LED Truck Advertising Creative Specs: A Field Guide

Almost every creative file we are handed for an LED truck has the same problem. It was built for a screen somebody sits in front of.

Monitors are viewed from two feet away by a person who is not moving, in a room with controlled light, with as long as they want to read. An LED truck panel is viewed from forty to a hundred feet away by a person who is walking or driving, in direct sun or at night, for about three seconds, while five other things compete for their eyes.

Those are not the same medium and they do not take the same file.

This page is the spec sheet I wish clients had before the design work started, plus an honest comparison against the other street formats we run, because the right answer is sometimes not a truck at all.

I am going to be specific about what works. I am not going to give you a single pixel dimension that applies everywhere, because rigs differ and anyone quoting you one universal canvas size has not worked on more than one vehicle.

The spec questions you need answered before anyone opens a design file

Ask the operator these, in writing, before creative starts. If they cannot answer all of them quickly, that tells you something.

Exact pixel dimensions for each screen. Side screens and rear screens are different, often substantially. You need both numbers.

Pixel pitch. The spacing between diodes. This tells you the minimum viewing distance at which the image resolves rather than looking like a dot matrix. It also tells you how small your type can go before it crumbles.

Nits, and whether dimming is automatic. Brightness capability in daylight, and whether the rig steps down at night. If dimming is manual, you want to know who is responsible for doing it.

Colour behaviour. LED panels are not calibrated monitors. Reds tend to bloom, deep blues tend to go muddy, and mid grey tones compress badly. Ask whether they can play your file on a panel before the first shift.

Accepted file formats and frame rate. Video codec, image formats, frame rate the player expects. A file at the wrong frame rate will judder.

Loop behaviour. Does the player loop seamlessly, is there a black frame on the wrap, can creative rotate on a schedule.

Whether there is a bezel or frame intrusion. Some rigs eat a few pixels at the edges behind a frame. Anything critical placed at the extreme edge can be clipped.

Get those seven and you can brief a designer properly. Without them you are guessing and you will find out on the first night.

The creative rules that actually hold on a moving screen

Type size is the whole game

Here is the test I use. Print your creative at roughly postcard size. Hold it at arm’s length. If you cannot read it comfortably and instantly, it will not read on a truck.

That sounds crude. It is remarkably accurate, because it approximates the angular size of the screen at realistic viewing distance.

In practice this means headline type occupying a meaningful fraction of the screen height, not a tidy proportion that looks balanced in the design file. Street creative looks oversized and clumsy on a desktop. It has to.

Body copy, in the sense most designers mean it, does not exist here. If you have a sentence, it is the headline. If you have two sentences, cut one.

Contrast beats colour

Mid tones disappear. A grey on slightly lighter grey, which reads as sophisticated on a screen, becomes a flat blank on a sunny street.

What survives is hard separation. Light on dark or dark on light, with real distance between the values. A thin elegant typeface in a brand colour on a background two shades away will be illegible from across the road and perfectly readable in the approval meeting. That mismatch is where most disappointment comes from.

Motion should be slow or absent

Fast cuts, rapid transitions, flashing elements. On a vehicle that is itself moving, this reads as flicker and visual noise, it photographs badly, and in some places rapid flashing on a road facing display is a genuine safety concern that will attract attention you do not want.

Slow pans, gentle fades, a single element entering and settling. Or just a static frame held. Static frames are underrated. A well built static frame on a truck is frequently stronger than an animation, because every viewer in the three second window sees the complete message rather than a random slice of it.

Brand presence must be continuous

The classic failure: a ten second spot that builds to a logo reveal in the final two seconds. Most viewers see a random three second slice. Four out of five of them never see the logo.

The mark stays on screen the entire time. Corner, lower third, wherever, but present in every single frame.

Build for each aspect separately

Side screens are wide, rear screens tend toward square. One file stretched to fit both will be distorted on one and letterboxed on the other.

Design the side version properly, then rebuild the rear version. Not resize. Rebuild. The composition that works at a wide aspect usually fails at a square one.

Loop length should be short

A handful of seconds. The loop repeats continuously while the screen is on, so length buys you nothing except the risk that viewers see an incomplete fragment.

Multiple short spots rotating is fine and often good. One long spot is not.

What to leave out entirely

How LED truck creative compares to the other street formats

This is the part people actually need, because the question underneath “what are the creative specs” is usually “is this the right format.”

Versus posters and wheatpasting

Poster creative is a still image at high resolution on paper, viewed by a pedestrian who can stop if they want to. It tolerates far more detail than a truck screen. You can run a dense illustration, smaller secondary type, even a short block of copy, because the viewer is stationary and close. A QR code on a poster at eye level works properly.

The trade: posters do not move, so the audience has to come to them, and placement does all the targeting work. But they are there at 3am and still there next Tuesday. Persistence is the entire argument.

Production reality: poster artwork is one build, one aspect, cheap to iterate. LED truck creative is at least two builds plus playback testing.

If your message needs more than five words, a poster carries it and a truck will not.

Versus static vehicle wraps and box truck advertising

A wrapped box truck is a poster that drives. The creative rules are closer to outdoor print than to video: one static image, enormous type, hard contrast.

Advantage over LED: no generator, no screen failure, no power, lighter vehicle, access to tighter streets, and it is working every second the vehicle is visible whether anyone switched anything on or not. It is also silent and visually calmer, which matters in sensitive districts.

Disadvantage: one message for the whole campaign. No rotation, no dayparting, no last minute change, no motion, and nothing after dark unless it is separately lit.

If your campaign has a single message and runs for weeks, static is frequently the better buy and I will say so. If you need three messages, or a message that changes by daypart, or night visibility, LED earns its complexity.

Versus sidewalk decals and stencils

Completely different creative problem. A sidewalk decal is viewed from directly above at close range by someone walking. Type can be modest, detail is fine, QR codes work extremely well because the viewer is on foot and can stop.

The trade: a decal reaches only people who walk over that exact square of pavement. Zero reach beyond its footprint, but very high attention within it, and it stays for the run of the campaign.

Decals are a conversion format. Trucks are a reach format. They are not competing and they pair well, with the truck driving awareness through a district and decals catching people at the doorways.

Versus projection

Projection creative is the closest relative to LED truck creative in one way: light emitting, night only, motion capable. It is the opposite in another: scale.

Projection can be enormous, so type size stops being a constraint and the dominant constraint becomes surface. Brick texture, windows, surface colour. You design around architecture.

Advantage over LED truck: spectacle and photographability. A six storey projection generates content in a way a truck rarely does.

Disadvantage: it is fixed to a surface and a position, it is night only, it needs permission from a property owner, and it is gone the second the rig powers down.

Versus street teams

Not a creative spec comparison at all, but worth naming. Street Teams carry a message with a human attached, which is the only street format capable of a conversation. Printed collateral in hand can be as dense as you like.

Trade: reach per hour is low, cost per contact is high, and it requires training.

The honest summary table, in words

If you need detail and dwell, go printed or decal. If you need night time reach across a district, LED truck. If you need scale and spectacle for content, projection. If you need persistence over weeks, posters or a static wrap. If you need conversation, street team.

Most campaigns that work use two of these, not one.

Daypart variants, because one file does not cover a run day

A truck that runs a morning block, a lunch block and a night block is facing three different audiences in three different light conditions, and sending one file to cover all of it wastes two thirds of the opportunity.

Morning commute creative should be blunter than you want it to be. Vehicle viewers, bright low sun, people who are late. Brand mark and one statement. Nothing that needs working out.

Midday creative can carry slightly more. Pedestrians in walkable downtowns move slowly and look around, and the viewing distance is shorter, so a second line of copy survives here when it would not survive at 7:40am.

Evening commute creative behaves like morning creative with better attention. Traffic is usually worse and nobody is late going home, so dwell is longer and a short sequence of two frames works.

Night creative can lean on the panel. After dark the screen is the brightest object on the street, so saturated colour on a near black field is at its most effective, and heavy white fields are at their most unpleasant.

Brief all of these together in one round. Retrofitting a night variant the week after launch means a second design cycle and a second review, and it usually arrives after the nights that mattered.

Name the files by daypart and face. At 6am in a cab, nobody should be working out which version belongs where.

Testing creative before the first shift

This step gets skipped constantly and it is the cheapest insurance in the process.

Play it on an actual panel. Not a monitor. The colour shift from design file to LED panel is real and it mostly runs in the direction of less contrast and more bloom than you expected.

Photograph it from distance. Stand where a real viewer stands, forty to a hundred feet away, and take a photo in daylight and after dark. Look at that photo, not the file.

Check it with the sun behind you and in front of you. A screen with low sun directly on it is a different and much worse object.

Watch a random three seconds. Start the loop, look away, look back for a count of three, look away. What did you get? If the answer is “part of a transition” the edit is wrong.

Check the rear screen separately. Everyone reviews the side and forgets the rear exists until they see a photo of it stretched.

What goes wrong, and what we talk clients out of

The agency delivers one master file. One aspect, one length, built for social. We ask for the rebuilds and sometimes we are told the budget for design is spent. That is the moment to decide whether to run a simplified static frame instead, which we can build, rather than put a cropped social asset on the road.

The brand guidelines fight the medium. Thin typeface, muted palette, generous white space, small logo lockup. All correct for print, all wrong at a hundred feet. The conversation we have is about an outdoor exception within the guidelines. Brands that have one are easy to work with. Brands that do not usually end up running something that underperforms and blaming the format.

Somebody wants a full commercial on there. Thirty seconds with a narrative arc. No. Nobody watches a truck for thirty seconds. We cut it to the strongest three seconds and run that.

Somebody wants maximum brightness at all hours. A screen at full daylight brightness at 11pm in a tight street is genuinely unpleasant, draws complaints and makes night photography of the truck unusable because the screen blows out to white. We dim. Clients sometimes argue. We dim anyway.

Somebody wants the truck to carry the entire campaign. This is the one I push back on hardest. An LED truck is a presence format with no residue. When the shift ends, nothing remains on that street. If you want the district still carrying your message between shifts and after the run, put Wheatpasting & Poster Campaigns in the same corridors the truck works. The truck supplies motion, night visibility and frequency. The posters hold the ground. Running the truck alone means paying for reach that evaporates at the end of every shift, and I would rather tell you that before the invoice than after.

Somebody picks the biggest rig for the tightest neighbourhood. Screen size and street access trade against each other directly. The streets where this format performs best are usually the streets a very large vehicle cannot comfortably work.

A practical creative checklist

Before you sign off a file for the road:

That last one has saved more shifts than anything else on the list.

Frequently asked questions

Request a campaign quote

Send us the creative you already have and the city you want to run in. We will tell you honestly whether it will read on the road, what needs rebuilding, and whether a truck is even the right format for the message.

If a poster run or a static wrap would do the job better, we will say that instead.

Request a campaign quote and we will come back with real screen dimensions, a creative spec and a route logic.