Dubai Duty Free Digital Experience

— Overview

Dubai Duty Free is another successful example. It welcomes over 75 million passengers per year and has a turnover of $50,000 per square metre. Equipped with state of the art signage appliances, sales performance was measured before, during and after a digital campaign with encouraging results. A perfume brand saw its sales performance boosted by 114%, while a cosmetic brand saw its performance increase by 56%.

With 89 outlets across the departures and arrivals sections of Dubai International Airport and a total of 18,000 sq m of retail space, Dubai Duty Free employs over 4,300 staff and handles around 62,000 transactions per day or 22 million per year (2011).

Dubai Duty Free in partnership with Connectiv, the digital media specialist for the duty and travel retail industry, has selected ONELAN's Linux-based Net-Top-Box (NTB) signage appliances for its duty free advertising network due to the NTB's proven reliability in 24/7 applications, high quality Blu-ray content playback, detailed proof of performance, minimal maintenance overhead and ease of use.

A key operational requirement was to deliver real-time dynamic scheduling of content to match advertising to specific airport locations and flights – a key element of the Connectiv offer to airport retailers. This will enable advertisers to target specific groups of passengers more accurately as they transit the airport. For example, advertising in Chinese can be delivered to passengers traveling to or from China. This is achieved using the advanced scheduling capabilities of the new Content Management System whereby dynamic metadata can be used to change the playback behavior of the signage network in real-time, based either on manual intervention or automatically from flight information data.