Advertising Moving Online from Traditional Mediums? It’s Not Online, It’s on Dogs
by
on February 07, 2009,
We’ve been talking quite a lot lately about the future of advertising in the current recession and how we still hope that advertisers will restructure their budgets to pay for more online impressions instead of paying for expensive TV advertising that is also told to be more difficult to evaluate in terms of ROI than online ads are. And while I don’t think we’ve seen signs of actual large-scale movement from traditional advertising mediums to online advertising networks, today I have seen an example of pretty creative approach to advertising in my home city - Novosibirsk.
The thing is that the local advertising agencies are looking for new revenue sources instead of those advertisers don’t want to spend money on any more. Outdoors advertising is one of the most heavily damaged mediums here as we see lots of blank billboards around the city. The explanation is pretty simple: advertisers are not willing to pay for a pretty expensive way to showcase their products to people who spend more and more time at home instead of walking around the streets and are too busy thinking about their problems to even notice anything around.
But marketing people are supposed to come up with unusual and creative solutions and what I’ve seen today in the news makes me feel proud for the local advertising and marketing professionals here as they have suggested a totally revolutionary advertising medium to advertisers that is also a cost-efficient one: advertising on dogs.
The pattern is dead-simple: for every potential advertiser they suggest a breed and an idea for a campaign. After that they contact dog owners from their database (the agency already has over 200 dogs they can involve in a campaign) and with those who are willing to participate in this particular campaign they sign an agreement that stipulates exactly how often a dog owner should walk the dog and where - all the time with the dog wearing a special branded coat. In exchange the dog owner receives a monthly compensation depending on the campaign but usually it is around $30 per month - definitely not a lot but enough to buy monthly supply of food for the dog.
And while this new idea to advertise on dogs may sound revolutionary and too unusual to all, it has tons of advantages to advertisers: for example, the money that can buy you a billboard for one month will buy you 10-15 dogs wearing your branded coats for the same month. But in addition to being very cost-efficient, this form of advertising has a very rare benefit: it is still noticeable. As advertisers already know, people try to avoid ads in every way they can: they switch channels on TV during a commercial break, they use ad blocking plugins in their browsers when surfing the web, and they don’t even pay attention to everything beyond the content of a site when they happen not to block ads overall. But a dog wearing a coat featuring a logo of a local company is something definitely worth noticing so people often stop to talk to the dogs’ owners about this idea, stroke the dogs a little - and of course they will remember the company advertising in this manner.
What’s more, I have a feeling that people who happen to see such dogs serving as an advertising medium will also be very willing to share what they’ve seen with their friends and family, some also making photos of such dogs and showing such photos everywhere so this is probably one of the best examples of viral marketing I’ve seen in a while.
To tell you the truth, after watching this new idea for local advertising I have a strong feeling that advertisers will hardly want to choose some local online resources to push their brands to local communities as these cost-efficient dogs will certainly be an option that will draw way more attention from the local people and will also do a lot for the brand awareness, at the same time building a pretty positive image for the company. Now I wonder if we will see other advertising agencies elsewhere coming up with databases of their local dogs as well and will offer the new idea to dog owners and advertisers everywhere. And of course I wonder what market share this new medium will earn in the future once companies realize it is efficient - possibly way more efficient than anything else they’ve tried in the past.
You can watch the video from the Russian news below but it is in Russian though it may give you understanding of how dogs are used as an advertising medium here. Image and video via 1TV.ru.
