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Smart Billboards
djdanlib writes "The New York Times ran this story Sunday about the Mobiltrak smart billboard system. It works by detecting what radio station you're listening to as you pass by a billboard, then displaying advertisements targeted at that station's demographic. It's kind of like a real-time Nielsen Ratings system for radio. And it's entirely passive, requiring no special hardware in your car - it receives the faint tuning signal generated by your radio." We've mentioned these before.
Is the Howard Stern show still on the radio these days? That could get dangerous.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Talk about blipverts...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Finally a way to get back at all of those stupid SUV driver!
Stuck in bumper to bumper traffic...SUV cuts you off.
Broadcast message to billboard: "Man in Silver SUV with license plate 12345 has no pants on, is currently drinking, and likes to beat small puppies".
Sig it.
Smart Billboards, Dumb Advertising.
uh, people who want traffic reports? People who want to listen to the news or weather?
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
here
Umm..if my radio isn't on will I get a message.."Switch on your radio stupid moron! I am not getting any signal. I gotta play some ad for you"
Just a general Q and O...
How well would these wok in high traffic areas? I could see something like this in Kansas or some other place where you have time to hit the reciver, change the ad and such, but in a high traffic area?...would it try to pick up if you driving a Ford POS or a Beemer and then chose the ad based on that?
What if I am listening to Art Bell? Would it show me an ad for the latest book on Shadow Gov? Jim Rome? How to have a take a not suck? Kim Kommando? Your a loser and need to return your computer right now? Top 40? All you $$$ belong to us - The RIAA? (off topic rant I know)
Seriously, seeing an ever changing sign in a high speed/high traffic zone is an pile-up just begging to happen. I would hope they keep these kind of things in areas where concentration can be peoperly applied to them without the detriment to overall driving situation.
(This post too sucky to spehl cheq...)
I was thinking before I posted, "What happens when there's bumper-to-bumper traffic; how do you target every car when they move that slowly?"
But then I got to thinking: could you drop a radio next to the billboard and amp the faint tuning signal, so, say, all the people listening to top 40 see ads targeted toward NPR listeners?
I guess this is theoretically possible. Funny how every new advertising technology begs the question, "How can I subvert this?"
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
The way I station surf - NPR, Rock, Top 40, oldies,.... all in a span of seconds - the billboard would be flickering like disco ball!
There is no spoon or sig.
It would seem that a particular radio station or advertizer could hack the system and bias the billboard by leaving a box of cheap battery powered FM radios by the side of the road (or a weak FM transmitter). With all those radios tuned to the same station it would fool the billboard into thinking that the cars where tuned to that station. Thus the billboard would leave the same ad up and log high ratings for the station.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What if an enterprising radio station put a powerful radio tuned to their station next to the billboard's receiever?
Then it would overpower the car radios and make it appear that all the cars are tuned to that station. This would seem like a good thing for that station's marketing department.
I lived right by the one they had in Roseville, CA. It was extremely bright, annoying, and dangerous seeming. While you are driving down the freeway (especially at night) it was so bright that you couldn't not look at it. Which I'm sure is the point. But when you have thousands of people flying by at 70mph, it just doesn't seem safe.
Most billboard business is based on renting the space. If you have to rely on a radio station's demographic to get your ad up there, how would you pro-rate that rental fee? Does the radio station get anything out of it, if you try it that way? And so on. Seems like a substantially different business model could build around this idea -- something "hits"-like.
(And more importantly, what does this mean for public service announcements? If I'm driving down the road and all the billboards are tailoring themselves to messages about the D.A.R.E. program, am I listening to Rush Limbaugh, or what? How about if all the pictures turn to messages about abortion?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Oh man, you are so behind the times. I ripped all my news and weather reports to mp3's a long time ago. Now I can listen to peace treaties or car bombings, sunny weather or rain, depending on my mood on any given day! It's great!
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
This sign doesn't react to what it detects. It simply logs what stations people are listening to, so that the advertiser on the board can look at that info and decide who to target during different parts of the day. It works exactly like Nielsen ratings. The info gets collected and people look at it to make decisions, it's not reacted to immediately.
- Why does every radio emit a signal? Is it inefficiency? Is it really every radio or only old ones?
- Is this signal broadcasted back through your antenna or is this just a faint signal inside your radio and they have really good receivers in their billboards?
- Has anybody tried to create a radio that doesn't emit this signal?
- Is this only something with FM radio, or also with AM?
Thanks for some clarifications.I primarily listen to my iPod using an iRock FM transmitter. Its signal strength is low enough that I fear Billboards may overpower it.
If I *ever* catch a commercial interrupting the sanctum of my iPod to my car stereo, I will clip the antenna lead and install a loop around the sticky pad where my iPod sits. If that doesn't work, I'll cut radio completely out. I'll get a preamp and amp with a direct connection.
Who needs radio? I won't go back to radio until there is some kind of cellular packet radio with multicast distribution. Then I could listen to my favorite stations cross country. Even with a 5GB iPod, smart playlists allow you to randomly rotate 2.5 days of continuous uninterrupted no-repeat music from your own collection. Even a 64MB flash based MP3 player will give you 45 minutes to an hour. 256MB is easily one leg of a car trip or a two-way commute.
In my family, smart billboards would be called "a day late and a dollar short." All it's really worth is a line in the sand drawn by the Ad companies. Flip them the bird!
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
I listen to the radio. NPR. I commute and get my news on the way to work each morning.
-Sean
this way I could get the bill board to restrict its selection to topics. If my Ad was in that rotation then I probably just improved its visibility five or ten fold. I could sell that to people who place ads.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Hmm, what's this then? Some kind of new editorial disclaimer to enable double posts?
-- james
Does it display a table of executives slaughtering a baby when you drive buy listening to a ClearChannel or Infinity station? ;)
Back up a little. So these Machines mentioned Before -- they're like Carriages, only without Horses? From whence do they derive their Motive Force -- some kind of Magnetikal Effect? -- Poor Dick
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
According to the article, the billboard analyzes patterns to find out what ads to display at what time of day; it doesn't change for every car that comes down the road:
"Using the information collected by the Mobiltrak device, Future Ford knows that on weekdays that stretch of I-80 carries a lot of drivers who listen to country-and-western stations, so that's when the dealership advertises the Ford F-150, a popular pickup truck. Evening drivers, Mobiltrak has found, are more apt to listen to talk radio and adult contemporary, so they see ads for Tauruses and Escorts"
The parent is completely out of touch with mainstream society. "Who actually listens to the radio anymore?!" I guess the record labels can stop paying Top 40 stations to play their crap, seeing as how no one listens to them. I guess all those rap stations my friends listen to can fold, since their only remaining membership is luddites.
Yes, MP3 players are getting cheaper, but an iPod is sill $200, and every car built in the last 30 years has an AM/FM radio. Aside from just the weather, the news, and talk shows -- streaming, time sensitive content -- the radio offers the opportunity to hear new music.
You might disagree about the benifits of radio, but the fact is that most people don't own an MP3 player, and most of those who do still listen to the radio. "Who still listens to the radio?" On the freeway, the vast majority of people.
... driving is soon going to be much more hazardous with the advent of new, "Pop-up Billboards".
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Being paranoid is getting to be more work all the time.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think that if enough people are driving by, it'll happen on its own.
Hey! come on! try dividing it by anything!
Dude, give the engineers a bit more credit. They're not morons. The prospect of a schizophrenic, strobing billboard I'm sure has been considered.
Just as elevators in tall buildings don't get all flabbergasted and shoot out of the roof, these bill boards should be pretty well behaved too.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
Prior Art?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I been waiting for a sign that'll fix me up with a tuba-playin girl.
Hello, this is Harris. I'm in right now, so you can talk to me personally. Please start talking at the sound of the beep
Advertising everywhere, all the time, reminded me of my experience at a Mexican beach last week. While a sitting on the beach admiring the natural and human scenery, hundreds of [ licensed ] vendors walk by every few seconds pushing everything from blankets, artwork, tatoos, food, sexual partners, etc. 99.9% of the interactions are "not interested", but they keep on coming all day. Its much like the MS TV commercial why the Blubberfly boots the salesmen.
This is the kind of idea that sounds cool on the surface, but can't really work out irl.
How many billboards have you driven past lately where you were the only one around in a car?
Even if it does some kind of averaging. What, you're going to average Howard Stern and NPR? Is the result going to be better than the vanilla demographic they have for that area anyway?
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
I wonder what would happen if you designed your "leaky radio" signal on purpose to appear from multiple car radios. Maybe a career of driving in rush hour traffic for some unlucky bastard? Guys driving around town with special getups designed to break the threshold levels of the billboards and turn the adverts to their employer's ads? Ick. It sounds about as fun as artifically inseminating sheep for a living.
You are almost right, but not quite.
The way a modern superheterodyne radio works is like this:
You want to listen to a radio frequency at F1.
The radio creates a local oscillator (or LO) frequency of F2, such that abs(F2-F1) = F3, where F3 is a fixed, intermediate frequency (or IF). A common IF for FM radios is 10.7 MHz, and a common IF for AM radios is 455 kHz. By pulling the signal to a fixed frequency the rest of the radio's design can be better optimized and simpler.
Now, F2 can be either F1+F3 or F1-F3, it make little difference. So one way to confuse the system would be to retune the radio so that it uses "the other IF" - i.e. if the radio is using F2=F3+F1, retune the guts so that it uses F2=F1-F3.
Alternatively, replace the IF strip to change F2, and then retune the radio appropriately - if the sign's systems assume an IF of 10.7 MHz, and you are using an IF of 9.7 MHz, that will confuse the sign. The difficulty there is getting components designed for a non-standard frequency. If the radio is using the old "tuned slug" design this isn't so bad, but if the radio is using a crystal filter you are looking at custom crystals.
However, there is no need for the LO to be coupled to the world - the first stages of the radio can amplify the RF and decouple the first LO mixer from the world. It just takes a bit more work on the sheilding of the radio - you use a milled block of aluminum rather than foil sheilds. I know, since that is what I do for a living - design radios (well, radio test gear, which is a special case of the class Radio)
However, building a jamming oscillator at the needed frequencies to scramble this sign, while completely illegal, is also trivial - buy a cheap FM transmitter kit and retune it slightly. Of course, by causing interference you are in violation of FCC part 15 rules, and will get nailed if you get caught, so don't, 'mkay?
If it bothers you, just don't listen to the radio.
www.eFax.com are spammers
to put a 5 dollar solar powered transmitter 20 feet from the billboard dialed to the classical station.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
So, what will the billboard think when it not only gets the news that I'm listening to a radio station that doesn't really exist (91.9MHz), but also gets blasted by the 91.9MHz FM signal my car's emitting? Will they use Tuneprint to figure out what song is playing? Will they simply categorize me as "geek" and display ads for computer stuff?
Nah, they'll probably be too stupid for that. They'll probably think "Wow, this guy's listening to bumfuck cornfield radio!" or whatever the 91.9MHz station is that sometimes leaks through and interferes with my music. I'll probably get ads for Bibles or manure.
Exception: I listen to a college radio station show on Thursday afternoons: Guerrilla Radio, on WRUW 91.1 FM, 1630-1730 Thursdays. Unless I forget.
What would be interesting are billboards that send out ads. For example, you are driving by a heineken ad, and it says on it "tune your radio to 89.7" or something like that and you could listen to the ad that went along with the billboard. Might be useful if you wanted more information about an the subject of the billboard. Kind of like a drive-by movie theater where when you are in the right range, you can hear the movie audio.
-Vib, videogame freelancer for news0r.com, videogame.net, and vnorby.tk
Seriously, what if the majority of riders are listening to truly non-commercial stations like student stations e.g. ones with voice id's like "WCBN 88.3 FM - at the far left of your radio dial" or "Radio Free Ann Arbor". Would the billboard show an ad for a state or city park or a free concert? Or just tell people to bike to work?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
No, it will probably not react to XM or Sirius radios, unless you are using a modulator with it (to listen over an FM station preset in your car) in which case it will read garbage.
That last statement probably needs more elucidation. If you have your sirius/XM radio being rebroadcast on, say, 99.3, then the billboard will detect your LO at 99.3+10.2=109.5 and correctly conclude that you are listening to a radio tuned to 99.3, and it may also detect the modulator's carrier at 99.3, and conclude that you are listening to 99.3-10.2=89.1. If there are stations on neither of these frequencies, it won't be able to make any sense of it.
As a practical matter, you shouldn't set your modulator to the frequency of an existing local station, as you will probably not get very good audio.
On the other hand, XM and Sirius have the potential to sell info, since the radio is entirely under their control. That is not to say that current models transmit this info, but since ALL models are manufactured under supervision/license, future models may have the capacity to store/retrieve/forward that info.
Then we would have a Sirius problem :-)
www.wavefront-av.com
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw this article.
Personally, I found the advertising techniques in that movie to be a hell of a lot scarier than the whole Future Crime stuff. Probably because the advertising could happen. As I watched the movie I was picturing advertising execs having wet dreams, and board meetings saying, "We need this!"
And now, here is the beginnings of it.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!