Toward Better Advertising Campaigns for Transit

The team at Mobility Lab has produced a series of articles offering recommendations on how transit agencies should advertise their services.

First, Ethan Goffman writes an article suggesting that to compete with the media attention focused on prestigious and hip corporations like Tesla, Mercedes Benz, and Uber, transit agencies should "combine efforts – and budgets – in a national effort."

"This could create spots that 'do it all,'" adds Goffman, "using the best contemporary messaging techniques to highlight the benefits of transit. Branding for a specific transit system could then easily be inserted into the ads by local agencies that identify with the messaging. Such ads would help overcome resistance to change, emphasizing the personal, social, and environmental benefits of transit while appealing to everyone from millennials to seniors."

In a follow-up article, John Perry adds two more cents about how transit agencies can ensure quality in advertising campaigns. The premise of Perry's argument: "most contemporary transit advertising in the U.S. sucks. A lot of it is very flat and bureaucratic, unimaginative, and oftentimes with a hokey gimmick." Perry does identify one example par excellence: the work of Metro in Los Angeles, which "produces videos that are splendidly made."

(Perry's article is republished by Mobility Lab. The original article is on Perry's blog, Bastard Urbanism.)