Bang for the buck: low-cost advertising campaigns that worked.

• Author: Johnson, J. Douglas

To promote or not to promote. Aye, that's the query. Whether 'tis better to suffer a profit decline after the recession because you left the public eye, or to forge ahead in a sea of trouble and keep plugging away at advertising so people still know your name when things get better.

No question the Bard on Avon would have scribed those sentiments. After all, he was a retailer, sold tickets to his plays and must have had qualms when the box office faltered in merrie olde England. What to do? What to do? And you really can't say the dilemma is much ado about nothing. Advertising is a vital marketing tool under all conditions. You know you'd better use it right.

However, you don't have to ante up $42 million like Coca-Cola did to contract for what's called the TOP III Olympic sponsorship. It includes Albertville and Barcelona plus 1994 in Lillehammer, Norway, and 1996 in Atlanta. Man, that's a pile of bottle caps.

You say you don't have $42 mil to get in the game? Smaller players can pay some less to stimulate business. The trick is to get compatible agency and client minds together and promote smarter than the usual. A big part of it is a meld of personalities, the players in the play.

For instance, here is a national advertising success story at fairly low cost. The product is so specialized many people don't even know it exists. Dennis Tippmann of Tippmann Pneumatics Inc. in Fort Wayne makes guns for paintball games. Say what? Never heard of the sport? It came out of California and was first played in the woods between teams dressed in camouflage with their faces painted like Apache warriors. Now the action has moved to new venues. You walk into a dark warehouse filled with large things to hide behind. Opponents with guns are in there hiding behind big things too. The object is for you to sneak around and "burn" other players. That is, splash them with a ball of colored paint shot from an air gun. According to the advertising copy, you will probably "let loose primal, guttural screams" such as "Yeehaaaa!" during the process. (And quite possibly "Oooo!" and "Ouch!") To win, you must be the last to be hit or not hit at all. If you do get "burned," consider yourself "toast." That's "paintballin'" sure as you're born.

OK. Dennis Tippmann is a big player in this blaster business. He is actually the leading producer, with a national and international market. His guns are "of innovative design, dependable and can take the punishment the sport demands." He also makes a virtually indestructible, paint-spewing hand grenade to liven the fun. Tippmann's latest coup is a semi-automatic "toaster," and the top of the line retails for $425. Older models cost in the high threes.

In July 1990 Tippmann met the Boyden & Youngblutt advertising agency of Fort Wayne. The boys opened their doors and started paintball work the first week. To the project came president and creative director Andy Boyden with a degree in commercial art from Indiana University and a six-year stint at Bonsib Inc. in Fort Wayne as creative director. Also at the table was vice president and senior account supervisor Jerry Youngblutt. His degree is in marketing and graphic design from IU. He worked in sales for three years--for Disney World to develop the Tokyo and Epcot centers--then put in a year as an account man at HPN Advertising in Fort Wayne. An impressive team of players.

Youngblutt recalls, "What basically happened is we put together an informal questionnaire and made calls to the paintball venues. We wanted to find out just who had played this game in the past and who would be playing it in the future. One of the enthusiast publications, Action Pursuit Games, put out another survey. We compared our notes with theirs and found out that a younger crowd had started to play. We said, 'What's hot with the young crowd? What will entice them?'

One thing we noticed was that even though the manufacturing is done in Indiana, a lot of trend-setting is done in California. Things start there and move east. We decided these younger guys were into skateboarding and rollerblading. They wanted things to be lightweight and fun. They didn't want to be too militaristic. Dennis Tippmann felt the same way.

"We heard comments in our research like, mothers weren't letting their 15-year-old sons go off in the woods and play. They didn't want them out there in Rambo games. So lighted parks and warehouses evolved. Different games called "Speedball" and "Capture the Flag" developed. The action became more fun and recreational than war-like. We jumped on that...