Been so busy these past few weeks I didn't get a chance to mention this ground-breaking new media that appeared on Tokyo trains about a month ago.
Japanese printing companies have started offering advertisers the ability to display moving pictures on paper advertisements.
The above ad announces the debut of a new mascara from Lancome that uses a vibrating applicator brush. The poster is made from electronic paper—a technology that allows paper to be written and rewritten repeatedly. So what you're looking at is essentially a paper poster hanging from the ceiling of a subway train in which the image changes.
Similarly some train stations are now equipped with poster banks for electronic paper ads that can refresh with new images at specific intervals. If you're an advertiser and you rent the space, you can replace the ad whenever you want while sitting right at your office desk, since the wall frames are connected to PHS phone networks that tap into the internet.
One problem is that, as far as I know, the paper technology is still limited to creating black and white images (perhaps that's why the moving portion of the above subway poster is b/w). Nonetheless, data collected from Japan's Toppan Printing showed that even with black and white ads commuters were about 50% more likely to look at moving electronic paper wall posters for 5 seconds or more, as compared with color ads printed on regular paper.
