THE TOP 5 BENEFITS OF RIDESHARE / E-HAILING CAR ADVERTISING
1. Memorable – proven to be the most memorable and noticed meduim on the road*
2. Targeted – wrapped cars reach geographic areas that are difficult, or impossible, to reach through traditional billboards and buses.
3. Tracked – Accountability in ad spend matters! All wrapped cars are APP Technology tracked with location, route maps / heatmaps, mileage and impressions.
4. Scalable – wrapped cars has the ability to reach many markets, with many cars, all through one media supplier.
5. Affordable –commonly wrapped cars are a fraction of the cost of traditional billboards
Car wraps, a form of graphic media that rose
to prominence through its wide usage on service vehicles and 18-wheelers, have
recently become an accessible media format to marketers at-large. Within the
past few years, a select out-of-home industry has been created that enables
advertisers to leverage networks of high-mileage rideshare drivers who want to
wrap their cars in advertising.
Although the media format is rapidly growing,
there are many South African marketers that are unfamiliar with this new marketing
channel. Understanding the media format’s advantages is critical in leveraging
it as a successful marketing channel tactic.
Below we discuss the 5 key differentiation factors of this medium.
1. Memorable
Vehicle wraps are proven to be the most memorable form of transit advertising. A study done by Nielsen in 2019 surveyed 999 participants and asked “When was the last time you noticed [_Medium_] advertising”. The results were as following:
Reach and frequency are usually the primary considerations weighed when assessing how far an ad budget can go within a media format, but what also needs to be considered is the memorability factor. After all, what good is an ad’s reach and frequency if nobody cares to look at it?
2. Targeted
In 1998, SAMOAC (South African Manual
For Outdoor Advertising Control) was established by the then Department of
Environmental Affairs and Tourism to regulate the visual environment. This
together with the applicable metro by-laws limit
where billboards could be placed. Zoning restrictions is why you’ll pass by 100
billboards on your travels on the N1 instead of, say, 200 billboards. This is
also why there is a lack of billboards in highly affluent and suburban geographies.
This is especially true in hard-to-reach geography’s such as cape town.
A large benefit of wrapped cars is that there
is no such regulation, so they can be used to reach geographic areas which are
difficult, or impossible, to reach through any other out-of-home media format.
Because of this, wrapped car advertising is frequently used in highly demanded
markets where out-of-home inventory is very expensive, or locations that
traditional billboard media cannot reach.
Eazy Ads sources their drivers from the specific areas and cities being targeted, ensuring that the exposure generated is in the correct locations for each campaign.
3. Tracked
We live in an era where almost everyone and
everything is tracked. Your smart car, your Google home, the cellular computer
sitting in your pocket. Most of us know and accept that our locations and
online activity are being actively tracked at all times. This cultural trend
has seeped all the way through to the advertising industry, as marketers now
know that this constant connectedness empowers them with higher levels of ad
spend visibility.
One glaring exception to this transparency,
however, has been the verification around transit out-of-home. This has been
problematic to many advertisers, as it is quite common for buses and taxis to
go out of commission for extended periods of time due to mechanical problems,
and advertisers have no way of verifying this.
Unlike buses and taxis, wrapped vehicle advertising incorporates a much higher level of transparency and accountability. Drivers selected for an ad campaign are GPS tracked via our APP technology and their mileage, impressions, and location data / route maps are provided back to the advertiser through an online dashboard, which the advertiser has access to 24/7. Accountability in ad spend matters! This makes reporting on the advertising campaign a breeze.
4. Scalable
Given the sheer volume of rideshare cars and
its omnipresence across the country, car wrap advertising offers the
flexibility to go wherever the geographic needs are, in however many markets
are needed. This factor is important when considering time efficiency.
When buying traditional out-of-home across multiple markets, a marketer will very commonly have to work with multiple out-of-home companies. The media supplier that sells advertising in Johannesburg, may be different than the supplier that sells advertising in Cape Town. Therefore, a large media buy across multiple cities will necessitate working with multiple suppliers. All of this requires time as each OOH company will have different prices, terms, and styles of business. The result of having one out-of-home media partner that can easily activate markets equates to more time and money to focus on other things.
5. Affordable
The costs associated with the larger-than-life
mega site billboards on the N1 can fetch prices of up to R500,000 per month.
While we know this is on the extreme side of the OOH market, it shows how high
the price range can be for out-of-home.
Generally speaking, the shorter the supply
and the higher the demand of billboards in a market, the greater the price for
the rental of that billboard. This explains why a highly demanded billboard in
an expensive market like Sandton can cost about R70,000 a month, while an
ideally located billboard in East London may cost R35,000 a month. Is it worth
the money? Well to understand this, we need to take into consideration what
each billboard is delivering – impressions. When impressions and cost are
looked at together, the result is a ratio referred to as Cost per Thousand
Impressions (CPM). A billboard that costs R250,000 a month, which generates 4,200,000
impressions, will carry a CPM of R59.50
Unlike traditional billboards, cars are in abundant supply. The more crowded the marketplace, the larger the amount of cars available for campaigns. So in situations when billboard prices increase due to short demand, it is very likely that car advertising prices actually decrease. This is an ironic paradox which attract many advertisers to the car advertising medium. This is reflected in the monthly price per car, which will generally range between R3800 – R6800 per month and generate approximately 250,000 impressions per month. The usual CPM’s witnessed for car advertising range between R15 – R27.
This presents the opportunity to deploy a number of sleekly branded rideshare vehicles with your brand message, creating buzz and brand awareness for the modern age!
Selecting the optimal media mix for an upcoming advertising campaign is never an easy task but being familiar with the many media formats and their unique advantages is the correct first step. Wrapped car advertising is just one of several out-of-home options available to you, but its growing prominence and strong abilities pave the way for tremendous marketing gains when leveraged properly and incorporated forming the perfect complement to an existing media mix.