If you leave my house, which is located on the west bank side of New Orleans, and head toward the Mississippi River bridge to get toward the downtown area and the French Quarter, you’ll see a billboard on the left-hand side of the bridge advertising Hostgator.

This billboard, which is right next to one of the most important corridors in the city, is just one of an ongoing nation-wide billboard campaign for the company. That campaign started mid-to-late last year with billboards launched in ten major cities and has been spreading since.

It’s a rare “real world” advertisement for a hosting company. But even more unusual is the use of “large format” media, which is both expensive and largely unproven when it comes to advertising online services.

However, anyone who surfs the Web without an ad blocker knows well that Hostgator has never been shy about advertising. It’s mascot can be seen on countless Web sites, including this one, but its latest push has gone far beyond the norm.

As the economy has slowed down, Hostgator, it seems, has jumped on the opportunity to ramp up their promotion efforts, setting themselves up to be one of the biggest players as the Internet economy regains traction.

UFC and Tattoos

Hostgator isn’t just investing in Web ads and billboards, it has also been exploring other, more out of the ordinary, ad opportunites.

One of the more prominent moves they made as to acquire the domain gator.com and then use that to sponsor fighters with UFC 111. This comes after other attempts to advertise on earlier UFC events led to more mixed opinions of its effectiveness.

Also, at least one person has been paid $3,000 to tattoo Hostgator’s name and logo into the back of their neck. A larger plan, one that involved tattooing Hostgator on hundreds of people, was scuttled due to legal concerns.

Clearly Hostgator is trying to get beyond just Web advertising and even traditional physical advertising and into some more creative venues.

Sponsorships and Mailers

Another area Hostgator has been increasingly aggressive in is sponsorships and affiliate programs.

Almost any site that you might expect a beginner or more advanced consumer to be looking for information about running a site, is either running a Hostgator banner or participating in their affiliate program. This is especially true of sites that focus on WordPress-related elements. However, no matter what platform, there seems to be almost no hosting or site-development related sites that don’t have a Hostgator banner.

However, even more unusual has been Hostgator’s aggressive use of direct mail. I have received three offers for accounts I had with them previously (test accounts I closed once testing was done). What was even more interesting was that, though most of the branding and letter itself was from Hostgator, the content was a coupon and advertisement for Google Adwords.

It’s clear that Hostgator is using every possible means and every possible partnership to reach customers, new and old, and though it is impossible to say if it is working as Hostgator is a privately-owned company, it definitely is having an impact on awareness.

Comparisons to Godaddy

Though Google, Yahoo! and other Internet companies are well known offline, they spend relatively little on advertising. The only Web company well known for its “real world” advertising (that is still in operation) is Godaddy, whose famous Super Bowl commercials have made the brand a household name at the same time they’ve often stirred up controversy.

However, there are major differences between the two. Godaddy has used a handful of well-placed commercials to get its brand out where Hostgator is taking a more guerrilla style, using billboards, mailers and other more localized advertising on a massive scale. Where Godaddy’s style of advertising is more about a single well-placed shot, Hostgator is throwing everything it can.

Another key difference is that, judging from their advertising, the two services aren’t competing. Godaddy, in its ads, focuses primarily on its domains service and Hostgator on its hosting though each provide the other as well.

Finally, where Godaddy uses eye-catching commercials and Godaddy Girls, Hostgator’s brand is more about its name. There is very little to Hostgator’s ads other than its name and, in some advertisements, the price per month and an offer to build a Web site.

Bottom Line

Hostgator may be the first Web host to attempt this kind of massive advertisement campaign but it will not be the last. Though Web ads will continue to be the driving source of advertisement for web hosting firms, as the industry grows and building Web sites become more and more commonplace, expect to see more hosts advertise on billboards, television, magazines and in direct mail.

Most likely, unless this campaign is shown to be woefully ineffective, we will soon see other hosts dipping their toes into the kinds of advertising that Hostgator is doing now.

The good news is that this will likely mean a slew of new hosting deals and services as the market gets more competitive but it also means that we soon enough won’t be able to ignore ads for hosting, even if we do use AdBlock Plus.

Related posts:

1. Google Ads Get “Interesting” Google just announced on their official blog a new ad...