Two separate costs
The site. Rented from a media owner, priced by location, traffic and duration. This is your cost with them and it is usually much the larger of the two.
The material. Printing, fabrication and installation of what goes on the site. That is our half.
Confusing them leads to the common mistake of economising on the material to afford the site - which produces a faded, badly fitted piece on an expensive location for the whole rental period.
What drives the material cost
Area, obviously. Then substrate: standard flex for short campaigns, star-flex for longer, and ACP or a fabricated board for anything permanent.
Then finishing and fixing: eyelets, reinforcement, framing, and the method by which it will be held against wind. This is where cheap quotes hide, and where failures happen.
Then installation: height, access, traffic management and whether the work has to happen at night. On a large or awkward site, installation can exceed the printing.
And duration: a piece specified for three months on a site you will hold for a year is a piece you will buy twice.
Artwork for something read at distance
The single most common outdoor mistake is artwork designed at desk scale. A hoarding is read from tens of metres, moving, in under three seconds.
That means very few words, one idea, high contrast, and a logo that is legible rather than large. It also means resolution requirements are lower than people expect - a hoarding does not need 300 dpi at final size, and insisting on it produces unusably large files.
What it does need is correct proportions for the actual site, which frequently is not a standard ratio, and a safe margin so nothing important sits where a frame or a fixing will cover it.
Where outdoor money is wasted
Too much copy. A hoarding that needs reading is a hoarding that is not read.
A site chosen for footfall rather than for sight-lines. A location where the board is visible for two seconds beats a busier one where it is behind a tree.
Cheap material on a long rental. The site cost continues whether the print has faded or not.
No plan for the second month. Outdoor rewards repetition, and a single burst is usually the least efficient way to buy it.
What we do
We design and produce outdoor material - hoardings, gantries, shop fronts, site and barricade branding - and install it. Artwork is prepared for the real site dimensions rather than a standard ratio.
We work with your media plan and your site bookings. We are not a media-buying house and will say so rather than quote for something we do not do.
For a campaign that also lives in print, the same artwork family produces both, which is why the hoarding and the leaflet are the same red.
