Another day, another ambient media opportunity. This one, though,
might be a bit more significant than all those schemes you hear about to
put ads on food packaging, bar urinals, the back of people's eyelids and
so on.
A new company, MotionPoster, is trying to sell the world's metro
operators a system that allows short, silent, TV-style commercials to be
shown in the windows of trains as they pass along tunnels. Images are
projected by a series of back-lit boxes along the walls of the tunnels.
Thanks to some pretty clever technology, that predicts how fast the
train will be moving and adjusts the projection of the images
accordingly, the effect is like a short film being shown within the
window.
The system has been installed in Athens and Budapest, with Frankfurt and
Munich also signed up, and three or four more metro operators just about
ready to go, according to the company's chief executive Charles
Holden.
He says six of the 20 operators the company is in "serious talks" with
are in Asia, and adds that he expects to sign one up "in the very near
future" and have the system in every continent by the end of the
year.
In Europe, the first two advertisers are Adidas and Coca-Cola. Adidas
has already gone live with the first execution in its campaign, created
by Leagas Delaney and bought by Carat, which depicts an athlete running
alongside the carriage, waving at the passengers and then accelerating
out of view.
When you consider that 30 billion journeys a year are made on metro
systems worldwide, and 600 million are made, for example, on Hong Kong's
MTR, the potential is clearly big. As with any new media opportunity,
however, it poses as many questions as it answers. Yes, it's a new way
of reaching people, but soon it won't be new any more - it'll be just
another aspect of the ever-more fragmented media landscape. And with the
spiralling growth of media sites, there's the accompanying danger of
ad-bombarded consumers becoming ever more weary with marketers' attempts
to communicate with them.
This last issue affects all ambient media - especially those that are
more intrusive than moving metro posters. Hong Kong's Kowloon Motor Bus
(KMB) and Citybus, for example, have TV screens, complete with sound,
pumping both programming and advertising at passengers on 2,100
buses.
A spokesman for the companies' sales representative Roadshow said the
companies surveyed passengers for their opinions on an ongoing basis,
and monitored sound levels carefully.
Holden refutes the idea that MotionPoster will be seen as intrusive: "I
don't think it'll be any more intrusive than other metro advertising.
It's silent, which is important, and people have the option to watch it
- it's not forced on them."
He claims that achieving cut-through won't be a problem. "I have no
worry about dilution," he says. "It's a great product, which delivers
the audience, and does it in a fresh way. We're going for the
mainstream; we want this to be a major advertising category worldwide.
We're positioning this as a premium product, as you can see with our
first two advertisers."
Holden adds that media and creative agencies are being educated about
the system's merits; it'll mostly be sold by the major outdoor and
public transport sales houses: "The CPM will be competitive with
cross-track, because we've got a much, much bigger audience. Everybody
on a train passes from one station to another."
Not all agencies are convinced that ambient media proliferation is
necessarily a good thing. New opportunities have to be approached with
caution, according to Ogilvy & Mather China vice-chairman Joseph
Wang.
"People are already deluged by tons of commercial material every day,"
he says. "Those messages have to be managed so that they are
consistent.
"Consumers are going to become irritated. You have to be very, very
careful if you're going to do this sort of thing. The person is captive,
so you have to get their permission, or it's an invasion of their
privacy.
"The content really needs to stand out. You need to do something that
entertains people. So people will have to design creative that's
appropriate to the environment."
Creative cannot easily be adapted for the system from other media, so
appropriateness is a big issue. So is the non-permission-based nature of
ambient media, argues Leo Burnett regional managing director Richard
Pinder: "The mechanism we're all increasingly proud of in our industry
is people choosing to view. We're moving from a monologue to a dialogue
with the consumer, and that's true in everything we do - direct
marketing and the internet, but also advertising. If you force your
advertising on people when it's inappropriate or not wanted, they'll
vote with their feet."
Introducing new types of ambient media addresses the problems of
advertising with more advertising.
Reaching the jaded consumer becomes more difficult as each advertising
execution becomes a slightly fainter voice in the cacophony. The acid
test for something like MotionPoster will be whether the cut-through it
will undoubtedly initially achieve has any staying power, or if it's
based on novelty value. If it gets anything like as big as the company
claims, it won't be another slight dilution, but a major new medium. We
shall see.
