Get your Media Campaigns Moving with Transit Placements by DCW

Transit ads come in all shapes and sizes, offering advertisers a complex menu of options to reach their audience. This blog will break down the importance of these placements and showcase the ways we’re in prime position to be your partner for this type of potent media buying.

Why we Love Transit Ads

We love transit ads because of their versatility. They can raise memorable awareness for virtually any brand, with an especially impactful punch for local goods, services, and locations. These placements reach two primary audiences – travelers and commuters, each with their own nuances and strengths.

Travelers tend to have higher household incomes, are open to new offerings and experiences, are already in a spending mindset, and have predictable media and movement behaviors. Not only are they receptive to travel-related brands, but they’re also ideal targets for luxury goods, impulse buys, and service upselling.

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Commuters on the other hand are much broader audience than business and leisure travelers. Their media consumption is characterized by even more predictable repetition as their time spent on trains and buses or at stations surpasses other travelers in terms of both regularity and duration. While travel audiences can fluctuate based on economic conditions, commuters are much more reliable and are back on the rise since 2020. In New York, the return-to-office rate in Manhattan is now 76% of the 2019 level, with over half of commuters in the office for 3 days or more.

Regardless of the transit type, associated audiences are characterized by high volume foot traffic and long dwell times, while sitting and waiting creates unique opportunities for sustained awareness. DCW’s combination of digital and traditional media buying enables us to fully exploit these openings.

Our digital capabilities include every platform imaginable, including digital out of home offering pinpoint targeting, and also geofencing capabilities that double down by retargeting later with additional ads that amplify and echo the messages seen during trips. On the traditional side, our leverage in the marketplace yields discounted rates for our clients. This is especially helpful for smaller budgets as they can benefit from greater discounts, since we purchase media in the upfront market. In addition to fantastic rates, our decades-long relationships with inventory providers get us access to a wide variety of key placements.

Trains

Rail includes placement opportunities for both stations and aboard trains. Waiting, unfortunate delays, and sitting all combine to yield dwell times. Eyeballs are on ads for much longer than any YouTube videos, TV ads, or regular roadside billboards.

For stations, DCW can place digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads throughout the US and beyond. In the tri-state area, our offerings for Metro North and Long Island Railroad are especially discounted when compared to the regular marketplace, empowering our clients to reach thousands of commuters daily from Poughkeepsie to Port Jefferson and throughout in the NYC DMA.

Our rail reach even extends below ground into the subway. For instance, we recently ran a brand awareness campaign for our health insurance client MetroPlus Health, covering the interiors of subway cars with both long car cards and rectangular wall posters.

Planes

Air travelers encounter several potential ad placements on their journeys. Airports are an ideal advertising ecosystem due to long waiting times, opportunities to walk by different screens and panels, and a high concentration of travelers. Digitally, airports are great places to target with geo-fencing. Traveler devices can be identified and targeted with ads seen well after their trips.

Screens and panels are especially impactive. As one media provider has noted, airport goers “are pre-conditioned to notice screens around them as they move throughout their terminal. This results in a highly attentive audience that is ready to engage with screen-based content and take action.” Advertising has even spread outside the terminal and into the jet bridges that connect planes to buildings. These placements are yet another high impact zone as passengers wait to board. This media can be controlled by any number of parties including traditional media companies operating airlines, or the airports themselves.

There have been recent developments in the ‘final frontier’ of travel advertising – onboard flights. A major publisher in the space who runs ads on inflight Wi-Fi is working to expand its targeting offerings to use destination and origin targeting.

Automobiles

Auto-related placements remain impactful and innovative despite the 5% decrease in the number of traditional roadside billboards from 2019-2024. Bus shelters are effective for several reasons. They not only show ads to waiting passengers on a daily basis but also serve as mini-billboards for pedestrians and passing street traffic. We ran bus shelters ads for our client the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), targeting placements around the museum in DC with bold creative highlighting their recent ‘Uncanny’ exhibit.

Moving from stationary shelters to more mobile placements, one interesting recent development has been the ability to place ads on taxi tops programmatically. Digital banners can be targeted to specific cities and even neighborhoods through DSPs accessing taxicab inventory that is both eye-conspicuous and constantly on the move.

Rideshares are also targetable. Lyft opened inventory on its app in August 2023, offering advertisers video placements and large display “poster” ads. Targeting includes ride area, lifestyle, ride history and payment method. It can even be contextual, aimed at users based on their destinations. For instance, a new movie trailer could be targeted to a Lyft user enroute to a movie theater. Uber has similar offerings, with both display and video. They estimate that the average Uber ride is 15 minutes, with riders spending at least two of those minutes on the app.

One major player in the car travel ad space was Waze. Waze used to feature sponsored search results, promoted, pins and other placements. The popular navigation app was acquired by Google in 2013 and there were plans to incorporate the platform into Google Ads. However, Google suddenly pulled the plug on Waze ads in the second half of 2023. It remains to be seen if these ads will be revamped and brought back to life. It is worth noting that DCW was a certified Waze Ads partner and is ready to become so once again if or when the platform ever returns.

Bonus: Boats

Our transit reach can even hit bodies of water. Ferries are one of the more relaxing and scenic modes of commuting and offer a variety of ad placements. While nautical inventory may not always be as quirky as the ad below spotted on Florida’s intracoastal waterway, they do offer long dwell times, including both stations and watercraft.

DCW recently placed ads for MetroHealth Plus in State Island Ferry terminals, combining ubiquitous banners with large attention-grabbing video panels. This is just one of the many commuter ferry services operating in and around New York City. Each one offers a variety of ad placements. In addition to the usual screens and banners, the NYC Ferry has host onboard activations that have included commuter manicures and a live DJ. In one creative case we POV’d the Cape Cod-Nantucket ferry for a medspa client looking to offer their hangover IDs to worse-for-wear passengers ending their vacations.

Reach an Audience on the Move with DCW

Are you interested in learning more about reaching commuters and travelers? Drop us a line and we can discuss the unique ways we can achieve your advertising and media goals across any method of transit.