If you’ve walked down any street in New York City recently, chances are high that you’ve seen an MTA bus and, with it, an ad for the Museum of Sex.

Across the city, more than 3,000 buses are running with the museum’s logo plastered across the front, which has led to countless social media posts from curious, amused, and only sometimes annoyed observers. The omnipresence of the museum logo is all in service of leaving the institution’s mark on the city, Daniel Gluck, founder and executive director at the Museum of Sex, told Marketing Brew.

“It’s fun to see the Museum of Sex logo on every bus in New York,” he said. “Hopefully it becomes another iconic New York thing.”

The Museum of Sex opened in 2002, but Gluck said it took years before the MTA would consider allowing it to advertise. It first placed its logo on city buses in 2018 with Outfront Media, but the spots were removed following complaints from bus drivers. (Gluck said the negative feedback was surprising, given the “overwhelmingly positive” response from the public.)

The current campaign, which launched in December and will run through the end of this year, so far hasn’t faced any calls for removal, and Gluck said the museum has seen a bump in foot traffic and earned media from the ads—including from an incident in February when a wild turkey brought a bus to a stop and was photographed face-to-face with the logo.

“It’s been going very well,” Gluck said of the campaign. “A lot of people are really getting a kick out of it.”

Take a ride?

The Museum of Sex has experimented with billboards, posters, taxi tops, and digital ads, particularly in Miami, where it just opened a second location. However, Gluck said a “good chunk” of the museum’s advertising budget goes toward the NYC bus runs because “there’s something very New York about mass transit…and we’re very much a New York brand.”

Right now, MTA buses are decked out with Museum of Sex logos in four color combinations, though it started out as just white text on a black background. Gluck said he and his creative team plan to experiment with new colors and textures throughout the campaign, perhaps adding elements like gold vinyl or fur. Because he said new ad designs can take weeks to get feedback or approval from the MTA, it could take a while before those show up.

In the meantime, Gluck said, “It’s really fun to see two or three buses coming down the avenue, all in different color combinations.”

The Museum of Sex has used more detailed imagery in past ad campaigns, Gluck said, but only on the subway, where viewers have more dwell time.

“You walk on the subway, you see a strong image, a great name for an exhibition, and the Museum of Sex logo, and it all comes together [as] a really nice, quick, instant-reaction ad,” he said. “When it comes to the bus ads, we don’t have the luxury of a captured audience because people are only seeing a bus ad for a very short time.”

Past subway campaigns from the Museum of Sex have included images of sideways mouths, golden robots, and people floating through psychedelic landscapes. In each case, the museum has been careful to convey what its exhibits are about while also being sensitive to the MTA’s guidelines around appropriate imagery and ad copy, Gluck said. Other brands, like sex-toy company Dame and dating platform OkCupid, have butted heads with the MTA in recent years for rejecting ads the agency deemed too sexual.

It’s not out of the question for the Museum of Sex to spice things up and introduce image overlays to its bus ads at some point, especially if Gluck and his team expand their real estate to the sides of the vehicles, but a big part of what he sees as the humor and the emotional impact of the campaign is slapping the logo on something as simple as the front of a bus.

“You can put our logo on a very innocuous image,” he said, “and suddenly it takes another context.”