South Africa OOH Media Adds Screens To Delivery Scooters, Incorporated In Larger Ad Buys

September 17, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Putting digital out of home-focused screens on delivery vehicles is a fairly well-established tactic for media companies, but a South African effort does things a bit differently by making screens on the backs of scooters part of a larger ad buy across several ad formats.

The online publication TechCentral reports how a company called Polygon has small, square LED displays on the back and sides of cargo boxes attached to delivery scooters, and sells time on them alongside some 3,000 ad faces on roadside billboards, inside mini-buses, in malls and in the aisles of stores. So far, the ad scooters are just in Johannesburg, but Polygon is active in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Nigeria and Kenya.

As in many cities and countries, meal and grocery delivery by bike and scooter has seen a boom in activity in the last few years. The boxes on the rear of scooters have become something of a standard, and well suited to adding screens, as well as a small media player, battery and connectivity. Ad play-out is tied to geo-location and time of day. Polygon has partnered with Swift Media to recruit delivery drivers who have their own scooters, paying them a monthly fee for incorporating the ad screens.

Some of the screens also have computer vision cameras that provide anonymous audience measurement data, and the company says it is working on a method to also detect and count devices in range that have WiFi on.

The company photo suggests the LED screens are best seen at a distance because of their lower resolution/coarse pixel pitch, which would be a function of keeping display hardware costs down.

TechCentral notes that while the solution has been cleared for use in Johannesburg, a by-law in Cape Town, South Africa’s 2nd largest metro area, bans digital advertising on vehicles.

I suspect there are numerous cities, particularly in Asia where scooters are everywhere, that also have these digitized cargo boxes, but the one I definitely know about is in London, called Ad-Moto. There is also a service in that city putting ads of cargo delivery e-bikes.