Also in this report:

– Location, location, location: Grant: Old real estate adage also applies when planning outdoor advertising campaigns p.19

– Five key issues dominate in outdoor: Young: Planning, Buying, Location Quality, Posting and Follow-up are essential considerations p.20

– Know the product in every market: Saunders p.22

– Spotlight onOut-of-Home Creative p.24

– Do your homework: Hughes p.25

Despite a proven track record, transit advertising remains, in many respects, a misunderstood medium.

Let’s start with the name.

The convenient umbrella term ‘transit’ lumps together three very different media – interior transit, exterior transit and shelters – each of which has its own distinct audience and capabilities.

For suppliers, the challenge is making sure that clients understand the differences, and know how to utilize those capabilities.

Ron Hutchinson, president of Toronto-based Urban Outdoor Trans Ad, notes that the demographics of exterior and interior transit are very different.

While exterior transit is relatively well understood by advertisers, he says, there are still some serious misconceptions about interior.

Perhaps the most significant misconception is that the primary audience for interior transit is teens.

On the one hand, Hutchinson says, it is true that young people are the heaviest users of transit on a per capita basis. (‘In Toronto after four weeks, we can reach 62% of teens. There isn’t any other way to get such a high percentage of that target audience so efficiently.’)

This reality is reflected in the range of categories that dominate interior transit advertising – among them confectionery, snack foods, entertainment and sports shoes.

On the other hand, nearly two-thirds of the interior transit audience is over the age of 25. That’s not surprising when you consider that teens make up a relatively small percentage of the overall Canadian population.

Hutchinson says the thrust of Urban Outdoor Trans Ad’s business development activity is to continue capitalizing on its ability to reach teens, while at the same time attempting to target new categories of advertisers.

The company uses PMB Print Measurement Bureau figures and other research to back up its case.

The effort is beginning to pay off, Hutchinson says. Financial services companies such as Dynamic Mutual Funds and Altamira Investment Services, for example, are now using interior transit advertising.

Among the other characteristics of interior transit that Urban Outdoor Trans Ad spends a lot of time researching are the size of the audience and the length of exposure to advertising messages.

‘People are on the bus or the subway for an hour on average,’ says Hutchinson. ‘So it’s very much like an in-home media buy. If someone is spending a hour with an ad, you can tell them a lot.

‘Another amazing number is that every day in this country there are five million people taking the bus or subway. I don’t think there are too many television shows that reach an audience of five million people.

‘Given the nature of this exposure, advertisers have a chance to explain things and create attitudes towards the services they provide,’ says Hutchinson. ‘They also have the ability to do take-one pads, so that somebody can take something away from an ad, and then take some action.’

In Vancouver, meanwhile, Seaboard Advertising is attempting to battle another of the misconceptions about interior transit – namely, that the audience consists largely of lower-income, blue-collar passengers.

Karen Nightingale, marketing director of Seaboard, says the company is using research done in conjunction with BC Transit in its presentations to clients, in order to provide a more accurate profile of transit ridership.

‘We’ve worked with BC Transit on usage research they’ve done, to determine profiles for each of the different modes of transportation,’ says Nightingale.

‘What it shows is that there’s a strong white-collar commuter audience, higher-income and 25-plus, during the peak hours.’

In the off-peak period, she says, one gets the senior citizen and college student groups.

While there is a skew to teens and young adults with interior transit advertising, Nightingale says, there are also a number of advertisers now using it successfully to target women 18-49.

Exterior transit is a different animal entirely.

Hutchinson defines it as an outdoor medium, much like transit shelters or posters. And like all outdoor advertising, it affords only a small temporal window in which to communicate a message. As a consequence, exterior transit is most effective for advertising that can give people a quick visual understanding.

The largest single audience segment for exterior transit consists of drivers and passengers in cars. Pedestrian traffic is secondary.

‘It’s not unlike the rest of outdoor,’ Hutchinson says, ‘with the exception that there’s probably a higher-than-average spend by media companies. And I think that’s simply because of the broad reach and frequency the medium develops.

‘We also get a lot of business from confectionery companies and the entertainment business – movies and video rentals is a very big category, and getting bigger with each passing year.’

Urban Outdoor Trans Ad currently has a reach-frequency model under development that will help illustrate the effectiveness of exterior transit.

The model, called exposr, is being developed by Richard Jean & Associates. It is expected to launch to the client and agency community this fall. exposr will calibrate estimates of circulation, and ultimately reach and frequency, as well as frequency distribution.

Hutchinson says this is the first new work done on the subject in close to 30 years.

‘I think this will be one of the final things that is missing in terms of establishing exterior as an outdoor medium, changing the perception so that it is viewed as a mainstream exterior medium.’

Transit shelter advertising – the third medium under the ‘transit’ umbrella – has demographics similar to those of posters and billboards, and can deliver the same kind of impact, according to Brian MacLean, president of Mediacom in Toronto. Conventional wisdom says it is also most effective when using the same types of creative executions as other outdoor vehicles.

MacLean says the major misunderstanding about shelter advertising is the perception that it is strictly a pedestrian medium.

‘We have vehicular counts for all of our locations, as we do with outdoor,’ he says. ‘We’ve also spent a lot of time on self-promotion advertising over the last several years, to show the importance of not putting up a magazine ad on a transit shelter, because it’s not a pedestrian medium.’

For the last four years, Mediacom has been using its media model, What Works in Outdoor, to demonstrate this point to advertisers and agencies. The company worked with the University of Alberta on an analysis of more than 600 awareness studies to come up with some conclusions about what makes good communication in outdoor.

MacLean also emphasizes the value to advertisers of Mediacom’s free pre-testing service, which can help determine the effectiveness of a piece of shelter advertising.

‘Something that looks good on a drawing board might not look good when you put it on a shelter,’ he says.

Unlike other forms of outdoor advertising, MacLean says, transit shelters can be much more targeted, right down to individual neighborhoods.

Advertisers have used executions in a number of different languages in transit shelter programs, or targeted upscale neighborhoods in this way.