TfL and Exterion on digital ribbons, automation and a new way of serving brands

A year since Exterion won the Transport for London advertising contract, bosses at both organisations have unveiled their joint plans for a change in the way they work with agencies, the imminent arrival of new digital ad formats, and 2018’s automation plans.

‘Hello London’, the revenue-sharing partnership between TfL and Exterion, launched in October 2016 and gives advertisers access to one audience across more than 400 stations.

Expected to generate £1.1 billion for TfL over the next 10 years, Google, Lloyds Bank, Hewlett-Packard and Thomson Reuters were the first brands to advertise on the new premium screens at Canary Wharf. Now, Chris Reader, head of commercial media, TfL, and Dave King, Exterion UK managing director, have shared further details of how they want to vastly improve the advertising opportunities across the capital’s transport network.

“We want to serve brands in a way they have never been served before,” Reader told Mediatel.

“But I want agencies to think about how they engage with us. We now have the ability to create some fantastic campaigns, so we want agencies to move beyond the mindset of TfL just being a place where they can buy adverts to where they are coming up with ambitious ideas that are high impact, immersive and creative. We want them to know we are receptive to new ideas.”

King said this shift in the way all parties work will “overcome the preconception that it’s difficult to do business with TfL – because it’s not.”

Dave King

Reader admitted that TfL is “complicated”, however, the organisation has a much stronger appetite than it has had in the past to use advertising as a way to enhance the customer experience.

Historically, Reader said, TfL was not close enough to what was evolving out of the agencies, but now, via the Hello London partnership, it can be much more hands-on.

“We want to be the first public transport system in Europe that can stand on its own two feet – one that receives no government subsidy. To do that, we need to work in a different way and that means we need to understand and better use our commercial assets.”

To that end, rather than just be an ad seller, Hello London is allowing TfL to work more closely with brands and agencies to try and work out how to develop what Reader calls “wow” moments.

Recent examples include the Lucozade ‘Find your Flow’ campaign which saw microchips placed in the bottom of bottles and when swiped at a turnstile would give a free journey across London, and the series seven launch of Game of Thrones – an experiential campaign that was designed to get commuters to interact and share pictures via social media.

Looking back, Reader said that TfL’s original advertising strategy was much more hands-off. “We policed the contract and that’s about as far as it went,” he said. “Now we’re integrated and want to do things differently. And that’s allowing us to unlock better opportunities.”

New digital canvases

As of next month, Exterion Media and TfL will launch the first advertising on DX3, a new digital channel of cross-track video screens – an upgrade on the ones used in the past – which will allow full-colour, HD video. 20 units will be live by the end of November. By the end of January, there will be 60 of these full motion, dynamic displays across 16 stations, focused on Zone 1.

This will be followed by new D6 and D12 LCD screens – taking the number of D6 screens to over 400, and the number of D12 screens to over 50.

Some escalators will also be upgraded with the roll-out of continuous ‘ribbon’ video screens replacing the single screens that adorn the walls of stations in central London.

“Personally, I’m most excited about the ribbon screens,” Reader said. “I think they will offer a very innovative canvas for brands.”

Chris Reader

There is still plenty of space for classic print posters, however – a favourite of tech behemoth Apple, King noted, as much as smaller brands inside train carriages – so advertisers will always have a mix.

However, King was keen to stress that Exterion is a digital media business to the core. “We’re now powered by data and we’re digitising our business not just through these assets, but through the way we plan, buy and interact with our customers,” he said.

“We’re trying to build data-rich environments. That’s very important. We can accurately target advertising campaigns and we can use tap-in, tap-out [journey] data – all anonymised – to make sure the advertising is relevant.”

Advertisers have access to an insight tool that draws on anonymous, aggregated data from Telefonica UK’s 25 million O2 customers, as well as a ‘Hello London Data Dashboard’.

Automation is coming next year

King revealed, exclusively, that in the first half of 2018 Exterion will launch its new automation platform, Adfloe.

Stressing that the business is not using the ‘programmatic’ tag – something King described as “a bit of a red herring” – the system will allow for full campaign automation.

“Yes, we’re going to automate, in time,” King said. “It will be in the first half of next year and we’ll be looking to make it easy for our customers to find availability, plan, optimise and transact.

“We want to automate those processes and we’ll do it with the [OOH] specialists and the agencies, serving up our APIs so we can plug into our customers and so they can plug into us.”