New LED technology and leading light for advertisers

October 14, 2008

LAADtech team members (from left) Katie Inglis, Peter Inglis, Scott Geldard

A new lightweight LED screen developed by UQ Business School's Enterprize business plan competition finalist, LAADtech, proposes to make outdoor advertising more versatile and easier to install.

LAADtech, along with six other outstanding finalists, will compete for the $100,000 prize at the UQ Business School Enterprize Pitch Day on Thursday, October 16 in Brisbane.

LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes are used extensively as large replay screens at sports stadiums and increasingly for dynamic billboard advertising. However these are often heavy and require specialised structures to support them.

LAADtech has developed a lightweight LED technology that allows for a dynamic advertising screen to be fitted to an existing billboard without any additional modifications.

Team leader Peter Inglis said the innovative design of the LAADtech LED screens allowed them to be up to one quarter of the weight of traditional LED screens, making dynamic billboards an affordable option for billboard owners.

"Our screens are a maximum of 20mm thick and can be folded up," he said.

"This means we can retro-fit the screens to existing billboards without any modifications to support the weight."

Mr Inglis said that by upgrading an existing static billboard to a dynamic display, owners could increase their advertising revenue by up to seven times.

"Dynamic billboards have the advantage of being able to display more advertising and make it possible to manipulate the display for different times of the day," he said.

By winning Enterprize, Mr Inglis said the team would be able to refine the technology used for managing the signs from a remote location.

"We want to be able to refine the way that we run the billboards remotely so that someone working in an office could run several billboards," he said.

Provided by University of Queensland