Ad Kiosks Could Be Coming to Downtown Seattle. But Are the "Public Benefits" Worth the Tradeoff?
Revenues from the vertical billboards would fund the Downtown Seattle Association, a private business group.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Downtown Seattle Association, an umbrella group for downtown businesses, is asking the city to approve a 30-year permit that would allow a Columbus, Ohio-based advertising company called Orange Barrel Media (through its affiliate, IKE Smart City) to install up to 30 eight-and-a-half-foot-tall digital advertising "kiosks" on sidewalks downtown.
The slides, according to an IKE representative, would "include a mixture of video and static images."
It's the second time the city has taken a run at adding kiosks to the downtown landscape. The first proposal, by a Google-affiliated company called Intersection, fizzled in 2018.
The type of permit IKE and the DSA are seeking, known as a term permit, is usually reserved for "significant structures," like skybridges and tunnels, that need access to city right-of-way on a long-term basis; it's unusual, if not unprecedented, for the city to grant a long-term permit to dozens of small structures in unspecified locations.
As proposed, the permit would include an option to add another 50 kiosks in the future, including 30 in other neighborhoods, including Ballard.
"We'd like a lot more [kiosks], but we're comfortable starting with with 30," DSA CEO Jon Scholes told PubliCola earlier this year.
The kiosks, which will operate 24 hours a day, will scroll through eight ad slots every ten seconds; at least one of the slides will be "proactively curated by the city, organizations like ours, and the community to help people understand what's happening and what's available" in the area, Scholes said.
That local programming could include images of Seattle artists' work, tourist maps, emergency updates, and guides to downtown events. Scholes said people might see an ad for a concert on a kiosk, for example, and say, "'I'm going to come out for that concert that I didn't know about'—generating more pedestrian traffic and traffic for events and parks."
"This level of custom curation provides the City and local stakeholders the ability to curate the content that pedestrians encounter, driving discovery of local and businesses and events, encouraging public transit use, and delivering a platform for non-profits, artists and local businesses who otherwise would never have such an opportunity," an IKE spokesperson told PubliCola.
According to IKE, cities typically get more like 20 percent of the slides because not all the ad space sells. IKE says its business model is based entirely on ad sales, and that, unlike Intersection and other kiosk companies, it does not sell user data. [Editor’s note: Due to a typo, this post originally—and erroneously—said that IKE “does sell user data.]
A portion of the income from the digital ads—an estimated $1.1 million a year—would go to the DSA to beef up its public programs and events and to fund the business group's Downtown Ambassador program, Scholes said. Additional revenues could go to the city, a spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell, Jamie Housen, said.
"We believe the kiosks would have many public benefits that would complement the goals of Mayor Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, including promotion of local businesses and events, WiFi access, wayfinding and mobility tools for visitors, and accessible information on resources like food and shelter for people in need," Housen said.
"From the city's interest and our interest, this is a heck of a deal," Scholes told the city's Design Commission earlier this week, when it held the second of three meetings to discuss the proposal.
At that meeting, a representative from OBM, Jessica Burton, told commissioners that unlike kiosks operated by other companies, the IKE kiosks won't include charging stations or built-in tablets—a key distinction from kiosks in other cities, like New York and London, where unhoused people often use the kiosks to charge their devices or get online. Omitting these amenities, Burton, will help "eliminat[e] loitering" and "any type of unnecessary congregating" around the signs, Burton said.
During the commission meeting, officials representing the city's public safety departments touted the kiosks' ability to display emergency updates, call 911, and provide real-time public safety information with a single touch. "Let's be smart, let's be innovative, let's be practical, and let's have the humility to recognize that there are a lot of things working really well in a lot of cities, and the intelligence to look at our own local scoreboard," CARE (911) Department Chief Amy Smith said. "I'm very excited about these kiosks."
But commissioners questioned the value (and equity) of having an emergency alert system that only serves a few blocks of downtown Seattle, and wondered about the usefulness of some of the kiosks' other features, such QR codes people could use to find local events on their smartphone, or a "Photo Booth" app that allows people to snap a selfie.
Commissioners pressed representatives from OBM and the DSA to explain what public need the vertical billboards would fulfill, and how downtown would be improved by their presence.
"If I try to put this in the context of a magical world in which the city of Seattle has the money to install these themselves, with no advertisement whatsoever, to just provide the public benefits that have been displayed here today, is that desirable?" commissioner Jay Backman said.
A former vice chair of the design commission, Ellen Sollod, said she didn't think the purported benefits were worth the downsides—"not just the visual clutter of the objects in the landscape, but the visual clutter of the messaging" from illuminated ads all over downtown Seattle.
"I'm very concerned about the continuing homogenization of Seattle, and when I look and I see that this is a program that [has] been used in many cities all over the country, I have to say, maybe the information is specific to Seattle, but it's a further homogenization of our landscape," Sollod said.
"If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
The city's sign code prohibits most illuminated and video signs, although there have been many exceptions, including the large flashing sign at Climate Pledge Arena. The reasons for this, historically, have had to do with both driver distraction and Seattle's general distaste for ads in public spaces—something Paula Rees, a Seattle planner and designer who's been fighting against all kinds of billboards downtown for years, says the kiosks epitomize.
"I don't know about you, but when I get on my phone, and I’m scrolling, and it’s throwing ads at me I can’t stand it. It drives me nuts to go outside and have that same thing on a public street," Rees said. "I just think it’s not appropriate in the public realm. I don't get up every morning and say, 'I want to see another Verizon ad.'"
As for driver distraction, a consultant hired to study the kiosks' impact said she didn't believe the kiosks will be a problem, since they'll be located in areas where speed limits were limited, in 2020, to 25 miles an hour. Deaths from auto collisions have steadily increased since 2013, and spiked after the new speed limits went into effect, suggesting that lower speed limits aren't doing much to inhibit dangerous driver behavior.
Privacy advocates have also raised concerns about the kiosks. Although the signs won't include security cameras—an optional feature that other cities have chosen to deploy—Tee Sannon, technology policy program director for the ACLU of Washington, said, "my concern is that this is a slippery slope—once the kiosks are out there, you can retrofit them" to include cameras, she said. "At least we have the surveillance ordinance," Shannon added—a law that requires a formal review of all new surveillance technologies.
The IKE spokesperson confirmed that in cities that have the cameras, "IKE has provided local authorities with necessary video recordings to assist in criminal investigations, but only in select instances and always in accordance with local law."
Sannon also said it's unclear exactly what kind of user data IKE collects and retains. According to IKE, the company "does not collect or sell personally identifiable information or any other data of any kind." However, IKE's privacy policy says the company does collect "personal information" such as IP addresses, individual device identifiers, geolocation data, and information collected when people voluntarily interact with the kiosk, such as looking up a location on a map.
"Their privacy policy seems to be riddled with a number of contradictions," Sannon said. "It says they don't collect personally identifiable information, but it also says the WiFi does collect MAC addresses, which are unique identifiers [for devices], based on the rationale that it's to offer WiFi functionality."
Scholes, from the DSA, said he is sympathetic to privacy concerns, but noted that many technologies people already use involve sharing personally identifiable information with companies. If companies that operate in public spaces couldn't collect personal data of any kind, he said, "We wouldn't have bike share, we wouldn't have scooter share, and we won't have EV charging provided by private companies. We wouldn't have public Wi Fi in airports. I think these are legitimate concerns. But we've made public policy decisions to balance the public benefits provided by private entities at no cost to the taxpayer [against] a bunch of different interests."
The Design Commission will hold one more meeting to discuss the DSA and IKE's proposal before making a recommendation to the city council later this summer. The mayor's office reportedly wants to have the kiosks up and running before the FIFA World Cup in 2026, which is expected to bring a flood of tourists to downtown Seattle.
“IKE says its business model is based entirely on ad sales, and that, unlike Intersection and other kiosk companies, it does sell user data.”—do you mean it doesN’T sell user data? How can the business model be based entirely on ad sales if they sell user data?