How Do Digital Billboards Work?

The Basics

Digital billboard advertising is a fast-growing industry, and according to www.statista.com, outside-of-home (OOH) advertising is 382% more effective at driving online and cross-channel marketing than TV commercials. Digital billboards work by displaying a series of images for a set amount of time, and each time an image is displayed, we call that an Impression, or sometimes, more casually, a Flip. Businesses can pay to have their ad image displayed for a certain number of impressions each day.

In almost all cases, each image is displayed on a board for 7.5 seconds for each impression. With 60 seconds in a minute, 7.5 seconds means that the board can display ads for up 8 unique advertisers every minute. We call these divisions Slots. When you purchase a slot for a period of time, that's what we call a Campaign.

This means that an advertiser who buys one slot will have his ad displayed 1,440 times every day, or 1,440 daily impressions. That's a lot of exposure! Also, to accomodate businesses with lower budgets, it is possible to purchase Half Slots and Quarter Slots. A half slot will be displayed on the board for 7.5 seconds every two minutes, and a quarter slot will be displayed for 7.5 seconds every four minutes. Here's how that breaks down:

Slot Type	Daily Impressions	Daily Total Time
Full	1,440	180 Minutes
Half	720	90 Minutes
Quarter	360	45 Minutes

These are just a few of the advantages to using digital billboard advertising:

• No printing required! Ads for traditional billboards must be printed at a very large scale, and then the printed ads must be installed. The printing and installation are time-consuming and expensive, but digital billboards just use standard JPG images.
• Updating your ad image is free, fast, and easy. If you decide that you want to change your ad for any reason - for example if you discover a mistake in the text, or if you just prefer a different design - updating your ad is as easy as uploading your new image to your campaign.
• Target multiple customer demographics. The nature of digital billboard advertising allows you to create multiple ad images within your campaign, and then display different ads at different times, or with other conditions. Want to show images from your lunch menu only between 11 and 3? Simple. And adding multiple images with targeted schedules is always free.
• Ads are always visible. Traditional billboards often become less effective at night or during bad weather conditions because they can be difficult to see. Digital signs are always visible because they produce their own light.
• Fewer people read newspapers, and we all skip commercials. Outside-of-home advertising is on the rise because more traditional advertising methods rely on mediums that are becoming less common. TV commercials are becoming a thing of the past, and newspaper ads are only reaching a small slice of your customer base. Billboard advertising reaches across multiple avenues because everyone has to drive.

If you want to check on availability or pricing, use our search page.

Schedules

When you set up multiple ad images and then target them to run at specific times of day, or on specific days of the week, this process is called Day Parting. It allows you to narrow your ad based on the audience you are expecting to see it, and can have a huge impact on the success of your ad campaign. Here are a few examples of how day parting can make your campaign even more effective:

• Show an ad featuring breakfast food and coffee during the morning commute, but switch to ads featuring standard menu items in the late morning and for the rest of the day.
• Tie your ad to the culture by featuring football imagery on Sundays and Mondays.
• Show an ad with a coupon code during afternoon rush-hour and try to capture business when your audience is stuck in traffic.
• Alternate between two different ad images based on the day of the week, so you can test which ad is performing better and fine-tune your offering.

In the Loveless Digital system, after you place an order each section of time that you rented will be converted into a Campaign. You will be able to access the Campaigns section of our site to see the details. When viewing the campaign details, you can add as many schedules as you need, so you have the tools to use day parting to your advantage.

Multiple Ads at the Same Time

Aside from using different schedules to switch between multiple ad images, you can also assign multiple ad images to the same time schedule. If you use this option, the digital billboard will automatically cycle through all of the ad images that are allowed at any given time. This is true regardless of whether these images are assigned to the same schedule.

In other words, if "Ad Image A" is assigned to a 24/7 schedule, but "Ad Image B" is assigned to a schedule that only displays between 2:00pm and 6:00pm, then at 3:00pm the billboard will cycle beteen "Ad Image A" and "Ad Image B", but at 9:00am only "Ad Image A" will appear.

What If There Is Available Time on the Board?

In many cases, there will be times when not all of the available slots on a billboard are filled. When that happens, in most cases, the result is that the billboard will display the ad images that it does have for longer times. This means that, in some cases, advertisers will get some additional impressions for free. Bonus!