A ground floor screen on Newcastle's quayside, and a walk in viewing within 24 hours

The situation

Akenside Studios is a multi-let office building on Akenside Hill, a few steps up from Newcastle's quayside. It is also where Fuse works, which is exactly why the screens went in here first.

The building had a number of vacant offices and one asset that was doing nothing at all: a prominent ground floor window with genuine passing footfall.

The space was not being actively marketed. The conventional answer would have been an external static board fixed to the building, saying the same thing in the same way for as long as it stayed up, and not even that was there. Everyone walking past every day was being told nothing.

What was at stake

Vacant space costs money in two directions at once. There are the holding costs while it sits, and there is the rent that is not arriving. Anything that shortens the void pays for itself quickly, and the cheapest audience available to any building is the people already walking past its front door. That audience was being ignored.

What Fuse did

  1. Put three high brightness screens in the ground floor window. Screens built to be readable through glass in daylight, carrying motion video rather than a fixed board. The playlist runs on roughly a 90 second rotation with each advert running 10 to 15 seconds, so a passer by sees a moving, changing message rather than a sign they stopped noticing weeks ago. The building's own availability led the loop, alongside paid local and national campaigns in the other slots.
  2. Made the content controllable from anywhere. Adverts are scheduled and changed remotely through the Fuse screens portal, so a price change, a let agreed, a new availability or a seasonal campaign goes live on all three screens without anyone visiting the building. No printing, no signwriter, no site visit.
  3. Measured what the frontage was actually worth. A Fuse Footfall counter was installed alongside the screens to record passing activity at the window. It counts anonymously, producing interval data on how busy the frontage is by hour and by day, so the building has evidence rather than an assumption about its own position, and any advertising sold from that window is priced on something real.

The result

Within 24 hours of the screens going live, the building took a walk in viewing from someone who had seen it from the street. Successful lettings followed.

One window, three screens, and an enquiry from an audience that had been walking past the building every day without being asked.

"We put the screens in our own window before we offered them to anyone else, because I wanted to watch it work rather than take somebody's word for it. Within a day we had a walk in viewing from someone who had seen it from the street, off a frontage that had been saying nothing to everyone who passed it. That tells you what an empty window is actually worth."

Jamie Mableson, Managing Director, Fuse

We did it on our own building first

Every Fuse service gets proved on our own front door before it is offered to anyone else. Fuse Meetings runs live at Akenside Studios. The screens went into the ground floor window here, with a footfall counter behind them, for the same reason.

It means two things. We are not asking a landlord to be the first to find out whether this works, and we are not describing a result we have only read about. We watched the enquiry come through the door of our own building, from a window that had been telling nobody anything.

More on the screens

Fully managed end to end. Fuse supplies, installs, operates and maintains the screens and the content, so there is nothing for the landlord or the agent to run. The playlist can carry the property's own marketing, local business advertising and national brand campaigns in any mix, and motion video is proven to outperform static signage for attention. Content is scheduled centrally and updated remotely, and the screens are removed cleanly when they are no longer wanted.

The contrast with an external static board is the whole argument. A board says one thing, cannot be changed without someone attending site, and is ignored within days by the people who pass it most. A screen changes as often as the building needs it to, carries several messages in rotation, and can earn from the slots the building is not using itself.

Screens suit ground floor positions with street frontage and real passing footfall. Where a building has that, the frontage is an asset. Where it does not, a screen is the wrong answer and we will say so.

More on Fuse Footfall

A footfall counter turns a frontage from a guess into a number. It records passing activity continuously and builds up interval data over time, which answers three questions a building cannot otherwise answer: how busy is this position really, when is it busiest, and is that changing.

For a landlord or agent that is evidence to market with. For an advertiser it is the basis of a rate that can be justified. And because the data accumulates, the building gets more useful the longer it is measured. Counting is anonymous, and the system is designed to count people rather than identify them.

The point

An empty unit is usually treated as a cost to be endured until someone takes it. It is also a piece of advertising space in a position someone else would pay for, and the first thing it should be advertising is itself.

Talk to Fuse about what your frontage is doing, on 0330 333 1166 or enquiries@fusecorp.co.uk.