Second Hand Car Salesman.

We are thinking about selling Laura’s car, but I don’t want to pay to put it in Auto Trader and I’m not desperate enough to stick it on eBay yet either. Basically if someone is willing to pay what we are asking and is near enough to collect it then we have a deal. It seems to me that most of the time, when people are faced with a similar conundrum, they go all Tony Hart and turn their motor into a mobile advert.

The usual rubbish

On the face of it, this would seem like the perfect solution. As you drive your car around the local community, your A4 advert proudly displayed on the inside of the back window, it can be seen by all of those potential buyers. The reality is somewhat different. You have a shorter than normal window (no pun intended) of opportunity to get any information across to the viewer as you go tanking it down the high street and to top it all, they have to memorise your contact details in a couple of seconds. Unfortunately the approach most people seem to take is to pile on as much information onto the advert as possible; in the smallest font they can get away with, and sign off with an eleven digit mobile number. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the reading skills of Johnny Five and I certainly can’t recall a full mobile number after a five second viewing.

The montage at the top of the page show some typical (and not so typical) solutions to this challenge as provided by Flickr and a five minute search. They are representative of most of the attempts that I have seen in my time and I think they are all missing a trick. None of these guys are capitalising on the web to get the bulk of their information across and ensuring that the viewer can more easily remember our contact details with only a few seconds exposure.

My social experiment

To be honest, I’m not sure whether the general public in the sleepy New Forest town where I live are ready for shortened URLs, but that is my solution and I’m sticking to it. The way I see it, the car is the advert and all I need to tell people is that it is for sale, roughly what I want for it and how to find out more. You don’t need to know the make model and engine size, its written on the boot, and you can tell if it is a good runner or not by the rattling noise it makes when it turns the corner at the end of the street.

I want to give you as little information as possible, letting the car do the selling, allowing the user to spend the time remembering the web address. Then they can log on at home, I can tell them all they wanted to know (but would never have fitted on the ad) and let them make their decision, or even ask a question, in their own sweet time.

The solution

So here it is, my answer to the Car For Sale challenge. Only three lines. All you need to know.

Job done. I have put the emphasis on the For Sale at the top to draw the eye and establish the purpose of the sign. Then its onto the address I need them to remember. As a bonus, the price and dub dub dub have been added, knocked back as secondary information, to show a guide price and that the link is a link.

My biggest concern with this is that the unenlightened will miss the dot between the tr and the im and never reach the site. I also have no way of knowing how many will see the ad versus those that visit the web address. This is not my usual flavour of vigilantism, but if we do decide to sell the car I will write a follow up post to show if the experiment worked.