Photo products: Turning your existing sites into a simulator
Published · 4 min read
Almost every media owner already has photos of their sites. They sit in the site database, in the booking portal or in the folder of proof-of-posting shots. On the German booking site plakat-verkauft.de, for instance, clicking a map marker opens the site description and a photo of the poster location.
Those photos are the raw material for a Creative Simulator. In most cases you do not need a new shoot. The real question is which of the existing pictures will work and which ones you should take again. Five points decide it.
1. The whole site has to be in the frame
A catalogue photo often shows the surroundings and crops the panel. That is not enough for a simulation. The frame must be fully visible, with a little room around it.
Some surroundings help, though. The street, passers-by and neighbouring panels are what turn a mockup into a preview your client believes. Three shots work well: one head-on, one slightly from the left and one slightly from the right.
30-second test: Open the photo and trace the panel’s frame with your finger. If it runs out of the picture anywhere, the photo is lost for the simulation.
2. The four corners decide
For an artwork to sit on the panel in the right perspective, it is mapped onto four corner points. Guides to perspective transforms stress that the order of those points has to stay consistent. Every corner you can only guess shifts the whole artwork.
In practice, a lamp post, a branch or a parked van tends to hide exactly one corner. In a head-on shot you barely notice. Once the artwork is on it, you see it at once, because one edge sits crooked.
30-second test: Check all four corners in the photo. Is each one clearly visible, with nothing in front of it? If one is missing, shoot that site again.
3. Wide-angle lenses bend the edges
Standing close to a billboard, you reach for the wide angle. That has a price. With barrel distortion, straight lines parallel to the edge of the frame curve outward. The effect is much stronger at the edges of the picture than in the centre.
For a simulation that is awkward. A frame that bends slightly in the photo will not match an artwork with straight edges. It is better to take a few steps back and put the panel in the middle of the picture.
30-second test: Hold a ruler or any straight edge against the top of the panel in the photo. If the frame visibly bows, the shot is too wide.
4. Light and the state of the panel
The ideal photo is taken in daylight, of an empty panel or one showing a single colour. An old artwork full of text makes it harder, in our experience, to fit the panel cleanly.
Night shots and photos taken against the sun almost always fail in our projects. In the first case the frame loses its detail, in the second the panel sits in shadow and the artwork looks flat. A phone photo is fine, as long as it is landscape and at least 2000 pixels wide.
30-second test: Shrink the photo to a quarter of its size on your phone. If the frame and edges are still clear, the light is good enough.
5. Send the format and timing along
A photo shows the perspective, but not the format. A German 18/1 billboard measures 356 x 252 cm as standard. Send the size with the photo and you get a photo product on which the artwork sits in the correct aspect ratio.
Digital screens also need slot and loop length. Only then does a spot play in the preview the way it will play on the screen. Video and 360° products are a separate topic. They need footage shot on site and therefore more lead time.
30-second test: Add one line per photo to your list: type, location, format, and for DOOH also slot and loop. If anything is missing, ask for it now.
How we take your sites over
New customers send us the photos they already have. We fit the panels and set them up as photo products in the Creative Simulator. It costs you nothing. How many sites we take over is agreed with you beforehand.
Your tenant is ready straight away. The advertising surface is detected on the photos automatically, and the product lands directly in your tenant. For photo sites that takes minutes. If you would like to try a single site first, you can do that through the “free screen setup” page, with no contract and no invoice.
Why this works without image editing
The work goes into the photo once. After that, no artwork needs its own montage. Your client drags the file onto the panel and sees in seconds how it looks at that location. The five checks above tell you beforehand which photos can carry that.