Digital Billboards

Digital Billboard Up Ahead: New-Wave Sign or Hazard?
By LOUISE STORY | The New York Times | January 11, 2007

Their very name once told it all: a board to post notices or advertisements. But billboards are getting a makeover.

Billboard companies are adopting digital technology that rotates advertiser images every six or eight seconds — the better to catch the eye. The new billboards look like television screens, although the images do not move.

The problem, safety experts say, is that the new billboards may work too well, adding yet another distraction for drivers.

There are currently about 400 digital signs across the country. But within 10 years, about 4,000 billboards may be converted, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

The technology has excited both billboard companies, which can generate three to five times more money from the digital signs, and advertisers. Clear Channel Outdoor and Lamar Advertising, which has installed the majority of such billboards, promote the digital signs as more effective at getting consumers to pay attention.

“There’s a perception in the advertising industry that you have to up the ante,” said David Zald, assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. “We see so much information coming at us that for it to actually leap out and capture our attention, one has to go at a more salient level than you used to.”
But, he added, “there’s a trade-off between the advertiser’s need to grab our attention and the actual safety implications of that attention capture.”

The digital signs have also revived a debate in towns and cities that dates to 1965, when the Highway Beautification Act was passed, limiting the number of new billboards that could be erected. Billboard critics have long said the roughly 450,000 billboards in the United States scar the landscape along highways and local roads. Billboard companies counter that they have a right to sell the space.

In fact, billboards are not just for roadsides anymore. Advertisements have been popping up more frequently inside subways and buses, shopping malls, office buildings and airports.

Over the last two years, the category, which the industry refers to as out-of-home advertising, has been second only to the Internet in its growth rates. But it is still dwarfed by television and print. Marketers spent about $6.7 billion on out-of-home ads in 2006, of total ad market spending of $285 billion in the United States, according to estimates by Universal McCann, part of the Interpublic Group.

While the billboard industry says the digital signs are not dangerous, driving safety researchers say there has not been enough research to know for sure. Most driving studies have focused on cellphone use. Still, researchers said the digital signs may tax drivers’ awareness more than old-fashioned static signs.

“In my opinion, they’re definitely distracting,” said Deanna Singhal, research associate at the Traffic Injury Research Foundation, a driving safety group in Ottawa. “It’s going to not only keep their eyes away from the road more, but it’s also more cognitively demanding.”

A study commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration is recommending further research into whether the signs present risks to drivers, said Dale Keyes, who oversaw the research. The study, by the Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, a federal agency in Tucson, will be released in a few weeks. The federal government has also allotted $150,000 for a future study of digital signs.

Meanwhile, the signs are flying up. Lamar Advertising is converting about 28 traditional billboards to digital signs each month, and company executives consider new locations in weekly meetings, said Tommy Teepell, Lamar’s chief marketing officer. The company does not plan to convert all of its roughly 158,000 signs to digital, focusing instead on the ones in the most heavily trafficked areas, he said.

Lamar has so far heard mainly positive reaction, Mr. Teepell said.

“Typically, the response we get is people love it because they’re very attractive,” Mr. Teepell said. “The colors are attractive and the creative looks good. You don’t ever have colors faded in the sun.”

Eileen Furukawa, broadcasting analyst for Citigroup, said profit margins on digital signs can run as high as 70 percent, while static signs have closer to 45 percent profit margins. She is recommending that investors buy Lamar and Clear Channel Outdoor stock.

Digital signs are sold more like TV commercials than traditional billboard signs, ad executives said. Advertisers can buy spots for a single day or for a few hours, rather than weeks at a time as on normal billboards.

“Changeable signage is very much a part of the outdoor landscape as we move forward,” said Jodi Senese, executive vice president of marketing for CBS Outdoor, a division of CBS, which has not yet posted digital signs along highways.

Digital signs, Ms. Senese said, offer “immense creativity, flexibility and targetability for different demographics, which was really never an option for out-of-home advertising.”

Clear Channel Outdoor has created digital billboard networks in six cities, including Milwaukee, Tampa and Albuquerque. The networks can be cued to show the same ads all over the cities at once, mimicking how people usually see the same TV commercials while watching the same shows. Clear Channel Outdoor is also placing TV screens in mall food courts.

Digital billboards are one of the main growth areas for outdoor companies, and what is more, advertisers are eager to sign up, said Paul Meyer, president and chief operating officer of Clear Channel Outdoor. “You can’t avoid it,” Mr. Meyer said. “There’s no mute button. There’s no on-off switch.”

Billboard companies generally have to obtain permits from local governments to convert their signs to digital boards.

Some towns have turned them down; others are negotiating everything from a quota for conventional signs to the brightness of the digital images.

In Syracuse, for example, after passers-by began complaining that a digital sign installed last year was too bright, Lamar was quick to turn it down, said Charles Ladd, the city’s zoning administrator.

Omaha has not allowed digital signs, and does not plan to unless the billboard companies offer to remove multiple conventional signs for each digital sign.
“All they have to do is push a button,” Tom Blair, the city’s planner said, “and they can flash and disturb the motorists.”

Bill Brooks, mayor of Belle Isle, Fla., a town of 6,000 people near Walt Disney World, said he negotiated with Clear Channel Outdoor in December to allow the town’s first digital sign, in part because he does not want to risk entering a protracted legal battle.

As an active member of the National League of Cities, Mr. Brooks said he was well aware of the lawsuits other towns have faced over their billboard regulations. The American Planning Association and the National League of Cities have publicly accused the billboard industry of aggressively suing cities and towns over their billboard regulations.

Indeed, in the last seven years, there have been about 100 cases in federal courts, about three times the amount from 1993 to 2000, said Eric Damian Kelly, professor of urban planning at Ball State University. While almost all the lawsuits have involved traditional signs, the American Planning Association said digital billboards would probably be the next battleground.

Some consumers said the digital billboards provided entertainment on the road.

“I always read them when I drive by,” said Caitlin Neary, 22, who passes a digital sign in Connecticut when she drives to her parents’ house in Fairfield. “I always watch to see it change. It catches your eye more.”

But others said the signs are more distracting than cellphone calls. Lisa Christopher said she nearly had an accident when she first saw a digital billboard in Vestavia Hills, Ala., a suburb of Birmingham. Within days, Ms. Christopher, the former PTA president at a local high school, said she was getting calls from other worried parents.

“It was so bright, it almost jumped out at you,” Ms. Christopher said.

The sign was not up for long. Last month, the Vestavia Hills zoning board told Lamar Advertising to turn it off

Billboards That Look Back

In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.

Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.

Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.

“Everything we do is completely anonymous,” said Paolo Prandoni, the founder and chief scientific officer of Quividi, a two-year-old company based in Paris that is gearing up billboards in the United States and abroad. Quividi and its competitors use small digital billboards, which tend to play short videos as advertisements, to reach certain audiences.

Over Memorial Day weekend, a Quividi camera was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.

“I didn’t see that at all, to be honest,” said Sam Cocks, a 26-year-old lawyer, when the camera was pointed out to him by a reporter. “That’s disturbing. I would say it’s arguably an invasion of one’s privacy.”

Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative.

Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.

“I guess one would expect that if you go into a closed store, it’s very likely you’d be under surveillance, but out here on the street?” Mr. Cocks asked. At the least, he said, there should be a sign alerting people to the camera and its purpose.

Quividi’s technology has been used in Ikea stores in Europe and McDonald’s restaurants in Singapore, but it has just come to the United States. Another Quividi billboard is in a Philadelphia commuter station with an advertisement for the Philadelphia Soul, an indoor football team. The Philadelphia billboard was installed by Motomedia, a London-based company that converts retail and street space into advertisements. It installed the A&E billboard in association with Pearl Media, a Butler, N.J., company.

“I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

“You could make them conspicuous,” he said of video cameras. “But nobody really wants to do that because the more people know about it, the more it may freak them out or they may attempt to avoid it.”

And the issue gets thornier: the companies that make these systems, like Quividi and TruMedia Technologies, say that with a slight technological addition, they could easily store pictures of people who look at their cameras.

The companies say they do not plan to do this, but Mr. Tien said he thought their intentions were beside the point. The companies are not currently storing video images, but they could if compelled by something like a court order, he said.

For now, “there’s nothing you could go back to and look at,” said George E. Murphy, the chief executive of TruMedia who was previously a marketing executive at DaimlerChrysler. “All it needs to do is look at the audience, process what it sees and convert that to digital fields that we upload to our servers.”

TruMedia’s technology is an offshoot of surveillance work for the Israeli government. The company, whose slogan is “Every Face Counts,” is testing the cameras in about 30 locations nationwide. One TruMedia client is Adspace Networks, which runs a network of digital screens in shopping malls and is testing the system at malls in Chesterfield, Mo., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Monroeville, Pa. Adspace’s screens show a mix of content, like the top retail deals at the mall that day, and advertisements for DVDs, movies or consumer products.

Within advertising circles, these camera systems are seen as a welcome answer to the longstanding problem of how to measure the effectiveness of billboards, and how to figure out what audience is seeing them. On television, Nielsen ratings help marketers determine where and when commercials should run, for example. As for signs on highways, marketers tend to use traffic figures from the Transportation Department; for pedestrian billboards, they might hire someone to stand nearby and count people as they walk by.

The Internet, though, where publishers and media agencies can track people’s clicks for advertising purposes, has raised the bar on measurement. Now, it is prodding billboards into the 21st century.

“Digital has really changed the landscape in the sort of accuracy we can get in terms of who’s looking at our creative,” Guy Slattery, senior vice president for marketing for A&E, said of Internet advertising. With Quividi, Mr. Slattery said, he hoped to get similar information from what advertisers refer to as the out-of-home market.

“We’re always interested in getting accurate data on the audience we’re reaching,” he said, “and for out-of-home, this promises to give a level of accuracy we’re not used to seeing in this medium.”

Industry groups are scrambling to provide their own improved ways of measuring out-of-home advertising. An outdoor advertising association, the Traffic Audit Bureau, and a digital billboard and sign association, the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, are both devising more specific measurement standards that they plan to release by the fall.

Even without cameras, digital billboards encounter criticism. In cities like Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, outdoor advertising companies face opposition from groups that call their signs unsightly, distracting to drivers and a waste of energy.

There is a dispute over whether digital billboards play a role in highway accidents, and a national study on the subject is expected to be completed this fall by a unit of the Transportation Research Board. The board is part of a private nonprofit institution, the National Research Council.

Meanwhile, privacy concerns about cameras are growing. In Britain, which has an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras — one for every 14 people — the matter has become a hot political issue, with some legislators proposing tight restrictions on the use and distribution of the footage.

Reactions to the A&E billboard in Manhattan were mixed. “I don’t want to be in the marketing,” said Antwann Thomas, 17, a high school junior, after being told about the camera. “I guess it’s kind of creepy. I wouldn’t feel safe looking at it.”

But other passers-by shrugged. “Someone down the street can watch you looking at it — why not a camera?” asked Nathan Lichon, 25, a Navy officer.

Walter Peters, 39, a truck driver for a dairy, said: “You could be recorded on the street, you could be recorded in a drugstore, whatever. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s cameras everywhere.”