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"What's Up With TruckSide"
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Sign Business
April, 2001
“TruckSide advertising represents a huge market
opportunity for sign and graphics companies, and the surface
has barely been scratched.”
TruckSide advertising has been around for years, but a new twist
aims to take advantage of the potentially hundreds of thousands
of blank TruckSides roaming the roads of America.
The old twist was simply an extension of a company’s on-premise
advertising…Furniture trucks hauling chairs and tables
across town with a photo of their goods emblazoned on the side,
or the local television station cruising for photo ops with
their logo plastered on the side.
Of course truckers have always had a hankering for highly stylized
and personal graphics on the doors of their cabs, usually lettered
by a unique breed of extremely talented artists.
That’s old school. There’s nothing wrong with old
school, but the new school envisions big bucks selling graphics
on the sides of trucks that don’t have direct affiliation
with the companies who advertise on the side of them.
These days, XYZ Trucking Co. hauling lobsters, or whatever the
catch of the day might be, from Cape Cod to Boston, could advertise
been.
"People see TruckSide advertising as an additional revenue
source, especially when freight hauling is down because the
economy is down overall", says Doug Scott, news production
editor of Transport Topics. A trucking publication that recently
ran an article about TruckSide advertising. "It is growing
in importance, you will see a lot more of the owner/operators,
- the small guys or small fleets - doing it".
The parties that benefit from TruckSide advertising include
the trucking companies, advertising agencies, media companies
that rent the sides of the trucks, the advertiser and , last
but not least, sign and graphic companies.
"One tractor-trailer company could have 30,000 vehicles
- you add that up and the amount of square footage across the
country is phenomenal." Says Jack Berry, founder of PrintCom,
a grand format digital printer based in Raleigh, N.C. "If
they qualify it, quantify it and get some leaders to adopt it,
I will retire soon."
MEASURING TRUCKSIDES
Qualifications and quantification of the effectiveness of TruckSide
advertising is showing hopeful early results. The Traffic Audit
Bureau (TAB),which audits and authenticates the circulation,
or number of impressions, for out-of-home advertising, like
billboards, has devised a system known as MARG for tracking
TruckSide advertising effectiveness.
The MARG System basically marries information from a Global
Positioning System (GPS) that tracks a truck’s movements
every 2 minutes with traffic data from the federal government’s
Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) to audit the circulation
of a particular moving ad.
"The system was in development for over 2 years and we
introduced it in December of 1999, so the system is out there
right now and people are in the process of getting the GPS leads
in," says Larry Hennessy Vice President and General Manager
of the TAB.
Hennessy, says that initial test results from Chicago showed
about 40,000-50,000 impressions per day for a McDonald’s
ad that ran for 12 weeks on 3 trucks, either on the interstate
near the city or closer to the center of town, which averaged
more impressions.
"I don’t know if it is a direct comparison (to billboards)
because the media is very different, says Hennessy,. "It
is real easy to count how many people see a billboard. With
trucks in motion it’s much more complicated, but the numbers
generated in Chicago are relatively equivalent what outdoor
advertising is doing there".
Tests in other major metropolitan markets, like Atlanta and
San Francisco, have shown similar results. Things are definitely
looking up for the inner metro markets, where delivery trucks
and such make their rounds within the city limits.
"One of the phenomena we’ve seen in the last couple
of years is outdoor media mixes, or optimization, where instead
of buying just posters and bulletins, advertisers are seeing
the opportunity of reaching consumers in micro or niche markets
where they can reach consumers during part of their daily life
cycle," says Steven Freitas, Chief Marketing Officer of
the Outdoor Advertising Assoc. of America (OAAA), "They’re
seeing opportunities to reach them in various places, and one
of the products they’re definitely considering and using
is TruckSide advertising".
Freitas adds that the OAAA hopes to start compiling national
circulation figures, with numbers of the top 25 metro markets
within a year.
This niche marketing is not restricted to urban areas - the
Texas Lottery has had success on the open road, but so far,
excluding the Texas Lottery, it’s the only tracked example
of TruckSide advertising.
"We do it a little differently for the Texas Lottery program
- we lease the trailers ourselves and sublease them to the company
so that we can control the vehicle", says George Gearner,
Chairman/CEO of Minneapolis -based Fleet Advertising Media Group
(FAMG), which sells TruckSide media packages to advertisers.
Gearner is also first chairman of the TruckSide Advertising
Council (TACA), an advocacy group for TruckSide advertising.
"All of the trucks have LED digits on the sides of them
that display the current jackpot of the Texas Lottery. We can
access those trailers from the Internet and change the digits
using GPS", says Gearner.
Initial results from the Texas Lottery campaign have also been
positive. Though the trucks aren’t blazing the coveted
inner urban trails (however, they travel within 50 miles of
the central business district), they’re traveling to and
stopping at the places people buy lottery tickets.
This speaks to the targeted niche marketing that the advertising
industry has been moving toward for some time with alternative
media forms, like TruckSide advertising.
"About a year ago, Tide wanted to reach people whey they
might be spilling food on their clothes, so they put Tide ads
on paper napkins in diners and restaurants. It didn’t
matter what the CPM was, what mattered was that they wanted
to reach diners eating. In many regards, TruckSide is the same
way, " says OAAA"s Freitas.
TRUCKSIDE HURDLES
TruckSide advertising is not without its roadblocks as a number
of factors need to be overcome in order to fully explain the
possibilities. As mentioned earlier, quantification and qualification
of the numbers is one, while the specter of regulation is another.
"There are not a lot of regulations pertaining to TruckSide
advertising, per se, but because it is becoming more prevalent
very quickly, a lot of cities are starting to take a look at
TruckSide advertising. There are some cities - specifically
New York, San Francisco and Boston - which have taken that step
and are aggressively looking at regulatory controls. There is
some litigation in those cities, because there are aspects within
the city laws where they are questioning whether it’s
legal to carry signs on trucks. They’re talking about
a significant reduction or elimination with those cities, so
some of the companies involved in those cities are already in
court dealing with those types of legal issues and free speech."
However, regulation thus far applies mostly to mobile billboards,
trucks that are designed to be moving billboards - particularly
for special events like conventions - and they usually don’t
carry deliveries.
"Any time that the government sees an opportunity to get
involved in business, they do. However, we have been very careful
nopt to violate any of the federal or state department of transportation
regulations. The trucking company knows what the rules and regulations
are, and we rely on the", says Gearner.
There already has been a precedent of sorts set by the fact
that metro busses have been carrying ads on them for years.
It would be difficult to override that precedent and not allow
trucking companies to sell ads on the sides of their vehicles.
For the time being and for the most part, regulation is a non-issue
and the time is ripe for sign and graphics companies to put
together advertising packages for trucking companies. |
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