Mexican Sam’s Clubs Using Floor Projections To Promote Brands

October 1, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Cavernous retail warehouse stores like Costco and Sam’s Club don’t tend to have the best sightlines for using big digital displays because of the concrete floor to metal ceiling shelving units that sit above eye-level shelves, so one workaround is using projectors to put media on the floor.

That’s what Walmart-owned Sam’s Club is doing in some 100 stores in Mexico – using 7,175 lumens laser projectors to deliver brand messaging aimed at shoppers.

Projectors are part of what Sam’s Club very weirdly calls the DUBAI project, short for Digital Unit for Better Activation in Club. … You can picture me cross-eyed. Wouldn’t co-opting the name for a Middle East city-state confuse people every time it was used? Anyway … the effort is all about reaching consumers as they shop, and includes other media around the stores.

The agency that put the program together is using Christie’s DWU760A-iS projectors – one per store, so far.

Sam’s Club is not a thing in Canada, and I’ve not been in one in the U.S. Google tells me if I got in my car and drove seven hours, I could pop into the one in Bangor, Maine. So … no. Costco is 10 minutes from me.

But I THINK, at least, that Sam’s was testing this with Wovenmedia, based on what they told me in an April 2021 podcast. 

While 7,000 lumens is nice and bright, the supplied photo suggest it is still fighting with the lighting in that store. You also have the challenge of shadows, with the projector being directly overhead – though shadows would presumably be more pronounced if the projection was coming from an angle.