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Animated Ads in a Subway Near You
prostoalex writes "A company called Sub Media claims a successful launch of motion-picture ads in New York subway. The ad agency, created by a PhD in Astrophysics, prints ads on Kodak transparencies, so that when the train speeds up, the resulting images create a full-blown motion picture. The first ever ad of this was run for Target in NY, and there is another one planned for Discovery Channel."
I saw this in NY when I went to H2K2. I didn't know it was newsworthy though :).
I told my wife about it 'cause I think it spooked everybody on the train. Something about the way the adds "move" gives you really bad vertigo. You expect everything outside the Path to be dark and moving by at a good pace, instead you look out the window and see gay men and women dancing around red and white bullseyes wearing tight white bellbottoms and goofy smiles. It's like riding a train into the twilight zone.
But, I suppose it will sell a lot of addspace.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I recently saw the Discovery Channel ad on the PATH train too. The ad that was showing was for The Discovery Channel's Shark week, so it featured a shark swimming around. The first time I caught it out of the corner of my eye, it sort of startled me. I knew the train was under the river at that point, and seeing a shark made me think something might be very wrong with the subway!
As much as I hate the ads plastered everywhere these days, I think this isn't a half-bad idea. A lot of the people riding the subway have nothing better to do. As you note, they often "zone out". Those people will probably view the ad, especially if it's interesting (think of the possibilities of a long-running story type campaign). Here's a situation where a lot of people have nothing better to do-- as opposed to pop up ads where I'm trying to do something else but the ads interrupt me.
I've been on that subway, it (the implementation) is cool. they have red LEDs spread along the wall next to the tracks and the ads "chase" alongside the train as it zips down the track so it floats outside the window. Quite surreal to watch.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I wish I noticed this story earlier.
For all of you New Yorkers who rode the D train from Brooklyn into Manhattan in the late 70's and early 80's, this is old hat. I don't know when they pulled the plug on this, but between Dekalb Ave. and the Manhattan Bridge some artist had done exactly this along the abonded Myrtle Ave. stop. It depicted a 1950's style rocket ship taking off and landing.
I must have watched this a 1,000 times on way in to high school. Of course, this was art and not an ad.
Back in the 1980s, an artist created an installation in the New York Subway called Masstransiscope which essentially turned the subway into an unrolled and oversized zoetrope.
Bradbury, et al., suggested using a material that was common years ago but may not be so common now - it was a type of reflector that showed a picture when viewed one way and another picture when viewed from a slightly different angle. You could flip back and forth by rotating the reflector. Their idea was that if you're going to have an animation museum, the museum itself should be animated. But since they were specifically aiming at kids, they set up the entry just for the kids.
What happened depended on how tall you were. If you were an adult, you saw these static cartoon adult characters, i.e., Goofey, Donald, etc. following you along as you walked down the hall to the exhibit. But if you were a kid, or you lowered your eyes to kid-height, what you saw were an animated Huey, Dewey and Louie running in and out of the cartoon adult's legs.
On a similar note, I recently bought a complete set of Popular Mechanics Do-it-Yourself encyclopedias (published in 1968), and one project that was detailed was a picture done in a similar manner, except instead of lenticular lens plastic being used, three pictures were used. Two of the pictures were cut into strips that were glued back-to-back and in order. Then a third picture was placed in the frame, and via grooves sawed in the top and bottom of the frame edge, the strips were placed perpendicular to the main picture. This basically allowed three different "views" in one picture frame as you looked at it from the left, the right, and "head-on". The project was described as using portraits: A left portrait, a right portrait, and a frontal face portrait.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon