• by Tameka Kee , December 12, 2007

A&E Network's campaign for its new show "Paranormal State" features massive billboards in New York and Los Angeles with visual and audio effects that make passersby think they're having a supernatural experience.

But according to vendors like BlueBlastMedia, this kind of creative is also having an effect on the industry as a whole--helping to bring a more concrete sense of interaction and metrics to out-of-home (OOH) ads.

New York-based Horizon Media was the agency behind the "Paranormal State" campaign, an effort that featured a combination of print, broadcast and cable spots, as well as theater ads and the interactive billboards (or non-traditional OOH). But Horizon had to tap BlueBlastMedia, a smaller tech-driven firm, to actually execute the experience in SoHo--where users walking below the billboards heard voices saying things like "Who's there?" and "It's not your imagination."

BlueBlastMedia is a vendor of the Holosonics technology that enables billboards to transmit the "audio spotlights," or sounds that can only be heard by people within a predefined vicinity. The New York-based firm has powered Holosonics wallscapes for Target and smaller, poster-sized "wild postings" for Mariah Carey's new fragrance (via Elizabeth Arden), in addition to the "Paranormal State" campaign.

According to JP Freeley, director of BlueBlastMedia, part of the allure of these kinds of non-traditional OOH ads is that his firm can provide "hit reports" tied to the Holosonics data. "It's almost like CTRs for online ads," Freeley said. "Since wild postings are motion-activated, we can keep a log of how many times the message is triggered. And all of the audio spotlights allow agencies to measure what times of day or day of week are getting the most traffic."

While Freeley admitted that the technology couldn't actually measure how many people acknowledged the message or looked at the poster, he said that it could help agencies figure out whether a billboard or poster was placed for maximum exposure, and whether it would be worth their client's dollars the next go-around.