NEW YORK - Starting today, video screens in coffee shops, casual eateries, and airport newsstands in five cities will display the work of The New York Times, under a deal with RMG Networks, a major owner of such screens.
RMG will take some 850 screens it operates in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco and rebrand them as the NYTimes.com Today network, displaying only material from The Times’s website, interspersed with ads. Another 850 screens will be added over the next few months.
Garry McGuire Jr., chief executive of RMG, said people who will see the screens are a good match for The Times. He said his company could offer advertisers “a lot of demographic data on the users in the environment.’’
The basic presentation will show an article on the left side of the screen and pictures and video on the right, on a 14-minute cycle, with ads, and some of the content, tailored to the location. Viewers can use cellphones to download either the Times work they have seen or coupons from the businesses they are visiting.
The screens are an appealing vehicle for advertisers, “especially in areas where people are waiting, sitting, standing in line, kind of captive for a while,’’ said Linda Kaplan Thaler, of Kaplan Thaler Group, a Manhattan ad agency.
Privately held RMG’s largest owner is the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
