Swedish Solutions Provider Visual Art Wins Deal For 15,000 Screens For Finn Retail Group

December 13, 2021 by Dave Haynes

Digital signage has matured through the years to a state that networks announced with 1,000s of screens is no longer big, encouraging news, but I still think it’s a pretty big deal to get word of a screen network that would hit 1,500 stores and have some 15,000 displays.

The Swedish solutions provider Visual Art has done a deal with the Finnish retail company Kesko “on a software solution that will be used to create and publish content for about 15,000 digital screens in K Group’s grocery stores,” Visual Art says in PR.

“With our own CMS at the bottom, Kesko now has the opportunity to easily control and adapt the content from a central location, but can of course still create localized content for individual stores and screens,” says Pontus Meijer, CRO at Visual Art. “This type of digital communication solution suits us perfectly and Kesko is through its size and type of stores, obviously an extra feather in the cap to have as clients.”

The deal with the Finnish retailer reflects what seems to be happening more and more in large-scale signage projects – with Kesko pretty much handing off the planning, rollout and ongoing management agreement to Visual Art.

“We were looking for a simple, intuitive and user-friendly digital signage software to have full control of our digital fleet. In addition, it is important that the solution integrates with all our other types of systems, something that Visual Art has managed to solve for us,” says Pekka Valkearanta, CIO for Kesko’s grocery unit.

Based in Helsinki, Kesko has some 1,800 stores in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Visual Art is based across the Baltic in Stockholm.

I’m not much of a fan of screens mounted up above the natural line of sight for shoppers, but sometimes you have to work with what the venue makes possible. It’s one of those things that likely needs to be seen to determine if it visually works, or doesn’t.