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Digital out-of-home pays tribute to Star Trek's Spock.

After the passing of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who made Mr. Spock a household name, digital billboards around the Atlanta area paid tribute to the late pop culture icon.

March 20, 2015 by Christopher Hall — w, t

After the passing of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who made Mr. Spock a household name on Star Trek, digital billboards around the Atlanta area mysteriously began paying tribute to the late pop culture icon.

The 15 digital billboards showed a stark black-and-white image of Nimoy as Spock, offering the open-handed Vulcan salute with the phrase, "He did," referencing the salutation that accompanied the salute, "Live long, and prosper."

Several of these billboards are up around the Atlanta perimeter.. Pretty cool #LLAP #RIPSpock pic.twitter.com/MO9xaKWN72

— AxN R0K (@R0KL0bStEr) March 2, 2015

Images of the billboards quickly spread across social media, from Twitter to Instagram, before the instigators of the tribute outed themselves as the billboard company itself, Outfront Media (formerly CBS Outdoor):

#OUTFRONTMedia is behind the #ATL #Billboard tribute to @StarTrek @CmndrSpock @TheRealNimoy. http://t.co/mu0Lh1wLuy pic.twitter.com/eYIozRYxwZ

— OutfrontMediaUSA (@OutfrontMediaUS) March 2, 2015

"As a company, we at Outfront put up the boards," company spokeswoman Carly Zipp told CNN that day in a statement she also later sent to Digital Signage Today. "Lead by our Art Department, we decided to pay tribute to a man who lived long, and prospered. Millions of fans globally loved Leonard Nimoy. Our medium, with its ability to communicate almost instantaneously, would be a great way to display a fitting and timey tribute to the man, so we dedicated our boards to promote the simple yet effective message. We’re glad it’s being noticed!"

The dynamic capabilities of the technology driving the digital signage and the digital out-of-home advertising sectors lends itself to just this kind of quick and nimble responsiveness to current events, Zipp said in an email.

"Our digital boards are a quick and nimble medium to display topical messages – whether it’s related to celebrities, a missing person or a sports play," she said. "Thanks to great creative teams in-house, we are able to produce original and compelling creative and put it up on our digital boards within minutes for hundreds of millions of eyeballs to see. That’s the beauty of modern out-of-home, we’re everywhere our audience goes and we’re able to create messages that speak to them in a dynamic and expedient fashion."

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