Digital ad screens popping up on S.F. sidewalks
As if screens weren’t already ubiquitous enough, a new generation of TV-size digital billboards has quietly become part of downtown San Francisco’s streetscape.
Clear Channel Outdoor, a Texas company responsible for many highway-side billboards, is installing a network of highdefinition LCD screens on newspaper racks along Market Street and around Union Square, the Financial District, the Moscone Center and AT&T Park.
The 55-inch screens reflect an aggressive new push by advertisers to get in front of consumers even when they’re away from TVs, computers and mobile phones.
“We picked the creme de la creme of where the pedestrian audience is in San Francisco,” said Robert Schmitt, Clear Channel Outdoor’s Northern California regional president. “It’s a new format, and we’re excited about it.”
Not everybody feels that way.
“It’s ghastly,” said Darcy
Brown, executive director of San Francisco Beautiful, an organization that has fought the spread of billboard advertising. “We don’t need any more advertising. We’re inundated on our phones and our computers. Everywhere you look, we’re being sold all this stuff that no one needs.”
But with outdoor advertising revenue continuing to grow, digital billboards may be here to stay.
Roadside advertising has been an American staple since the shaving cream company Burma-Shave increased sales with a series of small, eyecatching wooden signs in the 1920s. Over time, billboards grew in size and quantity, which also triggered community backlashes. Indeed, San Francisco voters in 2006 placed a moratorium on new billboards by passing Proposition G.
But companies like Clear Channel Outdoor are converting some existing boards into giant computer-operated screens, which are more cost efficient because they can display more ads in the same space.
Now the industry is rolling out smaller digital screens — “digital urban panels,” in industry parlance — to further expand “out of home” advertising, a catch-all category that covers ads on streets, bus shelters, train stations and taxis.
Out-of-home ad sales should increase about 3 percent this year to $33 billion, according a report from Magna Intelligence, an industry research arm of the New York ad firm IPG Mediabrands. While digital panels make up only about 5 percent of outdoor billboards, they already account for 14 percent of revenues.
Out-of-home advertising “cannot be skipped or blocked,” according to a Magna report. Younger people, in particular, “have become experts at avoiding advertising by choosing ad-free, paid-for media or blocking-ad insertions on free websites. (Out of home) is largely immune from that threat.”
Tech companies Apple, Amazon and Google are among the biggest adopters of digital screens, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.
The ad industry is looking to fill “every nook and cranny,” said Max Ashburn, spokesman for Scenic America, a Washington, D.C., organization that’s tried to stop the spread of billboards throughout the country. “They’re trying to get in everywhere they can.”
Clear Channel Outdoor, which is a public subsidiary of iHeartMedia, formerly known as Clear Channel Communications, began installing its first street-level digital ad panels in November. It lit the first 50 San Francisco panels with Apple as its initial advertiser. The company has since installed 20 more and plans to have the rest — 100 in total — operating by the end of January, Schmitt said.
The panels cycle through screens about every eight seconds, which means every ad gets displayed about 1,250 times a day. The messages, which have no audio, can be changed on the fly. The ads can be tailored to display at certain times or locations, depending on what kind of audience the advertiser wants to reach.
“You can do public service messaging on these on the spot or in times of need,” Schmitt said. “Someone just sends us a file, and we put it up.”
For now, the panels aren’t showing full-motion video. Last week, the panels showed only one ad, for a health care conference, interspersed with generic scenic photos — and on several visits to some of the displays, hardly anybody seemed to notice until a reporter pointed them out.
“It’s so crowded and busy here, so nobody really pays attention,” Emily Tam of San Francisco said as she waited to cross the street Sunday near Union Square. “Maybe if it was a little higher, we would have seen it better.”
Tourist Grant Knox of Los Angeles said he would rather see more trees planted on the sidewalks. “That makes you feel a little more relaxed, rather than staring at a billboard that’s trying to sell you something,” he said.
But Steven Green stood next to a board on Market Street admiring how it brightly highlighted the way San Francisco was “leading the world right now” in technology.
“Sometimes you won’t even realize it because it just blends in,” Green said. “I wish I could take it to my house. And I ain’t
even got a house.”
The boards could soon get more attention with new ad campaigns about to start, Schmitt said.
So far, the company plans to install the boards only in San Francisco because of Clear Channel Outdoor’s unique relationship with newspaper boxes.
When City Hall officials moved to eliminate individual, freestanding news boxes in the 1990s to keep streets tidier, publishers including The Chronicle sued, saying the plan would have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights. After years of political and legal battles, the city agreed to install about 1,000 consolidated newspaper racks, each holding about eight to 10 publications.
Clear Channel Outdoor won the city’s bid to install and maintain the dark green racks, offsetting the costs through small ads on the back of about half the boxes.
The digital panels replace some of the older, static ads, and Schmitt said that if they do well, the company may add more. Outfront Media, a Clear Channel Outdoor rival, has already installed 55-inch screens atop subway entrances in New York and Boston.
Clear Channel Outdoor is also tying the panels into its digital screens at Muni bus shelters. Another transit agency, BART, now has six digital screens on the platform walls of the Montgomery Street station and five at Powell Street. The screens, run by the firm Intersection Media, rotate ads with news, weather, sports and BART messages, said BART spokesman Chris Filippi.
Digital screens are also finding their way to cars. New York’s Taxi Media has video screens atop 125 of that city’s cabs. Last year, United Airlines used the screens for a campaign that displayed in real time, based on the cab’s location, a comparison of travel times to local airports. And Los Angeles startup WaiveCar offers electric car rentals subsidized by electronic ad boards on the roof.
Ryan Langan, a University of San Francisco assistant marketing and branding professor, said he expects a “proliferation” of digital ad screens, although billboard companies have to show advertisers data to prove they work.
“This isn’t a panacea for anyone,” Langan said. “It’s one more avenue, one more medium, one more touchstone for getting their messages to their target audience.”
But San Francisco Beautiful’s Brown said more screens will only add to the city’s “visual noise.”
“It’s terrible, we already can’t think because everybody is scrolling through their phones,” she said. “The mind needs to rest. Where are you going to find that in our environment? Nowhere.”