Do you want ads in the backseat of your taxi?

I don't know why but I seem to be morbidly interested in how taxis are getting connected (I have a previous post on the Digital Taxi here).  Taxi fleets have been early adopters of connectivity technology for purposes of logistics/coordination and they are pioneering the integration of multiple connected devices in the car for commercial purposes.  And New York City's taxi fleets are the earliest of early adopters, compared to other cities in the US.

Now, this early adopter community is turning to back-seat advertising. I was in New York City two weeks ago and noticed, during my frequent taxi-rides, that virtually every taxi there has an interactive digital screen in the back-set, in addition to a card-swipe to pay by credit card and receive a printed receipt.  The devices have been built by Verifone. 

Turns out there are two competing offerings across New York. One side includes Verifone (Transportation Systems) in partnership with WABC.  The other side includes Creative Mobile Technology together with ClearChannel and NBC Universal.  A New York Times article on this is here.

The real twist in this tale seems to be that cab drivers hate this system with a passion - they have to listen to the same news snippets and advertising jingles over and over again. It drives them crazy!!

Local content (GPS tracking, local weather, celebrity news etc.): This screen has a map with the taxi's location on it (presumably tracked through GPS). Note the tabs on top for news, weather, sports, dining, etc.  Live TV is available (Accuweather news in this screenshot) - New York's local ABC affiliate WABC is running this Taxi TV network. 

Display and video ads: Advertising is a prominent part of the screen real-estate - I noticed a healthy distribution of ads (not just house ads), including ads from the Red Cross, New York Times and others. I called the number listed on the screen and it directs to WABC's ad sales team. The New York Times suggests that all 13,000 of the city's taxi cabs are equipped with some sort of interactive display technology, whether from Verifone or others.  Let's assume each cab is running for 12 hours a day - this amount to 156,000 hours of viewer time per day or roughly 57M viewer-hours per year which makes it a nice little property (a back-seat passenger is somewhat captive and so this viewer-hour may be worth more to the network than the equivalent time spent in front of a TV at home).

Comments

[JonesDigitalMedia]

Dev,
Interesting blog. I like the idea of screens in Taxi-cabs, but I think they fall-flat on the content side of things, as most DOOH screens often do. I also wanted to take the opportunity to introduce my company, Jones Digital Media (www.jonesdigitalmedia.com) We are a DOOH strategy and creative company. I have been thinking about
securing some funding to create high quality content that DOOH operators could then license to use in multiple venues and wondered if you had any experience or interest in this kind of investment?