Digital signage
in Glasgow

The mistake is treating both as «a shop in the city centre». They are opposite problems:

• On the main street you are competing with everything else for two seconds. Nothing subtle survives. One statement, very large, and the discipline to leave everything else out.
• On a side street almost everyone walking past came looking for something specific, and there is far less competing for attention. Here a screen can afford to explain — three lines get read, which never happens fifty metres away.
• The side street's real job is arrival. People are checking whether they are in the right place. Saying clearly what you are, from a distance, does more than any offer.

The practical consequence for anyone with two units in the city is that the same content cannot serve both, even in the same brand and the same week. The campaign can be shared; the wording and the amount of it cannot.

Counting settles it faster than guessing: stand outside for ten minutes and count how many people pass. Under fifty, write to be understood. Over five hundred, write to be seen. Those are two different jobs and almost nobody separates them.

The practical constraints are small and worth knowing before anything is mounted:

• Brightness after closing. A screen at daytime brightness at eleven at night is genuinely annoying from a first-floor window. Dropping it in the evening costs nothing and prevents the one conversation nobody wants to have with a neighbour.
• Movement more than light. Static content at low brightness is fine overhead; something that flashes or scrolls is not. If anything runs overnight, it should be still.
• Whether it runs at all. Plenty of businesses here get more from switching off at closing than from an all-night display, because almost nobody walks these streets at three in the morning.

The other direction is the more valuable one and it is easy to miss: a large part of your trade lives within fifty metres and passes on foot, most days, at predictable hours. That is a very unusual audience — it means content aimed at people who already know you works here, where nearly everywhere else it is wasted.

What that changes in practice is what goes on the screen: not «who we are», but «what is different today». Someone who walks past your door four hundred times a year has read your name. What they have not read is that the bread comes out at four, or that you now open on Sundays.

Stand across the street after dark and look up before you settle on a brightness. Two minutes there tells you more than any specification, and it is the cheapest good neighbour policy there is.

The fixture list arrives in the summer, so the dates are settled early. The kick-off is not: television moves it, often confirmed around six weeks out and occasionally later. And it is the time, not the date, that decides everything downstream.

• A lunchtime kick-off eats the lunch trade and hands you a second one. The street empties before twelve and fills again from mid-afternoon with people who have been standing outside for two hours. Those are two different customers on the same day, and the second is hungrier and in less of a hurry.
• An evening midweek game is not a Saturday. The same crowd arrives straight from work, later, and leaves faster because of the last train. The window of use is narrower and it is the only one you get.
• And a late TV change lands on your staffing, not just your screen. That is why this is worth setting up once: the content should be switchable by time on the day, not rebuilt.

Which points at the setup rather than at the wording. Three ready blocks — before, during, after — sitting there all season, and on the day you move the times. That is thirty seconds from a phone. Writing three new things on a Saturday morning is not going to happen, and everyone who has tried knows it.

Now the part that most of the city needs to hear instead: for a business not on one of those routes, a big match is a bad day. The centre thins out, parking disappears, some streets close and deliveries arrive late. Chasing that crowd from half a mile away is money spent on people who will not deviate by one street. The useful move there is the opposite one — know the dates so you can staff and stock around them, and put the screen to work on the trade that does turn up.

The thing that decides which of the two you are is narrower than «near the ground». It is whether you sit on the walking line between the transport and the turnstiles — a corridor a few streets wide that does not show on any map. One afternoon of watching from your own doorway settles it, and it is worth knowing before you plan a season around it.