By Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati Bell Inc. is heavily marketing its i-wireless pre-paid line. But instead of television commercials or traditional newspaper advertising, it has chosen to promote its message through movie screens and computer terminals.

For i-wireless, which is targeted to young people, Bell is placing text messages on Web site banner ads, movie screens and other places inviting users to its www.push-buttons.com site to decipher them.

Add in a couple of targeted radio ads and the rest of the i-wireless marketing is "guerrilla" campaigns that use new ways to get directly to customers, said Nathan Stierwalt, the 26-year-old marketing manager.

"We're speaking to them in the way they speak to each other," he said, noting the popularity of text messaging with teens and young adults. "They communicate not by voice but with their thumbs."

The site has been up only a month, but it's getting "click-through" rates that are more than double the national average of about 0.2 percent, Stierwalt added.

Cincinnati Bell is not alone. Marketers across the country are struggling for new ways to reach young people and men of all ages, those least likely to respond to the traditional television commercial.

The message could be the same as any television commercial, but marketers more and more are diversifying their media mix.

Some of the new media includes:

• Guerrilla or viral marketing, which infiltrates a target group. Bell, for example, sends groups of teens into crowds at high-school football games with the wireless phones. Some companies even pay people to tout their product on Internet chat rooms.

• Product placement, where the product is used in a television show or movie.

• Cinema screen advertising, shown before the movie starts.

• Publicity. Procter & Gamble Co. was the first company after the 2002 Winter Olympics to secure an endorsement from Canadian figure skaters Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. P&G hired Sale and Pelletier, who were awarded a gold medal after news broke of a judging scandal, to endorse Crest Whitestrips.

The advertising world is watching the trend even more closely after P&G, one of the world's biggest advertisers, launched a review of its multibillion-dollar North American media budget. It wants to reach consumers at various "touch points," officials said.

"It's not going away," said Brian McHale, president of local media firm Empower Media Marketing. "Everything about our society says, 'I want it faster. I want it quicker. I want short messages. I'm busy, don't take my time.'

"Really, what you're talking about is lifestyle marketing."

As recently as two decades ago, advertisers had only to buy time on the major TV networks, place ads in magazines and newspapers, and design a national campaign. But the advent of cable TV, and now the Internet, has made buying media much more complicated.

Television ad expenditures are growing more slowly that those placed on the Internet and other new media, according to figures supplied by Empower.

At P&G, for example, television still accounts for about two-thirds of the total global ad budget. But that percentage is going down, P&G said.

"TV still is the easiest way to get your message out to the most number of eyeballs," McHale said. "While TV isn't going away, advertisers aren't going to be able to rely on it solely."

Examples span many industries. Last year, the Enquirer started CiN Weekly, a free distribution tabloid aimed at digging deeper into the 25- to 34-year-old readership demographic group.

Empower, whose main business is placing ads in different types of media, has done more of that in recent years. For example, when planning a campaign for Biore strips, it cut a deal with the producers of the hit movie What Women Want to have star Mel Gibson wearing the strips during the movie.

The most innovative advertising agencies in the country are doing the same thing, said Chuck Porter, chairman of Miami agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, at a recent meeting of the Advertising Club of Cincinnati.

"We don't use the term 'guerrilla marketing,'" Porter said. "We simply look at the whole world as media."

Crispin Porter took the charge literally. In its campaign for BMW's Mini Cooper, it bought nine Ford Excursions, put Minis on the roofs and drove around a target city. The campaign tagline was "the fun stuff goes on the roof."

In another example, the agency bought 12 seats at a National Football League game during a Monday Night Football broadcast, then took the seats out and put a Mini in the stands. The 61 seconds on the air would have been valued at $541,000 but only cost the agency $19,000, Porter said.

"Again, you can't measure the media," he said.

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E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com