Out-of-Home and Billboard Editing and Proofreading Services

Out-of-home is the only advertising medium where the audience is moving. A roadside poster is read by someone travelling at fifty miles an hour, in traffic, in weather, glancing away from the thing they should be watching. A rail platform panel gets longer but competes with a phone. A bus side is seen for two seconds from an angle. Every one of these is a hard constraint on word count, and every client has copy they want to add.

We edit what out-of-home advertisers, agencies and specialists produce — poster and billboard copy, roadside and high-dwell-time format copy, digital out-of-home and dynamic creative copy, transport and transit copy across formats, retail and point-of-purchase posters, wayfinding and environmental copy for brand spaces, experiential and event signage, mandatory information and legal line placement, campaign concepts and rationale for out-of-home, format specification and adaptation documentation, site and location rationale, and post-campaign evaluation material. Our editors apply the constraint before the copy is written rather than after.

The word count is the discipline, and it is not a stylistic preference. A roadside poster passed at speed gives a reader roughly two seconds of usable attention, which is around six words plus a brand — and the copy that arrives is fourteen words plus a URL, a QR code, a strapline and a legal line. We work on these by establishing the format's actual dwell time first and writing to it, so a high-dwell site at a station gets a different treatment from a motorway site rather than the same copy in a different shape; so the legal or mandatory line is placed and sized honestly, because a legal line nobody can read has not been given and the requirement is not satisfied by including it; so any call to action is one a person moving can actually perform — remembering a short brand name is possible, typing a URL is not, scanning a code from a car is not; and so the idea is tested by being read aloud once, at speed, by someone who has not seen it, since that is the only condition that matters. The constraint improves the work; the copy that survives it is the copy that had something to say.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including campaigns before launch and site information. We are editors rather than media specialists or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on site selection, format suitability or advertising standards. What we can do is make the copy fit the two seconds it will get.