Marketing to a Captive Audience

By Carol Tice of Entrepreneur.com



Want to catch the eye of high-income customers? Your best chance may come while they wait to board airplanes.

For instance, travelers strolling through Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wis., see a large, backlit poster of the team at Cornerstone Business Services, a business broker based in town. There are two of the luminous, 3 feet by 4 feet posters, one in each airport terminal, so visitors see the ad no matter which airline they fly.

Cornerstone president Scott Bushkie says the company got a good deal, paying $300 a month for the two posters, in part because they signed a multi-year agreement. Since putting up the signs four years ago, Cornerstone's brokered the sale of at least one business whose owner discovered them through the posters and he has heard from many other interested prospects looking to either sell or buy a company.

"It's paid for itself," he says. "A couple of other business owners in my networking group are doing [airport advertisements] as well now."

Airport Advertising's a Worthy Investment
As Bushkie discovered, airports offer a unique opportunity to advertisers looking to reach a wealthy demographic. A study of major airport visitors conducted in 2007 by Arbitron, a media and marketing research firm, showed three-quarters of commercial plane flights are taken by frequent fliers, and those passengers are much more likely to have annual incomes of more than $100,000.

Even better, airport denizens are often idling in the terminal without much to do once they've passed security, says ad agency managing partner Jeff Eberlein of Strata-G Communications in Cincinnati, Ohio.