Bus-ted! Being the Ad

It’s quite a strange experience to have your picture on the front of an MTA bus. Or rather, on the front of EVERY MTA bus. But that’s exactly the experience my “News at 10” co-anchor Kaity Tong and I have had for the past month.

The WPIX promotions department, in putting together its marketing and publicity plan for our newscasts, made a decision to go with buses. Not the side panels you see when you’re walking on the sidewalk and the bus passes by on the street. We’re talking the front of the bus, where you see our faces approaching, in a delightful and friendly way, as the bus is coming at you. Kaity and I were happy to hear about the plan. It’s always nice to have your newscast promoted out there in public. It might make more people watch, which, as you know, is pretty much the whole idea of this TV thing.

We’ve had promotional campaigns before. A few years ago, the 10 o’clock news team—me, Kaity, Sal Marciano, and Mr. G—had our mugs plastered all over subway stations throughout the city. I was a subway rider at the time, and there was one of these posters at my “home” station, at 96th and Central Park West. I admit, it was kind of a kick to be standing there, waiting for the train, glancing over my shoulder at a big, oversized photo of….. me! But the fun didn’t last long.

A big problem with subway posters, as opposed to bus ads, is that they are stationary. They just hang there. And you know what that means. That means somebody can draw on them. Somebody did. I barely had a chance to gloat over my own ad in my very own subway station before it happened. A person had drawn on our news team picture. Not on me. Not on Sal or Mr. G. The graffiti was focused on Kaity. Poor, poor Kaity. There is no possible way I could describe to you what I found myself staring at that day, but let’s just say the picture of my lovely co-anchor was defiled beyond any acceptable community standard.

You can imagine my reaction to this. I started laughing so hard people on the platform began edging away to safer territory. I remember how I rushed into the station that day to tell Kaity exactly what had been done with her likeness. Ah, good times, good times.

But with buses, you’ve got to be a pretty determined graffiti artist, what with them constantly moving down the street, and all. So I’m happy to say, Kaity made it through the campaign with her honor and dignity intact, as far as I know. I also loved it when my wife, driving one day in Manhattan before she even knew about the ads, looked in her rearview mirror to see my giant, smiling melon bearing down on her. That might explain the recent nightmares she’s been having.

Mostly, though, it was all very weird. I’d be standing on a corner, waiting to cross a street, and a bus would pull up next to me. Riders and pedestrians walked past oblivious to the fact that the guy whose big face was on the bus was actually standing right there. Should they have noticed? I don’t think so. When you get on a bus, or see a poster or a billboard, do YOU look around to see if, just maybe, the person in the ad is there beside you? I think if that were to happen, it would be disorienting, perhaps unpleasantly so. At any rate, not a single pedestrian or rider ever made the connection. (And I would go wait there for a long time!) One night after work, when Kaity and I were standing beside 42nd Street waiting to get her a cab, she started jokingly pointing at the front of a passing bus, and then pointing to us. Nobody noticed but the driver, and I’m sure that didn’t even make his top ten of weird things he’d seen that day.

The campaign is over now. One day, the front of every bus is a funhouse mirror; the next, we’re replaced with an ad for a clothing line that includes—I kid you not—Dickies. Oh, Fame. Why do you taunt me so? I had wanted to get my six-year-old twin boys into town to see if I could impress them with the bus ads, since me actually BEING on television doesn’t accomplish that. They’re a tough crowd. Now we’ll never know.

Although... I’ve heard the CW11 has bought up all the ad space in Penn Station for news promotions. I could take the kids there, and just let them bask in the sheer Daddy-osity that will be surrounding them. That should impress them once and for all, right? Unless that graffiti dude gets there first.