Digital outdoor screens in London
As any cosmopolitan city London is bustling with activity. Visitors and citizens crowd the streets, while the town tempts them with beautiful sights, tasty food, and trendy clothes. The task is the same as everywhere else: to lure, to charm and to sell. Not surprisingly, all the streets, especially in the center, are plastered with advertising. A traveler admires everything and tries to notice all. However, one gets quickly tired of the bright patches of advertising and stop paying attention to it. Until one reaches the place where enterprising advertisers managed to install a digital outdoor screen. From this moment on you are in their power. People are surrounded by beautiful old buildings but all eyes are focused only in one direction: digital outdoor screen attracts people as a magnet. With unpredictable regularity it offers to buy something, to eat something, to travel somewhere.
London digital outdoor screens are concentrated around two major central city squares. Anyone who goes to the city center inevitably comes to Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square. Central location, business offices, shopping malls make these areas extremely attractive for advertising agencies. Both squares are lit with neon and electronic digital advertising, and any observer can see that the dynamic advertising of the outdoor screens is much more interesting and pleasing to the eye.
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| Digital LED screen in London at the Piccadilly Circus | Outdoor advertizing screen in London on the cross-section of Oxendon and Coventry streets |
The outdoor digital screens elegantly complement the gently curving façades of buildings and fit nicely into the architectural style of both squares. Since the viewing angle on the modern outdoor screens is adequately wide (up to 120 degrees), the image can be easily seen and read by practically all people in the square. Modern technologies allow to manufacture digital outdoor screens of almost any size and shape and control them in any convenient regime – to display the image vertically, partition the screen into several viewing areas, combine textual and video regimes.
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| Digital LED screen at the Victoria railway station in London | Outdoor screen in Dover |
Naturally, the roofs of low buildings (central districts of European cities usually contain not very high buildings) are also very attractive for outdoor advertising purposes. However the static though bright neon advertising remains hardly noticeable – while the outdoor screens inevitably get into focus of attention and becomes the central point around which all other advertising is arranged in the attempt to stay in focus.
In London there are many small electronic signs for textual information, including “information boards” on bus stops. Similar large lamp banner screens are also very useful in places where long viewing distance requires larger size of letters. To use LED boards in such cases would make them unjustifiably expensive.
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| Vertical curved advertizing LED screen in London at the Leicester Square | Large outdoor advertizing screen in Glasgow |
Railway terminals are always busy, noisy and crowded. To attract attention in such conditions is not easy. However, a digital LED screen can do it very effectively. Even in a hurry people would look at the LED screen, watch beautiful images, read suggested texts. LED displays and screens at the railway terminals are even more useful then at sports stadiums. After all, an outdoor screen at the stadium operates effectively only during the scheduled match or show, while a screen in the railway terminal operates effectively all day round.
The English are relatively conservative in their habits and their attitude to new technologies. Nonetheless, the number of digital outdoor screens for advertizing in London is constantly growing. There are plans to install several more in the business center near the port and in the center of the city. Having realized that digital outdoor advertising is very effective, the agencies of other towns have started installing digital screens, too. Now, arriving passengers from the Eurotunnel to Dover are met by the digital screen. Another advertizing screen was installed in Scotland in Glasgow on the roof of a huge trading center. Slowly but surely the digital displays and screens are invading into the British territory, only to stay there forever.
