How COVID-19 will Change Gas Station Advertising?

Gas Station Advertising: learn more about this tactics

COVID-19 will change the current station advertising strategies

The ripple effects from the COVID-19 crisis continue to spread throughout the business world, with the advertising industry now feeling its destructive effects. There are still many uncertainties as to how the next few months will impact the global community, both professionally and personally, so it is essential to look at both spectrum to make educated decisions regarding advertising investments.

Marketers will have to adapt. It will be key for their survival to staying on top of the latest trends, watching the data for insight. The increased “work from home” periods will naturally lead to an increase in the time spent at home. A survey conducted by the platform Numerator indicated many industries are shifting their advertising messaging. As example, restaurants are pivoting to food delivery message. The food industry has been quick to pivot their messaging to focus on in-home delivery options.

The consumer behavior is changing to carefully stay-at-home. People are not going to gas stations and there is no exposure to gas station advertising. According to Global Web Index’s ninth release. Nearly half of global consumers say they will not return to shops for ‘some time’ or ‘a long time’ after lockdowns ease. There is yet more fear towards outdoor public venues with 60% of consumers anticipating that they will wait for ‘some time’ or ‘a long time’ before attending events there.

Adzze has been working with its clients to adapt to a more sensitive message. The team has been extending the capabilities to offer advertising options that can reach the consumers at their safest place: at home. Adzze has been investing heavily in extending the capabilities to offer advertising options that goes along this new trend. One of these concepts is to advertise on pizza boxes and door hangers.

 

Door Hanger Marketing

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 (you can see more details on the ROI calculation at the end of this article)

Gas station advertising will be highly impacted

The use of gas station advertising 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.

At the end of March, Gartner reported that 65 percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) surveyed were planning to cut marketing budgets as a result of business disruptions from the coronavirus. The survey showed that 34 percent of businesses expect “reduced levels of business operations” due to COVID-19, 10 percent expect operations to be severely restricted, and 2 percent will cease business operations. This will highly impacted gas station advertising.

It is clear that this type of tactics will become obsolete.

Marketers will shift to In-Home Delivery Ads

The advertisement is printed on pizza boxes (or pizza toppers) and shipped to the pizzerias that the advertiser selected. The advertising pizza venues distribute to the consumers locally or they deliver at their homes. These venues are recognized pizza chains, so the advertiser has exposure to reputable brands. The pizza box ads get delivered in the hands of the consumers at their homes reaching on average 45 min of brand exposure. Sometimes the consumer leaves the pizza in the fridge generating additional exposure. On average, each Pizza Box Advertising venue delivers 2,000 pizza box ads per month with an estimate 1.8M impressions/month.

There are few reasons why marketers would choose Pizza Box Advertising instead of other traditional media vehicles:

High Brand Recall

Consumers are overwhelmed with digital ads that they see for a fraction of second and barely remember them. The attention span for digital ads is minimal to make them remember. The pizza box ads create a surprise effect making it more memorable. Studies show that this type of ads can evoke an 80% recall rate (8 out of 10 households individuals remember to see an ad on pizza boxes)

Low Cost

The budget used to place a 1 billboard on a high traffic highway for 1 month can be re-allocated to distribute 60,000 pizza boxes. This is sufficient to cover all households of a small town in the USA.

High Return on Advertising Spend

The average ROI is 2.5X. This means, for every 1 dollar the advertiser invested in a pizza advertising campaign, they received at least additional 2.5 dollars of sales.

This article will elaborate on the details of each reason.

An effective advertising strategy should enable a clear way to track number of impressions.  Traditional billboard advertising display lack of targeting and tracking possibilities. If the billboard is placed at the sideroad of a highway, many drivers cannot focus on the ad message generate a  low engagement with the target audience. Recently, unconventional agencies came up with alternatives to solve the targeting issues with approaches as mobile billboards, digital OOH, ads on trucks and other ads in places people don’t expect to see as flags, backpacks, inflatable objects, gas pump and balloons.

Pizza Box Advertising is a more effective tool because it creates an effect of surprise in the mind of the consumer that receives the pizza boxes. This element of surprise regains consumers attention as it generates a cognitive stimulus. This effect makes the ad message more memorable. Each pizza box top can be seen on average by 3 people per household. They will have a meal staring at your advertising message so it will be impossible to ignore the message.

The cost of Pizza Box Marketing depends on the total quantities/units to be produced, the complexity of the creative/design, the distribution location and shipping costs. By selecting the right agency, the unit cost of a pizza box might vary between $0.80-1.50 and the pizza toppers $0.30-0.60 per unit.

Let’s now compare it with the current outdated advertising methods:

Billboards

The costs of billboards typically depend on the creative, format, size, location and demographics. It is not viable to calculate the number of impressions since billboard companies cannot precisely identify how many people are looking at the billboard – usually these are guesstimates based on the traffic of the area. Traditional billboards cost $14,000-20,000/month in larger markets.

Now let’s put it into the comparison perspective:

Using the same budget of 1 billboard during 1 month in a larger market, the advertiser can reach approximately 60,000 households with a personalized message on your pizza toppers. This is a large reach impact that could cover every household in a small city.

What would you prefer: paying for a billboard that is not personalized and not even noticed by distracted drivers or reaching 60,000 households that will literally grab your ad in their hands?

 Direct Mail

Direct Mail is another outdated tactic. The cost of direct mail as postcards are approximately $0.20-0.40 per unit. This is at similar price range as a pizza toppers.

Now let’s put it into the comparison perspective:

Approximately 60% of the postcards or letters go straight to the garbage and don’t even get noticed while 100% of the consumers must see your pizza box ads.  This brings the ‘’cost per visualization’’ of post cards 2x higher than Pizza Box Advertising.

Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) of Pizza Box Marketing

Let’s assume that you are the Marketing Manager of a local movie theater. The recent pandemic caused you a drastic business harm since the past months most Americans were forced to stay home quarantined. Now that your activities are back to normal you must recover the lost sales with more a creative approach.

You start planning a campaign to distribute 20,000 pizza toppers using local pizzerias. The pizza box ads will include a free popcorn in case they purchase a movie ticket.

Typical conversion rates of Pizza Box Marketing range between 4-6%. This percentage will depend on how attractive the offer is and how compelling the artwork is. Let’s assume for this case a 5% client conversion.

Audience Reach: 20,000 toppers

Converted clients (5%): 1,000 new customers

Sales price of the ticket: $15

Incremental sales (after the campaign): $15,000

Cost of the ads campaign: $6,000

Return on the Pizza Box Advertising investment: 2.5x.

Conclusion: for every 1 dollar you invested in a door hanger campaign, you received at least additional 2.5 dollars of sales.

Adzze offers ad placement on pizza boxes nationally. We work with a network that will enable you to place your ads in the hands of the consumers.