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Story featured in Sunday Herald - 23 September 2007

PEDESTRIANS walking past Forrest Media's digital outdoor advertising screens will soon be offered messages via their mobile phones as the company gears up to launch two new screens in London and Birmingham city centres.

Dubbed "bluecasting", Forrest will be the first to launch the service in the UK. It follows a London trial by rival group Titan which gave people passing an advert for Coldplay's X&Y album the opportunity to download excerpts to their phones.

Chris Trainer, head of Forrest Group, the parent company of the media division, said he was excited by the possibilities of bluecasting, which included everything from text messages to podcasts.

"Imagine you are a newspaper and there's been a cup final and you want to advertise an exclusive interview with the winning goalscorer. We could offer people an excerpt over their phones, " he said. The company, which is based in Glasgow and also has a digital screen in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens, is awaiting planning permission for the sites it has earmarked for London and Birmingham, with a view to setting them up early next year.

Trainer did not want to say where the screens would be based until the permission was granted. The company is also looking at Dublin and another UK city.

Although Titan provides screens for city railway stations and Viacom is planning a network of screens for tube escalators in London, Forrest is the only company to have them outdoors in the UK. With digital outdoor advertising in the UK growing at a rate of over 40-per cent in the second quarter, Trainer said it meant that outdoor companies could sell space in dayparts for the first time. Forrest has already experimented by selling dayparts to Renault and The National Lottery, which wanted to quickly buy space to announce a rollover jackpot.

With television audiences being spread ever more thinly across multiple channels, Trainer said these kinds of deals would help maintain outdoor's strident growth.

He added that five years from now, Forrest would have at least one digital screen in a central location in every city in the UK. For now at least, the company makes most of its money from high-quality backlit hoardings in prominent roadside and city centre spots around the country.