Advertising: Common Sense Rules
By Jim Boldebook
Some of the best advertising advice I've ever heard came from seasoned car dealers with a lot of good common sense. I'd like to share a few of these pearls of wisdom.
An extremely successful dealer in Rhode Island once revealed his used car "research" program to me. Very early one morning, the dealer and his used car manager parked by the main bridge coming into his side of town and observed the types of vehicles people were driving. The conclusion: Most of the vehicles crossing the bridge before 8:00 a.m. were three to four years older than the vehicles after 8:00 a.m. The implication: Advertise older, bargain-priced used vehicles on the radio before 8:00 a.m., and late model vehicles after 8:00 a.m. That's exactly what they did. Using a popular morning radio host and specific copy for each demographic, the dealership's spots were narrow-cast to reach the available target audience with much greater efficiency. The proof: It worked. Advertised vehicles sold much faster.
A well-known dealer in the Northwest told me he bought television time during old movies on the weekend. First, the dealer would request an advance schedule of movies to be run in the coming month. Then, he would hand-pick the ones in which he wanted to advertise. The dealer would purchase a spot in every single break in the movie, up to ten commercials in less than two hours. The reasoning: People who start watching an old movie generally watch the entire program. Even more importantly, his philosophy was that people would handle personal needs during the movie because they had seen it before, and thus would be more likely to sit through a commercial break, whereas with a new movie, people would wait for the commercial break to refresh themselves, make a phone call, etc. No scientific studies here. Just good old "seat of the pants" common sense. The proof: It worked. Customer recall of the dealer's ad message was up as well as sales. You may not be able to reach all the people in your market with a small budget, but if you can reach a specific targeted group with enough frequency, you can create action.
Another example of good common sense came from a dealer in Georgia who told me she didn't have a very large ad budget so she decided to be "creative" with the dollars she did have. She bought one radio spot per morning on the most popular stations in town. Each week the spot would run in a different quarter hour segment for the entire week. For instance, the first week, the spot would run every morning between 7:00 and 7:15. The next week the spot would run between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. Her reasoning: Most people leave the house at about the same time every day. For the group of people leaving home at 7:00, they would hear her message every day that week, and it might have a better chance of sinking in-as opposed to five spots run R.O.S. (run-of-schedule). After 13 weeks, the dealer concluded that the campaign was a success. Traffic and sales were up!
One of the best examples of common sense came from a dealer client in the Northeast with multiple locations. The dealerships had been spending virtually all of their advertising budget in a large metro newspaper for the better part of 60 years. The dealer told us: "You've heard the expression, 'I know 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half?' Well I know more than 50% of my advertising is wasted ... and I know exactly where the waste is!" His judgment was based on research that showed advertising was responsible for only 15% of his traffic. His common sense conclusion: Since he was only advertising in the newspaper, the cause of his ad inefficiency was evident. After embarking on a mixed-media campaign with intensive post-analysis, the dealer has dramatically improved his advertising efficiency.
The neat thing about common sense is how easy it is to use. One dealer told me he had never bought radio because "Every station is #1 according to the research! Who can you believe?" I asked the dealer if his employees were representative of his customers' demographics. He thought about it for a moment and then said that if he could attract customers exactly like the kind of people working for him, he would be thrilled. His employees were all working. They lived in his area. They all drove cars. They were men and women of all ages in different social groups. So the dealer and I went around his dealership with a clipboard and did a personal survey of every single employee. Three days later I presented him with an analysis of the information that we had gathered. Our media purchases for the next three months were based on this information. Two things happened. First, the dealership enjoyed an immediate increase in both traffic and sales, and second, employees of the dealership began commenting on the ads.
As an added benefit, one of the radio stations most mentioned by the dealership employees was not highly rated, and thus we were able to negotiate a very attractive rate. The station that Arbitron rated #1 in adults 12+, Mon.-Sun., actually faired poorly in our "common sense" investigation.
In one of the most recent studies of dealership Web sites, the biggest complaint of consumers was the failure of dealerships to respond in a timely fashion to e-mail requests. Most dealerships wouldn't run a heavy ad schedule on Friday and Saturday and give most of their salespeople the weekend off. Why then do dealerships spend thousands of dollars designing Web sites without a plan in place to electronically "greet" visiting customers?
Looks like we need a little common sense mixed in with our new millennium technology!
If you'd like to share your "common sense" advertising ideas with others, e-mail jboldebook@dealeronline.com
Jim Boldebook is President of Creative Broadcast Concepts (CBC), an advertising/marketing agency working with some of America's most successful dealerships. jboldebook@dealeronline.com
