Last summer we wrote about FreeHand Advertising and its initiative to give free, ad-supported notepaper to college students, and now ABS Notebooks is going a step further and handing out whole notebooks instead.
The Shadow Notebook is a five-subject notebook that gets cobranded with participating colleges and universities across the US and distributed by the school at the start of each semester. The university's logo appears on the cover, and pages of school-related maps and information get included within. Thirteen four-colour, full-page advertisements, meanwhile, act as subject dividers in each notebook, giving advertisers the means to engage students while they are a captive audience in the learning environment. Students, naturally, carry the notebooks with them throughout the day over the course of the semester, which from the advertiser's perspective amounts to 96 impressions over a four-month period, ABS says. So far, about 700,000 notebooks have been distributed to college students at campuses nationwide.
College students spend some USD 198 billion per year, according to Harris Interactive, so it's no wonder advertisers are going to new lengths to reach them. We've now seen free photocopies, free printing, free notepaper, free phone calls and now free notebooks—it all goes to show, there's no such thing as too much free love!
Website: www.absnotebooks.com
Contact: info@absnotebooks.com
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One way of producing useful free things for this market would be to interest a large corporate to give the item for free in exchange for their logo and contact details being placed clearly on the item. This is good marketing for creating consumer awareness for the corporate's brand, to be distributed to the best market one can influence: those about to become buyers.
This is clever. I like clever but let's remember that clever is not good marketing. Good marketing generates desirable results - measurable results like sales and profits. Do you know what kind of results they are getting? What kind of ROI?
While awareness is a good first step to customers becoming familiar with your products, services, and brands - nothing makes a business owner smile about an advertising and marketing investment like an improvement in sales.
Can you do a follow up report about the results of the campaign?
Stacy
http://www.BringBuyers.com
Small Business Will Prevail
Notebook media is a great way to reach college students: high ad acceptance, huge # of impressions over the semester, and university endorsed.
I am the President of GPA Media (www.gpamedia.com) and we've been doing the same thing as ABS Notebooks for 2.5 years now. This media falls in the alternative or non-traditional OOH media segment, which is one of the fastest growing segments in the media industry. Happy to provide anyone with case studies and ROMI figures.
We work with about 70 schools in the U.S., and about 30 in Mexico. We do notebooks, product sampling, and student discount cards.
You can visit our website or call us at (310) 294-3709.
Stacy,
Great point -- it always does come back down to results. Fortunately, the Shadow Notebook has had incredible traction and pull for all our past partners. Wrigley (one of the featured brands in the image above) had a 16X ROI.
You can see some of our case studies at: http://www.absnotebooks.com/mk/case_studies.html
Of course, you can also get in touch with me directly and I could tell you a whole lot more.
PS: To the fine folks at Springwise, appreciate the article. I've always been a major fan and it was great to see our name in the limelight.
Cheers.
Ken
ABS Notebooks
http://www.absnotebooks.com
(312) 265-8388
I'm working on StudyPrint (free printing faclilites) in the UK - I'm really interested to get some free love for students set up here (being a current undergraduate myself) and have been working on them for over a year now. If anyone else is remotely interested it would be great to hear from you!
John Peden
http://studentpreneur.co.uk
John Peden | May 4, 2008 3:02 AM