Advertising campaign to continue in Elk Grove Village
Elk Grove Village officials want you to know the town is a great place to do business, and they're willing to spend $463,760 to say so.
The village is continuing its "Makers Wanted" advertising campaign for the 2016 calendar year with television commercials, digital billboards, print advertisements and a website, building upon its initial marketing push from May to October of 2015.
The village board Tuesday night approved a contract with Red Caffeine Inc., a Lombard marketing firm, which creates the ads and places them in local media.
The ad campaign is an extension of Elk Grove's "Beyond Business Friendly" brand, developed by the marketing firm to attract businesses to the village's sprawling business park.
Mayor Craig Johnson said the village's business development and marketing office received thousands of responses from business owners as a result of the advertising - either through phone calls or a contact form on makerswanted.org. Many asked for more information about tax incentives or relocating to Elk Grove.
"We were very impressed with the quality and number of responses we got. The thing with marketing is it takes time to build up name ID," Johnson said. "We're seeing it really start to click in."
Like last year, the ad campaign will continue to feature commercials during Cubs games on Comcast SportsNet, and banner ticker ads during the game next to the score box. Johnson said the largest amount of business contacts came in September, and he thinks it correlates to the Cubs playoff push.
New this year, Elk Grove will also sponsor the TV station's breaking sports news update segments.
Commercials will also continue to air in the Chicago market on cable stations such as CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and the Golf Channel.
Ads will run Monday through Friday on three digital billboards along Route 53, the Tri-State Tollway and Interstate 290.
Print ads will appear in Crain's Chicago Business.
This year's ad campaign will not include radio commercials, which aired last year on WGN, WBBM and WLS. Johnson said more business owners mentioned they saw Elk Grove ads on TV, as opposed to hearing the radio spots.
The campaign is being funded by the Busse/Elmhurst tax increment financing district, established in 2014 to spur economic development in the business park.