• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 13, 2012

The Digital Place-based Advertising Association has appointed two new members, both representing suppliers of digital signage, to its board of directors -- a first for the industry organization, whose board was previously composed entirely of executives from digital ad networks and network aggregators.

BroadSign International president and CEO Brian Dusho and NEC Display Solutions president and CEO Pierre Richer are both joining the DPAA board of directors; their appointment comes following a recent amendment to the organization’s bylaws allowing suppliers to serve on the board.

Before joining BroadSign in 2003, Dusho was co-founder of AV Nation, president and founder of Synapse Digital, and president of Hoffman Video Systems. He also held management and sales positions at MCSI, Intellisys Group, Technical Innovation, Baker Audio and YKK Corporation.

Richer has served as president of NEC since 2007; the company gave him the additional role of CEO in May of this year. Before being appointed president, Richer served as senior vice-president and general manager of NEC’s Visual Systems Division, where he also served as the division’s vice-president of sales and new business development. Prior to joining NEC in 2003 Richer spent almost a decade at InFocus Corporation.

The appointments follow a busy first half of 2012 for the DPAA, NEC, and BroadSign. BroadSign is rolling out digital installations around the world as part of an agreement with JCDecaux first signed in 2011. Meanwhile NEC recently announced it is installing 900 large-screen displays at Las Vegas-McCarran International Airport’s new Terminal No. 3, which will be used for airline branding and to provide travelers with flight, baggage and gate information and directions.

In June the DPAA announced that it had subscribed to Media Behavior Institute’s USA TouchPoints, a syndicated service that provides advertisers and media companies with insights and data on consumer behavior based on location, activity, social setting and mood, by time of day and day of week. USA TouchPoints will advise and collaborate with DPAA on analyses of TouchPoints data for the association's presentations, presumably focusing on the ways that digital out-of-home video networks reach consumers, and their advantages relative to other media platforms.