Infinity Marketing Team

Event Marketer Magazine, April, 2004

When Char-Broil launched its mobile Grilling Team tour last summer, the program had 3.5 days of up-time per week across 13 weeks. This summer, the company went with a regional reincarnation that operated 4.5 days a week. The adjustment gave the barbecue maker 13 additional event days.

The adjustment gave the barbecue maker 13 additional event days

“We decreased the amount of time our team is traveling while we increased the amount of time we spent at events,” says Char-Broil vp-marketing Rob Schwing.

From a scheduling standpoint, mobile tours are getting extreme makeovers as marketers try to get more, waste less, and touch additional strategic touchpoints. The most attention is being given to the all-important “activation days,” the sum of a tour’s weekly up-time. Going up or down by just a half-day can increase or decrease a mobile tour’s up-time by several weeks. “It can make a huge difference,” says Eric Baker, director of client-services at Chicago-based Marketing Werks, which handles the Grilling Team.

As a result, brand managers are beginning the tour scheduling process with activation day forecasts and then building their routes. The heightened focus on up-time has forced a greater debate of regional versus national tours. National programs come with the biggest and the best events across an entire operating region but also low activation day averages. Regional tours come with more up-time (quantity of events) but with fewer quality events to visit.

It’s no longer an either-or decision. Hybrids of the two formats that take national tours on regional swings have become more common. So has the use of several regional tours that together form a national presence. Hewlett-Packard is sending tricked-out Escalades into three regions simultaneously for a collective 500 events through December (Agency: Infinity Marketing Team, Los Angeles).

Other companies are launching national and regional mobile elements for the same tours. eBay just wrapped a program that sent a mobile camp cabin immersion into six markets and a separate scaled-down mobile element into 400 ClearChannel concerts with portable camp tents and instant-win cards (Agency: Ignition, Atlanta). “The concerts got us national frequency, and the [immersion] got us quality interactions,” says eBay senior manager of consumer marketing Carolyn Pollock. “We executed in a way that didn’t sacrifice quality or quantity.”