Thursday, January 12, 2012

take on the subway platform ad

As a veteran of the NYC subway system, there is something that has been bothering me for years.    Do the people who handle the sales of the ads on the platforms have different pricing depending on the direction of the train on that side of the platform?

The reason I ask is, take a random platform on the R train going into Brooklyn and you'll know that you will always find people waiting on the platform for the uptown train but rarely anybody waiting to catch a downtown one.    Basically it's a city which revolves around Manhattan, so any platform that serves trains that go into Manhattan will have people on it while the platform on the other-side of the tracks is mainly used by people getting off the train and directly departing the station.   So whereas the same amount of people will go through both turnstiles, you'll get  much more captive audience on one side as people will stare at these ads as they patiently wait for their train to come barreling down the tunnel Since advertisement is all about capturing a captive audience there must be a different price for both or at least there should be.

Then I think about another aspect of it.. there probably is a lot more graffiti on the uptown advertisements as there will obviously be many more bored teenagers standing on one platform who will deface just about anything..

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