in Vegas this year you might have noticed some of these guys dotting the show floor. Some of the names were familiar, like Mitsubishi with their Diamond Vision signage and new Reflective LCD unit. Others, not so familiar, like Korean-based Samik Electronics who told us, "We are here in the U.S. because we believe this market is about to take off here."

The DDS market has already begun to take hold in Europe and Asia as that part of the world has always seemed to take to new technologies rather quickly. We understand there are parts of Asia that have started to place advertising on ATM screens while patrons wait for their banking orders to process. Talk about a captive audience.

While DDS technology is moving rapidly, there are still drawbacks. There are limits to the size of the screens, set up and installation remains far more complicated than traditional signage and the versatility of where you can hang a traditional sign is still tough to beat.

But the benefits to advertisers are intoxicating – targeting your message to specific demographics and then having the ability to change that message as the demographic changes…even in as short a time frame as morning to evening in the same day. Being able to deploy multiple languages of the same message if your location dictates is yet another trick DDS can handle.

Time will tell just how quickly this market begins to impact the U.S. retail sign space, but suffice it to say, it is time to take a peek. Whether it is seen as an invasion or an opportunity will play itself out over the coming years. While it’s unlikely that traditional printers can get in the game on the hardware side, the software and content parts of the equation may offer some interesting opportunities. We have all entered retail locations where traditional signage and DDS systems are combining for some very effective product campaigns.

The other good news, and we chat about this on page 18, is the fact that all new and revolutionary technologies usually offer up some sort of interim technology that provides a bridge to the new world. Sometimes these offerings eventually find a place they can call their own. A company out of Palm Springs, California, Digital Visual Werks, may have just such a product in their "Intelligent Signs", that combine both traditional and Narrowcasting methods terrifically.

You might also want to seriously consider your Digital Asset Mangement (DAM) strategy and take a peek at our Special Section on exactly that. The more efficiently you manage your data/content/workflow the more ready you'll be to figure out how you can be a player/competitor in the DDS game in the future.

If nothing else, it will certainly be fun to watch this new technology attempt to grab hold and the subsequent scrambling of the old guard. The bar is undoubtedly about to be raised as the assault for our attention in the retail space rolls along.