Imagine you have a perishable product which is only available one weekend a year in each larger city across the country. This product is dynamic, colorful, and some might say outlandish. Your target audience is young families, specifically families with little boys in the home.
You do have some advantages in that the product you’re selling is on the move in huge tractor trailer trucks on busy interstates during the week and then those same trailers are parked in high visibility, high traffic locations for the weekend your product is for sale in that market.
Given all that, you MUST be shipping your product in colorful trailers that are works of graphic art, right? Right? Not if you are Feld Motor Sports’ Monster Jam monster truck series. With multiple casts of trucks and drivers performing at the same time across the country (at up to TEN cities across North America on any given weekend), this series involves dozens of racing haulers. Of those dozens of trailers, very few are branded. The in-house Monster Jam racing haulers are typically plain white, maybe with a couple of logos on the rear trailer doors such as the one shown below in Birmingham, AL in 2012.
Incredibly, even the show monster trucks, whose purpose is to draw attention to the weekend’s shows with promotional appearances, are often delivered in plain white trailers like this one. A typical 53′ hauler has over ONE THOUSAND SQUARE FEET (92 square meters) of prime, mobile outdoor advertising space, all going to waste.
What would I like to see Monster Jam do for their racing hauler marketing? First, ANY consistent branding or logos on the trailer sides and rear doors would be a start to build brand awareness. Going a step further, Monster Jam has great associated visuals; why NOT promote your show’s biggest stars and most action-packed moments with a life sized photo graphic? Add the website URL and social media contacts to the hauler and suddenly you have an impactful mobile advertisement that generates excitement and engages potential customers.
Keep in mind that event tickets and souvenirs sales are only part of Monster Jam’s revenue stream. Monster Jam has extensive licensing agreements with companies such as Hot Wheels to produce and market Monster Jam products. These products are available year-round at big box retailers like Target and Wal-Mart as well as online through their own e-store and e-commerce sites such as amazon.com. Branded haulers would serve as triggers of goodwill from past experiences for existing customers; adding advertising specifically for these licensed products would then help generate more sales and even impulse buys with the ubiquitous of mobile computing today.
Monster Jam could even take a page from the classic playbook of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. For generations, the circus has paraded from the railroad siding where the circus train parked through the city to the show grounds, generating public buzz and media attention every year. NASCAR now does the same with their immaculate racing haulers, preceding though the streets of Las Vegas and other major cities in a bold announcement of their arrival in town. Combining fully branded racing trailers with the monster trucks themselves in a grand entrance would be a marvelous way to leverage local media and social network activity.
Of course, there are reasons not to brand these haulers. Any wrap or paint work costs money to create and apply. If the haulers are rented or leased versus owned, the owner may prohibit such modifications or require expensive abrasive blast and repaint of the trailer prior to return. Finally, Monster Jam’s marketing team may have simply chosen not to make the haulers part of their overall marketing strategy.
Your comments are always welcome; tell us what YOU think by submitting a comment below. I’d especially love to hear from any marketing or advertising professionals and if you’re a graphics guru, submit your ideas at cahabatech@yahoo.com or comment below.
Next week we’ll look at a couple of racing series who I think are doing racing hauler marketing RIGHT.