BroadSign To Drive 3,500-Screen Ad Network For French Hypermarket Group

November 2, 2016 by Dave Haynes

A lot of the deals that get announced in press releases by software vendors aren’t big enough to get more than a shrug from people outside those companies, so I don’t tend to bother writing them up. But there are ones, here and there, that are big enough and sufficiently different to warrant some attention.

Montreal-based BroadSign says it has won a deal to provide the digital OOH CMS platform for the French firm IMEDIACENTER, which has aspirations, at least, of lighting up as many as 3,500 displays in the entrances, central store aisles and main shopping mall corridors of the hypermarket, grocery and shopping mall group Auchan.

The company also intends to use outdoor displays to market at shoppers in areas where cares are loaded with purchases.

The ad network, presumably at full deployment, would reach north of 400 million people annually, though many of those eyeballs would duplicated (people shop more than once a year).

The interesting thing here is that Auchan is not only a big retailer in France, but is active in 17 countries and has more than 3,000 locations.

What’s also interesting, if I am decoding the press release and other material about IMEDIACENTER, the company and ad network are actually owned by Auchan. If I have that right, then this is a big retailer creating and running its own digital OOH network, which is VERY different from a third-party coming in and trying to make a go of it and sharing ad revenues with the host retailer.