The United Kingdom is home to one of the most iconic digital displays in the world – the Piccadilly Lights. The screen is 783.5 square meters large and shows a patchwork of six ads that change their place around the screen every 90 seconds. Owing to its central location in London, it reaches both local and tourist audiences, whom market research describes as “city sophisticates” and “career climbers” with “lavish lifestyles.” It is quite a tasty morsel for advertisers that attracted many big brands, such as Amazon, Balenciaga, Cinzano, and McDonald’s, to name but a few. In fall 2023, Gem Display launched Scotland’s largest and UK’s second-largest digital out-of-home (DOOH) screen in central Edinburgh. It measures 166 square meters and is located directly in Edinburgh’s World Heritage zone, gathering impressions from local and foreign audiences.
, such as JCDecaux or Clear Channel, seem convinced of the medium’s effectiveness as the
has been growing uninterrupted through the pandemic and the economic instability of 2022 and 2023. This, in turn, results in ever-broader
.
DOOH is better with programmatic
Digital outdoor media is one of a growing number of media that can be bought programmatically. DOOH ads also have the added advantage of being more easily targeted to reach specific audiences, either based on data collected in the psast or on facial recognition. If equipped with the right technology, the displays can detect the age, gender, or even the mood of its audience and show an ad best suited for that demographic. The key
reason UK marketers included DOOH ads in their media mix was the possibility to measure their performance in numerous ways. However, the most common performance indicator used for this purpose is increased brand awareness, followed by the performance of digital channels, and generated impressions. Marketers’ preferred
format is shopping mall screens, closely followed by large format, and supermarket screens. Underground ads are the least popular.
Sustainability in focus
DOOH advertising is criticized because it needs electricity to work. Environmental organizations stress that energy saving is necessary for the world to become more sustainable, and DOOH displays are energy guzzlers. A digital six-sheet screen, typically seen at bus stops,
consumes as much electricity as three UK households, and a digital billboard as much as 11 homes. Additionally, energy has become a limited good in Europe in the face of the Russia-Ukraine war. Advertising operators in many European countries were mandated to switch off digital ad screens at night to save energy. This was not the case in the UK, but British consumers do expect the ad industry to take steps to become more sustainable. Saving electricity and reducing light pollution were essential
issues the advertising industry had to address in terms of sustainability, according to the results of a survey carried out in 2022 among adults in the UK. Some DOOH businesses are listening and slowly but surely introducing sustainable elements, such as green energy use, replacing traditional lighting with LEDs, or introducing solar-powered displays.
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