LinkedIn Debate Reignites 'Is Digital Signage An Industry' Question
2026-09-16 · via Digital Signage Today
A LinkedIn post from Lee Dydo, founder and chief experience officer at Dydomite, arguing that digital signage is "dead" as an industry has drawn tens of thousands of views and dozens of responses, according to a report from Digital Signage Today. The post did not question whether screens or content still work. It questioned whether digital signage ever became a real industry at all.
Dydo's argument, as reported, is that digital signage lacks the traits of a mature industry: no standard technology stacks, no consistent pipelines, no shared expectations across projects. He describes it instead as a medium that gets bolted onto other fields, retail, corporate, transit, hospitality, rather than standing on its own. In his view, the hardware and installation side of the business already has a home under AV. What is left over, the messaging, the content strategy, the long-term network support, never got its own clear identity or recognition.
For anyone running screens day to day, this is not an abstract branding argument. Dydo points to the practical split he sees among clients: a financial services company needing real-time market data under strict compliance rules, a small retailer wanting to swap a promotion in minutes with no IT staff, a museum needing synchronized playback across a dozen screens telling one story. He argues these are fundamentally different disciplines that all get filed under the same "digital signage" label, which makes it hard to talk about the field coherently or, notably, hard to support a single major trade show around it.
According to the report, Dydo says the response to his post revealed a gap between private and public opinion: people told him privately they agreed but weren't willing to say so under their own names given how visible their roles are.
Dydo's proposed shift is to stop treating digital signage as an industry that must justify its own existence and instead treat it as specialized expertise, systems thinking, edge devices, content automation, live data storytelling, that plugs into whatever vertical is buying it. He frames the real differentiator going forward as "delivering intent reliably": making sure a network still does what it was built to do months after launch, rather than drifting into an unwatched, stale loop.
The report does not say whether any formal industry body or trade group has responded to the framing, or whether operators or integrators are changing how they market their services as a result. It is presented as an ongoing conversation rather than a resolved one, with Dydo himself ending his original post by asking where the field goes from here.
The announcement in full
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A LinkedIn post declaring digital signage, as an industry, is dead draws thousands of reads and dozens of posts sharing opinion and insight.
September 16, 2026 by Judy Mottl — Editor: RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com, Connect Media
Imagine a LinkedIn post declaring "digital signage is dead" and none of the dozens of responses rebut it with a definitive "no it isn't."
That doesn't automatically decree digital signage is dead. The post feedback reflects more on how digital signage has yet to evolve as an industry and is viewed more as a medium.
Lee Dydo published such a LinkedIn post to share a discussion he had been having for over a decade in one-to-one conversations with people across the digital signage spectrums – conversations with people at different companies in different roles.
Everyone shared the same underlying frustration, he said in an email interview.
"At some point you trip over the same rock enough times that you realize you could just move it. That's really what the post was," said Dydo, who is founder and chief experience officer at Dydomite, LLC, a cloud-based digital signage software and presentation platform based in North Carolina.
Digital signage is dead. Not the screens. Not the pixels. Not the concept of content in space. But as an industry? It never really came together. And after 13 years in this space, I've come to terms with a painful truth: digital signage is a medium, not a market. There are no standard stacks. No mature pipelines. No consistent expectations. Every project is bespoke, every integration fragile, every client convinced their use case is unique. It's AV duct-taped to marketing duct-taped to IT. I've seen brilliant people do incredible work—then burn out reinventing the same wheel with different branding. We keep calling this an "industry," but industries evolve. They consolidate, specialize, and scale. Digital signage just… drifts. From retail to corporate to transit to hospitality. Always adjacent to something real, never quite standing on its own. If you're in it, you know what I mean. I'm not bitter. I've built a career here. But I'm ready to stop pretending it's something it's not. What we do have is experience in systems thinking, physical UX, edge devices, content automation, and live data storytelling. That's valuable—but maybe not under the banner we've been flying.
It concluded with one simple question: Where [do] we go from here? That's what I'm thinking about next.
The responses came fast and furious and kept coming.
"The response confirmed it wasn't just me: tens of thousands of people saw it, fervent comments and reactions, and afterward people came up to me in person and told me how much they agreed," Dydo said. "Several said they just couldn't say so publicly given how visible their own roles are, but they told me to keep writing. That gap, between what people will say privately and what they'll say on the record, told me as much as the post itself did."
The reason Dydo views digital signage as 'dead,' and is more inclined to view it as a 'medium,' all comes down to a lack of clarity, a fuzzy definition and industry adoption.
"A medium is just a vehicle. Paper is a medium, but if you said you were 'in the paper industry,' what comes to mind immediately is people manufacturing or selling paper, a real, specific economic activity," he said. "Digital signage never had that clarity. If any part of it is actually an industry in that sense, it's the hardware and installation side, and that already has a real home, it's just AV. What gets lost is the other half: how a message actually gets crafted, how these networks get supported over time, the expertise behind deployment itself. That's supposedly bundled into digital signage; too, it just never got its own real recognition the way the hardware side did under AV."
Dydo also pointed out how digital signage is being deployed in various sectors and why that factors into the 'dead' scenario.
"You can see this play out in who we actually work with. A financial services client needs real-time market data displayed within strict compliance and landlord constraints. A small retail operator needs to update a menu or promotion in minutes with no IT staff at all. A museum needs perfectly synchronized playback across a dozen screens telling one continuous story," he said.
Those are all completely different problems, three completely different disciplines, all filed under the same label, he added.
A real 'industry,' said Dydo, can support a big general trade show and currently there isn't one in play. But the community and the expertise are still very real and still growing.
"That's exactly why I think "medium, not market" is the more useful and honestly the more hopeful way to look at it. It stops asking this work to justify itself as a self-contained industry and lets it show up as what it actually is, real, specialized expertise that plugs into a lot of different industries, each on their own terms," he said.
Going forward Dydo believes there should be a focus on building digital signage networks that deliver messages in a clean way and 'delivering intent reliably.'
"Once you're not chasing an industry-shaped identity, the real differentiator becomes follow-through, a network still doing exactly what it was built to do six months after launch, not drifting into a stale loop nobody's watching," he said. "Delivering intent reliably means the actual point of a display, what a client wants communicated, to who, in that moment, survives all the way through deployment instead of getting lost in hardware markup or a handoff where nobody's left accountable. That reliability is where real trust gets built, and it's a much more solvable problem once you stop trying to solve "the industry" and start solving the actual work in front of you."
Judy Mottl is the editor of RetailCustomerExperience.com and DigitalSignageToday.com at Connect Media. She is an award-winning editor, reporter and blogger who has worked for top media for nearly four decades, including AOL, InformationWeek and Internet News, as well as for leading technology providers including HP. She’s written everything from breaking news to in-depth industry trends and reported on technology long before the internet arrived, including the debut of the first smartphone. When she's not sharing insights on digital signage deployments and trends in retail customer experience she's on the beach or watching the latest live murder trial.
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