In your city, there may be fifty or more local McDonald’s, Subway sandwich locations, and as many of the various restaurants under the Yum Brands umbrella (KFC, Long John Silver, Pizza Hut). In fact, in every metropolitan area, these major franchises are grouped into local advertising buying groups or “cooperatives”. So in addition to advertising that is purchased nationally by the franchisor, the local coop group purchases advertising that is only displayed in one specific territory, region, or metro area.
If you own several Spark promotional vehicles, you can enter into a long term contract with the local restaurant coop group that will give that group exclusive use of one or more of your vehicles to promote their brand. It will be a very affordable ad buy for the franchise group, and a profitable venture for you. Here’s how it might work for a local McDonald’s group:
- One or more Spark Expo trucks is dedicated to the McDonalds coop group.
- The trucks are completely wrapped in McDonalds graphics.
- The trucks are parked in high visibility locations at each McDonalds store for a week at a time throughout the term of the contract. (you should coordinate the parked locations to be near one of the building’s exterior power outlet so it’s possible to plug into the truck’s external AC power port)
- Alternately, the trucks can be taken to special events in the community during the term of the contract.
Taking advantage of Spark’s computerized media platform, you can build a series of ads that are broken up into day parts. During the morning, the digital displays show ads for McDonald’s breakfast menu items, and then automatically at 10:30AM, the playlist changes to show a series of ads that feature the lunch menu, and then again in the mid afternoon, the ads might switch to milkshakes, snacks, and other after-school items. You can even show information like the current time and temperature in between each ad, to make the displays more relevant to the local audience.
Each week, or even every few days, the truck would move to a different McDonalds in the area. Local motorists would begin to believe that many of the trucks have been deployed.
At any time during the year-long campaign, you can easily change the ads for McDonalds by logging into your private online ad server account. Uploading new content takes less than a minute. You can even give the franchise group’s local ad agency a secure login into the system, and they can manage their own content.
This business model is extremely low overhead for a Spark truck owner, since the trucks are almost exclusively parked and don’t require daily fuel and driver expenses.