1000 Rolling Billboards

Traffic, Eyeballs, and Mills or “Why Be a Billboard for a Car Dealership?” 

A conservative estimate would have 1,000 automobiles being driven by persons with a close association with Mills (e.g., students, staff, faculty, administrators).

If each car is driven two hours per day and during an hour it is in front of 10 different other cars then we have 1,000 x 7 x 2 x 10 = 140,000 potential impressions per week. Or 7,280,000 per year.

But how many are we now taking advantage of? How many of the 1,000 potential roving advertisements convey a Mills message? A recent informal survey of the cars parked in front of Mills Hall found one – and this one was on the front, not the back of the car.  That's 1 of 43 cars; it implies we are taking advantage of maybe 3% of the opportunity, under 200,000 eyeballs instead of 7 million per year.

UNIQUE! Only one Mills license plate frame observed on the oval

By contrast, our survey found between 50 and 75% of the cars were advertising car dealerships or, occasionally, other colleges/universities.

 

A Project Idea

Suppose we got a Mills license plate frame on every car. What would it cost? How would we do it?

Cost. A quick look on the web yields costs ranging from less than one dollar (for plastic frames in quantities ~1000) to $11.00 (chromed metal in small quantities). Retail price at Mills bookstore was $8.95.

How. Key thing to wide participation would to be to minimize cost and – even more importantly – to completely remove the hassle of installation. Thus, we might

• distribute with parking tags or at registration. 
• or perhaps even better we simply go around one day and do each parking lot (we might ask people to leave a permission slip on their dashboard or something like that). 
• or just have someone there installing them during registration/orientation. 
• or we tie parking premiums to them – you get to park near your office if you display a Mills license plate frame. 
• or to encourage the practice we could have a bit of a lottery during first month of school. Each day we pick a random number and the Nth car through the gate with a Mills license plate frame that day wins an ____. 

Other Considerations. Should our plates say something other than “Established 1852”? We might get some kick on the campaign if there were some choices. Perhaps ranging from the very sober (see above) to “Not a girls school without men…” or whatever our latest tagline is?  Have enough variety that people in the Bay Area look forward to seeing the next one, collecting them all.  Or maybe a new branding motto that comes out of the strategic planning process?