Whiz kid.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Restroom advertising

JEFFREY KAHN ISN'T A PLUMBER. OR A UROLOGIST. OR ONE OF those scary guys with towlettes who offers to dry your hands in the men's room of a five-star restaurant.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But if you want to know about the restroom habits of your average sports fan, Kahn is your man.

He can tell you the average male who attends a Colorado Rockies game will visit the restroom 2.3 times over nine innings, and will stay inside the place for an average of two minutes and 42 seconds. He can tell you the mathematical relationship between the number of tickets sold and the number of times toilets flush. He can recite by memory the number of restrooms in Coors Field (15 for men, 18 for women, excepting the club-level section).

Kahn is a former corporate attorney who ditched the legal profession and now spends his workdays in a Denver office, thumbing through contact lists and making sales calls on behalf of InStadium, a Chicago company that's determined to transform restroom advertising into a respectable, profitable medium. InStadium, founded by some of Kahn's law-school chums from the Chicago-Kent College of Law, plants Plexiglas-encased, 13-inch-by-17-inch posters at eye-level above men's-room urinals and along walls within women's restrooms at sports venues around the country. If you've made a pit stop this summer at Coors Field, Dodger Stadium, Yankee Stadium, the Louisiana Superdome, San Francisco's SBC Park or any of 21 other professional sports facilities around the country, you've seen InStadium's handiwork.

InStadium likes to emphasize that it commands a captive audience. To be delicate, there aren't many places to stare, without seeming intrusive to one's neighbor, except straight ahead.

Don't laugh. OK, do laugh. Kahn does. A likable, energetic guy, he's heard every bad joke about sports fans and their, umm, relief patterns there is.

But InStadium and its main rival, Florida-based ScoreMedia, are plenty serious, and there's big money involved. A typical season-long presence at a baseball park can cost an advertiser $21,000 or so. For that, sponsors can hang a print ad in every arena washroom, protected by a sturdy case and tended by technicians who patrol the facilities every few games to make sure everything looks right. (The Plexiglas covers are a must: Most stadium maintenance crews use powerful jet-sprayers to clean restrooms.) InStadium even offers tear-off coupons affixed to some billboards.

Compared with bigger stadium signage deals...