Skip to content

Buying Groceries from a Transit Shelter Advertisement

outdoor advertising that doubles as a shopping guide
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could order your groceries online while you were commuting or at least check to see what you need to buy? That way, you could take care of two annoying tasks at the same time.

The folks at Peapod came up with a mobile phone app to do just that—order your groceries online while commuting or even resting at home. (Unfortunately Peapod is not available in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, or Chattanooga.) They also came up with an ingenious outdoor advertisement for their app on transit shelters to get people to download and use it.

Figuring that the average commuter has little to do while waiting on a bus or train, they placed transit advertisements in Chicago and Philadelphia. These transit shelter advertisements include a QR code so that folks can download the app as well as pictures of popular products to jog people’s memory of what they might need.

When shoppers see something they want to buy, they can actually place their orders on the spot. (No need to go home and enter it online.) The billboards make it easy to get some shopping done and even schedule when it will be delivered.

Success with Transit Advertisements

The campaign was so successful that over 90% of the people who downloaded the app from the QR code made at least one more order. It makes sense to me; you have both a well-timed reminder and an easy way to get it done all at the same time.

Other companies have had success as well. The retail giant Tesco has had excellent results with similar transit shelter billboards in South Korea, Japan, and Singapore.

Advantages of Interactive Transit Advertising

Clearly this example of transit advertising is new and different. The transit advertisement itself doubles as a service provider. With relevant content, people are less likely to see it as invasive or annoying. With the connection to our phones, customers are much more like to talk about it with their friends.

Advertisers increase the rate that information gets shared when they use interactive marketing techniques.