Use Your LED Sign For Good, Not Evil

We’ve already addressed some common issues people take with LED signs. However, some complaints about digital signage, in some situations, can be warranted.

Those issues stem not from LEDs themselves, but more frequently are the result of misuse or plain anti-social or selfish behavior by business owners.

Yes, your LED sign is yours. But other people have to look at it too, and there’s a big reason why you don’t want to be that guy when it comes to advertising:

Your brand will suffer, and so will your sales.

So without further ado, I present to you…3 Ways to NOT Annoy Your Neighbors with LED Signs.

Provide Value, Not an Eyesore

What you put on your sign can evoke a huge range of reactions—amazement, inspiration, disgust, hatred, and anything in between.

The most expensive, flashy sign in the world can’t save you from an off-color joke, garish design choice or an uninspired message.

In a much bigger way than other advertising media, LED signs are a permanent fixture in your community. While a botched newspaper ad will come and go, and wacky Facebook campaigns will be forgotten, it’s much easier to garner disrespect and enmity with a bad LED message.

In short, the best way to reduce your advertising investment into a glorified bulletin board is to screw up your messaging and design content. Your LED sign isn’t a place to show off. Your content has to benefit viewers, or it’s just visual garbage.

Consider the average commuter who has to read your sign every day, perhaps more than once. A sound message and pleasing design will either have no effect (at worst) or leave a positive impression.

Replace strategic content with scattershot advertising and ugly design, and the story changes.

Now you’re distracting commuters and getting on their nerves. Your annoying messaging gets associated with your company as a whole, and guess who isn’t going to patronize your business anymore?

Blind Them with Value, Not Light

LED signs are bright by nature. There’s no avoiding it.

Indeed, brightness is almost always a good thing, because light = visibility, and ads need visibility or they can’t do their job.

But there’s a fine line between bright and too bright.

The power of LED advertising comes from a combination of getting the right message in front of a ton of people, and making it impossible for them to avoid that message.

Brightness plays a big role in the unavoidable front along with placement of the sign and the sign’s size. At the same time, brightness is the easiest aspect to overdo.

Besides dying faster and costing more for electricity, ultra-bright LEDs look like the surface of the sun and irritate people—both drivers and pedestrians. Just like with poorly executed content, excessive brightness is a surefire way to label your business a public menace.

Luckily, LED software makes it easy to adjust brightness levels based on time of day, allowing you to dim the sign when it’s most likely to annoy people, and light it up when you need extra visibility.

Use common sense. If you think it’s too dim or too bright, it probably is.

Know When to Advertise

If you run a bank, do you need to advertise your low-interest loans at 3 am? No, and for the same reason Christmas tree farms don’t pay for advertising during summer.

When is just as important as where and what when it comes to LED signs. Digital signs have to be placed in a strategic location, they have to be loaded with powerful content, and they have to target potential customers when it really counts.

Remember, there’s a reason why radio station ads are so much more expensive for the morning and afternoon commute.

Using that assumption, it’s safe to shut down your sign when there’s no one to talk to. You’ll save on electric, plus your business won’t look weird when you’re advertising carpet cleaning after midnight.

Again, it’s easy to program your sign using its software to shut down or dim during off hours. If your customers are sleeping, they can’t admire your pretty design or your killer messaging.

The Friendly Neighborhood LED Sign

Your business doesn’t exist separately from your community. That’s never more apparent than with LED advertising, since the medium literally takes up a chunk of the local real estate.

Do your business a favor—set yourself apart from the crowd by adopting these LED best practices, and stay on your neighbors’ good side.