Last weekend saw the second prix that Abu Dhabi hosted, this year though there has been a massive increase in the exploit of digital marketing, some indoors and some outdoor digital signage.

There are several uses of digital signage used from within the surrounding hotels to the pit lanes, so let us look at them and see how dynamic marketing is being exploited.

Resort – Dynamic Signage.

In a hotel or resort, most of the dynamic signage is installed indoors in the buildings, ranging from LCD advertising displays promoting what is on the menu at the restaurants to digital posters promoting what is accessible from the hotel shop or room service.

In the bars a variety of digital posters are used to advertise the beverages on offer to possible buyers, for guest information much larger screens can be used that are a floor standing LCD poster, these run on the same built in ads player. Now these are utilized for displaying when the race starts, when the courtesy buses are departing to get visitors to the race in plenty of time.

Grand Prix – Digital Signage.

Then when you get to the arena and enter the focal gates, you are met with big LCD TVs that are housed in shielding LCD enclosures; these offer the protection from the high temperatures through a small air conditioning unit that is managed by the audio visual manager for the location. In the pit lanes little screens around 32 inch in size, these show all the positions of the drivers, so that at a glance the pit crew can see straight away who is coming in for a tire change or top up of fuel.

This is a standard example of both indoor and outdoor dynamic signage working together and the hardware used is relatively simple to use even for new people in digital signage. Let us look at the technology used.

Digital Poster and Digital Menu Board.

Both pieces of equipment comprise of a LCD display that can be located in either landscape or portrait position, both units have a built in campaign player that work on a memory card and the size of campaigns are only dictated by how many you can get on an 8GB card.

Media formats supported are JPEG, MPEG1, MPEG2, AVI and MP3, giving the user total control over their advertising project.

The advantage is these units are affordable and an easy move for anyone who has never used dynamic marketing before.

The free standing LCD display uses the same equipment as the digital poster, but is based into a free standing steel unit.

Outdoor LCD enclosure.

These are created from steel and watertight to prevent water ingress, they save from harm the marketing hardware from the weather and potential vandal assaults, permitting integrators to use standard hardware designed for indoor use, outdoors at a much more cost effective price. As the dedicated outdoor digital signage equipment is very expensive.