A driving force in advertising

Published 8:03 pm Friday, June 29, 2007

Mike Seifert knew his advertising company had something when people started whipping out cameras and taking pictures.

He was sitting on a sofa in a life-sized IKEA ad, a living room staged in the back of a clear-paneled delivery truck. As the truck rolled by crowds at Seafair, people snapped photos of the fishbowl-like display, and Seifert marveled at how effectively the ad grabbed attention.

“People were going crazy,” said Seifert, vice president of sales and marketing for the advertising company. “When was the last time someone recorded your television spot?”

The Kent-based company behind the ad, GoMobile Advertising, is offering an eye-catching alternative to billboards and transit ads: Trucks fitted with vinyl scrolling advertisements and three-dimensional displays that travel through high-traffic areas or appear at crowd-drawing events.

Seifert and Chris Schuler, who worked together in broadcast sales and marketing, started the company in 2005. Since then, GoMobile has built a network of affiliates with trucks in 45 markets, including Snohomish and King counties, and in 23 states.

GoMobile promises to “break through today’s media clutter,” offering its clients cheaper rates than traditional media and a portable form of advertising that can be customized.

Clients can rent one or all of the scrolling billboards or lease the entire vehicle, tricking it out with custom vehicle wraps and three-dimensional displays. KFC, for instance, leased trucks to help introduce its Chicken and Biscuit Bowl. Inside the truck is a Paul Bunyan-sized papier mache replica of a chicken and biscuit bowl.

Advertisers can blast music or messages with speakers mounted on the outside of the trucks or send a message through a radio broadcast on an FM frequency. A street team can deliver promotional materials to onlookers while the truck rumbles by. Advertisers can follow the path of the trucks using GPS tracking, and even send coupons to the cell phones of people near the truck. All the Washington trucks run on biodiesel.

Ad rates vary but a week of three billboards on one truck costs $1,500, plus the cost to have the billboards made. The company said about 40 people see the boards each time they rotate, and they’ve based those number on traffic counts made by the state Department of Transportation.

One of these trucks may be coming to a traffic stop near you.

Jim Dupras, a retired U.S. Army officer living in Lake Stevens, recently became an affiliate for the company, purchasing one of the $100,000 trucks and the right to cover most of the north Puget Sound area.

“This concept is an intriguing idea and nobody else is doing it,” said Dupras, who named his business MunyAds.

As an affiliate, Dupras will sell ads for his truck and share driving duty with an employee he recently hired. He can make as much as $32,000 a month if he sells all the ad space, but he pays for upkeep and lease for the vehicle, insurance, fuel and the driver’s salary, all of which reduce his potential profit.

Dupras started a few weeks ago and hasn’t landed any advertisers, although he has had nibbles from a local casino.

Instead, he’s fitted the truck with public service ads, something GoMobile encourages.

Dupras drives the truck to the busiest intersections at the peak of traffic so the ads get maximum exposure. About 68,000 cars travel through the intersection of Evergreen Way and Everett Mall Way daily, and Dupras “milks the intersection” by driving through, taking a right and circling back. Even breaks are taken at strategic locations that offer maximum visibility, he said.

So far, he’s received positive reactions from drivers, he said.

“It’s phenomenal,” he said. “People just gawk, stare, point, laugh. All the emotions come out.”

The truck makes a big impact at night. The interior is illuminated, making the truck stand out.

“I drove it around downtown Everett at nighttime and people were just like ‘What in the world is that.’”

Advertisements plastered on the side of buses, trains and trucks, called transit advertising, aren’t new. It’s common in Europe and Asia, where billboard space is limited. The twist is these ads are dynamic and motion does capture attention, said Richard Yalch, a professor of marketing at the University of Washington’s School of Business.

That doesn’t mean the ads will translate into people buying a product. Outdoor advertising such as billboards are usually used to attract attention and create or maintain awareness, he said.

“Usually they want to know how they will benefit from using it,” Yalch said. “This is better communicated through TV, radio or print.”

Yalch wondered about the safety of advertisements designed to attract the attention of people who should be doing something else: steering their cars.

“You would think that there could be a significant liability if someone got into an accident and claimed to have been distracted by the moving billboard passing them on the road,” he said.

Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com.