Digital signage
in Melbourne

The mistake is using the screen inside to advertise. Inside, everybody already found you. The value is at the point where people are deciding whether the lane is worth walking down:

• At the mouth of the lane, one thing only. What is down there and how far. Not a menu, not an offer — a reason and a distance. «Coffee, 30 m» does more work than anything else that could occupy that space.
• Upstairs venues need the street-level screen to say «upstairs». It sounds too obvious to be worth a line and it is the single most common reason people walk past.
• Inside is where detail belongs. The menu, the story, what is on tonight — for people who have arrived and stopped.

The counterpart is honest and worth saying: if being hard to find is part of the appeal, a bright screen at the entrance can work against the thing that makes the place work. In that case the answer is smaller and quieter rather than nothing — enough to remove doubt for someone already looking, not enough to advertise to someone who is not.

The way to know which you need: stand at the mouth of the lane and watch people hesitate. If they stop, look, and walk on, the missing information is directional — and it is one line.

The split is unusually clean:

• Stays behind: painted signage, vinyl on the glass, anything drilled, built or wired in. Written off the day you hand back the keys.
• Comes with you: the screen, the player, the mount if it is a standard fitting, and — most valuable of all — the content itself, which took the longest to make.
• And travels instantly: the account. Playlists, schedules and layouts are the same in a new address; only the words about location change.

There is a second reason this matters beyond the accounting, and it shows up in the first week at a new address: a business that moves loses its passing trade completely and keeps only the people who follow it. What brings them is having been told, repeatedly and early, in the place they already look — which is the window of the shop that is about to close.

That gives the screen a job most people only think of far too late: announcing the move for weeks, with the new address and the date, while the old door is still open. It costs nothing, it reaches exactly the right people, and it is the single highest-value thing a frontage does in the life of a business that relocates.

Before spending on anything permanent, ask what happens to it if the lease ends. If the answer is «it stays», that money is rent, not investment — and it should be weighed as rent.