With digital advertising long tapping into users’ mobile habits, traditional advertisers have felt left in the dark ages. But billboards are about to get smart, and technology would allow them to know where you’ve been and where you go after you see them. Advertising giant Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which owns tens of thousands of billboards across the country, announced Monday that it will be debuting a new kind of consumer-tracking system called Radar.
Following in the footsteps of targeted advertisements seen on the web, Radar will tap into data from several partner companies to determine what kinds of advertisements will be displayed on a billboard screen. Just as importantly, the system will also track how good of a job the ads are doing at convincing people to look up the brand on their phones, or go out and shop. “In aggregate, that data can then tell you information about what the average viewer of that billboard looks like,” Andy Stevens, senior vice president for research and insights at Clear Channel Outdoor, told the New York Times. “Obviously that’s very valuable to an advertiser.” READ MORE
