New form of outdoor advertising

New cost effective outdoor advertising medium.  Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Illuminated Shutter Advertising Do you want to target young urbanites? Do you want to advertise your own products and services on your premises?   Do you want to drive trade to your business premises to increase sales? Benefits      Would you like to see how your brand will look displayed on one of our shutters? For a free mock up get in touch  follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  Copyright © 2011 Streetskins Limited, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Streetskins Ltd 1 Weir Raod Wimbledon SW19 8UX  Please don’t send anymore like this | Change Preferences  Click here to be removed from the mailing list

A funny Streetskins moment - The Battle of Lloyds

As with everything in life there are certain situations that are highly amusing. Once such event occurred late one Friday afternoon (it was even close to early evening), the Streetskins installation team had arrived at the installation site in Cobham. This area is an extremely posh part of greater London, it is situated very close to the Chelsea Football training facility, so it is where most of the Chelsea footballers live, as well as the upper end of society.

The installation team had unloaded all the tools and welding equipment outside the Lloyds Pharmacy (which had now closed) and had begun to file down the side channels of the shutter. If anyone has any experience with an angle grinder, it makes an extremely loud noise, and small sparks fly in all directions. Halfway through the filing down of the one side channel the transport Police arrived, transport police are different to the normal police as they mainly travel on public transport ensuring there are no problems. The two coppers, asked what we were doing, and after a detailed explanation and few photos, they were extremely impressed with the idea and carried on strolling down the high street.

The installers were getting fairly close to the end of their filing when two police cars came roaring around the corner, sirens blearing, skidding to a halt diagonally across street, blocking all traffic in both directions. The one installer on top of the ladder got the fright of his life and nearly fell from his perch. 2 policeman leapt from their vehicles and screamed "What are you doing?". After a brief explanation they radioed to call off their backup that was on route to our location. Apparently they had received a call saying that a group of burglars were "carving their way through the Lloyds Pharmacy shutter, trying to steal drugs". They further stated that every police gun unit in Surrey had been mobilised and at this stage there were 8 squad cars, all armed to hilt, on their way to the "Battle of Lloyds". Talk about an over reaction if there had ever been one.

The police then proceeded to give us a lecture on notifying the police prior to our arrival. I told the police that two officers had strolled past 30 mins earlier, they didn't seem too bothered, and didn't think we needed to notify anyone about our actions and moved on. The police responded to that saying, "Yes, but those were only transport police". What he was really trying to say was, "The transport police spend their days catching trains and buses around, we are the real police we have cars".

The moral of the story is that cops in posh areas can also be snobs.

Video of Streetskins coming down with the shutter

How Streetskins Works

A basic slide show showing how Streetskins operates:

Video Showing Streetskins Examples

This is a slide show showing a variety of Streetskins examples:

Streetskins and the Digital Revolution

Streetskins currently only offers traditional vinyl PVC prints to customers, but if you have a look at the video below, the strategy will be to incorporate LED curtains into our product mix. This will be done when clients are able to realise a decent ROI from the increased cost that is associated with digital formats. 

There are a few technical issues that need further development before this really becomes viable. 

The greatest advantage with digital formats from a media owners perspective is that advertisements can be changed regularly and remotely, bringing the variable costs down considerably.

Streetskins and the London Riots

These were nervous days for Streetskins, not business crippling, but potentially fairly costly if all of our advertising locations had been vandalised. After the first days of the riots everyone here had a collective sigh of relief that we had no installations up in Tottenham at that time, but then the violence spread. After visiting Brixton high street and really anticipating that both our installations to be completely destroyed, it was pleasantly surprising to see that both signs were exuding their advertiser's messages more prominently than they had ever done. The retail premises on either side had their shutters and windows smashed, and the client for whom we were advertising had every window smashed.

All other locations in London were unscathed, apart from a single instance of vandalism at one of our sites in Islington but we had a few minor repairs to do. The biggest difficulty was for the installers to navigate around London, between the war-zones, as all of our postings have to occur at night.

So what does impact does this have on the future?

The first aspect is to have a look at lost revenue. Streetskins was in discussions with one of the UK's largest pizza chains to set up 96 virtual shop fronts around London for a 12 month period. The chain wanted to set up virtual store fronts on other shop shutters during the hours they were closed. Capitalising on the fact that our media is perfectly positioned for evening and entertainment related products. Unfortunately 100% of this budget is now been redirected into placing shutters on their own stores, hopefully when the coffers recover we might be able to revisit their original proposition as well as the stores that now have shutters.

Believe or not, we do not encourage shop owners to install shutters, our philosophy is foremost adding value to our clients, and at the same time improving the UK street scene. It is felt that after these riots the eradication of shutters is a long way off and if anything the supply is only going to increase.

The disjoint between brand awareness and direct ROI is diminishing

The UK is still very much a follower in the OOH environment. The Japanese (and the east) have always been at the forefront of technological innovation in this space, and due to the UK's somewhat conservative approach to evolution in this space has seen very slow moving growth this sector. This could be attributable to many factors, but the most realistic would be the fairly entrenched buying habits of older generations as well as fairly stringent planning laws. The times are changing.

Tesco has recently embraced this in Korea:

Streetskins is now able to provide a very similar virtual shop front to campaign mentioned above, the fact that Streetskins can provide large format, eye-level advertising space on the shutters of high street shops, where the consumer can interact directly through m-commerce is very powerful. 

We all know that e-commerce has revolutionised retail in the UK, but m-commerce still has a way to go before the real value of OOH is realised. The market just needs to catch up, but don't you worry it will.

Streetskins has did a study for one of the large UK retailers, and it was determined that has much as 42% of all urban traffic passed their premises when they were closed, further showing the viability of shutter advertising. In an environment where space is extremely costly, retailers should not allowing anything to go to waste.