Ads from highway coalition target worries of motorists

There's a simple reason that gridlock features prominently in the new advertising campaign developed by Reno's Innerwest Advertising for the Nevada Highway Users Coalition.

Focus groups and other research found that gridlock and worries about gridlock motivate Nevadans like no other highway-related problem, says Ben Kieckhefer of Innerwest.

Other highway issues, he says, simply don't have the same power to move people to action.

The advertising campaign rolled out last week on a Web site as well as placements broadcast and billboard placements throughout the state.

The coalition chaired by Reno's Stan Goodin, president of Goodin Insurance & Financial Services, seeks to spur development of more highway capacity around Nevada.

Traffic on Nevada's roads is projected to rise by 100,000 vehicles in the next three years at the same time that the costs of highway construction are rising.

Already, traffic on the state's highways has increased nine times faster than the capacity of the highway system, the coalition says.

"We're trying to raise the awareness of people," says Kieckhefer. "We don't have a specific solution in mind right now."

The coalition is financed by construction and development groups, labor unions and chambers of commerce from both ends of the state.

The advertising campaign is scheduled to run through February.

Its starting date last week was carefully selected, Kieckhefer says, to come after the hullabaloo of the presidential caucuses hullabaloo that also had consumed much of the available time and space for advertising anything else.