Beefeater Case Study

The Client

Part of the Whitbread family, the Beefeater brand launched in 1974 with the opening of restaurant the Halfway House in Enfield. As the name suggests they were predominantly known as a steak house, providing quality food at great value prices. Whitbread has invested heavily in the brand, now called Beefeater Grill, with an estate of over 130 restaurants nationwide with more branches opening later this year.

The Challenge

Beefeater Grill was looking for a solution to provide large-scale roadside digital signage. They wanted the ability to easily deploy content to this screen, to schedule different day parts and to amend signage instantly without using a disc or dongle. However, because the sign was at the roadside they were limited in terms of what data infrastructure they could use.

An important factor in this deployment was to ensure the content on the screen was large enough to be easily visible from the roadside. As it was outside, there were challenges in ensuring it was weather and vandal proof, in addition to housing it in an attractive totem.

The Solution

The DMP Immersion media adapter uses hardwired, wireless or 3G connectivity to deliver content. It was felt 3G would be the most suitable option for this deployment; because it removed the need for complex data infrastructure, all that was required was power.

DMP Immersion connects with DMP Evolution, a web-based digital signage creation, deployment and management tool, which enables close control of digital signage from anywhere with an Internet connection. This solution allowed the signage for the totem to be created, deployed, scheduled and amended from any location.

The screen is an 80” LED display; the large format ensured it was clearly visible from the roadside. The display has a light sensor on it, which controls the brightness of the screen according to ambient light conditions.

After consultation with Beefeater, it was decided that the screens should be mounted in the preexisting roadside totem. The manufacturer of the totem, Sign2000, cut a space for the LED screen in the structure. This approach made excellent use of the existing structure and removed the need for complex building work in the car park at Beefeater. This meant the whole installation process, including on-site testing of the screen, took less than half a day.

The Outcome

The challenge was to find a workable solution to provide outdoor, large format digital signage using a 3G solution to deploy the content. This has been achieved with impressive results.