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Google is testing its DoubleClick ad tech on a new type of screen — the digital billboard or as the ad industry calls it, Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) Media.
The trial began in the UK in October and should run for a short while longer, according the Business Insider, which broke the news. The BI says Google doesn't have plans to launch anything larger than this initial run, which is testing how premium billboard ads can be bought programmatically via DoubleClick.
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Google is well poised to dominate this sector thanks to DoubleClick's wide use throughout the ad industry.Grabbing a piece of the DOOH pie would also address — at least partially, at least in the minds of inquiring analysts and shareholders — how it is shoring its ad revenues up against ad blockers and digital fraud, both of which have been highlighted a great deal recently in media.
In some places billboards are shot full of holes.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:30PM
I wonder how well they scale. Even if capital markets are screwed up such that the cost of the giant display is free, just the electric bill must be impressive.
Locally there are several along my commute. About 200K drive past per day. Lets assume 36 kilowatts to run one, they're big and daylight viewable so I don't think this unrealistic. At the usual buck per watt-year thats $36500 per year or $100/day or half a cent of electricity per commuter-impression. Which sounds cheap. However this is the busiest interstate in the state on weekdays. I never look at them due to traffic and construction unless there is a massive slowdown. Per theoretical viewer they are extremely cheap. Per actual ad impression seen I suspect even under ideal conditions they are extremely expensive. In this way they are "blocked" or ignored even worse than online ads. People are at least theoretically looking in the general direction of an online ad.
Before I looked at the article I thought it was about those hideous hotel elevator monitors that spam their users. Those things are obnoxious, but at least financially they should scale, being practically no computational resources and a small monitor / big tablet screen. We're likely to suffer thru acres of small spam monitors very soon. This will probably lead to augmented reality and apps that place black squares over spam for us. That would be kind of cool right now, it'll be necessary in the future.
Advantage number 234523 of online shopping over brick and mortar will be adblocking spam. You know as B+M die they'll grab at any revenue like the drowning rats they are, so toward the death of a store it'll be wall papered in spam monitors to drive away the last few customers and squeeze the last blood from the revenue stone.