Interesting video about ads in Times Square
John Woods visits Times Square and explores the advertising there.
The One Times Square building is empty. Why? Because the owner can afford it by selling ad space alone. It costs $300,000/month to advertise on that structure -- one of things you'll learn in this behind-the-LED-screens look at Times Square.Link (Thanks Andrew!)
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I have been to or through Times Square ... must be more than 100 times ... yet I did not know it was named after The New York Times.
Captain Obvious might advise "if you're not going to run your brain, then don't run your mouth [or your keyboard]" but I suppose a lot of people might not associate Times Square and The New York Times. From Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve to Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and from The NBC Nightly News (with Tom Brokaw, anyway) to MTV TRL, "Times Square" is an incredible eyeball magnet and pronoun. It is so much a pronoun that in these thirty-odd years I never considered its etymology.
The Times should do more to connect the dots. It is certainly among the most mainstream naming sponsorships, but is it also the least understood, or the sponsorship fulfilling the least of its potential?
http://gothamist.com/2008/06/05/encore_ny_times.php then there's this kind of advertising AND IT'S FREE ;)
Huh. Okay. I guess that's really lucky for the owner of One Times Square, that he can afford the building just from the money for the sign on the side and doesn't have to... actually... use the building for anything.
Because... that would be... bad? Someone help me here?
RE: Nores
It's actually more cost effective for One Time Square to not have any tenants then to utilize the space. When you have commercial tenants in the building, you need to worry about habitability of the space. The cost far outweighs the rewards. Think air conditioning costs, fire safety maintenance, hiring a security guard, etc. These are things that they don't need to worry about without tenants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Times_Square
When I worked for Reuters, and they were building Three Times Square, we were informed that building codes *require* new buildings to have large lighted marquees. (And they went all out at the time, not only with the large screen on the corner and the three screens inside, but the quirky long vertical screen above the corner. Before the building was done and the screens were fully set up, they were hastily configured to display "We Salute NY's Finest" - it was just after 9/11.)
Anyway. So not only are those bright fancy marquees lucrative, they're also mandatory!
@ #1 BRIAN GLANZ:
Two little tidbits about "Times" naming. First, the neighborhood I live in which is currently known as Boerum Hill was once—and still in some cases of city bureaucracy—called "Times Plaza". The reason? A block away from me is a building that once housed a New York Times Brooklyn distribution or printing plant; never too clear about that.
Also, as far as real estate and advertising goes, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and 4th Avenue was an older 4 story building that was basically bricked up and used for billboard space on the sides... Until the NYC real estate market boomed, and suddenly the billboards came down, the bricks came out and now they are "luxury condos".
And FWIW, One Times Square is weird. It used to house a Warner Brothers store. But in the past 5 years it housed this odd/semi-propaganda museum of drugs and terrorism or something along those lines. It was free and on street level, but it had full scale mockups of motel room meth labs and Afghanistan drug huts. But they still had the Warner Brothers logos on the elevator banks. Really creepy.
Thanks Jack, you pointed this in just the right direction. More about the naming of Times Square:
In 1904 when the deal went down, apparently no money changed hands, so it's not sponsorship by The New York Times.
As at [All Hail!] Wikipedia, Times Square was first known to New Yorkers as Long Acre -- "George Washington stayed in Long Acre while in New York during the American Revolutionary War." A half century later with industrialization, it became Longacre Square, its name from the mid-1800s until 1904.
Then, "it was renamed Times Square on April 8, 1904, by proclamation of Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. at the urging of Adolph Ochs, owner and publisher of The New York Times."
At the urging, eh? What did Ochs have on McClellan? Those were wild times in the newspaper business.
Anyhow, Jack you're right to raise the informality of neighborhood naming. "Times Square" is not a sponsorship in that The New York Times does not appear to pay for the privilege, right there in the cold heart of paying for play.
Full circle, then: perhaps The Times types don't go out of their way to connect the dots just to not overplay their hand. Should they shine a light on their 104 year-old favor, Times Square could become Bloomberg Square, Trump Square, or with 70-some billionaires in The City and its glitziest bauble up for naming, someone will pony up.
One more juicy bit from Wikipedia: Before its renaming as Times Square, Longacre Square had a nickname: Thieves Lair. So a mid-1800s nickname neatly sums up our modern Times Square in the eyes of mid-1800s Marxism.
I took this occasion to upload a couple tangential Times Square snaps on Flickr, calling them Diddy Square, 2005 and Thieves Lair, 2004. Cheers. BG
Yeah, Nores, the thing is that the real estate market doesn't have a whole lot to do with peoples' actual need for usable space. Most of the time its weirdness isn't very noticable, but in special locations like One Times Square... you can see the cracks in the logic pretty clearly sometimes.
You know, that's one of the things you give absolutely no thought to, but when you're told about it, it's absolutely fascinating.
Thanks, guys!
/b
That was really interesting!
(Shortest comment!)
I agree.
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I thought it interesting- and it never occurred to me before- that here we have a case where the ads are exactly what people go there to see.
It's like Superbowl, the ads are a major attraction.