By Darren Cremins, MD of EMEA & Australia, Videri
LONDON, ENGLAND — April 19th, 2026 — I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when putting a screen on a wall was the innovation. That era is over, and if you’re still operating like it isn’t, it’s time to catch up quick.
This week, I sat on a Digital Signage Workshop panel produced by POPAI at the VM&Display Show alongside experts from TRISON and OUTFORM. The setting was perfect for the conversation, as VM&D sits squarely in the world of visual merchandising, meaning point of purchase, store design, and brand/customer experience. Digital signage lives inside that world, not next to it, and that distinction turned out to be a grounding truth of the discussion.
The "stick a screen on it" era is done
First question out of the gate went right at the heart of the matter–are we still putting screens in for the sake of it?
Look, let’s be honest. Historically? Yes. Plenty of that. A screen goes on a wall because someone decided it should. No strategy, no CX planning, no outcome in mind. Just…a screen.
But the industry has genuinely moved on. It’s more tactical now. There are different shapes, different sizes, touch options, QR CTAs, and interactivity that goes far beyond a glorified poster. Of course, it supports functional signage, wayfinding, and environment-setting, but the question has shifted from “should we put a screen here?” to “what do we need this screen to do?”
Stop bolting screens onto gondolas
A second point I’m keenly passionate about also came in hot, which is that digital signage works best when it’s part of the infrastructure. When it’s an afterthought tacked onto the final store design, it doesn’t just show–it’s felt.
One of Videri’s partners, Mediascope, does a great job of getting this right. From the moment they’re briefed into a project, they’re thinking about every aperture to be tapped, including digital. The screen is embedded into the environment. It doesn’t look bolted onto a gondola or hung from a pole dangling off the ceiling. It belongs there. It serves a clear purpose, and everyone understands how. That only happens when digital is brought into the design conversation from day one.
Get the right people around the table. All of them.
This is one I personally raised because I’ve lived the alternative.
A team spins up a proof of concept, it goes brilliantly and everyone’s buzzing and ready to roll out. Then deployment starts and the wheels come off. Why? Because IT wasn’t in the room. Brand, store or merchandising was doing one thing while ops was doing another. Two or three active POCs running in parallel suddenly start clashing because nobody joined them up and the whole thing grinds to a halt. Next comes the mad scramble, where everyone has to reverse-engineer their way back with the team that should have been around the table from the get-go.
It comes down to governance. Get the right people around the right table asking the right questions with the right KPIs in mind. And recognise that deploying 50 screens for a POC is fundamentally different from a full rollout. The governance that works for one doesn’t just scale itself to the other. You have to plan for that.
ROI is only half the story
Measurement sparked real debate. Are we measuring the right things? And honestly, is what we have good enough?
The answer depends entirely on what you’re trying to achieve. A brand wants awareness and visibility. A retailer wants customer insights and sales uplift. Different goals, different metrics. Too often, we lump them together under “ROI” as though that settles it.
I pushed the room on this. What about ROE? Return on experience, not just investment. What is the actual output the brand and retailer want from that screen? If we only talk in hard sales terms, we miss the enormous value of what a well-designed, connected in-store experience delivers.
There were solid conversations around first-party data, loyalty integration, touch interaction, and sensor technology, including where GDPR draws the line. The closed-loop measurement challenge in physical retail is real, and you don’t always know who’s standing in front of a screen at any given moment. But we’re getting sharper. Dwell time, audience composition, contextual triggers like time of day, traffic patterns, demographics. Serving the right content at the right moment. That’s where this is heading.
The question the room sat with was a good one: is the measurement we have today good enough? I think it’s getting there. But we’re not done yet. And that’s exactly why we need to keep having these conversations.
Retail media: make money, but don't sell your soul
We touched on in-store retail media even though it wasn’t the dedicated session for it. The message from the room was unanimous: be careful.
Retail media should be a win-win-win. A win for the consumer, who feels guided rather than sold to. A win for the brand, who gets awareness and uplift. A win for the retailer, who generates revenue while enhancing the store environment.
But there’s a real temptation to overdo it. Fill every aisle with screens pushing ads and you dilute the very thing that gets people through the door in the first place: the experience.
The people in that room get this instinctively. Merchandisers, store designers, experience specialists. They know that people go to a Puma store or a Nike environment because of the brand, the story, the feeling. One panellist shared a great example of someone’s son visiting Lush, doing an in-store bath bomb experiment, and being gifted the bath bomb as a thank-you afterwards. That’s experience. A screen in an aisle doesn’t replace that.
So yes, monetize your store environment. But be selective about it. Make sure the store is still a place people actually want to spend time in.
The screen won't do the work for you
If there’s one thing the panel agreed on, it’s this: digital signage in retail is heading in the right direction. The use cases are expanding. The technology is more capable than it’s ever been. But the screen itself isn’t the strategy.
The colleagues on the shop floor need to understand it as part of their toolkit, not just something that showed up in their environment one morning. And the teams designing, deploying, and measuring these programmes need to be having the hard conversations. About governance. About what success actually looks like. About whether we’re building experiences or just filling wall space.
Right screen. Right place. Right time. Right content. That’s the bar. And it’s absolutely achievable if we plan for it from the start.
Darren Cremins is Managing Director of EMEA & Australia at Videri. He joined the Digital Signage Workshop panel at the VM&Display Show alongside representatives from TRISON and OUTFORM.
About Videri.
Founded in 2013, Videri transforms physical spaces into intelligent digital brand platforms — enabling brands and retailers to activate campaigns, drive sales, evolve trade marketing, and unlock new revenue through a software-driven digital signage ecosystem. With over 100,000 Canvases deployed across 80+ countries, Videri powers digital where it’s needed most. Visit www.videri.com
