Niche media company Epic Outdoor, which specialises in the development and marketing of large-format, high-impact static and digital out-of-home (OOH) platforms, has launched South Africa’s largest-ever digital billboard site on the N1 highway. The billboard is powered almost entirely by solar power.

The property was specifically designed to accept advertising, and at 400 m², the international-standard light-emitting diode (LED) billboard will be the largest roadside LED billboard in South Africa, the company says.

The launch took place at a ceremony on February 1, where the billboard was switched on.

While the concept is noted to be similar to screens in London, New York and Dubai, those billboards target pedestrians predominantly. This is a massive roadside digital LED, on a bespoke building that has a run up of more than 800 m, Epic Outdoor points out.

The LED screen is able to cater for all modern OOH creative techniques, including deep motion and anamorphic three-dimensional techniques. Additionally, the screen can be segmented into smaller panels allowing for creative use of multiple simultaneous creative displays.

This is posited to be ideal for campaigns where brand and product appear together or collaborative campaigns, for example, a network provider and a cellular phone company.

Epic Outdoor enthuses that all the traditional OOH metrics are amplified by the combination of the size and positioning of this screen. “It all adds up to a site with incredible impact. The site ticks every single box, it’s unique in the South African context,” highlights director Rene Hedley.

Impact, Hedley explains, is the measure of how quickly or likely the audience is to receive the campaign message. It can be created by relevance, timing, or in this instance, by the scale of the advertising platform.

“It is inconceivable that anyone could ignore a screen of this size for the full duration of the 800-m-plus run-up, particularly as this stretch of highway is notorious for routinely being highly congested. The dominance of the site creates the impact, thereby virtually guaranteeing higher campaign awareness,” Epic Outdoor asserts.

COMPETITIVE EDGE

Epic Outdoor points out that OOH advertising in South Africa is growing at a rapid rate, and that while this is good for the industry, it presents competition issues to make sure advertising campaigns are viewed, as well as mitigating loadshedding impacts of screen downtime.

The unveiling of the new solar-powered billboard is indicated to solve both problems, with the new high-impact site.

To combat the audience dilution that loadshedding creates, the site will be powered by a large solar farm, installed on the property behind the screen, and providing over 95% of the screen’s energy requirements.

This is the first billboard of its type in South Africa to be powered by sustainable energy sources. “The technology used is of the highest quality, and the board is able to operate very efficiently,” says Hedley.

The 830 kW of power required daily will be supplied by 270 540 W panels installed on the large field behind the property.