A plan to hire a firm to coordinate advertising on County
Express buses and bus stop shelters hit a roadblock as no agencies
showed interest in running the program. The plan is now being
scaled back to be coordinated in-house and to include ads only at
select bus stops.
A plan to hire a firm to coordinate advertising on County Express buses and bus stop shelters hit a roadblock as no agencies showed interest in running the program. The plan is now being scaled back to be coordinated in-house and to include ads only at select bus stops.
“We don’t know why” no responses were received from the county’s request for proposals that detailed the expectations of an advertising agency, said Betty LiOwen, transportation planner for the Local Transportation Agency (LTA). “I am assuming it’s because we are a pretty small market and they didn’t see much of a profit margin.”
The original plan was to bring in nearly $50,000 a year by allowing advertising on county buses and bus stops. An advertising firm would have had the exclusive right for five years to sell the advertising and in return provide the LTA with a minimum annual guarantee or 60 percent of the contractor’s annual gross revenues earned in conjunction with the local advertising, whichever was greater.
LiOwen previously said that other counties said allowing advertising on transit vehicles created a “significant revenue source” that was also a steady income stream.
“We did let the (advertising agencies) in other counties know it was available twice and we did contact as many as we knew,” she said. “Obviously, they weren’t interested.”
So last week the LTA, which operated through an agreement between San Benito County and the City of Hollister, voted to bring the advertising effort in-house and sell space on bus stop shelters near Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital on Sunset Drive and at Fourth and San Benito streets downtown. No advertising would be placed on vehicles under this plan.
See the full story in the Pinnacle.
