We’re in the business of meeting customer needs, not just renting vinyl.  A simple lesson but one which needs repeating.  Here’s a great story Gordon Borrell told at last year’s  Geopath/OAAA 2016 Conference.  The out of home advertiser in the story provides an example of what not to do.

A couple of months ago the headmaster of a private school called me and said, “Can you help us with out advertising?”  I said I’ll get some proposals and I’ll vet them for you and then I’ll help you pick one.  They needed to fill 30 seats…So I called an outdoor company, a newspaper, an ad agency and a guy who only does digital stuff and I got proposals from them.  They wanted to spend $25,000 by the way.

The ad agency hemmed and hawed and they just seemed to want to do a whole lot of research and consult and that was going to take up a whole lot of the money and then they were going to do some digital stuff.

The digital guy wanted to do some digital only stuff.  He wanted to do search engine optimization and some banner ads and maybe do something on their website which they really needed…but I didn’t think his work which was just digital only would do anything.

The out of home company sent back a proposal with six billboards.  It was a four page proposal.  Every single one of the pages had pictures of billboards on it.  That was it.  Nothing.  They were out of here.

The newspaper came back and said well we’ve researched your school and we’ve found that your competition is these four or five companies and that you tend to draw your customer base from this region right here so what we’ve proposing is to do some search engine optimization and strategic banner ads which will appear on peoples facebook pages that are from these markets.  You get the picture.  In the end they got the package.  They sold the print ads and they sold online ads.  The took all $25,000.  And it was because they really understood the customer.  They were in it with the customer.  The customer saw them as a partner that understood their business.  And that’s the environment we are in.

Gems like this are why you need to plan to attend the OAAA/Geopath national convention and Expo May 15-17, 2017 in New Orleans.

You can see Borrell’s 2016 talk below.  The story starts at about 30 minutes and 40 seconds

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