We get asked this every week, usually by someone who has just gotten a quote for a billboard and is trying to decide whether it's the smart move. It's a fair question, so here's a fair answer. Billboards are good at some things. They are just not good at the thing most local businesses are actually trying to do, which is get a specific driver to make a specific turn today.
What a billboard is for
Reach. A billboard on a highway shows a brand to a very large number of people who are not currently able to do anything about it. That's fine when the goal is awareness, when you're a hospital system or a personal-injury firm or a beer, and the sale happens weeks later somewhere else. Big, fixed, expensive and slow is the right shape for that job.
It is the wrong shape for a model home, a car wash, a plaza tenant or a grand opening, because none of those need a hundred thousand impressions on the interstate. They need the few thousand cars on the road out front to notice the entrance.
The honest side-by-side
- Placement. A billboard stands where the billboard company owns a lease, which is rarely your corner. A Spinja™ stands where the driver decides, at your turn-in, on the side of the road that can actually turn.
- Eye level. A billboard is thirty feet up, in a sky the driver isn't looking at. A spinner is at windshield height, in motion, in the lane of attention where the eyes already are.
- The message. A billboard says one thing for the length of the contract. A Spinja™ carries this weekend's offer, and next weekend's, and the price you changed on Thursday.
- The booking. Billboards are sold by the month and the year. Spinners are booked by the shift. You run the Saturdays that matter and nothing else.
- The cost. We won't put numbers on either side here, because billboard rates swing wildly by market. What we'll say is that a full weekend of Spinjas™ at the corner runs a fraction of what a billboard does, for a driver who is one turn away instead of one exit away.
The thing only a human can do
At Sentosa Riverview in Tampa one of our spinners threw a helicopter, a full sign rotation overhead, and froze with the arrow pointed at the community entrance as the light changed. Every driver in the front row watched the whole thing. Then they read the arrow. That's the sequence: the trick earns the glance, the freeze spends it on your name.
A billboard can't earn the glance. It's wallpaper by the second commute. A yard sign can't either. It's furniture by the first. A person doing something surprising at eye level gets the double-take every time, and a driver who does a double-take remembers what the sign said. Ask the people who rolled their windows down at Bainbridge Coral Springs to ask the Spinja™ where the leasing office was. Nobody has ever asked a billboard a question.
So which one?
If you need a whole metro to know your name over the next year, buy the billboard. If you need the cars on your road to turn in this weekend, put a Spinja™ on the corner. Plenty of our clients do both. None of them have ever replaced the corner with the board.
The Spinjas put trained sign spinners on the corner in Los Angeles, Seattle, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa Bay, Orlando and Fort Myers & Naples.
Request a free quote or call 1-855-SPIN-NOW (1-855-774-6669). Skip the wallpaper. Put a Spinja™ on your corner.
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