Put your client in America's elevators

Put your client
in America's elevators

Get them both coming and going from the office

By Kathy Prentice

  Targeting is what the new out-of-home venues are about. Identify a consumer group and put your message where they shop, commute and go for recreation.
    The latest hot target is the office crowd.
    For a long time, the workplace was largely out of range for advertisers. You could hit workers in a hundred different ways on their way to the office in the morning, and later when they were driving or taking a bus or train home. But the window in between--roughly from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.--was blank.
    Elevator advertising is changing that. Video screens in passenger lifts are spreading through the major markets via high rise office complexes.
   And of course, they are finding a captive audience, giving passengers something to look at instead of their feet.
   To find out how to get your client into America’s elevators, read on.
    This is one in a Media Life series on buying the new out-of-home venues. They appear weekly.

Fast Facts

What:
    Advertising on video screens inside elevators.

Who:
   Captivate Network, headquartered in Westford, Mass.

How it works:
    Wireless, flat-panel 10 ½ inch diagonal display screens deliver a combination of content and advertising.
    The screens are located above the control panel buttons on either side of the elevator doors with the bottom of the screen positioned six feet from the elevator floor.The screens are in the transoms above the elevator doors in units that don’t have space to accommodate them near the control panels.
    The top two-thirds of the screen displays programming while the bottom third displays advertising.
    Screens can display photos, graphics, text, animation and video in full color.Audio is not used in elevator displays.
    Ad creative can be full-motion video or static. Captivate’s creative team works with advertisers to modify stills or creative content developed for television. “This is similar to watching television,” says Steve Duffett, Captivate's vice-president of advertising sales .
    “It’s a ten-second silent commercial instead of 30 seconds. There are a lot of cute commercials where movement on the screen catches your eye. Research shows that a visual experience imprints in the mind of the viewer and the recall is extremely high.”
    Programming which includes local weather, local and national news, sports data, stock market updates and traffic reports, interspersed with ads, is delivered to each building from a central hosting facility. The loops are then relayed to each elevator via a wireless LAN.
    Content providers include CNN, The New York Times, The Associated Press and the Weather Channel.
    Content and ads are displayed in five-minute loops which are refreshed every 20 minutes, according to Duffett.“We’re moving toward a methodology later this year that will constantly refresh the content.”
    Every ten seconds a new screen is displayed.
    Ads run for ten seconds and are repeated every 12 to 15 minutes for a total of 14 minutes screen-time each day, based on 21 hours per day. The screens display content for 24 hours. Each ad runs 84 times daily, 588 times weekly and 2,352 times monthly in each elevator.
    “The ten-second screens serve up value. We’re a sound-bite nation conditioned to that frequency,” Duffett says.
    The top content is read in the first three to four seconds, Duffett says, with viewers’ eyes then moving to the bottom of the screen to the ad until the 10 second loop is completed.
    Captivate’s contract buildings average 30 floors, he says, with 3,000 to 4,000 business professionals working in each.Riding an average of six times each day, viewers are in the elevator up to 30 minutes a week and 24 hours over the course of a year.
    Captivate ads are aimed at consumers making decisions about business-related and personal purchases. For instance, Continental Airlines advertises to both the corporate officer and the individual taking a family on vacation, Duffett says.
    “These are decision makers for corporations and also individual consumers,” he says. “So while they’re consumers of business systems or software for their corporations, at the same time they’re consumers of automobiles, airline tickets or even a cup of coffee.”
    Advertisers are primarily large, national companies. For instance, automotive ads are usually placed by manufacturers. Companies typically buy the entire market, though ads can be placed regionally. For instance, Mercator, a Massachusetts-based firm specializing in software and data analysis, started its first campaign in Boston with thoughts of expanding into Chicago and Toronto.
    Ads deliver branding and call-to-action messages. Mercator is using a series of elevator ads in buildings where current clients as well as potential clients have their offices.
    “Now when we make cold calls to companies in one of the (Captivate) buildings they say ‘I saw your ad in the elevator,’” says Donna O’Neil, Mercator’s general manager. “Branding and name recognition have completely turned around within our contract period.”
    Most elevator ads are part of a campaign mix, Duffett says. Mercator uses the elevator ads in campaigns that also include print ads in major marketing research publications and occasional direct mail pieces.

Markets:
    U.S. markets include New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta.

Numbers:

How are they measured?
    Elevator ads are measured by impressions. Captivate currently reaches over one million business professionals every workday, delivering 47 million impressions daily.

Research:

What product categories do well?
     Computer software and hardware, travel, telecommunications, wireless communications, financial services, food and beverages, automotive, pharmaceuticals, media, credit cards and airlines are some of the product categories that do well in elevators.
    Captivate designates segments of inventory for a variety of products within categories.“For example, within the computer category there are software, databases, desktop tools, operating systems, customer relationship management, hardware, laptops, hand-helds, printers, desktops, disk-storage servers and networks,” Duffett says.
    Within automotive, they reserve slots for luxury foreign, luxury domestic and SUVs.
    An independent market study by the Massachusetts-based Pathfinder Research Group found that 94 percent of building tenants find the screen appealing, 97 percent of riders find the screens a positive addition, 96 percent of tenants find the screens easy to read, and 92 percent feel the information is up-to-date. Ninety-three percent report that they read the screens every time they ride the elevators.
    Weather, local news, national news and business news are the most popular features.
    The ad recall rate is 33 percent.
    Building tenants ride the elevator an average of 5.5 to 6 times per day while visitors ride an average of twice a day. The average ride is between 1.5 and 2.5 minutes. Total time spent in an elevator is five to ten minutes per day.

Demographics:
    The average elevator rider is between 25 and 54 with an average household income of $150,000 annually. The gender ratio of riders is 50/50.
    Captivate viewers are three times more likely to pay $35,000 or more for a new automobile purchase within the next 12 months than the average customer.
   Ninety-three percent of Captivate viewers are college graduates, with 34 percent having done post-grad work. Seventy-six percent are in managerial or professional positions, with forty-six percent in finance, including investment, commercial banks and insurance; and 19 percent in law firms.
    Captivate viewers are also twice as likely to have taken ten or more domestic business trips over the last 12 months than the average consumer and 81 percent more likely to have taken ten or more personal vacation trips over the past year.
    They are 58 percent more likely to upgrade their PC hardware over the next 12 months and 22 percent more likely to own a cellular phone than the average consumer.They are 89 percent more likely to have used the professional services of a full-service stockbroker over the last 12 months than the average consumer.
    The target audience is professionals employed in financial, legal, high tech and media industries. Captivate Network is in landmark office towers like the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building in New York City, the Sears Tower and Aon Center in Chicago, the Prudential Tower in Boston, the Fountain Place in Dallas, California Plaza in Los Angeles and the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco.
    Tenants in Captivate contract buildings include PricewaterhouseCoopers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Nike, Fidelity Investments, America Online and MCI.

Making the buy:
    Lead time is typically a week to two weeks, but ads can be placed as quickly as 24 hours with creative in hand.
    Contracts usually run at least three months with one month being the minimum.Creative can be changed during the run.
    Long-term or one-year commitments can secure a spot within a product category,Duffett says.A company selling a range of products can change the ad content.
    Pricing is based on cost per person or on a CPM basis, he adds. “The rule of thumb is 25 cents per person per month, but it varies based on commitment.It costs $150,000 to run on the entire U.S. network for a month.”
    Ads run on weekends, but at no cost to advertisers who contract for the Monday through Friday workweek, Duffett says.
    Captivate headquarters are in Westford, Massachusetts. Other offices are in Atlanta, Boston, Calgary, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver.

What’s unique:
    Reaching business professionals at their offices during the traditional workday, a window of advertising opportunity that is usually closed.

Who’s already in elevators:
    Continental Airlines, Dunkin’ Donuts, MCI Worldcom, Salomon Smith Barney, 3Com, AT&T Wireless and Mercator.

What they’re saying:
    “We saw this as an opportunity to reach our potential customers in a subliminal way.People have to see you in seven different ways before they recognize your name and we saw this as a nice way to do that without hitting them over the head with it.”–Donna O’Neil, General Manager of Massachusetts-based Mercator.

Web site info:
    Captivate Network at www.captivatenetwork.com

-Kathy Prentice writes about out-of-home advertising for Media Life, penning her stories from the resort town of Traverse City, in the upper reaches of Michigan.

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