14. Bottlenecks Encountered by Outdoor LED Media:

Digital outdoor led as a new generation of media communication, from June 2005 to enter the Chinese market, has shown extraordinary outdoor communication power, in recent years more and more media companies have launched outdoor led color transparent screen media, gradually covering the downtown business district, showing a booming trend.

• 1). Opportunity and Challenge Coexist

According to the data of the Advertiser Research Institute, 66.7% of the advertisers surveyed said they would maintain or increase their outdoor media advertising; 49.5% of the advertisers surveyed said they would maintain or increase their advertising in emerging outdoor media. Nowadays, China has the largest number of outdoor LEDs in the world. LEDs have become a mainstream trend in outdoor advertising due to their own advantages in area and media location, as well as flexible placement and less interference by government policies.

The rapid scale of early development has also made the led market competition seem more intense, and the outdoor electronic signs for schools’ market has come to a time of reshuffling. Foreign enterprises use their capital advantages to seize outdoor media resources, customer resources and market share; emerging digital outdoor media companies also use the inertia of being able to upgrade if there is capital investment, such a low threshold for entry, and have introduced led color screens.

In two years, the domestic led market has kept pace with international ones in terms of quantity and speed, and some have even outperformed foreign media. But when many led outdoor media development is unusually rapid within a few years, gradually highlighted some problems such as industry marginal profit reduction, led media ecology and other thinking, showing that China’s outdoor led media gradually into the development of the bottleneck stage.

• 2). Four Major Bottlenecks

A. The overall market started to show a slow growth trend

For first-class cities, traditional outdoor media companies have occupied many urban business circle locations, but in recent years, the pressure on costs has gradually emerged, with the increase in position costs, screen costs and operating costs, making digital outdoor led media grow slowly and profit rates have also declined significantly.

Specifically, among the various media forms, outdoor best outdoor display is the lowest increase in all media, only 3.7%. In the face of an increasingly bustling led market, uneven development and regional proliferation have been recognized, and the relative saturation of the digital outdoor led media landscape has arrived.

B. Advertisers wandering

It has always been confusing for advertisers to evaluate the effectiveness of digital outdoor advertising media, and there is still controversy about the effectiveness of led segmentation, which leads to advertisers’ hesitation in choosing led media.

For outdoor media selection, advertisers and agencies are pursuing the so-called “effectiveness” in a broad and fundamental sense. A group of scholars have also studied a series of application indicators for outdoor media evaluation and assessment. The traditional approach is to conduct some “quantitative” “environmental measurement” for a single media, including environment, location, angle of view, lighting, visibility time, traffic flow and pedestrian flow, price, contract duration, maintenance, etc. characteristics, price, contract duration, maintenance, and insurance, etc.

Despite the detailed classification of the indicators, the industry still pointed out the shortcomings, specifically in the monitoring method, the choice of sampling method and the consideration of pedestrian flow. However, with the change of outdoor environment and market, and the change of consumers’ life pattern and behavior, the evaluation of outdoor advertising effectiveness has begun to change from “quantity” to “quality”. Or we can say that basic numerical calculation can no longer effectively explain the actual effectiveness of individual locations.

Furthermore, most of the controversy over today’s digital outdoor LEDs comes from advertisers questioning the effectiveness of advertising between static traditional outdoor and digital outdoor. All of this is since advertisers generally request reports and analysis materials from digital outdoor led media operators from third parties, and the led media industry still lacks more scientific and perfect monitoring and evaluation data to assist media planning, and the evaluation of the effect of led segmentation in terms of accuracy still needs to be strengthened.

C. Advertising companies’ creativity is weak

Compared with the three camps of Western advertising, China’s advertising along the foreign effective advertising, but too much attention to form and implementation, the pursuit of big scenes, big production, the serious lack of creativity is most prominent. Outdoor clear led media is even in the fight for large areas, product upgrades, completely ignoring the advantages of their own media.

In terms of advertising form, the ads placed on outdoor led street advertising screens to one-way communication for the most part, in the eyes of consumers is still “big TV”, high-density advertising in the face of the cruelty of market competition ultimately did not bring good marketing returns.

In terms of advertising content, the simple and one-sided introduction of products, or the overwhelming imitation, cloning, rigid and copycat are easy to cause consumer resentment, while being played with high frequency in exchange for consumer recognition, bringing negative effects self-evident.

In terms of production level, most of the advertisements are roughly produced, and the poor quality of the images naturally affects the quality of the communication. It seems that the technical aspects also reveal a lot of problems, resulting in a lot of financial resources wasted on meaningless informative acts.

D. Social Problems

As we all know, because of the high brightness of led screens, large areas and other characteristics, the city brought a certain degree of visual pollution is one of the more complaints in public opinion surveys. In China, Coca-Cola’s advertisements are uniformly in bright red standard color, eye-catching and open, while Coca-Cola’s outdoor advertisements in Tokyo, Japan, the background color is uniformly and unobtrusively white. Similarly, the color of McDonald’s signage in Paris, France, is never the red that we can see, but a low-key gray. This is the harmony of the city brought about by the mandatory laws abroad to protect the color of the city.

From the aspect of urban planning, too much improper LED will also to a certain extent destroy the urban landscape. As we all know, urban architecture is a business card of the city, it is necessary to ensure the shape and function of the building itself, but also to consider the relationship between the building and the city’s style, the surrounding environment, and outdoor advertising. These indicators are complementary and harmonious is a perfect way to present, but there is no shortage of those who recklessly destroy the building facade led outdoor advertising, covering up the original appearance of the city, and even damage to the urban landscape.

3). Three Major Countermeasures

In response to the above-mentioned problems, for the development of outdoor led media, we must consider the media conditions, characteristics, and audience response, and carry out creative new targeted with the media environment and attributes. This kind of innovation not only has formal innovation but also content innovation, to realize the sustainable development of media.

A. Technological Innovation, Accelerate Digital Upgrade

At present, most of the domestic digital outdoor led advertising screen, from the level of technology, the deep level of technological involvement still cannot reach, technology development, product application is still relatively superficial. In recent years, the digital outdoor media cluster in foreign countries has seen a significant increase in the quality of 3D displays, which combined with the declining cost of the technology means that it is a not only feasible but eye-catching outdoor advertising medium now.

3D display technology offers advertisers a new way to reach and impress their advertising audiences, such as the Real 3D format. The “Real3D” full surround visual effect is achieved without the use of 3D glasses, but by adding a special filter to the HD display. The displayed image is broken down into several complexes overlapping segments, which are resolved by the human eye into a lifelike image that looks like real 3d outdoor advertising led display screen.

Clear Channel outside led display screen, a UK-based company promoting a “real-time 3D” advertising campaign, claims to be running the world’s first true 3D outdoor advertising campaign. Consumers were exposed to customized 3D previews on 42-inch monitors at bus stops on Oxford Street, Buckingham Palace Road and Kensington High Street in London.

For example, the original trailer for the film Percy Jackson and the Thief of Fire was a 2D film that was transformed into 3D by adding and remastering several elements to the installation, thus taking the promotion of the film to another dimension. It is safe to assume that 3D graphics technology will take OOH advertising to a whole new depth for years to come.

B. Try to Interact with Social Media:

In terms of digital outdoor led media’s own advantages, it is a breakthrough in the tradition of an all-round carrier that considers both motion and static, and already contains three modes in terms of broadcasting methods: pure TVC video broadcasting, electronic magazine style broadcasting, and FLASH creative broadcasting. This makes digital outdoor LEDs the most flexible and most compatible form of outdoor media today, and it can also complete the live broadcast of live events and support the intensive broadcast of live events during time, making it a media of high interest to advertisers.

In fact, as far as technology is concerned, digital outdoor media can be very diversified, and more can be achieved through interaction to achieve multi-directional communication and expand greater development space; there are two aspects that can be developed, one is interaction, that is, interaction between outdoor media and consumers, and there is the cost effect of outdoor media, after outdoor is accepted by users, especially now after the booming development of community media, community media After outdoor media is accepted by users, especially now that community media is booming, the word-of-mouth effect generated by community media makes outdoor media have great development.

C. Focus on the Creative Exploitation of Digital Outdoor

Considering creative mining is a way to use LEDs and how to use them well. YouTube did an interactive theme in London’s famous Canady Street last year, using eight high definition led displays and providing touch interactive services, which mobilized users’ initiative and allowed people to choose videos to watch at will. According to statistics, the big led screens generated more than 10,000 interactions in the five weeks after the campaign began and increased the number of hits on YouTube and Flicker and Twitter. The campaign can be evaluated as a success in terms of the large led screens and the high click-through rate, but the homogeneity of such a planned campaign is also obvious.

What we need to do is to be more creative from the origin of interaction, and we must start from the consumer’s point of view, guided by the concept of consumer centric. Tebow’s attempt has already foreshadowed the direction of digital outdoor in China, for which Karen Media planned and executed the “World Cup Twin Cities Experience” campaign in two first-tier cities, Tianhe in Guangzhou, and Argufying in Beijing.

The two sites set up outdoor experience devices and giant soccer balls at the same time, and the interactive activities included ball-turning games, FIFA soccer video games, Bluetooth photography and other items. The highlight was the core of the interaction: “Twin Cities Shooting PK”, in which the audience could kick the ball against the led advertising panel, making the two cities of Guangzhou and Beijing interactive.

The medium should match the content. Advertisers ultimately want audiences to receive content and induce buying power, not simply see the message. Interaction should be the highlight of the led big screen. Advertisers can use their money to buy a bigger screen because they want to get more attention. And the conversion between attention and desire to buy is the ultimate function of led big screen, advertisers should understand the role of putting led big screen is to use the size to win eyeballs, to interact to win the market.

• 4). Conclusion

Our country has been integrated into globalization, and the trend of globalization affects all walks of life in China, and the creative concept of marketing of foreign clients affects local clients, and really affects the outdoor advertising industry in China. Under such a background, digital outdoor led media, in the process of continuous technological innovation, use advanced marketing concepts to guide its scientific development, use the idea of full media integration to enhance the integration with radio and television, the Internet, cell phones, etc.; continue to study the outdoor behavior of consumers to guide the communication strategy, and link with digital media and mobile media experiential interaction, digital outdoor advertising led.