Pssst: Want To Buy Some Two-Sided DOOH Displays? Like New. Just £500 A Pop.

March 16, 2022 by Dave Haynes

DOOH media companies in the UK and maybe across the waters in Ireland and mainland Europe might be interested in what amounts to a fire sale of a bunch of big, robust and unneeded double-sided digital street furniture displays.

They were manufactured as bomb-proofed trash bins for London financial district sidewalks, doubling up as ad and information displays. The bins were to be deployed prior to the 2012 London Olympics, but did not fully roll out.

The media owner, Renew, ran into issues over privacy and was ordered in 2013 to disable the anonymous data collection tech it was using. While the screens could be monetized through advertising, we can assume at least part of the business model was aggregating pedestrian behaviors and characteristics and selling that.

This was anonymous data collection that was then aggregated, which media and technology companies would tend to say invaded no one’s privacy. But people were freaked out back then about being tracked and a decade later, that’s still pretty much the case.

The Birmingham display firm and media owner Elonex picked them up after the company that originally had them manufactured closed down. They were made at a unit cost of £42,000 per unit, and now Elonex will happily unload them for £500 each. Nick Smith, CEO of Elonex, says the build quality is very high, and the things are over-engineered. “We did have a plan for them,” he writes on Linkedin, “but now need the warehouse space, if you can help then it would be greatly appreciated.”

$500 for double-sided displays is kinda fantastic, in theory, but the screens in there would be 10 years old and quite possibly just 720P. Depending heavily on specs, including dimensions, they might be retrofitted with brighter, higher resolution LCDs, perhaps with built-in media players, for a cost still well-well below new daylight-rated displays with finished enclosures and all the engineering to power them, cool them and protect them.

There’s also the issue of freight costs – maybe not so much in the UK, but certainly if the buyer was further afield.