Roadside billboards frequently encourage passersby to visit local businesses. A billboard or "hoarding" is a large outdoor signboard, usually wooden, found in places with high traffic such as cities, roads, motorways and highways. Billboards show large advertisements aimed at passing pedestrians and drivers. The vast majority of billboards are rented to advertisers rather than owned by them.
Typically showing large, witty slogans splashed with distinctive color pictures, billboards line the highways and are placed on the sides of buildings, peddling products and getting out messages. Billboards originally existed alongside and later largely replaced advertisements painted directly onto the sides of buildings or designed into roofs in shingle patterns.
Billboard advertisements are designed to catch a person's attention and create a memorable impression very quickly, leaving the reader thinking about the advertisement after they have driven past it. They have to be readable in a very short time because they are usually read while being passed at high speeds. Thus, there are usually only a few words, in large print, and a humorous or arresting image in brilliant color.
Some billboard designs spill outside the actual space given to them by the billboard, with parts of figures hanging off the billboard edges or jutting out of the billboard in three dimensions. A humorous example in the United States around the turn of the 21st century were the "Chick-fil-A" billboards (a chicken sandwich fast food chain), which had three-dimensional cow figures in the act of painting the billboards with misspelled anti-beef slogans such as "frendz dont let frendz eat beef." Mechanical billboards Some modern billboards use a technique called tri-faced (also known as rotating or multi-message billboards). These billboards show three separate adverts in rotation using a mechanical system. They are made up of a series of triangular prisms arranged so that they can be rotated to present three separate flat display surfaces. The displays of these billboards are printed on strips of vinyl which are fixed to the faces of the triangular panels, with one strip from each of three different displays attached to each panel. In this way, as the panels rotate and pause, three unique signs can be displayed in the same space. These signs are thought to be more effective as the motion draws attention to the messages displayed.
Digital billboards New billboards are being produced that are entirely digitized-using projection and similar techniques-allowing animations and completely rotating advertisements. Even holographic billboards are in use in some places.
Interaction is an emerging theme in electronic billboards, with Britain at the forefront: in Piccadilly Circus the Coca-Cola billboard responds to the weather and responds with an animated wave when passersby wave at it. London movie theatres are experimenting with billboards which contain an embedded computer chip which can interact with the web browser found in many cell phones to provide more information on the subject of the advertisement.
In the spring of 2004, in Times Square in New York City, a "Yahoo Autos" promotion displayed on an LED billboard allowed one to call a phone number with a cell phone and play a two-person racing game where the cars appeared on the billboard. There are also upcoming billboard technologies that will synchronize with advertisements on radio stations.
Opposition to Billboards - Visual and Environmental Concerns Many groups such as "Scenic America" have complained that billboards on highways cause too much clearing of trees and intrude on the surrounding landscape, with billboards' bright colors, lights and large fonts making it hard to focus on anything else. Other groups believe that billboards and advertising in general contribute negatively to the mental climate of a culture by promoting products as providing feelings of completeness, wellness and popularity to motivate purchase. One focal point for this sentiment would be the magazine "AdBusters," which will often showcase politically motivated billboards and other advertising vandalism, called "culture jamming." As of 2000, rooftops in Athens had grown so thick with billboards that it was getting very difficult to see its fabled architecture. In preparation for the 2004 Summer Olympics, the city embarked on a successful four-year project demolishing the majority of rooftop billboards to beautify the city for the tourists the games will bring, overcoming resistance from advertisers and building owners. These billboards were for the most part illegal, but had been ignored up to then.
