There has been a surge of interest in outdoor digital signage in the last year or so. More and more advertisers and retailers are seeing the benefit of placing screens in an outdoor location for raising brand awareness or advertising.
Digital outdoor advertising has many benefits over indoor systems especially when you consider the potential size of the audience and outdoor campaign can reach. However, there is a substantial investment in erecting digital screens in an outdoor locations and ensuring you get a return on this investment is vital in making the whole campaign worthwhile.
And while careful planning of the content, locations, estimates of potential audiences etc etc can go along way to helping you calculate the return on investment; hidden costs, unforeseen circumstances can often see these plans come to nothing.
Damage and Breakdown
One are where costs can unexpectedly dramatically increase is in the event of damage or breakdown. Replacing or repairing screens can not only add dramatically to running costs making that return in investment (ROI) get ever increasingly further away but also if the screen is down its not increasing awareness or providing advertising, further impeding your chance of getting a ROI.
Damage Risks
There are several common reasons why outdoor digital signage is prone to unexpected failure but the main two are:
• Insufficient protection from the elements
• Deliberate tampering or vandalism
Whilst most outdoor digital signage systems are protected from the weather (usually to NEMA 4 or IP65) often this protection is centred on waterproofing and rainfall and not enough attention is given to the potential extremes of temperature, both of which will disable a screen or at the very least shorten its operational life.
Another common cause of outdoor digital signage breakdown is vandalism which sadly all to common as outdoor screens are often left unsupervised.
Prevention is better than cure
Preventing your outdoor digital signage from failing if the temperature changes unexpectedly or if it is attacked by vandals can be easy to do if the screens is housed in an adequate enough LCD enclosure. Many of the outdoor LCD enclosures not only offer the optimum climatic conditions for the screen to operate within the enclosure but with anti-vandal measures like toughened shatterproof glass and solid steel construction they can withstand the most determined of vandals.
