DD is currently working with two schools in Colorado and two in Texas, with a combined enrollment of over 70,000 students. Sponsors for the 1996-97 school year included Pepsi, Burger King, Lamar Outdoor Advertising, and Norwest Banks. There are four different levels of sponsorship, with more visibility at the higher levels. Moving down a couple of notches, Cover Concepts provides book covers to more than 22 million students in over 31,000 schools. Who's Who of companies that want to reach kids.
Ad space is sold by the flap, cover, or entire sheet.
The resulting covers are received with varying degrees of enthusiasm by parents and teachers, some of whom try to get around the message by having the students put the covers inside out. But most students are happy to carry around the labels of a favored company-the Nike swoosh can turn a textbook into a fashion accessory. Cover Concepts has received letters from schools thanking the company for providing materials that are greatly in demand. Making such materials palatable to district opinion leaders is a more complicated proposition. We take the marketer's objectives and a long-term knowledge of how teachers work and what they have to work with, and add to that a sense of what entertains kids and gets them juiced up.