Digital displays on U.S. 52 are one of latest trends

Saturday, August 18, 2007


Traffic whizzes by the digital billboard near the U.S. 52/Waughtown Street overpass.(Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman)
It’s hard to miss the billboards that look like two big plasma TVs on U.S. 52 between Business 40 and Interstate 40.
The digital billboards are one of the latest trends in outdoor advertising. They are the first of their kind in Forsyth County.
Although some people might consider them one billboard, they are actually independent of each other; two “faces” in one location. The off-premise signs replaced a traditional steel billboard with vinyl ads.
In the United States, there are 450,000 billboards, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Inc., a trade association in Washington. As of the first of the year, about 500 of them were digital, but that number has grown since then.
“We should see several hundred built a year over the next few years,” said Stephen Freitas, a spokesman for the association.
The digital billboards on U.S. 52 are owned by Lamar Advertising, based in Baton Rouge, La.
At 10 feet 6 inches by 36 feet, the signs change spots every 8 seconds for up to six advertisers on each side. An ad is shown every minute, which amounts to about 1,600 times a day for each advertiser.
The signs are operated by computer from the Lamar of Lenoir office.
“Basically it’s a big LED screen that we can operate in real time,” said Jamie Machut, the vice president and general manager of Lamar of Lenoir.
“The billboard is controlled by a high-speed modem connection. I can sit here from my desk and change an ad in a matter of minutes,” Machut said.
All he has to do is send e-mails to the billboards.
Lamar started installing digital billboards in its markets across the United States in January 2006, and now has more than 500. Lamar of Lenoir operates 1,500 billboards, and 11 of them are digital, including four in Greensboro.
“It’s a very small part of our business, but it’s growing,” Machut said.
He said that the biggest advantage of going digital is flexibility.
“It’s not really a billboard anymore,” he said. “It’s more (like) broadcast advertising.”
Machut declined to divulge the cost of Lamar’s billboards, but he said that they can cost up to five times more than traditional billboards.
Industry experts said that costs depend on a variety of things, including location and size, but they estimate construction costs for digital billboards in North Carolina at $250,000 to $300,000.
Experts said that digital billboards are the wave of the future in outdoor advertising.
“It is probably the most exciting thing to come down the pike in a long time in billboards and partly out-of-home media,” said Bill Porter, the owner of Big Shots Advertising in Winston-Salem.
Big Shots handles the digital-billboard ads on U.S. 52 for North Point Chrysler Jeep in Winston-Salem.
“You can continually merchandise the different messages that you want to make,” Porter said. “You can change them every day. About as fast as you can send an e-mail, you can change them.”
Still, experts don’t expect digital billboards to totally replace traditional ones.
“There may be a great billboard spot in the middle of nowhere, but there’s got to be demand built up for it,” Machut said.
The big digital signs are often faced with regulations, and some critics said they present aesthetic issues and safety problems for drivers.
But Freitas of the Outdoor Advertising Association said that two recent independent research studies show that digital billboards do not present any driver-distraction or safety issues.
The Federal Highway Administration hopes to have by 2009 the results of a planned study on the effect of digital billboards on drivers.
Fred Holbrook, a commercial-zoning review officer for the City-County Inspections Department, said he has not received other requests for digital billboards but expects that there will be more.
“It just opens so many more avenues for the advertisers to be able to keep the billboards current,” he said.
Still, Holbrook said that new digital billboards will most likely replace existing billboards because there are not many places left in Forsyth County where people can construct billboards because of space requirements and regulations prohibiting billboards from obscuring the view of areas such as downtown Winston-Salem.
Lamar’s biggest local competitor, Fairway Outdoor Advertising of the Triad in Greensboro, does not have any digital billboards in the Triad.
“It obviously is one of the new technologies that are available to the industry, and it is exciting technology,” said Dan O’Shea, Fairway’s general manager, “but they need to be deployed in the right places.”
O’Shea said that Fairway would first make sure that its digital billboards are a good fit and conform with community ordinances before deciding to put them up.
“It’s not something we’re going to rush into,” he said.

Source: Winston-Salem Journal -By Fran Daniel