🔒Following in his father’s footsteps, Jonah Lazowski takes on parking advertising startup

The son of a prominent Hartford parking magnate, Jonah Lazowski said he learned about the business world, professional relationships and entrepreneurship from an early age.

“I like to say that I was born in a parking garage,” said Lazowski, whose father Alan Lazowski owns LAZ Parking, one of the largest parking operators in the United States. “My first job was at a ticket booth taking tickets and I also did valet parking.”

Now Jonah Lazowski, 27, said he’s looking to follow in the entrepreneurial footsteps of his parents and sister, who each own their own business. He’s launched a startup company called A Lot Media that offers digital and static advertising services at parking facilities and is now in about 150 locations in Connecticut and New York.

The company got its start in 2017 with seed funding from Alan Lazowski and is showing some early promise. A Lot Media plans to be in 500 locations in five states — Connecticut, New York, Florida, California and Illinois — by the end of this year, said Jonah Lazowski, whose company has three full-time and 25 part-time employees.

“Five years from now, I’d like to have a much larger team of people,” said Lazowski, adding his business has seen 50% growth year over year since 2017 and has revenues in the seven figures; he declined to give specific numbers. “I’d like to be in the top 25 markets in the country.”

Family affair

Originally interested in starting his own film production company, Jonah Lazowski, who was born and raised in Hartford and majored in film production at Boston’s Emerson College, said he ditched that idea and went to work in marketing and branding at sportswear-apparel company Fila.

While at Fila, Lazowski said he helped launch a billboard campaign that sparked his interest in the advertising business. Of course, he already had some background knowledge of the parking industry as well.

He founded Hartford-based A Lot Media when he was 22 years old.

Alan Lazowski said he admired his son’s passion and willingness to forge his own path. The business idea was solid too, so he seeded Jonah’s venture. It actually mirrors the way Alan Lazowski got his start in business.

In the summer of 1981, while still a student at UConn and with a small loan from his grandfather, Alan Lazowski began parking cars at a restaurant in downtown Hartford. By that summer’s end, he was managing five parking locations and 30 employees.

Since then, LAZ Parking has grown into a national parking management, transportation and mobility company with managed revenue in excess of $1.8 billion and over 12,000 employees.

“He was very creative and wrote this business plan. We loved it,” Alan Lazowski said of his son’s startup. “I love backing entrepreneurs in business. I mentor a lot of people and back a lot of people in business and certainly will do that with my kids.”

Entrepreneurship runs in the Lazowski family. Jonah’s mother, Marcia, runs an interior decorator business, while his sister, Jesse, owns a jewelry company called Marlo Laz. (Jesse was recently interviewed by well-known journalist Katie Couric and her Spiked Heart Pavé Necklace was worn by actress Sarah Jessica Parker in the new “Sex and the City” revival series.)

Jonah Lazowski said his company has signed deals with the four largest parking companies in the country. He leases space at their facilities and then finds companies that want to advertise within them.

Clients can choose static or digital advertising, or both.

Static options, Lazowski said, include ads on gate arm wraps and tickets as well as wallscapes.

Digital signage includes interactive and touch-screen options that can be placed in payment areas, valet waiting lounges and even elevator lobbies.

The company also offers digital dynamic rate boards to parking-lot operators.

“We have space for cameras to be embedded in our screens allowing us to do facial recognition and audience surveying in order to ensure that our audience demographics fit our customers’ needs,” Lazowski said. “We also integrate with parking-equipment companies to allow their rates to be displayed on our screens. This allows garages to do dynamic pricing, similar to the hotel and airline industries, for the first time. Before our screens were in garages, there was no way to do this with standard printed rate boards.”

Key industries he’s targeting include automotive, insurance, tech, health care, retail, real estate, among others.

One local client is Hartford HealthCare, which recently renewed a partnership deal with A Lot Media that will increase the healthcare provider’s display ads to 30 garages statewide.

Hartford HealthCare president and CEO Jeff Flaks said the partnership, which will continue through 2023, has helped in spreading his organization’s message to a wider audience.

“From their first campaign with us, A Lot Media has raised the visibility of our brand in every corner of the state, including markets we previously had trouble accessing,” Flaks said.

The future of advertising

A Lot Media competes in the out-of-home advertising sector, which earned $6.1 billion in 2020, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA). That number represented about 2.8% of the overall U.S. media spend.

Lazowski said he views out-of-home advertising companies — like Outfront Media, Lamar and JCDecaux — as competitors because they are chasing similar ad dollars, but they are much larger and offer different services.

There are few players in parking-lot advertising, he said, which can attract an audience for a longer period of time compared to other ad mediums.

For example, the OAAA said the average highway billboard is visible for just eight seconds while those same ads in a garage are visible for more than five minutes by motorists as they enter, leave and walk through the facility.

According to a third-party tracking company, A Lot Media ads placed in 50 select New York City parking garages have drawn 2 million impressions a week; 30 garages tracked in Connecticut, which were larger, garnered 2.2 million impressions a week, Lazowski said.

Those numbers were derived from various sources, he added, including tracking the number of actual garage customers, as well as U.S. Census and Department of Transportation data.

Meantime, rates for static and digital ads vary. As an example, the company charges $1,200 for four weeks of digital advertising in Manhattan’s high-end garages, Lazowski said.

A Lot Media is also vertically integrated. Through Lazowski’s business partners — brothers Josh and Jesse Cooper — it manufactures its own digital equipment in China, prints large format static advertising, and has in-house software development, print and install teams that manage all logistics.

“This is the future of advertising,” Lazowski said. “We can do full motion video, you can play audio and you can have a camera embedded in screens.”