Eye Candy That Pays Money

The new mantra to trucking is near-real-time GPS-based trailer tracking has the potential to squeeze out operational inefficiencies, recover a lost trailer and/or derail a terrorist plot. But what isn’t common knowledge is the same technology can initiate a revolution in fleet graphics.

That’s what outdoor advertising firm Market Information Services of America, Inc. (MISA) is betting on, upon implementing a unique proposition with Terion, Inc. The two companies have announced the integration of Terion’s FleetView 3 trailer tracking system with MISA’s marketing database. … Full Article Here:

OK, I spend a lot of time writing about saving money using GPS tracking to help operate your fleet more efficiently. In some cases I can point out how a business can even make more money by, perhaps, getting an extra sale or service call per week out of a truck/technician. Those kinds of savings can add up fast. But what if your trucks are just traveling down the highway from point “A” to point “B”, and you’ve already eliminated any waste motion and assigned your work force in the optimum way possible. Can you still make more money with your trucks?

You bet! Of course you can strike a deal to paint advertising on the trucks …I mean who hasn’t seen an old trailer parked at the side of the road serving as a billboard, its freight-hauling days over? But what about live billboards, traveling from place to place?

Commercial display advertising in fixed locations is typically priced by ‘eyeballs’. The more potential customers who will see the billboard the more an advertising agency can charge for the display. Well this scheme takes the same principle and applies it to billboards in motion. An advertiser can quite accurately be charged by the number of impressions since the route and times the truck was in view are easily determined from the GPS tracking data. A very clever application of technology and one that seems to me to be a huge potential market. Who hasn’t traveled for a day down the Interstate and passed dozens of Crete Carrier Corporation white trailers with their dated red “hockey stick” logo, dozens of white a C.R. England trailers with their low red stripe and stylized herald, dozens of deadly dull yellow or white J.B. Hunt dry freight trailers, etc.

It would cost a fortune to put fixed billboards of that size in place along that many miles of highway. And yet, they are out there, day in and day out. What’s that sound I hear? Something like a knocking noise?