What to Actually Show on Your LED Display
The hardware is the easy part. Most screens that fail commercially fail on content, and it is a solvable problem.
A ₹2 lakh display showing a stretched photograph and a phone number returns nothing. Screens almost never fail technically — they fail because nobody decided what goes on them or who updates it.
Four rules that cover most of it
- One idea per frame. A frame carrying an offer, a phone number, three product shots and a festival greeting communicates none of them.
- Hold each frame for six to eight seconds. Long enough to read at walking pace, short enough that a queue sees the whole loop.
- Text large enough for the distance — roughly one hundredth of the viewing distance in letter height. If it needs more than about eight words, it is a poster, not a screen frame.
- High contrast. Fine detail and subtle gradients disappear at any outdoor pitch. Bold shapes and strong colour survive.
What earns its place
| Content | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Today's price or rate | The single most-read thing on any retail frontage. Jewellers know this; most other trades do not. |
| One current offer | Specific and time-bound. "20% off school bags until Sunday" beats "great discounts". |
| A real product photograph | Shot properly, of stock you actually have. Not a manufacturer render. |
| Something dayparted | Breakfast until eleven, evening offer at six. This is the capability a printed board cannot match. |
| Festival greetings on the day | Cheap goodwill, and it demonstrably gets photographed. |
Budget for the photography
A bright screen makes bad photography look worse, not better. A half-day shoot of your actual products is the cheapest line item in the whole project and the one that decides whether the screen returns anything. This is especially true for food.
Name someone
Decide before installation who updates the screen and how often. We train two people at handover rather than one, because the installations that go stale are the ones where the only trained person went on leave in week three.