In cities all over America, digital billboards that pop up to the advantages of direct digital interchangeable graphics, images and text to create a medium where advertising contracts were for months or longer traditionally sold at a time.
Since January 2007, about 400 digital billboards populated the American landscape, according to an article in the New York Times. Quoting a forecast from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, OAAA, the article reportedthat approximately 4000 digital billboards will be in use in 10 years.
In a recent example of the use of a digital billboard encapsulates probably the reason why its so appealing better than a 10,000-word dissertation on it ever could. Digital billboard operators in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and Waterloo, Iowa, January 3 teamed up to deliver news from Iowa presidential CAUCUSES that is updated every seven to 10 minutes until the process was completed and Senator Barak Obama and formerArkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was declared the winner.
Who have access to this kind of immediacy of such a scale in the outdoor advertising arena was unthinkable a few years ago. What it translates to on a commercial basis is the same digital sign can be used to advertise hundreds of products on the same day not the same product for months on end.
To date, the dominant display technology that is responsible for these digital billboards is a particularlyclear, particularly responsive light emitting diode LED. Just like their TV or plasma or LCD flat panels, old-fashioned cathode ray tube televisions or pictures based on small picture to make discrete elements called pixels, light-emitting diode-based billboards rely on an array of LEDs to display text, graphics and video. (Video is a great demand in stadiums, it is more doubtful how useful it is safe or would be if the intention was to communicate with drivers zipping down the interstateat 70 miles per hour.)
While highly effective, large LED signs are quite expensive and power-hungry. A Washington Post article last spring quoted an executive with CBS out of one of the three largest outdoor advertising companies in the world, so to say, a 14-by-48-foot LED digital billboard cost about $ 450,000. With that kind of price tag, it is easy to understand why their number of OAAA forecast to grow to only 10 years in 4000, while approximately 450,000 billboardsacross America. It is not hard to imagine that a full-on, high-quality video, text and graphical-based LED signage may be out of reach for hundreds of thousands of other outdoor signage applications.
There is however an alternative. New high-gain projection screens, such as the XL-A-Vision screen AccelerOptics in Carthage, Missouri, has the ability to reject enough ambient light-even the intense afternoon sun to the use of video projectors a practical,affordable alternative. Depending on the type of configuration can provide this approach to outdoor digital signage costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars as the LED-based approach.
Recently, the first major outside the application of an XL-A-Vision screen online in Grants Pass, Oregon, where the developer of a modern office complex installed a double-projection-based outdoor-sided sign that is based on the high-gain screen. The 10.5-by-15-footsign, the building's owner had painted: "The Paragon" offers all the benefits that one would expect from a digital sign, including the opportunity for the advertising sales to offset the cost of the display.
But what really drives home the point of why this approach to outdoor digital signage is significant is the fact that the building's owner, Consolidated Financial, did not have the budget to pay for an LED-based non-digitally signed. As a projection-based signage made possible by a high-gainProjection technology was not available, the company abandoned the idea of installing an outdoor digital signage has been abandoned.
While the number of digital billboards use LED technology will climb over the next 10 years, think how many more applications for outdoor digital signage will be enabled by this revolutionary, affordable approach to projection technology. High-gain projection screens, such as those used for the Paragon may have as big of an impact on theoutdoor advertising landscape, if not bigger-than-LED-based approaches.