• by Daniel Frankel , July 22, 2008

The buzz term is "moment of exclusivity." "With digital signage, we can make every sign in the building read Coke or Pepsi or whoever it might be," says Mark Foster, general manager of the Diamond Vision Systems Group for Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, one of a small number of companies doing brisk business right now by festooning big sports venues with giant light-emitting diode (LED) display systems. Mitsubishi's handiwork will soon be featured in the new Yankee Stadium, where the company will build a high-definition LED scoreboard measuring 101 feet wide and 59 feet tall.

"We're just at the beginning of this," says Mark Steinkamp, marketing and sales support manager for Daktronics, Mitsubishi's chief rival in the ballpark LED display biz, which is also contributing digital signage to the Yankees' new facility. Daktronics also performed a massive AV integration for the new Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
If fans of the National Hockey League's New Jersey Devils miss a Budweiser ad on the massive center-hung LED scoreboard because they left their seats to buy beer, they can catch the same spot on one of the 100 LCD monitors mounted in the concourse area. If they're in the parking lot, they'll see the ad on a giant LED board mounted on the side of the building. "The Prudential Center really takes it to the next level," Steinkamp notes.

Right now, he says, only a handful of big brands - Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch among them - have been sold on the concept of paying a premium in order to occupy, at a given moment, every digital display in the stadium with a video commercial or static brand image.

"The technology is quite new," explains Steinkamp, whose company also operates a nascent ad sales and creative shop to service the in-stadium advertising business. "It's going to take a while for everyone to think past static (signage) panels. Time has to be sold now instead of space."

For teams, the technology doesn't come cheap. Baseball's Kansas City Royals, for example, paid a reported $10 million for Daktronics to build and install a 100-foot-high, 85-foot-wide high-def LED board at the newly renovated Kauffman Stadium, along with an 85-foot-wide centerfield video screen and 500 linear feet of LED ribbon board that lines the upper deck.

However, with half-inning-long spots on the big board going for anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000, and moment-of-exclusivity buys running in the six-figure range, the timeline for recouping this investment seems short enough.

In fact, sports-focused firm Front Row Marketing Services estimates that with ample LED, signage can generate between $8 million and $10 million year.