We present a wide interactive banner display installed at a city sidewalk and the findings from two long-term field studies investigating the opportunities of public displays to actively shape the audience. In order to improve parallel usage and dissolve crowds, our wide display subtly directs individual users by visual stimuli and manipulates the audience like a puppeteer, thus reversing the notion of adaptive content being implicitly manipulated by the users.We first investigated visual signifiers which attract initial users approaching sideways, and then others, which actively influence user positions and regulate audience constellations. We found that dynamic visual stimuli such as frames and ellipses are effective (1) to direct users in front of the display, (2) to distribute multiple users along the display, (3) static frames are more effective than moving or interactive ones, and (4) these visual stimuli also work indirectly by inducing social pressure among users.