The Wall Street Journal-20080215-Mass of Messages Lands at Heathrow- New Terminal to Sport Hundreds of Ad Screens To Generate Revenue
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080215
Mass of Messages Lands at Heathrow; New Terminal to Sport Hundreds of Ad Screens To Generate Revenue
Full Text (832 words)London -- Travelers at Heathrow Airport's new terminal will be able to sip champagne at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant or eat doughnuts at a Krispy Kreme outlet. One choice they won't get: avoiding ads.
In a major expansion of the world's busiest international airport in terms of international passengers, Heathrow owner BAA is scheduled to open the airport's fifth terminal next month -- with more advertising than almost any airport in the world.
From giant billboards overlooking security lines to television screens in the underground train station, the ads have been positioned in ways BAA hopes will make them impossible to avoid. There are 333 billboards or posters and 206 flat-screen TV sets, which can change ads to target specific flights. By contrast, Los Angeles International has 34 advertising TV sets in the entire airport and New York's John F. Kennedy International has 40, according to JCDecaux, a Paris-based specialist in outdoor advertising that was hired to design and sell the new Heathrow ad space to marketers.
Behind the advertising push: BAA, a unit of publicly traded Spanish conglomerate Grupo Ferrovial, is pushing advertising to help generate profit from the terminal, which cost GBP 4.2 billion ($8.25 billion). While U.S. airports are typically owned by local or state governments, they too increasingly are turning to advertising to make money.
BAA saw an opportunity in the travelers expected to pass through Heathrow. The airport, which serves Europe's biggest financial center and is a transit point for many flights to and from the U.S., draws heavily on international business travelers, a group advertisers will pay a premium to reach. Some 27 million people are expected to pass through the new building, called Terminal Five, in the first year and Decaux estimates that 30% of them will earn more than $100,000 a year.
To map where passengers would walk, Decaux hired researchers with video cameras to follow people around other terminals as they checked in and waited for flights. The researchers also monitored passengers' pulses: The average business traveler's heart rate was 91 beats per minute, they found, compared with 70 beats for a relaxed person.
"Highly aroused people are receptive to messages," says Kevin Miller, Decaux's head of research on the project.
Typical Terminal Five visitors will see between 50 and 120 ads, depending on whether they arrive at the airport by car or train and whether they fly domestic or international flights, says Julie France, U.K. managing director of unit J.C. Decaux Airport. That's at least one ad every two minutes and 55 seconds, based on the two hours and 26 minutes an average traveler spends at Heathrow.
The Heathrow ads are part of efforts to reach people outside traditional television, radio and print advertising. While outdoor advertising is a small part of the industry, it is growing faster -- at 8% a year -- than all other advertising forms except the Internet.
One place Decaux had trouble getting permission to advertise was the immigration hall, where officials check travelers' passports. British officials would allow just one ad, a 20-foot billboard on a side wall, due to the sensitivity of the area, Ms. France says.
Ad buyers say Heathrow's use of liquid-crystal-display TV sets might be copied by other airports. The sets are designed for short, soundless ads. Conventional TV ads wouldn't work because the screens don't have sound and most TV ads are too long for a busy airport. Heathrow's TV sets are part of a network of some 600 TV screens at eight airports across Britain, including London's Gatwick and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Decaux sells spots on them nationally and by airport.
"This is the first time that digital [advertising] is playing a really significant role" in an airport, says Jonathan Goldsmid-Whyte, chief executive of WPP Group's Aviator, which buys ad space in airports for clients.
Decaux sells ads in 141 airports around the world and expects Terminal Five to be its most lucrative individual terminal, measured by revenue per passenger, a Decaux spokesman said.
So far, Decaux has sold 65% of the ad space in Terminal Five to brands including Visa, which bought four 95-foot-long billboards overlooking the two security lanes. The billboards were offered for GBP 1.5 million a year. A Visa spokeswoman declined to say if the credit-card company paid the full price.
InterContinental Hotels Group booked posters near the check-in counters because it wants business travelers to see Crowne Plaza hotels as stylish, just like the new building. The ads will show interiors of Crowne Plaza hotels in London and Geneva.
Terminal Five is "modern, contemporary and well-designed," says Mike Greenup, brand director of the London-based company's Crowne Plaza Hotels and Resorts division. "We want to associate the brand with that."
Packed with shops and restaurants, Terminal Five has a gently curved roof modeled on London's big railway stations and glass walls so people can watch planes take off and land. The first scheduled flight is a British Airways Boeing 747 from Hong Kong on March 27.
