• by Erik Sass , December 12, 2007

Washington, D.C. has traditionally had less outdoor signage than New York and Los Angeles, but all that is changing--at least in part of the nation's capital.

Gallery Place, a 715,000-square-foot shopping, entertainment and residential complex in northwest D.C., recently became home to LED billboards with an audio component at several busy intersections. The inaugural advertisers are Coca-Cola and AT&T.

According to calculations using pedestrian and automobile traffic counts through the area, the LED signage should be able to create almost 40 million impressions a year. The area around the intersection of 7th Street and several cross-streets, including H Street and I Street, sees over 2 million vehicular trips and roughly 1 million pedestrian trips a month. It's not clear how many of these exposures are repeat viewings by a single individual.

Gallery Place and downtown D.C. in general have boomed in recent years, with a flurry of new residential and retail developments driving an increase in pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Adjacent to Chinatown and the Verizon Center Arena, Gallery Place sits atop a mass transit hub and allows pedestrian access to the Smithsonian Museums and the Washington Mall.