Tube escalators to get video ads

By Cory Doctorow at 5:08 am Monday, Apr 4

The London Underground railway (AKA "the tube") has the world's most amazing escalators -- escalator after escalator, ear-poppingly-long marvels of diagonal transport. It's common to see advertisers buying up an entire escalator's worth of ad-space, producing a kind of public transit Burma Shave moment, with each installment heaving into view as the escalator carries you upward.

Now Viacom is piloting video ads -- with audio -- on flat panel displays on the tube escalators. Given how many stickers, blobs of strategically placed chewing gum, and markered-over bon mots you see on the paper ads, this seems an extraordinarily expensive proposition. Yet it does open up the possibility of some pretty cool little films that are optimized to be played in a series of diagonally placed screens to a moving audience. It remains to be seen whether any of the advertisers will rise to it, or whether we'll just get shorter TV commercials.

In a few weeks, Viacom Outdoor plans to start installing 66 screens in the London Underground that are essentially video posters with changing text and animated images. The animated signs are made of liquid crystals that realign under electrical stimulation.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)