Mobile billboards

Laranzo Dacres, Gleaner Writer

The Castrol Car

While most business owners use traditional methods of advertising their products, there are the more adventurous ones among us who opt to go the unorthodox way, by placing their billboards on wheels.

One such is Tropical Batteries Jamaica Limited, distributors of Castrol oil.

Cruising around on 22" run-flat tyres is the Castrol car, which is a 1-series BMW hatchback wrapped with the Castrol logo, featuring a larger-than-life oil bottle on the roof.

According to Catherine Collins, sales and marketing manager at Tropical Batteries Jamaica Ltd - distributors of Castrol - with this 'moving billboard' her organisation can map out a route to capture the attention of the target market.

"The moving billboard allows us to take our advertising message to each of the locations we target, thereby increasing the visibility of the brand in the eyes of the consumers," she said.

"In making the decision to use this non-traditional method of advertising, we looked at the costs associated with a regular billboard - taking into consideration the visibility that we needed for the product - and found that in order to reach the wide market we identified, we would need to rent several billboards positioned in strategic places," she explained.

mobile extras

Instead, Collins said her company chose to buy the BMW so it could be available for use in any promotion, at any time and in any place.

The car is fitted with a state-of-the-art multimedia system, Goodyear's Extended Mobility (run-flat) tyres for a better cross-country driving experience and logo wrapping, among other extras, at a cost of about J$4.5 million. In fact, the multimedia system features an Alpine 9884 head unit, DVD player, 19" flat screen TV, two 800W JBL amplifiers, two 12" Kicker subwoofers and audio pipe tweeters, which Tropical Batteries Jamaica uses to provide entertainment for the company's promotional events.

"We chose the BMW because of the premium appeal it has in the market place. In addition, BMW recommends Castrol as the oil of choice for all its models, therefore, it made sense to forge a strategic partnership," Collins explained.

So successful has been the innovative advertising approach for the Castrol oil brand, that Tropical Batteries recently acquired a Toyota Tundra 2009 which has been wrapped with the Good Year logo.

Another brand outside of the Tropical Batteries listing which has also used the 'mobile billboard' effectively is the Red Bull energy drink. That product is wrapped around a two-seater Mini Cooper, featuring a supersized Red Bull canister at the back of the vehicle. Efforts to speak with a representative of the brand to ascertain the effectiveness of the non-traditional method of advertising were unsuccessful as Automotives was advised that it was against company policy to do so.

The Red Bull car - photo by brian carless