Billboards + Waze = More Money

Driving past rows of billboards along the highway I thought of how wasteful this ad medium are. It costs a lot to put up yet you don’t know who looked at it and there’s no way to retarget the audience.

Then I saw Waze running on my smartphone sitting at the dashboard. Well, Waze do know who had driven past the bilboards. It knows the gender, age, mobile phone type and so much more. If simple geofencing produced too many match then can narrow down by how many times the audience had driven by or where they live and so on.

Google can pretty much partner with any billboard provider to offer ad retargeting service. They can also sell the analytics data for the billboard provider to serve their clients better. Or perhpas it will only make it more obvious how useless billboards are.

The idea sounds rather creepy and invasive but technically it can be done. There’s no need for additional hardware to be installed. Just supplying the data to sell more ads slot.

Perhaps Google had secretly trialed this service. Who knows?