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.