Sightings: Office Lobby Network In UK Re-brands

April 18, 2012 by Dave Haynes

I got into the still strange world of digital signage and digital OOH almost exactly 13 years ago, finding myself wearing a hard hat and riding on top of an elevator up a skyscraper in Calgary. I was putting screens in elevators, and part of the deal was figuring out how to get the signal to those screens.

Way back then, I was thinking (as I hung on), “This would be so much easier if we could just put the screens in the lobby.”

It’s now been done – has for a while – by the Wall Street Journal Office Network. I like the venue, but not so enamored with the screen design and overall approach.

I quite like, however, the way this is now being done by a company in the UK called ECNLive, which was re-branded this week from the older, longer Executive Channel Europe. ECN is not a carved up information screen. It’s OOH home media nice integrated into the top tier office property environment. There are information screens, but a lot of what’s being done is big impact, full screen visuals, and they’ve got screens in the elevator wait areas and other public areas in the office blocks.

Says the company website:

Our rapidly expanding display network delivers a real-time mix of live news, relevant content and full-motion display advertising to executives working in more than one hundred of London’s most prominent corporate buildings.

From SMEs to PLCs, ECNlive connects brands with hundreds of thousands of business people working for some of Britain’s most dynamic companies in diverse sectors ranging from technology to finance, fashion and media.

We enable brands to maximize the potential of digital display media, blending real-time updated content with the flexibility of day-part campaigns, capturing business audiences in high-dwell time corporate locations.

The big attraction, of course, is the cost of install and maintenance tends to drop way down when screens are outside an elevator, not in it. There are still some significant challenges getting power wires through poured cement support walls to those screens and then matching the enclosures to the fit and finish of the lobbies, but it would still be waaay cheaper even with much larger screens because of the big dollar installation and maintenance costs that come with elevator companies that happily charge BIG hourly rates for crews ANYTIME there’s an issue.

Hat tip to OOH TV for flagging the story.

 

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