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SME, Park an Advert - Innovative Advertising

Keywords: Advertising.

Innovative advertising for the small to medium sized enterprise. Some businesses think they already do this, they may not.

This crafty bit of clever advertising was done by a company advertising a leisure activity (carting). The problem is that some people love to go carting but will not go everyday, some may only go once. How to advertise or communicate to lots of potential new customers to inform them of the offering.

Make use of traffic congestion

The company has a clean van, onto which they fixed their advertising. They park the Van in eyesight of a busy road heading into London where commuter traffic always slows to a crawl every morning and afternoon. Result low-cost "billboard" style advertising to a targeted, captive, suitable audience.

Why is this advertising audience targeted captive and suitable?
Carting is a driving experience, the audience are mainly drivers. Carting costs money, the commuter traffic is going to and coming from work, they have money. The advertising audience is therefore targeted, and in rush hour it is almost completely "captive", you should see the jams!

What a great idea 10/10 from me for innovation.

Why do some companies incorrectly claim to do this?

Some will say but we have our logo on our vehicles, even our salespeoples cars.
When salespeople parks their cars, they are outside a company or at home in some dormitory suburb in evenings, this is not targeted advertising. Worse still, some companies claim to do this but do not enforce disciplined cleaning of their vehicles. No one will be impressed by your advertising on a dirty truck which has finger graffiti written into the dirt on it.

Your advertising has to be clean, advertising has to be seen.

(note: the picture which I could not resist is a car parked in an unsuitable spot for an advertising billboard, where it landed after someone's lively driving, not what the sales people in this example did. :-)

[Author mark@sticky-marketing.net date 20/02/01]

Comment from psyonicdreams@ntlworld.com on 22/02/01
A company in Essex I used to know had a company Ferrari! Wherever they parked it there were always people looking at the car, it had the company name and address on both sides, so everybody that looked at the car had to see the advert!

Another bit of advertising I used to like was a carpet company that used to put big posters on the windows when the sales were on, nothing new there, but they always used to put one of them upside down. The sales always stuck in peoples minds and I always heard people talking about the sales because of it!