The Amazing Digital Billboard – A Lesson on Immediacy

Big-Screen TVs
Digital billboards are the biggest advancement in outdoor advertising since the invention of the traditional billboard. But the advertising industry hasn’t fully realized how to best take advantage of the new technology by harnessing the immediacy of the medium.

The Benefit of Digital Billboards to Marketers – Immediacy
Gone are the days when a billboard goes up for a month with static content and then comes down a month later. Digital billboards offer marketers the opportunity to change up their message daily. Marketers need to embrace the available immediacy of digital billboards. Here are some examples:

  • Jay Leno should advertise each night’s guests via digital billboard. (Lotteries have been using a form of this strategy for a long time now.)

  • Woot.com (where there’s one deal per day) could post its daily deal on a digital billboard.

  • Your local bar/restaurant could advertise it’s daily drink specials on a digital billboard.

  • Old Navy, which always offers a deal on one “item of the week,” could post that item on a digital billboard each week.

The opportunities are seemingly endless with digital billboards.

A Note About Detriments to Digital Billboards
There is a great debate going on throughout our country right now about the hazards that digital billboards pose to drivers. This post does not touch on that debate. I’ll leave that debate to the experts and just talk about the marketing benefits of digital billboards.

Add This To Your To-Do List
Immediacy is very powerful in all forms of advertising – not just digital billboards. Being able to put a current or future date or time on an advertisement causes people to take notice. Look for ways to build immediacy into your marketing efforts – it might be as simple as spicing up your homepage once a week with a special offer. People will begin to take note and will come back to see the next week’s special offer.

There’s never a lack of ideas.

Comments

  1. John in YorkSeptember 28, 2009

    A UK company has this set-up:
    A camera reads car number plates. The software looks this up in a database and knows the model of car. The billboard then presents a deal customised to the model of car.

    This is clever and creepy at the same time.
    It's turning out to be controversial.

    A govt department sold the database to the company. This is common and most people find it OK for operational uses like insurance quotes, crime detection, etc. There is a kind of implied consent with the car owner. But this is missing completely when used for marketing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nick SSeptember 28, 2009

    Sounds a lot like the Tom Cruise movie, "The Minority Report." Thanks for the comment, John.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sofia LambertMay 26, 2022

    Great blog I enjoyed reaading

    ReplyDelete

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