Subway Stations Become Digital Holiday Storefronts Via On the Go Kiosks

Maddie Cotterill

Just in time for the holidays, Intersection is teaming up with the New York Transit Museum, one of the city’s leading cultural institutions, to once again transform subway stations into interactive digital pop-up shops, enabling millions of daily commuters to browse and purchase transit-themed gifts via the MTA’s On the Go kiosks as they wait for trains.

Demonstration of New York Transit Museum Holiday Gift Guide on an OTG kiosk on Tue., November 22, 2016. Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit

Demonstration of New York Transit Museum Holiday Gift Guide on an OTG kiosk on Tue., November 22, 2016.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit

Beginning Nov. 25 and running through the holiday season, the Transit Museum Gift Guide will be live across 161 kiosks in 34 stations across New York City, including major hubs like Grand Central, Union Square, and Fulton Street. Transit customers can browse products, including apparel, collectibles, children’s toys, and more, and push a selected product to their smartphones via text message or email to seamlessly complete the purchase—all while waiting for their train. The campaign, which celebrates the museum’s 40th anniversary, is expected to reach more than two million customers daily.

Damian Gutierrez, Strategy Lead at Intersection told us “Engaging consumers today is about meeting them where they are. With millions of New Yorkers and visitors navigating the City during the holiday season, public transit is the perfect venue to reach them. This campaign is just another example of how innovation in advertising can drive revenue for the MTA while improving the experience for customers across the board – in this case, creating an opportunity to shop for fun transit products while actually in-transit.”

Demonstration of New York Transit Museum Holiday Gift Guide on an OTG kiosk on Tue., November 22, 2016. Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit

Demonstration of New York Transit Museum Holiday Gift Guide on an OTG kiosk on Tue., November 22, 2016.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit

The Transit Museum Gift Guide comes on the heels of a record-setting interactive New York Lottery campaign enabling customers to play Tic-Tac-Toe against MTA riders in other stations in real-time in a first-of-its-kind interactive ad developed by Intersection. Generating the highest engagement ever seen on Intersection’s kiosks during its two-week run, customers played more than 90,000 times, with nearly 50,000 users opting to play again after their first go.

Regina Asborno, Deputy Director of the New York Transit Museum said “This is a fantastic way to browse the Museum’s collection of gifts and choose something for that special someone. Displaying our holiday merchandise on the OTG kiosks in an interactive format brings the catalogue to life and makes that subway wait time just that more productive.”

As part of a public-private partnership with the MTA New York City Transit, Intersection developed and built the On the Go kiosks, which provide countdown to arrival, one-touch visual directions based on real-time train status and neighborhood maps. All of these services are paid for by advertising on the kiosks’ dynamic, contextually relevant advertising platform that offers programmatic, place-based video, transactional and interactive capabilities.

Demonstration of New York Transit Museum Holiday Gift Guide on an OTG kiosk on Tue., November 22, 2016. Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit

Demonstration of New York Transit Museum Holiday Gift Guide on an OTG kiosk on Tue., November 22, 2016.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit

The New York Transit Museum, one of the city’s leading cultural institutions, is the largest museum in the United States devoted to urban public transportation history and one of the premier institutions of its kind in the world. The Museum explores the development of the greater New York metropolitan region through the presentation of exhibitions, tours, educational programs and workshops dealing with the cultural, social and technological history of public transportation. Since its inception forty years ago, the Museum – which is housed in a historic 1936 IND subway station in Downtown Brooklyn – has grown in scope and popularity. The New York Transit Museum operates a Gallery Annex in Grand Central Terminal that presents changing exhibitions. As custodian and interpreter of the region’s extensive public transportation networks, the Museum strives to share through its public programs their rich and vibrant history with local, regional, and international audiences.


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