Brothers launch car wrapping business Wrappr
Brothers Liam and Jonte Shaw have launched Wrappr, a car wrapping business which aims to challenge the OOH industry.
The announcement:
Car wrapping – why it hasn’t worked before and how we figured it out
Startup brothers Liam and Jonte Shaw are picking up steam with Australia’s top brands, having reinvented the way wrapped cars will play into the modern marketer’s outdoor media mix. Wrappr, the new OOH media brand, combines consumer advocacy with wrapped cars to create a measurable, mobile, dynamic outdoor medium.
Marketers have been sceptical of car wrapping in the past, and for good reason. Up until Nielsen’s most recent 2019 Out of Home Advertising report, car wrapping performance has received very little attention from industry research bodies. Now, with third-party validation of the format, wrapped cars are set to become a much more frequent addition to the media mix.
The Nielson report found that:
1. Wrapped cars are the most noticed transit media format:
○ 326% more than rail ads
○ 106% more than taxis ads
○ 16% more than bus ads
2. Wrapped cars are the second-most noticed OOH media format overall
○ 64% more than street furniture ads
○ 36% more than posters
○ 16% more than digital billboards
The Wrappr model allows brands to build ownership of a local area, and/or ownership of a customer persona. Having spoken to numerous others that have pursued similar media models, Liam and Jonte identified the three largest barriers to car wrapping success – previously, car wrapping companies would:
1. have no way of ensuring safe driving from their drivers,
2. have little-to-no way of tracking performance, and
3. did not align the drivers with the brands they were promoting
To test their solution to these problems, whilst working with Foodora, Liam developed the concept for Wrappr and engaged the delivery service for what turned out to be a highly successful pilot campaign. Foodora ran a performance test between three cities – Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. In Melbourne and Sydney, Foodora spent 80% of its out-of-home budget on traditional outdoor advertising – billboards, bus wraps, station domination campaigns etc. In Brisbane, Foodora spent its remaining 20% of budget on Wrappr, with 20 Wrappr Advocates, and had the same investment in digital marketing as both Melbourne and Sydney.
Over six months, Brisbane sales grew by 108%, while sales in Melbourne and Sydney grew only 34% and 1% respectively. That’s an increase of more than 74% in sales between cities, with less than half of the investment.
Foodora country manager Jeroen Willems attributed the success of the campaign to the fact that Wrappr was able to provide out of home advertising at a “fraction of the cost of traditional options”, and that the format gave them “much more precision than otherwise would be possible in out of home.”
How Wrappr works
The goal of a Wrappr campaign is for brands to build ownership of a local area, and/or ownership of a customer persona. The company currently services all capital cities and regional centres in Australia.
Brands come to Wrappr with their campaign KPIs – including which postcodes they would like to target, and the kilometres their Advocates need to drive every month in target areas to receive an incentive ($500 per month on average). Then brands outline their target personas, and Wrappr match-makes the brands with the perfect Advocates who not only do match their personas, but also are already fans of the brand.
Wrappr has an army of Advocates at the ready for nearly all of Australia’s top brands. Each potential advocate is screened and surveyed, so Wrappr knows them on a human basis, and which brands they’ll be best suited to rep on the road*. “We actually run all of our Advocates through an NPS survey of over 150 brands,” explains Liam Shaw, Director and Cofounder of Wrappr. “So, for example, if Aldi came to us and wanted to do a campaign, we could connect them with only people who rated them an 8, 9, or 10 out of 10. Currently on our database, this would mean we can connect Aldi with 172 Advocates, who can then be filtered even further with respect to who Aldi would be looking for.”
“The goal of a Wrappr campaign is for brands to build ownership over a local area, a customer persona, or both. If a brand wants to show off how loved they are by locals, or how loved they are by a particular customer segment, that’s what we do,” explains Liam Shaw.
Wrappr also incentivises and encourages safe driving – GPS devices are installed into all Advocate cars while they’re driving for an active campaign, monitoring speeding and unsafe braking or acceleration. Wrappr cars also have a sticker on the back asking “How’s my driving?” so members of the community can alert Wrappr of any unsafe driving. Any unsafe driving has penalties attached to it.
Wrappr is also very ROI focused, “We don’t believe in hiding behind opaque methodologies,” explains Jonte Shaw. “We want to help advertising be seen as trusted and genuine, so showing a clear ROI, which is third-party verified, is vital to this.”
To achieve this, Wrappr has partnered with market-leading retail analytics provider Blix, to provide their clients with granular, ROI-focused reporting and insights.
Blix provides Wrappr with real-time, third party-verified reach, frequency and uplift numbers for every Wrappr car. Through Blix identifying smartphones within the vicinity of Wrappr Advocate cars, and using Wrappr’s GPS tracking units, Wrappr is able to track precise advertising impact and drill down to wider insight – Wrappr is able to read:
● In-store foot traffic uplift – measuring smartphones in retail locations that have detected a Wrappr car compared with ones that haven’t
● impressions – number of smartphones detected by cars
● close-up impressions – smartphones which stayed within 20 metres of Wrappr cars for 30 seconds or longer
● repeat impressions – smartphones which have been detected multiple times
● time spent in target advertising area, and
● kilometres driven in target advertising area
“These metrics allow us to not only report CPM, but we can also say how much it costs brands to reach effective frequency, or what their cost per lead is if they have a physical presence,” explains Jonte Shaw.
Wrappr also enables brands to create On-Demand Activations, incentivising Advocates to drive or park their wrapped cars at key locations or events. For example, if a brand wanted to spontaneously target Australian Open or AFL Grand Final attendees, they could simply send out an On-Demand Activation to their Advocates and ask them to drive and/or park outside these events, and Wrappr will coordinate the activation and track the results.
“On-Demand Activations are a fantastic way for brands to create high-impact brand moments where all of their Advocates collect together. It’s pretty hard to ignore ten or more branded cars driving past you,” explains Liam Shaw.
Liam says it’s early days, but he already sees many exciting prospects from this new form of outdoor media, and plenty of interest from brands.
Source: Wrappr media release
Every few years car wraps pop up.
I sure hope they proof-read their wraps. By Nielson do they mean the one in Fort Myers, or do they mean Nielsen.
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Hi Methuselah,
Good catch – thank you. This has been fixed.
Hannah – Mumbrella
Thanks Methuselah!
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