Mobile Billboard Advertising
Roving Trucks Can Offer "In Your Face Marketing" at Special Events
Despite rising fuel costs and environmental concerns, the mobile billboard business is still growing and developing new concepts to attract viewer attention.
The mobile billboard industry, which sprang up in the 1990s, is reportedly growing at a brisk pace even though it is driving head on into the rising cost of fuel and growing concern about vehicle emissions into the atmosphere.
A mobile billboard isn’t just another sign on the side of a truck. As Go Mobile Advertising shows on its website, these are specially designed, box-like trucks with six-foot-tall billboards on both sides and their backs. They usually deliver nothing but messages formatted as billboards. The ads are vinyl and may be stored in 10-by-6-foot glass cubes for the sides of the truck and in 8-by-6-foot cubes for the back. The ads can be scrolled electronically and continuously.
Instead of avoiding heavy traffic, their owners like to send the trucks into bumper-to-bumper traffic. If desired, mobile billboard vehicles can park near crowded special events or anywhere they might be seen by thousands of eyes. Or they can cruise around an event or stadium for a lot less money than those huge blimps charge to do the same thing.
Billboard Trucks Ideal for Special Events, Tailgating Parties
It can be a perfect vehicle for a tailgating party, another fee opportunity that the colleges and pros surely won’t miss.
An advertiser can ad loud music to his mobile billboard if he is willing to annoy those folks in the area trying to listen to their own music.
In some ways, the time is ripe for mobile billboards despite rising fuel costs and environmental concerns. After all, there is a plethora of big special events, more commuting than ever, and all that snarled traffic turning trapped motorists into captured audiences. This is all happening while most other advertising sectors struggle with new problems and audience segmentation.
Mobile Billboards Offer Same Benefits as Highway Billboards
The truck billboards provide most of the same benefits that companies like Billboard Source Inc. attribute to their highway billboards. They say viewers:
- Can’t turn billboards off like they turn off radio and television;
- Can’t throw away the billboard like they do newspapers, magazines and direct mail;
- Can’t change the channel like TV viewers often do during commercials.
But unlike a highway billboard, the mobile billboard is likely to be seen more than a few seconds and at closer range. It can be what Go Mobile Advertising likes to call "in your face marketing."
Billboard Trucks Can Carry Product Displays
Displays of furniture and other products can be set up inside the truck for special occasions and events.
In addition to its standard billboard trucks, Go Mobile Advertising also offers a 3D display truck. That’s a transparent vehicle, in which a company can set up a show window-type display that can be seen from outside the truck.
Arrangements can also be made for the distribution of literature and samples from either the standard or 3D display trucks.
Mobile billboards are likely to be less expensive than the bigger highway boards. According to Megan Hartley of the Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore billboard would cost $6,000 to $7,000 for a month’s rental early in 2008, while a four-week exposure on a truck billboard would cost about $4,000.
Sources:
Baltimore Sun, February 28, 2008
GoMobile Advertising
Billboard Source, Inc
