Once upon a time, in a time before Siri and location-based apps, there lived these ancient things called phone booths. You know the booths that sat on random corners and at gas stations that required quarters to place a call to another landline? Yeah, those. In most places, these now useless booths are still inconveniently nested in their original locations, serving virtually no use at all…until now.
In an announcement last week, New York City made news headlines for its partnership with a company called City24x7 to install “SmartScreen” stations at hundreds of old phone booth stations across the city’s five boroughs. That is, 32-inch touch-based, tablet-like screens that will replace roughly 250 traditional payphones. The SmartScreens are a genius destination marketing tool as they will serve as an interactive local neighborhood information hub, featuring details on restaurants, stores, and safety information. If this isn’t enough to make The Big Apple more of a crowd-pleaser, perhaps the free Wi-Fi hotspots will do the trick. Though the SmartScreens will not allow users to surf the web, they will serve as hotspots to connect smartphones and tablets to when in close proximity. Not to mention the HD cameras and microphone capabilities that will not only increase city officials surveying options, they will probably eventually allow patrons to make Skype calls.
As an agency that specializes in destination marketing, it’s important to analyze the good, the bad and the ugly, and give praise where praise is due. This, is genius, if we do say so ourselves. It’s a very innovative way to utilize old resources and apply new technology to them, thus giving these payphones a second chance at life.
Imagining that they’ll implement some sort of tracking via advertisements and directory searches, it’s quite possible that the numbers will be impressive to say the least. The devices are scheduled to debut in May with a pilot program and, if successful, will continue expanding across the city. We’re anxious to see how this all pans out. Do you think the hype will live or die? How do you think these stalls will impact the future of destination marketing? Let us know.
