Why Have the Ads on Beijing Subway Line 14 All Gone Artsy?

It is a deliberate bid to stand out, a forced response to a far bigger rival, and, of course, a transplant of some traditions and know-how from Hong Kong's metro.

If you have ridden Beijing Subway Line 14 lately, you may have noticed that it feels different, say, from Line 1, which crosses it at Dawanglu Station.

Its middle section opened only at the end of last December, so clean new cars and a pleasant setting are to be expected. But the difference we mean is something harder to pin down: an artsy sensibility, and it comes through in the line's ads.

On the platform lightboxes, for instance, you might find six people holding up bowls of noodles from their hometowns to greet you, the story of a city night runner, or a glimpse of horse-racing life on the Tibetan plateau.

"Life digests everything by itself, needing neither anyone's help nor anyone's consent." Picture coming across this line from Chekhov on a billboard amid the subway crush. Does that give you a sense of the style?

They appear as lightbox ads, but they are not the "subway ads" you are used to. At a glance, you can hardly tell who placed them.

Beijing MTR Corporation Limited (Beijing MTR), which operates Line 14, calls this kind of ad a "public service ad," though it is clearly not the kind of "public service ad" you have seen before. Beijing MTR makes these ads with commercial companies or nonprofit organizations, which supply words and pictures suited to a public space; the brand itself appears only in small print.

The four ads above, for example, are the "Face to Face" series Beijing MTR made with Yitiao, the "Ordinary People's Diaries" series made with Tencent News, the "Maisu Notes" series made with a nonprofit in Tibet, and "Words of Masters," made with One-Way Space.

Since Line 14 opened, these "public service ads" have made up about half of all its ads, and they are the main source of the line's artsy feel.

The style follows from the line itself. Line 14 is shaped like a reversed "L" and links Beijing's northeast with its southwest.

"On the east side, Line 14 passes the 798 Art District and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and it runs through white-collar areas like Dawanglu. The south is more residential and down-to-earth. So we positioned Line 14 as artsy and artistic, and built content around that style," Gao Xiang, head of non-fare revenue at Beijing MTR, told QDaily.

According to big-data analysis by Beijing MTR and Beijing Mobile, Line 14's riders (mainly commuters) are chiefly young, university-educated office workers around 30.

So when it drew up its marketing strategy, Line 14 made this group its target audience: young people who work at a fast pace, face long, stressful commutes, read widely, and have their own views on life and their own goals.

Giving each line its own theme and commercial positioning is one of Beijing MTR's business strategies, and Line 14 is not its first attempt. Seven years ago, Line 4, the first line the company ran in Beijing, was given a young, humanistic style because it passes through the university district. Its in-station public projects include the Line 4 Art Museum and the Line 4 Poetry Workshop.

When Beijing MTR Says "Public Service Ads," What Does It Mean?

For people who have lived in mainland China for a long time, the term "public service ad" probably calls to mind slogans like: protect the environment, honor your elders, be civilized and set a new social tone...

"Our idea of a 'public service ad' is different," Gao Xiang said. As he describes it, their definition is broader and leans toward the "public" side of the term.

To some extent this carries on a tradition of Beijing MTR's parent company, MTR Corporation, in Hong Kong. Deng Kangyan, editor-in-chief of Hong Kong's Phoenix Weekly, made this point more than ten years ago: "The mainland often treats public service ads as a tool for moral instruction. Citizens are like pupils, and the public service ad is a lofty schoolmaster. So when you visit many mainland cities and see their public service ads, you think less of the city. Hong Kong speaks on equal terms: either from a legal angle or as a reminder, offering people a practical lesson, a warning, or a sense of authority."

The same idea runs through all of Beijing MTR's public service ad planning. "Our approach is to share things the way a friend would. First we have to respect the other person, and treat passengers as knowledgeable people with their own views and their own judgment."

Subway ad space is never 100% sold. On mature lines in first-tier cities, commercial ads usually fill about 70% of the space, and the empty 30% goes to public service ads. Because Line 14 has only just opened and does not run through the city center, commercial ads currently fill only about 50% of its space.

"In Hong Kong, these idle lightboxes are usually filled in partnership with nonprofits such as museums. We think that, as the operator, we can be more proactive and plan content more systematically for passengers," Gao Xiang stressed. "It is a sensible use of resources that costs us nothing extra, and partnering with outside organizations brings in better content providers."

Under Beijing MTR's arrangement, public service ad partners pay only the production cost, not the high placement fees charged for ordinary commercial ads. A 12-sheet lightbox ad at Xidan Station, for example, costs more than 100,000 yuan for four weeks, while producing it costs just 1,000-2,000 yuan.

As for the division of labor, partners such as Yitiao, Tencent News and One-Way Space usually supply the images and text, and Beijing MTR works with an ad agency to package and design the material before it goes up. Beijing MTR strictly limits the content of public service ads. No large brand logos are allowed, for example, only a basic brand presence, to stop anyone from slipping in a disguised commercial.

In choosing partner brands, one of Beijing MTR's main criteria is a matching style. Because subway media are held to very high safety standards, the company also watches these brands for a while to see whether they are stable, and some internet companies were ruled out for this reason. As a result, most of the current partners are fairly niche, artsy, content-focused companies.

Seen from the other side, because Beijing MTR sets demanding standards for the content and form of public service ads and strictly limits brand presence, big companies with money to spare may prefer to buy commercial ads, which give their brands a louder voice.

A Typical Case: "Face to Face: New Year, New Mileage"

"Face to Face: New Year, New Mileage," the themed public service campaign celebrating the opening of Line 14, was the biggest of the first batch of ads. We use it to trace how a typical "public service ad" comes into being.

"Every time a line opens, we do a theme. For residents along the line, the opening is a big occasion. In the first week, many people go down to have a look even if they are not riding anywhere. That is a non-transport demand, and we call it 'touring the line.' It is also the best moment to build the brand," Gao Xiang said.

When the eastern and western ends of Line 14 opened earlier, Beijing MTR ran the themes "The Subway Opens, the Garden Expo Comes" and "Line 14 East, Joy Within." But Gao Xiang felt both were still told too much "from the subway company's point of view."

"So when the middle section of Line 14 opened, we wanted something closer to ordinary people's daily lives. The theme we had in mind was eating and traveling as one, but it had to be expressed in a young, stylish way."

Beijing zhajiang noodles, Taiyuan knife-cut noodles, Chongqing peas-and-minced-meat noodles, Wuhan hot dry noodles, Hangzhou pianerchuan noodles, Xiamen satay noodles: six people from six places talking about the noodles of their hometowns. That was the story "Face to Face: New Year, New Mileage" finally told.

"Face to Face: New Year, New Mileage" public service project

Lightbox ads

A set of print ads made with Yitiao Video: six people from different places, each showing a noodle dish from their hometown

In-car video

The video version of the lightbox ads: the six people show how to make their hometown noodles

Vending machines

With Qingnian Caijun, vending machines at station exits for the two weeks before the opening, each day selling a semi-prepared version of one of the noodle dishes in the ads

Opening-day event

"Noodle spoon" souvenirs on sale at Fangzhuang Station

Yitiao Video handled the creative content and production of the ads. Yitiao is a WeChat official account that makes short lifestyle videos, so making the "Face to Face" public service ad was close to its everyday work.

"We actually ran this project as our own content, and we played it on our own channels too, so in effect we gave Beijing MTR a complete package of good content," Fan Zhixing, Yitiao's operations director, told QDaily. "At the same time, when we published it on our own platform, we also promoted the opening of Beijing MTR's line. It was an exchange of resources."

For Yitiao, the main reason to take part was to promote its new official account, "Food Channel" (it appears in the ads as a small logo in the upper left and a QR code in the lower right).

After the "Face to Face" ads with Yitiao, Beijing MTR also teamed up with Qingnian Caijun to put "noodle machines" at station exits for the two weeks before the opening.

Qingnian Caijun sells semi-prepared fresh food. Working from the descriptions of the six noodles in the "Face to Face" ads, it developed semi-prepared versions and sold them from vending machines at station exits at a discounted 1-2 yuan.

"It is a perfect fit for buying in context: people see the billboard and the noodle-making video in the subway, and when they leave the station the vending machine has exactly the matching product," Ren Mu, co-founder of Qingnian Caijun, told QDaily. "Also, Qingnian Caijun's target users are office workers born in the 1970s and 1980s, and a large share of them commute by subway. The eastern stretch of Line 14 is full of the young people we are trying to reach."

As with the public service ads, Qingnian Caijun paid Beijing MTR no rent for its vending machines, but it bore the full cost of selling noodles at a discount.

"One serving costs about 7 yuan on average, and Xiamen satay noodles and old Beijing zhajiang noodles are especially expensive. Developing them drove us crazy. You have no idea how many ingredients go into zhajiang noodles. The toppings include toon sprouts, which are really expensive in winter!" By Ren Mu's rough estimate, they sold about 15,000 servings over the two weeks; at a cost of 7 yuan each, that came to more than 100,000 yuan.

Still, Qingnian Caijun does not see this as a money-losing deal, because it treated the event as brand promotion. "Many people are still unfamiliar with semi-prepared dishes, and the best way to show users their value is to have them actually try one."

On opening day, Beijing MTR also sold souvenirs at Fangzhuang Station: a commemorative opening badge and a set of noodle spoons.

It also handed out a "connection map" that invited passengers to collect commemorative stamps from all nine new stations, a game probably borrowed from Hong Kong.

What Does It Mean for a Subway Line to Have a Style?

For passengers, ads that are easier on the eye make the ride more pleasant. Besides being a means of transport, after all, the subway is also an important public space in the city.

"In clothing, food, housing and travel alike, once basic needs are met, people want beauty too. Travel shouldn't be just a way to get from point A to point B; it should be a more varied and richer experience," Gao Xiang said. "At rush hour, people are in a hurry, and what matters most is safety and speed, so they may not notice anything else. But the other 80% of the time is off-peak, and riders then have latent needs beyond transport. At the very least, we can make the experience a friendlier one in the softer details."

Years before he worked with Beijing MTR, Qingnian Caijun's Ren Mu had already taken notice of the company while living along Line 4. "I always thought of Beijing MTR as a very open company, willing to try new kinds of business, like the poetry workshop and the art museum on Line 4. The image they give off is younger and more diverse, and I personally like it. The impression I formed as an ordinary passenger did play some part in the early stage of this collaboration."

Gao Xiang sees a clear trend in recent years: more and more Chinese subway companies are realizing that how they run and market their lines matters.

"Beijing began building its subway in 1969. Given the economy of the 1970s, the subway focused on construction and moving people. That reflects how the industry started out, and it was still true even five or six years ago."

Since 2008, subway construction in China has boomed. In 2009, only eight Chinese cities had subways, with four or five hundred kilometers of track in total. By this March, the figures had reached 25 cities and 3,500 kilometers.

"With this change, every subway company has realized that running the line as a business is as important a responsibility as building it and moving people," Gao Xiang said. He noticed that this year almost every subway company issued commemorative Year of the Monkey "monkey tickets," and many newly built subways in other cities have cultural design touches as well. "None of this is directly about transport, but it helps us communicate with passengers and build a brand. As society develops, it also expects the subway to be not just a people mover but a public platform that represents the city."

But Beijing MTR is, in the end, a commercial company. Beyond the ideal of improving a public space, what really drives it is business. Remember that this kind of public service ad cannot, in the short term, earn anything like the returns of commercial ads.

To see why, look at the competition Beijing MTR faces. In the past, a Chinese city's subway was usually run by a single state-owned enterprise. Beijing MTR, brought into Beijing in 2006, was the country's first joint-venture subway company. Today Beijing's lines are run by two companies, Beijing Subway Operation Corporation and Beijing MTR; Beijing MTR runs Line 4, the Daxing Line and Line 14.

Subway revenue falls into two parts: fare revenue and non-fare revenue. With fares fixed and passenger numbers roughly stable, the part operators can change is non-fare revenue, which includes commercial advertising, telecom services and commercial retail (rent from shops, ATMs, vending machines and the like). Advertising makes up 60% of it.

"When a city has two subway companies and the lines we run are only a small share, we are at a disadvantage in commercial competition," Gao Xiang told QDaily. "When advertisers buy commercial ads, for instance, they can choose either company. The other side has a big advantage in scale, but if our media environment is better, our audience is more attractive and our reach is better, advertisers may choose us. As for what public service ads contribute to the business, they build up the brand and set us apart from the competition, which will help us attract advertisers later on."

Line 14 is also stricter about commercial ads. Ads from industries such as private hospitals (men's health clinics, cosmetic surgery and the like), P2P lending and lotteries are not allowed.

Ordinary commercial ads must also meet a higher visual standard. Images that leave passengers uncomfortable, such as large areas of black or red, are out. So are ads in the style of "big-character posters," such as mall discount ads that are all text and no design. Ads with skewed values are not allowed either, and that takes human judgment.

Beyond the Ads, the Style Shows in the Station Decor

It isn't just Line 14. Many subway stations in China and abroad are decorated to reflect the character of their neighborhoods.