Britten Media goes after B-to-B and B-to-C event promotion opportunities
PROUD PARENTS celebrating a new birth, Joe’s Tavern hosting a Monday Night Football party and the Warren Rotary Club sponsoring a car wash all have one thing in common: a big event they want to trumpet.
A new site, BannerGalaxy.com (www.bannergalaxy.com), wants to help them do just that. Formed in August, the venture is a spinoff of Traverse City, MI-based Britten Media, a $10 million manufacturer of sports event banners seen annually on over 500 nationally televised events.
With technology/equity partners Byte Productions, Banner Galaxy allows businesses and consumers to create and design their own point-of-purchase or party banners while viewing real-time changes. And of particular interest to associations, clubs, franchises, retail chains and corporations, the service allows their local affiliates to customize banners using a secure set of sign templates that use approved company colors, logos and artwork.
“In the past, a soft-drink manufacturer with 800 bottlers would send a disk or ad slick out and bottlers would create banners at a local sign company in their own neighborhoods,” says Paul Britten, the firm’s CEO. “The end result was wasted transaction time for the bottlers and no banner uniformity.”
With Banner Galaxy’s method of mass customization, any number of banners can be produced with identical brand logos and artwork, while customizing the product for a specific convenience store, neighborhood ad or local event.
Cost, of course, is another consideration for companies that create a large number of banners. The central division of Labatt USA had investigated the possibility of investing in a banner printing machine to cost-effectively create approximately 30 to 40 custom banners monthly for use on premise at bars and festivals, says Joe Warnstedt, Labatt’s graphics manager.
“What I liked most about this was that it was a turnkey project with zero overhead cost and zero maintenance on our end,” says Warnstedt, who met with Banner Galaxy designers to create templates for Labatt’s beer brands. With a laptop and Internet access, anyone using an authorized password can order a banner at any time. Now, Labatt’s sales representatives and wholesalers in the central division can chose a brand-appropriate banner for an event and customize their specific information online within minutes.
“The trend is certainly to create consistency and I’ll be interested in seeing how companies and corporate brands take advantage of this, especially bottlers and distributors where the corporate brand wants to maintain control of basic creative design while letting people in remote geographic locations create their own tailored promotional message,” says Laurie Najjar, editor, Point of Purchase magazine. From their brick-and-mortar business, Banner Galaxy has gleaned about 45 member companies, of which 35 are national fraternities and sororities. To increase the customer base, a direct mail piece was sent in October to Britten Media’s 30,000 existing customers.
Although Kiwanis and Rotary International have already signed on, their membership represents another growth area. “As a company we’re seeing that by going to the top of these associations and becoming the central archive housing their artwork, we’re picking up potentially 5,000 customers instead of a single customer,” says Britten. Each chapter can visit the Web site to promote local events. By entering a user name and password they can enter the “planet” which houses licensed artwork and logos to build a wide variety of customized – yet controlled – banners.
But Britten believes that consumer traffic could potentially dwarf the company’s existing B-to-B infrastructure. Banner Galaxy purchased over 200 domain names geared to specific niche interests in an effort to drive consumer traffic to its site, such as, weddingbanners.com, anniversarybanners.com and hockeybanners.com.
“Every one of those domains becomes a `planet’ in Banner Galaxy. So Banner Galaxy has a gazillion stars and solar systems,” says Britten. “Through the different `doorways’ or `planets’ that consumers can land on, we can accurately track a consumer’s origination.”
He adds: “We expect to have feedback surveys on the site. We hope to ask what other types of templates they’d like to see, such as artwork or new products.” Although the site is now limited to banner creation, future plans include expansion to posters, display materials and digitally printed wallpaper.
Britten sees the 24,000 established small sign shops in the U.S. that specialize in short run orders and banner orders, as the site’s fiercest competition. because of their strong relationships in their local communities.
An expected addition to the experience is a prompting service in which reminders will be sent. For corporate users, a full-time employee will study sports and current events, then e-mail reminders to local wholesalers and bottlers prompting the opportunity for a banner.On the consumer side, customers will be able to opt-in for the service.
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