Digital escalator panels advertising

What it is

A run of digital screens set into the wall alongside an escalator, spaced so a passenger passes them one after another. They are sold as a station run rather than individually: you take the shaft, not a panel in it.

The escalator is what makes the format work. It moves at a fixed speed, so every passenger passes every screen in the same order, at the same pace, facing the same way. Almost no other advertising environment controls the order in which its audience sees things.

Why advertisers use it

Because the order is fixed, the panels can be treated as one piece of communication rather than the same advertisement repeated. A proposition can open on the first screen and resolve on the last, which is closer to a storyboard than a poster site.

Being digital, the run also takes multiple executions and day-parting, and it accepts artwork on a shorter lead time than anything printed. A campaign can change message between the morning and evening peak in the same station.

Cost

£25,000 per station run, per 2 weeks. Rates move with zone, station footfall and trading period: January and August are the softest, the Christmas run-in the hardest. That figure buys the whole run at one station for the fortnight, not a single screen — worth checking when comparing quotes, because some rates for this format are quoted per panel.

Whether that flexibility earns its cost depends on the campaign: digital and paper compared honestly.

Booking and lead time

Six to eight weeks ahead is the sweet spot: it protects both the price and the quality of the sites you get. Station dominations and peak trading periods need longer. Copy clearance sits ahead of the on-air date, so leave room for it in the schedule.

Designing for a moving audience

The frame is portrait and the reader is in motion, so each screen has to land in the couple of seconds it is in view. In practice that means one idea per panel and type that survives peripheral reading — not a layout that rewards study.

The sequence is the opportunity and the risk. A run designed as six variations on one execution wastes it; a run that depends on the passenger catching every panel in order will lose anyone who joins the escalator halfway down. The reliable shape is a sequence where each panel stands alone but gains from the ones before it.

Supplying to spec is only half of it: copy clearance sits ahead of the on-air date.

When not to buy it

This is a station format, not a network one. It concentrates spend where the escalators are — largely zones 1 and 2 — so it buys depth at chosen locations rather than coverage across London. If the brief is broad reach against a dispersed audience, in-carriage or poster formats do that job for less.

It also only exists where there are escalators. Shallow sub-surface stations and much of the outer network have none, so the station list is shorter than for any poster format and is confirmed at booking.