Seidio Rides Las Vegas Monorail Campaign to CES Publicity Windfall

The company, four-time CES exhibitor Seidio, came to the show intent on transforming itself into a “widely recognized brand,” said its communications manager, Jack Yang. Though the company is now working earnestly to transform show leads into sales, Seidio through its monorail branding attracted to its booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s North Hall “a lot of converted traffic that we wouldn’t have had otherwise because no one would have known we were there,” Yang said.

In late-October planning meetings for CES, several among Seidio’s marketing team discussed “how cool it would be to do some public outdoor transit advertising” during the show, Yang said. “But it was really hard for us to pinpoint an exact location in Las Vegas to do a public outdoor advertisement.” Before long, the team “sat down and talked about the pros and cons” on wanting to “wrap” an entire monorail train, inside and out, with the Seidio messaging, he said. “To us, at the end of the discussion, the pros easily outweighed the one con, cost,” which Yang estimates ran the company about $80,000. The Seidio-outfitted train went “live” the Friday before CES and stayed live through the following Sunday, two days after CES closed for its 2013 run, he said.

Internally, around Thanksgiving time, “the general debating process was to talk about how we were going to make Seidio a widely recognized brand,” Yang said. “The brand already has strong presence in the wireless accessories industry. It’s just that as a consumer brand in general, how do we go about making people find out about us?” The monorail serves not only the CES crowd, but also the tourists who happen to be visiting Las Vegas during the show. “When we were crunching all the numbers, we decided to go with it,” he said.

For its $80,000 investment, Seidio got “the full outside wrap” of the four-car train, plus the train’s entire interior, except the ceilings, Yang said. The company opted out of the ceilings because “we felt that would've been maybe a little too much,” he said. Seidio did opt to inundate the train’s floors with its logo, messaging and booth number, but not without some soul-searching debate, Yang said. “The floors were a big one for us, but my CEO at first didn’t like that because he didn’t want the brand that he built to be soiled by the people who got on the train,” he said. “It’s interesting, because the floor’s really the first thing people look at when they board the train. They're minding the gap between the train and the platform, and the logo being right there just immediately grabs their attention by saying, ‘Oh, this is not your typical linoleum floor.'"

Seidio signage on the outside wrap of the train was identical on both sides, Yang said. The outside of the first and fourth cars bore Seidio’s corporate logo, while the second car’s exterior sported its “Smarter Mobile Accessories” tagline and the third had its North Hall booth location, he said. “We could've done a lot more,” he said. For example, “they gave us options to print four-color, but we wanted to keep it simple.” Seidio worked hand-in-hand with Las Vegas-based Elite Media, a multi-city specialist in large signage and billboards, Yang said.

This CES was Seidio’s fourth in a row and it marked the first time the company mounted a booth as large as 1,200 square feet, Yang said. That’s double its exhibit space at the 2012 show and three times as large as the booth it mounted in 2011, he said. “The booth got progressively bigger, so I can’t say all the increased traffic came from the monorail,” he said. “The bigger booth definitely did its part.” But preliminary data from the CES badges that Seidio scanned showed traffic to the booth more than doubled from last year, he said. And Yang said he personally greeted many visitors who saw the company’s logo and messaging blasted on the monorail train, and “made a mental note to stop by the booth next time they were in the area,” he said. Other visitors to the booth had heard of the Seidio brand before, but the monorail branding served for them as a reminder to visit the booth, he said. “Our whole mission was to get you interested, and hopefully get you to stop by the booth,” not sell a product, he said.

Based on its experience at this CES, there’s a “fairly positive indication” inside Seidio that it will repeat the monorail campaign at next year’s show, Yang said. “Time will tell.” Seidio plans to exhibit at the CTIA 2013 show May 20-23 in Las Vegas, but will forego advertising on the monorail for that event, Yang said. That’s because the Sands Expo and Convention Center, where CTIA 2013 is being held, has no monorail station. Monorail trains overhead pass near the Sands, but over the rear loading docks, well away from the view of crowds entering the facility through its Sands Ave. entrance or via the Venetian Hotel, Yang said.

The four-mile-long Las Vegas Monorail has been dogged by financial problems and declining ridership since it opened to the public in 2004, though CES each year has temporarily lifted the system from its ridership doldrums, when tens of thousands of fare-paying CES showgoers typically file through the system’s turnstiles (CED Feb 20/07 p6). Yang said Elite Media made Seidio no guarantees about how many advertising impressions it would make if it plastered company messaging inside and out on a four-car train. Instead, Elite Media trumpeted success stories of other companies that have purchased train wraps in the past, he said.

Las Vegas Monorail Authority representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment on how many riders typically crowd the system during the four-day run of an average CES. The authority releases ridership data on a quarterly basis, so 2013 statistics aren’t yet available. In calendar 2012, 4,128,134 customers rode the system, which was 16.2 percent fewer than 2011’s ridership, the authority said. Though total CES attendance has been on the rise each of the last three Januaries, ridership in that 2012 month was 382,217, or 14.4 percent lower than ridership in January 2011.