Little billboards | Seth’s Blog

On the West Aspect Freeway in Manhattan, there is now a billboard for some kind of placebo dietary supplement. In the corner is a QR code for much more information and facts.

Until the man or woman in the passenger seat has a telephoto lens on their telephone, there’s no way in the world that this is heading to get the job done.

My late close friend Jay Levinson said that the most helpful billboard would say, “FREE Coffee, Next EXIT.” A phone to action, applicable to the viewer, simple to see and have an understanding of.

Precise billboards are a whole group of media, but now we’re surrounded by a new type, a smaller, more evanescent and common a single: Social media posts. You may well see a thousand of these a day.

Social media started as text updates from one human to an additional, but many thanks to photo sharing, some of the posts have develop into a little something else entirely. A chance to build reliable, actionable and very clear reminders of what you are and what you stand for.

But maintaining Jay’s edict in brain, they function best when they’re about the viewer as considerably as they are about you. They work better when they can be viewed and understood from a distance. And they operate much better when they “sound like you.”

Here’s an instance of a handful of dozen electronic billboards that my fellow volunteers developed for the Almanac. These blew me absent. Totally free coffee certainly.