Generating ad dollars while giving New Yorkers free Wi-Fi

February 23, 2017

LinkNYC began rolling out across the city about a year ago, replacing old-fashioned pay phones with kiosks that provide free phone calls and high-speed Wi-Fi and carry ads on digital screens. More than 500 are up, with thousands more to come. The de Blasio administration is already calling the public-private partnership a success, but LinkNYC still has to generate $500 million in ad revenue on behalf of the city during the next 12 years. That’s where Marta Martinez comes in. The veteran digital-advertising executive was recently named chief revenue officer of Intersection, the company that manages LinkNYC’s ad program.

The old phone booth ads made the city money. How will LinkNYC do this?

Consumers want value when it comes to marketing. We will be able to bring traffic and transit information or the weather but also more emotional things [such as] allowing the kids of New York to call Santa, which we tested this holiday season. Over time you will see marketers enable and sponsor these programs.

How are you working with retailers?

Retailers have found that the longtime value of a customer triples if they interact through both the website and a physical store.

article continues below advertisement Dossier WHO SHE IS Chief revenue officer, Intersection
AGE 47
BORN Lleida, Spain
GREW UP Barcelona, Spain
RESIDES White Plains
EDUCATION M.B.A., NYU Stern School of Business; M.S., ESADE  in Barcelona
COMING TO AMERICA Martinez was a digital consultant in Barcelona for brands such as Spanish clothing chain Zara when she realized “technology was  going to grow faster in the U.S. than in my beautiful Spain.” To smooth her way here, she enrolled in the Entertainment, Media & Technology program at NYU Stern, which eventually led to digital marketing and advertising positions at Havas, MediaMath and AOL.
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR The kiosks are used mostly for Wi-Fi. On Jan. 1 at 12:05 a.m., a kiosk in Times Square set a record for Wi-Fi users logged in to a single location. “You can imagine all the Snapchats, tweets and Instagram posts that were shared from there!”
IF SHE BUILDS IT, THEY WILL COME “A lot of advertising people grew  up in physical or digital advertising. We’re going to build a bridge.”

We can map data showing who those consumers will be and then drive them through our advertising messages into the stores.

So far the ads look the same as the ones on the old phone booths.

Last year we were laying the foundation. This year we are figuring out what happens on the screens. You will see a lot of experimentation over the next six months. We’ll be programming content like you program for television. It will be different in the morning than at night. We want both the advertising Bahis Siteleri and the content to be useful. Another campaign we’re doing with an advertiser goes: “There’s a delay on the N and the R. Come have a beer with us.”

Parents had complained about people watching porn on the LinkNYC tablet screens. Are you worried about any other unintended consequences?

We are doing something that has never been done before: We gave high-speed connectivity to people who had never had it. It was not an issue once we changed the functionality by permanently disabling the kiosks’ [web] browser. I wasn’t here, but I know it wasn’t fun. I hope we continue to learn. Are there other uses that will surprise us? I hope they surprise us in a very positive way.

Is the kiosk program expanding to other cities?

We just announced our international expansion, to London. But New York City is the biggest market, and this is our R&D hub. We are inventing here for the rest of the world.

You’ve held senior positions at AOL. Why come to a startup?

Clearly there’s a lot of innovation now around smart city technology: connecting the physical reality to what we do digitally and using technology to humanize a city, turning it into a community. The opportunity to take the traditional billboard business and connect it to our digital experiences—that is what brought me here.

How do you connect the physical with our digital experiences?

We did a campaign with MillerCoors in partnership with [music app] Shazam that enabled consumers to download the songs that each neighborhood was listening to that day.

What were people listening to?

David Bowie passed away during the campaign. The entire city was listening to him!

Retailers have found that the longtime value of a customer triples if they interact through both the website and a physical store.

We can map data showing who those consumers will be and then drive them through our advertising messages into the stores.

Last year we were laying the foundation. This year we are figuring out what happens on the screens. You will see a lot of experimentation over the next six months. We’ll be programming content like you program for television. It will be different in the morning than at night. We want both the advertising and the content to be useful. Another campaign we’re doing with an advertiser goes: “There’s a delay on the N and the R. Come have a beer with us.”

We just announced our international expansion, to London. But New York City is the biggest market, and this is our R&D hub. We are inventing here for the rest of the world.

We did a campaign with MillerCoors in partnership with [music app] Shazam that enabled consumers to download the songs that each neighborhood was listening to that day.

David Bowie passed away during the campaign. The entire city was listening to him!

A version of this article appears in the February 20, 2017, print issue of Crain’s New York Business.

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