Ad vantage

To boost revenues, the MBTA is experimenting with big, creative advertisements. But when do these public displays cross the line?

Space For Sale by Jason Gay

If you visited the Harvard MBTA station in the past month, it was virtually impossible to miss the advertising blitz for the Wall Street Journal. The $50,000 mega-campaign -- which was scheduled to come down by this weekend -- included five giant advertisements inside the station's core, near the elevators and train turnstiles. Each ad featured red lines of copy inserted into the paper's staid banner. Two ads, for example, looked like this:

THE I'm 29 and just took my company public STREET JOURNAL

Another one read:

THE If Grandpa had wsj.com, you'd have a bigger inheritance STREET JOURNAL

The MBTA calls this type of campaign "station domination," and there's no doubt that the Journal blitz was, well, dominating. Never before had the T allotted so much space to a single advertiser: the five banner ads were 30 feet long by 10 feet tall -- a wee bit smaller than a highway billboard. What's more, though some Journal ads were placed in traditional display cases, others were hung in spaces not normally used for advertising. Three were big stickers, stuck to the station's tiled walls. Two were draped from the ceiling rafters, right over the escalators -- practically smacking passengers in the face as they entered and exited.

Philosophically, it was possible to see the Journal campaign-- whose slogan is "Adventures in Capitalism" -- as another epitaph on the old Harvard Square, a neighborhood historically associated with establishment-rattling and, occasionally, radical thought; had these banners been raised a generation ago, the kids might have burned them down. (Some indignant soul, it should be noted, did write "Adventures in Fascism" in black pen under one Journal ad, and another was defaced with stickers championing local unions.)

But as the T continues to champion station domination, the bigger issue may be how appropriate this commercial bombardment is in any such environment. MBTA stations, after all, are public spaces, maintained largely with tax dollars. They're not like the FleetCenter, the tops of taxi cabs, or even the rooftops where billboards are placed; T administrators are not autonomous owners who can do whatever they want with their property. Special consideration is called for any time public space is sold to private interests. If nothing else, last month's Journal campaign raises a simple question: how much is too much?

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That's a question the T hasn't yet sorted out. Station domination is a relatively new trend, and there aren't really any rules. Administrators review advertisements for content -- "We do have standards," says T spokesperson Joe Pesaturo, and the T has in fact rejected ads because of language or sexually explicit images -- but the guidelines for placement are less strict.

It's fair to say, however, that T management's basic position on station domination is Go, go, go. The transit authority is under heavy pressure from legislators to contain costs and find new sources of revenue (a fare increase is likely in the offing), so the prospect of reaping some extra money from private sources is, to say the least, enticing.

"Think about it [station domination] in the context of the current situation we're in, with people discussing the T's finances," says Pesaturo. "Here's one way that we're trying to raise some non-fare revenue."

Arranging these deals is the job of Park Transit Displays, Inc., a Weymouth-based firm that acts as an intermediary between advertising clients and the T. Park Transit vice-president Peter Brown says that station domination and other large-scale campaigns are the biggest thing going these days in public-transit advertising. Brown's company helped arrange Nike's massive April campaign at Park Street, which was tied to the Boston Marathon (the ads featured scenes of bananas, water cups, jersey numbers, and other runnerly items, superimposed with the race date and the Nike Swoosh). It also placed Apple Computers' "Think Different" ad, which now wraps around the T's elevator kiosk in Harvard Square.

Brown says that growing numbers of advertisers are opting to make one big splash instead of spending their advertising budgets more gradually, on traditional formats. "They feel they can get a lot of bang for their buck by doing one dramatic thing, as opposed to buying 50 cable [television ads] or 100 radio-station [ads]," he says.

The key, Brown says, is creativity. In addition to station domination, the T has experimented with "brand cars," in which one advertiser buys up every allotted space on a single train car. Brown says Park Transit also introduced Boston to the technology that allows a single bus or train to be "shrink-wrapped" in a single advertisement. To date, buses and trains have been wrapped in advertisements for Lotus, JAM'N 94.5, Dunkin' Donuts, the Gardner Museum, Nike, and the T itself, among others.

The T's most controversial advertising move, however, was its 1997 decision to allow Citizens Bank to buy "naming rights" to the State Street stop on the Orange Line. Under what Pesaturo describes as an "adopt-a-station" program, Citizens pays $161,000 a year for three years to cover maintenance and beautification costs for the station, which in exchange is referred to as "State Street/Citizens Bank." (When the current deal expires, a permanent name change will be considered before Citizens re-ups; according to the Boston Business Journal, "Citizens Bank Plaza" is a possibility.)

When the Citizens deal was announced, traditionalists howled; critics wondered when the T was going to announce stops named "Copley/Saks Fifth Avenue" or "Park Street/Finagle-A-Bagel." But Pesaturo says that although the transit authority has had occasional conversations with other bidders, it hasn't come close to another naming-rights deal. "We're very picky about it," he says.

Still, it's obvious that T management is steadfastly in favor of continuing these public-private arrangements. Pesaturo says that since Citizens got involved, the State Street station has gotten noticeably cleaner. "The proof is in the pudding," he says. "They got on top of it. They got some new benches and did some rehabilitation work."

And, more to the point, these advertising ventures bring in money. Park Transit's Brown says that since his company began working with the MBTA in 1992, the transit authority's annual advertising revenues have jumped from $3.5 million to $10 million.

"Station domination," Brown says, "is just the tip of the iceberg."

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Of course, public-private ventures in general are on the rise nationwide as legislators and municipal agencies try to contain costs, and as corporations and other business entities try to hitch their names and images to popular civic projects. In Boston, for example, companies like 3Com, Intel, and Microsoft have provided free computer technology to public schools; Nike built a basketball court out of recycled sneakers in Dorchester.

But the tradeoff between public and private interests is quite different when it involves straight advertising, as is the case with station domination. In such cases, the relationship is much more fundamental: the T charges a fee, and the advertiser simply hawks its product or service. And though revenues do provide some public benefit -- i.e., keeping fares down -- not everyone believes it's an even exchange.

"They [the MBTA] are letting themselves be taken advantage of," argues Lydia Eccles, a Chinatown resident who led a campaign several years ago against the "Commuter Channel," the now-defunct in-station television service that alternated transit updates with commercial advertising. Indeed, considering the scale of the Wall Street Journal's campaign and the thousands of commuters who pass through the Harvard T stop each day, $50,000 for one month may be an awfully good deal for Dow Jones & Company, the paper's owner. Eccles points out that it's about the cost of running a couple of full-page advertisements in a daily newspaper. What's more, Dow was able to aim at very specific demographic targets (yuppies and techies) by hitting Harvard.

But the real problem with station domination and similar schemes, Eccles says, is that citizens become "captive" to a private message while they're on publicly owned property. Compared to conventional, smaller advertisements on buses, trains, and platforms, these major ads are impossible to ignore, she says. (Eccles reserves her biggest scorn for the shrink-wrapped buses and train cars: "They are making people ride around contained in an advertisement. It's outrageous.")

Ian MacKinnon, a long-time street performer who ran for Cambridge City Council in 1997, complains that these ads represent a corporate invasion of public space. To register his protest of the Journal's boffo campaign, MacKinnon decided to grab his guitar, dress up as a suit-wearing stockbroker, and sing stock quotes at the Harvard stop.

"This appears to be public space, but it's now controlled by merchants and advertisers and people who sell space to advertisers," MacKinnon says.

Even to some people who don't necessarily mind the idea of auctioning off the public's property, the Journal campaign was a bit much. "It doesn't bother me as much to imagine that the government is selling away public space when what's being done is interesting," says Sam Lasky, an architect with the Boston firm of William Rawn and Associates, who says he found the ads "excessive" and minimally creative compared to Nike's Marathon campaign at Park Street, which he labeled "brilliant."

Lasky has a point: individually, the Journal ads may have been clever, but the Harvard campaign was just big and dull. It was poorly integrated into the station's interior, and what could have been a memorable display was simply an annoying one. From an aesthetic standpoint, station domination and similar ventures will work only if advertisers consider the surrounding space and attempt to complement it, not overwhelm it.

More than anything else, however, the T must decide how far it will allow advertisers to go. There's no question that the additional revenue is attractive. But so is the integrity of public space -- even public space that's underground. Not every inch of it should be for sale.

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.