An Amber Alert in action

At the end of October 2008 I found myself with quite a few hours to spare as I waited in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport for a connecting flight. Having never been to Chicago, I hopped on a train that was heading for the city. On the journey I stared out the window and among the many sites I saw was a billboard displaying what is known as an AMBER Alert™.

The AMBER Alert Program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases. The goal of an AMBER Alert™ is to instantly galvanize the entire community to assist in the search for and the safe recovery of a child.

This creative use of a billboard got me thinking about how the Billboard medium is evolving, and how with the help of technology, the Billboard is becoming an effective Direct Response channel. Here are a few examples of how technology is breathing new life into the Billboard:

SMS activated billboards.

To coincide with their Pinball themed TV Commercial for the Ford Fiesta, Ogilvy & Mather created Interactive Billboards in Belgium that offered passers-by the opportunity to win a Ford. The Billboard worked like this; each passer-by would send an SMS with his/her first name to a short code and indicating the code on the billboard. This allowed Ogilvy to not only collect user data but also track which billboard sites were generating the most response.

Once the passer-by has sent the initial SMS message the billboard replies and sends another SMS with a question. If the recipient answers correctly, the billboard reacts like a winning pinball machine and the passer-by is included in the draw to win a Ford Fiesta. For every incorrect answer sent by text message, the pinball machine displays a ‘tilt’ message.

Face Recognition Software and Billboards.

For anyone who has a relatively new digital camera, you’ll notice little boxes picking out faces on the view screen before the camera captures the image. This basic, and more affordable, form of face recognition is now being applied to Billboards by engineers at Microsoft, who have developed a prototype advertising system that uses a small camera to determine a viewer’s gender in order to select an appropriate ad to display.

NEC has also developed a similar system, which utilises mobile technology in a rather clever way. The viewer stands in front of the billboard and sees the advertising message chosen by the software… if the user wishes they could then place their phone over a reader attached to the billboard and have a coupon sent to their phone. NEC calls this system ‘Digital Signage Solution,’ combining their advertisement delivery and display system with their advertising value measurement system.

This allows NEC to deliver advertisements in accordance with conditions such as geographical areas, time and attributes of target clients. It can also measure advertising effect, focusing on whether the people who saw the advertisement showed interest or whether the advertisement stimulated the viewer to purchase.

Frequency adjusted messaging.

If you’ve ever driven in the States you’ll know that you can’t drive down any highway without being bombarded with advertising messages. Being in your car will in no way let you escape from the advancements that are being applied to Billboards, as technology is now available that monitors the radio frequencies of passing cars.

This allows not only for such things as traffic alerts and AMBER Alerts™, but also for local radio stations to synchronise adverts played on the station with adverts that are shown on the billboards. It also allows national advertisers to have messages displayed to cars based on the demographics applied to the listeners of particular radio stations.

Criticisms of the new advancements in Billboards

There are a number of criticisms being aimed at the new advancements being applied to Billboards, which range from concerns over privacy to light pollution and how much energy is needed to power what are essentially huge television screens.

So far with regards to privacy, campaigns conducted so far have always required user opt-in, so have in no-way proved to be intrusive.

A solar powered billboard

To ensure the costs for running these new billboards are kept to a minimum, many of them are now being powered by their own solar panels. An electricity supplier from California has installed the first electric energy-generating billboard in the U.S. This device produces energy with the help of 20 solar panels, which are placed on its roof.

These solar powered billboards have also been used to counter the argument about light pollution. Some Digital Billboards have been set to actually shut down once the sun sets, thus allowing residents in urban areas some rest-bite from being bombarded with technicolour sales messages.

Digital Billboards are the future.

It’s clear that these technological advancements with Billboards are here to stay and can both intensify and strengthen a brand that utilises their Direct Response capabilities. The attraction to advertisers is that you can conduct a seamless trackable campaign that someone can interact with on the high-street that then sends them a follow-up email or SMS/MMS.

If you’d like to know more about Digital Billboards and the future of Advertising… why not give Red C a call on 0161 872 1361 or click here

Tags: Amber Alert, Billboards, Digital 48-Sheets, Digital Agency Manchester, Digital Billboards, Direct Marketing, Direct Response Advertising, Face Recognition Software, Future of Advertising, Interactive Advertising, Interactive Billboards, Interactive Marketing, Manchester Advertising Agency, SMS Marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Blog, Creativity, Marketing, Marketing Innovations, Tomorrow's World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.