The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The out of home media company Intersection is probably best known as the operator of that network of smart cities display totems - called LinkNYC - on the sidewalks of Manhattan and New York City's boroughs. But the company has a much bigger footprint around the United States - mainly mass transport systems, but also the flashy Hudson Yards mixed-use development in New York, and United Airlines.

I had a good chat with Chris Grosso, who took over as CEO a couple of years ago, but had already been with the company for a few years, having come over from the broadcast and digital world.

We got into several things - like the state of the DOOH industry and the evolving needs and demands of the municipal governments who become business partners for Intersection. Smart cities needs, for example, are shifting.

We also get into Intersection's recently announced addition of AI-driven ad and content targeting, with the idea of making what's on screens not just relevant to the city, but all the way down to neighbourhoods and streets.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Intersection Is all about? 

Chris Grosso: Sure, and thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here, Dave and I very much enjoy reading your publication and the newsletter, and the email all the time. I’m Chris Grosso, the CEO of Intersection. We are a leading out-of-home advertising company in the USA focused on major US cities. We really are differentiated from the other out-of-home companies in three ways. One is typically we put in consumer amenities in center cities, most notably things like the LinkNYC program in New York, so Wifi kiosks across the city of New York. We do customer information and advertising systems for places like Chicago Transit Authority and SEPTA Transit Authority in Philadelphia.

And we do bus shelters in many US cities as well. So very much driven by bringing consumer amenities and partnerships with cities and transit authorities. The second biggest differentiator for us, which is most relevant to this conversation, is our focus on content and programming. We like to put useful content on our digital screens, and we wanna put entertaining content on our digital screens, and that could be anything from what time your train is coming to what the weather might be to art or fun facts. We want to program these screens just as you program any other screen in order to make them entertaining and engaging for consumers.

And the last piece of our business we pride ourselves on is selling data-driven advertising. We like to be very focused on the data that helps our advertisers understand who they're reaching when they advertise with us, as well as what happens after the release. 

So the idea of consumer amenity that I gather that the smart city-ish kiosk that you're putting on the street and other things like that, that’s a more modern version of the amenities, to use your term, that outdoor companies have been doing for a whole bunch of time with bus shelters, right? 

Chris Grosso: For sure, and we're also in the bus shelter business as well. We do some stuff with Bikeshare, and I think it's a long tradition in out-of-home advertising to bring the amenity to allow us to get access to the public right of way to put the advertising in, and this is very valuable for a city transit authority because they're getting something that they don't have to put up the cash for. So it's a real value-creating event both for the communities as well as the advertisers. 

Is it the price of entry now for particularly larger urban geographies like New York and so on, where if you want to play, you're going to have to provide infrastructure as well? Can't you just put in display totems?

Chris Grosso: I think it really depends on the municipality and the deal structure. In some cases, companies have