advertising techniques
Taking It To The Streets
JHerzog · · 12 Comments
Besides blurriness, what you see there is the latest advertising technique hitting the streets of the St. Louis metro area.
In this photo, a “kid”(which I’m using to refer to anyone younger than my ripe old age of 29) is dressed in a pizza costume holding a Pizza World sign, earphones in ears, dancing around wildly on the side of the street.
The first time I saw this happening was several months ago. I drove by a man in a statue of liberty costume animatedly dancing on the side of the road outside of a strip mall. At the time I thought Liberty Tax was crazy, and there was no way they were going to get any traffic from that nonsense.
Then I saw a kid standing outside of Little Caesar’s. Hot N’ Ready read the sign that he was holding while he also rocked out to whatever he was listening to on his headphones, and I thought, these people are crazy, but I honked and waved because – why not?
A couple of weeks ago I was browsing for furniture and was headed to Weekends Only. Across the street is a somewhat run-down looking building with a not-so-catchy sign out front for Home Decor Liquidators. For a long time I wasn’t sure it was even open and didn’t care to drive into the lot to check. But as I was driving to Weekends Only, there was a guy standing by the street in front of their building dancing around with their sign in hand. Because I now knew that they were in fact open, I ended up checking them out as well.
Then just a week or two ago I saw 2 kids standing on opposite sides of the street with these huge, awkwardly shaped signs for T-Mobile. No costumes and instead of dancing with the signs they were flipping them around in all types of crazy ways, but that was enough to get my attention to find out what they were doing and what was on their sign.
Today when I saw this kid with the Pizza World sign, I actually turned around! Albeit not to get a piece of pizza, but because I wanted to get a picture to share this craze that I’ve been seeing everywhere. Although I was starving and if I hadn’t known I already had free pizza waiting for me back at my office, I very well might have grabbed a slice of pizza and soda for $3 and probably taken a picture with the kid also. Hello social media!
So does it actually bring them business? I don’t know the answer to that. But here I am, recalling the names of 5 businesses that have caught my attention with this type of advertising after seeing them out on the street just one time. And that’s more than I can say for a majority of the commercials I see on t.v., hear on the radio or that pop up when I’m browsing the internet.
Has anybody else noticed an increase in this advertising trend or is St. Louis just crazy?