Ducati is running a new advertising campaign in the latest round of Moto-Mags and as I’ve been seeing the image pop up all over the place, I keep finding myself wondering about the ‘core’ of the motorcycle advertising landscape and perhaps it’s the visual world I live in, but I keep finding myself wondering why exactly do motorcycle manufactures even run print ads in the first place?

I understand that if you’re a bike building company, you have to get your brand out and into marketplace and the public consciousness. This is a game of perception after all and there is some intrinsic value to marketing your brand to an audience beyond your loyal niche followers. But honestly, how many people base their buying decisions on an eight, ten or fifteen thousand dollar motorcycle because of what they read or saw in a print ad? Of all our forms of media it seems the least representational when defining the riding experience. Certainly it’s not nearly as visceral as a well done thirty second commercial that airs on say Speed Channel which can offer a motorcycle buyer a glimpse into the world of riding with a taste of the sights and sounds that go along with it. It’s also not nearly as immediate as internet advertising because you actually have to pick up the magazine and flip through it to see the ad. If anything, I would imagine that whole heck of lot more folks make their purchasing decisions based on the actual articles inside the magazine. So why spend the cash on a full page ad, when it all really comes down to subjective choices made by the editors of your favorite moto-mags? Seems to me that it would be far more economical and potentially rewarding to fold the advertising budget into making sure that your test fleet is in tip-top shape. I also wonder why motorcycle ads aren’t more like movie listings in your local paper which tell you where a movie is playing in your neighborhood. If you’ve ever gone to the Ducati website, it’s not exactly the easiest thing to locate your local dealer, taking you several pages down into their site until they show you the information.

So instead of making it easier to find your local dealership someone produced the above advertisement, no doubt in an attempt to create that ‘cool factor’ for a got-to-have-it now buying public. This works very well in our everyday life for books, t-shirts, or other heavily promoted items, but does anyone really think that for a guy or gal throwing down their hard earned cash on a big ticket item like a motorcycle an advertisement like this made any difference at all? I doubt it.