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LED Billboards: Outdoor Advertising in the Video Age

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Update time : 2019-11-16 16:27:00
The Growth of LED
The video or electronic LED billboards, while having been around for several years as a functional animated outdoor media format, is still in its infancy as a developing medium of video message boards for outdoor advertising. As an emerging media system, LED video billboards offer a greater flexibility of use than conventional billboards could ever provide. With high brightness, high resolution LEDS, the conventional billboard has been transformed into the perfect high-tech electronic outdoor display medium. Not only are electronic billboards full color and large format, but they also have many distinct advantages including displaying animation and in effect showing television commercials outdoors. The electronic signs also act as a multiple message provider, where one sign can show a loop of continuous messages. As for changing a sign message, it's as easy as clicking with a mouse button, rather than sending out a crew to pull down and replace a billboard message.
 
One of the best features of these electronic signs is the possibility of evolving them into a citywide or regional display-advertising network. Here, a series of connected video screens could provide everything from a broad-based advertising presence (sign messages on continuous video loops) to a very tightly controlled demographic-specific displays tailored to week morning commutes or mid-afternoon shoppers (depending on sign locations) or special weekend sales announcements presented to a Friday evening home commute.
 
To date, LED video billboards have matured into two specific applications of use (spectaculars and roadside displays) and its third application (multiple signs as a network system) is just beginning to emerge as a viable outdoor advertising format. In its first and most expensive application, LED video billboards appeared as sign components to Times Square and Las Vegas spectaculars. In Times Square you can turn in any direction and come face-to-face with three or four LED video spectaculars all at once. Most prominent is the front of One Times Square which is filled up with LED video billboards as are many of its surrounding Times Square buildings with equally overwhelming LED displays including NASDAQ (Smartvision), ABC NEWS (Multimedia, Rancho Cordova, California) or Lehman Brothers (Daktronics - Brookings, South Dakota).
 
In Las Vegas, most LED billboards are attached to street side pylons which extend along the Strip upwards of one hundred feet into the air and combine backlit flex face signs with fully lit, full color LED video signs (MGM, Ballegio, Paris, Las Vegas, Bally's, etc.). The use of these signs however is very as either in Times Square or Las Vegas, it's one client with one hundred per cent utilization of the sign to promote their brand identity or services rendered and that's it.
 
LED for Advertising
The LED video billboard in its second application was developed in a scaled back form from its spectacular counterpart, and set up as a highway sign that is a 21st century counterpart to its more conventional print billboard. Granted electronic billboards are much more expensive and there are still sign code issues to be dealt with, but nevertheless electronic signs are beginning to dot the highways as a forerunner to a continuing presence of electronic and video outdoor advertising. Herewith lies the challenge to video billboards; will it be a supplement to work hand-in-hand with print as an outdoor advertising presence? Or is it more a technological wonder with a short life span that eventually defers back to conventional billboards? Or will these LED, video billboards maintain enough presence to blossom forth and create inner city and regional advertising networks not unlike a television network with its affiliate station relationships?
 
In outdoor advertising, LED video billboards are a new ballgame, a effort of setting up electronic billboard installations as a multiple location advertising system. While print billboard agencies may see electronic as an upstart within their domain, LED video billboards sallies forth with the same spirit as other earlier entrepreneurs who started experimenting with the horseless carriage and the all new, all 'talking' movie pictures. The emergence of a networked LED billboard system has become a technical possibility, but is limited more by the current overall cost of a single advertising company acquiring a reasonable collection of LED video billboards to create a unified video billboard network. While for the most part electronic billboard networks have yet to happen in the United States to any degree, versions of these systems are beginning to take off in Canada and Europe. Several overseas advertisers have begun the embryonic formation of such networks, and with these systems in place, there is an interest in who has done what and where.