Signs of the Times
Driving down the Sunset Strip, you spot a video billboard advertising a hybrid SUV. Intrigued, you press a button on your dashboard that immediately downloads a spate of information into your handheld computer. At the Beverly Center, you stroll by an advertising kiosk that senses your gender, approximate age and personal style, then flashes an ad for a store that fits your demographic. During the interminable wait for an elevator at Century City Towers, you pass the time by reading the newspaper--ads and all--on an electronic ink board mounted on the wall.
These scenarios may be coming to a billboard near you sooner than you think, thanks to technology that’s making outdoor advertising more eye-grabbing, more interactive, smarter and definitely more in your face. Already, video boards have changed the Los Angeles landscape--three dot the Sunset Strip, and one sits atop an office building on Wilshire Boulevard near Western Avenue. The intersection of La Brea and Santa Monica boulevards, currently a visual yawner of a location, is targeted to get a video billboard as part of a new gateway entrance to West Hollywood. In addition, video-projected ads on sides of buildings are popping up around the city, and plans for Hollywood’s ongoing face-lift include proposals for video movie marquees and rooftop neon signs.
The board boom is happening at a time when we’re bombarded by advertising images--some say as many as 3,000 a day. While the push to create attention-grabbing boards hasn’t escaped skepticism and controversy, even within the advertising world, the march to develop new forms and formats continues:
* LED billboards (like those on the Sunset Strip). Using light-emitting diodes, their colorful moving images look like videos and can be viewed day or night. The boards can show full-motion images or rotate a series of static ads, the latter often preferred by outdoor advertising companies since they don’t require several seconds of undivided attention. Images also can be regulated via computer to accommodate changing target audiences--commuters during drive time, cruisers and club-hoppers at night, families on weekends.
* Interactive outdoor ads. These offer information that can be downloaded into PDAs; in Manhattan, a company called Streetbeam set up 100 street-level kiosks in the Financial District that allowed pedestrians to download messages from various companies. Among them were auction schedules for Sotheby’s, which reported 250 downloads from 10 kiosks during one month. Jim Allman, Sotheby’s vice president of worldwide marketing, saw the trial as promising: “Sure, I’d have loved it if it had been 2 million, but that would have been pretty unrealistic.” He said he thinks the company reached its target audience and would use the tactic again.
* Scrolling ads. Century City Shopping Center, among others, already displays posters that scroll inside frames, and the technology may be utilized on billboards as soon as next year.
* Electronic ink. This burgeoning technology is expected to be more adaptable than ink on paper but can have a similar appearance. Ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry, which then forms a pattern of pixels. These microcapsules are suspended in a liquid “carrier medium” that can be printed using existing screen-printing processes onto virtually any surface, including glass, plastic, fabric and even paper. Its main application currently is in e-books, but it is being tested for in-store displays. Applying the technology to billboards is more than a year away, says Jeff Sandgren, director of market development for the Cambridge, Mass.-based E Ink Corp.
* Video projection. Although it seems a natural for advertising, especially in L.A., where commercial building wall space is abundant, up till now cost has made it nearly prohibitive. That may change soon thanks to a new Hollywood-based company, Firefly Imaging Inc., an offshoot of Angstrom Stage Lighting Inc. Firefly Imaging has devised a new, less-expensive projection system that also produces less heat and therefore is more efficient.
* 3-D billboards. While not exactly cutting edge, these too have received a boost from new technology. Atomic Props & Effects Ltd., a Minnesota-based company that produces 3-D boards, was able to create a giant moving Miller beer bottle on the Sunset Strip, thanks to new lightweight materials and computers that activate the rising bottle cap.
Los Angeles isn’t likely to turn into “Blade Runner” overnight, however, with those bleak images of downtown skyscrapers transformed into huge video screens and floating billboards moving silently throughout the city. The sprawling nature of L.A. and our addiction to cars will probably never get us as close to this as Times Square, which already hosts enormous video boards, LED signals and multiple neon images and scrolling text signs.
Still, the future of billboards in L.A. is a hot topic. Last December, the City Council voted to ban any new boards, but it is considering a proposal to remove some existing boards in neighborhoods and allow outdoor advertising companies to put up new boards alongside freeways in the city. Although new development projects may petition for signage, there’s no precedent for an existing static board changing to a video board. The ban hasn’t stopped outdoor advertising companies and ad agencies from speculating on how billboard technology will eventually alter the urban environment. They agree, however, that while the future might be delayed a bit, it’ll be here eventually.
“The new forms are going to move and twitch and twitter at us; they’re going to have laser projections and sound, and all kinds of things will happen,” says Jeff Goodby, co-founder and co-creative director of Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the well-known San Francisco-based ad agency responsible for the “Got Milk?” ads, the phenomenally successful campaign based on two words and clever images. “If there’s anyplace it will catch on, it’s L.A., because everybody’s in their cars and it’s a great place for outdoor advertising. It’s accepted, it’s sort of embraced.”
Goodby finds these twitchy boards “attractive canvases to mess around with. I think there are ways to make that stuff alluring but not offensive.”
Nevertheless, ad execs aren’t all racing to book the nearest high-tech board for their clients, many of them preferring to take a cautious approach to what’s happening in the industry. Candice Chen, associate director for Venice-based TBWA/Chiat/Day, stays abreast of new developments but doesn’t see the new boards fitting every client: “It depends on the individual client, their objectives, their creativity, how much risk they’re willing to take.”
Advertisers “are so desperate to cut through the clutter that they’ll push the envelope in terms of what’s the most attention-getting thing,” says Warren Berger, author of “Advertising Today” (Phaidon Press, 2001). “There’s been a general revival of billboards. ... The feeling used to be that you’d just pass a billboard by on the road, and you had a better chance on TV. Now, people have the ability to zap commercials, and billboards can’t be zapped.”
Flashy, moving images attract attention, but can they hold it? A full-motion ad can demand five seconds of concentration, a lot to ask of a pedestrian, much less a driver, for whom that distraction could prove fatal. So far so good on the Strip: Lt. Buddy Goldman of the L.A. Sheriffs’ West Hollywood Station, who patrols the boulevard, reports that since 1996, when the first video board was unveiled there, the medium has “never been a contributing factor of any traffic accident on Sunset Boulevard.”
Going national, particularly into suburban and rural areas, will be also be a test for new forms of street advertisements. For now the expense of such technology has made it the domain almost exclusively of deep-pocketed companies such as Nike, Apple and Coca-Cola, but as prices come down, there’s no telling where high-tech boards could land. An outcry seems inevitable: “I suspect they won’t be stopped until they occupy the landscape to a degree that people find them troublesome,” Goodby says. “That’s when people will speak up. But I don’t think anything is going to stop it.”
A sketchy timeline for the advent of new technology makes it difficult to predict a definite date when we’ll start seeing high-tech boards. Some say interactive billboards are a mere six months away; doubters say they heard that prediction two years ago. City ordinances may keep moving or interactive boards at bay for years.
Diane Cimine, executive vice president of marketing for the Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America, doesn’t believe flat, static boards are in any danger of extinction: “Each of these applications provides a unique kind of anchor to a campaign in a memorable way. The wave of the future is not in replacing regular billboards. This is an enhancement, an extra added effect.”
Old and new ideas for billboards are being integrated into the ongoing renovation of the Hollywood Entertainment District, an 18-block area along Hollywood Boulevard between La Brea Boulevard and Gower Street. Paul Prejza, principal of the Culver City-based design and architecture firm Sussman/Prejza & Co., is in charge of signage for the area; his proposal includes reintroducing rooftop neon signs like those of the area’s glory days in the 1920s and ‘30s, putting motion LED boards onto theater marquees (the income would help subsidize the theaters), placing tall walls on blank-sided buildings and offering companies taking up at least 12,000 feet of office space their own display.
“The variety of different techniques is what’s going to make it rich,” Prejza says. “Who knows what we might have in the future--maybe holograms floating in space.”
But when is enough enough? Prejza says the Hollywood district’s focus on entertainment makes it an ideal area for high-tech signage. “Hollywood Boulevard is a scenic drive, and it has to be paced,” he says. “You have to have excitement and then a calm moment. A city is obviously not just advertising.”
Advertising, he argues, is just “a way of communicating, and if those people who are advertising are communicating well and in a way that’s not turning people off, then that will keep the overload at bay. People still believe that this is a glamorous place, and part of this is trying to bring back some of that glamour.”
