Advertising 102.

May 3, Solvang.

Sometime last year Jim Judkins, the owner of Circus Chimera started experimenting with mass mailings as an advertising tactic, and this year the sight of stacks upon stacks of United States Post Office crates filling with envelopes has become a familiar one around the circus.
On days when they don't set up or take down the tent, up to 35 workers sit in the cookhouse tent and fill envelopes with $3 coupons and passes. The envelopes are mailed to every business in town for every given town. The system is fine-tuned so that for a small town like Solvang the circus covers not only the town itself but others around, and in turn in a big city like San Jose only specific businesses are targeted.
There is also not the same amount of advertising for two days of playing a town than there is for one where the circus will stay a week. "There is no cookie-cutter way to do it," says Jim, who analyzes every town to determine what is the best way to cover it. "We look at the market and try to decide what the intelligent way to promote it is," he says.
In all it costs Circus Chimera about two thousand dollars a show to advertise through mass mailing, at a rate of one dollar per envelope to businesses and forty cents per postcard sent to residences. Other, older ways of advertising are still being used but it seems that the strategy has worked. "We are seeing the difference," says Jim.