‘A daily wonder experience’: Trinity Leeds

Trinity Leeds represents the latest in a growing number of digital malls, offering new opportunities to advertisers

Trinity Leeds represents the latest in a growing number of digital malls, offering new opportunities to advertisers

When a shopping centre opens, in general it doesn’t go unnoticed. Trinity Leeds surpassed expectations when it launched this March welcoming 132,000 people. The shopping mall, said to be the size of 13 football pitches, is the largest project of its type in Western Europe boosting 120 shops, 12 restaurants, bars and cafes and the largest Everyman cinema in Britain.

At The Screen’s most recent Breakfast Briefing, Sean Curtis, head of marketing at LandSecurities, the company that owns the £378million shopping centre, Neil Morris from Grand Visual and JCDecaux’s Mark Bucknell got together to share their knowledge and experience of the new digital mall. Trinity Leeds features gigantic interactive videowalls, Google product search, LED advertising screens, its own mobile app, which can be tailored by the user, and totally free wifi through out.

“We own many big shopping centres in the UK, but with Trinity Leeds we pay special attention on following a customer led strategy,” explains Curtis. “Things have changed in the world of retail and we also need to change to attract and retain the public.”

Making the site a digital destination in its own right was one of the key objectives; the other was to give customers and retailers the best communication platform they could wish for. The ubiquitous use of wifi allows people to search compare and buy online, even if they are in the shopping mall.

“Nine out of ten purchases are done online today and a big proportion of the searches and buys are done on mobile devices,” notes Curtis. “When we were planning this project we asked ourselves, should we dance with the internet devil in a shopping mall environment? The answer was yes, definitely.”

Using Google’s product search paired with GPS capacities means that people can search online but it will only show retailers within Trinity Leeds. Customers’ preferences are logged in LandSecurities’s new CRM system, allowing it to offer a segmented and personalised service. “A multichannel customer is worth more than a single customer,” Curtis remarks.

The ease of use and customer-centric approach is also reflected in the £1million screen network investment. The screens, located in key areas across the mall, have information about events, special offers, news, the cinema, city guides and the centre itself. But most importantly for retailers, 70 percent of the air time on these beautiful digital canvases is dedicated to local stores’ advertising and promotions.

Morris described this project as unique for Grand Visual. The company’s day-to-day job is to deliver outstanding campaigns, but in a limited timeframe. In the case of Trinity, it had to consider how to orchestrate digital content across the mall all day, every day, for a whole year.

“It’s like running a channel,” says Morris. “Our brief was to deliver an immersive ‘daily wonder’ experience using Trinity’s screen state. To create these special moments for visitors, we designed a series of interactive content applications. It’s more like an art installation than anything else, but so far it’s been very successful in engaging visitors and providing a surprise factor.”

Using Panasonic D-Imager, a sleek camera-sensor located above the videowalls that collects spatial information about its environment, passers-by can interact with the screen without having to touch it.

“Nobody has done multiple-[dimension] image processing before now,” says Morris. Grand Visual worked with Fraps for the real-time video capture; this is a work in progress, with new interactive games and other experiential projects in the pipeline.

The digital experience at Trinity Leeds also includes a network of JCDecaux’s newly-launched M-Vision digital six-sheets. “The screens give Trinity Leeds and its retailers tactical opportunities,” explains Bucknell. “The advertising in it is location-specific and brands have the power to update their advertising or copy with relevant opportunities and promotions.”

According to Bucknell, malls are retail’s fastest growing environment. The average time people spend in them has risen to 178 minutes, with a 161 average spend and a 12 percent over-spend. “Digital just enhances the customers experience and gives retailers to tools to reach their audience with the right message at the right time,” he adds.

Since opening, Trinity Leeds has welcomed half a million people per week. Its modern look and feel, as well as its practical functionality using wifi, mobile and digital signage, gives Leeds citizens a sense of pride and creates a new destination for the city’s visitors.


First published 3 June 2013 – Output

A lesson from the agencies: creating successful DOOH content

Kinetic used Olympics-related creative at key high-traffic locations, such as airports, last year to promote Visa during the Games

Kinetic used Olympics-related creative at key high-traffic locations, such as airports, last year to promote Visa during the Games

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) offers innovative ways in which a brand can engage with customers. But this engagement has to be increasingly clever and provide added value for people to stop, interact and recall the campaign. What do agencies have to bear in mind to make successful content for this medium?

“To create awe-inspiring campaigns, agencies need a brilliant idea, to find the right location for the ad to reach the target audience, and use the technology available for best results,” comments Nick Mawditt, global director of insight and marketing at Kinetic. “Our studies show that companies that embrace new technology for their advertising get a more favourable perception amongst the audience. DOOH messages are increasingly event-led; this could be a celebration, such as Easter, or current news.”

Will Awdry, creative partner at Ogilvy, recalls the success of the agency’s Olympics 2012 campaign for BP featuring Jessica Ennis. “We ran pre-emptive DOOH messages (‘Go Jess Go’) the night before her big event, which then became a congratulatory piece when she secured the heptathlon gold medal. This was carried out pretty much in real time with London Underground signage. Off the back of it, Twitter and other social media sites were on fire and the conversation was live.”

Liam Boyle, managing director of Monster Media, considers: “The role of technology is to aid the brand in communicating its core objectives relating to its platform and positioning in unison with its planning schedule across the full marketing mix. There are a variety of tools that can now be accessed to further drive above-the-line campaigns all the way through the line.

“Immersion is the future and the now,” Boyle continues. “Creating brand experiences through DOOH leverages the convergence of the experiential and advertising models. These are powerful channels on their own, but even more potent when mixed together. Technology is the binding agent that allows brands to converse directly with their desired demographic and facilitate a more valued, quantifiable and quantitative, connection.”

All the agency representatives interviewed agreed that campaigns can undergo meticulous planning but they also need to be able to grow organically. Sophie Burke is head of marketing at Zoom Media, which claims to be the UK’s largest digital media network in health clubs. She adds: “The media planning cycle is generally quite lengthy and requires a great deal of thinking ahead. However, the majority of truly successful and innovative media campaigns involve an element of spontaneity – whether it’s copy which can be adapted dynamically based on real-time data, or an interactive component which allows the consumer to get involved.”

But not any old interaction will cut it. Mawditt says that, in Kinetic’s experience, direct touch rather than gesture-controlled interaction makes the engagement and recall more powerful. “If you touch a screen, you are engaging in a more personal and private level, even if it’s in a public space. With gesture, the engagement is brief and people can feel self-conscious.”

Campaign content needs to be timely but also allow for user-generated content; it is in this area where social media comes into play and facilitates the call to action. Real-time campaign metrics need to be aligned to marry the technological capability of the screen with other live information, such as online engagement, as demonstrated with Posterscope’s campaigns that use Liveposter, a dynamic content scheduling and distribution product.

Posterscope’s Adam Cherry talks about the McDonalds London 2012 Olympics photo exchange exercise, which gave the brand a 73 percent positive perception boost. The campaign consisted of a real-time creative exercise: photographs submitted via Facebook were matched with custom straplines and delivered to hundreds of screens nation-wide. This was then fed back into the protagonists’ Facebook timelines to be shared with friends, prompting them to join in and create a snowball effect amongst fans.

“Social is a very powerful tool,” says Boyle. “We’re big believers in the potential to integrate and give brands the opportunity to converse directly with their audience after the initial point of engagement. Giving consumers the chance to engage through interactive digital and brands’ CRMs, and data as a result, will be a benefit to both in the long run.”

Posterscope’s Cherry forecasts: “The future will see DOOH scheduled and traded in new ways, focusing much more on the impressions delivered rather than number of screens bought.”

Where DOOH is concerned, advertising content is increasingly featuring social media to drive customer engagement and provide valuable data back to brands. But, in order to make those objectives successful, it’s time for the creatives to get creative.

First published 22 March 2013 – Output