Say hello to the new show, same as the old show.
The first Customer Engagement Technology World show is this fall, but the event formerly known as the KioskCom Self Service Expo & The Digital Signage Show is merely making official the evolution of the show's focus from its very beginnings.
"The new focus is the old focus, but because of the name change it will bring that more to light for everybody," show general manager Lawrence Dvorchik said in a recent interview. "It is not just a one-technology event; it is a multichannel engagement and strategy event."
The 14-year-old tradeshow started with a focus on kiosks and self-service technologies, Dvorchik says, but it quickly became apparent that the meat of the issue went deeper. The real focus, he says, became how to get people to use kiosks and self-service tech, because the machines and the technology are failures if nobody uses them.
"So the focus on engagement started very, very early. We're talking 1999," Dvorchik said. "And while we kept the name KioskCom, the focus was all about the engagement, and as we added The Digital Signage Show and did more research, and as more technologies are becoming integrated and applicable … it became more important that we focus on the customer engagement portion of it."
The show's advisory board, made up of end-users, venues and brands, told show organizers those were the things they needed to concentrate on, Dvorchik says: not so much what the pieces of technology are, but how do end-users engage customers and what technologies will help them do that.
So the evolution of a technology-focused show into an engagement strategy show has been going on for nearly as long as the show has been around. And given that, this year's show won't be radically different that the KioskCom shows of years past. The first edition of the new CETWorld show will be held Nov. 10-11 at the Javits Convention Center in New York City.
There will be new attractions at the show, though, that reflect the show's new name.
From an educational standpoint, there will be several educational tracks dealing with mobile technology — mobile apps, mobile marketing and mobile advertising — Dvorchik says. There also will be discussions and educational sessions that tie-in to social media throughout the show, he says.
The SocialSphere and the Blogger Zone will return this year, and show sponsor Vollmer Public Relations will be working with show attendees on how to use social media more effectively, and profitably, in their businesses, Dvorchik says.
"Social media will be a theme throughout a lot of the sessions," he said. "We're absolutely tying all of that in … The whole focus is customer engagement, whether it's smart phones or social media — and to me social media ties into smart phones, and Web as well, and digital signage, because they become the medium through with the social media is engaged with."
From a digital signage perspective, there will be a heavy focus on advertising and networks, Dvorchik says. For the first time the show will have a full, two-day conference track dealing with advertising and network operations for DOOH and place-based media, as well as mobile, he says.
"It's an entire advertising track, and it is the only one that runs start-to-finish, two days," he said. "So we're really focusing on the benefit of it from that standpoint."
Organizers also expect to see an up tick in ad and marketing agency participation, he says. Attendees from that sector also qualify for complimentary passes for the show.
From a kiosk and self-service perspective, show organizers have done more to pull out specific area of interest, he says: The focus will be less on specific technologies and more on business strategies and multichannel engagement.
Overall, the show is just going to be well-rounded and expansive than it has been in the past, Dvorchik says. There continues to be significant growth with all of these technologies, along with a generalized lack of knowledge of how to use them effectively, he says — which is what the show aims to change.
Because it all comes down to how do users get the customer to engage through technology, he says.
"If you can't get them to take an action, you can't generate the ROI you're looking for … That's the bottom line: No matter what the technology is, if you don't have an engagement strategy and an engagement plan it's not going to work," he said. "That's the crux of everything: How do you get people to take that next step, which is to focus and act?"
