Rotating your billboards? Think twice!

Basically, the concept is that instead of having one location in Sandton, e.g. Rivonia Road, for two months, you can move it around every two weeks thereby getting exposure on Rivonia Road, Grayston Drive, William Nicol, and Jan Smuts for the exact same budget.

In fact, you can even throw caution to the wind and rotate it for bi-weekly exposure in Sandton, Randburg, Midrand and Centurion. If you make the reasonable assumption that two weeks on a good route is enough for the commuter to view, absorb and be impacted by your creative and message, then you are on a great wicket - four times exposure for the same budget.

Diminishing value

But this game doesn't work well without a third umpire. It obviously starts well at site one which was the anchor point that got you hooked. It may even trickle down well to site two and three, but the laws of diminishing value start to kick in.

In Media Trace's September audit of all Gauteng billboards we found that Bestmed has a board on Heuwel Road in Centurion that faces the opposite direction on a one way street. In Midrand, Africa Investor has a backlit facing the ever popular 'shisanyama' joint (appropriate target market?) while Senza, an Italian restaurant located in Braynston, has a board on the main route in and out of Tembisa Township.

Don't get me wrong, the concept of rotating boards is brilliant and can provide a fantastic opportunity to get more for less. However, you need to make sure that every site in the rotation is up to the task and that the media owner is not using your boards to fill 'avails' that no rational client would have ever purchased in the first place.