This year, as I have been riding the subway, I noticed that there are a lot of advertisements for books – the dead tree kind. Typically they are for mysteries or thrillers (come read xyz’s latest book that is EVEN BETTER than their last one) and can be found on both smaller landscape and larger portrait formats. They aren’t advertising well known (to me) books, like say The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Hunger Games, but lesser known releases
This strikes me a bit weird, because I see reading books as a dying format (although newspapers are surviving quite well on the subway), especially the physical book kind – I see many people with Kindle/Kobo/Sony/No-Name ebook readers now. In fact, I’m curious whether readers riding the subway would decide to buy a book based on seeing an ad – you likely wouldn’t be reading a book by the same author! For example, if you were listening to your mp3 player (more likely), specifically listening to say…Eminem. Would you decide to buy the Drake album if you saw an ad for it? Maybe it’s just a hint for you to check out something new.
But then that seems like a low rate-of-return for paying for the large portrait-sized ads. I actually wonder if it is the TTC advertisement department approaching publishers and introducing them to the idea of advertising to bored, book readers on the subway? I haven’t seen a surplus of unused ad space on the TTC, but you never know!
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