Customer Experience

The Big Apple's starring role in the 'smart city' movement

Chris Grosso, CEO at Intersection, offers a recorded video conversation about the new 'We Love New York CIty' campaign across the Intersection LinkNYC screen network, the power of DOOH and smart city innovation.

Courtesy of Adobe Stock.

April 19, 2023 by Daniel Brown — Editor, Networld Media Group

(Editor's note: An earlier version of this article ran on Digital Signage Today, a Kiosk Marketplace sister publication.)

Chris Grosso is a proud New Yorker. He also happens to be the CEO at Intersection, a "smart city" technology provider that manages the LinkNYC kiosks that connect New Yorkers and visitors with each other and amentities and attractions.

As part of the "We Love New York City" campaign to reactivate the city as it recovers from the pandemic, Grosso holds a birds-eye view of how digital media technology is making the urban living experience more rewarding, a campaign that will educate urban stakeholders nationwide about the possibilities for a more vibrant lifestyle.

Grosso recently offered his insights about the LinkNYC experience in an interview Daniel Brown, editor of Digital Signage Today, a Kiosk Marketplace sister publication. He offered his insights about the ways to leverage DOOH in cities, the value of leaning into the smart city movement, ways to protect privacy while adding value for viewers and advertisers and insights from trends in the digital signage and marketing world, along with Intersection's work in many other U.S. cities.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Interview Transcript

Daniel Brown

Christopher, we have a lot to talk about, but feel free — would you want to go ahead and introduce yourself and your work?

Chris Grosso

I am the CEO of Intersection, and we are the largest independent out of home company focused on America's biggest cities. We work with cities, transit authorities, private districts and airports to vote for any combination of consumer amenities, content and programming and (of course) data-driven out of home advertising to these locations.

Daniel Brown

Wow. So you're a busy guy. And it sounds like you're working with New York City, Chicago, maybe any of these other cities.

Chris Grosso

Yeah, most of the major U.S. cities, we're in — in New York, we operate with our partners, the LinkNYC program, which is the largest street furniture program in the United States, where we've deployed 2,000 kiosks that have advertising content, free Wi-Fi, cell phone charging, phone calling across the city. You know, well over a million people have used the free Wi-Fi over the years — over the last couple of years — as well as from a communications vehicle, we've got this tremendous reach, we reach about 80% of New Yorkers every week on the network. So New York City is obviously a key part of our business. But we also have a pretty big presence in Philadelphia with the digital street network, and we work with SEPTA down there. And we work with the CTA in Chicago. SFMTA in San Francisco, and a lot of the other major transit authorities in most of the major U.S. cities.

Daniel Brown

In general terms, how many impressions per day/week/month are you getting, just in New York CIty alone?

Chris Grosso

Well, the New York number's huge. It's probably two and a half billion per month according to Geopath across the network, maybe 2 billion a month. It's a big number.

We reach 80% of New Yorkers. If you go to New York City, it's impossible not to see a bunch of Links and the great content and advertising that's on them.

Daniel Brown

Would you say this plays into the "smart city" movement across the country?

Chris Grosso

I think we helped invent a lot of the smart city movement. Intersection was created through this partnership of Titan, which is municipal advertising company and control group, which was a digital innovation firm. Those two companies came together to win the contest to take over the payphone business in New York City. So New York City said, "Hey, someone come reinvent the payphone."

The two companies came together before I got here and created Link, which was really to replace the payphone in New York City with what is the 21st century version of the payphone. And it's things like free Wi-Fi, it's things like, you know, cell phone charging, it's also to make a phone call. But then it's real-time information and paid for by advertising. So, if you think about smart cities, it's been hard to get big, successful smart city programs that actually pay for themselves. And I think Link is an example of one that's been successful from a consumer perspective and self-sustaining.

Daniel Brown

In so many industries, people were saying, "The sky is falling!' You're getting rid of these iconic payphones!" But in reality, technology is adding value for everybody involved. It's not taking something away. It's adding something.

Chris Grosso

And it's surprising. The biggest story we had last year in the company was when we took the last payphone out, because they were still around. And, it's amazing, people were still using payphones. Even when I got here, people were still using the payphones. So, you need to replace that. I have a 13-year-old and an 18-year-old, and sometimes they don't have their cell phone (or) their cell phone's not charged, and they will make a phone call from the Link because they need to call someone, so it's there for that purpose. And people do need to make phone calls. And we still get hundreds of thousands of phone calls on the Links as well. So, there's the classic service, because people's cell phones may not be charged, you might [need] international via an international plan, so there's a lot of reasons — you might be charging your phone and making a call while you're charging your phone — so people still use the phone calling as well.

Daniel Brown

I got this press release. It was so cool, it was, "Fuggedabaoudit." New York City is rebranding. Can you tell us about this new campaign and how you got involved?

Chris Grosso

Sure. So, we work very closely with the Partnership for New York City, which is a great organization of all the companies in New York, all of which want to make New York a better place for everybody. And Kathy Wylde runs that group. And she's a tremendous civic leader and a great friend to many of us in the city. So, she — with the governor and the mayor — wants to put together a program to really reactivate New York City coming out of the pandemic and showcase all the city's strengths and mobilize New Yorkers really to help themselves.

I do believe New York is the greatest city in the world, and my colleagues and other cities get mad at me. And, you know, even my partners and other cities may get mad at me. And we do sell ads and other cities. But New York is a very special place, particularly for those of us who live here, who have gotten through the pandemic, and raised our families here and have our friends here. And we all deeply care about the city.

One of the great things I think about New York is you do have these people at all levels of government at all levels of the public sector, the private sector at all levels of income, race, gender — I really just love New York. And I think this was a way for us, with the partnership to kind of rally. They realize that this is a great city and that New Yorkers will make New York better, because that's what we always have. And, you know, the world is littered with people who bet against New York and you never bet against New York City because New York City always comes back. And look, New York is really a city of neighborhoods, and, I'm a New York City public school parent, and it's great. Like we go to the neighborhood public school, you go the neighborhood bodega, you go the neighborhood restaurant, your kids see their friends in the neighborhood playground.

Daniel Brown

We've chatted with folks about the digital out of home industry and the sort of screen fatigue, over-saturation. In L.A. we talked to Kevin Bartanian, and he's done neuroscience studies of how the brain starts shutting down observation centers when there's too much coming at you. How do you operate in this context? And still craft meaningful content that reaches people?

Chris Grosso

You know, I think you've got to put everything in context. And you think about screen fatigue right now: people have spent so much time in front of their computers, so much time on Zoom. There's a lot of data that says people want to be out and about in cities. So, I think whatever that screen fatigue is, in cities is pales in comparison to screen fatigue everywhere else. And then you want to think about doing things on the screens that create real value for people, it can't just all be bombarding people with advertising. And that's something we pride ourselves on.

Link is doing lots of content. You know, we've got great content programs, it could be art, it could be what time my train is coming, it could be Link Facts. One of my favorite programs we do is we do content of what this neighborhood in New York looked like before — 100 years ago, and you have the pictures there. So, people are willing to engage and look with the content. And then you put the advertising on as well, because we do have to pay the freight.

But you want to bring some balance. And in many cases, even the advertising can bring value, it could be sponsored, sports scores — at one point we did the sponsored crypto ticker — it could be directions to a nearby store or something that's on sale. So even the advertising can bring value to the consumer. So, I think it's about creating great content on your screen. So, it's actually something people want to look at or need to look at, like what time my train is coming in, even the weather — or it's advertising. Sometimes the advertising itself can be either really highly entertaining or useful for people.

Daniel Brown

How do you evangelize for the smart city? How does it help citizens? How do people react to this transition? Do you think more cities across America should embrace this?

Chris Grosso

I think a lot of our business is really predicated on bringing value to the digital screens and bringing consumer amenities, and so it could be wayfinding. If you go to Hudson Yards in New York, we've got the whole wayfinding system where you can go and click [to see] where my restaurant is on the kiosk, but you also see advertising. In the transit authorities, what we've done with many of our transit partners is we have dual-purpose screens.

The screen is advertising, but it also has real time information, like what time my train is coming. If there are changes in train service, people can look at those and see that. So, the transit authority gets a lot of value from us because they get revenue. And it's an important revenue source. But also, it's an amenity to help ridership and help customer engagement because it tells people when their train is coming and tells people if there's been a change in service. It might have an important piece of new information about an upcoming change in service on the system. So we try to bring value to the consumer while also selling the advertising. And I do think that combination is really important.

Daniel Brown

I've heard a lot of cities talking about, "hey, we'd like to do it, but it sounds really expensive." But it sounds like they're missing out on that side of the picture. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Chris Grosso

Well look, I think you have to make the numbers pencil out. And I think you've got to have projects that that make sense. And, in some cases, the amenities make sense with digital. In some cases, they may not require digital. So, I know, we have programs with, for instance, the city of Philadelphia, where we have digital signs on the side of bus shelters. We also have just plain bus shelters, and we front the capital for that, because people need bus shelters, and the static signs work very well from advertising as well. But what we will do is we will use digital data to help inform what's going on those static signs.

So even if it's not a digital sign, you still can look at the sign and get some data digitally. Because we, for instance, in a privacy-effective way, understand, based on third party device data, who might be near the sign. We use Geopath ratings to rate the sign, which is all based on digital data. So we can still get that kind of digital measurement while using a static sign.

Privacy is really important, right? Because you're working in public space. So, there's a few things on the privacy side that are non-negotiable. One is that you shouldn't be targeting people with public space advertising in public space, like The Minority Report, like "Hi, Chris," when he walked by the sign. That is completely not allowed. You cannot, should not ever do that. I think that's very important.

The second thing that's also important is, you shouldn't be putting up devices to sniff out what people are doing around the sign. You don't need to do that. And you probably shouldn't be doing that. What you should be doing is partnering with privacy-friendly data sources that in a privacy-friendly way are looking at what's going on with devices across the device grid. And that's available in privacy-friendly ways on people's cell phone devices that are being collected with people's affirmative permission.

So, you've got to do this in a privacy-friendly way. Otherwise, people don't want to give up their personal data, which is understandable. And you need to make sure that the industry has got a balance; the industry shouldn't be tracking individuals, it should be tracking, looking at aggregated data in a privacy-friendly way.

Daniel Brown

One of the other trends we've been following is the rise of diversity, equity and inclusion, alongside accessibility. And then of course, a lot of consumers and businesses are talking about sustainability, environment, governance — are these factors as you develop your nationwide network in these smart cities?

Chris Grosso

Yeah, for sure! It's actually core to the strategy, I think, in a couple different ways. One is, I think our partners want equity in how the cities are covered with projects. So typically, you know, if you want to do a bus shelter program, the city's going to want bus shelters everywhere, and you need to be able to deliver bus shelters everywhere. And a lot of where our focus is, is, "Hey, where are the most people?'" It doesn't matter what kind of people, we just want to get to the most people, it's the greatest good for the greatest number.

But you want to do that in an equitable way. So, the equity is really, really critical to the partner. And we're very cognizant of that. The other thing we're cognizant of too, is, we need to have a team that looks like the cities that we serve. So, we're very focused on internally building a diverse team, I feel pretty strongly that a diverse team gets you better outcomes, both that it has better ways to work with the community. But also, it's important to have different points of view and different ways of thinking on the team itself to get to the best outcome. And there's a lot of data that says diversity is actually really good for your business. And finally, our employees are demanding it as well. So, you've got to do both from a partner perspective. Partners want focus on diversity, both in what you're doing and how you're running your company. Your employees want that. But the good thing is, is it usually actually is net positive for the business as well.

Daniel Brown

I love that the old saying, "do good to do well," I want to kind of bring us home with one of my favorite questions. What's your favorite, most creative, outstanding thing you've seen in terms of creative on your network? And also, what's one of the biggest mistakes you keep seeing folks, not just you, anybody in the industry, that they keep making that you're like, "Goshdarnit, I wish they just fixed this!"

Chris Grosso

I think on creative, the thing I always think is the best thing we do is the Link takeover, where an advertiser can take over a chunk of the Link network, or the entire Link network, for a key period of time — it could be two hours before a movie launch. And it's really pretty powerful because you take over the entire city with creative.

Some of the movie studios have done this in the past for launches and you can see all the different creative. And it may be all the creative around a movie taking over New York City for two or three hours, you get a massive reach, you get real impact. I still think that's pretty exciting and powerful and very unique to Link.

In terms of stuff I wish folks didn't do as much of, I think it's really important for the industry to balance, think carefully about deployment and how big these digital networks should be. Because I think it's great to have big digital networks. But at a certain point in time over building these networks is not good from a business perspective. And you want them to be at the right size, so that the economics work and you don't overly clutter the environment. When you're putting in a digital network, you've got to make sure you're delivering value for the consumers. And you've got to make sure that you're generating revenue to pay for it.

The other thing I think is really important is that, as an industry, we need to collectively get to a point that everyone's working off of audited metrics from Geopath, or some other audited source. But I think it's really important that everyone's using audited data. Let's start with audited numbers, right? Everyone's being measured on the same third party sources.

About Daniel Brown

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Daniel Brown is the editor of Digital Signage Today, a contributing editor for Automation & Self-Service, and an accomplished writer and multimedia content producer with extensive experience covering technology and business. His work has appeared in a range of business and technology publications, including interviews with eminent business leaders, inventors and technologists. He has written extensively on AI and the integration of technology and business strategy with empathy and the human touch. Brown is the author of two novels and a podcaster. His previous experience includes IT work at an Ivy League research institution, education and business consulting, and retail sales and management.