Art and Design
Vinyl Vehicle Wraps Rev Up Advertising on the Speedway and the Highway
Convenience, durability and light weight cited as benefits
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Feb. 15, 2008 (VNS) – The brilliant graphics that cover the cars competing here in the run-up to the Daytona 500 are not painted on—they are vinyl. And half the cars have whole-vehicle vinyl wraps.
Vehicle wraps are digitally printed vinyl films that can be easily removed, a convenience that is especially useful for teams that have different sponsors from one week to the next.
“Vinyl is the only option for creating a scheme you can transfer to the cars and trailers instantaneously,” explained Kip Johnson, president of High Point, N.C.-based Motorsports Designs Inc., the nation’s leading provider of racing graphics.
He said that last week, a car was wrecked during a practice, so the back-up car was needed. However, that backup car was red and the team’s color scheme was blue and white. Thanks to vinyl wrap, the car was transformed on-site in two hours.
In a sport where any extra edge can be critical, teams prefer vinyl wraps to successive layers of paint. “Paint weighs 14 to 16 pounds and a vinyl wrap weighs only 6 or 7 pounds,” Johnson said.
Off the racetrack, vinyl wraps are becoming more popular in outdoor advertising campaigns. According to John Rodriquez, president and CEO of BigideaWraps.com of Pembroke Pines, Fla., vehicles are a natural medium for outdoor advertising, given the increasing amount of time people spend driving—or stuck—on the road and looking at other vehicles.
“Vinyl wraps can last five to seven years outdoors, and vinyl overlaminates offer some protection from corrosion, ultraviolet rays and general wear on the vehicle’s original paint job,” Rodriguez said. “Also, they can be removed without injuring the original paint job.”
Although bus wraps have been around for over ten years, improvements in printing technology have given vehicle wraps a market boost. Today, vinyl wraps increasingly cover not only cars, vans and trucks, but also bikes, trains and boats.
A spokesperson for the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority recalled that, when CBS Outdoor vinyl-wrapped the entire inside surface of four subway cars with scenery advertising Westin Hotels, tourists paid the $2.00 subway fare just to ride the train.