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Uneasy riders
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Advertisers now follow you everywhere you go.
Be afraid. Be very afraid
by PHILIP PREVILLE
From an advertiser's perspective, the problem with billboards is that they're trying to reach people on the move, people busy thinking about their own lives or concentrating on the road. In other words, billboards are trying to hit a moving target.
But what if the billboards could move too? What if they could follow people around, everywhere they go--outside their metro station in the morning, on Ste-Catherine at lunch, along the Main in the evening?
Ronald Bérubé figured it was a great idea. His company, Euromobile, is one of the fastest-growing in Quebec. Alas, not everyone shares Bérubé's enthusiasm. Washroom advertising made people mad, but if there's one thing that could possibly be worse than advertisers who watch you pee, it's advertisers who stalk you.
In the beginning: Bérubé first got the idea in 1991 when a couple of fellows from France, whom he'd hired to paint his fence, told him they used to drive mobile advertising trucks in Paris. He got himself a truck and mounted four different-sized billboards on it. His wife supported him for five years while he nearly went bankrupt. "My billboards weren't standard size," he explains. "Advertisers had to adapt to me. To be successful, I had to adapt to them."
Big money: Thanks to some good advice and a $125,000 start-up loan from the federal government, Bérubé went out and purchased three Ford F-350 trucks, then mounted industry standard 10-by-20-foot billboards in the rear cab. In 1996, he finally broke even on revenues of $60,000. Bérubé now has 12 trucks in his Euromobile fleet. Last year, he pulled in just over $1.2-million in revenue. Prices are based on a complex formula depending on the number of days of advertising and the size of the market, but Bérubé says it works out to around $700-900 per billboard per day.
Big trouble: When the MUC Police first saw Bérubé's trucks, the first thing they did was slap him with a $135 fine; according to city bylaws, buses are the only vehicles allowed to display billboards. Bérubé used the money he got from the federal government to sue City Hall, and got an injunction that kept him in business. City Hall says it hasn't given up the fight. "Those vehicles pollute, and they tie up traffic," says city spokesperson Francois Lemay. "And unlike buses, they don't have the added benefit of moving people around. We don't have an exact timetable, but we do intend to act on this issue."
Final factoid: The concave billboard design offers Bérubé many advantages. For one thing, the concave billboard makes it stand slightly shorter than 10-feet high, allowing his trucks to travel beneath short overpasses. For another, he's patented the design in Canada--which helps discourage competition. But competitors have sprung up nonetheless, featuring billboards that rotate and that can even be raised in the air. :
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