Event Marketing

Last week I went to Hilton to watch the Iowa State Men's basketball team defeat the traitorous buffaloes of Colorado.  While there I noticed that seemingly everything in the stadium was used as a piece of marketing material.  Almost every media timeout featured an ad.

- American Family Insurance had the student section "pump-up" their logo by supplanting it on a live video of the students pushing their arms up in the air.

- Delta Dental had a similar strategy as the camera found smiling fans while playing a song that basically repeated the words; "put a smile on your faaaaace..."

- Scion put their logo on the back of some large signs that the students used to organize their coordinated free-throw movements.  (A quick aside - coordinated free-throw movements are dumb and that has been proven)

- The student's t-shirts also had many sponsors, but I didn't notice any of them or remember any of the sponsors on the shirts that I wore while I was in school and in the student section.

- Toyota of Ames hosted a free-throw contest at half-time.  MC included!

- Someone won round-trip air-fare from some company by winning a dizzy lay-up competition.

- The floor used to be sponsored by Pioneer, or at least there was a Pioneer logo on the floor at one point, I didn't catch if it was still there.

- I'm sure there were many more that I either don't remember or didn't notice.

That last 'dash' point is the most concerning thing to me.  I was actively trying to notice and remember the marketing schemes that took place during the game and just a week later I can only slightly remember 7 of them.

I have no idea how much American Family Insurance pays to run that ad to a captive audience of roughly 10,000 people.  Captive meaning that we couldn't change the channel on the big-screen, not that Iowa State was forcing us to watch their basketball team against our will.  However, I bet that if you polled the 10,000 people that were present for that game last week, less than 400 (4% is a typical response rate for mailings) would be able to recall that ad and even less would be able to correctly identify the company. 

My point is, most people look past the marketing schemes we see every day.  I couldn't find up-to-date numbers on this, but according to David Shenk, in his book Data Smog, the average American encountered 560 daily advertising messages in 1971.  By 1997, that number had increased to over 3,000 per day.  With the growth of the internet and corporations seemingly making more of an effort to advertise I wouldn't be surprised if that number was approaching 10,000 ads per day. 

The trick as a marketer is to stand out above the white noise that we Americans have been forced to just look past.  Bringing that back to Iowa State basketball games, I still remember the shoot 5 for 5 promotion they ran at halftime from games when I was 6.  Benson Motors would give away a free car if anyone could make 5 shots in a row from various spots on the floor.  The trick that made me remember the name "Benson Motors" to this day is that the MC was always the same guy and he always had the crowd get involved with saying the company's name as the introduction to the contest.  I used to think Benson Motors was someplace special to go, even though in reality it was just like any other car dealership.  If a car dealership could get a 6 year-old to be excited to go there, and not bug his parents about how boooored he was, I think they would consider that a resounding WIN! 

I've read some other cool stories about companies making smart marketing decisions recently.  Jack-in-the-Box has something similar to a sports mascot star in its commercials.  That mascot, and his son, recently showed up at a LA Lakers game and just acted like they were there to watch the game.  While I'm sure the team was aware of the stunt, the Jack-in-the-Box guy didn't do anything to draw attention to himself, which in turn made it a cool story that I heard about here in Iowa.  That is successful marketing!  All it cost Jack-in-the-Box was the courtside tickets and whatever they had to pay the actor.

Right now, as I watch the Big East Tournament on ESPN I see logos for Reese's, and read that Volvo and St. Patrick's Church are official sponsors.  Really, a church!  I'm sure that all of those companies have deals that allow them to use the schools likenesses on other advertising materials, but just placing a logo on the floor isn't going to get you noticed.  Challenge your marketing department to come up with something that will generate traffic on Facebook and Twitter.  Repeating other people's ideas is lazy and is going to cause your marketing efforts to be part of the massive amount of white noise that we as American's naturally filter out every day.