During your last holiday travel, you have undoubtedly seen all kinds of roadside eye-catchers placed on various signboards. This fact proves that the outdoors surrounds consumers with its presence everywhere, as it offers media choices that suit every target audience, geography and strategic plan. It is a comprehensive mix of effective media delivery mechanisms that reach people in their cars or on subways, in airports and malls or in any number of growing outdoor media settings. Outdoor is roadside, outside and inside, above and below ground and on the move.
Since drivers passing through places with high traffic typically have little to occupy their attention with, highway advertising proved to be mostly noticeable and prominent because it uses billboards, posters or even station platforms combined with other kinds of flashing decorations. Billboards are large outdoor signboards, usually wooden, that show large, witty slogans splashed with distinctive color pictures. Billboards are often drivers' primary way of finding out where food and fuel are available when driving on unfamiliar highways. There were approximately 450,000 billboards on United States highways as of 1991. Somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 are erected each year. Billboards are in Europe a major component and source of income in urban street furniture concepts.
Most highway signs are harmless as they exist to advertise local restaurants and shops in the miles to come and are crucial to developing business in small towns that no one would stop at otherwise. Even national or global brands will make use of highway advertising objects in order to let people know about the variety of their services and products. However, you might occasionally pass a billboard or poster with questionable images and messages, like a close up on a woman's chest with a crude comment printed nearby, or silhouettes of scantily dressed or undressed women. Obviously, if you don't like what you see, especially in your hometown, you are free to speak up, but will it somehow change the situation inside the highway advertising industry and in the way authorities govern roadside advertising...? That is a tough question. The fact is that advertisers know what we want. They also know how to make us want what they are trying to sell. Just as a magician uses props to make the audience believe that something is happening which, in fact, is not happening, advertisers use props to create illusions and direct our thinking about products. Of all the props advertisers use (pictures, music, etc) language is the most misleading. Learning how advertisers use language to create illusions, and why they work, allows us to avoid making poor choices when we buy products - but that is another topic for discussion.
Speaking about highway advertising abuses, facts have proved that billboards and posters have long been accused of being distracting to drivers and causing accidents. Signs with bright colors and eye-grabbing pictures may cause drivers to look away from the road during a crucial moment. Electronic, animated signs in particular have been singled out as a cause. Studies have also shown that billboards at junctions and on long stretches of highway may have a particularly detrimental effect on road safety. One of the study's findings indicated that a five-second distraction at 60 mph often resulted in the driver traveling the length of a football field without fully concentrating.
Many ecological groups have also complained that billboards on highways cause too much clearing of trees and intrude on the surrounding landscape, with their bright colors, lights and large fonts making it hard to focus on anything else. Other groups believe that billboards and advertising in general contribute negatively to the mental climate of a culture by promoting products as providing feelings of completeness, wellness and popularity to motivate purchase. For all the above-mentioned reasons there are some states that have issued laws to prohibit billboards: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, etc.
On the other hand, highway advertisments cannot be considered as the only fact making drivers distract their eyes from the road, as elementary driver schools teach that drivers should keep their eyes on the road and their minds on driving. Roadside distractions have only an informative purpose, they shouldn't be allowed to cause accidents.