Television is without doubt the greatest modern device ever invented for advertising. But at least in Manhattan, if a 37-year-old businessman has his way, the taxi could give the TV a run for its money.
The man, Eyal Cohen, has patented what may be thought of as a very expensive, computerized sandwich board that screws onto the roof of a cab, and that over the next few months will increasingly begin to invade whatever small part of pedestrians' brains is not already ad-saturated.
At first glance, the device may not appear much different from bus advertisements or, as technology goes, from the old Times Square news zipper. But consider these facts: There are 12,187 medallion cabs in the city and the billboards atop the cabs are, conveniently, at about eye level.
With the help of a global positioning monitor, a computer, a cellular device and an electronic screen, the cabs can do something that other advertisements, even those on television, cannot: deliver any message an advertiser wants, at any time, pretty much anywhere in Manhattan.
For example, if Macy's wanted to advertise an underwear sale only during the hour before it begins and only in a six-square-block area around its Herald Square store, it could pay Cohen's company, Adapt Media, to type these instructions into a computer at his company's Manhattan headquarters.
The computer would beam the message to all the cabs that are equipped with the electronic billboards; as soon as their positioning devices signal that they have entered the area near Macy's, the sale ads would begin to flash on the LED screens atop the cab. If advertisers wanted to communicate in Chinese in Chinatown or in Spanish in East Harlem, they could.
"This makes it seem as if, here is this big company talking just to you, as if they know you are on the Upper West Side right now and it is 99 degrees outside and they know you would like a Coke," said Cohen, a former electrical engineer from Tel Aviv who founded the company two years ago and now counts AOL Time Warner and ESPN among his clients.
Of course, it is not at all certain whether New Yorkers, who find advertisements even in public restrooms or phone booths, really want to feel that a multinational conglomerate is speaking to them personally as they cross the street.
"For me, no, I don't want that," said Robert Henshaw, a computer technician who was crossing Times Square last week as one of the cabs passed near him, flashing sports scores sponsored by ESPN. "I've got too many people talking to me as it is."
But, he added, "The baseball scores ain't bad, you know?"
The devices, called AdRunners, are on only 50 cabs, a number approved by the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission for a test of the devices.
Before they were deployed atop cabs, the signs were subjected to other tests -- including ones in a wind tunnel -- to make sure they would not rattle off the cars and fall into the street.
At the end of June, the company received approval to place the signs atop as many cabs as it wanted, and Cohen says the company is in negotiations with large taxi fleets and individual owners, who can make as much as US$125 a month per cab for allowing the signs to be installed. This is more than cab owners can earn for placing old-style cab-top billboards on their cars.
If everything goes right, Cohen said, there should be 150 of the signs roaming the city by the end of this year and 900 by the end of next year. (He will not say how much the signs, which are made in Tel Aviv and China, cost, except that the cost of each is "in the thousands."
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