Before we first started our company Advertise Me – we didn’t have a clue what the industry was called and the different terminologies that was used to describe this booming industry. Back then, the idea of having advertisements or content such as menus, images, videos, weather feeds, and text displayed on digital screens was still at its infancy. Commercial plasma screens was becoming more popular and with the introduction of LCD screens, prices of plasmas was becoming more affordable. If you look at the below image of google trends for the term digital signage, you’ll notice that this term became more popular (from google’s search perspective) in 2007. I tried trending the term digital out of home and dooh but google responsed with “do not have enough search volume to show graphs.”
One of the terminologies that we were unfamiliar with was DOOH – to date we still don’t use this term that often since it has been replaced by Digital Signage. Now to me, the two terms DOOH and Digital Signage can be used interchaneably and I don’t care if there is a difference. One might say that DOOH (since it’s not at home) is a screen network in a public area and that digital signage can be located in a corporate building to display internal communications. To me, both are the same but Digital Signage sounds shorter and easier to say so we’ll stick with this. 🙂
If you have a different opinion let us know.