Feature Article June 2007

Electroluminescence offers distributors new opportunities to compete in the dynamic signage arena

There’s nothing like Times Square. Tourists stream past you, the blare of car horns and the thud of feet hitting pavement fill your ears and the signs along the avenue burn brightly, eclipsing the night sky with a canopy of light. You see the ever changing LCD screen of the NASDAQ, top lights on the newest Calvin Klein ad and the plasma screen TVs of the MTV studios.

Advertisers and retailers in America have been harnessing the appeal and power of light since the early 1900s, when the first electric billboards appeared in cities throughout the United States. As the technology becomes more advanced (from the neon signs of yesteryear to the Sony Jumbotrons of today) and cheaper to create and install, consumers will see more electronic signage in the out-of-home advertising market. And this won’t be limited to the great outdoors. LCD screens and animated light displays have already found their way into shopping malls, airports and even the local Borders book store.

“Lighting in general is just becoming huge now,” says Steve Pendlebury, president and COO of Electro-LuminX Lighting Corp., Camarillo, Calif. Electro-LuminX manufactures light displays and the company’s patented LightTape was featured prominently during this year’s Super Bowl half-time show where it was used to outline the uniforms of the Florida A&M University marching band. “It’s going to be a booming industry because if something is lit, you get higher sales and if something is lit and animated the sales will be even higher.”

The Light Conundrum
So what does this mean for print distributors who sell promotional products, particularly in the point-of-purchase arena? A lot, if you consider the changing trends in the retail market. For example, a survey of store managers and owners recently conducted by the Point of Purchase Advertising Institute showed that 70 percent preferred advertisers to supply displays with motion rather than those without motion and 67 percent believed that motion displays brought in more sales. This may be the reason why the study also found that motion displays were more likely to get high-traffic placement in stores (88 percent) than non-motion displays (47 percent).

Unfortunately, selling the popular neon signs that are found in drug store windows or scrolling light-emitting diode (LED) tickers is probably outside the scope of most distributors’ expertise. And unless distributors totally change their business models, digital signage isn’t a good choice either. (That market is cornered by software providers that control the networks that display the in-store television ads.) But luckily, there is technology out there that is almost 100 years old but hasn’t been commercially viable since the 1980s. It employs screen printing, can be battery operated and appear as thin as cardboard or even a sheet of paper. You’ve probably come across it more than once today. (Hint: It probably lights your car’s dashboard.) It’s electroluminescence.

Electroluminescent (EL) displays are solid state, screen-printed electronic devices composed of a “lamp,” which is the lit substrate, and the controller, the attached box that tells the signage in what sequence to emit light. It is composed of thin, phosphor coated or printed plastic sheets with conductive surfaces. When alternating current is applied, the phosphorus lights up.

The main difference between LED and EL is that “LED has the same principle as a light bulb,” explains Pat Keown of iGraphics Precision Printing, Grass Valley, Calif., which produces EL signage. “But like a light bulb, it eventually just dies. It’s what we call catastrophic failure. EL works like a capacitor. It fades over time rather than undergoing catastrophic failure.”

Also, EL doesn’t get hot, can be a flexible substrate and is more energy efficient than other lighting displays.

The appearance of EL signage in stores, trade shows, bars and night clubs is still an awe-inspiring novelty but there are those in the industry who say this will soon change. “You’re going to start seeing it more,” Pendlebury says. (Electro-LuminX’s LightTape employs electroluminescent technology.) “At some point it will come down to who has the best technology and price point. It will differentiate who’s working with [casino resort developer] Steve Wynn and who’s lighting up hundreds of smiley faces at Wal-Mart. In this business, you have some Ferraris, but there are a lot of Hyundais out there.”

Electronic Paper: Another Emerging Medium
Electroluminescent displays aren’t the only technology that produces flexible, paper-like sheets that act like traditional light displays. Electronic paper uses electrophoresis to create images that can disappear or reappear thanks to an electric charge. One of the leading innovators in this field is the supplier E Ink Corporation, Cambridge, Mass., which currently offers a commercial display version of the technology called “Ink in Motion.”

“It has the primary benefits of paper,” says Darren Bischoff, senior marketing manager at E Ink Corp. “But it also acts like a lighted display because you can change the message and animate it. In the signage area it has been used in point-of-purchase advertising. The Ink in Motion’s preprogram version was used by Microsoft in the packaging of one their Xbox releases. It was also used at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.”

In addition to having the same attributes as EL displays (it has low energy consumption and the thinness and light weight makes it usable in many environments and portable), Bischoff says electronic paper is also better than EL because it reflects light rather than emits it. You can see it even under the ambient lighting of most retail environments and “electronic paper uses no electricity when it’s not animated,” he says.

But like any medium, electronic paper also has drawbacks. Because the technology is still considered new, the price isn’t very low and the turnaround time for production isn’t as fast as other P.O.P. products. Bischoff says the three companies that manufacture displays using electronic paper “would probably take about two to three weeks to turnaround a prototype. And it can mean up to eight weeks for the finished product.”

While electronic paper is gaining momentum in other markets (you can currently find it in some Motorola cell phones and the Sony electronic book reader device), it’s still trying to make inroads in the out-of-home advertising arena. “It’s still early in its life in terms of penetrating the signage market,” Bischoff says.

In Search of a Dynamic Presentation
When RE/MAX started a new advertising campaign in Atlanta that included four 14 by 48 foot-billboards and transit ads on 12 buses, it wanted to show its audience just how groundbreaking the real estate franchise could be.

“We’ve been an innovator in the real estate market since the 1970s,” says Clyde Good, advertising director for RE/MAX in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. “We were one of the first companies to have all our agents and listings on one website. We wanted a campaign that reiterated just how innovative we were.”

RE/MAX bypassed traditional print manufacturers for the job as well as LED and neon signage manufacturers. “We didn’t even look into LEDs and neon because we wanted to be innovative,” Good says. “We knew that type of technology wouldn’t get us any buzz."

A search for “buzz” was the same reason why Hunt Adkins, a Minneapolis advertising agency, decided to skip using conventional banners and signage for a September 2006 outdoor ad campaign for Pentax, a digital camera manufacturer. “We really wanted to do something that would grab people’s attention,” says Leah Steig, media strategy director at Hunt Adkins. “Because Pentax is a camera company on the cutting edge of technology, we wanted a campaign that could show that.”

So both RE/MAX and Hunt Adkins decided to use “GlowSkin” for their ad campaigns, a patented EL technology produced by Safe Lites LLC, Eden Prarie, Minn.

Tony J. Morse, director of marketing at Safe Lites, says an added plus to using GlowSkin in outdoor campaigns is that it’s less intrusive than other lighting methods. Also, cities that have light pollution ordinances seem to prefer light emitted by EL that glows rather than shines. “The regulatory bodies seem to favor GlowSkin because the brightness isn’t as strong,” Morse says. “In addition, EL doesn’t impede night vision, which is why you find it in the instrument panels of Black Hawk helicopters and many cars. And with GlowSkin, we can control the frequency of animation. Right now, we’re operating most of our campaigns at a threshold of 10 second intervals.”

But this doesn’t mean EL technology doesn’t grab as much attention as its more brightly lit cohorts.

“We love how the GlowSkin panels look on the buses,” Good says. “You can see it coming from several blocks away and it’s great [environmentally friendly] technology because the panels run on just two batteries. The technology certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s definitely dynamic. We decided to do it in Atlanta because that is our largest market and it wasn’t really economical to do it in the smaller markets. We figured that in Atlanta, we’d get more bang for our buck.”

The Winds of Change

Trends in the P.O.P. market

Some studies indicate a growing shift away from traditional print products in the retail market, specifically in the point-of-purchase arena. Based on the participants’ responses, print providers should anticipate that the static, cardboard displays commonly found in stores and grocery markets today may decrease while signage like ELs, LEDs, LCDs and plasma screen TVs may become more prominent.

Last year, Display and Design Ideas magazine conducted an online survey of about 100 participants from the retail industry. Almost 70 percent of respondents to the “At-Retail Media Survey” said that digital signage would be used slightly or significantly more by retailers in the next three to five years. And the type of at-retail media that 19 percent of respondents said would appear significantly less in their stores within the next 12 months: corrugated cardboard displays. That was the highest percentage of respondents to show a downshift in choosing among all in-store media. Corrugated cardboard displays also showed the highest rate of dissatisfaction with 17 percent of respondents saying they were either very or slightly dissatisfied with the medium.

When it comes to EL technology, dynamic presentation often means a higher price tag. “For surface animation signs, prices generally range from $50 to $100 each for quantities of 200 or more,” says Keown, based on the price of EL applications that iGraphics produces. “With orders of less than 200, the unit price goes up substantially due to engineering and setup costs.”

For that reason, Keown recommends that if vendors sell EL displays, they focus on pitching it to larger customers who have bigger marketing budgets. “It doesn’t really get cost effective until you get to more than 200,” he says.

But some in the industry argue that EL displays are still comparatively cheaper than other lighting media and perhaps that’s the approach you should take when pitching them to clients. “Small to medium sizes should cost about 25 percent less than any other lighting solution,” says Rafael Revivo, CEO of SDR Technologies & Solutions, San Diego, Calif. “You start to see the prices balloon when you get into much bigger signs.”

Another thing to consider when selling EL technology is the applicability of the medium. There are two schools of thought as to whether EL displays are best suited for the outdoors.

“I would give about two to three months for a billboard,” Revivo says. “An indoor display, we could offer a guarantee of maybe two to three years. The problem with EL displays is that they are very sensitive to their environment. Humidity, dust and UV lighting can affect how long they last.”

Keown agrees. He said a traditional backlit display would probably be better in this case. “EL doesn’t suit itself well to the outdoors,” he says. “It’s better for casinos and bar applications.”

But Morse says the problems with outdoor EL signage stem more from how the display was made and who made it, rather than the technology itself.

“The people who say EL doesn’t work well as an outdoor application probably say it for two reasons,” Morse says. “One reason is that illumination typically doesn’t show up well outside in natural light unless you add animation. Another reason is historically and even today, a lot of the EL providers offer more of a novelty grade of the technology. Most of those EL applications you can’t get wet and when they aren’t well protected from UV rays, they start to fade.”

Morse insists that some manufacturers like Safe Lites make EL applications more durable and wider in their range of applications. “For example, we made safety gear for a client once using GlowSkin,” Morse says. “The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) sets the requirements for safety gear and when we developed the vest, we wanted it to be classified by ANSI as a Class II. But in order to do that, the vest had to be washable up to 25 times.” After a few trials, Safe Lites was able to develop EL panels that could endure that many washings.

“I have to admit that in the six years we’ve been doing this, we’ve had our challenges of how to make this applicable for the outdoors,” Morse says. “But we’ve developed a method for how we coat and laminate each lamp and how we encapsulate each phosphorus cell. In fact, in the past few years every project that we’ve done was an outdoor application or an application that needed to be washed.”

Electro-LuminX knows that EL displays are catching fire. It can see it in its sales. Advertisers use the company’s LightTape to outline a tennis court graphic on a billboard in London for Puma, an athletic footwear company. Stage designers in a Las Vegas production of Monty Python’s “Spamalot” use LightTape cutouts of the performers. But Pendlebury says that despite increased use of the technology in several markets, the company still starts at square one with each new client and has to explain the attributes as well as the reliability of electroluminescence.

“It’s taken tremendous effort to get people to realize that the technology is a lot better than what it used to be,” he says.
Revivo agrees. “One of the problems we’re having is educating potential customers who are used to working with neon signage,” Revivo says. “This is a lot more complicated, and when you tell clients about all the options they have, all the things they can do with EL, they start to get confused.”

But for the industrious vendor who is willing to teach the customer, the opportunities are definitely out there if you find the right niche. “It’s just something so unique to the market right now because very few people can do it and even fewer people can do it right,” Keown says.

LaShell Stratton is assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to lstratton@PSDA.org.

An Illuminating Idea