Blimp Advertising

January 5, 2009 | By Marc Porcelli | No Comments »

So I tried something different while on vacation one day this past week – I left my BlackBerry back in my room and went to the beach with my family away from the work world. Although I suffered slight separation anxiety at first, it felt great to be away from work! But it didn’t last long…

While sitting on the beach watching my fiancé and son make sand castles, I noticed the Goodyear blimp approaching from the south. As the blimp came closer, I started to make out the language that was displaying on the screen, “Visit Goodyeartires.com for more information. Official tire of Nascar…” Being in performance-based-accountable online marketing, I though of what a waste this was.

How could Goodyear and their AOR determine the value to justify the costs of this blimp? Did this truly serve a purpose and did it actually make people buy tires? Growing up as a kid, I would always see the Goodyear blimp on TV watching sporting events and from time-to-time visiting the Jersey-shore. But did this ever really make me want to buy tires or affect my purchasing decision? The answer, not consciously, no (I have also never bough Goodyear tires).

Goodyear has strong brand recognition and they have a high level of credibility, but does this brand currency translate into sales? If so, how can you definitively prove that it does? I don’t think there is really anyway that you can, particularly given the promotional marketing methods that I observed.

What did come to mind while I was watching the lettering on the blimp was that they should have had a specific call to action while providing a value proposition to the viewers. Being on a beach and being that the blimp flew the same area (for those familiar with South Florida, Deerfield Beach to Delray Beach) the could have tailored the call to action. For example, “Visit your local Goodyear or authorized Goodyear service center for a change to win a free set of tires or log onto www.GoodyearBimp.com to enter today!”

This promotional method encompasses a strong call to action with a strong value proposition for views to win a free set of tires. By telling the users to visit a Goodyear or Authorized Goodyear service center it in theory will increase floor traffic, which in turn should increase sales. This can all be tracked when users then fill out a form in a store to get a change to win the free tires.

Likewise, when users log onto www.GoodyearBlimp.com in theory there would be a strong call-to-action reminding the users of the free tires and to click on a map and section of the country where users could click on to represent where they saw the blimp. The users would then go to a form with the same strong call-to-action to fill out it out for a chance to win free tires.

By filling out this information, not only is Goodyear getting value information on their users that they can later (with permission) use to re-market to the users, but they are more importantly measuring the effectiveness (as much as could be given the promotional method) of the blimp campaign. Finally, Goodyear is also creating a relationship with their users by incorporating the offline and online brand and providing the user with value.

As we move deeper into the recession and as deflation increasingly takes its tool, it’s going to be all about accountability moving forward – or at least you would think it would be.

The rest of the day at the beach was great!

Share
Related Posts:
Tagged: , , , ,
Category: Advertising Agencies, Marketing Strategy, Media Buying, Online Marketing, Recession Marketing

RSS feed | Trackback URI

Comments »

No comments yet.

Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.