Trailer tracking has found its way into the advertising world. People who pay for ads on the sides of trailers now use trailer tracking to confirm where their ads are and how many people see them.

The latest example comes by way of mobile communications provider Terion Inc., Melbourne, Fla. This week, Terion announced it will provide 10,000 of its FleetView trailer tracking systems to NxGen Telematics Inc., Apple Valley, Minn.
NxGen, in turn, has contracted with Fleet Advertising Media Group of St. Paul to supply FleetView-based systems to monitor trailers that carry paid advertising. NxGen will use FleetView to provide frequent GPS (Global Positioning System) location reports, which will be displayed on a web site. There advertisers can verify their ad’s location and exposure to the public, usually to people in passing vehicles.
According to George Gearner, Fleet Advertising Media Group CEO, GPS systems are critical to the growth of truck advertising.
"Without the ability to track from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week in two-minute increments, there is no accountability for auditing,” he said.
No one can be certain exactly how many people have seen a truck-side ad, of course, but New York-based Traffic Audit Bureau for Media Measurement has developed a formula it claims can come close. The bureau’s method overlays trailer location information with Department of Transportation traffic statistics. The method, called Mobile Advertising Report Generator, yields the number of people likely to have seen a truck-side ad.
According to the bureau’s web site, “The model assumes that 85 percent of the time the opposite side traffic is visible across the median. It calculates oncoming traffic and traffic traveling in the same direction separately. The model is conservative in that it does not give credit for night-time traffic, unless the advertising is back-lit. It also does not count when a truck is stopped unless it moved in the last two minutes, since we cannot tell from the data whether the truck is stopped on the street or in a loading dock.”
The model does not yet include pedestrians.
The system was tested on Chicago-area interstate highways last November with three trucks carrying an ad for Seiko watches. Results indicated that the ad reached an estimated 40,585 commuters per truck each day.