Highways and Buy-ways

"The young people as well as the adults have the message of the billboard thrust upon them by all the arts and devices that skill can produce.  In the case of newspapers and magazines, there must be some seeking by the one who is to see and read the advertisement.  The radio can be turned off, but not so the billboard or street car placard.  These distinctions clearly place this kind of advertisement in a position to be classified so that regulations or prohibitions may be imposed upon all within the class." --- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1932


When we refer to the internet as a highway, the Information Highway, I suppose billboards would be the spam cluttering that highway. As I travel the length of Interstate 40, I encounter countless billboards and relish those stretches of highway without obtrusive signage as dearly as downloading e-mail with the barrage of spam.

Admittedly as I approach a town I find myself referring to billboards to locate a hotel with high speed internet and as I empty another tank of gas, I scout for competitive gas prices. (I have paid as little as $1.68 in Jackson, Tennessee and as much as $2.49 near the Grand Canyon.) It would be nice to only have to see the information when we need it.

I can imagine a future where our cars will transmit a signal that will cause electronic sigs along the highway to change to fit our buying habits or needs. Perhaps the signs won't clutter the highway at all. The ads might display on devices in our cars or air through the car's radio or GPS system. in their book, Street Graphics and the Law, Daniel Madelker and William Ewald write, "Imagine the change in the view of America if signs and billboards spoke to us separately instead of screaming at us en masse.  If the overhead utility cables were buried out of sight.  If public rights-of-way (and parking lots) were landscaped.  Consider what it would be like if you could find and read street names and house numbers easily, if symbols and roadside radio signaled to drivers 'where to find what' -- instead of the all-too-common verbose signs we have now."

Perhaps you remember that scene in Steven Spielberg's movie, Minority Report, when Tom Cruise's character, John Anderton, walks through a mall of the future in which window displays offer personalized sales pitches to him and other passing shoppers.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo already offer ads based on our searches, and Google's new g-mail service will actually tailor ads based on the content of the e-mail. Send a g-mail message to a friend about a book on politics you just read, and it will automatically contain links to vendors who sell the book and other ads that the computers at Google think might appeal to the reader. You may have noticed that the banner ad at the top of this blog changes with the content of the most recent post thanks to a similar automated process with Blogger.

I have seen a few unusual billboards on Interstate 40. In Tennessee I saw several billboards advertising vasectomy reversal only to be followed a few miles later by anti-abortion billboards and signs advertising adoption agencies. A hotel billboard in New Mexico advertised "Martians Welcome."

I have seen a few billboards with URLs for the advertiser's website and several electronic informational signs over I-40 in Arizona that refered drivers to a URL for road conditions. We've all seen signs giving an am radio station to tune into for road and weather conditions, but a URL? Obviously Arizona highway officials must assume that many travelers are carrying laptops.

My focus on technology caused me to misread one sign a few days ago in Arizona. It read "DSL $1.85" in large, bold letters. I had seen truck stops advertising Wi-Fi wireless internet, but wondered how much time online a traveler could get for $1.85. A few miles later it dawned on me that DSL was not a reference to a broadband internet connection but to diesel fuel!

Have you seen any unusual billboards along the highway this summer? Are you fed up with spam? Post a comment.