‘Billboards for commuters, not drivers’

Billboards may distract, but accidents are more often the result of reckless driving.

Philippine Center for Out-of-Home Media Research (Philcourse) executive director Lloyd Tronco told reporters in a press conference in Manila on Wednesday that this was the result of a study conducted by their group.

Tronco urged government agencies, particularly the Department of Public Works and Highways and the Metro Manila Development Authority, to regulate the industry through policies “based on research, not knee-jerk reactions.”

In the survey conducted on 600 respondents, aged 16 and above, conducted from May 15 to May 21, Tronco claimed 24 percent, or 146 respondents, ride private cars daily while 76 percent, or 454, commute to work or to school.

Passengers

Of the 24 percent who ride cars, only 13 percent actually drive while the rest are passengers.

“The implication is billboards are there not for the drivers. The medium reaches 87 percent of nondrivers, so the issue that billboards are traffic hazards deserves more study,” Tronco pointed out.

“The billboards are built for commuters and nondrivers,” Tronco added.

Asked if the respondents liked to look at billboards, 82 percent of the respondents representing 493 persons replied positively and almost half of the respondents admitted to having been moved to purchase products based on what they saw in outdoor advertisements.

Tronco said out-of-home media are the second-strongest awareness builders, next to television.

The study conducted by the research group is patterned after the comprehensive outdoor study in the US, which asked 2,004 respondents, representing a population of 300 million.