Get the Message?

The message is commonplace: "It's a desert out there: Be water smart."

The place it's coming from is anything but common: the urinals at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Your alone time is for sale. Those quiet moments you spend waiting in the grocery checkout line, pumping gas, even urinating, are being targeted by advertisers eager to wedge their messages further than ever into everyday life.

Called captive advertising, it's a response to the immunity consumers have developed to traditional marketing methods.

"People are tuning out because of sensory overload," says Michael LaTour, marketing professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "Messages are coming at them all day long now, so they're more prone to tune them out."

Peter Tawil, president of Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Pump Media, says the items advertised on the video screens his company operates at 82 Terrible Herbst stations across the valley experienced an "immediate boost in sales" at the associated convenience stores.

"Today, people are on the move, and it's harder to reach them with traditional media," Tawil says.

Captive advertising also is the latest move in a weapons race against consumers armed with DVRs that fast-forward past commercials, and satellite radio and TV broadcasts that banish them entirely.

"As a way to get a message across, it makes sense to place it where it's less likely -- at least initially -- for it to be ignored," LaTour says. "So advertisers trying to land an account are going to try to convince would-be clients that they're going to be more innovative, more creative, and think out of the box."

One of the most creative new approaches was introduced to Las Vegas late last year.

"When you open your car door to step out, you're always going to look down," says Becky Osborne, president of Parking Stripe Advertising, a Golden, Colo.-based company that places ads atop the white lines defining parking lot spaces.

Parking Stripe performed installations for Nationwide Insurance at the Fashion Show and Galleria at Sunset malls, and at 10 Home Depot locations, charging $10,000 per parking lot.

"They were trying to hit ZIP codes where they had agents setting up new businesses," Osborne says. "So we were trying to target locations where consumers would be within those ZIP codes."

While captive advertising can be extremely successful, LaTour warns that it also can backfire by annoying the people it is trying to target.

"At what point, do you get some semblance of a message across, versus just causing irritation to the consumer?" LaTour asks. "It's a very delicate process because different people react differently -- depending on the individual and the circumstances they're in, and the mood they're in at the time."

"That's why research, that digs deeply, has to assess this," LaTour adds, "and traditional marketing research doesn't necessarily do that."

Some captive advertising methods are so far out there, they die on the drawing board.

"At one point, there was discussion about how we could potentially put billboards up into orbit so people could be able to see product slogans," LaTour says. "There was an outcry against that, because it was thought to be a form of environmental pollution."

R&R Partners is the agency that places urinal ads for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which paid $55,000 for a five-month package at the Thomas & Mack Center that also included signage on the scoreboard, Jumbotron and commercials during radio broadcast of games.

"We don't think it's really intrusive," says Eric Nelson, the company's media supervisor, who explains that conducting business where men do their business just makes too much sense.

"Our media research showed that men are the ones that typically change the (irrigation) clock," he says, "and it's kind of a unique place that you don't think you would see something."

However, he adds: "We didn't want to do a big, long message there."

Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0456.