Tech ads on the New York subway are up 50% this year

Many of the AI ads are geared toward selling AI services to healthcare, finance or other businesses; some are from consumer brands and established tech companies showing off their AI products.

Some AI ads intentionally target transit lines that run through Wall Street to reach finance workers, Mottesheard said. Others target areas around convention centers during buzzy AI conferences.

Generating buzz is part of the equation. The average New Yorker’s commute is 30 minutes and the “shared experience…inherently sparks conversation,” she said.

And ironically, as more people turn to chatbots and agents for internet searches, it’s getting more difficult for AI brands to get in front of consumers through the channels the tech industry has long relied on.

That “will place a bigger premium on reaching real humans,” Mottesheard said.

New York still trails Silicon Valley in its embrace of AI ads: Tech represented about 40% of first-quarter advertising across all media in San Francisco, according to Outfront.

While Outfront declined to provide specific dollar figures on the AI-linked spend, one AI company, Friend, said it put more than $1 million last year toward plastering the city’s subway stations in a much-discussed ad campaign.

Marc Lore, CEO of food-tech startup Wonder, said advertising on the New York subway isn’t about direct ROI. It’s about implanting your brand in people’s heads.

The subconscious impression that a train ad creates “ultimately increases your conversion on the channels that are easily trackable,” like physical mail and social media, Lore recently said on Semafor’s Compound Interest show. Word of mouth is a factor, too.

“Maybe somebody got a direct mail piece and they were just throwing it away, and they somehow don’t even remember seeing it on the subway, and they did,” he said, “and it looks more familiar to them.”