‘Urinating on their ad creative’
To be sure, urinal mats aren’t for every advertiser; in fact, GoGorillaMedia, a New York vendor of guerilla media that produces message-laden tchotchkes such as swizzle sticks, condoms and matchbooks for clients, said that although many marketers inquire about urinal mats, few pony up the money for a buy. “It is very difficult to get a client past the fact that there’ll be people peeing on their ad creative,” said Joe Bonadio, senior account manager. “It is a challenge.”
But certain clients will venture into unusual media, such as electrically charged vinyl posters in bathrooms. (The electric charge causes the material to stick firmly to a glass surface.) Earlier this year, cable networks TBS’s media buying agency, RET Media in Atlanta, used GoGorilla to post 1,350 charged 5-by-7-inch posters on bathroom mirrors around Los Angeles and New York City. Designed to lure viewers to reruns of Sex and the City, the message read: “Samantha. Richard Wright. Men’s bathroom. Episode 87.”
The packaging of condoms distributed in men’s bathrooms has also become a hot advertising medium. Herc, a maker of a powder used in energy drinks, hired GoGorilla to produce a condom-package-based buzz marketing campaign. It featured creative taglines like “Play Harder” and “Keep it up.” GoGorilla’s senior account manager, Suzanne Hansen, said the message was “very specific to the medium.” Echoed Axe’s Mr. Rubin: “If you have the right creative, there’s a lot of talk value” in bathroom advertising.
But even marketers who buy space in restrooms put a limit on the venue. “I wouldn’t do graffiti advertising in a strip club,” said Ms. Hunt of Sony Music Nashville. “I don’t see [a bathroom] as a negative. We are careful about where we select to put these ads. Ours are right next to [the toilet stall posters of] eyecare physicians, finer lady’s shops and health-care providers.”
Even Ms. Broderick of Starcom Worldwide, responsible for the Conker urinal mats, agreed that “bathroom advertising comes with baggage: It is a bathroom. You really have to work with the humor of the fact that you are in the bathroom. The link between the message, the media and the target has to be at play.”
While decrying the loss of the “good old days,” when going to the bathroom allowed for privacy and a media-free zone, Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, looked on the bright side: “Maybe the benefit is that as bathrooms increasingly become a major place for advertising, we will all see cleaner public restrooms because advertisers will have a vested interest in keeping them that way.” |