Europe Has A New King Of The LED Ad Boards … In Suburban Vienna???

March 1, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Via Sixteen:Nine’s German language content partner Invidis …

The largest LED Digital OOH display in Europe has long been the big Picadilly Lights display in central London, but an even larger screen has just lit up on an office building located in a suburb of Vienna, Austria.

The semi-transparent LED appears, from, images, to cover perhaps 40% of the front face of the 50 meter tall commercial building, meaning a whole bunch of people now see outside through a grill (the non-illuminated back-end of these LED displays).

The screen is roughly 1,020 square meters, quite a bit larger than the 784 sq. meters of the ad board in London. The location is attractive to media companies because it is on major roadways and near a big shopping mall. The display has its own name, Number One, and its own website.

Number One, says the company, generates a whopping 12 million impressions per month. The use of high-intensity LEDs allows not only for optimal visibility during the day, but also for a brilliantly illuminated image in the dark. Drivers head towards the gigantic advertising space for almost 2km, which cannot be overlooked, due to its ideal alignment.

The screen was built and installed by Rineo Sign Factory, using Absen product. Don’t know the pitch, but it can do 10,000 nits, which is PLENTY bright enough to be visible in the middle of a sunny day.

Number One also appears to be the name of the media owner, though time on the display will be sold and managed by Infinity Media and the outdoor advertising specialist Triconsulting.

I don’t know the story behind this, and definitely don’t know a lick about advertising and sign bylaws in Austria, but do wonder if cladding a building is a workaround to getting permissions to put up a free-standing LED board on a pylon. If the building is already there, and the relatively lightweight mesh LED just attaches to the existing structure, it might not need the same approvals and get the same scrutiny. It may also help that there doesn’t appear to be much, if any, residential nearby.

I like the video below because it shows the mesh being attached and does the nice job of running update messages on the blocks of screens as they got lit up.