LED Billboards Pollute the Mental Environment

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The last few times I’ve driven into the city, I’ve noticed more and more of these LED billboards popping up. They’re like having a bunch of TVs pointed at you as you drive, unavoidable in their bright flashes and demands that you BUY BUY BUY.

Until recently, displays like these have been relegated to downtown crossroads like Times Square, now they’re invading our backyards. I can only imagine the recent growth in LED technology and reduction in cost to producing these devices has contributed to their emergence. Couple that with media fragmentation and advertisers desperate for eyeballs, and what do we get? Advertising that’s more and more interruptive and irritating (as if the stretch of I-294 between 88 and O’Hare wasn’t bad enough already).

I won’t pretend that I don’t revile these billboards. What I don’t have (yet) is a consistent philosophy and belief system as a marketer myself, of what advertising is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad.’

In my pseudo-hippy phase, which was brief (and no I won’t show you pictures), I became a fan of Adbusters magazine. I resonate with a lot of their thoughts on how commercial culture pollutes the mental environment, but I eschew the mag’s hyper-liberal conspiracy theory politics. In fact, the latter is the reason I don’t currently read it, even though I still agree with their views on media. They talk about the “mental environment” the way environmentalists talk about preserving our physical environment. In essence, they brought a phrase to what I’d been sensing — an onslaught of commercials and content that was not relevant to me and that was designed to disrupt thought and create a sense of need that wasn’t there before. The intense, sickly feeling of being sold to at every corner.

From a business perspective, these billboards are a new market opportunity, the result of technology enabling advertisements to be more effective. Now advertisers can fraction off use of a billboard space, presumably making outdoor advertising more cost effective for advertisers, and allowing ads to be more targeted (an ad for morning commuters, for example, who tend to fall in certain demographics). Seems innocuous enough, until you consider how this affects the audience on the road and how these blaring ads stir up more angst in an already frustration-filled part of the day–the commute.

So I must ask, at what cost will we continue to push the envelope of interruptive advertising? In an age where online, marketers are moving more and more towards permission-based techniques and even social marketing that’s far more targeted, mass media is soldiering on with more resolve than ever to annoy the p*** out of people. Continuing, as they always have, to talk AT their consumer (whom they see as an object to sell to) rather than TO their customer (a person who chooses to buy).