Last week I made that the statement that Pentax had no apparent marketing and ad plan, that they would go months without an ad placed in the major US photo mags and that I had never seen 1 ad for the MZ-S. This past weekend I was watching the Pikes Peak hill climb on ESPN ( for our non US brethren, ESPN is a 24 hour a day cable sports channel ) As each vehicle passed a certain point on the race track going up the mountain, the TV camera picked up a large Pentax red banner placed next to ESPN's banner. The next day I was watching ESPN Sport Center news. They were showing highlights of a Seattle Mariner-Oakland Athletic baseball game. The camera angle was from behind the pitcher toward home plate. The rolling advertising banners on the base of the wall behind home plate all of the sudden switched to 3 large red Pentax banners. In less than 24 hours I had seen more Pentax "ad" effort on TV than I had seen in months in the pages of my favorite photo magazines. The new Pentax ad campaign: Get the Pentax name in front of the TV camera as often as possible!
DG