A strategically placed network of digital signs is earning British retail icon Harrods an extra A$3.5 million income annually....

By ROBERT STOCKDILL

Step into the endearing London shopping Mecca of Harrods a couple of years ago you might have noticed some of the several hundred poster boards dotted about the store. Many were in the escalator lobbies or in corridors running between departments.

But they were static and - not exactly at the forefront of modern technology.

Today, Harrods has replaced many of them with a network of more than 100 digital screens in five different sizes running on five different networks. And the results have been spectacular.

"Our ad revenues have tripled over the last 18 months," explained Harrods'

Guy Cheston, advertising, sales and sponsorship director, in a presentation to participants in this year's Westfield World Retail Study Tour. "We're now generating over 1.5 million pounds in advertising income and we've had a total of 500 different advertisers who've used our system."

Cheston said each screen on average generated 16,500 pounds per annum - "so it's a nice little money making machine".

 
"Our concessions were investing about 15% of their marketing spend in the post medium and they're now investing over 70% on the digital screens so we feel this has been a fantastic success."

The project took a couple of years to come to fruition. About three years ago Harrods had four or five screens dotted about the store - in wrong place, said Cheston, not networked and not facing customers - "and from an advertising point of view they were providing very little return on investment".

"We've probably come a little bit later than other retailers to digital screens. We watched other retailers and we found the way they were implementing them - hanging from brackets or ceilings - was not the way we
wanted to go. We wanted to do something different. That comes at a price and we averaged 5000 pounds per screen on the installation."

 
It took 15 months to research and decide which technology partners were best for the project - and evaluating whether to contract the project out or run it in-house. They chose the latter.

A significant decision was to partner with LG. "We did a deal with LG to provide screens at no cost in exchange for contra advertising and placing their logo on all the screens so that saved us about 500,000 pounds," said
Cheston.

Harrods opted for portrait screens rather than landscape - a deviation from the format used by most retailers.
"Our research showed television is very much a one-to-one medium and television is very much a landscape format. We felt very strongly what we were installing was digital posters as opposed to television.

"Advertisers are geared up to supply work in A4 format for posters or magazines and as we don't run audio on our screens, we felt we really needed to distance the medium from TV," said Cheston. Another factor was that most of the screens were installed in place of poster boxes, which were of portrait shape.

"We encourage animated creative, so in most cases the advertisers are usually supplying us with creative they'd normally use for posters or magazines. We can spin or move some of the content to capture the eye (on screen).

"Without audio, few commercials are as dynamic as they would be on television, however there are advertisers who do want to run video which we can run in the middle of the (vertical) screen. We tend to top and tail that with some branding and a call to action message.

"We have clustered the screens in key spots around the store where most customers can actually see several screens in one view (in fact there are 10 in one stairwell). We try to ensure at any one time they get a view of about four screens in one sightline and when you see all the content changing simultaneously, it is actually quite an impactful view.

"We also believe a moving customer will always struggle to absorb a moving message so the majority of the screens tend to be clustered around places where our customers are static - such as entrances and exits (and escalators).