Billboards are an old but booming ad medium | Hacker News Reader

Billboards are an old but booming ad medium

economist.com

55 pointsjkuria43 comments

Well I think there's an important thing to be mentioned here (something that I believe Nielsen stated in the past), which clogged the mind of many marketers - the effectiveness of a medium isn't bound to an action.

An ad doesn't need to be clicked, or have any form of interaction, to be effective, because there's no correlation between clicks and brand impact/recall.

It's like for years brands were buying snake oil and online advertising brought the truth forward, and was the only truly transparent medium - backed by data. Funny enough it has been increasingly showing itself as nothing but transparent... fortunately there are tools and organizations focused to help clear these waters (with ad fraud and viewability metrics).

Anyway, this all goes to say that, depending on the brand, a proper media mix for a brand communication strategy is quite complex. For a long time there has been data to back it up (though admittedly not the most accurate one - but still, it had something to support it).

In some countries radio is audited by declarative studies for example - it's far from perfect, and it has room to improve - but it's not a blind pick based on gut feeling.

Online advertising just created this odd gap between marketers and traditional media. Maybe because the barrier to access online advertising was lower, both in terms of cost as well as to the medium itself... but it has always been in use.

For an instance, luxury goods never stopped investing in OOH... Apple positions itself near such OOH communication as well, for a long time.

So, it's good media owners are focused on improving the measurement of this medium, and maybe should focus as well on the way it's bought (though they seem to do fine without the bidding system of online advertising).

> An ad doesn't need to be clicked, or have any form of interaction, to be effective, because there's no correlation between clicks and brand impact/recall.

With billboards there is an implicit "click" in a way for every car that drives by. It is shoved into their faces, whether they want to or not. At least online, you can block ads. So the action is a car driving by. With some modeling could guess how many average cars would drive on that particular segment. A billboard on a rural road might be worth a lot less than one one say I-90 or I-75.

With magazines it's the same, they know how may subscribers it was sent to, so there was always some modeling around number of impressions made. How well that's correlated to the people interested, and then people who went and bought something because of it is probably where most of the snake oil is.

Another interesting thing is that online, users don't have to just block click, but they can actively subvert the click-based metrics by generating false clicks. Which this extension does:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/

No, there is not an implicit click. There’s an implicit impression. The online ad business has long counted and valued clicks and impressions separately.

Ah you're right. A click would indicate user is interested while an impression is that they just saw it.

Just to add that a click can be a mistake as well, or can even not be a human click... one has to be very critical when checking this data.

You can generate interest and just trigger an impression (depending on the creative).

> Maybe because the barrier to access online advertising was lower, both in terms of cost as well as to the medium itself

You mentioned about this offhandedly, but this is one of the main reasons for current landscape. For companies without a massive revenue/profit and marketing budget, which is most of them, investing a large chunk of money into something that "maybe" works is a hard decision. Heck, even hiring someone who has a track record of delivering good off line marketing result is probably out of reach for them.

Think of it this way, before online ads, how do small companies market their product/service to non-local customers?

Well it might have been a poor choice of words, but there was also a time where online advertising was a mayhem with no centralized inventory - it just evolved very quickly.

Well before online ads and a DIY (or in house) media buying for small companies, there used to be agencies that would help with this - media agencies exist for quite some time... but outside of this, I guess it would depend on the product/service. Basically they had centrals to buy media space a "re-sell" it.

Other then that, you had to go POS (Point of Sale) communication, or go to someone who bought and managed media (agencies).

I've noticed that the biggest online advertisers are rarely the largest advertisers overall.

Sure, there are airlines that target travelers and travel sites. But I've only once seen a Coca-Cola or McDonald's ad, for two examples. Yet these are massive companies who seem to only advertise offline.

There's a reason for this. They didn't get to become enormous companies by having stupid marketing departments. They know more about advertising than anyone at AdWords or Exponential or Federated.

The advertisers I see online are smaller companies, and internet companies advertising at each other. The only times I see a big brand advertise online, it's when the ad has been very carefully placed on very specific websites that match what the brand offers.

Well I guess that depends a lot from market to market. For example, here in Portugal both Coca Cola and McDonalds use youtube a lot (well coca cola used to advertise more overall, now, not so much - maybe because other brands present no threat in this market).

But mass market companies can afford the "waste" broad media has, and can afford frequency - so they pump a lot of GRPs to achieve their goals... a lot of reach and quite some frequency.

It's worth noting that even in the US, billboards are not universal, but a conscious choice of local voters. Four US states prohibit them: Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska. It's possibly interesting that all of these states also have excellent reputations for scenic beauty.

Here's a Vermont Public Radio story from 2008 about how they were banned in 1968: https://vprarchive.vpr.net/vpr-news/billboard-ban-turns-40/. Interestingly, it was mostly a Republican party initiative, although it eventually gained enough bipartisan support to pass.

Just an anecdotal add-on to this, but when driving through South Dakota, I encountered more billboards than I'd previously seen in my entire life.

...and half of them were probably for Wall Drug! ;-)

Oh god so many for Wall Drug. The funny thing is that I have no idea what Wall Drug is, just that it was ahead... Until it wasn't.

>a conscious choice of local voters

I think you've inverted it; the removal is a conscious choice. The presence is simply a default at this point (I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who has even considered that they were something to be banned).

Some cities prohibit billboards, too. And some places only allow them along freeways, or prohibit them only along freeways. Or restrict their size, color, intensity, how often they change, etc...

It's a very messy space. I don't envy their lawyers.

>It's possibly interesting that all of these states also have excellent reputations for scenic beauty.

They all have large tourism industries based off of said scenic beauty and want to protect it. This is openly stated.

For what it’s worth, I find out about every new tv show and movie almost exclusively from billboards. While tough to measure, they have an affect.

I still remember the excitement the first time I saw a URL on a billboard, probably 1995, and it was for a sci-fi movie (although which, I no longer remember).

So, in my hometown of Austin, Texas, there are numerous billboards which once had advertisements, which in recent years go unused. Typically they will put up a public service announcement or just a random piece of art, but it's clear they'd rather be renting it to a paying customer. I am suspicious of the idea of a billboard "boom".

Could be from mismanagement of the company that runs the billboards. People don't just call in and ask (usually) and want to buy a spot...you have a sales team and they go out and sell them spots.

Anecdotal evidence may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.

True, but “boom” has a meaning. The Austin market looks like a bust. Could it be that a company that sells outdoor ads is pushing a narrative?

It could also be that the entire world isn't Austin.

> It could also be that the entire world isn't Austin

I'm saying that it is. If the Austin outdoor ad market looks weak, anecdotally, then it is probably weak everywhere and this article is a lie. Why can't the article just be a lie? That seems like a better use of everyone's time. Just assume the article is a lie and move on

Yeah that was my exact thought; this looks like a puff piece paid for by a billboard company. But, I have no proof of that, because how could I, but it smells fishy.

PSAs are used by marketers to a/b test performance, so those likely were still from a paying customer.

How does that work though? There's a giant billboard by me that has a daddy slime monster and a son slime monster and it says something along the lines of "Take time to be a dad today".

How does a marketing company go about measuring the impact that billboard has on how many dads spent more time being dads?

You have a location in Denver and one in Boulder. Buy a billboard outside of each town, but outside of Denver put up a PSA and outside of Boulder put a real ad. Look at revenue growth between stores 1 year later and you can see the impact of a billboard.

Oversimplified of course, and this doesn't work with 2 locations, but with 200 you can start to make more solid conclusions.

(I use PSAs to test digital marketing so I'm sure its different, but you pretty much just use PSAs as a control group)

Well, the physical world is the last place where I still have to see ads. So I guess if you want to appeal to an adblock-using demographic, it might make sense.

Indeed.

It's actually kind of funny that here in London, we want to encourage people to take the train, but we simultaneously scream at them that they're too fat, poor, and bald.

It's funny that the UK is one of the most expensive places in the world to catch a train, and when we do we're bombarded with advertising the entire time.

Actually, perhaps "funny" isn't the right word...

I posted about this in another thread. In order to delete all advertising from TfL services (~5% of revenue) my bus fare would go from 1.50 to 1.58.

Of course, immediately after that, someone brought up the fact that they can't afford 8 pence. I figure they must have spent it all on hair loss products from the advertising.

the city where i live banned every single billboard/outdoor advertisement[1] and, imho, it was one of the best ideas our local government had.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

When I drive across Germany, England, and Ireland, I rarely ever see a billboard.

Are there any tools online to see billboard density maps per country?

In England billboards tend to be in urban areas and not, so much, on major roads. There is legislation which prevents this, on safety grounds, [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/advertisements#considerations-af...] which has led to a few innovative workarounds such as large vans parked in fields near to motorways with signs on the side.

One person used a redundant rocket transporter as an innovative alternative and got a fair amount of publicity in return. https://www.lingscars.com/missile-truck

Tangential question: has anyone here used billboards before to advertise a web-based product or service? How did you track conversions (special phone number, url, sms address, etc)? Have you found them effective at targeting a particular segment of the market or for pushing a particular niche?

Sydney buses have ads for various tech brands - Salesforce, Xero (I think?) and a couple more I can't remember. If you think 'enterprise software' it's mostly brands in that category. The fact that I can remember some of the brands means it's working I guess, but I can't speak to your actual question.

Lots of tech companies use billboards along US 101 in the SF Bay Area.

Roadads (https://www.roadads.de/, I can't seem to find an English version of the site) is an interesting idea of trying to apply some of these tactics, but adds location to the mix. Eg. advertising for a specific restaurant at the next exit. They're giant e-ink displays though instead of LCDs. That could probably be used stationary too, anywhere full color ads are less important.

I've seen flower company billboards all over SF. Surprisingly it has to work as I've heard from my friends that there is buzz about them.

Another form of tracking people. Wifi/Bluetooth and IMSI catchers? Is there any business without intrusive forms of surveillance today?

By the way, there is an interesting discussion about this on Capital & Growth:

https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1334/are-billboards-r...

Cannabis companies are limited to only a few means of advertising so billboards are one of the best. FlowerCompany is finding strong results using them too.

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