Ads increasingly inundate public places

For other agencies that oversee public spaces, advertisements offer a way to deal with growing costs, including post-9/11 security measures. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the region's airports and other transportation facilities, said it has spent $2.3 billion on security investments alone since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The ads on the George Washington Bridge for insurer Geico, which were scrapped, would have generated $3.2 million over two years.

“Our aim was to try to offset very high security and operating costs without having to pass that on to the customer,” said Port Authority spokesman Tony Ciavolella.

Lee Halladay, president of Signs of Support Mid-Atlantic, said more municipalities are showing interest in her business, which puts ads on city vehicles. The money has been used for things like buying additional vehicles or boosting parks and recreation budgets.

Ads on city cars and trucks may be less obtrusive to residents than, say, an ad on a bus stop right outside someone’s house, said.

“They’re not sort of being lambasted with it in their neighborhood,” she said.

In King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, 25 of the county’s approximately 1,300 buses were “wrapped” in ads that covered most of the bus in 2006. The ads brought in about $740,000, or 12 percent of total revenue from transit advertising, said Sharron Shinbo, program project manager with King County Metro.

But in November, after rider complaints, King County officials decided to stop allowing ads that cover the windows. The ads will be eliminated beginning in 2008.

Shinbo said very few people complained. Still, she noted that while people seem more willing to tolerate a big billboard or other outdoor advertisements, to many a public service like the bus system is a different matter.

“I think there’s an ownership of public transportation that they feel,” Shinbo said. “People don’t feel like they own the billboards, but they feel like they own the bus system.”

Smith, of Yankelovich, expects companies to continue to try to push their marketing messages into unconventional places, even though some will result in public outcry.

Still, he argues that some of those campaigns will fail to draw in new business because customers these days are looking for more control of the content they see and don’t want to be inundated with a message they didn’t choose.

The risk, he said, is that those advertisers will just end up contributing more clutter to an environment already crowded with marketing messages — which consumers are getting increasingly good at simply ignoring.

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