Billboards That Know You

Promethus · December 15, 2003, 20:47

Billboards That Know You
By JENNIFER BARRIOS

Published: December 14, 2003

Does it sometimes seem as if the billboards you pass on your daily commute are targeted to appeal to people exactly like you? Well, depending on where you drive, it could be that the billboards are listening in on your car radio as you drive past. Using a specially equipped dish manufactured by Mobiltrak, a Phoenix company, advertisers are now able to detect which radio stations drivers are listening to and then alter the messages on their electronic billboards to match the demographic that clusters around those stations.

There are only a handful of these responsive signs in operation so far. Smart Sign Media, based in Sacramento, is using Mobiltrak technology on five billboards in California. One is near Future Ford, a car-and-truck dealership off I-80 in Roseville, Calif. Using the information collected by the Mobiltrak device, Future Ford knows that on weekdays that stretch of I-80 carries a lot of drivers who listen to country-and-western stations, so that's when the dealership advertises the Ford F-150, a popular pickup truck. Evening drivers, Mobiltrak has found, are more apt to listen to talk radio and adult contemporary, so they see ads for Tauruses and Escorts.

Mobiltrak's technology relies on a little-known fact about car radios: they don't just receive signals; they also emit them. A car radio tunes to a particular station by mixing the signal from the ether with its own internally generated signal. It's that faint internal signal that the Mobiltrak dish picks up.

Right now, the device works something like a Nielsen survey -- it picks up a sampling of passing radios and then calculates patterns of listenership. But the technology is improving, and the targeting is getting faster. Mobiltrak plans to introduce a digital version next year, and when it does, the billboards will be able to react nearly instantly to the demographic patterns of drivers in the area, switching the ads it displays to target drivers ever more precisely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/ma...ILLBOARDS.html

Kuciwalker · December 15, 2003, 20:57

*remembers Minority Report*

Ming · December 15, 2003, 20:57

It is really great technology... I've seen a few presentations on it, and it's absolutely amazing. However, it still has it's flaws. The type of people traveling on a specific stretch of highway varies dramatically by time of day... and the new digital version will be able to deal with it. In Chicago, the early early morning crowd is mostly Stocks/Bonds traders and Construction workers... The slightly later morning crowd is your classic mid level to senior level white color worker... after 9am, you get more truckers, and soccer moms... the digital version will be able to adapt quickly to the changes... however, it will be interesting to see what message in the early morning gets priority... BMW's for the financial community... or F150's for the construction workers and tradesmen

Kuciwalker · December 15, 2003, 20:59

We just need a Conquests ad

mrmitchell · December 15, 2003, 21:03

I wonder how easy it would be to **** with this kind of thing. For example, leave 100 portable radios next to it that are all tuned to a specific station.

Japher · December 15, 2003, 21:06

Great!

First we spam Poly, now we want to spam the highways? No thanks!

Bugs ****ing Bunny · December 16, 2003, 13:23

It creates interesting legal questions. For example, what if a billboard you approach suddenly starts offering you scat videos and treatments for herpes?

Under UK law, publicly displaying personal adverts derived from retail habits would probably breach the Data Protection Act.

General Ludd · December 16, 2003, 13:28

Quote:

Originally posted by Japher
Great!

First we spam Poly, now we want to spam the highways? No thanks!

Spam the spammers!

alva · December 16, 2003, 13:31

I'd rather see a future without any advertising.
Auch, that really must be a tough concept to compute.

chequita guevara · December 16, 2003, 13:58

That's definately going to open itself up for some culture jamming. http://www.adbusters.org/

Agathon · December 16, 2003, 14:55

On the bright side what this means is less advertising.

At present I am bombarded with thousands of advertisements for women's beauty products, something I have no interest in and would never buy. The advertisers are wasting millions of dollars showing advertisements for this kind of thing to people like me. They're wasting their time and mine. It's about as good a case of massive inefficiency as one could find.

Presumably, if the means of delivering advertising became more efficient, companies would have to spend less on it and prices would go down.

General Ludd · December 16, 2003, 15:10

Quote:

Originally posted by Agathon

Presumably, if the means of delivering advertising became more efficient, companies would have to spend less on it and prices would go down.

Yeah, right. More efficiency just means more output.

They'll spend the same and build twice the billboards with their savings.