Some signage is about catching the eye as you drive or walk past.  But one way to increase the advertising component is to place your screens where you have natural DWELL TIME.   If you can catch the viewer in an environment where they are stuck for a few minutes and you can offer a compelling and interesting thing to watch then you have video real estate you can sell.   And for those scenarios a three panel layout works well.   The viewers are used to it.  In fact, they are probably used to getting useful information from those side panels.    Those applications are about monetizing the signage efforts as well as providing a nicer customer experience.  Fancy displays (circular, tiled, whatever) may attract more interest initially, but they cost more than the commodity 16:9 displays that are commonly used now.  Increasing costs without a sustainable increase in revenue detracts from the ROI.  If you’re in it for the long haul then you ignore that at your own peril.

That said, there’s so many other opportunities for signage.  And many of those are special to the location or venue.  I would agree with Nate that in many of those cases novel formats are needed.  A traditional three panel display format in those venues looks silly – like the operator is stuck back in the 90s and isn’t with it yet.  The latest innovations in signage are great for our industry and I love to see them.   But I think that as our industry grows up we will start to see a growing awareness of market segmentation and categories of signage.  And what works perfectly well in one won’t work at all in another.  I look forward to the learning process.