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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."
As long as they aren't pop up ads...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Here's a fairly recent article about this from the Boston Globe
(Google cache link, since the original story is now archived)
....which replaced the Target ad. On the PATH train from New Jersey running between 14th and 23rd Street Stations in Manhattan, left side of tunnel.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
I thought for a second they were talking about the restaurant Subway... And to think my 200-pound weigh loss diet was in jeopardy! I'd hate to see animated ads with the big old flabby Jarrod and the new, skinnier one...
Have you been in a subway for oh, I dunno, the past 30 years? There are already ads plastered all over them, in stations and on trains.
This will be very confusing for the New York subway graffiti culture.
Once every subway tunnel in the world has these though, people will just mentally filter the ads out like they do with 95% of other advertising.
The article headline didn't go as far with it as they could have.
"And the words of the PROFITS are written on the subway walls..."
-l
some hood is gonna figure out how to tag these things with porn images and give full length porn movies to subway riders.
"Yeah Joe....we just arrested another bum for pleasuring himself on the subway. We really need to get the public works dept. down there to clean the spray paint off those ads."
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
I wanted to show you how it worked by creating an image that would animate as you used the down arrow to scroll down this discussion page but the crapfilter ate it.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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
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.
That's why I close my eyes when I drive. Thank God for my Excursion and the custom rambar on the front.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
They have some videos from news coverage and simulations at their website
I guess a degree is pretty powerful, if it can start its own company....
Karma: T-rexcellent.
As for the incentive, of course there's the initial novelty, but it's also more interesting than reading the 'Injured? Call 1-800-BIG-MONEY!' ad that's by the subway car's interior roof, or the budweiser ad that's on the subway car's interior wall.
Personally, I like the ads, and if I don't want to see them, that's why God invented the concept of not looking.
And in other news Gator today unveiled their newest advertisement product
"We don't want to go into details about how it will work but I will say that customers who order our free Ray Ban sunglasses will be in the thousands and the impressions will be many"
While many are buzzing about being able to get Free Rayban glasses the NY Transit authority is quite upset.
"This is going to eat into our subway ad revenues. It's theft and we plan on pressing legal action"
Not just on transparencies, but on Kodak transparencies . Is that a product placement right on the front of slashdot?
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
Just came back from Athens, where this is up and running, in full-annoyance mode, showing really cheesy Coca-Cola ads. FWIW, I think this was either on Grammh 2 between Panepistimio and Omonoia or on Grammh 3 between Evaggelismos and Syntagma (or both?).
// zyqqh