Unlike their colleagues in the suburbs, New York City brokers can’t place signs around the neighborhood pointing to an open house. But now, those brokers can do something their suburban colleagues cannot: place ads on video screens in the back of taxicabs cruising around the city.
Call them property taxis. Taxicab video screens, which arrived late last year, are currently installed in more than 11,000 yellow cabs. The screens offer a continuous video loop, which lasts about 14 to 18 minutes. About a third of that time is devoted to advertising.
And, real estate firms have been among the advertisers to catch this new wave with the hope of reaching affluent New Yorkers and out-of-towners while they are actually sitting still.
Extell Development, the Corcoran Group and Core Group Marketing are among the first real estate firms to sample the new advertising form.
Like all advertisers, they buy either video ads or touch-through banners from content providers, firms like WABC-TV or NBC Universal. The content providers, in turn, have deals with one of three companies that provide the screens to the city’s cabs.
The videos (assuming the passenger doesn’t turn off the screen) last slightly longer than the average 13-minute cab ride. Passengers can also view text feeds in addition to, or instead of, video.
Depending on the content provider, the ads capture an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 viewers per day. More importantly, the taxi delivers an attractive demographic.
“Where in New York do you get a captive audience as well as the right audience?” asks Christina Lowris, Corcoran’s executive vice president for marketing and advertising. She says that Corcoran has been emphasizing its more “approachable” listings.
Corcoran has been employing the touch-through banner ads, each of which focuses on a specific listing. The taxi ads, Lowris says, have been very effective so far, though she wonders whether their impact will be diluted after other brokers start using the medium. Several of Corcoran’s direct competitors are lined up to buy taxi ads, says Michael Mongelluzzo, who directs the Taxi TV project for WABC-TV.
The taxi TV ads are priced on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis, where the advertiser pays only when the screen is on and its ad is aired. While the cost is based on the number of screens and the duration of the contract, Tom Haymond, vice president of NY10, a taxi network run by Clear Channel, says his real estate advertisers spend between $5,000 and $10,000 per week.
Clear Channel says it gives advertisers the option of running their ads only in specific neighborhoods, a feature he says is attractive to brokers looking to make their target audience as narrow as possible.
Core, for instance, touts the Jasper Condominium in cabs traveling on the East Side between 23rd and 42nd streets. The building is on East 32nd Street.
“For that building, it’s the best piece of advertising we’ve done,” says Steve Ganz, an executive vice president at the firm.
The medium is not cheap, the ad sellers concede, because it is so demographically targeted.
While taxi screen ads may be the latest thing, yellow cab riders have long had a jump on the hunt for the city’s real property: All they ever needed to do is look out the window, take a fancy to an address, hop out and make an offer.