A remarkable amount of money and technological effort is devoted to the proposition that billboard displays ought to have ratings similar to measurements of TV viewing.
Pioneering the effort is Nielsen Outdoors, a sibling of ACNielsen and Nielsen Media Research, which are units of Dutch-based VNU. Last year the Nielsen folks recruited about 750 people in the Chicago area to carry gadgets with them as they went about their daily routines.
The gadgets, called Npods, look like pagers and communicate with global positioning system satellites every four seconds to constantly record where they are. Nielsen combined detailed information of where its volunteers traveled over the several days they carried their Npods with demographic information about the volunteers.
This information was overlaid with an exhaustive inventory of all the billboards, bus stop ads and similar signage in the metropolitan area. The result is a report that intends to show how many Chicagoans, and from which income and age groups, drive, walk or bicycle in the vicinity of which signs.
Nielsen keeps the research details for the outdoor sign companies that financed the effort, but Bob Luff, Nielsen chief technology officer, disclosed that the study discovered that 96 percent of the signs in Chicago’s metro area were passed by someone in the study.
The billboard people, whose worldwide business amounts to $5.8 billion annually, believe that if they can get a ratings system in place, they will attract more advertisers’ dollars.
“An undermeasured medium is an undervalued medium,” Luff said.
To augment its data about what kind of people passed which signs, Nielsen can ask volunteers questions about signs they remember, what effects the signs had and so on.
Also, in some cases the firm installed a gadget in volunteers’ automobiles to monitor their eye movements, providing information that suggests whether a sign they passed actually caught their eye.
Before Nielsen devised this system, the closest billboard promoters came to counting the traffic passing their ads were hoses strung across streets that counted passing vehicles, Luff said.
Nielsen has done smaller tests in other cities since its major Chicago effort and hopes to prepare billboard ratings reports for several metro markets worldwide.
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Besides attempting to bolster the outdoor advertising business, Nielsen’s technology also might find some secondary uses, Luff said.
“Using the information we gathered, we can see where the best routes are for getting around,” he said. “This information could be valuable for urban planners. Instead of widening an existing highway, they might see where improving alternate routes could relieve traffic congestion.
“This database could have several applications. But our primary mission is to serve the needs of the outdoor advertising industry.”
Light research: Further developments of a light-emitting transistor has been reported by two Illinois researchers, Nick Holonyak Jr. and Milton Feng, computer engineering professors at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
“We have shown that the transistor laser, even in its early state of development, is capable of room-temperature operation at a speed of 3 gigahertz,” said Holonyak. “We expect the device will operate at much higher speeds when it is more fully developed.”
The researchers first reported a demonstration of the light-emitting laser early last year. At that time the device operated only at very cold temperatures. Achieving room-temperature operation is a vital step toward a device with commercial applications.
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