Visit Norway, from your subway seat

November 11, 2011 by Dave Haynes

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A couple of students at the Miami Ad School are getting some attention online for an advertising project that uses LED light bars to create advertising in subway tunnels.

The technology – which has been around for a few years now – uses the motion of the subway trains to create the animation of the visuals. I’ve only seen it once or twice in subways and always liked the element of surprise of ads showing up in the windows of cars in a dark tunnel.

This was a case study/student project done by students Annamaria Zollet and Matei Curtasu for the travel website VisitNorway.com.

“We filmed it in Moscow, Russia, where we are currently interning'” says Curtasu. “The ad tunnel system has been around for a while, and it currently runs in NY, LA, Moscow, Copenhagen, London and Barcelona (as far as I know). Companies such as metroVISTA are installing these screens in subway systems, and they’re usually charging about $50,000 per month to run an ad (in Moscow).”

The two are from the Miami Ad School’s Hamburg, Germany branch (yes, that is a little confusing), and are working at Saatchi.

I assume it is the massive, middle of the night, double-overtime labor cost of putting this system in rail lines that’s behind the lack of rollouts for this technology, because you have to think it’s effective when the creative is well executed.