By Ashley Jordan-Nowe
Inside Tucson Business
Published on Friday, October 26, 2007
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No – it’s a giant foot driving through the streets of Tucson?
During this season of ghosts and goblins, one local technology company is launching a marketing campaign hoping to put the demons of bad IT service to rest, or at least break a few stereotypes along the way.
Nextrio, an IT consulting and software development firm, as part of a word-of-mouth marketing campaign, wants to attract attention and draw viewers to the campaign’s website, www.ithorrorstory.com.
"What better way to generate a buzz than to have an enormous float driving through the streets," said Cristie Street, managing partner of Nextrio, 5225 N. Sabino Canyon Road.
At 28 feet-long, the float is clad with a toe-tag reading "R.I.P Computer Nightmares," and a graveyard of broken computer parts. Banners hang from the side advertising not the company, but the website.
Nextrio chose this unorthodox marketing approach with the hopes of reaching more people and poking fun at the IT industry.
"Tucson is a driving town," said Leslie Perls, principal and creative director of LP&G, the advertising company behind the campaign. "[Nextrio] is a referral-based business. With that in mind we wanted to take a different approach. We wanted a way to break through all the clutter and get people talking."
The website doesn’t directly sell Nextrio’s services, but is instead meant to be an entertainment site and support network for those who have survived awful IT experiences. With blog-style dialogue of real-life IT horror stories, and old black and white horror films dubbed with IT mockery, the site is intended to provide a laugh to those jaded by technology.
"Everyone has wanted to kill their computer at one point or another. We want to poke fun at the negatives within our industry," Street said. "Computers are unknown to many people and the unknown is scary. We want to acknowledge that."
Like many consulting companies, Nextrio receives most of its business from word of mouth, so traditional marketing doesn’t have the same affect, Perls said.
"Consumers have to take in thousands of messages a day. It becomes white noise," she said. "You have to have edge. It can’t always be butterflies and kittens."
And the campaign’s slogan, "We keep IT up," doesn’t evoke images of butterflies or kittens.
"We want people to know that we find value in laughing at ourselves," Street said. "This is just demonstrative of the type of company we are."
The float will be driving throughout Tucson through Halloween.
Ashley Jordan-Nowe is a Tucson-based writer.
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