Elevator Advertising in Vancouver vs Venue-Based Media
Elevator advertising and venue-based media are both forms of indoor, place-based out-of-home advertising, but they reach an audience under very different circumstances. Elevator advertising in Vancouver puts a screen in front of people during a short, enclosed ride between floors in an office or residential tower. Venue-based media puts a screen inside a specific commercial or community location — a café, clinic, pharmacy or grocery store — during a visit someone has chosen to make for an entirely different reason.
For advertisers and property or venue marketers weighing the two, the decision usually comes down to where the audience already is, how long they stay there, and what kind of message fits that moment. This guide compares the two formats across environment, dwell time, coverage, creative requirements and reporting, and looks at when each format — or a combination of both — makes sense.
How elevator advertising works
Elevator advertising places digital screens inside elevator cabs, and often in adjacent building lobbies, within office towers and residential high-rises. It's typically sold by specialized indoor and office media networks organized around a building or portfolio of buildings, rather than by the property itself.
The defining feature of the format is the ride: short, enclosed, and largely free of competing distractions. Target Digital Canada, one of the networks operating in this category, describes a typical elevator ride as lasting around 15 seconds, with roughly two minutes spent in an adjacent lobby. That's a fixed, repeatable window — the same rough duration on every trip, regardless of who's riding or why they're in the building.
In Canada, this category is measured through the Canadian Out-of-Home Marketing and Measurement Bureau (COMMB), which now measures all of the country's major residential and commercial elevator networks, including Pattison, Captivate, UB Media, IHN Media and Vertical Impression. That gives buyers an independently verified way to compare elevator inventory across providers.
Totemian doesn't currently operate elevator cab inventory. Where Brandboards do appear in building lobbies, they function as a venue-embedded placement tied to a specific ground-floor business rather than as part of a building-wide elevator network — a distinction the coverage section below covers in more detail.
How venue-based media works
Venue-based media places digital screens inside a specific commercial or community location, rather than along a route or inside a shared building system. Totemian's Brandboards are an example: managed digital signage screens installed inside real-world Metro Vancouver venues — pharmacies, cafés, clinics, grocery stores and restaurants — as part of an environment a visitor has already chosen to be in.
The audience isn't riding to a fixed destination on a schedule set by an elevator. They're picking up a prescription, waiting for a coffee, sitting in a waiting room or shopping for groceries, and the screen is simply present in that environment rather than intercepting a ride. That difference in context shapes almost everything else covered in this guide, from dwell time to creative pacing.
Totemian operates as a place-based media network, not an advertising agency or a signage hardware vendor: it manages the screens, content scheduling and technical operations across its venue partners, while advertisers buy inventory across the network. The category is covered in more detail on the Brandboards page.
Audience context and dwell time compared
Dwell time behaves differently across the two formats because the underlying activity is different. An elevator ride lasts roughly the same amount of time on every trip — around 15 seconds in the cab and up to two minutes in an adjacent lobby, per Target Digital Canada's own figures cited above — regardless of who's riding or why. The screen gets one shot at a brief, repeatable window.
Inside a venue, dwell time is tied to the reason for the visit, and it varies considerably by venue category. In Totemian's experience managing Brandboards across different venue types, a clinic waiting room tends to produce the longest and most attentive dwell: people are often waiting for a while, they're mildly bored, and a screen becomes something that helps pass that time. A grocery store produces a shorter, more transactional kind of exposure — the screen functions less as boredom relief and more as a presence at the moment a shopper is actively choosing what to buy.
That distinction matters for planning. An elevator buy delivers a short, uniform exposure across a building's occupants. A venue buy delivers a variable exposure shaped by the visit itself — sometimes brief and decision-adjacent, sometimes longer and attention-seeking. Neither is inherently better; they suit different kinds of messages.
Coverage, frequency and location selection
Elevator advertising is typically bought by building or portfolio: an advertiser secures a rotation across some number of towers, cabs or lobby screens within a network, with reach scaling by the number of buildings included. Coverage is a function of which buildings a given elevator network operates in, not which specific venues are relevant to a brand.
Venue-based coverage works the other way around. Locations are chosen individually, based on which venue types and neighbourhoods fit an advertiser's audience — a pharmacy in one part of Metro Vancouver, a café in another — rather than by building portfolio. This is covered in more detail through venue-based advertising in Vancouver, including how location selection ties back to campaign goals.
There's also a growing area of overlap. Brandboards can be placed inside building lobbies as well as inside individual venues, which means a single mixed-use property with ground-floor retail or food service could, in principle, host both an elevator network's cab and lobby inventory and a venue-embedded Brandboard inside one of its street-level businesses. That combination hasn't come up in a live campaign yet, but it's a realistic scenario worth flagging for property and venue marketers evaluating both formats — more on that in the final section below.
Creative requirements in elevators and venues
Elevator creative has to work inside a tight, fixed window. With roughly 15 seconds per ride, the format favours a single clear message and minimal copy — creative that reads instantly rather than creative that builds across multiple exposures within one encounter.
Venue-based creative has more room to work with, because the audience may be in the venue longer and may return on repeat visits over time. A Brandboard loop can rotate multiple pieces of content, and a message can build familiarity across visits rather than needing to land completely in a single glance. General guidance on adapting creative to a real-world environment — pacing, legibility and format — is covered in how to design ads for real-world spaces.
That extra room comes with a corresponding responsibility. Because a venue-based screen sits inside a real commercial or community space — a pharmacy, a clinic, a family restaurant — content is checked against both Totemian's own internal standards and any rules the venue itself sets, before it goes into rotation. Elevator networks apply their own building and brand-safety standards, but the venue-fit consideration is different: a Brandboard is part of somebody's shop or waiting room, not a shared building amenity.
Measurement and reporting differences
Elevator and office media in Canada is measured through COMMB, the national out-of-home measurement body. COMMB's indoor circulation methodology counts the number of adults with a reasonable opportunity to see a screen over a seven-day period, using expansion factors applied to pedestrian and occupancy counts. That's an estimated exposure figure, not a per-ride headcount — a modelled circulation number rather than verified individual viewing.
Venue-based reporting works differently because it's tied to a single, known location rather than a modelled building population. Totemian's reporting to advertisers centers on delivery: how a piece of content was scheduled and played at the venue level, alongside audience-context metrics such as average dwell time at a given venue — a useful signal for understanding how long people are actually present near a screen, though it's a venue-level average rather than a per-viewer measurement. More detail on how Totemian separates delivery data from estimated audience figures is available in venue-level reporting; the process for setting up a campaign in the first place is outlined at Brandboard campaign planning.
Reading either format's numbers correctly means keeping delivery, estimated exposure and audience action separate, rather than treating any one of them as proof of a business outcome like a sale or a store visit.
When to use one format—or combine both
The choice between elevator advertising and venue-based media usually comes down to where the campaign wants exposure to happen. Elevator inventory fits campaigns aiming for frequency across an office or residential building population — reaching the same commuting or residential audience repeatedly over a short, predictable ride. Venue-based Brandboards fit campaigns that want relevance tied to a specific activity or errand — a pharmacy visit, a coffee run, a clinic wait — where the message can connect more directly to what the audience is already doing.
For a property with both an elevator network and ground-floor commercial tenants, the two formats aren't necessarily competing choices. A campaign could use elevator screens for building-wide frequency and a venue-embedded Brandboard in one of the property's own businesses for more contextual, activity-linked exposure — a combination that hasn't been tested in a live campaign yet, but one that Totemian's lobby-placement capability makes practically possible today.
Advertisers weighing this decision against other Vancouver-specific formats, including transit-adjacent options, can find additional context in commuter advertising alternatives.
Conclusion
Elevator advertising and venue-based media both put a screen in front of an indoor audience, but under different conditions: a short, fixed ride versus a variable, activity-linked visit. The right choice — or the right combination — depends on whether a campaign needs broad, repeatable frequency across a building or contextual relevance tied to a specific errand or wait.