Lamar’s Director of Digital Development Bill Ripp gave an outstanding talk on siting digital billboards at the 2023 OAAA conference.   Ripp has installed 4,500 digital billboards in his Lamar career. Digital siting is hard. Lamar Advertising relocates 10-20 digital signs a year and they let 10-20 digital signs fade to black because they are not worth replacing.  Here are Bill Ripp’s 10 commandments of digital billboard development.

• A good location is always sold, has a good long lease, has a long approach with slow traffic and has few competitors nearby.
• Freeway sites can be tricky.  In heavily populated urban area yes.  In between towns you ought to think twice.  You have to watch the size of a board.  Don’t put a poster panel on a freeway.
• Stoplight boards are almost always winners.
• Multi-digital sites are a bad idea.
• Be careful with two digitals on the same structure.  The market usually prefers one side.  Put the sign on your best sign.  if you have great demand put up a sign on the other side.
• You want a board big enough to have large characters when a car is moving fast.  I like to see all characters on a freeway 36 inches or higher.  You need 50′ of viewing distance for ever 1″ character height.
• A 16 mil board on a freeway does you no good.  Noone will appreciate it.  They are too far away.   At 226 feet you cant tell the difference between 20mm and 16mm.
• Use downward casting leds to mitigate dark sky issues.
• Large viewing angles require more power.  You want a narrow viewing angle.
• Aspect ratios matter.  Keep an aspect ratio that’s similar to a poster or bulletin.  You want a 3.43 aspect ratio which means a sign that’s 14′ by 48′, 12′ 42′, 10.6′ by 36’…Keeping a consistent aspect ratio will make it much easier to design and reformat ads.

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