Getting on Board

In Manhattan's trendy SoHo district, rock star Lenny Kravitz peers down from a 60-ft.-wide billboard for Absolut vodka, holding in his outstretched arms what appears to be a digital cable with bottle-shaped plugs. This isn't just the physical manifestation of the vodkamaker's latest hip ad campaign; it's also a display of advanced technology. At the bottom of the sign, Absolut invites passersby to send a text message or enable their Bluetooth cell phones to download a free 4-min. MP3 track where they're standing. "We always try to be edgy and different with our ads, but this time we wanted to go beyond the traditional," says Jeffrey Moran, a spokesman for Absolut, which has a similar sign up on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Thanks to the Web, cell phones and applications like Bluetooth and text messaging, one of the oldest ad media is suddenly one of the industry's most fashionable. U.S. marketers spent $6.3 billion last year on out-of-home campaigns, as billboard advertising is called--an 8% increase from the year before, making outdoor the second fastest-growing ad medium after the Internet. And we're not talking just your standard roadside EAT AT JOE'S billboard. Today's outdoor ads are everywhere--on waste cans, taxis, bus shelters, phone kiosks, even gasoline nozzles. Intrusive? Perhaps, but some of them are also interactive at your request. And at a time when consumers have become increasingly mobile and increasingly overloaded with information, the outdoor ad industry is touting the billboard, the updated version as well as the old standby, as the last powerful way to reach a mass audience efficiently. "It's a medium where there is no remote control," says Paul Meyer, worldwide president of the $2.7 billion Clear Channel Outdoor, a leading player in the global outdoor arena. "You can't mute it or change the station. You can't turn it off. It's there 24/7."

Technology, in part, is driving the medium's rebirth. It's easier to generate buzz when what you're doing is genuinely cool. Consumers can now download music, play video games, watch movie trailers or custom-design a pair of sneakers and purchase them--all by interacting with outdoor ads. Signs can send a digital coupon to our cell phones, and soon they may even start addressing us by name, as they did in Steven Spielberg's 2002 futuristic film Minority Report. "We're almost there," says Stephen Freitas of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, an industry trade group. "Outdoor advertising is evolving to a world of two-way advertising very, very fast."