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First State tries new technique to lure beachgoers from Jersey to Delaware

Photo courtesy: Carvetise

Ever hopeful of luring sun worshipers bound for the Jersey shore to the beaches of coastal Sussex, the Delaware Tourism Office is rolling out a fresh marketing tactic this year.

And “rolling out” really is the proper term, because the effort calls for using what amounts to mobile billboards  -- 20 cars neatly wrapped with a promotional message cruising highways in Montgomery and Chester counties in Pennsylvania from now until the end of July.

Orchestrating the $24,900 campaign are two University of Delaware graduates, Mac Nagaswami and Greg Star, who named their business so it describes exactly what they do: Carvertise.

“Carvertise is an up-and-coming form of advertising that’s very targeted,” making it ideal for testing new strategies in tightly defined markets, says Linda Parkowski, state tourism director.

The two Pennsylvania counties were targeted because they’re affluent and have a high percentage of women who are making travel decisions for their families, Parkowski says. The Tourism Office’s primary marketing targets are women age 35 to 55 in households where the head earns $75,000 or more a year.

And, she says, both counties are areas where beachgoers have traditionally been more likely to head to New Jersey than to southern Delaware.

“We considered not only the counties’ residents, but also the people who work in those areas and commute through them,” adds Eric Ruth, Tourism Office spokesman. “We found that the Main Line area is an especially high-traffic area, and sees daily commuters who are coming in and out of Philadelphia.”

The cars have been wrapped with an image of waves gently lapping a Delaware beach and incorporate the tourism office’s “Endless Discoveries” tagline and a suggestion to “Begin your journey at VisitDelaware.com/Beach.”

Carvertise offers the Tourism Office – and other clients as well – some unique benefits, says Star, Carvertise’s chief operating officer.

First, as a new advertising format, it delivers “exposure in a different way,” thus making a deeper impression.  In addition, it offers clients “an intelligent match” by recruiting drivers who live and work in the areas the client wants to reach.

A third benefit, while hardly unique, is Carvertise’s ability to reinforce the advertising message through the power of word-of-mouth communication. As Star explains it, once drivers have their cars wrapped, they attract the attention of family, friends and co-workers, creating an instant conversation starter that enables drivers to deliver another nudge to promote the product that’s posterized on their car. 

To give that word-of-mouth communication added impact, Parkowski says that Carvertise drivers will be given a supply of brochures promoting Delaware beach attractions that they can hand out if anyone asks them for more information.

“Drivers can also take a picture of their car and post it on our Instagram account. We hope it creates a lot of interaction and buzz,” Parkowski says.

The “tourism campaign will generate more than 5 million impressions, at a minimum, and that’s being conservative,” Star says.

To monitor those impressions, Carvertise installs a GPS system in each car it wraps, and the company’s tech gurus, Aaron Kessler and Scott Tian, have devised a user interface that clients can check out at any time of day. The interface gives the location of each vehicle, how many miles have been logged and, based on traffic patterns for the time of day the vehicles are on the road, an estimate of how many people have seen the rolling billboards.

Delaware beaches attract more than 6 million visitors a year, with Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York and Virginia providing the largest numbers of visitors from other states, says Carol Everhart, executive director of the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce.

Visitation was essentially the same in the first three months of 2015 as it was in the same period last year – a little more than 26,000 people, but that’s not bad when multiple snowstorms are considered, Everhart says.

Early indications are that the 2015 beach season may be better than last year’s. Property managers have already requested more than 14,000 “Realtor bags,” packets filled with visitor guides, maps and coupon offers, from the chamber, an increase of more than 2,000 over last year, she says.

Tracking how well the Carvertise campaign pays off will require a bit of guesstimating, Parkowski says, because there’s no precise way of determining how many summer beach visitors will make their vacation decisions based on seeing a mobile ad.

The plan, she says, is to track inquiries for state travel guides and other visitor information by ZIP code to see whether more inquiries are coming from Montgomery and Chester counties. If the numbers are up, she says, “we would at least know that we have created the intent to travel.”

The Carvertise campaign isn’t the Tourism Office’s only beach promotional campaign this year. On its Facebook page, the office is offering a chance to win a three-night beach giveaway to those who make an online request for beach travel information.

Carvertise landed the contract for the beach marketing campaign by requesting a meeting with state Tourism officials. The Tourism office didn’t put out a formal request for proposals “because nobody else in the area does this,” Parkowski said.

At the meeting, she said, “they showed us other clients they have worked for and how their projects have been effective.”

Nagaswami, the company’s CEO, started the business, originally called Penguin Ads, in the summer of 2012 while still a student at the University of Delaware. He got the idea, while sitting in traffic one day, noticing the density of cars on the road and thinking about how drivers might get paid while spending time on the road. That led to his vision of everyday drivers having their cars wrapped in ads that could easily been seen by other drivers, and pedestrians as well.

Star met Nagaswami that fall, when Nagaswami made a presentation about the business to one of Star’s economics classes. After the class, they talked, and they soon began working together and became partners.

Like most small businesses, they started slowly, sometimes taking on clients who wanted only one car wrapped. And that one car was often the one Nagaswami or Star was driving. “You’ve got to walk the walk,” Star says.

In late 2013, they got their first big break, landing a deal to wrap 15 cars to promote the Kenny Family ShopRite Supermarkets and, soon after that, the United Way of Delaware annual campaign.

In the spring of 2014, Star met with Wilmington entrepreneur Barry Schlecker, owner of Barry’s Events, to discuss a possible promotion for the Rockwood Ice Cream Festival. From that meeting came the suggestion to change the company’s name from Penguin Ads to Carvertise, which would concisely reflect the core function of the business.

“I took the idea back to Mac,” Star recalls. “We realized there was no name for the industry yet. ‘Carvertise’ was a natural, so why wait to change the name?”

The new name has helped with branding the business, Star says. “‘Carvertising’ is a word that’s really catching on. It’s becoming part of the everyday vocabulary, at least in my experience.”

Growing steadily, Carvertise has a client roster that also includes the University of Delaware, Wilmington University, the Delaware 87ers basketball team and Naturalawn of America.

Carvertise subcontracts with a Wilmington business, Precision Color Graphics, to print and install the full-color wraps on drivers’ vehicles. Drivers – there are more than 2,280 from Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey are already in its database – are paid $100 a month. They need insurance, a good driving record and “a presentable vehicle” that would make a good impression for Carvertise’s clients, Star says.

Because word-of-mouth is a component of every campaign, Star says that he and Nagaswami interview every driver to make sure they have positive feelings about the business they will be promoting on their car.

Star and Nagaswami attribute their early success to a broad range of mentors and supporters in Delaware’s entrepreneurial community, including the Delaware Economic Development Office, UD’s Horn Program in Entrepreneurship, the Start It Up Delaware and 1313 Innovation incubation spaces and the state and New Castle County chambers of commerce.

“We’re learning,” Star says. “With every new client we have, we have to prove our success.”

Larry Nagengast, a contributor to Delaware First Media since 2011, has been writing and editing news stories in Delaware for more than five decades.
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