Digital billboard installed at busy Ballarat Central corner

The large LED sign is the latest billboard to be installed in Ballarat by Gawk Outdoor, which operates eight digital and static billboards across the city.

Humffray Street closed for some time on Sunday as a large crane was required to install the billboard following a two-year process.

The billboard will run 10 advertisers every week, changing every 30 seconds, and reach almost 200,000 cars every month with the billboard already booked out until mid-December.

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Gawk Outdoor director James Course said its billboards were targeted towards local businesses, rather than the larger businesses that usually used billboard advertising.

"From our business model perspective, we're kind of probably the lower end of the scale of what billboards would cost comparatively to some of the other stock that's been existing in Ballarat," he said.

"There are a lot of billboards that have been there for probably 20 years or so and then there's some of our stuff which comes into the market and really trying to open up that local business side of it."

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However, Mr Course said Ballarat residents should not expect to see digital billboards on every corner any time soon.

"It's actually really heavily restricted by planning and if I pulled up a planning overlay, it already kind of discounts probably 90 per cent of the properties in Ballarat, just because you can't put a billboard on anything that's not zoned right," he said.

"Then you also look at heritage overlays and the like and there's actually not very many properties that are suitable outside of those heritage overlays in Ballarat.

"Some of the perceptions, people start talking about them popping up everywhere, I think that's definitely not the case, particularly in Ballarat. That's not to say there won't be a few more pop up over the next few years, but overall, it's not going to be a billboard in your face everywhere you drive.

"In Ballarat, we've kind of covered off a lot of those audiences. That's not to say we've put a line through it, but we're probably taking our foot off the gas in Ballarat as a market just because we think we've kind of covered off a lot of those different areas that an advertiser might want."

Deakin University management and marketing lecturer Dr Michael Callaghan said the rise in outdoor advertising, especially in regional centres such as Ballarat, was driven by a number of factors, including the decreased effectiveness of TV and radio advertising, increased use of social media, and population shift to the regions.

"People's time has them focusing more on social media and streaming online, those sorts of things have meant that in terms of bang for buck, what we might call traditional media outlets for advertising like magazines, newspapers, television and radio, advertisers are now madly looking for other avenues to get people's attention and one of the more constant forms of advertising in terms of audience reach and recall has always been outdoor advertising," he said.

"[Social media] can be good for certain groups of individuals, but if you are mainly looking to target people on a geographic basis or a population basis, then outdoor advertising is actually growing in terms of being one of the more effective ways to get people's attention in terms of these sorts of messages."

Dr Callaghan said the lowering cost of the technology has allowed more businesses to access the type of signage that was previously only seen in Times Square or Tokyo and in turn, gain more attention through the addition of light and movement to their signs.

"Billboards have been around for probably, I'd suggest even 100-plus years if you count store signage. The people that travel geographically past that advertising, eventually they build a resistance to that message because it's always there. One way of overcoming that resistance is by doing something to the billboard or to the sign that makes it change or catch people's attention," he said.

"Anything that causes movement, because we're largely animals that deep in our brain, we're concerned with keeping an eye out for threats, particularly if you're driving a car and something moves, your subconscious will draw your attention to it.

"When you can increase the attention to the image, that means that people's recall of the image and the advertising message is going to be far greater."

However, Dr Callaghan said there were some potential concerns for councils and roads departments to consider in approving future digital signs.

"It's not something that's new, but because of the lowering of cost of the technology, it is something that I do think that local councils and roads departments, particularly when it comes to safety, need to consider where these things are being positioned," he said.

"If you're positioning one of these on a high flow intersection that is already known for lots of accidents, adding in a further distraction by having an animated billboard in the middle of all of that is just going to increase the potential danger.

"The other downside is in a town like Ballarat that does actually have a historical overlay in terms of the way in which the buildings of the town look, there's a risk there that it might end up looking like Las Vegas if too many people start hanging out these sorts of signs."

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