You're trudging up the steps to your front door, keys in hand after a long day at work, when you notice something out of the ordinary. There's a doormat under your feet.
How strange. You didn't have a doormat when you left for work.
The doormat is green with a small strip of blue at the bottom. The green part looks like grass, and it has gray hash marks along the sides, as on a football field. There's a small football in the lower left corner.
In white is the DirecTV logo and these words: “NYC--NFL capital of the world. Get every game, every Sunday--now online in every building.”
The doormat is an ad for NFL Sunday Ticket Online, a streaming video package offered by DirecTV. The satellite company came up with the idea as part of a campaign in Manhattan that GoGorilla Media helped execute.
“DirecTV wanted something right where people think of signing up for service,” says Sasha Engel, chief financial officer and chief operating officer at GoGorilla. “It kind of reminds you every day when you're going in and out of your house.”
Key to the campaign was to make it a fairly nice doormat, not something tacky that folks would take one look at and throw away.
The doormat was a needlepunch rug with latex non-slip backing measuring 3 feet by 2 feet.
“They were not cheap material or anything,” Engel says. “We wanted high quality to prevent slips and trips.”
When it came to distributing the doormats, DirecTV chose to target upscale neighborhoods in Manhattan that could afford the Sunday Ticket’s $350 price tag.
The campaign was executed in two waves, the first starting Aug. 17, the second two weeks later. In all, 4,000 doormats were distributed.
The campaign worked in two ways. First, it was eye-catching in exactly the way a good alternative media stunt should be. The doormats were unexpected but not unwelcome, a cute way to reach people right on their doorstep without being overly obtrusive.
Secondly, the doormats reached more than just the homeowners and businesses where they were dropped off. Passersby also saw them.
One business actually moved their mat inside, where even more people were exposed to the message.
“We got a pretty good response from what we saw, because people kept them in place,” Engel says. “We didn't get any complaints, which is always good in guerrilla advertising.”
