Most billboards, when viewed from the side, are flat. But some billboards have large objects jutting out from them. In this Billboard Mastery podcast we’re going to explore the world of 3-D billboard designs.
Episode 122: All About Three-Dimensional Ads Transcript
Most billboards are two-dimensional. LED signs give us that extra spice, taking the two-dimensional ad where it can actually change. But in some cases, there are billboards out there which are three-dimensional. The ad actually extends beyond the confines of that flat plane. This is Frank Rolfe with the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're going to explore the world of three-dimensional billboards. How they're built, what they cost, and what the net impact can be. Now, the first time I ever did a three-dimensional billboard, it was for Chick-fil-A. They wanted us at Chick-fil-A, putting up this billboard, to put two gigantic three-dimensional cows on the sign. One climbing on the back of the other to paint with a paintbrush, "Eat more chicken." That was the campaign that Chick-fil-A got off the ground with many, many years ago. But I had never built anything three-dimensionally on a sign, and I had absolutely no idea how to do this. So I called around other sign companies and said, "Hey, have you ever built a three-dimensional billboard?" And they said, "Oh, yeah, we did once. It was maybe a baseball for a baseball team, a football for an NFL team." And they all gave me the same name and number to call to try and build a three-dimensional billboard.
So I reached this person. They were down in Austin, and I said, "Look, I'm building a billboard for Chick-fil-A, and they want me to attach to the sign face two giant cows. How do we do that?" And the guy said, "Well, I can do that, but it's gonna be really expensive." And that's the first thing you have to know about three-dimensional billboards is they're incredibly expensive. I'm not talking hundreds of dollars. I'm not talking thousands of dollars. You're talking more like tens of thousands of dollars. And here's how they make them. They take giant pieces of foam. These things are huge. And they cut in that foam the basic object that they're trying to create on three-dimensionality. It's very crude. If you look at them up close, it looks very amateurish. But they slice these giant blocks down. They effectively sculpt them with saws. In this case, they re-resembled a cow. And then what do they do? They take that and they cover it with basically what is effectively paper mache to give it a hard outer coating. Or they can also spray it with fiberglass to get that hard outer coating. And then they paint it.
And they're very crude. When you see them up close, you'll say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that we spent thousands and thousands of dollars on this very, very crude yet giant creation." But when you put them up on the sign and you're looking at that sign from 500 feet or 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet back, they don't look that bad at all. So the first thing about these things is they're very, very expensive. The next thing is that they do look very, very crude, but it's not something you can do yourself. Don't get the idea, well, these are so crude I can go buy the parts and do it myself. There's no chance you can. They're also very, very expensive to hang on the sign, obviously, because you're adding an entirely different world of wind load. Signs traditionally only have wind load issues when the wind hits them from the front or rear of the ad face. But in this case, a glancing blow, wind going down the side of the ad face, could have catastrophic consequences. So these things are not easy to do. And that's why you see so few of them out there.
And that's the reason that people do them, because you do see so few of them out there. I bet if we got in a car right now and drove every billboard in the United States in one night, we would find out of all those hundreds of thousands of signs, very, very few that are three-dimensional. In any major city in America, it could be anywhere from Chicago to Los Angeles, you're probably not going to see more than maybe five three-dimensional ads out there, because they are so very expensive. But at the same time, they can be so very effective. When Chick-fil-A put up their three-dimensional signs, they were all over the media, all over the news. "Has anyone seen those giant, humorous cows?" My billboard was on the front of the Dallas Morning News. People said, "Look, look at these wild Chick-fil-A ad." So people are willing to spend the money often because it is so effective in getting attention, and so unique. But yet there are also problems with it. One problem is that it's really, really hard to work around. Your creative can only be in the portion where you don't have the giant three-dimensional object going through.
So you're not going to be able to get a lot of verbiage on there, not a lot of pictorial photography on there, because to make sense of doing it, that 3D object is going to have to be huge, probably basically half of your sign. So that can be an issue. And also, people tend to get jaded and tired of the things when they've driven them a whole bunch of times. So you kind of get fatigued on that. When we put up the Chick-fil-A cows, they were initially clever, but I'm sure people got tired of the pun not that far into the future, probably within 30-60 days. And yet it was stuck up there like a bad joke or a bad TV commercial on late night TV. They basically just annoyed people until it had been up there long enough to justify its cost and then be removed. The bottom line is, if the advertiser is not all over you to do a three-dimensional ad, I wouldn't really steer them into it. It's very difficult for you as the sign owner to produce them. They're very expensive. I really question their effectiveness, but they are one more item in the arsenal of creative thought that any advertiser may want to get out and use. This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.