Walk through most American cities and you notice how exceptionally good they are at monetising attention. Every taxi, elevator and hotel lobby is a miniature media centre. Airports advertise on every square inch they can fit a bracket onto. There is an instinctive understanding that if someone is standing still, you can probably sell them something.
UK cities are not far behind. Anyone who has travelled on the Tube or Metrolink will know that there are few journeys where you aren’t being promised a magic potion for consolidating all your existing debts into one monthly payment. Or the app to finally rule all other apps. But in general, British towns have been slower to turn eyeballs into money.
The screens that do exist in our high streets are often advertising Amazon, Just Eat, and other organisations whose business model depends on you not going outside. Infrastructure sitting in the town centre advertising reasons to avoid the town centre. A host ecosystem politely nurturing its own invasive species, like a gardener watering the weeds.
Every screen has a price tag linked to the footfall in front of it. The prime locations command king’s ransoms, making the highest-traffic spots the exclusive preserve of the deepest pockets.
It didn’t take Rupert Murdoch to see the opportunity in aggregation. Thousands of screens stitched together become a media business, which companies like JCDecaux have built at enormous scale to sell advertisers something rather more valuable than a collection of screens: reach.
Over the years, billboard culture has become so ingrained that we assume the pecking order is fixed in stone. Screen advertising is for the big dogs, leaving the local mongrels to fight over the scraps, hoping the TikTok algorithm might occasionally throw them a bone. Money brings influence, a hierarchy as old as capitalism itself.
But if the billboards are for the bourgeoisie, there is also a proletariat hiding in plain sight. Our towns are stuffed with digital real estate, each little worker going about its business, minding its own patch. The TV in the pub. The coffee shop. The display in the dentist’s waiting room. The library noticeboard. The digital display on the high street. Each one operating in splendid isolation, just waiting for a shop steward to unionise them.
Individually, each display commands a tiny pocket of attention. Aggregated into a local network, they reach a collective audience of beer-drinking, coffee-buying, dentist-waiting, book-borrowing local shoppers. An audience nobody else could buy.
Like its capitalist counterpart, such a community network would be selling attention, but using proximity rather than volume. A billboard shouts at ten thousand people on the off chance a couple of them listen; a hyperlocal network converts at a far higher rate, targeting an audience that is only three minutes from the farmers’ market, on the lookout for a local gig, or in need of a last-minute gift. Walking distance is always a convincing pitch.
In sheer numbers, such a network could compete with the eyeballs of a large billboard (which, let’s not forget is worth thousands of pounds/dollars per day). And without the pressures of a commercial media business, its remit would effectively be to advertise the town, to the town, using the town’s own furniture.
For any place fighting to stay visible in an economy designed to pull attention elsewhere, controlling what gets promoted to its own population is a powerful form of economic self-defence. And all that’s required is a few new televisions or a handful of venues willing to repurpose an asset they already own, plus the technology to push content to it (which, you might have guessed, is a feature of Loqiva’s Digital Town Hub.)
The investment doesn’t require a big budget. It can start with the infrastructure already sitting around the town, the pub screen currently showing the racing results, the café TV showing a muted news channel, the library noticeboard showing last year’s pantomime. The pitch to each landlord is simply to change the channel. And in return they get a live, self-updating TV guide to their local place, as well as the warm glow of being a good comrade, part of the collective seizing the means of promotion.
With little more than the flick of a switch, each town could both control and become its own media channel, featuring real, up-to-date local content, fed by the businesses and place manager, intended entirely for local eyes. A whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The technology is there. The screens are there. The audience is there. All that’s missing is someone to bring it all together.
Screens of the town, unite!