Control Where Your Advertising Is Seen With Billboard Advertising

LED electronic billboards could be the answer for your next advertising campaign if you want to control where your adverts are seen.

It is predicted digital advertising could take a significant hit due to recent revelations that adverts for leading companies have been shown alongside extremist and inappropriate content. These adverts on the Google advertising network were shown to be appearing alongside inappropriate content on YouTube, despite many advertisers being unaware of the possibility of that happening.

These adverts had been automatically triggered to display on video content, but Google had failed to limit these appearances to appropriate content.

Big names such as Jaguar and Reuters have suspended their digital advertising spending on Google and YouTube until they can obtain some assurances that this will not happen again, they have said.

The revelation that these adverts were being shown on extremist websites, some of them promoting terrorism or extreme political views, followed an investigation by The Times newspaper into the issue.

Google has had its financial forecasts downgraded following the issue, which has affected UK advertising specifically.

Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser voiced his concerns in the WallStreet Journal, about Google parent company Alphabet.

“Although spending by advertisers who have announced their intention to suspend spending on YouTube and other Google properties is relatively small so far, we think that awareness of the incident will marginally curtail global growth this year versus prior expectations, leading us to reduce our price target on Alphabet slightly, to $950 versus $970 previously” Wieser wrote in April.

Google and YouTube control around 60 per cent of the online advertising market, according to the Financial Times.

Many companies are concerned that the lack of control over where their adverts are appearing could have a detrimental effect on their brand image.

Since the scandal, Google has claimed it has improved its artificial intelligence to reduce the incidences where paid-for digital advertising appears next to hate videos.

However, the company had ‘limited resources’ with which to do this, claimed Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler in an interview with Bloomberg.

He was also keen to point out that only one in one thousand advertisers experienced this problem, and many had nothing to worry about.

Despite the low risk associated with online advertising, it is important the advertisers know where their adverts are likely to appear, and that they understand what they can do if they don’t.

LED billboards offer companies significant control over what and where advertising appears. While digital advertising does offer some significant opportunities to target advertising at specific audiences, there are a growing number of options for billboard advertisers to do just the same.

Recently we reported on Sainsbury’s supermarket, which has chosen to deploy heat sensitive billboards to display weather appropriate messages. This means they could, for example, target people most likely to be receptive to barbeque related adverts, at the time they would be most likely to make these purchases.

Talk to us about the opportunities we can help you harness with our billboard technologies.