Astral Out-of-Home is bringing some additional clarity to Toronto transit.
Beginning next month, the Bell Media unit will start replacing 40 of its existing transit shelters in downtown Toronto with new units featuring 84-inch high-definition digital screens. The installation is expected to be complete by early December.
The new units will be situated in “busy, commercial areas” said Ron Hutchinson, senior vice-president, real estate services for Astral in Toronto. “The areas in which they’re situated need to be of high-interest to advertisers, have clear sight-lines, 24-hour power and so on,” he said.
Each shelter will be capable of displaying a series of eight-second ads in a 48-second loop. As per the terms of its 20-year street furniture contract with the city, Astral will also set aside 4.4% of the digital inventory for city use, as well as for emergency messaging and other announcements such as Amber Alerts.
Astral first asked Toronto council’s permission to incorporate digital advertising in its transit shelters in 2013, but was required to amend its original proposal in order to ensure the shelters complied with the city’s safety requirements.
The company also worked with Toronto Police Services, utilizing its crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) approach that works by eliminating criminal opportunities in and around property. “Everyone’s looked at it, everyone’s agreed that the rules and standards that are in place are appropriate, and off we go,” said Hutchinson.
Astral has had 40 digital way-finding units in Montreal for the past year, but this represents its first incursion into street-level digital advertising in Toronto. The digital screens represent a fraction of the company’s 4,900 advertising faces in the city, said Hutchinson.
Council has given Astral permission to add as many as 120 new digital transit shelters over the next three years, though Hutchinson didn’t provide a timetable for when that rollout would take place.
“In the digital world I expect there’ll be more of these screens – I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” he said. “Obviously we’d like to expand it more, but we’ll see how it goes. We’re not under any specific pressure.”
Hutchinson compared the impact of the new transit shelters with that of the large-format digital screens that have replaced many of the static boards along major highways such as the Gardiner Expressway.
“We believe it’s vitally important to continue offering our clients new ways to reach consumers,” he said. “It’s a little too early in the street furniture project to know what else might be possible in terms of the technology…but for the moment we’re content to be able to offer advertisers the best resolution they can get in an incredibly flexible medium. It’s a giant leap forward from the days of ink on paper.”
