Andrew Amaro. (Photo by Darren Brown, OBJ)

A growing number want you to advertise on their cars

For two hours a day, five days a week, Andrew Amaro sits in his Volkswagen Jetta, crawling along the Queensway in rush-hour traffic and staring out his window.

The electrical engineer senses an opportunity in the lack of advertising along highways 417 and 174, and with that a chance to make money during his daily commute from Orleans to Bells Corners, by selling space on his car for magnetic ads.

"I noticed a couple of people had stickers on their cars and licence plate holders have the names of (auto) dealers. I figured, why not use the entire car to do that, because we're all advertising without knowing it," said Mr. Amaro, who started his advertising venture – called Your Ad on My Car – about two months ago.

With a current fleet of three vehicles available for advertisements and plans to expand to other cities, Mr. Amaro is just one of a growing number of entrepreneurs offering themselves or their assets as advertising vehicles.

This format of using individuals to market a message or product falls under the umbrella of guerrilla marketing, typically defined as substituting brains for money in a marketing campaign, said Bruce M. Firestone, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Ottawa's Telfer School of Management.

When told of Mr. Amaro's business, Mr. Firestone drew parallels to an ad website launched by British university student Alex Tew called the Million Dollar Homepage. Marketing it as "a piece of Internet history," Mr. Tew sold a million pixels for $1 each to advertisers to display their logos, graphics or slogans, each linked to their respective websites.

The end result is a novel webpage crammed with a dizzying number of tiny boxes in a retina-burning array of psychedelic colours.

Although Mr. Tew has already made his million, Mr. Firestone cautioned guerrilla marketing campaigns such as the Million Dollar Homepage and private vehicle advertising often have trouble cracking the mainstream advertising market.

"If you look at the Million Dollar Homepage, you see casinos, you see hosting services, you see party poker...You probably don't see too much Microsoft or IBM.

"One of the things you have to look out for in guerilla marketing is that it's got to appeal, in most cases for long-term viability, to the top brands. And the top brands are very careful what they associate themselves with," said Mr. Firestone.

Mr. Amaro, who affixes heavy-duty, custom-printed magnets onto his car, markets his service as a low-cost alternative to other forms of advertising such as bus displays. He also hopes to distinguish himself by promoting the flexibility of magnets, which can be changed to promote, for example, a new weekly special at a restaurant or an upcoming festival that only needs one month of advertising.

Mr. Amaro said he hopes the flexibility and lower cost will separate his service from vinyl vehicle wraps, traditionally applied to fleet vehicles of contractors and television stations. These wraps are also used by companies to advertise their products on non-commercial vehicles as everyday people drive to work or go shopping. Earlier this year, two Montreal men in their early 20s founded Media in Motion, which pays drivers up to $400 a month to drive their cars while wrapped in vinyl advertising.

"It's cheaper than a billboard, and companies are always looking for a new advertising angle," said co-founder Franco Perrotta.

The company has about 40 wrapped vehicles on the road and has attracted clients as large as Molson, said Mr. Perrotta. Like Ottawa's Mr. Amaro, the Montreal duo plan to expand into other Canadian cities.

But unconventional advertising campaigns tend to benefit from a first-mover advantage that limits long-term growth, said Mr. Firestone. In addition to the danger of consumers becoming accustomed to seeing advertising on cars, there are already signs that the supply of automobile owners willing to put ads on their vehicles already outstrips the amount of companies looking to advertise.

Alfred Coates, president of Ottawa-based Threepods Marketing Communications, said he's been contacted by several drivers looking to make money, but has not found anyone willing to pay.

The biggest obstacle, he added, is that there's little way for advertisers to measure the impact or return on private vehicle advertising, especially in a city like Ottawa that lacks the urban density of larger centres such as Los Angeles or New York.

"At least when you're buying bus ads, which are very popular, you know that buses are going to be on a certain route all day long," said Mr. Coates.

Nevertheless, he acknowledged the role of individuals in marketing a company's message and, as an example, pointed to a Mini Cooper campaign encouraging consumers to visit the company's website and create their own commercials, which were then uploaded online and rated by other users.

The trick, said Mr. Coates, is being creative enough to overcome the public's looming exhaustion with advertising.

"I think people are sick of advertising. It is in the public sphere everywhere and there comes a point where people (say), 'Stop bugging me.'"

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IN BRIEF

Prominent guerrilla marketing campaigns

Labatt ran a campaign encouraging friends to send and sign e-mail petitions encouraging the Ontario government to create a new long weekend in June.

Taco Bell floated a target in the Indian Ocean during the de-orbiting of the Mir space station and said if any pieces of the decommissioned space station hit the target, they would give a free taco to everyone in the continental United States.

Jubilee Fine Jewellers in Ottawa ran a promotion in Christmas 2004 promising a full refund to all customers who bought merchandise between Dec. 9 and Dec. 24 if more than eight inches of snow accumulated at the airport on Dec. 31.