Digital Billboards: Very Shiny

Since I don’t drive much, I often miss trends like digital billboards:

- Matt Richtel, Electronic Billboards Called Another Driving Distraction

The billboard industry argues that the new signs are part of a larger technological and economic shift to a paperless society (no more crews hoisting and removing ads from billboards) and that they give advertisers more flexibility.

Marketing materials published last year by Clear Channel, one of the nation’s biggest billboard companies, say the digital billboards are, among other things, ideal for posting game scores by advertisers like radio stations and sports bars. News organizations can also use them — “as the Web site headline changes, so does the digital billboard,” the materials say.

”It’s a very flexible, very responsible medium and very impactful,” said Ron Cooper, chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor, which has 450 digital billboards and plans to add 150 more this year. Big corporations that have used them include ABC, AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, General Mills, Ford and Verizon. “Consumers report seeing it, remembering the brand, remembering the advertisers.”

He and others in the industry say they have been careful to make the signs memorable but not distracting. They say the “television on a stick” label is an exaggeration.

“It’s a slide projector — it shows one image after the next,” said Bill Ripp, a vice president who oversees digital billboards for Lamar Advertising, another large billboard company. “We were as concerned as anybody. We wouldn’t want to cause danger.”

So many people are concerned about the dangers of texting while driving, and now, digital billboards, that they forget the elephant in the room: It’s driving that’s dangerous. Let’s get rid of the damn car culture! Then digital billboards would be a cool thing.

Now, that to one side. Let’s take the digital billboards on the highway theme to the extreme.

Imagine that in the near future your car could be outfitted with a transponder of some sort, like the one we use for EZPass toll booth systems. We could opt into ad networks so that when we are driving home late at night, after working too long one evening, all alone on the highway, the ad could be targeted us individually on that big shining billboard.

Or imagine that Sunday afternoon, when a large number of Redskins fans are within sight of a digital billboard, and they opt to show the Redskins game scores. Five minutes later, the traffic is mostly soccer fans, so they get the DC United scores.

Or you could text from your car, and your Twitter message could be displayed next to the scores.

Or they could synchronize a series of displays to target you as you speed along, showing you five different shots of this years Camaro.

All of these things are obviously dangerous, at least to the driver of the car, but so are GPS systems, cell phones, reading while you drive (I have seen that a lot in Southern California), changing clothes while you drive (saw a woman putting on pantyhose while driving, once), applying mascara, eating, making out, and so on.

But putting up giant digital biillboards is an eyesore, and obviously intended to make people look at them. It’s inherently a distraction, while drive-through fast food isn’t. We should outlaw this.