REPORT #3
(exerpt
from a Time Magazine article)
Author:
Jim Chappell
Get Paid to Drive? We didn't believe it
either at first, so we checked it out. Here's what we found...
Would You Wrap Your Car in an Ad for $400? Of course you would--you're
an American! So here's how it works...
Let's
say someone offers to pay you cash money to get into your car every
day and drive to and from the office, the same as you usually do,
with just one catch. A vinyl wrapper will be stretched over the
car so that it looks like you're driving a pint of ice cream.
You
tastefully decline, choosing not to contribute to a culture in
which everything is for sale and ads are scrawled on every inch
of space that isn't part of someone's forehead. But what if they
paid you enough to wipe out your car payment? Or if the ad were
for something cool, like a dotcom? You're a red-blooded American.
For the right price, of course you'd sell out. So in case you were
wondering 23,000 people got there ahead of you.
"I
was stuck in traffic one day and thought, 'Wow, all these cars
look really boring,'" says Daniel Shifrin, 31, a former executive
headhunter who started Autowraps in San Diego last year and moved
it to San Francisco in February. "I'd read where outdoor-advertising
space was so scarce and the demand was growing, and I thought--the
car is the last form of available real estate out there."
Welcome
to the NASCAR Nation, where a trip to the market may soon seem
like two laps in the Cracker Barrel 500. Shifrin says he's done
$1 million in sales this year and has 160 cars on the road draped
in the same clear-vinyl ads you see on buses. Most of the cars
are in the San Francisco area, where drivers get as much as $400
a month, but Shifrin has business in 11 cities and an online registry
of 23,000 people who want in on the deal.
[One
company] in San Francisco, pays drivers $350 a month to use their
own wheels but hopes to find advertisers who will cough up free
cars.
Shifrin
sees a day when thousands of drivers get car insurance in exchange
for a wrap. Others see the end of the world. "It's the same
as putting a billboard in your front yard. The public realm is
being visually polluted," says Jim Chappell, president of
the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. Gary
Ruskin of Commercial Alert, a Washington watchdog group, wonders
if auto ads can be outlawed as a traffic hazard. "The advertising
industry is in our face at every turn, and many of us feel assaulted."
Wake
up, Gary. The war is over, and you lost. Every other yahoo on the
street is proudly advertising for Tommy Hilfiger, John Deere or
the Boston Red Sox. At least auto wraps drivers get paid.
"I'm making the choice to do with my car as I please,"
says flight attendant Billy Dulin, 33, as we tool around San Francisco
in his Volkswagen Beetle. Dulin pockets $250 a month for a partial
wrap pitching Lowestpremium.com car insurance.
A
full wrap costs about $3,000 to produce, and advertisers pay as
much as $2,000 a month on top of that. One happy Bay Area customer
is Adrienne Kolowich, marketing manager of an online lottery called
LuckySurf.com. She had seven employees' cars wrapped and hired
a full-time driver. "I can have him drive down Highway 101"--where
a billboard can cost $100,000 a month--"or across the Golden
Gate Bridge, or have him hit a Giants game."
Ali
Mohebbi, 45, a restaurant-equipment supplier in San Francisco,
is turning heads at Fisherman's Wharf. His Beetle is wrapped in
a snowy landscape to pitch Dreamery, the gourmet line of Dreyer's
Grand Ice Cream. Passersby take pictures and ask for free samples.
"Let's
say it were a condom ad, Ali--the perfect wrap. Would you still
do it?" I ask. He says there's no way he's driving around
in a condom. A pedestrian stares at Ali's car, looking like she's
already had a scoop or six. "How about this deal, Ali?"
I ask. "You get paid $400 to drive around doing nothing, and
I get paid to ask you stupid questions?" It's America, says
a smiling Ali, who grew up in Iran. "That's why people come
here." He hits the gas, and we're like two nuts in a speeding
sundae, selling, selling, selling as we go.
"It's
like putting a billboard in your yard." --JIM CHAPPELL
COPYRIGHT
Time, Inc.