Creativity – It works better than SHOUTING! December 9, 2009

I love when people have the creativity and vision to do something new and unique with signage. As businesses owners have had their cash flow slow down because of the recession, they have become more selective with their advertising. Trying to shout your message as many times as possible to wear people down into listening can be very expensive. The alternative that advertisers are turning to is making advertisement that is more memorable, interesting & exciting. Signs is one area where you can make a big splash with a low cost, if you can get creative.

A good example being creative with signage is this advertisement for Mini Coopers. You could take this same size sign, put it on a wall somewhere and you would only have 1/100 of the impact. Someone had the vision of putting it at the top of a subway staircase. So know the sign shows that even though it’s a small car, there must be a lot of room on the inside. This is accomplished with the placement of the sign making it appear there are hundreds of people getting in and out of it. I believe this has a much bigger and longer lasting effect than if the sign had big blinking lights that said that same thing.

Not to say that’s it easy to some up with creative signs like the Mini Cooper ad, but it’s definitely worth it. There can be the occasional pitfall with trying new ideas with signs. In the example below, WPMI-TV in Alabama made a billboard for their local news. On it you can see the 3 news casters and an L.E.D. board that allowed the station to update the latest news by way of twitter. Let’s just say that its always a good idea to think of where your sign and message is being placed.

So as you can see, signs are becoming less of a static media and more interactive & memorable. Much like a website, they are advertising 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you have the creativity and vision, you can make a sign into something that gets people talking, or something that people will take pictures of and pass around on the internet. Who knows, you could even have somebody writing a blog post about it and giving you even more free advertising. That’s a hard price to beat.