Whenever my girlfriend and I take a long drive, we fight over the radio, flipping the dial more often than the stations change DJs and formats. Rarely, if ever, do our listening choices reflect our economic situation or our buying habits.
That would, I imagine, be bad news for the enterprising folks at Alaris Media Network of Sacra mento, Calif., who have erected 10 snazzy video billboards in California that scan the radios of passing cars and adjust the marketing messages on their screens accordingly.
They can’t target individual drivers, at least not yet. But they can discern general patterns in the traffic. If a lot of people are listening to country music, for example, the billboards could display ads for a local Western-themed clothing store. Classical-music listeners might be treated to pitches from tuxedo-rental shops or Lexus dealerships. You get the idea.
The debate over this technology is fairly predictable: Some say it will help advertisers get better results. Others call it intellectual carjacking and yet another threat to privacy.
In lieu of any hard data about such a system’s performance over time, I can only judge how well these billboards might work by examining my own listening habits. And I wonder if millions of people aren’t a lot like me.
During a recent trip to visit family and friends, my significant other and I spent 10 hours in the car over two days. At the beginning of the journey, the hour or so between Boston and Providence, our fingers were rarely far from the dashboard as we struggled for control of the airwaves.
First we listened to Broadway show tunes (her choice, obviously), but Ethel Merman’s caterwauling soon sent me in search of classic rock. My full-throated rendition (with air guitar) of BTO’s “Takin’ Care of Business”—which I swear would pass muster with Simon on American Idol—inexplicably prompted another switch, to a pop-oldies station that seemed to specialize in Motown.
We both like that style of music just fine but soon began to argue over whether Diana Ross had died. (Answer: No, but her career has.) Next stop: a hip alternative station, which played songs neither of us knew by artists we’d never heard of, which made us both feel pretty old and out of touch with the much-prized 18-25-year-old set.
We breezed through some R&B and hip-hop, caught snatches of news, talk shows and public affairs, and ended up on the down-home twang of Joe Diffie’s “John Deere Green.” It probably goes without saying that we turned the radio off at that point.
At no time, to my knowledge, did our listening patterns say anything insightful about us beyond suggesting that we have the attention spans of kindergarteners. Hell, I can’t rem ember a single ad we heard on the radio that day, and I was much too preoccupied to concentrate on any billboards blurring past.
In my experience, people in cars search for music based on their moods and whims or for any number of unpredictable reasons; their consumer needs don’t always factor in. I guess I just don’t see the logic in high-tech billboards that, as BTO would say, are workin’ overtime trying to figure us out.
Art & Commerce: Radio Daze
