Archive for April, 2010
Advertising Balloons: The Five W’s
The effectiveness of advertising balloons is topped only by the relatively new phenomenon of advertising wrapping. Wrapping, which consists of printing advertising on thin material and literally wrapping it around an object to turn it into a billboard, is extremely costly. Advertising balloons, on the other hand, are extremely affordable. Here, then, is the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of advertising inflatables. Who: Advertising inflatables are relatively inexpensive, and can definitely accommodate even the most modest advertising budget. Advertising balloons allow small- and medium-sized businesses and organizations to compete with their larger counterparts. What: Advertising inflatables include advertising balloons, advertising blimps, custom balloons and helium balloons. Some are filled with helium, while others are filled using cold-air blowers. Advertising blimps and advertising balloons are typically tethered to the ground or a rooftop, and float up to 120 feet above the ground. Twenty-foot tall dancing balloons, often in the shape of a person or character, are tethered to the ground and are filled using an air blower. Most companies keep a variety of standard advertising inflatables in stock, but they can also make balloons or blimps in virtually any shape. When: Use advertising inflatables anytime you need to draw the attention of passersby. Advertising blimps are great when you want to attract attention from a distance. If you have a retail store near a highway, for example, a small blimp flying in the sky will grab the attention of drivers. If you wish to attract street traffic, a dancing balloon tethered to the ground at street level will cause heads to turn. Keep in mind, though, that dancing balloons tend to fall over in winds over 20 miles per hour, and are most effective on calm days. If you have a booth at a trade show, you may wish to hang advertising balloons from the ceiling. Where: Advertising balloons and blimps can be used anywhere you want to stand out from the crowd, whether it’s near a storefront, at a street festival, at a fundraising event, or at a trade show. Why: Advertising inflatables are an extremely cost effective method of drawing attention to your store, product, or service. For as little as $300, you can have an effective advertisement that you can use as often as you’d like.
By: Chris Robertson
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Building Wraps – Great Advertising Tool
Ever passed a colorful facade of a building and noticed the clear photos, printing and shine? Probably ‘Yes’, but never stopped to think how it could work for you?
Building wraps or vinyl banners have slowly come to replace the traditional signboards and permanent signs. Vinyl banners are durable, roll up easily for easy mobility and can withstand extreme temperatures. ‘No fade’ and ‘no curl’ features allow for flexible means of applications. Large format banners are good options for advertising your products while targeting a larger clientele to step in your office or shop, in case you have placed it strategically. Billboards are outdated ways to attracting attention while banners are sleeker, colorful and can be of any size.
They are specially used in areas where the weather can be on extremes like too much sunlight or too cold, where traditional banners may roll, chip or fade. They are ideal for places with extreme climatic conditions, where you need long lasting economical advertising. Building wraps or large format banners are very useful whey you want to advertise a sale or an event promotion. With improved digital technology, you can easily print a large format banner within minutes!
All that is needed is a computer where the graphics can be downloaded, large format the graphics according to your specifications and digital print it. Vinyl banners have come up as economical alternatives to other paper or painted signs and billboards.
Vinyl banners hung together forming large pictures are known as building wraps. They may cost a little more than billboard advertising bur building wraps can be seen from miles generating revenue for the building owner and business for the advertiser. Even half a building covered with advertising is enough to leave an impact on the minds of people.
The main thing is the designing of the wrap which attracts maximum attention. So, always go to a professional to artistically design your building wrap advertisement. However, building wraps have more functions than just being an advertising tool. They are good concealers of building sites; buildings undergoing repairs while also provide a preview of the completed project. Big buildings, when taste fully wrapped become quite a sensation and people just come to see something spectacular and new, which is what the advertisers are hoping for.
Building wraps are better than advertising in the local newspaper and whether it is the launch of a new car, business, sales or product promotion. Building wraps with the aid of large format printers have taken printing to a new level. From huge skyscrapers to your neighborhood building, anything can be wrapped depending upon your budget and the targeted audience. Go to a professional to custom design your building wraps.
By: Syed Raheem
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Home Improvement Advertising – Getting the Most from Your Advertising Dollars
If you are a home improvement contractor, you already know that the economy has directly impacted your business. You have probably felt the pinch in your bottom line profits. In the past, many home improvement contractors have relied on homebuilders to provide the majority of their business. With the housing market in a spiral, what has happened to contractors who relied exclusively on new home construction to keep their business viable? The truth is many have gone out of business or are struggling to stay afloat hoping the housing market will resurge.
Perhaps for the first time, many contractors are forced to reach out to a new type of customer – the homeowner. While contractors may be experts in their field, many have never had experience in creating a marketing or advertising campaign. The logical response is to buy advertising because they know little about marketing. However, unless your advertising efforts are targeted to your audience, meaning homeowners who want and can afford your services, you may be wasting money and not getting desired results.
The question becomes how do you buy home improvement advertising which will produce results? There are many publications who claim to specialize in home improvement advertising, but there are many variables which can affect their efficiency. The majority of these publications contain editorial content in the form of articles and tips which are often contributed by your competitors. Many of them also contain ads from non-home improvement businesses. The reader’s focus can be distracted by pizza coupons, dry cleaning, or oil change advertising, for example. While these publications may have a large distribution, they may never reach your target audience, especially if they are sent to apartments or homeowners not in your geographic or economic target market, or if they are placed in businesses counting on foot traffic.
What should you look for when choosing a venue for your home improvement advertising? Follow these tips for optimum results. Look for publications which:
target the top homes by value in the marketplace; provide a venue to showcase your best work through photographs and images of how a home could look; only have advertisers who specialize in home remodeling; and
give your direct contact information
By: C. Goebel
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Digital Signage – A Digital Approach To Outdoor Advertising
In cities all across America, digital billboards are springing up, bringing the benefits of instantly changeable digital graphics, images and text, to a medium where advertising contracts were traditionally sold for months or longer at a time.
As of January 2007, about 400 digital billboards populated the U.S. landscape, according to an article in The New York Times. Quoting a forecast from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, OAAA, the article reported that about 4,000 digital billboards will be in use in 10 years.
A recent example of the use of a digital billboard probably encapsulates the reason why they’re so appealing better than a 10,000-word treatise on them ever could. Digital billboard operators in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and Waterloo, Iowa, teamed up Jan. 3 to deliver news from the Iowa presidential caucuses that was updated every seven to 10 minutes till the process was complete and Senator Barak Obama and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee were declared the winners.
Having access to that sort of immediacy on such a scale in the outdoor advertising arena was unthinkable a few short years ago. What that translates to on a commercial basis is the same digital sign can be used to advertise hundreds and hundreds of products in the same day -not the same product for months on end.
To date, the dominant display technology responsible for these digital billboards is a particularly bright, particularly responsive light emitting diode -LED. Just as TVs -whether their LCD or plasma flat panels or old-fashioned cathode ray tube televisions- make pictures based on tiny discrete picture elements called pixels, light-emitting-diode-based billboards rely on an array of LEDs to display text, graphics and video. (Video is a major application in stadiums; it’s more doubtful how useful or safe it would be if the intention was to communicate with drivers zipping down the interstate at 70 miles per hour.)
While highly effective, large LED signs are quite expensive and power-hungry. A Washington Post article last spring quoted an executive with CBS Outdoor, one of the three largest outdoor advertising companies in the world, as saying a 14-by-48-foot LED digital billboard costs about $450,000. With that sort of price tag, it’s easy to understand why the OAAA forecasts their number to grow to only 4,000 in 10 years while there are about 450,000 billboards across America. It’s also not too hard to imagine that full-on, high-quality video-, text- and graphic-based LED signage may be out of reach for literally hundreds of thousands of other outdoor signage applications.
However, there is an alternative. New high-gain projection screens, such as the XL-A-Vision screen from AccelerOptics in Carthage, Missouri, have the ability to reject enough ambient light -even the intense noonday sun- to make the use of video projectors a practical, affordable alternative. Depending on the type of configuration specified, this approach to outdoor digital signage can cost in the tens of thousands or dollars, not several hundred thousand dollars as with the LED-based approach.
Recently, the first major outdoor application of an XL-A-Vision screen went online in Grants Pass, Oregon, where the developer of a modern office complex installed a double-sided outdoor projection-based sign based on the high-gain screen. The 10.5-by-15-foot sign, which the building’s owner has dubbed “The Paragon,” offers all of the advantages one would expect of a digital sign, including the opportunity for ad sales to offset the cost of the display.
However, what really drives home the point of why this approach to outdoor digital signage is significant is the fact that the building’s owner, Consolidated Financial, did not have the budget to pay for an LED-based digital sign. If projection-based signage made possible by a high-gain projection screen technology had not been available, the company would have abandoned the idea of installing an outdoor digital signage.
While the number of digital billboards using LED-technology will climb over the next 10 years, think of how many more applications for outdoor digital signage will be enabled by this revolutionary, affordable approach to projection screen technology. High-gain projection screens, like those used for The Paragon, may have as big of an impact on the outdoor advertising landscape -if not bigger- than LED-based approaches.
By: David Little
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Electronic Advertising Signs – Can Your Business Use One?
Companies that are looking to purchase Electronic Advertising Signs for their business should be very cautious when deciding upon a sign supplier.
Although electronic advertising signs, or electronic led signs as they’re also known, can be a powerful message medium, it’s in any company’s best interest to research some facts before spending any money.
An Electronic Advertising Sign display is a integrated display system, which combines microelectronic technology, photonic technology, computer technology, information processing technology. It is gradually becoming the leader in display field by virtue of its vivid colors, wide dynamic range, high brightness, long time span and steady capability.
LED display, which is the advanced media in the world, are widely used in advertising, securities, information spread, news release and so on. LED display is a kind of screen which is used to display text, graphics, images, cartoons, videos and other information, controlled through certain control. They are widely used in large squares, sports centers, traffic systems, shopping centers, parks and buildings.
To your advantage, The Sign Guys both designs and manufactures LED Commercial Signs and outdoor full color signs for the purpose of electric advertising, which are more suitable for displaying large video and images than other video equipment.
APPLICATION
Electronic advertising signs are typically applied in large square areas, sports centers, as a traffic system, in bazaars, other public areas, shopping centers, parks,etc.
SIGN SPECIFICATIONS
The basic specifications for electric advertising signs are as follows:
P10mm, P12mm, P14mm, P16mm, P20mm, P25mm, P30mm,
P31.25mm, P36mm, P40mm, P50mm
SOME ADVANTAGES OF USING ELECTRONIC ADVERTISING SIGNS
* Ability to reach a larger customer base
* Ensure that your customer’s will receive any and all messages that will be up-to-date and absolutely relevant
* These types of signs also have the ability to promote Brand Awareness, thus making your business’ name, logo or slogan more memorable
OUR SIGN FEATURES
*High brightness that can be adjusted based on the change of the environment automatically.
*Best uniformity, with the excellent consistency of luminescence
*Clear, delicate and vivid display effect of the videos, images, texts etc.
*Big viewing angle, no picture change, no color excursion
*The sign is capable of being serviced from the front or the back.
*Distinctive modulization design, easy to carry, install, dismantle and maintain.
*Life time is more than 100, 000 hrs with lower power consumption.
In conclusion, if you want to purchase Electronic Advertising Signs, be sure to use the information above as a basic guideline. Being business savvy means that you’re smart enough to decide to follow the guidelines, learn your options and chances are you will be able to save thousands of dollars.
By: Carlos G Garcia
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