Due to open later today, New York's Times Square is now home to one of the world's largest and most expensive digital billboards in the world. Measuring the length of a football pitch, and running the entire length of one city block, it is situated along the front of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, just outside the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway.
No exact measurements have been announced prior to the launch, but as a guide a football pitch in
the U.S. is 110 metres long, it is said to be six to eight stories high.
The site is
one of the busiest in the U.S, with more than 300,000 pedestrians entering the area on a normal day. Another
115,000 drivers and passengers pass by it every day.
The display feature almost 24 million LED pixels. To advertise
on the screen will costs more than $2.5 million for four weeks, ranking it as one of the most
expensive pieces of outdoor ad real estate on the market.
A digital art exhibition by the Universal Everything studio
collective will animate the screen from Tuesday night. Google will take over as the exclusive, debut advertiser a week later,
on Tuesday 24 November, with a campaign that runs through the New Year.
The screen is the biggest and
the only one to cover an entire city block, from 5th Street to 46th Street on Broadway, in the Times Square area.