Offers to the Gallon

While outrageously high from a historic perspective and tragic in many cases, foreclosures impact a relatively small percentage of the total population. High gas prices on the other hand, you can’t escape. Even if you don’t drive, you have felt the impact of the gas. Food costs more. Airline ticket prices are discouragingly steep. Just looking at the perpetual price creep as you pass the pumps can cause a loss of sleep at night. Companies like Exxon might as well change their taglines to, "Everyday High Prices!" With the price of fuel having both seeped into the national conscience and forced a material change in the lifestyle in a critical mass of people, it was only a matter of time before companies started to leverage this pain point. Take auto maker Chrysler, purveyor of such highly efficient cars as the Dodge Viper and a whole line of fuel parsimonious trucks, for example. In May of this year, they unveiled "Let’s Refuel America", a masterpiece of marketing that offers buyers of select automobiles (sorry Viper enthusiasts) gas at the equivalent of $2.99 per gallon for 12,000 miles per year for the first three years of vehicle ownership. As the company says, "These are challenging times. Fortunately, the Let’s Refuel America Program is doing what it can to help." One’s ability to read that last sentence with a straight face aside, the program, though, ends July 31, 2008, assuming you can also overlook the fact that purchasing a more fuel efficient vehicle would yield higher savings than the guaranteed price for petrol.

The actual mechanics behind Chrysler’s "Let’s Re-Fool America" are complex and involve a partnership with Pricelock. As their name suggests, "Pricelock is the first company that offers patent pending fuel price incentive programs for automobile and other equipment manufacturers, as well as price and budget management solutions for large and small fleets." Doing this requires extreme financial sophistication in the commodities markets and some big cajones. (Interestingly, there is a connection to Pricelock and our industry. Scott Painter, founder of auto lead generation site, Zag.com, is one of Pricelock’s founders. Not your typical direct response marketing, he is "drawn to big, game-changing ideas that solve big problems or make an experience better.") Pricelock though doesn’t work with consumers directly, opening up the market opportunity that MyGallons.com looks to fill, no pun intended. It’s a savings-club much like Sam’s club or Costco with a membership-fee of $29.95 or $39.95, plus a small per use fee. Users pre-purchase gas at $3.99 per gallon for regular. In many major metropolitan markets, this would equal a forty-cent per gallon savings, and if you purchased 90 gallons worth of gas (enough to fill up two cars three times), you’d cover the cost of membership. If gas prices continue along their current pattern, the program could yield a savings more than $1000 for heavy drivers of say Chrysler trucks. Unfortunately for MyGallons, they initially leveraged the same alternate payment infrastructure that Pricelock does, Voyager, run by US Bank that works with approximately 97% of the gas stations, but have run into snags with US Bank not honoring its agreement between MyGallons and one of the fleet card resellers.

What would a solution to rising fuel costs be without a pure-play entrant from our industry and in the form of none other than incentivized marketing. We’re not talking about the hokey MLM looking Ethos website, a nice leverage of the water company of the same name, but America’s Gas Rebate, the quite official sounding site which "has set up a national commercial program design to offer gasoline prices at $2.49 per gallon." It’s run by Mediazone, and I found out about them through the following ad. (True to its name, America’s Gas Relief Program, which runs on the RadioGasDeal.com domain name, does buy radio time to support their marketing efforts, leveraging Google Radio if I had to guess. I heard one of the ads in an NYC taxi.)

A visit to the landing page below shows a much more official looking page than the standard incentive site. Mediazone is far from the first to play on high gas prices for incentivized marketing, but they are the first that I’ve seen to think outside the $500 gas card box.

It’s a lengthy, text filled landing page, and my favorite part is the charts to add to its legitimacy, one of them being a custom designed graphic describing the incentivized marketing process along with a huge GasBuddy.com powered map of prices by region that looks like a weather map.

Confirming availability, i.e., entering one’s zip takes you to the less salesy data collection page, again aided in its legitimacy by real time information from Gas Buddy, or perhaps the useless but mentally soothing lock icon next to the email field.

Submitting data on Step 2 takes users to a WebClients powered incentive path, on submit popping up a non-VCLK incentive wall.

The incentive wall (i.e., page of offers needed to earn monetary credit) includes ads from new start-up GetAds.

All in all, ARGP, is a well-executed site and a step in the proverbial right direction for incentivized advertising. Does it try to play on current pain points? Absolutely. Revolutionary? No. But, it does so with more effort than the ten minute landing page, i.e., there is a greater level of investment than the standard templatized Free XYZ*. The same issues still exist around user quality and intent when seeing a vast majority of the offers that do not relate to the actual fulfillment. For the model to thrive in the long-run that issue needs addressing as the foundation supports the building and not the other way around. One day at a time it seems…hopefully with no survey component though.