Interactive Billboards
Think of them as billboards 2.0. Where traditional hoardings flapping paper promoting outdated products once stood, digital adverts are now watching you watching them. Think you can ignore them? Think again. The latest ads use smells and 3-D visuals to catch your attention, even beaming sound messages to cut through the clamour of a busy street.
Whereas advertisers were once happy simply to place posters for doughnuts near police stations, they now insist on knowing who is viewing their adverts. Companies such as Quividi, a French marketing technology firm, are happy to oblige.
Quividi installs camera systems in billboards and a computer analyses passers-by. We know this many people have walked in front of the screen, how many turned to face the ad, and how long they looked at it, says Paolo Prandoni, Quividis chief scientific officer. We can even tell their gender with an accuracy of 85% and measure who approaches to find out more.
Quividi has digital adverts that change depending on whether a man or woman is watching and is working on upgrading its system to detect different ages and even family groups. The company insists no data are permanently recorded.
One customer of Quividi is Motomedia, a Glasgow advertising agency that specialises in interactive shop windows. A campaign for the ITV show Pushing Daisies used sound, video and even a vent pumping out the smell of freshly cut grass, all controlled by Quividis technology.
Kenny Maclean, Motomedias founder, says: This is a society where all businesses measure the performance of consumers. Audience measurement showed that our original static advert wasnt effective, so we put the video on a four-minute loop.
Holosonic, a US technology company, is taking the idea one step further. It has developed the Audio Spotlight, a system that fires a beam of sound onto a small area from a distance of more than 60ft. The effect, the company claims, is to startle and entertain pedestrians without being audible to anyone outside the zone.
If that wasnt intrusive enough, three Xscape ski centres are the first UK locations to use 3-D ads with images that jump out 2ft from the screen.
Can we expect 3-D soap packets and jingles beamed into our heads as we commute to work? Roadside billboards require planning permission that can be refused on the grounds of road safety or local amenity hurdles that video screens and sound beams are unlikely to clear. High street shopping is another matter. A legal loophole means even noisy, smelly shop windows dont require planning permission, just a local authority advertising permit.
One scrap of comfort comes from Bill Wilson of the Outdoor Advertising Association. We did see talking posters in the past, he says, and the number of complaints was incredible.
