Opportunity: Since 2012, ESI Design has worked with Barclays to create dazzling media content for the digital signage at both the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn and the bank’s headquarters in Times Square. In 2019, Barclays approached ESI Design to upgrade their HQ signage with a future-forward design that would allow them to produce and update content internally and showcase their innovative brand.

Solution: ESI Design created a powerful portal for communication that connects Barclays’ to the Times Square audience. Launching with 16 custom media modes, the content includes evergreen brand stories, surprising interstitial moments and unique live data visualizations that captivate the attention of passersby.

Working closely with the Barclays brand and marketing team, we holistically designed an integrated digital signage system, including the physical sign structure, hardware, software, and featured content. While the new digital screens weigh about half as much and have just one-third of the wattage of the originals, they offer nearly five times the resolution and the capacity to display 281 trillion colors.

The iconic Barclays media façade features three types of branded content:
— Live data feeds: Powered by Refinitiv and Reuters, these live data-driven modes communicate insight and mastery of global markets and currencies through near real-time, artistically-inspired visualizations.
— Editable CMS Templates: The CMS for the new sign provides versatile content templates that can be edited by the Barclays team to create new stories on-demand, leveraging existing video content.
— Pre-Rendered Content: Linear content leverages beautiful visual assets and motion graphics to dynamically tell Barclays’ stories, including Barclays’ brand and business objectives.

Result: The transformed Barclays sign showcases their innovative, future-forward brand for the 130 million annual visitors to Times Square. The digital content platform also gives Barclays ultimate flexibility to change the look and feel of the media facade as their brand messaging changes over time, ensuring it stays relevant for years to come.