Marketer’s Fun and Games Lure Business, Polish Company Image
For San Diego marketeer Tom Di Zinno, fun and games are serious business.
The 40-year-old Di Zinno, owner of a downtown marketing agency, is a specialist at designing and implementing promotions that serve the dual purpose of building a client’s sales and enhancing an image.
In his 18 years in the business, Di Zinno has sent out millions of squeeze tubes filled with WD-40, put together radio sweepstakes, mailed coupons for Daiwa fishing rods, given away General Electric flash cubes and jazzed up PSA’s frequent flier program.
He once mailed models of convertible cars to all owners of San Diego apartment buildings to hype a Great American First Savings loan program. Why convertibles? “The loans were convertible from variable to fixed rate in 72 hours,” Di Zinno said.
Needless to say, Di Zinno’s purpose is not to demonstrate corporate generosity.
‘Buy’ Is the Message
“We’re trying to move people to act, to buy. At the same time, I have to paint the right picture of the company,” Di Zinno said. “You can’t, as Safeway once did, use a bingo promotion to try to attract more young families as shoppers. Bingo is an older person’s game and (Safeway) already has the oldest base of customers in Southern California.”
A good example of effective promotions, Di Zinno said, is that of Daiwa, a Japanese manufacturer whose aim was to project an All-American image.
“Fishing is a declining industry and so Daiwa is trying to ensure there is a future by educating and getting young people involved in it,” Di Zinno said. “Everything we did was more American than anyone else. (Daiwa) funded more kids to learn about fishing and during Christmas they gave away rods and reels to Toys for Tots.
“They are out front keeping the American fishing industry alive,” Di Zinno said.
To help Toyota sell its sports cars, Di Zinno worked with local dealers to design a game likely to pull sports car enthusiasts into showrooms. The prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to Rio de Janiero.
Although “chance promotions,” as Di Zinno calls games and sweepstakes, are more prevalent in American business than ever before, the rules of the game change sometimes from year to year. The inauguration of the California Lottery, which dangles prizes of millions of dollars before contestants, means that dollar prizes are no longer enough to ensure a response from a consumer.
“As the prize money builds in the lottery,” companies doing promotions “have to be embarrassed to put a $10,000 prize out there,” Di Zinno said.
Giveaway programs such as the WD-40 squeeze tubes are designed to “build trial,” Di Zinno said. But they are not effective unless the manufacturer is able to get prominent display space at a supermarket or department store. That’s because the giveaway is usually tied to a discounted offer on products available at retail locations.
“Shoppers have to be able find the product to buy it,” Di Zinno said.
Coupon offers are often highly targeted promotions that are developed with mailing lists, Di Zinno said.
Games are a tried and true method of building “foot traffic” at retail locations, said Scott Aylward of Franklin & Associates, a San Diego advertising agency. Aylward’s firm is helping manage the “Monopoly” promotion now under way at local McDonald’s restaurants.
“The game brings in customers and is designed to do that,” Aylward said. “What makes Monopoly successful is it has a ‘top of mind’ awareness level for our customers, so you are not reinventing the wheel or teaching anything new in getting them to play it.”
Aylward acknowledges that a contestant’s chance of winning are slim, comparing them to the lottery.
“Why is the lottery successful when only five people a week make it to the Big Spin?” Aylward said. “It’s fun, it’s fantasy, you are giving your people a little something extra.”
An Ohio native, Di Zinno worked in General Electric’s marketing department in Cleveland for four years before heading west to work at the Cunningham & Walsh agency in Los Angeles. He joined Phillips-Ramsey in San Diego and stayed for eight years before forming his company, Di Zinno & Partners, in April, 1987.
