Advertisements, already fixtures on Kyiv shop fronts, bus stops and metro cars, have found yet another venue – the streets.
A new ad medium, consisting of a moving trailer with a 5.1-by-2.4 meter billboard mounted on top, has cropped up recently in Kyiv. The trailers, known as 'mobiles' in the ad business, are pulled around the city streets by cars.
Eridan, the company that claims to have introduced the new medium to Ukraine in October 1999, now runs five mobile trailers around Kyiv's streets – that's 10 advertising surfaces.
'The agency wanted to become a trailblazer in introducing Ukrainian clients to mobiles,' said Sergey Soshinsky, project manager at Eridan. 'At present, six Polish ad agencies specialize in mobile advertising, with approximately 300 mobiles (or 600 surfaces).'
Soshinskiy hopes his company's fleet of mobiles will eventually grow to rival those of the Polish agencies. But to expand, Eridan will have to convince clients of the effectiveness of the medium – no easy task in these days of multi-medium advertising campaigns. But it already has at least one customer.
'Boehringer Ingelheim Ukraine was happy with the results of our advertising on mobiles,' said Andrey Molodorich, the drug company's Self Medication Product Manager in Ukraine.
Molodorich said that sales of his company's cold cure Lasolvan in the early part of the cold season this year matched sales for the peak of the previous year's season. However, he wasn't able to ascribe this success solely to the use of mobiles, as the company used a variety of ad mediums for Lasolvan during the campaign.
Support for the mobile medium has also come from marketing company Obriy Marketing, which conducted a series of interviews before and after Boehringer Ingelheim ran its Lasolvan campaign on mobiles.
According to Obriy, the mobile billboard's large size is an attention grabber. According to its research, 24 percent of the 352 people interviewed on the last day of a week-long campaign recalled the brand's name. A week after the end of the campaign, 9 percent of 350 people interviewed were able to remember the product name.
One factor that might put advertisers off mobiles, however, is the cost. The price for a day's worth of surface space is $85, compared to $450-600 for a month of space on a fixed outdoor billboard.
But the fact that Eridan as yet has no competitor in Ukraine counts in the company's favor.
Building company Kyivmiskbud uses its own three mobiles to advertise its new housing projects, but that space isn't available to other advertisers. So for the moment, Eridan has the road to itself.
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The Leo Group and the MacManus Group have finalized an agreement to merge at the holding company level, creating a new global advertising and diversified marketing services company to be temporarily referred to as BDM, Inc. The merged company will go public with a share issue within 12 to 18 months, depending on the sate of the market, the new company says.
At the company level, ad agencies within the group will still function as separate business units. The new group includes agencies such as Leo Burnett, D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles, Buhler & Partners, N.W. Ayer, The Kaplan Thaler Group and Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
'D'Arcy and Leo Burnett will continue developing as two separate agency brands, both with distinctive heritage, mission and client relationships,' said Oleg Popenko, D'Arcy's managing director. 'The merger adds to the overall stability of both agencies. It also means that one of the strongest competitors on the market becomes our ally, creating an opportunity to join our efforts anytime we feel it can benefit our clients.'
Olena Nikolayenko can be reached at [email protected].
