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New types of ads-and new kinds of advertising
companies-are popping up everywhere.
Resistance is futile BY JOHN GROSSMANN
YOU'LL FIND THEM AT THE bottom of the holes on golf courses. On the roofs of taxicabs. On fresh fruit. On hotel-room key cards, supermarket floors, even beach sand. Ads infinitum.
Or so it seems, as ever more inventive start-ups in the advertising arena, seeking to make their messages stand out amidst the traditional marketing clutter, slap commercial pitches on almost anything that doesn't move-and on many things that do. "There's so much entering the marketplace right now that it's hard to keep up with it," says Dave Yacullo, president of Outdoor Services Inc., a media-management company that has begun tracking what some are calling ambient advertising. (See "Your Message Here," at right.) The 1999 totals weren't in by press time, but Yacullo estimates that the gross billings for nontraditional ads grew by at least 20% last year, more than triple the increase for billboards, bus shelters, sports stadiums, and other traditional "out of home" venues.
Observers cite several reasons for the ascent of ambient advertising: the glut of promotional messages from conventional ad media; an increasing desire to microtarget consumers at or near the point of purchase; and the bulging promotional budgets of emerging dot-com companies, which, by the way, are stampeding past their own medium's banner ads, which shows.. what? Antsiness over sluggish click-through rates? Or simply a desire to enlist marketing vehicles as novel as their own E-ventures?
Of course, these new modes of advertising won't stay nontraditional for long. They'll either fizzle and fade or sizzle and go mainstream-the latter being the primary goal of the purveyors of offbeat advertising media.
Flooring it
"WE BELIEVE WE HAVE THE MOST crucial piece of real estate in the media world," proclaims Richard Rebh. "Right where (Continued on page 24) (Continued from page 23) every manufacturer wants to be, right in front of their product, right at the moment of decision."
Rebh is CEO of Floorgraphics Inc., in Princeton, NJ., which installs colorful two-by-three-foot self-adhesive billboards on the floors of supermarkets, drugstores, and mass merchandisers. Billings last year reached $26 million, up from $8 million in 1998, the company's first full year of selling, and...