The advertising folks at Seamless, the online food delivery service, appear to be using one of their current ad campaigns to target a curiously specific demographic: payphone users.

On its surface the campaign seems to wryly address that unknowably small percentage of New Yorkers who not only use payphones — or even know what they are — but who actually deposit coins into them and call restaurants to order food for delivery or pickup.

Messages like “What’s a phone booth?”, “Save your change for the laundromat”, and “Order takeout without the hangups” make deliberate yet strangely obtuse reference to the behaviour of using landline telephones to place orders for food delivery, a telephonic behaviour which still exists but is fading as adaptation of Internet-based delivery services grows.

The “What’s a phone booth?” ad is particularly conspicuous for its presence ON A PHONE BOOTH (purists would call it a “payphone enclosure”) and because most folks would not even realize that a phone booth is exactly what they are looking at. The payphone itself, essentially invisible for being mostly surrounded by display advertising and a roof, barely registers on most people’s advertising-blind radar.

“Save your change for the laundromat” suggests that instead of using your quarters at this payphone to call in your food delivery order you should use your iPhone instead, and save that hard-earned 25¢ for coin-fed laundry machines.

A third ad invites us to “Order takeout without the hangups”, a reference (one assumes) to the increasingly lost behaviour of actually hanging up a telephone. This ad slogan is not as specifically tied to payphones as are the others but taken as part of the series it seems to be another attempt to reach out to individuals who use payphones to order something for delivery or takeout.

Using a public telephone to place an order for food delivery is not completely beyond reasonable possibility:

• People living in SRO accommodations, transients, and the homeless might use public phones in this manner should they have the means to do so.
• Establishments not listed on Seamless or Grubhub might be reached using a telephone — maybe even a payphone.
• A power outage or simply a lost cell phone could lead to using a public telephone for this or any number of reasons.

These scenarios are realistic but I doubt if Seamless is reaching out to travelers, transients, or the homeless. Who are they targeting? Is Seamless genuinely going after mythical ordinary everyday people using public telephones to order pizza?

Or is it just an ironic, techy gag?

All three billboards include the tag line “Stop calling. Order takeout online.” followed by visual reminders that instead of using these payphones to place orders one could simply use an iPhone, iPad, Android device or web browser.

How many New Yorkers seeing these billboards had this palm-to-forehead moment:? “Why am I using a public phone booth to order delivery when I have an iPhone, a tablet device, a desktop computer, and Internet access?”

My guess is that these ads are meant to be ironic, targeting not actual payphone users but the relatively small snark element of the population who even knows a payphone when they see it. This segment of the population is only nominally larger than that which actually uses payphones.

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