11/20/07 - Businesses find a new place to park their ads

By Jennifer Mann
The Kansas City Star
Date: September 20, 2007

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Parking stripes at Oak Park Mall now carry ad messages. “It definitely cuts through the clutter,” said one ad executive.

You know the proliferation of advertising messages — by some estimates we get thousands a day — has reached a new low when you step on them in a parking lot.
Advertising executive Greg Gorman was in a meeting one day, needling people to come up with new places to put ads in an increasingly cluttered landscape.

“I pointed out the ” Gorman window and said, ‘Like, why not on those parking stripes?’ said. “Then I said, ‘Oh my God, why not on those parking stripes? ” Meeting over!’
And that’s how it came to pass that in parking lots across America, including the Kansas City area, ads are being plastered on those once-plain yellow stripes.

The bedecked parking stripes outside Macy’s at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park join a plethora of surfaces that marketers have co-opted for ads, including the drab bins used in airport screening, the drains of urinals and the bodies of people paid to have corporate logos tattooed on them.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance is paying what it views as an affordable $34.99 a stripe per 30 days to entice new customers as it competes against insurance giants such as Geico and State Farm, which outspend No. 5-ranked Nationwide by millions of dollars each year.

Noting that Kansas City is one of four markets it has targeted for growth, Jeff Myer, Nationwide’s director of advertising, said it was the novelty that caught his attention.
“We’re doing it mostly because it is new and it is unique,” Myer said. “It definitely cuts through the clutter.”

Myer is mindful, however, that this new advertising method adds to the thousands of images bombarding consumers each day.

Depending on who’s counting, that number ranges from 1,000 to more than 5,000. But it doesn’t matter if it’s at one end of the spectrum or the other, experts say, because our brains can process only so many messages, and it’s nowhere close to 1,000.

And as people are assaulted with ever more ads, they build defenses to filter the messages.

“The problem is that all the eyeballs see those ads and then they learn to not care,” said J. Walker Smith, president of the consumer research firm Yankelovich and co-author of Coming to Concurrence: Addressable Attitudes and the New Model for Marketing Productivity.

“It’s the blank-space-advertising strategy where you find someplace where people aren’t expecting it and are initially attracted to the novelty, but then with the continued use it just becomes part of the clutter. You just can’t process any more — there’s just nowhere to stuff it.”

For an entity such as Oak Park Mall, it’s a no-lose proposition.

Someone else takes care of the parking stripes. The ads generate revenue to cover costs on the expense side of the balance sheet, and tenants like the idea because the ads are in the parking lot and not at intrusive points inside the mall.

Stacy Scheelk, marketing director for the mall, likes the novelty of the ads and said there had been no backlash from customers or retailers.

“You can’t even see it until you’re on top of it and getting out of the vehicle,” Scheelk said. “It’s just a new way of getting a message across,” Scheelk said.

Gorman, who used to work for Anheuser Busch and has been credited — and he says sometimes discredited — for coming up with Budweiser frogs, said that he, too, ponders the cluttering of the landscape.

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