Early last summer, Carvertise, Delaware’s first advertising business on wheels, had about a half-dozen clients and 50 vehicles on the road.
At the start of this week, the number had risen to 16 clients and 245 cars – most of them in the Delaware Valley, but some as far away as North Dakota.
It wasn’t one big thing that prompted the three-year-old business’s rapid growth, says cofounder Greg Star. “It’s more like a lot of small things that add up.”
The concept of using cars and trucks for advertising is hardly new. Businesses large and small have painted their vehicle fleets for years and mom-and-pop shops have often used magnetized signs on the doors of their vehicles. “I bet some of Henry Ford’s old Model T’s had a phone number or advertising message painted on the side,” cofounder Mac Nagaswami says.
What’s different about Carvertise is that it pays people unaffiliated with the client business to have their cars wrapped with the client’s advertising message and to drive it to the same places they would usually go – to and from work or school, and on shopping trips – within the target area that the client wants to reach.
Nagaswami had the idea for the business four years ago, while a student at the University of Delaware. While stuck in traffic one day, he realized the potential of turning cars on the road into mobile billboards. Star, also a UD student at the time, heard Nagaswami discuss his concept in one of his economics classes, and soon they formed a partnership.
Nagaswami’s business model was a first for Delaware but not for the nation. “Paid to drive” enterprises had been tried in other parts of the country 10 to 12 years ago, but the model faltered due to rising gas prices, the increased popularity of online advertising and the recession of 2008-2009.
With advances in technology over the past decade, Nagaswami and Star have developed a model that goes far beyond merely wrapping cars with a laminated vinyl advertising message. They select drivers based on their travel patterns – ensuring that they will be on the road where and when the client wants its message heard – and install GPS software on the cars so they can verify that drivers are living up to their end of the deal. “They know we’re monitoring them. They know that if they’re not driving in the needed locations, they will be removed from the campaign,” Star says.
Drivers don’t make big bucks. They receive $100 per month, and most campaigns last four months. However, once the car is wrapped, there’s no extra effort on their part. They just have to drive where they usually drive. (One other thing: Carvertise does brief its drivers on the client’s business and gives them a supply of flyers or brochures from the client. If someone asks them about a campaign, they have the answers ready – making them brand ambassadors for the business.)
Carvertise contracts with Precision Color Graphics, a large-format printer in northeast Wilmington, to create its wraps, and has hired a four-member team that works in the heated bay at the graphics shop to install the wraps.
After landing deals with Kenny ShopRite Supermarkets and United Way of Delaware, Carvertise won its first state contract last spring – wrapping 20 cars in suburban Philadelphia counties with ads promoting Delaware beaches for the State Tourism Office.
The Tourism Office deal led to more work for state agencies – the Department of Health and Social Services and the Delaware State Housing Authority – and the exposure in Philadelphia led to a contract to wrap 30 cars for Thomas Jefferson Hospital.
“It’s continuous hustle,” Star says. “We work very hard, meet as many people as we can, and explain why this new advertising channel makes use for your company.”
Because car wrapping is a unique advertising medium, “when we go on a sales call, we’re not only selling ourselves, we’re also selling the concept,” Star says. “It’s much more of an educational sell. It’s not like selling [a familiar medium like] billboards or a bus wrap.”
But some of that is changing. “Through the internet, we’re getting a lot of traction,” Nagaswami says. (A Google search Monday for “car wrap advertising” generated a list that started with four business ads, and then Carvertise.)
So it wasn’t terribly surprising when Nagaswami got a call this spring from an ad agency representing the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, a nonprofit that operates a golf course and a summer music festival just outside Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the badlands of North Dakota, where billboard advertising is restricted in many parts of the state.
The foundation asked Carvertise to wrap 45 vehicles – 50 percent more than for the Jefferson campaign, their largest to that time, and 1,700 miles from their office in Hercules Plaza in downtown Wilmington. “They forced us to look at our process,” Nagaswami says, “and we realized that it all could be handled remotely, so we gave it a go.”
Using GoogleAds and Facebook, they found more than 100 potential drivers, interviewed them by phone and made their selections. Precision Color Graphics created the wraps and shipped them to North Dakota, where subcontractors handled the installation.
“We’ve show that our model is pretty transferable from market to market,” Nagaswami says. “We can run campaigns from afar.”
As the business has grown, Carvertise has become more sophisticated in its processes, especially in selecting drivers and streamlining its wrap design and installation.
In addition to setting basic criteria for drivers (age 21 and up, clean driving record, own a 2005 model or newer car), Carvertise is drilling deeper into its demographics. For a Wilmington University campaign to promote its master’s degree in nursing program, it looked for nurses and employees at hospitals and other healthcare facilities, Star says. For summer campaigns in coastal Sussex County, it gives strong consideration to workers at the outlets on Route 1 outside Rehoboth, since cars parked in the outlets’ lots can generate hundreds of impressions even while standing still.
For most ad campaigns, Carvertise tries to use mid-size to large sedans, and suggests that clients use a “half-wrap,” installing the ad message only on the sides of the car, and not on the trunk and hood, Nagaswami says. Such standardization permits printing all the wraps in a single size, eliminating the need for customization for different vehicle models, saving money and speeding the installation process.
When Carvertise got started, Star believed that car wraps could be an attractive advertising medium for political candidates, but he soon found that many politicians are risk-averse and accustomed to using the same techniques that worked in the previous election cycle.
This summer, Carvertise landed its first candidate ad campaign – Ciro Poppiti, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, has paid to have five of his volunteers’ cars wrapped.
“It’s actually innovative technology where you’re targeting areas and at the same time the drivers become ambassadors for your brand,” says Poppiti, who cites the Carvertise campaign as an example of his support for small business in a video posted on his campaign website.
Carvertise has already paid out more than $300,000 to its drivers, Star says. Some use the extra cash for their vehicle expenses, and others salt it away for retirement, he says.
“Economic development is important to us,” Star says. “Imagine when we have 1,000 cars on the road – 1,000 drivers making an extra $100 a month.”
We did the math. That’s $1.2 million a year – a nice little boost to a not-so-healthy economy, just for driving around.
