Local buses, trains and even some train stations have been slathered in advertising in recent years to raise money for cash-strapped transit agencies.
On Tuesday, commercial messages on mass transit in the Southland reached a new frontier when subway riders began seeing a 15-second video floating outside the train's window in a dark tunnel near Universal City.
The first ad was a short promo for the film "Speed Racer," featuring the main character's car zipping and flipping about. An ad for Target began showing later in the morning, complete with dancing models.
"It's intrusive to me," said passenger Roberta Richey, an actress. "If I want to see that, I'll turn on the TV or pick up a newspaper."
Reaction from most other passengers on a northbound Red Line train Tuesday morning was muted or nonexistent. The videos have no sound, and some riders didn't notice them. Others read; some slept or stared blankly ahead in the way that subway riders do.
And others liked what they saw in the tunnel between the Hollywood and Highland and Universal City stations.
"We were, like, freaking out. We were saying 'What are they going to think of next?' " said Ray Mann, a film producer, who first saw the ads last week when they were being tested. "The fact is that it worked. It caught my attention."
Which, proponents say, is precisely the point. Such video ads have become part of the subway landscape in San Francisco and New York and are even more prominent overseas.
But they also have raised hackles among those who see the line increasingly blurring between public space and commercial messages. The selling of naming rights to stadiums and placement of billboards have been widely debated nationally but seem less controversial on mass transit.
When officials decided to put a video ad in a subway tunnel in San Francisco, for example, only one member of the board of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District voted no, saying that it was wrong to sell the attention of passengers.
The firms that sell the video systems and ads say marketing surveys have shown that riders are more likely to remember products featured on subway tunnel ads because the ads are unique.
"With outdoor billboards, you never know how many people are actually seeing it," said Michael Swistun, the chief executive of Sidetrack Technologies, which built the system being used on the Red Line.
