Brite Media’s Advertickets is leading General Motors in a marketing push to give free valet parking during parts of May at a number of shopping centers around the country. The idea is to promote the company’s new Acadia crossover mini suv.
This evokes a lot of marketing the parking industry could provide for national products. Advertickets is the leader in this, of course, providing preprinted entry tickets that have everything from Coke to the latest movie on them. This is called, ‘out of home’ advertising. In other words, advertising that isn’t promoted to folks at home (TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines) but to people as they go about their daily lives. And where better, than in a parking operation.
There are other ideas for parking, too including signs on parking meters, displays on P and D and POF machines, banners and displays in garages, projections on walls and floors, the list is endless. But you have to be a bit creative and sell the concept to your owner. But why not? GM is paying big bucks to the shopping malls to be allowed to do this. If you use preprinted tickets, the tickets are free, saving beaucoup bucks. They are even paying the onstreet parking fees for two days in GM’s hometown in Michigan. The bags over the meters? Hawking the Arcadia, of course.
In some places, the promotion is going into coffee shops. In NYC, for instance, the approach is to give away free coffee with promotional material on the coffee cup sleeve.
Come on, out there, get creative. We are "hit" between 5000 and 10,000 times a day with an advertising message, from traditional ads, to the ‘net, to the brand of soft drink consumed on NCIS to the Jeans worn by Jeff Foxworthy. You can be a part of the push. By the way, it takes around 12 of those exposures to entice a person, most probably who is going to buy some type of the product, anyway, to buy yours. Of course some advertising is designed to get you to buy and SUV, however most is designed to get you, who are already thinking about and SUV to buy THIS SUV.
Wonderful, isn’t it.
JVH
One Response
JVH,
You’re right. Partnering is perhaps the most potent tool to delight or anger one’s prospective and current customers – and to attract media/blog coverage (as you provide for it here)
If fellow Parking Today subscribers want more ideas about how to proftably partner, just google “SmartPartnering” or see articles on my sayitbetter site.