LEDs or Ladders

Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief

Over on LinkedIn, Roger Dean Senior Vice President at ODA Consulting, responded to my Q+A post about this weeks Guardian newspaper article and coined an excellent phrase “LEDs or Ladders”

Discussing the migration (or not) from traditional billboards to digital (display faces), he continued “The business driver is mainly the considerably increased income available from LED signage over the equivalent sheet/vinyl board – even after allowing for the technology costs – and the fact that the content is infinitely configurable via IP connectivity which accommodates an advertisers’ changing needs”

In some work I have recently done for investors I have in turn used reports from Citigroup and Deutsche Bank analysts that have both said that in the US they are seeing / expecing digital display faces to return 6x revenue over traditional display faces.

I see also in the traditional world that Clear Channel and JC Decaux have both started to introduce ‘proof-of-posting’ as a way of boosting the accountability of posters as a medium.

Clear Channel have developed Wireless Activity Verification (WAV) using Nokia N70 mobile phones, scanning barcode labels on posters to confirm proof of posting which in turn gets sent back to their internal OASIS IT management system.

JCDecaux’s Live! proof of posting scheme uses PDAs, photographs and a link back to the company’s web portal.

Both interesting developments and initiatives. It’s obvious that traditional and digital will live alongside each other for some time to come.


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