New Urban Format For Vienna Ikea Has 100+ Digital Signage Screens

September 20, 2021 by Dave Haynes

The German-language consultancy and publisher Invidis has an interesting post up today that takes an extensive look inside a new urban concept Ikea store in Vienna, Austria.

While most people who know Ikea know about giant parking lots and loading areas for flat-packed furniture, but this one is an inner city setting where parking is hard to come by and most locals walk or cycle.

Instead of a giant yellow and blue warehouse-like building, this one is green, is one seven floors and shares the block with a hotel. Invidis’ Florian Rotberg  suggests this Ikea “is more like a hip department store than a self-service furniture store.”

Extremely interesting: how Ikea is integrating digital signage on a large scale for the first time. Well over 100 displays were installed on the five Ikea floors. It is not the spectacular WoW installations that shoppers in Vienna expect. But many small (12 “) up to large format (75”) and a few video walls. The digital touchpoints follow the digital poster concept and are intended to provide both product inspiration and additional product information. 

The public digital signage screens are not intended for interactivity and transactions, the Ikea app is available for this. The integration of the displays is also kept simple – primarily “on the wall” and depending on the mind in order to retain flexibility for the frequent redecorations. Accordingly, the power and network supply is clean, but often visible.

Full piece here (it’s in German but Google translates it quite well) …

Good to see this large-scale deployment of screens. Ikea has always seemed a natural for digital signage because of its maze-like layout and product set that in many to most cases involves assembly and not just pulling something out of a box or bag. My local store has a big outdoor LED screen on a corner that can be seen from well down the highway, but also has a decent amount of digital signage – but not like this one in Austria.