Digital signage wants to be taken seriously as an enterprise technology - yet half the industry still treats cybersecurity like an optional add‑on. For years, networks have been deployed with weak passwords, outdated OS versions, open ports, and media players left unpatched for months. The result? Screens that are beautiful on the outside and dangerously exposed on the inside.

Let’s be honest: Cybersecurity has been the industry’s dirty secret — ignored by vendors, underestimated by operators, and misunderstood by customers. All while digital signage screens have quietly become part of critical infrastructure: airports, hospitals, transport hubs, retail media networks, corporate communications, and public information systems.

This panel confronts the uncomfortable truth: Why did it take actual breaches and public defacements for the industry to wake up? Why do so many deployments still fail the most basic security standards? And who carries the blame when a single compromised player takes down an entire network - or a brand’s reputation?

With ransomware, supply‑chain attacks, and remote vulnerabilities rising across all connected devices, digital signage is no longer a harmless “AV project.” It’s a target. This session is a wake-up call - loud, necessary, and long overdue.

DooH players think they’re perfectly positioned to dominate instore retail media - but are they actually ready for the complexity of the in‑store business? After all, selling impressions on a roadside billboard is one thing. Running a data-driven, shopper‑centric media network inside a supermarket, pharmacy, or hypermarket is something else entirely.

Retail media isn’t just DooH with a shopping cart. It’s inventory data, trade marketing, attribution, SKU-level insights, shopper psychology, and the brutal reality of retail operations. It’s endemic brands demanding measurable sales impact — and non-endemics chasing attention in the one place online ad blockers don’t work.

This panel asks the uncomfortable question everyone is quietly debating: Are traditional DooH companies truly equipped to run high-performance retail media networks?
Or do retailers need a completely different skill set — deeper data science, tighter POS integration, and a customer understanding DooH has never had to master?

And here’s the twist: Retailers themselves are starting to realize that whoever controls in‑store media controls a multi‑billion‑dollar revenue engine. Should they really outsource or keep it inhouse?

This panel will unpack the turf wars, the misconceptions, and the new power dynamics shaping the hottest battleground in media today.