How business owners can capitalize on street performance art
As one of the oldest forms of advertising, sign holding made way to sign spinning as a way to attract more attention and business. How is its impact measured and how can businesses capitalize on this unconventional marketing strategy?
Independent Newsmedia/Cyrus Guccione
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General manager for AArrow Sign Spinners Jacob Grigsby (left) with new sign spinner Laquan McDonald.
Standing at the bustling corner of Thunderbird and Scottsdale Rd., general manager for AArrow Sign Spinners Jacob Grigsby is showing off some tricks he’s learned from his years of sign spinning.
As former world-ranked #7 sign spinner, Grigsby twirls his sign in the air effortlessly, working through a combination of tricks like the “suitcase,” “slip and slide,” “necktie” and “Bruce Lee” that incorporate swift changes in direction and a figure-eight pattern while getting friendly “beep-beeps” from idling commuters who like what they see.
Grigsby has been in the advertising industry for 12 years, working his way up from a spinner to a salesperson which is the general track of longtime sign spinners.
“You have to earn your stripes, but the goal is to get off the corner and become a salesperson and put that on your resume,” he said.
The job of a sign spinner can be tough, especially since pay is dependent on the number of businesses that hire spinners. Many have side gigs like Grigsby who supplemented his income with work as a dishwater and an HVAC technician during the COVID years when many businesses were closed.
Given the generally low barrier of entry to sign spinning, Grigsby says the job can attract characters from a variety of backgrounds.
“We’ve had people that were homeless that now run entire sign spinning markets,” Grigsby said, adding that a handful of spinners have made it big by going viral for their moves and being featured in video games, movies and music videos.
Nearly every spinner knows the story of Rico Ellis who was found spinning on a street corner by Ellen DeGeneres and given a car, a gift of $100,000 and purportedly a job on The Ellen Show.
“You never know what could happen,” Grigsby said.
Laquan McDonald is a new sign spinner who has learned every move he knows from Grigsby.
“(Grigsby) gave me a second chance,” McDonald said. “I’ve been in jail and I’ve been in prison and nobody wanted to give me a shot. He’s the first dude to give me a shot.”
In many parts of the country, sign spinners live in what Grigsby calls “spinner houses” where several sign spinners live together in subsidized housing and cover for each other when they’re sick.
Grigsby says spinner houses aren’t a thing in Arizona, but some corporations promote it for their sign spinners. There was even a time when Grigsby and his fellow spinners would spin for their apartment complex for reduced rent.
He urges his spinners to avoid fast food and hydrate before, during and after spinning. He’s known a handful of sign spinners who have lost upwards of 30 lbs. from hours of sign spinning.
“Street sport entertainment” is the term that Grigsby wants to catch on since sign spinners spend hours outside, pushing their bodies to the limit in the summer heat.
Combining athleticism and performance art, sign spinners are trained to draw attention through novelty and street entertainment. But is it actually an effective form of advertising?
FOMO
“We’re naturally trained to look for pedestrians and a sign spinner is essentially a moving human billboard,” says Joanna Kale, adjunct faculty in graphic design and visual communications at Scottsdale Community College.
Sign spinning is a topic of discussion in Kale’s Cross Media Marketing for Graphic Designers course which explains the play on customers’ fear of missing out or “FOMO.”
“Sign spinning is most effective whenever you are advertising something that is short-lived where someone needs to react right away,” she said.
Lunch specials, grand openings, closing sales and pop-up Christmas lots – these “now or never” opportunities are when sign spinning can be a business owner’s best friend.
This also means commuters need time between seeing an advertisement and acting on it to be effective.
For example, a sign spinner advertising a lunch special should be twirling their signs during the morning rush hour or spinning mid-week advertisements for Friday night deals.
Location is also key, Kale says. Placing sign spinners at locations where drivers can seamlessly turn left or right into a location and not worry about making challenging traffic decisions can make a big difference.
The grand opening of a baby store might see higher sales with a sign spinner placed away from the store but near a popular weekend brunch spot.
“Girls go out to brunch and if you’re advertising baby stuff, women are the primary buyers,” Kale said. “The key to any good marketing campaign is what you know about your customer.”
Split Testing
Sign spinning is a form of guerrilla marketing - an unconventional creative marketing strategy that seeks to generate buzz and draw attention in a way that traditional advertising methods do not.
Think flash mobs, interactive ads and ambient marketing campaigns that deliver messages in unexpected places and in unexpected ways.
Kale says measuring the impact of sign spinning is rooted in a century-old, controlled experimentation method called split testing or A/B testing, which compares the outcome of two versions of a marketing campaign to see which one performs better.
A coffee shop owner might promote a sale for a discount on regular coffee and another sale offering a free pastry with a coffee purchase.
Over time, the coffee shop owner can identify which promotional message resonated more with their customers and which led to higher sales.
If Tuesdays are typically slow for a business, the owner might introduce a sign spinner to measure store traffic and compare it to business on Tuesdays without a sign spinner.
“Back in the day, we put different phone numbers on different television ads to see which one performed better,” Kale said. “Today, we’ve gotten very spoiled with a lot of digital advertising without having to apply those thought processes but it all stems from one actionable variable.”
The outcome of sign spinning can be difficult to measure, especially if there are things that are out of a business owner’s control like street detours causing variations in traffic patterns or summer school break leaving local eateries in a lull.
Most important is understanding the customer needs and tracking data over time, Kale says. Whether it’s increased sales or feet in the door, new marketing strategies need time to play out.
While many businesses have transitioned into the digital age of advertising, Grigsby says he plans to do this for the foreseeable future.
“It’s all about getting out there, having fun, making money and making people smile,” he said. “It could be the best job in the world or the worst job in the world. It all depends on your performance.”
We invite our readers to submit their civil comments on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Cyrus Guccione can be reached at cguccione@iniusa.org.
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