Digital signage
in Belfast

The tempting move is to display prices in both currencies, and it is the wrong one:

• A converted price ages the same day. Rates move, the printed figure does not, and the discrepancy turns into an argument at the till — which is precisely what showing it was supposed to prevent.
• Two figures halve the type size. Both become hard to read at the distance a window is actually read from.
• What people actually want to know is what you accept. Cards, contactless, and whether euro cash is taken at all. Those are facts, they do not move, and they fit on one line.

So the useful window says the price once, in sterling, and states the payment methods separately. That combination answers the real question without creating a promise that expires.

The other thing worth showing to anyone travelling in for the day is the boring one: opening hours and how long things take. Somebody who has driven up has a return journey in mind and decides on time as much as on price.

If cross-border shoppers are a real share of your trade, the highest-value line on the screen is not an offer — it is «we take cards and contactless». It removes a hesitation that happens on the pavement, before anybody comes in to ask.

Three things follow from that pattern:

• Shelter puts people in front of you involuntarily. A doorway or an awning holds four or five strangers for several minutes at a time, several times a day. It is the longest attention your frontage gets and it is entirely unplanned.
• Between showers, everyone moves at once. The pavement goes from empty to busy in a minute. Anything that needs reading slowly is read by nobody in that window.
• The forecast is close to useless. «Showers» covers a day that is mostly dry and a day that is mostly wet, so planning content by weather does not work here the way it does in a climate with proper rainy spells.

The practical move is not weather-driven at all: write for the person standing still under your cover. That reader has three or four minutes, is not in a hurry by choice, and is close enough to read a full sentence. It is the one situation where a longer piece of content — what you do, why you are worth a visit — actually gets read.

There is a second-order point that costs nothing and pays back all winter: make the shelter obvious and welcoming rather than something to be moved along from. A door that people feel entitled to stand in front of is a door they eventually walk through, and in this climate that happens dozens of times a week without any advertising at all.

Stand in your own doorway during the next shower and count how many people join you. That number, multiplied by the showers in a week, is an audience you already have and are probably not addressing.