By Dustin Brown
As Forest Hills native Joe Dane Ortiz sat in a cab stuck in traffic just outside the Queens Midtown Tunnel more than two years ago, his eyes veered to the left and he saw a vision.
He wasn't delirious from the exhaust fumes, nor was he seeing shapes in the clouds overhead. Dancing across an enormous television screen mounted atop the Fresh Direct headquarters in Long Island City was an animated spectacular, an advertising homage to the digital age that turned his mundane cab ride into a life-changing experience.
“I'm looking at this thing. It's amazing how clear it was and informative it was,” said Ortiz, 29. “I said, 'Can you imagine if there was a TV in the back entertaining us?'”
His traffic-inspired vision eventually led to the birth of City Media Corp., which Ortiz founded with his brother, Alberto Ortiz, to turn a yellow cab ride into an experience the rider would ordinarily enjoy exclusively on his livingroom couch with a tub of ice cream on his lap and a remote in hand.
Ortiz and his brother devoted more than a year to designing a television format and custom-DVD player to fit above the partition in the rear of a cab, playing an hourlong loop that features ads, film shorts, public service announcements, clips of stand-up comics and news segments. Now it's ready to hit the streets.
“We don't only aim to advertise, but we aim to educate as well as entertain the public,” Ortiz said during a recent spin in a cab equipped with the new technology.
City Media is one of seven companies participating in a pilot program by the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission to explore the television technology in cabs. Four of the companies have already put their screens on the road, and Ortiz said City Media is planning its own launch event in April.
“Over the last four or so years, companies have approached the TLC with this concept, approaching it with different ideas about how to achieve a product that will interest passengers and provide something useful and enjoyable and not overly intrusive,” said Allan Fromberg, a spokesman for the TLC.
The pilot program, he said, will “let the public essentially decide which features and products it likes or does not like … and whether or not this is something the public is receptive to at all.”
Ortiz is already a businessman with an established track record. Shortly after graduating from Boston University with a business degree seven years ago, he bought a struggling medical transportation firm that was only pulling in $250,000 a year and turned it within a year's time into a $2.5 million venture.
City Media is temporarily housed in Ortiz's offices for National Medical Transport at 665 Woodward Ave. in Ridgewood as he and his brother prepare for a move into Manhattan.
City Media would pay medallion owners a monthly rate for the use of the space inside the cab, while the company expects to eventually offer either medical benefits or a retirement plan to drivers whose cars are equipped with the technology.
The profits will come from advertisers and independent filmmakers who pay to have their shorts featured in the hourlong loop, which will be updated monthly.
“Our commercials are not like your average television commercial,” Ortiz said. “Our commercials are entertaining. We want to embed it in people's heads so when they get out they remember it.”
Some advertising segments feature the company's street reporter Jen Pace exploring restaurants and fashion collections, while documentary-style clips discuss the history of such New York City landmarks as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.
One particularly witty public service announcement aimed at convincing children to eat their broccoli features an animated battle in which kids realize “the only way to get rid of your broccoli is to eat it all up.” The slogan goes, “Swallow your pride, girls. We've gotta eat 'em to beat 'em.”
But Ortiz's vision for his company does not end with broccoli battles: “I see us being the largest outdoor media company New York's ever seen.”
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
