What Is Digital Signage?

By Author: Graham Gallagher
Total Articles: 3698
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What is Digital Signage? Well it is a form of an electronic display device that is situated in public areas, streaming information for either advertising, entertainment or to inform the masses, also known as adfortainment.

Digital advertising is becoming more and more expected due to the fantastic return on investment. Compared to traditional static signs digital advertising is easy to use and quicker to get results and in this day and age when we are judged by our results, we need a solution that delivers constantly.

Due to large plasma and LCD television prices dropping in the market place, this has opened the digital signage market up, no longer are digital signs only in airports displaying adverts or on train stations displaying train times etc, we now see these displays, at gas pumps while we fill our cars up, up selling the petrol stores products.

Independent studies show that a small scale restaurant or retail digital sign solution will cost in the region of $4000-$6000 whose return on investment is realised almost immediately.

Who can use this new system to get their message across, well ...
... almost anyone down to the mom and pop stores in our towns. Anyone who has a product to sell will benefit from digital signage.

The main part of digital advertising is the actual advertisement; if this fails the advertising campaign is dead in the water. So the user has to create the marketing content, there are companies that provide this service for a monthly fee and it works out more affordable than employing someone to do it.

Once the digital content is created, it can be uploaded via an internet connection, compare this to the cost of duplicating the content and distributing it to each location, for example if you had 3 locations in New York, 1 location in Florida and your were based in California, and on average it cost $500 per location to renew the media this would save you $2,000! The new media content can even be scheduled to upload at a set time and the system reboots, displaying the new information.

There are many companies that are using digital signage for dual reasons, firstly to inform their customers and secondly to alert customers if there is a problem such as a fire at a particular terminal, or in colleges to inform students of class changes etc as well as any incidents on the campus such as gun crime.

The market is due to be worth $10 billion by 2011 in the USA alone, with Europe being worth $2 billion. I think this is one industry that is recession proof, as every business needs to advertise their services and this is the most cost effective way to get the marketing message across.