What every advertiser wants: effective, inexpensive, wide-reaching and penetrating advertising.
What most advertisers do and/or get: ineffective, expensive, “same old” advertising which just melds into all the other advertising out there.
I live in Toronto. Here, if I wanted to get a prime-time ad played on one of the big radio stations, I’d have to pay about 2K per “spread” (1 week of ads in a specific slot). This 1-week of ads will likely be only slightly effective because at first people don’t know you. The radio stations recommend at least a month, if you are trying to build brand recognition.
But, what if you could spend 2K and get mentions every hour?
The solution is simple: sponsoring a contest or giveaway. A few local companies have caught onto this, but not many. Sponsoring a travel contest for a local radio station, for instance, would cost about 2-3K. Radio stations typically do a week of lead-ups for smaller prizes, so you would get mentions quite often (they want people to listen at specific times, so they advertise the heck out of it).
A plethora of advertising. Effective, positive and penetrating advertising, not to mention for the family that wins the vacation.
One company here in town sponsors a daily contest called Beat the Bank. The concept is simple, but the cost to them is variable (winners try and guess which “vault” has the most money, and if they don’t get “caught” they win the vault they picked. Some days it’s nothing, others it’s 5,000$). This company has gone from a nobody to a household name purely because of the 50K worth of advertising they put into this.
The same concept works on a smaller scale as well. Most mid-sized websites would jump at the chance to giveaway books, gift certificates, etc. All you have to do is approach them and offer to pay all costs in return for a “sponsored by”. If you are truly lucky you would also get a copy of all addresses generated by the contest (as Yahoo! did with the Pepsi “billion dollar contest”).
This method of advertising isn’t for everyone, but if you are sick of ineffectual advertising and are looking for something within your budget which is a little “different”, this may be for you.
- cog commercial (and honda cog commercial)