If I am driving near my home, it will likely be to a business that I decided to patronize before I even left home. Those in-town billboards are thus only good for subconscious name recognition. I'm not going to hire an ambulance-chaser lawyer unless I need one, but if I do, there are two in particular that saturate the local ads around here, including the billboards. If you're in that sort of business, you really do need to put your name on every space you can buy.
On the highway, most of the billboard ads are for businesses positioned near the highway.
I don't think highway billboards and in-town billboards are realistically in the same advertising market, even if they have similar form factors.
Clever and eye-grabbing is strictly for in-town boards. The same people will see this message multiple times, perhaps even twice a day.
Highway billboards have to be simple and informative, and highly relevant to travelers. People may only see these once, ever.
When I'm on the highway, I won't even look at billboards unless one of the following applies:
- need food
- need gas
- need a toilet
And those functions are increasingly being replaced by GPS navigators with preloaded points of interest and by smartphones' interactive map applications.
