When you visit Las Vegas and its airport, you’ll experience the pinnacle of out-of-home media noise. The volume of messages, seemingly pasted to every surface and shouting at you from dozens of video screens, is overwhelming. In fact, it’s ridiculous. No single message breaks through, and the tourists remember none of it. I know; I’ve tested this. Surveying that overgrown media jungle I suspect that the advertisers represented on the Strip’s billboards, taxi-tops and video screens are playing an expensive game of defense. “If the competition is there, we better be there, too.” If the US Army is looking for more outlets to waste its marketing dollars, they should take look at Las Vegas. And the airport is a prime example of advertising run amuck.

Anyone with an advertising budget to protect should certainly consider airport advertising.

But Las Vegas’ airport?  Its soil has been tilled so many times, only the hardiest of crops- very strong brands with very deep pockets- can take root there. But allow me to contradict myself in the next paragraph.

Airport advertising can be a very effective mechanism for both building a brand and building a customer database.

Smaller, regional airports represent a golden opportunity to prospect for new business, particularly for regional brands with limited marketing dollars to spend. Generally, these small airports are less noisy media-wise, and passengers appear to flow through with less urgency than their big city counterparts. We have several of these regional airports within an hour’s drive of our three Alabama properties. The airports cater primarily to local area travelers, and many of them are high frequency fliers, passing through the same terminals several times a year. Interestingly, tourists traveling to our part of the country usually arrive by car, not airplane.

We’ve experimented with airport advertising that attempts to combine a brand message with a tactical component, usually an offer that can be delivered to a phone, redeemable at one of our resorts. The reason for doing this is simple- we need to measure our brand advertising effectiveness. There have been some epic fails. I was an early adopter of QR codes as a means to engage people with our advertising, but I have since abandoned all hope that our target customer will ever get comfortable with this technology. QR codes don’t work for us. On the other hand,

the mobile device remains a very effective tool for audience engagement, and when combined with an SMS opt-in message, an indispensable marketing channel for building a customer database.

Pictured above is Wind Creek’s latest effort to reach its target audience through airport placements. These display ads are adjacent to the baggage claim area at Pensacola Airport- brightly colored, eye-catching posters featuring a text-in offer. This is a tactic that will absolutely not work in a noisy media environment.

The ads work well here because the audience is fixated on the baggage carousel and is therefore more likely to read the ad in its entirety and the noise level is low- there is a limited amount of advertising in this area of the terminal.

This works to our advantage and the evidence is in the response: the ads paid for themselves within three months. As a casino company, we are very good at counting, and what we count here are two things: new members in the database, and the revenue that these new members are generating in our casinos.

The takeaway? We created a measurable brand campaign that works, and you can take that to the bank.