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You often read about ideas that sound promising until you think about them.
For instance, the National Organization of Women has a
deal on checks. Instead of ordering checks from your bank,
you can go through NOW. Your new checks, in addition to the
usual personal information and magnetic-ink account numbers
and bank-routing codes, will have a message: Pro Choice
-- Protect Our Right to Choose.
Patricia Ireland of NOW explains that you can thus send
a political message every time you pay a bill. Priscilla
Fenton, founder of the Message Check Corp. in Seattle, says
the average person writes 300 checks a year, and the
recipients are a captive audience.
Some audience. I don't know about you, but I don't look at a check for any longer than it takes to endorse the back. Then I race to the bank to deposit it to cover the checks I've already written.
The only people I know who stare at checks, and thus
form this magnificent captive audience,
are
prosecuting attorneys when they study the evidence before
hauling someone into court on charges of unauthorized
practice of alchemy -- turning paper into rubber just by
adding ink.
NOW may mean well, but check readers really aren't much of a captive audience. I read recently of a better method, though.
Some Chicago company is offering advertising space right above urinals. Now there's a captive audience with nothing better to do than read the ads.
I haven't seen any such ads yet; the men's-room walls at
the establishments I patronize either have graffiti or a
battered vending machine which offers Sensational
Sensual Thrilling French Novelties
for 75 cents.
There are many other possibilities for reaching captive audiences.
Consider boxcars. There you are, stuck at a grade crossing while a two-mile-long freight rattles by at the approximate speed of a glacier. You stare at the train, looking eagerly for the caboose, which trains don't have these days, of course.
You notice and you wonder. Why is an East Jersey & Hoboken hopper car passing through the Rockies? Where are all those Japanese automobiles bound? Why does the footloose tramp waving from an open boxcar look so happy? Why don't you give up on making payments and hop the next westbound?
Such seditious thoughts could be nipped in the bud with a few rolling billboards with political messages about how important it is to go to work every day or ads that made you covet some new $8,000 toy.
A vast captive audience idles at stoplights. Everybody peers at the red, ready to jump the instant it changes. Most municipalities are strapped for money, and progressive advertisers would gladly pay well to put short messages on the red signals: Eat at Joe's, Visit Historic Downtown, Re-elect the Mayor, etc. The message penetration and retention rates should be a prodigious improvement on those billboards that flit by in an instant.
Now that most gas stations are self-serve, why haven't
they figured out that most of the time you're there, you're
staring at the pump? As the dollar and volume amounts tick
along, they could also flash profitable messages: Better
check your tires. Our air hose is only a reasonable $2 for
2 minutes.
With the start of school, I've been reading worried
commentary about some new promotional scam. A national
company will set up a classroom with video equipment, and
beam in free educational
programming. There's a
hitch, of course -- the programs have commercials for acne
treatments, salty snacks, pre-worn-out blue jeans and the
other necessities of adolescent life in America.
But if it really pays to advertise to school kids, which are about as captive as an audience can get, there's a better way. Just buy advertising space on the classroom clock. They spend more time looking at that than at anything else in the room.
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