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A glowing juggernaut to arrive in Times Square

Auckland has seen an influx of digital outdoor advertising over the course of the last year, and the nation’s brands are queuing in order to get their messaging on these glowing rectangles. And while APN Outdoor’s billboard on Queen Street certainly isn’t diminutive with a height of 3×9 metres, it is but a tinny when compared to the advertising battleship that is about to be steered into New York City’s Times Square.

According to the New York Times, at eight storeys tall and nearly long as a football field, the new installation will span an entire block for 45th Street to 46th Street on Broadway (while massive, it isn’t quite as big as Saudi Arabia’s King Khaled International Airport billboard, which remains the biggest in the world).   

And the technology behind the billboard is equally gargantuan. The article in the Times says that “nearly 24 million LED pixels, each containing tiny red, blue and green lights, make up the display, giving it higher resolution than even the best of today’s top-of-the-line television sets.” 

But technology this sophisticated and advertising this big doesn’t come cheaply.

To book the space for a period of around four weeks, advertisers will have to fork out the chunky amount of around US$2.5 million (around NZ$3.1 million)—which is ridiculously exorbitant when considering that outdoor ad spend for the the whole of New Zealand was only $76 million in 2013.

That being said, American advertisers spend in the region of around $7 billion on outdoor advertising every year, and this amount is set to grow again this year. 

It’s also worth noting that when advertising in the cluttered Times Square space, being bigger might well be better in the hunt for attention. And this argument has already convinced Google to buy the space over the festive period.  

Visit Adweek to see an augmented version of what the billboard will look like.           

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