STRATEGIC PARTNERS
While not exactly flocking to ATMs in droves, dot-coms seem more willing than traditional businesses to give the new advertising medium a chance.by Ann All, editor
July 2, 2000
After turning the traditional business model on its head, dot-coms could do the same to the traditional advertising campaign. Internet companies are looking beyond the traditional newspaper, television and radio to more unconventional media -- including the ATM. These efforts to reach potential customers in out-of-the-ordinary places are called, appropriately enough, "guerrilla marketing." While entrenched advertisers like Coca-Cola and General Motors seem a little leery, dot-coms are as bullish on new forms of advertising as investors are on IPOs. And some of their early ATM advertising campaigns have yielded impressive results. half.com For instance, half.com, a site that allows users to buy and sell previously owned books, music, movies and games, expected a 4 percent to 8 percent conversion rate when it rolled out a coupon offering free shipping at 700 ATMs in seven states. The actual conversion rate, which indicates the number of people who bought or sold items after hitting the site through the coupon offer, was more than 20 percent. The site used a unique URL and bar-coded coupons to track user response. All 700 machines, located in ARCO am/pm convenience stores, were owned by KeyBank. Secora, a St. Louis-based media company, helped half.com design and place its ATM campaign, which began in mid-March and is still running in select cities. After designing the ad and screen, Secora remotely distributed the ad and coupon to the ATMs from its operations center in St. Louis using NCR's RAC/ASF software. David Moritz, president of Secora, calls his client -- and dot-coms in general -- "innovative marketers." Indeed, ATMs hardly seem cutting edge when compared to some of half.com's other promotional efforts, which include convincing a small Eastern Oregon city to legally change its name to half-com. The company also prides itself on its quirky slogans, all designed to convey its corporate philosophy of "Never pay more than half!" One example: "Get 10,000 Maniacs for the price of 5,000." Mark Hughes, half.com's marketing guru (yes, that's his actual title), thinks the ATM is an effective way for dot-coms to "rise above the clutter." That's becoming increasingly important, he said, because "the dot-com suffix is everywhere now." Brand awareness is an elusive commodity for dot-coms. While 17 of them ran ads during the 2000 Super Bowl, bidding the price of a 30-second spot up to a mind-boggling $2.2 million, how many viewers could remember the difference between Monster.com and Hotjobs.com? According to an article in Salon magazine, succinctly titled "Fumble.com," the Super Bowl ad blitz resulted in "a bit of gawking press coverage and a temporary uptick in site traffic, but nothing so lasting that it could be called "brand building," and nothing so irrefutably valuable -- except for maybe that priceless ego-gratification -- that it could possibly justify the huge expense for a whole batch of unprofitable companies." Hughes believes that ATM advertising -- or any type of guerrilla marketing -- works best for businesses with a unique product set. "It benefits us because we're not a 'me too' product. If you're in a 'me too' category, it's really tough out there," he said. "You've got to give people an incentive to go to your site," he added, with a compelling offer such as half.com's free shipping. Perhaps no other medium conveys such offers as effectively as an ATM, which can put messages on a receipt that many users tuck in a wallet and take away with them. One reason half.com was attracted to ATMs was a perceived overlap of customer demographics. "It's a correlation we're comfortable with," Hughes said. "For technology innovators and early adopters, using the ATM is like brushing their teeth." Food.com Another early advocate of ATM advertising is Food.com, a site that lets users order takeout or delivery from some of their favorite restaurants online. Based on a "phenomenally successful" test in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, Food.com expanded its campaign to more than 1,100 machines in 12 cities. The three-month promotion, which is running on machines owned by Bank One, First Union and Wells Fargo, ends in June. Angela Gyetvan, Food.com's vice president of marketing, said ATMs were a natural niche for her company based on the behavior patterns of a typical user. "When we really started looking at ATM advertising, it made a lot of sense for us to be there," she explained. "You've got higher-income, young people -- and many of them are making food decisions or impulse decisions based around food. It's not strange for them to be seeing a food association in that environment." Though many ATM advertising companies agonize over their inability to offer advertisers a cost-per-thousand that is more in line with traditional media, Gyetvan said price wasn't a deterrent for Food.com. "If you were to compare the pricing to traditional outlets the way it was a year ago, it would have been a problem," she said. "But given that everybody has bid the prices up so high, (ATM advertising) to me has become a pretty economical and efficient way to advertise." Like Hughes, Gyetvan thinks ATM campaigns are most effective with some kind of a "call to action," such as a discount or gift with purchase. "If you're just trying to put a message out there about your brand, it's less effective. I don't think you'll see broad Coca-Cola ads, but you may see Coke ads with a special offer," she said. Blazing Paradigm, Food.com's San Francisco-based advertising agency, has worked with two different ATM advertising companies, Seattle-based CashPoint and Atlanta-based ATM Communications. Haley Rose, an account executive with Blazing Paradigm, said her client and other dot-coms are attracted to ATMs because they're "new and original, at least for now." ATM advertising is still unusual enough that large-scale campaigns can score headlines and spots on the evening news. For example, the movie trailers currently running on Wells Fargo ATMs in California and Arizona earned ink in Time, Newsweek and USA Today, among other outlets. Like Hughes and Gyetvan, Rose reiterates the importance of a coupon or other "call to action." Because the artwork wasn't ready, Food.com ran an ad without a special offer in April. Response to that ad was disappointing when compared to the October test and early results from May. Food.com used a unique URL to track response. Unfortunately, however, it was nearly impossible to break out ATM advertising results; the same URL was used for a newspaper campaign. Still, Gyetvan said, Food.com got "a lot of positive ad-hoc feedback" from its customers. In the future, the company intends to monitor results more closely by directing ATM users to a more specific URL. One major glitch marred Food.com's campaign, at least initially. Blazing Paradigm had trouble converting its still advertisements to the format required by ATM owners. Eventually, the agency outsourced the conversion of its ads to another company. "To this day, the word ATM makes some people cringe around here because of the first time we did it," Rose said. EMAZING.com Just embarking on an ATM advertising program is EMAZING.com, a Louisville, Ky.-based company that provides free, emailed content to subscribers. EMAZING will invite ATM users to enter its Pop Culture Challenge trivia contest by posting nagging questions such as "What was the name of Elvis' twin brother?" on ATM screens and receipts. Those who visit EMAZING's site and correctly answer a question are automatically entered into a sweepstakes in which they can win prizes such as digital cameras. The campaign will run during the month of June on 100 ATMs in Indianapolis. The machines, owned by Access Cash, average about 500 transactions a month. Like half.com, EMAZING is experimenting with other forms of guerrilla marketing, including posting Pop Culture Challenge questions and its URL on paycheck stubs in Southern California and on movie screens and ticket stubs in Boston. Joe Pierce, EMAZING's founder and general manager, said he looked to alternative media like ATMs because "there's too much noise in the mainstream media from a lot of crazy dot-coms, each of them trying to be more outrageous than the other." Edgy ads -- such as Outpost.com launching a gerbil from a cannon -- can make an indelible impression, but they seem passe when they become the norm. So it's important to capitalize on "first-mover opportunities in different media," Pierce said. "ATMs present us with another opportunity to talk to people where maybe they weren't expecting to be talked to," said Tom Walthall, group media director at Doe-Anderson, EMAZING's Louisville-based ad agency. Comparing his marketing efforts to a political campaign, Pierce said his goal is one-to-one interaction with a potential customer. "The more we can get some information on EMAZING into the hands of a real person, the better. I could go out and walk through a mall today and probably sign 500 people." The ATM receipt-based advertisement is the key, he believes. "At least we know they're taking away something with them that says EMAZING on it." The location of the ATMs, all in sites like department stores and restaurants, also helps differentiate EMAZING from other dot-coms. "That positions EMAZING in a retail environment, and most dot-coms are not there now," said Todd Spencer, an account representative at Doe Anderson. While the cost-per-thousand (CPM) "is probably a little higher than ideally we'd like to pay," Walthall said, Doe-Anderson was willing to take a bit of a financial hit to test the strength of the medium. "If it's an effective tool for bringing people to the site and generating subscribers, then we'll gauge the CPM on its overall effectiveness, not its overall delivery," Walthall added. Gregg Rupprecht, vice president of sales and marketing for ATM Advertising Inc., the Baltimore-based ATM advertising company that worked with Doe-Anderson on EMAZING's campaign, said the CPM was "really never a sticking point." "They were able to look past it and see how strong the medium is," Rupprecht said. "If they get the feedback and response they're looking for, you can't put a price on that."
