“DO NOT BUY THIS . . .” Product Reviews on a Real World Billboard

“DO NOT BUY THIS. AFTER 5 YEARS IT WILL FALL APART.” 65,842  people see this every day.

I see this big car advertising billboard at the Cleveland stop of the Blue Line CTA in Chicago. Look at the red writing “DO NOT BUY THIS. AFTER 5 YEARS IT WILL FALL APART.” Someone wrote that on the billboard.

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Billboard on the Blue Line to O’hare. I’d estimate 65,842  people see this every day.

Some people in the office said that near the college campuses this writing on the billboards is rampant.

Thought 1: How to leverage behavior public commenting

I thought, wow, if people are going to write on this. What kind of campaign could you have where you put blank links or dotted lines and pens hanging on chains to encourage people to write comments. Why haven’t they put in Borders Bookstores little post-its for people to write their own comments about a book and post it beside the book. They do do that with store employees comments on a small selection of books.

Thought 2: How does this go virtual

I showed the photo to Rod Rakic and he said, that people are probably doing this virtually with things like google sideshare. I think the value here could be that the company could “look” and see what customer feedback is and perhaps change their ad to address it.

References

Viewership is based on the fact that 658,524 ride the system every day, 10 spokes feed into the city, this is one spoke therefore 1/10 of total.

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