This Advertising Company I Used to Work For

When there's a good product on the table, how do you take it that extra step further, and make it an amazing product?

I worked for an advertising company that had, in my opinion, a great product. They sold certificates full of buy one get one free coupons, for free oil changes, or buy one get one free ski resort passes, or buy one get one free dry cleaning, and my favorite, buy one get one free movie passes (and some passes were entirely free!) The entire value of these certificates was no less than US $500. And they sold them for anywhere between 20 and 40 bucks.

Would you buy one of those if you ordered pizza fairly regularly and you ordered 2 pizzas at a time? I would and I did! I paid 25 bucks and got 4 oil changes and a bunch of other discounts on brakes, alignments, and other stuff. Normally I'd pay 25 bucks for one oil change, so the deal made perfect sense. I dont ski, but the people I knew that did, were all over our sking certificates- that stuff can get expensive, and more often than not, you dont go sking alone! And the certificates came with buy one get one free meals at the ski resort restaurant and other goodies.

The way this was marketed was going door to door or business to business. This way, 90 percent of the houses or businesses we went to heard the name "Pizza Hut" or "Sam's Dry Cleaning". How did we know where to go? We located the business we were doing this promotion for, and drew a 5-10 mile radius around it. We broke up the map into grids, and targeted these grids. Everyday, a sales rep would go to a new grid, and there were anywhere between 5-15 sales reps working every day. That's a lot of word of mouth advertising. And even if people dint buy these certificates, they heard the name of the company we were representing, so the next time they were going to order pizza, Pizza Hut was probably one of their choices.

Our advertising company did not charge these Pizza Huts anything for doing them this great service. Pizza Hut had their name out in the public without paying a cent for this advertising - ofcourse, to get something, you gotta give something - all they gave up was a free pizza or 4 bucks off a large pizza. But wait, most people, if they think they are getting something for free, or they think they are getting a good deal, they will reward themselves for it... so, yea, i'm ordering 2 pizzas, i'm getting one for free, why dont I go ahead an order some wings since I saved on the cost of that second pizza. Or, my movie ticket was free, so I'll get myself some popcorn. Do you think one seat at a movie theatre was a lot to give away for the Cinema? Probably not... however, they just made 3 or 4 bucks on that popcorn you just bought, and that cost them 20 cents.

Great idea right? I certainly think so. So, why aren't more companies doing this? I know of one company that was a client of ours, and after our promotion was over, they decided to make their own certificates and sell them at their store. It was a local automotive repair shop. Apparently, the promotion we did for them brought in so much business, they loved the idea of these certificates and started designing and printing them themsevles. This way, they weren't giving away free oil changes, but were still getting the money for the certificates, and the customers that already went to them, had to option of getting their certificates directly from them and they got to save a bunch of money on their cars maintainance costs.

Why aren't we seeing these certificates at more stores? If I went to Applebees once a month, every month, and I always went with a friend, I would give them a one time payment of 20 bucks if I got buy 1 get one free meals for a year. That would cut the dinner bill in half every time and I would make my 20 bucks back in a few visits there, even faster if my friend split the 20 bucks certificate with me.

I think the idea the advertising company had was a great one- there's nothing like word of mouth advertising. Companies need to smart up and do this for themselves if the advertising companies aren't doing it for them. This way, Pizza Hut gets to keep the money from the certificates, not the advertising company.