A Different Kind of Witness
Every morning as the sun rises, a billboard on the edge of town catches the first light. It has watched thousands of sunrises from this exact position, more sunrises than any human will ever see from the same spot. Through summer heat and winter freeze, rain and drought, it stands in unchanging witness to the passage of time.
This might seem like a strange way to think about outdoor advertising. We usually consider billboards from our own perspective, as things we glance at briefly while passing by. But what if we flip that perspective? What if we consider the billboard’s experience of time rather than our own?
The billboard exists in a temporal dimension completely unlike human experience. It sees the same location at every hour of every day, year after year. It watches traffic patterns shift from morning rush to afternoon lull to evening commute. It observes seasonal changes in vegetation, weather patterns, and light. It remains while everything around it moves and changes.
The Static Observer of Constant Change
While you pass the billboard in a fraction of a second, registering its message in a brief glance, the billboard has been watching the road for months or years. It has seen thousands of cars pass, many of them the same vehicles driven by the same people on their daily routines. It has become intimately familiar with the rhythm of this particular location in ways that no human observer could.
Think about what a billboard positioned at a busy intersection witnesses. Every accident that occurs in its view. Every proposal that happens in the park across the street. Every protest march that passes by. Every street vendor who sets up shop nearby. The billboard sees all of it, indifferent and unchanging, while the human drama unfolds around it.
This constancy gives outdoor advertising a peculiar relationship with the communities it inhabits. A billboard displaying the same message for three months becomes part of the visual background of thousands of daily lives. People pass it every day, sometimes multiple times per day. The advertisement becomes woven into the temporal fabric of their routines.
Watching the Weather
Of all the things a billboard experiences that we do not, weather might be the most profound. We move through weather, experiencing it in bursts and intervals. We go from building to car to building, spending most of our time in climate-controlled spaces. But the billboard is always outside, always exposed.
It feels every rainstorm fully, the drops hitting its surface continuously for hours. It experiences the complete arc of thunderstorms from the first dark clouds to the final clearing. When snow falls, the billboard accumulates it gradually, layer by layer, until the message might be partially obscured. Then it watches the snow melt, revealing the advertisement again in patches.
The summer sun beats on the billboard’s surface day after day, fading colors imperceptibly. The winter wind buffets it without pause. Out-of-home advertising exists in full exposure to the elements in a way that we, with our heated homes and air-conditioned cars, rarely experience anymore.
This relationship with weather affects the billboard physically. The materials degrade at different rates depending on their exposure. A billboard facing south receives more intense sunlight than one facing north. Rain and humidity affect adhesives and inks. Temperature swings cause expansion and contraction. The advertisement is not just displayed on the billboard; it weathers along with it.
The Rhythm of Human Activity
From its fixed position, the billboard observes patterns of human activity that we, as participants in that activity, might not fully perceive. It sees the morning rush intensify and fade with remarkable regularity. It watches traffic build up before holidays and thin out on weekends. It observes the gradual changes in what time rush hour begins and ends as work patterns shift.
During the pandemic, billboards watched cities empty in a way that no fixed human observer could. They saw traffic volumes plummet overnight. They witnessed streets that were usually packed with cars become eerily quiet. They observed the gradual return of normal activity over months. These advertisements continued displaying messages about movies and restaurants and travel to empty roads, a strange disconnect between the optimism of commercial messaging and the reality of shutdown.
The billboard also experiences the annual cycle in ways we might not consciously register. It sees spring arrive gradually, watching trees bud and green over weeks. It observes fall colors shift and then fade. It witnesses winter’s bare branches accumulate and lose snow through multiple cycles. Seasonal decorations appear and disappear in windows across the street. The same houses are decorated for Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then nothing, then the cycle begins again.
Night and Day
The temporal experience of a billboard changes dramatically between day and night. Lit billboards transform at dusk, becoming sources of light rather than surfaces reflecting it. They glow in the darkness, visible from much greater distances than during the day. The surrounding environment changes completely as artificial light takes over from natural light.
At night, the billboard sees a different city. Fewer cars, but often traveling faster. Different demographics, different purposes for travel. The nighttime city has its own rhythms, and the billboard witnesses all of them from the same unchanging position. It illuminates the darkness around it, creating a small pool of light that has its own effects on the local environment.
Birds sometimes roost on billboard structures, using them as perches through the night. Small animals might take shelter beneath them. The billboard becomes part of the ecosystem, not just the commercial landscape. Its presence affects the local environment in subtle ways that accumulate over time.
What the Billboard Knows
If billboards could retain memory, they would know things about cities that no human observer could. They would understand traffic patterns with perfect accuracy. They would have witnessed the complete progression of neighborhood change. They would have seen every weather event, every accident, every moment of joy or tragedy that occurred in their view.
But billboards do not remember. Each moment is experienced and then gone. The billboard exists in an eternal present, always watching, never accumulating wisdom from what it sees. This might be the most profound difference between the billboard’s temporal experience and our own. We remember, learn, and change based on our experiences. The billboard simply persists, unchanging despite everything it witnesses.
Yet its presence creates memory for others. “That billboard has been there as long as I can remember,” people say. The structure becomes a marker of personal time, a constant against which we measure our own changes. The billboard remains while we age, move through life stages, change jobs and relationships. Its permanence makes our impermanence more visible.
