If you have ever taken a flight from or to busy airports such as O’Hare in Chicago or LaGuardia in New York City, you may have noticed the big red bull’s-eyes on the rooftops of Target stores nearby. These rooftop ads are created to strengthen branding while letting flyers know that Target stores are nearby.
These “aerial billboards” are not a new or rare concept. They have been in existence for a while now and have always been targeted at people flying overhead in airplanes. However, with the budding popularity and use of Google Maps and Google Earth along with map services run by Yahoo! and MSN, it is only natural to consider whether or not this old concept can be applied to this newly prevalent channel.
Up until now, the real estate industry has been the main beneficiary of Google Maps and other map services. They incorporate the map services in their sites and advertising to catch the consumer’s eye and give them a neat new tool to use. But now it seems that the potential for widespread use of map services to advertise is a big and exciting reality. Or is it?
Carlos Maycotte, a writer for The Cornell Daily Sun, writes “Soon, every available flat, rooftop surface will be covered in ads for McDonald's, Coke and Tampax. Why not? They were going to put ads for Spiderman 2 on the bases of the National Pastime a couple of years ago. What's going to keep the first enterprising Mr. Burns to paint a Target on the roof of his building? Thousands of people use Google Earth everyday. Zooming through New York, you can see hundreds of empty roofs, dozens of empty parking lots. Roofs will be the new billboards.”
Others are not so sure. RoofAds, a company that specializes in painting logos and ads on rooftops, does not use Google Maps or other online map services as selling points for their services. They only mention the millions of commuters that “gaze out of their airplane windows upon takeoff and landing from airports around the world. These commuters see mountains, rivers, cities, and white rooftops of large buildings.” Another argument against a widespread use of rooftops for advertising in the near future is the fact that online maps from satellite views are not updated frequently. On Google’s Google Earth site they mention the fact that images on their service are updated on a rolling basis, and that the current images have been taken by satellite and aircraft sometime in the past three years.
Essentially, current rooftop ads should not be attributed to Google Maps. They were created with the original intent of capturing the attention of flyers as they pass above buildings. However, the potential for the use of rooftops to advertise is clear and imminent, and as map services continue to improve their technology, and update more often, this prospect becomes even more promising.
And why stop with rooftops? Though it may be a bit fanciful, we might even begin seeing buildings constructed in clearly discernible shapes. Think huge logos visible from planes and satellite images.
This could be the start of something really big and exciting, but in reality it might take a few years before the use of rooftops and buildings for advertising on map services takes flight.
Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/
topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060124
RooftopAdsOnTargetForGoogleMaps.html
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/
blog/060117-091943
http://www.cornellsun.com/media/
paper866/news/2006/01/19/Opinion/
From-The.Earth.To.The.Goog-1477196.
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