Mangia! Mangia! Cure for gate anxiety.

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Mangia! Mangia! Cure for gate anxiety.
By Diego Vasquez
Jan 5, 2009 - 3:13:08 PM

If you believe the slew of pharmaceutical ads on TV, there are all sorts of ailments out there needing treatment that we didn't know even existed. Here's yet another: gate anxiety.

Gate anxiety is the fear that by leaving the gate at the airport one might miss an important flight announcement, or the flight itself.

There may be no medical cure for gate anxiety, at least as yet, but there's now help on the way for sufferers. It's at JetBlue’s Terminal Five at New York's JFK Airport.

And it comes with an interesting ad component--just when we thought there wasn't one more possible place to put an ad in airports that hadn't already been thought of.

It’s called Re:vive, and it's a network of 200 screens from which waiting passengers can order food and drinks and have them delivered right to the gate. Anxious travelers on JetBlue can now catch a meal without ever straying from eyesight of the gate.

The screens carry banner ads.

The system, which has been running for a couple months and rolls out ads next week, was developed by OTG Management, which handles concessions in Terminal Five, and Deepend, a New York design agency.

The screens are in a work area where travelers can set up what's in effect a temporary office, with a work surface and plugs for their laptops and cell phones. The menu screens are mounted immediately above the work area.

Here’s how it works: Passengers use the touch screens to browse through food and drink options from restaurants at the airport. They can then pay by credit card, entering their information on the screen. Their food order is delivered within 10 minutes.

Illy Caffe, the upscale coffee, is the first advertiser, and its ads will ask passengers if they’d like a cup of coffee with their order.

When the screens aren’t in use, they go into sleep mode and are taken over by 30- and 60-second video ads.

In time, James Summerfield, managing partner at Deepend, expects to see advertisers taking advantage of the system's ability to target travelers with unique messages.

“If you think someone at a particular gate is going down to Florida, the ad can be for, say, a sunscreen,” he says. “There is both time-sensitive messaging and also destination-sensitive.”

There’s no immediate plan to roll out Re:vive in other airports or markets, although OTG is considering other airports where it handles concessions. As for JFK’s Terminal Five, up to 55,000 passengers move through the terminal each day, most for a minimum of 90 minutes at a time, according to Deepend.