UK Firm Touts Planned Rollout Of 3,500 DOOH Screens Embedded In Hand Dryers

February 3, 2020 by Dave Haynes

Start-ups have been trying to make toilets in restaurants and bars a digital OOH advertising environment for 15 years or more, and as the saying goes, everything old is new again.

UK-based Savortex says it is rolling out hand-dryers that have a tablet-sized screen that can run full-motion video spots, booked programmatically and gender-targeted (washrooms is one scenario that doesn’t need AI to sort out male/female).

The backers of adDryer.com say the value to venue owners is revenue generation and analytics on the venue.

Says the website:

The adDryer by SAVORTEX is a revolutionary eco-friendly advertising platform, enabling all advertisers to promote ad campaigns, trailers, offers, rewards and incentives, specific to gender, time and location.The platform guarantees consumer attention for up to 10 seconds without distractions. This can be dynamically refined to the audience to gain real-time insights through a proprietary data portal measuring gender, engagement and site footfall.

It is the first platform of its kind, that will drive new revenue opportunities for site owners whilst delivering eco-friendly technology, energy efficiencies and productivity.

We are rolling out a network of 3,500 adDryer screens, equating to millions of guaranteed eyeballs in 2020, including venues such as The Shard, Gatwick Airport, LABS Co-work space, Euro garages and many more.

The company says the idea is revolutionary and a first, in various online/social media entries, but through the years there have been lots of attempts at screens married to hand dryers, and certainly no end of media companies putting screens on everything from sink taps to the tops of urinals (how’s you like to be the service tech for that?).

There have also been screens in mirrors and screens that are just wall-mounted and not attached to any equipment.

Here’s images from a quick Google search of hand dryer advertising.

As with most things, the tech gets better with time and experience, and certainly better connectivity, much-lowered hardware costs and programmatic ad targeting have made this sort of thing more workable than it was 5, 10 and most definitely 15 years ago.

Restrooms certainly present a media scenario that will see many/most patrons come in at some point. And hopefully people do wash their hands. Women would be mortified by how many men do their thing and happily wander out (notably in airports) without even looking at a sink. I know … Eeeeeeeew!

It is not really clear on the website, at least from my banging around, whether venues buy or lease these units on their own pounds sterling, or the media wing of Savortex puts them in free of charge, which is the age-old “build it and the ads will come” business model that has a shaky success record in DOOH.