Three weeks, 1340 displays, 39 sites: a digital record ?

Bron; www.screenmediamag.com

Esprit Digital is laying claim to the record of Britain’s biggest digital signage export, after rolling out a 39-site network for Westfield shopping malls in Australia.

Valued at AUD20m ($16m), built in just 12 weeks and installed in less than a month, it is described by Esprit as the largest overseas deployment by a UK digital signage supplier.

The network comprises 890 pods, about half of them double-sided and the other half single-sided, with 1340 65-inch LCD displays in all. They are driven by the Scala Enterprise content management system as well as proprietary software.

Said Esprit’s managing director Peter Livesey: “What the Esprit Digital team has achieved with this project has surely never been done before. To install just under 900 units of this complexity in so many locations across a continent the size of Australia in three weeks is nothing short of a miracle.

“In one fell swoop we have essentially converted Australia’s premier retail environments from a traditional paper-based advertising network to a digital one.”

Strips and sensors

As well as cameras to determine the age, gender and ethnicity of viewers, more innovative  capabilities of the Westfield pods include coloured LED strips to attract the attention of passers-by, and Esprit’s own Clear Space technology, which determines if there are any temporary obstructions in front of a screen.

The new network will be seen by about 550m shoppers each year at the centres run by Scentre Group.

That company owns and operates the 47 Westfield sites in Australia and New Zealand, which it says is the two countries’ largest group of shopping malls.

“The Westfield SmartScreen Network will fundamentally change the way brands can maximise the Westfield retail marketing environment,” said Bill Burton, general manager of Scentre Group BrandSpace.

“It gives them a level of quality, national scale, control and digital flexibility that they have been waiting for, enabling digital efficiency and effectiveness never before seen in Australian retail.”

Esprit already worked with Westfield in the UK, where it installed and maintains more than 400 LCD screens at the Olympic Stratford City and White City sites in London.