Six Seconds to Make Your Case
Driving is getting more hazardous by the minute. And in my case it isn’t just the incessant cell phone calls that are making me drift. It’s also my fascination with billboards and the need to critique every one along the way. Read. Comprehend. Edit. (Whoops!).
There are a lot of terrible billboards out there, as I’m sure you know. The biggest offenders are the cluttered ones: too much copy, multiple images (which means you can’t make out any of them), similar colors that render them unreadable. Too much (or too little) of what you need to get across an impactful, memorable message.
Then you have the billboards that are a bit too clever. So clever you have no idea what they’re selling. Considering that drivers only have a scant six seconds on average to read your message, I don’t recommend too clever.
The “greats” design by the numbers: six seconds, six words. Harder than you think.
Billboards are a secondary advertising medium, great for building brand awareness, supporting a campaign, giving directions, or promoting an upcoming “something.”
Believe it or not, the oldest known billboard was an ad posted in the Egyptian city of Thebes over 3,000 years ago (nubianslavesforhire.com).
But it was the invention of lithography in 1794, a novel etching technique invented by a struggling German actor and playwright that made it possible to produce large scale paper posters. Circuses eventually got into the act promoting their oddities, producing some of the most incredible Museum-quality poster art you’ll ever see.
But the first known bill or poster “rental” what we know today as billboard space wasn’t until 1867. And almost 100 hundred years and thousands of billboards later, Lady Bird Johnson got behind the Highway Beautification Act that limited the number and location of billboards across America (but also lined the highways with gorgeous wildflowers).
Billboards have kept up with the times – from paper, to plastic sheets, to electronic, and now digital. Flat is still the standard but more-and-more you see designs with moving parts, interactive features, and 3D appliques like the Chick-fil-A graffiti artist cows ("EAT MOR CHIKIN”)
And considering that the average American spends about 2.5 hours each day driving (nearly 18 hours per week), and is stuck in traffic almost 38 hours a year, billboards seem like a good place to allocate some of your marketing dollars if your customers are on the move.