Slobberfest Afterglow

Well it’s over (Slobberfest), and it was a success. We had an excellent turnout, despite this being the first year for the event. The massive coverage provided by Charter Media really spread the word. What I’m depending on for next year is a little word-of-mouth action triggered by the intrusive media reminders. The Humane Society came out well, and were very pleased with the event. I think, overall, that everyone involved was able to take away something beneficial.

I’m finishing up some Spay and Neuter PSA’s right now, which will run for a while in the aftermath of the event. I’ve rewritten the script too many times, trying to come up with a way of being clever and convincing at the same time, without coming across as scolding and/or cheesy. It’s an interesting position to attempt.

I know that the searches on our website for “Circle Six Design” went up 500% after the Slobberfest ads with our tag started running. Same for The Urbane Animal. I worked part of the day at Urbane and there were a lot of first time customers (that made purchases!). That’s the beauty, to me, of intrusive media. If you have enough saturation and enough repetition, you’ll get people to stop by without realizing they were affected by what they saw during the Twins game. None of the new customers at The Urbane Animal said “yes, I saw your commercial and had to come by and check it out.” They just felt inexplicably drawn to stop in whilst driving past, even though they had driven that route many times before. This time, the name stood out and triggered something in their awareness. That’s when it works. I’m considering seeing if we can afford a direct mail campaign before the first anniversary to capitalize on all of the intrusive media work we’ve done over the last year. A targeted postcard with a call to action could literally flood the store for a couple of days, bolstering sales and reminding people that it exists. Everyone loves a busy store.

Back at Circle Six, we’re still working on getting together enough capital to comfortably expand our ranks. There are several large contracts we would love to go after, and are confident we could obtain, but just don’t have the manpower to follow through on them. It’s kind of a rock/hard place situation, not being able to get contracts because we don’t have enough people, and not being able to add people because we don’t have the contracts. I guess that would actually qualify as a Catch-22.