Dublin ad agency Micromedia applies to operate five digital billboards using solar power

Out-of-home advertising agency Micromedia has applied to Dublin City Council to operate five partially solar-powered digital billboards across the capital.

Micromedia founder Dave Smith said the company had held “positive conversations” with the council about converting a number of “outdated” billboard sites to digital ones in a sustainable manner.

The company – which specialises in the promotion of music, culture and the arts – last month launched Ireland’s first zero-carbon illuminated poster on Pearse Street. The billboard, installed in collaboration with Solar AdTek, uses energy from four solar roof panels for its lighting.

The site, which Mr Smith described as a “fact-finding initiative”, is among those on which Micromedia has applied to operate a digital billboard. All five sites have “some solar potential”, depending on their location, and can also adhere to light-saving curfews, he said.

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“The way it works is that you apply for a conversion, but in order to get a conversion, you have to give up sites. You have got to find these historic billboard sites, decommission them fully, and then the council will weigh it all up and go ‘okay, we’ll convert that one, and then you’ll give up those other two’,” he said.

Micromedia’s proposal includes a “cultural remit” that would see 40 per cent of the ad space used to publicise cultural activity, with 5 per cent allocated for community events.

“Ultimately, what we’re talking about is stimulus in the cultural realm,” said Mr Smith, who also owns a dog-friendly yoga hub in Dublin city centre called The Space Between.

Another part of its pitch is that it will run a bursary for grass-roots cultural spaces, although this will not be a condition of the planning permission. Mr Smith previously ran a multi-purpose arts space in the docklands called Mabos, “which we ultimately lost to developers”.

Micromedia, which employs six people, wants to step into “a larger arena” in the out-of-home advertising business, but do so “in a way that is true to our own lineage”, he said.

His interest in the advertising business began in the “sellotape years” of his college days whilst running psychedelic trance music gigs. The laws at the time did not prevent him covering walls with fluorescent posters that were “quite horrific, in hindsight” and this attracted attention, leading to other promotional work.

“The council eventually got annoyed with all of it, and rightly so,” said Mr Smith.

He later established a regulated in-store poster and flyer service, then – more than a decade ago – Micromedia began investing in digital screens in busy retail environments. The company now hopes to participate in the modernisation of Dublin’s out-of-home advertising infrastructure.

“You have seen digital conversion happen in the last while, but it feels like it is on the precipice at the moment. It’s beginning to really happen.”