In the advertising age, it’s not uncommon to be unsure which form of advertising is the best of your brand. It’s also not uncommon to be unsure of what each format is, such is the variety available to businesses today.

Billboards are the most common form of Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising in the world. They are available in traditional poster formats, which consists of multiple sheets that make up a larger image, and digital versions, which can take the form of animations and video, as well as still pictures. They’re often situated at roadsides to catch the attention of drivers, pedestrians and commuters, but they can also be found on the sides of buildings, in shopping centres and even in bus shelters. The roadside versions, and the displays on the sides of buildings are often huge, which allows them to dominate the space and ensure that they grab the attention of consumers.

You may well have seen advertising hoardings on construction sites; when buildings are enveloped by scaffolding during a project, advertising is often displayed on that scaffolding or around the perimeter of a site to promote the company or the business that is doing the work. It’s also used to promote what is being built. Depending on the scale of the project in progress, hoardings can be hundreds of meters in length, which means there’s a lot of room for graphics to build brand awareness.

Another form of hoarding is the boards we see around football pitches, for example. Brands can pay for their logo, name or latest product to be displayed around the perimeter of the pitch, which can lead to immense exposure. In fact, the exposure can be two fold; firstly, you have thousands or tens of thousands of people in the stadium with their eyes glued to the pitch. Secondly, you have millions of people who watch football on TV every day, all tuning in live or to a highlights program who will see your brand on the screen. While these displays are much smaller than billboards, they can still be seen by a huge audience.

Billboard advertising is constantly evolving and changing in an increasingly digital age, and hoarding advertising can be found lacking in areas where billboards are thriving. Consider the advent of digital billboards – they allow for some of the most innovative advertising campaigns, from a simple, effective video to motion detection, interactivity and even augmented reality features. Hoarding advertisements are good at letting passers-by know about the work going on behind the hoardings, but a level of interactivity could help those people engage more with the brand, business or space that is being built behind them.

Secondly, billboard advertisements regularly change. One display for a car might be replaced by an advert for a watch two weeks later, or it might simply be replaced by a different advert for the same car. Hoardings, though, often remain the same until work is finished – changing them up every so often can help keep people engaged and stop the display from going stale.

Billboards and hoardings are similar in their promotional purposes, but with a difference in their usual locations. While billboards can be seen in various different locations, hoardings are only found around construction projects as an interesting combination of a safety barrier and promotional display.

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Billboard advertising is a great way for SMEs to build brand awareness in their local area, and it’s a lot cheaper than TV advertising. But digital and traditional billboards offer different benefits.

For example, digital billboards have a way of grabbing attention thanks to the lights, colors and moving images. But when you advertise on a digital billboard, you will be sharing screen time with as many as five other brands.

As a result, your ad may only get 10 seconds of air time per minute and will have to compete with other brands, some of whom may be more recognizable than your own. This is obviously not ideal if you are looking to build brand awareness.

Traditional billboards, on the other hand, are exclusive. Your ad is the only one up there for a given amount of time. This means SMEs can achieve maximum exposure within their targeted location.

Traditional billboards will almost always be more cost-effective over a longer period of time, but they also have their limits. For instance, if you are testing ads, you cannot make changes to your traditional billboard ad, but CAN make quick and easy changes to your digital billboard ads.

There are many outdoor advertising materials being used today in business. The most popular and beneficial marketing technique for the past decade now is Hoarding advertisement. There are some advantages to billboard Advertisements. Billboard advertising offers a lot of space and freedom to be creative. You will be guaranteed an audience when it comes to billboard advertising. Due to the display and location of your marketing campaign, it’s more difficult for consumers to ignore your ad. Marketers tend to have a misconception that there is only one form of billboard advertising.

In simple terms, a ‘hoarding’ is defined as a temporary (and often rustic) boarded fence in a public place, typically erected around a construction site and used to advertise the firms working there.

However, the definition of hoardings has evolved over time, to include the type of boards that we see running around the outskirts of football pitches.

Here, a wider array of brands and sponsors can pay to display their logo or a specific product, with these visible both to fans at the game and those who are watching on television at home.

The physical nature of hoardings mean that individual boards are often relatively small and tend to sit beneath our eye level, while they also boast a relatively simplistic design due to the lack of advertising real estate available.

However, as we see at football grounds and construction sites, larger hoardings can be created to showcase a higher volume of adverts side-by-side, with each sponsored message featured on a single board.

Although this increases the visibility and reach of a particular hoarding, it may also force certain brands to compete directly with one another and cause some messages to become lost amongst the noise.

Conversely, billboards are renowned as the most popular form of OOH advertising in the UK and internationally.

Of course, the sustained growth of billboards in the UK has been driven largely by the emergence of digital platforms, with DOOH ad spending peaking at an impressive £516 million at the end of 2019.

Interestingly, this trend has also triggered an increase in demand for traditional billboards, which tend to be more affordable and offer higher levels of brand exposure over time.

Billboards are also more diverse than hoardings, both in terms of their size and the number of locations in which you’ll find them.

For example, billboards come in an array of poster formats, which can combine a variable number of sheets to make up images of different sizes. At the upper end of this scale we have 48 and 96-sheet billboards, which allow room for clear primary messaging and are often placed prominently at busy roadside locations.

You’ll also see smaller billboards positioned on the sides of buildings and in close proximity to busy high streets and shopping centres, and in this respect, they’re often used strategically to share limited time promotions and drive traffic in-store.

In the case of digital billboards, these entities can utilise video and animations to create a more interactive advert that engages customers more effectively. These may be smaller and found at bus stops or train stations.

Certainly, both traditional and digital billboards offer greater flexibility and freedom to advertisers, especially in terms of the choice of placements and scope for creative expression and achieving visual impact.

Billboards also tend to benefit from a more sophisticated design, that may help to capture the attention of customers and successfully promote high quality products or services.