Electronic advertising in today’s business world

Electronic advertising means successful marketing.

Most companies have jumped in with electronic advertising, this can be either indoor or outdoor, wall or floor standing and these companies are seeing the benefit of their efforts.

What is electronic advertising?

Simply put, this form of advertising is using a display of some type with a storage device to play the adverts. The storage device can be something as low cost as the $60 Raspberry Pi, this can then be connected to the internet for remote updates of the advertising medium.

A good resource is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signage

Why companies use electronic advertising.

The content is current; it can be edited in seconds and display a new ad in a matter of 5 seconds, making this kind of advertising very flexible. If a product goes out of stock, you can change the offer to another overstocked item, if you want to sell something on topic you can integrate a news feed into the ads and associate products with the news updates.

What makes this unique is how organizations use the same hardware to get a different solution and maybe an improved advertising response.

Challenges between indoor and outdoor hardware.

For some reason, people who are new to electronic advertising have a thought that they can deploy a regular TV outdoors, the challenge they have is that the display will not work very well. And here are the reasons why:

• Home TV designed to work 6 hours per day.
• Can only be used in the horizontal position.
• The brightness of the screen will not be seen outdoors.

Solutions to the challenges.

Brightness.

For an outdoor solution, irrelevant if the display will be portrait or landscape, if the brightness is not there, you are dead wasting your time.

If the screen is in direct sunlight, you need something like a sunlight bright screen with a brightness of 2,500 cd/m2 (also called nits). This enables the viewer to see the ads in direct sunlight. Using a regular display will just cook the display and the crystals that make up the LCD will die leaving a large black part on the screen.

Commercial grade display.

If the display is not going outdoors, it still needs to be a commercial display, designed to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for years (usually 5 years) now compare this to a home TV, you get a 12 month guarantee on – so it is not the same.

A commercial grade display can be mounted in portrait and works perfectly, yet a home TV cannot rotate the picture – could you image trying to view the ball game in portrait – nightmare!!

For more data on electronic advertising and solutions, keep an eye out for the coming posts, you will be amazed at the solutions used.