Amscreen swoops in to hire Apprentice winner

Digital signage provider signs up Yasmina Siadatan for expanding marketplace

You're hired: Alan Sugar has tasked his latest 'Apprentice' with pushing digital signage business forward

Digital signage provider Amscreen has hired The Apprentice: Series Five winner Yasmina Siadatan in the wake of the popular BBC reality show’s grand final.

Siadatan, a 27-year-old restaurateur, will be the second winning ‘Apprentice’ taken on by Amscreen, which is chaired by Sir Alan Sugar and run by Sugar’s eldest son, Simon. The first was Series Four winner Lee McQueen, in 2008.

According to a spokesperson for Amscreen, the digital signage market is expanding so is a good place to deploy promising young talent.

“The size of that market is expected to quadruple to a worth of £248m by 2012,” he said.

“The company has gone from strength to strength and Yasmina has the right qualities to help push the business forward.”

Amscreen specialises in selling advertising space for screens it provides to bars, schools and other organisations, including the NHS.

Amscreen this month also signed up four-month-old reseller Digicom to drive national digital media sales, with a view to pioneering standards in real-time information provision.

Digicom was recently contracted to supply, install and maintain close proximity signage for BP, offering a mix of content using Amscreen’s bespoke plug-and-play travel information technology and Digicom advertising content.

Tom Goddard, executive chairman at Digicom, said: “The Sugars have a progressive company known for innovation and are committed to growing the Amscreen footprint. We believe it will be a market leader in number of screens by 2010.”

According to Posterscope, the UK outdoor digital market was worth £72m in 2008. Screen Digest figures suggest there are now about 100,000 such screens carrying advertising in the UK.