Easy Riders

American Demographics, March 1, 2004

Byline: SAM JAFFE

Few places are grittier, dirtier and slimier than a subway tunnel. Yet, that's where Peter Corrigan, CEO of Sub-Media LLC, is testing his new advertising product. Boots brown with the subterranean muck, Corrigan helps hang what appears to be a thin, rectangular box on the wall of a tunnel deep beneath the streets of Manhattan. But this is no ordinary box. Corrigan hopes that it will shine a new light on subway ads.

To a rider on the uptown PATH train between 14th and 23rd streets, the view is stunning. A moving picture unfolds outside the window of the train car, displaying a commercial for Snapple. Based on the same illusion that makes zoetropes and flip books appear to be moving pictures, these "films" are in fact a series of light boxes, sometimes hundreds of them, each with a slightly different poster. The motion of the train turns the series of pictures into a moving image.

"The amazing part of it is that it's always an enjoyable experience for the viewer," says Corrigan. Not only is it fun, but it's effective too. Citing a market survey done by Burke Research of Cincinnati, he says 84 percent of riders remembered the product linked to the ad.

MASS APPEAL

Why would a company like Snapple, a division of Cadbury Schweppes Plc., invest thousands of dollars to put a newfangled technology in a subway tunnel? After all, mass transit ads, and outdoor advertising as a whole, haven't historically evoked Madison Avenue's glitz and glamour. A peeling poster for a dermatologist's nail fungus removal treatment in a subway car, or a poster on a city bus for a movie that premiered months ago exemplify where transit ads have ranked in most blue-chip advertisers' strategic marketing food chain.

Not anymore. "Transit advertising is a forgotten medium that people are just now realizing gives a great bang for your buck," says Cheryl Poss, a research associate at Lamar Transit Advertising in San Antonio. "It's the undiscovered gem of the whole outdoor advertising industry."

Advertisers are looking anew at transit advertising as technologies make them more exciting and attractive, better ways are being created to measure their reach, and more commuters see them. Interest has grown so much that Clear Channel recently signed a $15 million contract with the Manhattan Transportation Authority to put electronic billboards at the entrances to more than 80 subway stations. Transit advertising was barely visible as a slice of the pie twenty years ago, but today it consists of 17 percent of all outdoor advertising, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

"People are spending more time out of home," says Stephen Freitas, OAAA's chief marketing officer. "Advertisers are spending more time trying to penetrate the marketplace; they want to surround the consumer with the message. There's been so much urban sprawl and it's often difficult to build new billboard signage, so one way to grow outdoor displays is to use transit advertising."

Mass transit is also an effective way for advertisers to reach varied demographic groups: the executive commuting on the train from the suburbs to the city, or a janitor taking the crosstown. The number of passenger trips on the nation's mass transit buses and subways rose to 9.7 billion in 2001 from 7.5 billion in 1997, according to the Federal Transit Administration, an arm of the Department of Transportation. In the past five years, mass transit ridership has risen 24 percent, faster than air travel or highway usage. Every day, 14 million Americans ride public transit. Another 25 million use it at least once a week.

Half of the nation's Fortune 500 companies are located in areas where mass transit is available and commonly used by employees, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) in Washington, D.C. In cities with populations of 1 million or more, 57 percent of transit riders made between $25,000 and $50,000, 18 percent made more than $50,000 and 25 percent made less than $25,000. Female riders account for between 52 percent and 60 percent of all riders (depending on the year of the study and the size of the metropolitan area). Only 7 percent of transit riders are over the age of 65. And a mere 10 percent are under the age of 18.

And all of those people are usually held captive for a good half-hour stretch, desperately looking for something on which to rest their eyes. As a result, advertising revenue rose by 20 percent in more than half of the nation's transit agencies in the two years between 1999 and 2002.

Mass transit ridership has been rising steadily since the mid-1990s at the same time that highway and urban congestion have gotten worse. "You look at a city like Phoenix, where the population is expected to double in the next 20 years," says Kathryn DeBoer, a marketing consultant with West Group Research in Arizona. "People are finally realizing that you just can't pave your way out of that."

NOT A POSTER BOY

Corrigan discovered his diamond in the rough two years ago. At the time, he was a lawyer for a venture capital firm, one of whose clients was Sub-Media. When he took a ride on the Atlanta subway system to check out the test run of the company's technology, he noticed commuters' reaction to the movie-like ads. "I saw a gaggle of teenage girls reboard the train at the end of the line just to watch the ad again," he says. "I realized that this was something enjoyable and entertaining."