I know… before anyone says anything, we’ll file this one under our absurd business ideas, but… why not? Why put advertising in public urinals? If we go back to an old study carried out by students at an American university, it found that when people are in a pleasurable moment, they tend to be more open to buying. Answering the call of nature gives us pleasure, and in this case the advertising would be, quite literally, right in front of our eyes.
And not just at urinals, but in the toilet cubicles themselves. I’m sure plenty of people know where their shampoo was made, and the ingredients of their shower gel, thanks to the time they spend sitting on the toilet. In other words, at that moment we’re even open to doing some reading. Of course, in public places the cubicles are used mostly by women, who in turn often go to public toilets in pairs, so in this case the idea wouldn’t initially be aimed at women.
If you’ve ever been in the toilets of a pub, bar or nightclub, where there are often as many as ten urinals in the same space, you’ll have noticed that, as a rule, everyone looks straight ahead, since, among other things, it wouldn’t do for men to look at the person next to them at a public urinal :).
I don’t think there are any statistics, but on a single weekend night millions of people use a public urinal across the country. In other words, that little patch of wall just above the urinal is seen more than any TV programme that night, and it’s a space nobody has made use of so far.
The difficulty with this business idea.
Clearly, the biggest difficulty in developing this idea would be changing the advertising in every venue, as the cost would be too high.
The solution to this problem could come from technology: installing digital displays so that the advertising in every venue could be changed automatically, all at once, from a single control centre, and even segmented by province. In that case, of course, the investment in digital displays would be very high.
In some public toilets we may have seen a television already installed at the urinal, and others have chosen to decorate the wall to add a touch of humour or originality, but so far nobody is exploiting it for advertising.
Another added problem would be brand image: some brands might not like the idea of appearing in a public toilet, although it would be a matter of testing to see whether the conversion results turned out to be positive.
There’s the idea. And I’d point out that, absurd as it may be, it’s no more so than other businesses that turned out to be very profitable despite their simplicity.
Further reading
- 4 amazingly simple ideas that turn over millions
- The worst business ideas (that still made their creators millionaires)
- 5 business ideas invented and patented by children
Featured image: Charles Marville, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
