While placement, location and timing are all important, great creative can often be the difference maker.
If you are designing your own creative, below are some guidelines and tools to assist you.
Engage the Audience: Create dialogue by encouraging interaction through social media and exclusive promotions where applicable.
Imagery Should be Bold, Clear and Easy to Understand: Avoid using complex scenes. Bigger is better, make your logo large and clear.
Product Identification: Make sure you can immediately read the advertiser's name and understand what the product is.
Short Words/Copy: Use short words for faster comprehension and include no more than 10 words total on your ad (with no more than 5 words in the headline).
Use Large and Legible Type: Words are viewed from distances. Any text that is integral to the design should be as large as possible. (See chart and notes below)
Increase Line Thickness: Thin lines optically disappear.
Use Bold Colors: Dare to be bold! Being subtle at a distance doesn't work.
Simplify Everything: Focus on one key idea or message.
Vibration | Complementary colors, such as red and green, are not legible together because they have similar values. |
Low Visibility | Any combination of similar color values result in low visibility. |
High Visibility | Any combination of dissimilar color values result in high visibility. |
Contrast | Yellow and black are dissimilar in both hue and value providing the strongest contrast. |
Strong contrast in hue and value is essential for creating good Airport Advertising. Hue is the identity of color while value measures a color's lightness or darkness. Contrasting colors are best when viewing Airport Advertising from far distances.
Take a few steps back from your monitor to see which color combinations offer the strongest contrast.
Color contrast, type choice, style and size are all critical factors for legibility in Airport Advertising. Feelings and opinions about typeface choices and styles of lettering can be subjective. Common sense dictates that they should be simple, clear, and easy to read. Type faces in upper and lower cases tend to be easier to read than all capital letters.
Space: Word spacing and letter spacing need considerable care. With too little spacing, letters tend to merge together when viewed from a distance.
Style: Simple type faces are recommended for use in Airport Advertising. As a general rule, ornate faces, those with thick or thin strokes do not read well from a distance. Sans Serif fonts tend to be more legible, since Serif fonts pose the problem of overlapping when spaced too close together.
Legibility: Whatever type face is selected, the ultra bold or ultra thin variety are not recommended. Heavy type faces become blobs from a distance, while very fine strokes tend to fade and disappear.
Distance in Feet | Minimum Readable X-Height in Inches |
---|---|
5' - 50' | 1" - 2" |
50' - 100' | 2" - 4" |
100' - 200' | 4" - 8" |
Text that needs to be included for legal reasons, viewed in photographs, or by someone standing closer with the intent of reading the disclaimer can be substantially smaller. High-resolution printed material can have letters that are smaller than the recommended guide.
If you are designing for a tiled LCD video wall, you must take into consideration that there are thin black "grid lines" that separate each screen that make up a video wall. You will receive a detailed specification drawing that indicates their exact locations.
If you do not receive a detailed specification diagram or have questions, please reach out to your Clear Channel graphics coordinator, or email us at CCAMarketing@clearchannel.com.
Update content in near real-time, have your creative automatically change based on conditions, engage consumers by adding RSS data overlays, or simply stack or day-part creative with our dynamic capabilities.
Below are a few sample capabilities to use as thought starters.
Conditional Triggers
Time Sensitive Promotions
Targeted Geodata Intelligence
Social and Text Call-To-Action
Dayparting and Ad-Stacking
Data Overlays and RSS Feeds