Foursquare and billboards: checkin for dogfood.

This is an interesting example of how you can leverage a location based service like foursquare to make your billboard ads more engaging: every time you check in at the billboard location, a dispenser – part of the „interactive“ billboard – releases some GranataPet dogfood.

Of course, you could have chosen SMS or Bluetooth as a way to interact with the billboard. But in that case, there wouldn’t have been any connection with the social network of the target audience. Using foursquare, the dog owners could inform not only their foursquare friends, but also their facebook friends and their twitter followers of the new way to access GranataPet dogfood…

(thanks)

Always read the fine print in advertising

In the following billboard, the price for a car rental is marked at 129.- Euros:

And as you can see, in the fine print, it says that at airports Sixt charges an extra 19%, i.e. 153,31 Euros in total. Why not you might ask – and I agree, why not. Let them charge what they want, where they want.

But I do ask, why they put up a billboard with this fine print copy AT THE AIRPORT? Yes, I took that picture at the airport in Hamburg!

Why did they not simply put up a billboard with the „real“ price for that location?

Measuring billboard viewers‘ eyeballs

There is a new technology, that counts the eyeballs that are viewing a billboard. And not just the ones close to it:

Xuuk eyebox2 is a $999 portable device with a camera that monitors eye movements and automatically detects when you are looking at it from up to about 35 feet away. Until now, Vertegaal says, such eye-trackers have been ineffective beyond 2 feet, required people to remain stationary and cost more than $25,000

Another example of classical media becoming measurable. Even better than the internet, where you still can’t measure eyeballs, only pageviews – yet you don’t know if the person really saw your ad.
(found at here)