CHARLOTTE, N.C.American Tire Distributors Inc.'s (ATD) Tire Pros Francorp. retail network recently launched its 2015 national advertising campaign involving the integration of multi-level sponsorships and advertisements with six of the nation's top collegiate athletic conferences and networks.
According to Tire Pros, the campaign is designed to build consumer top-of-mind brand awareness of the Tire Pros brand and its nationwide network of independent tire dealer franchisees.
The national advertising campaign kicked off in May with Tire Pros as the presenting sponsor of the 2015 Men's Southeastern Conference (SEC) Baseball Tournamentwith full category exclusivity and branded messages across multiple media platforms that included TV spots on ESPN's SEC Network, streaming video on the WatchESPN app, and digital advertisements on SECSports.com, among the venues.
Over the course of the year's second half, Tire Pros said it also will launch similar multi-layered campaigns as part of its official tire retailer sponsorships with the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big 12, the Mountain West and the Pac 12 Championship game. Tire Pros also will appear on FOX Sports' Big 10 Network in the fall as well as ESPN's SEC Network.
Dan Brown, president of Tire Pros, called the campaign the broadest the group has taken on since ATD acquired rights to the program in 2008.
We started at a very local level with our advertising, then we went from local to regional and then from regional to national, he told Tire Business. We were able to make that progression as the number of dealers continued to increase, and we began to get saturation from coast to coast....
We couldn't just start therewe had to earn our way there as we added more and more dealers across the country.
According to Mr. Brown, Tire Pros has grown to 651 dealers across the U.S.
The focal point of the new ad campaign is on television commercials highlighting Tire Pros, with the first spot unveiling the brand by teasing viewers with a close-up, indistinguishable view of the Tire Pros logo with parts filled with independent dealer-member facesculminating with the full Tire Pros logo slamming down in stadium lights, ATD said.
It noted that the spot urges viewers to experience the difference at a Tire Pros dealer near them, and dealer-members are able to tag the spot with their local branding.
Other spots are scheduled to follow, the company added.
As part of each sponsorship, Tire Pros dealers and their customers will have the opportunity to attend and participate in a number of sporting events through hospitality and promotional sweepstakes opportunities. Tire Pros said its dealers also will be able to promote the relationships with the conferences and the sweepstakes through point-of-sale material and across multiple channels with the help of dozens of digital creative files provided by its marketing department.
Tire Pros said its regional and national dealer councils, along with staff, worked closely to develop the ideas and plans for the 2015 national campaign.
It is truly rewarding to see the result of the hard work of our dealer councils and Tire Pros team payoff with our brand being elevated to a national level, Hootie Gipson, Tire Pros dealer and chairman of the Tire Pros National Dealer Council, said in a Tire Pros press release. We are the strongest group of independent tire dealers in the industry and this campaign is going to help increase brand recognition among consumers nationwide and as well as attract other high quality independent dealers to the Tire Pros franchise.
Wes Stephenson, vice president of operations for Tire Pros, said program members have been working together for years at the regional level to land various sponsorships, becoming the official tire retailer of the University of Virginia athletics department along with teams in multiple sports.
All of those were regional things we've been doing for a couple years now, and from that we've learned that the dealers have an appetite for working together to promote the (Tire Pros) image and the name, Mr. Stephenson told Tire Business. From that we thought, 'What could we do that could tie all of the dealers together within, not necessarily one sport, but within a kind of common purpose?' That's where we came up with the affiliations with various collegiate conferences.
You can see how the national (campaign) grew out of what we had learned on the regional side, he added. Once the dealers saw the success of the regional programs, they became much more willing to participate on the national side as well.
Mr. Brown said the campaign matches up well with its target demographic, as collegiate sports tend to have a higher field of female fans than professional sports. This allows Tire Pros to reach a broader audience.
In addition, fans of collegiate sports teams often are spread throughout the country.
Even though you would think that a lot of sports teams have their biggest base right there in the town they're located, with colleges the alumni tend to move all over the country, and with the growth of cable networks and so forth somebody can be a part of the Big 12 network and pick that up anywhere they are in the country, Mr. Brown said.
So there's a lot of spill-over for all the dealersbenefits for dealers that are not even in the region that has a big presence in the collegiate sports world. They still have customers that have interest in these various teams from around the country.
To reach this reporter: [email protected]; 330-865-6148; Twitter: @Will_Schertz