A New Billboard Longs for Human Touch

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a touch may be worth more.

Clothing label Intimissimi put that idea to the test with a street‑level billboard that brings touch into the brand experience. Installed across neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles, the billboards embed real cashmere swatches into the display, tempting passersby to stop and engage with the material.

While tactile installations may be a novel idea, billboards sit at the center of a growing market, with US out-of-home (OOH) advertising drawing a record $9.46 billion in revenue in 2025. A significant portion of the market’s growth is driven by interactive digital signage that can rotate content and measure performance.

No matter how a billboard looks—or feels—its impact comes down to location. To find the best places to share a brand’s message with specific audiences, media owners rely on human movement data and analysis from geographic information system (GIS) technology.

Wisdom of the Crowd

Human movement data is typically drawn from anonymized mobile device signals—a vast collection of time stamps, location coordinates, and ZIP codes. Once these signals are aggregated, filtered, and mapped, useful patterns emerge.

Where do commuters travel on weekday morning routes? Which retail districts draw high‑net-worth shoppers? What are the most common pathways baseball fans take to and from a game?

Market analysts translate these patterns into psychographic profiles—inferences about a group’s values, motivations, and likely brand preferences. Ad buyers and creative teams analyze where trend-driven urban consumers, value-oriented savers, and other psychographic groups work and shop before deciding where to place out-of-home ads and how to tailor their messages.

Consider Manhattan’s Times Square, through which as many as 330,000 pedestrians pass in a day. The crowd includes residents, daily commuters, and visitors from around the world. An ad campaign aimed at visitors could focus on specific needs, like where to shop, where to dine, or how to experience the city.

A recent GIS analysis revealed the five US cities that sent the most visitors to Times Square, and the psychographic makeup of each one. Visitors from San Diego included high-earning, fitness-loving married couples, while the Miami crowd included online-shopping singles who tend to live alone.

Media owners use this insight to give advertisers a clear account of how many people see an ad—and who they are. Marketers, in turn, can tailor their messages and buy placements with greater confidence.

Driving Traffic from a Moving Vehicle

Companies that place billboards in fixed locations rely on psychographic insight to reach the right consumers. For companies with ads on the move, the challenge is more complex.

For decades, the nation’s third‑largest beverage distributor wrapped its trucks in vinyl ads, turning its delivery fleet into rolling billboards. More recently, the company digitized its truck panels to offer ad campaigns that keep pace with fast‑changing consumer tastes.

The signage needed to appeal to buyers who expect accountability across channels—clear estimates of an ad’s reach, frequency, and performance. That posed a challenge. The company’s delivery routes averaged 40 miles over highways and through neighborhoods of varying makeup.

To understand who was seeing the ads, GIS analysts mapped the company’s delivery routes and identified areas within view of the rolling billboards. Once they’d analyzed human movement data from those areas, they could estimate not only ad impressions but also the psychographic profile of each audience.

Whether ads are fixed to a wall, outfitted with fabric, or mounted on a moving vehicle, their effectiveness depends on understanding how people move through the world. By making sense of human movement data, GIS gives companies a clear understanding of who and where audiences are. In a crowded media landscape, that precision is what helps brands stand out—and stay relevant.