Screens star at new Heathrow terminal
On 27 March this year, if all goes to plan, the first passengers will trundle their suitcases through the shiny new Terminal 5 (T5) at London’s Heathrow airport and, with a bit of luck, will glance upwards at one of the nearly 300 screens scattered across the terminal by JCDecaux Airport.
For Don Sperring, outgoing UK managing director with the company, and Richard Malton, the firm’s marketing director, the grand opening will mark the culmination of a project that started back in 2000, when the company started working with airport owner BAA on updating its signage systems.
T5 will have more than 280 screens in 20 interior and nine exterior locations. In its first year, T5 will see 27m passengers traversing the terminal, exposed to a range of 40- and 57-inch Samsung screens visible at check-in positions, departure lounges and gates, as well as at Heathrow Express stations.
And besides the Samsung screens, the T5 project includes four giant light boxes (29x3.6 metres) arrayed across the ticket channels, with each screen being larger than four London buses. On top of this, there will be six so-called Skyscraper screens (2.8x6.5 metres) greeting passengers as they enter T5, plus five light boxes (1.5x3.2 metres) on the giant zonal beacons that direct passengers throughout the check-in area. And these are just some of 700 digital locations across all seven of BAA’s UK airports.
“We were originally looking at deploying around 400 screens across all seven of BAA’s airports in the UK, but the effects of the [11 September 2001] tragedy in New York and a fall in advertising revenues generally forced us to rethink our strategy,” said Sperring. “The good news, of course, is that the cost of digital-signage systems has also been going through the floor, which meant that, despite the fall in advertising revenues, we have been able to increase the signage population to around 700 screens across all of BAA’s airports, including the Heathrow T5 project,” he told SCREENS.tv.
Portrait format
“The screens are the digital successor to the old paper posters you used to see in airports in years gone by. That’s why we went with a portrait, rather than a landscape, format and, of course, there’s no sound on the BAA screens. These facts are important, as it helps to differentiate them from TV screens,” he explained.
Sperring says that he expects the BAA portrait screens to gain a lot of eyeball time, as travellers will notice them for what they are not: “They’re not TVs. They’re a new advertising medium – an evolution from paper posters,” he said, adding that even though his company could have done a lot more with the BAA screens, including the T5 deployments, the real innovation has been placing the advertising channel in the hands of the advertisers.
“That’s a first in digital signage,” he said. “As long as the copy as been approved by all concerned, the advertiser can choose what advertising mix they have on each screen, whether it’s in Heathrow T1, T3 or T5, or Gatwick Airport.” Thanks to individual screens being addressable on the network with specific content, advertisers can target the arrival or departure of particular flights with language-specific messages.
Just advertising
Sperring’s colleague Malton also sees the Heathrow T5 project as central to his firm’s revolution in digital signage. “T5 has been a major catalyst for us, both in terms of the BAA real-estate project, and other aspects of our digital signage,” he said, adding that the screens are essentially a bespoke advertising medium.
“They’re not flight screens. Many of them are located adjacent to the flight screens, so travellers will see them. On top of that, they’re also unusual in not having any content on them – they’re purely about advertising,” he explained.
According to Malton, airports are very different from other screen-media sites. At the departure gates, he says, dwell times can often be measured in tens of minutes while travellers wait to board their aircraft. “As a result of this, we’ve found the advertisers are very aware of the fact that the BAA screens are a new medium. They have been very responsive,” he said.
Having said that, Malton cautions against advertisers getting too enthusiastic about airport signage on its own. “It’s really just another sales channel, even though it does give advertisers access to mass coverage. You can’t, for example, turn around at T5 without seeing a screen in your field of vision, it’s so pervasive,” he said.
One aspect of the Heathrow T5 project that Malton is proud of is the fact that the shopping facilities in the new terminal are high-end, with travellers expected to treat the terminal as a destination rather than a transit point. “It’s rather like London St. Pancras Station in this regard, with travellers lunching at Gordon Ramsey’s and then looking down a chain of a quarter of mile of screens, each spaced about ten metres apart,” he said. “The signage system is a spectacle in itself,” he added.
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