A consortium of 13 Southwestern-Ontario school boards, originally organized to realize savings through pooled purchasing power, is coaxing a new revenue stream out of its combined fleet of 2,500 school buses: transit advertising sales.

In October, London, Ont.-based School Bus Media (sbm) signed a three-year contract with the consortium that allows it to place ads on virtually all of the buses, creating a ‘BusNet’ of 5,000 exterior positions (one on each side) and over 50,000 interior ad panels.

SBM President Frank DaCosta says the new medium provides advertisers with a highly-targeted vehicle, so to speak, for reaching school-age children, their parents and anyone who commutes during the before- and after-school rush hours, when most school buses are on the road.

‘On a daily basis, there are two trips: one for aproximately three hours in the morning and one for three hours in the evening, both at prime-drive times,’ says DaCosta. ‘With the exterior panels, we’re talking to an audience of about 3.3 million people in the economic heartland of Ontario.

‘We carry about 175,000 students each day, twice a day, so you’re looking at about 350,000 impressions a day for the interior ads at an average trip time of about an hour a day (30 minutes each way). That is an incredible exposure for an advertiser,’ he boasts.

Under the agreement, 50% of gross ad revenues will be returned to the 18-month-old consortium for distribution among the individual school boards and private operators who staff and manage the school bus fleets – revenues that education directors at the various boards hope will offset the recent round of funding cuts instituted by the Ontario government.

But even with that positive spin, DaCosta admits he’s got a tough job on his hands selling the idea of marketing to children in an educational environment. He’s also got to address concerns on the part of some bus operators that exterior ads may pose a distraction to other drivers, and therefore pose a safety hazard to children entering and leaving the school bus.

Peter Askey, director of education for the Oxford Board of Education (London, Ont. and vicinity) was a key player in the development of the consortium and the deal with sbm. He says the interior ads undergo a diligent vetting process to ensure that they are appropriate for school-age children.

‘Parents want to be sure that the ads are wholesome and ethical,’ he says. ‘sbm is following its own code, which actually goes a few steps beyond the advertising code for children, but quite frankly, most of the ads for kids are going to be very appropriate.

‘What we’re anticipating as the most likely (problem) scenario is that an ad may feature a celebrity doing a product endorsement, and then the celebrity runs into some kind of problem.’ In that case, he says, the ad would be pulled.