Giant tech screen at Nottingham's Victoria Centre tailors ads to passers-by

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 23, 2017

UK shopping centres giant Intu has teamed up with Ocean Outdoor to launch a massive digital advertising screen in its Victoria Centre in Nottingham. It’s designed to engage shoppers and, interestingly, has content tailored to their consumer profiles.

The Nottingham One screen at the entrance to the mall will use innovative audience recognition cameras to identify someone’s age, gender “and even their emotions” so that it can display the ads that the tech decides are most likely to entertain them.

Intu and Ocean Outdoor’s partnership will expand the latter’s footprint to 10 cities across the UK and forms a key part of Intu’s strategy to deliver “experiences”, as well as simply places to sell product, across its portfolio.

The Victoria Centre is a high-footfall destination (its actually Nottingham’s number one in terms of visitor numbers) with the property giant’s customer experience director Roger Binks saying the “innovative technology [will] target shoppers already in a buying mind-set."

That’s important given the affluent catchment area around the centre and the fact that Nottingham is the UK’s seventh biggest retail centre.

Ocean’s marketing director Richard Melton said: “There’s currently a lack of external out of home options in Nottingham and [this] launch fills that void, offering brands access to the East Midlands’ most affluent and highest spending shoppers. And as Nottingham has the UK’s fourth-youngest population, there is also a significant number of younger mobile audiences in the city thanks to its vast student population and high proportion of 16-44 year-old residents.”