Extreme Advertising

“How to make sure your company really gets noticed”

From airborne blimps to eye-catching subway, bus and car “wraps”, advertising is getting more and more extreme. The tactics may not be new, but there's been a boom in oversize outdoor ads recently as online companies seek to rise above the din of dot-com ads in broadcast and print outlets.

The most effective extreme advertising supplements a broader, often more straightforward marketing plan that resonates with larger corporate and product positioning strategies. “Extreme” measures are implemented when they’re the best way to reach a target audience.

But keep in mind the medium’s design constraints. Experts recommend extreme advertising when you have a highly targeted message that can be easily conveyed in a few keywords. “Once you start marketing outdoors, if [the ad is] too busy, it doesn’t work,” says Frank Podany, president of AK Media, and outdoor media provider.

And just because you have a huge space to cover doesn't mean you can go wild with text and graphics. The best ads convey a simple message in an eye-catching and pleasant manner. “Whether it’s on a bus or in print, communication is hard,” says Burkey Belser, president of Greenfield Belser, a Washington graphic design firm. “It’s important to keep it simple.” Think of a bus speeding along a city street at 40 miles an hour, then design your ad accordingly.

Another design challenge of extreme media is the ad’s placement. With so-called transit wraps of see-through plastic around vehicles, you’re obviously working on an odd-shaped canvas. Elements like windows, doors, tire wells and vents can create a veritable obstacle course for the graphic designer to work around – or work into – the final design.

Because of extreme advertising’s differences from traditional media, you may need to turn to specialized graphics agencies.

Despite the challenges, oversize ads can produce a better return on investment than more traditional options.

Extreme advertising is growing apace with dot-coms’ marketing budgets, as companies struggle to be seen and heard. “People pay attention to it because they don’t expect it – it gets in your face,” says Dan Cerutti, CEO of Veridiem, a marketing performance-management company in Maynard, Mass. “It’s an alternative to these crazy television and radio ads to drive awareness.”

Even if the company is new to the scene, such advertising can pay off if it’s part of a larger strategy to raise brand awareness, and if it feeds back into the company’s overall mission. One example is San Francisco’s Gazoontite.com, a retailer aiming to be a one-stop shop for asthma and allergy sufferers. The company’s extreme efforts include a Gazoontite bus illustrated with giant dust mites that cruised San Francisco’s Financial District for several months last year. A new bus wrap program is hitting both San Francisco and New York this spring.

Bus and taxi wraps, first seen in the mid-1990s, replaced the time-consuming, labor-intensive and costly approach of hand painting. The wraps are adhesive-backed vinyl, produced with high-resolution imaging technology and printing. SuperGraphics, a Sunnyvale, Calif., graphics production company uses wide-format color printers with 3M Scotchprint systems. The result is a photorealistic, self-adhesive vinyl that adheres to – and can be removed from – a vehicle, supposedly without damaging the paint. One-way vinyl is used on the vehicle’s windows.

However innovative these media plans may be, “extreme for extreme’s sake” isn’t the way to go. Instead, the ideas conveyed should feed directly back to a company’s strategy. “It’s good to have extreme advertising, but make it relevant to your mission. I think some people miss that loop,” says Gazoontite’s Yu.

Extreme methods are popular among marketers not only for their buzz factor, but also because they’re often less costly than traditional advertising while more effective at cutting through the noise. Yu says billboards on San Francisco Bay Area’s heavily traveled Highway 101 run from $60,000 to $80,000 per month, while wrapped San Francisco buses cost only $10,000 each per month.

Although the price per view may seem attractive, level-headed marketing decisions still need to be made. Properly executed as part of a larger media plan with well-defined goals, says Veridiem’s Cerutti, “[extreme media is] a hell of a lot more effective than running television ads and counting hits.”

To Die For…

Дата добавления: 2015-07-11