With the rapid development of large outdoor LED signs, digital outdoor billboard advertising is fast becoming the preferred medium for cost-effective, high-impact advertising. The new technology is sweeping America and setting the trend for the 21st century.

A greater number of these LED digital-video billboards are being deployed in top ranked DMA's with premier highway exposure. These brilliant digital displays offer effective, high impact, targeted, and flexible advertising campaigns. These digital displays are widely accepted as the new advertising medium, because of their myriad advantages such as: dynamic creative elements and interactivity, guaranteed delivery and scheduled display, multiple advertisers with no clutter, co-op revenue opportunities, instant digital changes for season, price, or promotion, rapid ability to update content, timely insertion of trailer loops with advertising content, instant digital programming with informative and entertaining content, and the ability to deliver specific messages to specific audiences in specific locations.

The flexible LED (light emitting diode) medium allows instant message uploading via the Internet, so Amber Alerts, community event messages, public service announcements can run on the sign when they are needed. Today, outdoor advertising is a vital element in well-conceived marketing plans. According to the Outdoor Association of America, the top brands using outdoor advertising are a veritable blue chip list of brands: AT&T, American Express, IBM, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, just to name a few.

In an era when television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising are experiencing a decline in audience, outdoor advertising is gaining strength. According to the Outdoor Association of America the interest in outdoor billboard advertising has been steady and growing, making outdoor advertising the second-fastest growing medium next to the Internet.

Outdoor advertising has many forms, but the most popular of all times is the billboard. The billboard, which started with hand painted boards, evolved into high definition LED billboards. As an emerging media system, LED video billboards offer a greater flexibility of use than conventional billboards could ever provide. With high brightness, high resolution LEDs, the conventional billboard has been transformed into the perfect high-tech electronic outdoor display medium.

Electronic billboards boast a number of advantages, arguably none more important than the fact that the media can be changed in an instant. These large and bright-colored billboards are essentially showing short commercials geared directly at the consumer. The animated advertisements can be set in a loop to continuously show a set number of messages. And when a change is needed, instead of sending a crew to tear down the old and pain the new, it just takes the click of a mouse! Needless to say, look out for digital media as the future of outdoor advertisement.

About the Author

Zita Torok Mihok is the marketing director for Smart Sign Media, a leading outdoor advertising company. Smart Sign Media has helped transform the outdoor billboard advertising industry through highly dynamic and flexible electronic billboards.