Captivate Marks 20 Years Of Riding Elevators

September 29, 2017 by Dave Haynes

It’s likely Digital OOH and digital signage are seen by many as still-young industries, but there are companies that have been at it since the 1990s – including Captivate, which is marking 20 years of putting screens in elevators.

Now based in New York, the company got its start in Boston in 1997, around the same time another company up in Toronto called Elevator News Network was also starting to put screens in office tower elevators. The founders of each will say they were first, but it’s a moot point since the two companies were shotgun-married by VCs in 2001. (I was VP Ops of the Canadian company at merger time, and then the Canadian execs were redundant. Sigh.)

The blended company now has 10,000 screens in 1,600 office towers in all the big metro areas in the United States, and as far as I know “owns” the business in the country. Captivate has another 2,000 screens in Canada in the top five markets, but has significant competition in Pattison, a big, privately-held OOH company.

In marking 20 years, the company has introduced several new programming features, including:

  1. Editor says:

    Oooh, so you worked with Michal Kapral, the world record-setting joggler!

  2. Editor says:

    (I was in j-school with him in Halifax.)

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