Digital signage
in Sydney

Two practical consequences, and they pull in opposite directions across the year:

• In summer the screen competes with daylight for its whole useful day. If the glass faces the sun, that is the case where a brighter panel is genuinely worth paying for; if it is shaded or turned inward, the existing television is fine.
• In winter the evening arrives during trading hours and the same window suddenly becomes the brightest thing on the street. Scheduling a lower brightness after dark stops it reading as glare rather than information.

The other half of the long evening is who is out in it. Late daylight keeps people on the street well past the usual retail hours, so a window switched off at closing gives away several hours of the busiest part of the day for months at a time — for the price of leaving a scheduled playlist running.

Before buying anything for brightness, do the free test: put a sheet of white paper in the window at two o'clock in January and look at it from the footpath. If it is already hard to see, no setting will rescue an ordinary television in that spot.

Three consequences that cost real money:

• The reprint cycle is shorter than anyone budgets for. A window poster planned as a yearly item becomes a quarterly one, and nobody adds that up.
• A faded sign says something you did not intend. Customers read it as «closed down» or «not looked after», and they read it before they read the words.
• Vinyl and adhesives go too. Lettering on glass lifts at the edges, and that is a job, not a reprint.

The same sun affects a screen differently, and it is worth being precise rather than promotional: a screen does not fade, but it does need enough brightness to be read against it. Direct sun on the glass is the hard case for both technologies — the difference is that the screen recovers when the sun moves and the poster does not.

There is a placement decision that solves most of it and costs nothing: work out which hours your window is in direct sun, and keep anything that must be readable out of that patch. In a lot of shopfronts it is a two-hour window on one part of the glass, and everything else on the frontage is fine all day.

Look at the poster that has been in your window longest, then at a fresh copy of it. The difference is what your customers have been looking at, and it is usually more than anyone expects.

The customer that evening is not the lunchtime one wearing the same clothes. They have finished work, they are not in a hurry, they are frequently with someone, and they are browsing rather than collecting. Everything that works at one o'clock — speed, «ready in five minutes», the queue-shortening line — is answering a question nobody is asking at seven.

• The evening version can be longer. It is the one time in the week when somebody will read three lines standing in front of the glass. Every other trading hour, that is a waste of space.
• Say what is happening after this, not what is on offer. People out late are deciding what to do next, not only what to buy. A line about your Saturday, your new arrivals landing tomorrow, or the thing you are known for lands better than a discount, because it fits the moment they are actually in.
• And it is worth checking your own hours are on it. The single most common reason someone turns away that evening is not knowing whether you are one of the shops staying open. That is a two-word answer and it is missing from most windows.

Now the harder half, which applies to more businesses than the first: if you are not trading late, that evening is when your competitors are open and you are not. Chasing it is a mistake — the useful move is to make sure a person standing at your closed door in that hour leaves knowing exactly when you are open, which is the one piece of information a dark shopfront can still deliver if the screen is scheduled to run past closing.

Worth putting next to each other once, because the comparison decides where the effort goes: a Christmas version is used for about three weeks a year. A late-trading version is used fifty-two evenings. Both cost the same half hour to build, and only one of them is on almost every screen.