• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 6, 2009

Captivate Network, the out-of-home digital media unit of Gannett, is expanding from elevators in high-rise office buildings to the World Wide Web. In an effort to create an interactive backchannel for advertising and programming appearing on its elevator network, Captivate has launched a new site, www.captivate.com, featuring news, blogs, games, and to serve as a place to fulfill sweepstakes, offers and supplemental online content.

"We wanted to see if we could drive people to out Web content, and we found we could," said Mike DiFranza, founder and president of Captivate Network.

DiFranza says captivate.com is the first part of a "multi-platform" strategy that will eventually include mobile advertising and content, as well. The first phase of the effort was to test and demonstrate that place-based media in elevators could generate traffic and interactivity to a Web destination.

Via a series of sweepstakes and contest campaigns, DiFranza says Captivate successfully demonstrated that office works exposed to teasers and leads shown on elevator screens do go online when they get back to their Web browsers.

"Fifty percent of the time somebody is in the elevator they are either getting off and going into the lobby, or they're getting off and going to their desk. And we were able to get them to go to their desktop and take an action," he says, citing new research indicating that 55% of the audience exposed to Captivate said they would go online to access news stories they saw on screens, and 52% have actually gone back to their desks to visit an advertiser's Web site.

DiFranza says captivate.com is still in its seminal stages, but he envisions a variety of new interactive content that would feed back-and-forth between the elevator network. For example, he says the elevator network could promote participation in a Captivate "fantasy football league" that users would participate in online, and the top scoring players would be displayed on the elevator network's screens.