In Berlin, a New Underground Cinema

Every day in this self-styled center of European avant-garde, more than 70,000 bored subway commuters become a captive audience for some of Germany’s biggest advertisers.

A company called MetroCinevision has found a way to turn this city’s dark subway tunnels into a showcase for 30-second films and commercials. Nine-hundred still images are projected onto a screen that runs along the subway track. When a train speeds by, the sequence of images becomes animated in the eyes of passengers.

Commuters have seen ads for Deutsche Telekom phone systems and Nestle chocolate, along with scenes from films and messages from charitable organizations.

The innovation has beguiled Berlin commuters for only a few weeks, but its initiators believe they are on to something big.

“People riding the subway have nothing else to do but watch,” says Joerg Moser-Metius, founder and director of MetroCinevision. “These tunnels that have always been dirty black holes can now be stages for the ultimate captive audience.”

The first 18 “spots” being projected onto the walls of the most highly traveled stretch of the Berlin subway reflect Moser-Metius’ desire to attract both attention and income. The mini-films that play at window level of the subway cars 260 times a day include clips as varied as UNICEF fund-raising projects and a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Pawnshop,” along with the ads.

“It’s fun because it’s more distracting than still advertisements,” says Sarmen Azar, an 18-year-old student who travels the tunnel twice a day. “The other stuff you just sort of stare at without noticing because nothing moves in them.”

The fleeting films aren’t for everyone, though. “It’s hardly noticeable,” says middle-aged secretary Monique Remy. “I hope they aren’t spending public money on this.”

But 11-year-old Mohammed Zibara leaps for a window seat when he takes the subway to his soccer practices, pulling up to the plexiglass even more closely than children watch Saturday cartoons on TV.

“I like it, but it would be even better if it was longer,” says the young commuter as the promotion for UNICEF closes and the train enters the Hansaplatz station in the Tiergarten district, site of Berlin’s central park and zoo.

All the films are silent. But Moser-Metius says the technology already exists to add sound--only the investment funds to develop it are lacking.

MetroCinevision has bought exclusive rights to the Berlin U-Bahn tunnel walls for the next 10 years and has contracted with a group of erstwhile graffiti artists to put their decorative talents to legal and lucrative use.

Keen Graff-X--founded in May by former spray-paint artist Jacob von Recklinghausen, his brother Moritz and seven friends--fulfills commercial orders from MetroCinevision clients for cartoons and other images for advertising clients.

Each short film is made up of 900 stroboscopic images created by projectors mounted under a metal-backed screen that runs more than 1,800 feet only a few inches away from the moving subway. Computerized sensors synchronize the projection of the images with the speed of each moving train. After a train passes by one film sequence, all 900 projectors advance to another set of images to provide the next load of commuters with a fresh story.

The 18 mini-films will be changed every two months to avoid excessive repetition and to maximize the attraction for commercial sponsors, says MetroCinevision spokeswoman Esther Heyer.

With the help of a media-development grant of about $800,000 from the European Union, MetroCinevision premiered in late October but had to drop the curtain after its inaugural showing until mid-November because of a software bug that thwarted synchronization, offering viewers only a jumble of images as the cars swept by at their average 40 mph.

The mini-films--about two-thirds advertising spots and the rest public service or comic relief--so far appear only on the heavily traveled line between the Berlin Zoo and Hansaplatz stations, but MetroCinevision is preparing a second stretch of silver-screen subway through the busy Potsdamer Platz, along the old divide between East and West Berlin, early next year.

Moser-Metius also reports the company is putting the finishing touches on contracts with both the Paris RER intercity train network and the Heathrow Express service carrying air travelers between central London and Heathrow Airport.

Nearly half the initial batch of subway films have been cartoon-like promotions or experiments with imagery, such as the psychedelic shapes and visual gymnastics employed in one spot promoting the Expo 2000 exhibit in the northern city of Hanover.

While the animated ads and entertainment provide diversion for commuters, Berlin city authorities continue to regard the new medium more as a source of income than as a promotional sensation to attract more riders.

MetroCinevision is just one in an array of marketing techniques coming to Berlin’s underground transport network, says Andreas Orth, head of sales and marketing for the municipal transport authority’s advertising subsidiary. Live transmission of news, weather and travel information from public television are expected to be available within a few years, he says.

MetroCinevision said installation of 900 projectors, the metallic screen and the initial 18 mini-films for the Zoo-Hansaplatz line cost it about $2.6 million. Those start-up costs mean the medium is not yet profitable, but company officials say they expect the project to provide a return on the investment next year.

The cost to advertisers to have their mini-films shown on MetroCinevision’s leased tunnel walls is only slightly more than for the traditional stationary ads that hawk language lessons and pharmaceutical wonders on the marquee framing each subway car ceiling, Moser-Metius says.

The most costly part of the MetroCinevision project--the projectors and their installation--were one-time expenditures that can be amortized over a couple of years and should not drive up the costs to advertisers. Each new commercial produced by the advertiser can be converted for MetroCinevision at a cost competitive with the $1,800 charged by the city transport authority for a 60-day run of billboard ads.