The folks at Esprit Digital will be rightly pleased to have picked up a well-deserved award for their ambitious project of screen installations at the Westfield Stratford City mall in London.
But this is much more than just a tale of one digital signage supplier doing a good job. It’s further evidence that Westfield is setting the pace for digital media in British malls, and it’s testimony to the range of screen types that a large modern shopping centre requires.
At Stratford, Esprit built a dozen thin, double-sided pod-style displays; ten 55-inch digital posters, both inside and outside the building; ten 12-screen bulkhead displays; a 5x5 video wall in the cinema foyer; and three much bigger video walls outside the anchor stores.
To truly make the most of a space’s potential for communicating with its visitors, and to match the medium to the message – whether up close and personal in the case of the pods, or massive, striking and speaking to all, in the case of the video walls – the operators not only of malls but also of other large venues like airports and stadia are now long past the days of sticking up a network of 40-inch LCDs and hoping people look at them.
They are recognising that this kind of heterogenous mix is the only way to deliver different kinds of messages to different groups at different stages in their journey through the venue. And suppliers like Esprit that can deliver such a wide range of screen types will enjoy a significant advantage over the competition – for orders, as well as industry gongs.
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