Other Advertising

A billboard or hoarding is a large outdoor signboard, usually wooden, found in places with high traffic such as cities, roads, motorways and highways. Billboards show large advertisements aimed at passing pedestrians and drivers. more...

The vast majority of billboards are rented to advertisers rather than owned by them.

Typically showing large, witty slogans splashed with distinctive color pictures, billboards line the highways and are placed on the sides of buildings, peddling products and getting out messages. Billboards originally existed alongside and later largely replaced advertisements painted directly onto the sides of buildings or designed into roofs in shingle patterns.

Technology

Traditional billboards

Billboards are typically large wooden signs, with the larger ones typically 48'x14' or 24'x12' (width x height). The display is painted or printed on a vinyl sheet which is glued onto the board. Smaller 22'x10' and 20'6"x9' billboards display a series of thirty or twenty four printed posters respectively to make up the sign. This format is cheaper to produce but has less visual impact.

Mechanical billboards

Some modern billboards use a technique called tri-faced (also known as rotating or multi-message billboards). These billboards show three separate adverts in rotation using a mechanical system. They are made up of a series of triangular prisms arranged so that they can be rotated to present three separate flat display surfaces. The displays for these billboards are printed on strips of vinyl which are fixed to the faces of the triangular panels, with one strip from each of three different displays attached to each panel. In this way as the panels rotate and pause three unique signs can be displayed in the same space. These signs are thought to be more effective as the motion draws attention to the messages displayed.

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