Brightspace Media to close London office
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Following in the footsteps of troubled Screen operator, ScreenFX who closed their London office last month, Brightspace Media, I believe, are to close their London office in Covent Garden and move what is left of their operations to Hertford.
A few years ago, Brightspace Media who were one of the UK’s very first, if not the first, digital out of home media sales agency, had a staff of 8 and regularly took £100k – £150k contracts with the likes of Vodafone, T-Mobile and various drinks brands.
These days there are 3 employees in an expensive 1,500 sq ft of Covent Garden office space that probably does not make sense for them.
Brightspace Media is majority owned by the owners of Kaleidovision Ltd., based in Hertford, Herts. I have always believed that it is this close association that meant, Brightspace Media was unable to effectively compete for media sales on other people’s networks – and that this (external) selling was key to them scaling up to be a reasonable size.
Selling media only on Kaleidovision’s 400 – 450 pub, club, bar network is just not economic (and often not compelling enough, which is why often Avanti Screenmedia and Brightspace Media got the same campaigns).
There is a lesson here – niche and scale. Don’t try to be too many things to too many people, let people know exactly what you do and what you focus on, and get big as quickly as you can.
I am afraid we do not have very many good independent media sales houses around now and apart from abc media, none of any particular size – so what should the Posterscope’s and IPM’s of this world do?
Let’s hope that Publicis and Redbus up their game in Digital Out of Home as quickly as possible.
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