Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport will start to look a little more like Times Square as a new advertising agency remakes it with video walls and more illuminated displays.
Media firm Clear Channel Airports won a contract for all advertising at the airport for the next 10 years.
The company previously sold ads in Concourse G in Terminal 1 through an agreement with Delta Air Lines. Meanwhile, JCDecaux North America, the largest outdoor advertising firm in the U.S., was responsible for ads in the rest of the airport. It generated $2.2 million in sales at the airport last year and paid rent of $1.5 million to the Metropolitan Airports Commission.
The new agreement makes Clear Channel the first media company in more than a dozen years to handle marketing in the entire airport, which attracts 36 million passengers a year.
"The airport is the first impression you have to the city," said Jason King, spokesman for the company, which is a unit of iHeart Media Inc. of San Antonio.
For advertisers, he said airports represent a chance "to communicate with their audience from the time they arrive at the airport through their dwell time to their departure."
By the end of July, as part of the contract with the airport commission, Clear Channel will begin to add more video screens in the airport, including double-sided video walls, integrated flight information displays and other signage.
"The added benefit of digital is that it offers an advertiser the flexibility to change their ad periodically over the course of the day or to even have a different ad running at a different gate to reach a different audience," King said.
