Outdoor Digital Signage – Making the Most of the Medium

Outdoor digital signage is becoming ever popular along the high street with more and more large screen advertising hoardings replacing the static posters and billboards traditionally used by out of home advertisers. An increasing number of retailers and businesses are also installing screens outside for purposes of branding, information and promotion.

But outdoor digital signage is not a simple medium to get to grips with. While it may appear similar to using an indoor digital signage display, different attitudes in viewing outdoor screens, not to mention the logistics of installation, make it a different beast altogether.

Outdoor digital signage does have the advantage of being available to a large audience. No matter how many people will visit a high street store, more people will walk past so an outdoor location provides good opportunities for branding and promotion. However, while people may spend several seconds viewing an indoor digital signage screen, for outdoors the dwell time is much shorter.

There is little time to provide detailed content and successive transitions so outdoor content needs boldness and to-the-point information. Of course, just providing static content is a waste of the medium, so taking advantage of the benefits of outdoor digital signage takes some thought.

Simple transitive images, with each page showing branding and the key message that you want to get across, can create engaging and eye-catching content, but there is more to outdoor digital signage than just the content.

Modern high brightness, high definition screens, can produce bright and stark imagery but to attract as wide an audience as possible, bearing in mind outdoor digital signage is viewed not just by passersby but also those in vehicles, passing the store frontage, so size matters.

A larger screen has major benefits for an outdoor screen and the bigger the better. There is more chance of catching somebody’s eye with a large moving image than with a smaller screen, and if the content is engaging an appealing, the screen should work well.

Protection is crucial for outdoor screens, of course. Not just against the weather, although this is obviously important, but making sure the screen is resistant to impact and vandalism should prevent the need for having to replace and repair the screen, which would only add to the initial investment and make any return much harder to achieve.