Akenside Studios window lands walk-in viewing within 24 hours
A ground floor window just up from Newcastle's quayside has shown what an empty frontage can do, after new digital screens at Akenside Studios brought in a walk-in viewing within a day of going live.
Akenside Studios is a multi-let office building on Akenside Hill and home to Fuse. With a number of offices available and a prominent window that was saying nothing to the people walking past it every day, Fuse decided to put its own screens to the test on its own front door.
"We put the screens in our own window before we offered them to anyone else," says founder and director Jamie Mableson. "I wanted to watch it work rather than take somebody's word for it."
Fuse installed three high-brightness screens in the ground floor window, built to be readable through glass in daylight. They carry motion video on a rotation of roughly 90 seconds, with the building's own office availability leading the loop alongside paid local and national campaigns.
Everything is scheduled and changed remotely through the Fuse screens portal, so new availability, a let agreed or a fresh campaign can go live without anyone visiting the building.
Within 24 hours of the screens going live, the building took a walk-in viewing from someone who had seen the offices advertised from the street. Successful lettings followed.
"That frontage had been telling nobody anything," says Jamie. "Within a day it had brought someone through the door. That tells you what an empty window is actually worth.
"A static board says one thing, can't be changed without someone going to site, and gets ignored within days. A screen changes as often as the building needs it to, and it can earn from the slots the building isn't using itself."
Alongside the screens, Fuse installed a Fuse Footfall counter to measure passing activity at the window. It counts people anonymously, building up data on how busy the frontage is by hour and by day.
"The footfall counter turns a frontage from a guess into a number," adds operations director Elliot Leese. "For a landlord or agent, that's evidence to market with. For an advertiser, it's the basis for a rate that stands up."
Jamie adds: "Every Fuse service gets proved on our own building before we offer it to anyone else. Fuse Meetings runs live here, and now the screens do too. We're not asking a landlord to be the first to find out whether this works.
"Screens aren't right for every building. They need street frontage and real passing footfall. But where a building has that, the frontage is an asset, and the first thing it should be advertising is itself."
Read the full case study: The building that advertised itself