NU6 - A New Idea for Advertising by ML

A New Idea for Advertising
By: R100022

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the flashing neon signs used for advertising that was dotted along EDSA. As I grew older however, these signs were slowly replaced by huge lighted billboards and LED screens. Now, we are bombarded with many forms of advertising, whether on billboards, on TV, on the internet, on magazines, or even on small screens inside taxi cabs. We have to face it... no matter what form they may be in, advertising is and will always be present in our daily lives. My new idea involves a new and different venue for advertising a company's products and services, which if used correctly has the potential to be very effective.

Most if not all airlines nowadays allow consumers to book and pay for their tickets online. After completing the transaction, an e-ticket will be sent to the passenger through email. Some airlines also allow passengers to check-in online several hours before the actual flight. In such cases, the passengers' boarding passes are also sent through email. In both cases, these emailed documents are required to be printed out by the passenger and presented upon check-in. The same goes to online booking for many hotels around the globe—customers complete the transaction online and the hotel sends the printable accommodation voucher through email.

This presents an opportunity for these establishments such as Cebu Pacific Air, Philippine Airlines, and Shangri-la Hotel, to offer ad space in their printable e-tickets, boarding passes, or vouchers. There is a ton of potential for this since most of the time these establishments already require some information about the passengers (i.e. gender, birthday, location). Since they already have access to this valuable information, they could therefore opt to offer targeted ad placements to advertisers which has the potential to be more effective than traditional ads.

For example, a Singaporean women's apparel store could buy ad space in all e-tickets/boarding passes of women headed for Singapore. They could place advertisements that come in the form of discount coupons to their stores. This would be a win-win-win situation for the airline (who would have earned from the ad placement), the passenger (who would have a discount she can avail), and the advertiser (who would have more customers).

To take this idea further, instead of individual companies looking for individual advertisers which could be time consuming and inefficient, it is also possible to create an agency, a middle man of some sort, to centralize this process. This agency would partner with the many hotels and airlines around the world and create a catalogue of advertising opportunities that could be presented to advertisers.  The potential for an operation like this is endless.4