As our understanding of “disruption” changes, our essential services continue to keep us afloat.
This unforeseen pandemic has brought a lot of disruption to our lives.
“Disruption” is a word the out-of-home industry loves. Disruption for us is a moment of connection. We relish the notion of interrupting consumers throughout their day. Interrupting them with what we hope is a temporary moment of pause, of ease, perhaps learning, or ideally surprising charm. Disruption is what advertisers are looking to achieve across all their media channels, not just for their out-of-home executions, but it’s how that moment is achieved in the physical world that we sometimes overlook. For those who work in out-of-home, outdoor advertising, particularly functional mediums like transit advertising, can become a blur. We’re hyper-aware of its existence, its potency, and its relentless presence, but are we forgetting the importance of its place in the infrastructure of our cities – our hometowns?
During a typical weekday some 34 million people travel on public transport. Public transit is essential for our society to run. But these aren’t typical times. COVID-19 has made us more aware than ever of the essential need for public transportation infrastructure. Doctors, nurses, medical workers, grocery store workers, bank tellers, goods distributors, delivery workers, postal workers, energy suppliers, bus drivers, train conductors, ferry crews… when you break it down the list of essential workers is staggering. Public transit is critical infrastructure and we need our transit authorities more than ever.
It seems a great burden to bear, and we’re unbelievably grateful to our transit authority partners for the great lengths they are going to, and the hardship they are enduring through this extraordinary time in our history. At Vector Media we heavily rely on the continued operation of our 40+ public transit authority partners to operate our business. Transit companies have always been essential for us.
Without our transit partners we wouldn’t be able to share the thoughtful, considered messages and stories of our advertisers as they adapt to changes in consumer behavior, providing goods and services to help us all in our new, temporary “normal”.
As we at Vector continue to operate through this global crisis, we will be mindful of the hard work and graciousness of our employees and our partners’ employees out in the field, keeping services moving forward, and holding our communities up through tough times.
Disruption is just a moment of change.
