Yesterday I saw a new kind of advertising billboard disguised as a recycle bin! Like many recycle bins it is a graceless thing made of black plastic with a bright logo indicating what recyclable can be deposited in it. At each end of the bin is a flat panel video screen about a metre tall and half a metre wide.
On each screen is a live video feed featuring a mixture of adverts in one form or another, with a sprinkle of news flashes, weather and other useful data that it is hoped will be sufficient to prevent people blanking it from their field consciousness altogether.
Once registered it is doubtful the bin will ever be noticed again. It will become invisible.
The bin is the first product of its kind I have seen in London. However bus stops equipped with much larger screens have been on the streets for months, and screens above urinals in the toilets of pubs and bars have been around for years. On the roof of one central London bus stop I frequent, there is an experimental dot matrix display angled specifically to be seen by passengers on the upper decks of the city's famous buses. There have also been experiments with screens positioned in dark tunnels on the underground train system!
