Why the NYC Ferry is sailing into advertising

Seeing more ads on the NYC Ferry? Thank Mayor Eric Adams.

While the New York City transit system has always given advertisers the opportunity to reach commuters and tourists, the city’s ferry service—38 boats serving parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—has started to lean more heavily into partnerships and activations. It’s partially the result of an Adams administration initiative aimed at reducing the ferry’s reliance on public subsidies, Madalena Phillips, VP of marketing for the ferries and transportation division of the Hornblower Group, the company that operates the city’s ferry system, explained. Because, yes, everything is an ad network, even if it’s bobbing in the East River.

The ferry has a sizable audience: it’s carried a grand total of 35 million passengers since it first set sail in 2018, and averages a little fewer than 30,000 riders on weekends, according to its latest quarterly update. And last year, Phillips and her team began making outbound inquiries to brands to see about partnerships. At the same time, the ferry’s social strategy has shifted away from largely informational content (route and transfer details, for example) to something more entertaining, Phillips said, another potential draw for brand partners.

There have been several high-profile activations. In July, the ferry hosted a listening party for the release of Taylor Swift’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) album after pitching Swift’s management on a free promotional opportunity. The stunt was successful—Phillips said 3,500 riders showed up, even though there were only 350 seats—and Spotify reached out and bought an interior boat wrap that ran on select ferries for two weeks in October to promote the release of Swift’s next album drop, 1989 (Taylor’s Version). That arrangement included a sponsored one-afternoon-only event complete with free swag, friendship bracelets, and photo ops.

The team also pitched (and apparently convinced) Carvel to let its iconic aquatic mascot, Fudgie the Whale, greet riders with free ice cream on National Soft-Serve Day in August. The Ferry saw a 73% YoY increase in ridership the weekend of the Carvel activation, Phillips told us.

More recently, Celestial Seasonings’s Sleepytime Bear rode the ferry in January, taking photos and handing out free samples of the brand’s Sleepytime Tea. The 6 train could never.

Emily Rosen, a director of marketing at The Hain Celestial Group, said that the ferry’s social presence made the partnership a no-brainer.

“Why not do that?” she told us. “Folks are on the ferry, coming back from a long day of work…We can be that perfect accompaniment to help people wind down their day.”

Activations are a way for the ferry “to keep and maintain our ridership, retain ridership, while also attracting a new ridership that doesn’t necessarily have a reason to commute from one side to the other,” Phillips said.

The structure of brand deals can vary. While Spotify paid for its activation, Carvel, Celestial Seasonings, and Taylor Swift’s team didn’t pay for theirs. Brands get access to a “captive audience for a certain period of time; [riders are] onboard, they’re not going anywhere,” Phillips said, while the ferry gets to give riders a treat, and both boat and brand get to post about it. So do riders—search “NYC Ferry Taylor Swift” on TikTok, and you’ll find several posts with hundreds of thousands of views.

Those are all potential fares. “It’s ridership, reach, the promotion of pleasing our riders [who] create user-generated content, that’s been a huge fuel for us,” Phillips said.

While the NYC Ferry doesn’t have a specific advertising revenue goal, the per-passenger subsidy is expected to drop 30% by 2025, with at least some of that expected to come from ad revenue. Last fall, the ferry participated in a giveaway with Advertising Week, which is a pretty direct way to say, “Hello, advertisers!”

“Our goal is just to get as much advertising and spending opportunities as possible that fit within our schedule,” Phillips said.

Update Feb. 1, 2024: This piece has been updated with more current ridership information for the NYC Ferry, and has been updated to clarify the location of the Taylor Swift boat wrap.