Unipoles and hoardings get grouped together as "big billboards", and then get chosen by price. That is the wrong basis. They behave differently on the road, and the road should decide.

A unipole is two sites on one structure

Al Masa operates 41 unipoles and 44 megacom and mini unipoles, and almost every one of them is double-sided. One face takes traffic coming, the other takes traffic going.

That has a consequence people underuse. The two faces do not have to carry the same artwork. On a road where morning traffic heads into the city and evening traffic heads out, you can run the offer on one face and the brand line on the other, and the same structure works twice with two different jobs.

Unipoles also sit at viewing distance. They are read from a few hundred metres away, at speed, which rewards a short message and a large logo, and punishes detail.

A hoarding is one face, and it can be enormous

Hoardings are single-face, which sounds like a limitation until you see the sizes. From our 50 hoardings:

  • Umbrella Beach, Fujairah: 200m x 7m.
  • Flag Island, Khalidiya Street, Sharjah: 180m x 10m.
  • Emirates Road, Sharjah: 120m x 13.5m.
  • Al Khail Road, Dubai: 111m x 12m.
  • Al Zohra roundabout, Ajman: 100m x 11m.

At that width the format stops being a billboard and becomes a piece of the landscape. A 180-metre face is not "a bigger poster": you cannot see all of it at once, so it has to be designed as something the eye travels along, not something it takes in at a glance. The smallest hoardings in the inventory are 30 metres wide, which is a completely different design problem on the same service page.

Where each one is concentrated

The distribution of the sites published on our map is not even, and it is worth knowing before a plan is built:

  • Unipoles and mini unipoles: Sharjah 24, Ajman 22, Fujairah 15, Ras Al Khaimah 14, Dubai 6.
  • Hoardings: Fujairah 13, Dubai 11, Sharjah 11, Ajman 6, Ras Al Khaimah 4, Abu Dhabi 2, Umm Al Quwain 2.

Two things follow. First, a national plan built only on Dubai will miss most of this network. Second, the Northern Emirates are where the density is, which suits brands whose customers live in Sharjah and Ajman and commute into Dubai rather than the reverse.

How to choose, in one question

Does the road carry the same people twice a day?

If yes, a unipole earns its keep, because both faces work and repetition does the rest. If the road is mostly one-directional at the moment that matters, or the objective is a single unmissable statement, the hoarding is the stronger buy and the extra width is the entire point.

Check the face before you commit

Dimensions vary more than any other attribute of these formats, and they change what a design has to do. A 30-metre face and a 180-metre face need different artwork, different type sizes and sometimes different messages entirely.

Every site is published with its dimensions, photograph and map position on the unipole page and the hoarding page, and by emirate on the locations pages, including Sharjah, Dubai and Fujairah. Look at the photograph before the price. It answers more questions.