As the economic impact of COVID-19 continues to unfold, brands and agencies need to keep a up to date with the changing consumer behaviors and ensure they are prepared for any outcomes and find new opportunities. Marketers will have to change their strategies to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 is now a major focus since advertisers are researching better alternatives to keep their clients. Traditional out-of-home advertising methods such as billboards, bus stops, fliers, magazines, and transit posters will have a hard time finding their feet in the long run.
A survey conducted by the platform Numerator indicated many industries are shifting their messaging to in-home delivery. As example, restaurants are pivoting to food delivery message. The increased “work from home” periods will force the shift of advertising concepts. Numerator reported that Burger King and Little Caesars are even advertising new delivery options available in their stores.
Adzze has been adapting the advertising vehicles to a more sensitive message. The team has working on extending its capabilities to offer advertising vehicles that can reach the consumers at their safest place: at home. One of these concepts uses pizza boxes as advertising space. Think of this as small moving billboard that gets delivered at the consumer’s home. Studies demonstrated that this type of ads can evoke an 80% recall rate (8 out of 10 households individuals remember to see an ad on the pizza box) with an average ROI of 150%. This means, for every 1 dollar the advertiser invested in a pizza box advertising campaign, they received at least additional 2.5 dollars of sales. For more details see the article Estimating the ROI of Pizza Box Marketing.
Small businesses face many challenges, advertising costs being among the biggest. However, entrepreneurs have alternatives that they can lean on to offset the challenges. Talking about driving brand awareness, advertising vehicles offer the cheapest option for small businesses.
Cars are a necessity for any business, to commute staff and business owners from the business to other locations. Nevertheless, did you know that the car offers a great advertising space for your business? Otherwise called car wraps, advertising vehicles contain mobile billboards that are digitally printed. Often, the ad is printed on a vinyl, which includes graphics that are attractive to the eye. Depending on the specifications, the wrap can cover the entire vehicle or just a bit of space.
Wherever you drive to, consumers get to interact with your brand through the images and words on the car. According to ARD Ventures, car wraps generate as high as 70,000 daily vehicular impressions in the US. As such, there is a high likelihood of impressive conversion rates. Alternatively, studies indicate that advertising vehicles are 2.5 times better than static billboards when it comes to attracting attention. Due to the considerable attention it attracts, he recalls rate of the medium is close to 97%.
The Ad industry will focus on the Stay-at-Home vehicles
Recently the Interactive Advertising Bureau surveyed nearly 400 media buyers and brands. The results were surprising: 74% think the coronavirus pandemic will have a larger impact on their advertising spend than the 2008 financial crisis. According to the President of Interactive Advertising Bureau, David Cohen, “Typically marketers will press pause for a moment, take a breath, assess the situation, replay and reevaluate.”
The use of mobile OOH methods will most likely experience more decline in the coming months, given the fact when the economy re-opens, people will still be cautious and stay more at home. Mobile advertising using trucks, buses and others will be fast replaced by in-home advertising. The impact of COVID-19 has kept normally mobile citizens inside their homes. Hence, the best ways to reach your audience and maintain brand visibility will be to take your products and services to them indoors, as it will be clearly unprofitable to place adverts on advertising vehicles that no one is seeing.
Advertising Vehicle: Risks and pitfalls
As earlier discussed, small businesses lack the money to splash on ad campaigns. Therefore, entrepreneurs are most likely to utilize the small window of opportunity they get to put their brand out there. One of the pitfalls that advertising vehicles encounter is businesses put too much information on the car. Entrepreneurs may be aware that brevity is essential in marketing. However, lack of resources may push them to overdo the car wraps. Consumers have just about 5 seconds to take in the entire billboard. Thus, too much information is a disservice to the ad campaign.
Advertisers have been using alternative to static billboards as vehicle advertising or digital mobile OOH. However, the use of advertising vehicle during the ad campaign has risks as impact on reputation. When the truck carries the brand on the road, it plays the role of a brand ambassador. Any potential incident might risk other people on the road. If the truck driver misbehaves, the brand might suffer in terms of reputation. It is because the audience will associate bad behavior with the business. In addition, advertising trucks have several pitfalls as low return on the ad investment, difficult to track the outcomes and low brand recall. Advertising vehicle cannot pinpoint the exact audience that a business would like to reach. As such, the ad campaign might generate thousands of impressions per day, but only a handful of them will lead to direct action.
Another pitfall is poor graphic designs. Given the limited space available, the business may settle for poor graphics. Unfortunately, poorly done graphics depict a negative image of your business. Consumers are likely to read a lack of attention to detail and general ineffectiveness from such blunders.
In terms of risks, whenever the car involves in something nasty on the road, the business takes the beating. Once your brand emblazons on a car, the car becomes the brand ambassador. Therefore, misbehavior on the road is attributed to the general conduct of the business.
Advertising vehicle may be inexpensive compared to traditional ad avenues like billboards but it remains costlier than in-the-hand marketing. In-the-hand marketing means the target audience interacts with the brand while holding it. As such, the channel enables better audience targeting than any other advertising medium. For instance, consider an advertiser who uses pizza boxes to build brand visibility. For every pizza box that arrives in the hands of the customer, the brand gains higher visibility and higher conversion rates. In addition, individuals stay with pizza boxes for long depending on the time they take to finish the pizza. Therefore, they have more time to engage with the brand.
Door Hanger Marketing will replace traditional outdoor ads
The business of marketing is changing in the age of COVID-19. Whether its effects are brief or prolonged, marketers need to be nimble in these challenging times, and pivot when needed while optimizing performance throughout the crisis.
Advertiser will have to find alternative channels to reach consumers and many already pivoted to In-Home Advertising using food deliveries. This model represents the new market trend in advertising as an alternative to traditional OOH advertising channels. As delivery orders are being fulfilled, active advertising is on-going simultaneously. Ads are placed on pizza boxes and shopping bags and delivered into the hands of customers. The amazing part is that the ads enter people`s homes and stays in their faces.
New age advertising methods as seen at Adzze, will not only attract more clients but will effectively engineer the on-boarding of major businesses as many begin to see the tremendous benefit of in-home advertising. With innovative methods such as ads placement on door hangers. This concept guarantees definite impressions of your brands on prospective customers because our approach delivers the brand directly into the hands of your target audience at their homes.
Your advertisement is printed on door hangers and distributed to the households in the zip code or areas that were selected according to the marketing campaign. Adzze technology solutions are used to target demographic profiles such as income, age, ethnicity, marital status, so that we hit your exact target-market ensuring the door hanger delivery. In addition, the segmentation method enables to evaluate annual spend criteria so that you have a better insight into the spend behavior of the target audience. The consumers will be positively surprised if the door hanger brings them value as coupons or discounts. The advertiser must partner with the capable door hanger distributors to ensure to track the door hanger delivery to the targeted addresses. Typically, the return of the Door Hanger Advertising investment is 3x, this means for every $1 invested, the advertiser receives $3 back.
