The floor-standing sign (aka snap frame sign, or lease-line sign) has long been a fixture at retail stores in malls and storefronts. These lightweight frames are easy to move around and put poster-size graphics and messages near eye level in high foot traffic areas. For years, they’ve been touted as a relatively low-cost way to attract attention to marketing messages and promotions. But what if there was a low-cost, low-complexity, easy to manage way to make them digital?
Sure, paper signage is dirt cheap – if you never change your messaging. But to catch the eyes and attention of regular shoppers, chances are you’ll be changing the posters in these stands pretty often. Let’s see how those costs add up.
Paper poster vs digital poster? Yes.
Using a popular office supply retailer’s online site, we priced out a standard 24″ x 36” poster printed on 12 mil poster board at $41.99 plus tax and shipping. Using another major retailer’s site, I priced it out at $63 mounted on foam-core. Let’s average that down to $50 for ease of calculation. So if you’re changing your poster once a month, that’s $600 a year on printing. Change it weekly, and it’s $2,600.
With economies of scale — say you’re buying posters for multiple stores, maybe delivering posters for yearlong campaigns planned well in advance — you could definitely bring these costs down. But you’ll still have the costs of shipping and storage to consider, and there’s a high likelihood they’ll get bent or mutilated in either step.
The New digital alternative
Typical digital signage solutions can’t replace the light weight and portability a floor-standing sign. Many require external media players and thick cable, and are easily tampered with through their hardware ports or external controls.
But the Videri Canvas provides a viable digital alternative to the traditional floor-standing sign. Videri Canvases are light weight, thin, easy to install and give off very little heat. They are nimble enough to be integrated right into the floor stand, with just one exceptionally thin power cable that can easily be covered by a floor chase or wire concealer. Videri partners like Glass-Media have developed a battery-powered solution that means you can move your message around as you need to, where you need it most.
Most importantly, the messaging and imagery can be changed as often as you like, through an intuitive, no-nonsense CMS that connects via Bluetooth and sends data over WiFi. Your content is cached onboard the Videri Canvas system, so you never have to worry about dodgy Wi-Fi or internet connections.
At around $1,200, the Videri Canvas pays for itself in a year or two compared to a printed sign. But (and this is a big but) we’re not comparing apples to apples here. Digital signage has been shown to attract four times more attention that printed signs, improve recall by up to 55%, and lift sales by 30%.
With unprecedented flexibility, light weight and portability, and the potential for massive ROI, it’s time to consider crossing the threshold from print to digital signage.
