> Billboards are still sold manually by sales teams. You literally cannot buy a billboard online. If people could buy them as easily as you buy an Adwords ad, maybe many more small companies would.
It's interesting how these ideas continually arise. And as described it seems like a virtuous idea. By solving the scaling issues of the marketplace, smaller and smaller companies can buy ads. Which is good because it evens the playing field and reduces monopolistic behaviors, making the market more free.
But by solving those scaling issues, you'd also be making it easier for bad actors to buy advertisements. (In this case huge billboards.) And without collecting a _lot_ more data, or allowing a company to policy free speech, there would end up being much less accountability for who is buying the advertisements, and who is seeing them. You end up with the same situation Facebook, Google and Twitter are answering for in Congress right now. [0]
I don't have a solution, other than to stop building these types of marketplaces, but it is disconcerting.
We keep creating systems that have positive benefits, but at the expense of rarer-but-huge negative consequences, that are often "solved" by infringing more and more on our privacy to prevent the black-swan events from occurring.
PS. If anyone has interesting reading along these lines, I'd love to hear it.
Other countries have sane campaign finance and campaign advertising laws. I think it is outside of their scope in posting this idea to try and make up their own internal ones and enforce them (and enforcement would inevitably colored by their own political bias).
I think the comparison to Adwords is misleading about what this idea really is. This is just a self-serve and automated marketplace for billboard ads.
Adwords is much more specific to the combination of targeting intent through search terms or content on a page (adsense)and then delivering relevant ads in an open auction. The type of targeting for these billboards will be closer to display advertising targeting based on demographics (who drives along this freeway, who rides this bus), seasonality, etc.
> Billboards are still sold manually by sales teams. You literally cannot buy a billboard online. If people could buy them as easily as you buy an Adwords ad, maybe many more small companies would.
It's interesting how these ideas continually arise. And as described it seems like a virtuous idea. By solving the scaling issues of the marketplace, smaller and smaller companies can buy ads. Which is good because it evens the playing field and reduces monopolistic behaviors, making the market more free.
But by solving those scaling issues, you'd also be making it easier for bad actors to buy advertisements. (In this case huge billboards.) And without collecting a _lot_ more data, or allowing a company to policy free speech, there would end up being much less accountability for who is buying the advertisements, and who is seeing them. You end up with the same situation Facebook, Google and Twitter are answering for in Congress right now. [0]
I don't have a solution, other than to stop building these types of marketplaces, but it is disconcerting.
We keep creating systems that have positive benefits, but at the expense of rarer-but-huge negative consequences, that are often "solved" by infringing more and more on our privacy to prevent the black-swan events from occurring.
PS. If anyone has interesting reading along these lines, I'd love to hear it.
[0]: https://stratechery.com/2017/tech-goes-to-washington/