Last week in Vegas an era came to an end in the digital signage and kiosk worlds — and a new one will start later this year in New York.

This year’s KioskCom Self Service Expo and The Digital Signage Show at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas was the last KioskCom and Digital Signage Show. The show has been renamed and rebranded as Customer Engagement Technology World, reflecting the broader goals of the tradeshow and of the industries themselves.

For years, show general manager Lawrence Dvorchik has been evangelizing the convergence of digital signage and kiosk technologies as ways to engage the customer or viewer and achieve whatever ROI the deployer is after, whether it’s sales lift or increased brand awareness.

If the technology is not engaging the customer and getting them to do something, he’s fond of saying, it’s just visual spam.

And the digital signage and kiosk worlds have been proving his point for him, especially as both sectors also start looking to interact with mobile smart devices, and as players in both start to provide software or hardware for both — and since most kiosk also are, essentially, digital signs as well.

The timeliness of the move also has been reinforced by the recent trend of industry associations reorganizing or rebranding themselves to more accurately reflect the shift and better position the converged industry as a whole.

The Self-Service and Kiosk Association announced during KioskCom that it was merging with the Digital Signage Association to form the Digital Screenmedia Association. In addition to addressing the needs of its previous constituencies, the newly formed nonprofit association will, "look for ways to serve users, deployers, vendors, integrators, agencies and network operators in all areas of digital technology applied to audience engagement, including?mobile services," according to a statement from the new organization.

And in March the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau (OVAB) rebranded itself as the Digital Place-based Advertising Association (DPAA). Longtime OVAB board chair Mike DiFranza, the CEO of Captivate network, said at the time that the name change was endorsed by the OVAB/DPAA board after a lengthy consulting process — and that advertising professionals who plan and buy out-of-home advertising time for their brand clients were among the most enthusiastic advocates for the change.

KioskCom started as a kiosk tradeshow, and only relatively recently (in the last few years) added digital signage to its focus and name. In many ways, though, the two technologies have essentially the same goal, according to some observers, that the industries are better served by having a show that focuses on that overarching common goal of engaging the customer.

So starting with a November show in New York City, the Customer Engagement Technology World show "will focus on the expanding role of customer engagement in business success and improved ROI, addressing topics that are more reflective of what the industry has become and where it is going," according to a release from show organizer JD Events.

"The real issue is that these technologies are interwoven and in many cases are complementary, and the vendors do work with each other," Dvorchik said in January. "When we met with our Board of Advisers it was recommended that we focus on how these technologies are able to improve customer engagement, improve sales lift and lead down the path to purchase."
 
As kiosks and digital signage have become more prevalent and commonplace in the eyes of both customers and deployers, the focus now can be less on introducing the new technologies and educating deployers on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of them, and more on how best to use them.

"People now are very comfortable with do-it-yourself, self-service technologies," Dvorchik said in February. "They’re very comfortable with digital technologies, and it’s become much more of a focus on how to achieve your ROI in your customer engagement strategies than it is about how the technologies work themselves and why they need to be there, because people get it now."