Billboards

Driving home from a customer last week, I caught a glimpse of a digital billboard—the kind that flashes eight different ads per minute. From a cost and aesthetic perspective, these backlit displays are a big step up from the old paperhanger versions. But I wondered: What do drivers actually see and remember?

Curious, I pulled over and watched the traffic. At the speed limit, a passing driver would catch only one of the eight ads—if they were lucky. Some ads were short, sharp, and visually memorable. Others? They looked like bad PowerPoint slides—dense, cluttered, and hard to read even while standing still. Clearly, using this medium well takes skill.

Fact is, much of today’s visual world is painted in pixels. Between 2000 and 2025, the price per pixel for flat screens dropped about 99%. Whether on the roadside or in the hallways of factories and offices, flat-screen technology is everywhere, transforming how we share data and graphics. But is it transforming things for the better?

The roadside billboard reminded me of the roulette-wheel style visual management I increasingly see in companies. As screens get cheaper, they’re popping up in more workplaces—looping through content that might look great for a customer tour but spins by too quickly to be useful to frontline workers or managers. Sometimes they’re even mounted so high you’d need opera glasses to read them.

And then there’s the “bad PowerPoint” problem —too much data, not enough information. Are we really making operating conditions “clear at a glance within 10 seconds”, as David Mann advises in Creating a Lean Culture? Or are we running flashy screens without thinking about purpose or audience?

I’m not anti-digital. Far from it. Digital media is here, it’s cheap, and it will only get better. Newer displays are easy to update, can be networked across sites, and offer huge potential for sharing the right information quickly. The question is: will we use these capabilities for “what I need to know and what I need to share,” or will we just create revolving billboards?

There’s an old saying contrasting digital and manual approaches: high-tech, low-touch versus high-touch, low-tech. Why not aim for high-touch, high-tech? Used well, this technology could make problem-solving faster, clearer, and more collaborative.

What do you think?

O.L.D.

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