Tapping Taxi Ads

I just want to talk for a minute about how much I want to place one of these in-taxi banner ads.

They have a similar look and feel to the kind of banner ads you would see in a browser, but there are some important differences.

You don’t click on them, you ‘tap’ on them. The difference may seem trivial, but it’s not. When you’re surfing the web on your desktop, you already have your hand on the mouse, you’re already moving a cursor across the screen to choose particular pieces of content, you are already in a clicking state of mind.

But nobody gets into a taxi thinking about their imminent interaction with the TV screen in the back. Once you get in, you’re thinking about getting where you’re going. However, having entered the cab, you have, for the most part, given up agency in getting yourself there: that is now the job of the driver. So what do you do next?

Check out the “call to action” in the ad above: “Tap here if you could use a good night’s sleep.” You would never see that on a banner in a browser. People surfing the web for content are not motivated that way; they don’t want to share with some random advertisement the fact that they’re tired, and the reward of finding out what happens after you click the banner is not enticing enough to be effective.

But say you’re getting into a taxi, like I was, outside of a bar in Manhattan, late on a Friday night, and headed home to Brooklyn. Chances are very good that a) you actually are thinking about how you could use a good night’s sleep, and b) you’re already bored just thinking about the rest of the cab ride, and you have nothing better to do than click on the ad.

After all, if there’s no payoff, so what? It’s not like you’re going to get cookied and retargeted later (well, not yet). It’s not like the yammering three-minute loop of pseudo-content right under the ad is going to be so engaging that you won’t want to leave it. And it’s going to be hard not to keep looking at the GPS map of your journey so far, which is going to remind you how tired you are, and it’s right next to the ad, to which you’re getting exposed minute after minute.

This ability of the advertiser to predict your psychological state at the time of exposure is better than behavioral targeting. Now, did the mechanism that served the ad know that I was drunk, tired, and getting ready for a long-ish ride? Well, probably not, but someday soon, it will (or it should). Just factoring in the time of night, the day of the week, the neighborhood I was leaving, and the neighborhood I was traveling to would be enough. Then, if they want to give me some choices of what to look at and what to listen to, the targeting can be refined even further.

This Zagat Mobile ad is also perfect for the context…after all, if you’re in a cab, and you’re not going to look at the TV, the only other thing you’re going to do is going to involve your cell phone (if you’re alone, anyway). You sit down, close the door, give directions, and then think, okay: what should I do with this time? Who should I call? This ad helps you make that decision.