AdAge reports that New York City is experimenting with 12-foot wide LED screens on the sides of buses. The ads served on these buses will be networked into a central computer, allowing for customization of messages.
The messages can be tweaked to target consumers in different ways: the morning route can have messages from say a coffee brand and the evening route can switch to a beer brand. When the bus travels along say a certain suburb, say a Hispanic community, it can display a message in Spanish and so on. Think of it as web banner that personalizes messages based on the IP address. Cool, eh? It can even display real-time messages: details of tickets available for a concert or a theatre. Imagine this in Mumbai or Bangalore: an ad for a movie near a multiplex, an ad in Kannada as it moves into Basavangudi, an ad for a Marathi play in Dadar…bus advertising may not be static henceforth. When technology meets creativity, good things happen.