Interactive advertising displays: audience behavior around interactive advertising columns, life-size screens and banner displays

Abstract

Interactive public displays are the latest development in the field of out-of-home advertising. Throughout history characteristic shapes for billboards evolved such as flat rectangular displays, long displays or cylindrical advertising columns. This work presents novel interactive display designs that are based on these historical role models and allow passers-by to interact with them in a natural, touchless manner. It further pursues a vision where interactive public displays become more active themselves and actively influence passer-by behavior in order to increase their effectiveness, better attract attention and improve public interaction in front of them. First, to overcome the challenge that passers-by often do not expect public displays to be interactive and thus pay no attention to them, this work presents a solution called unaware initial interaction that surprises passers-by and communicates interactivity by giving visual feedback to their initial movements. To be effective, the visual feedback has to be designed considering the specific display shapes, their requirements to contents and the typical approaching trajectories. Second, to overcome the challenge that larger groups of passers-by often crowd together in front of wide public displays or do not take optimal positions for interaction, this work presents a solution to subtly and actively guide users by dynamic and interactive visual cues on the screen in order to better distribute them. To explore these concepts and following an initial analysis of the out-of-home domain and of typical display qualities, interactive counterparts to the classical display shapes are designed such as interactive advertising columns, long banner displays and life-size screens. Then interactive contents and visual feedbacks are designed which implement the presented interactivity concepts, and audience behavior around them is analyzed in several long-term field studies in public space. Finally the observed passer-by and user behavior and the effectiveness of the display and content designs are discussed and takeaways given that are useful for practitioners and researchers in the field of public interaction with out-of-home displays.