Many taxis in Singapore have a video screen mounted behind the head rest of the passenger seat. The purpose being to inundate passengers with more in-your-face (literally) advertising and other noisy detritus.
There is a perfunctory gesture towards providing information such as restaurants and movies. Touching these options merely brought up massive alphabetically organised lists of restaurant names, current and upcoming movies, and theatres. No reviews, no recommendations, and only the most basic info like cuisine type. Utterly pointless in all respects. (Select movie previews do play in the advertisement area of the screen but there is no way to contextually find out related info such as which theatre a particular movie is playing at.)
Even in this interactive mode, the primary intention of pushing noisy advertising is clear. A significant portion of the screen seems permanently dedicated to looping, epileptic, animated crap. Authenticity fail.
More distraction does not make better advertising. I will not recall your brand or product better because you have chosen to shove it in my face, along with tens of other similarly noisy ads. Just like I have an ad blocker in Firefox, my default behaviour now is to mute the sound as soon as I get in. If only there was a way to turn the video off too.
Given Martin Lindstrome’s research (see my post on his book Buyology), I would guess that advertisers are wasting their money on these taxi video ads.
