Las Vegas company’s trucks carry ads wherever customers want them seen

If you walk or drive by Las Vegas Boulevard, there’s a good chance you’ll see Kre8 Media Outdoor Advertising’s mobile billboards. Simple and flashy trucks carry ads up and down the Strip and any other roads their clients want to target.

Managing partners Jeremie Watkins and Shaun Habibian started Kre8 Media, 4050 W. Harmon Ave., Suite 1, in 2012, with two employees and one truck.

The two met after Watkins spotted Habibian’s digital truck parked in front of his house. Watkins shared with him his vision for the outdoor advertising company, and the idea took off.

Vanessa Coates, media manager for American Casino & Entertainment Properties, which owns the Stratosphere and was one of Kre8 Media’s first clients, said the pair launched the company at the right time, when other local mobile-billboard companies were folding or scaling back.

Today, Kre8 Media has more than 200 employees and 42 trucks, including one large digital-billboard truck with three LED monitors that the company founders hope to use to promote video ads and video games.

Two well-known Kre8 Media trucks on the Strip feature the Linq’s High Roller and Cirque du Soleil’s “KA”. They have movable parts that rotate and bring the Ferris wheel and the show’s wheel of death on the billboard to life.

Its mobile billboard for the “Rock of Ages” show goes a step further and includes a 3D guitar build-out accompanied by flashing lights, a fog machine and rock music.

“We have the best restaurants, we have the best entertainment, we have the world’s most amazing hotel properties; why not have the best ads?” Watkins said.

Unlike other forms of mobile advertisement such as city buses and taxis, Kre8 Media lets customers customize the route their truck will follow based on their target audience.

Mobile billboards are one of the best and only ways to advertise at the heart of the Strip, Coates said.

“They just stand out because there’s not much else on the Strip beside the casinos,” she said.

Watkins likes to tell his clients that they are on the spotlight at the stop sign.

“If you are at your car at a stop light and you are used to seeing the same stationary sign every single day on your way to work, it becomes wallpaper,” he said. “With the mobile ad, the last thing you expect to see is Celine Dion or Five Finger Death Punch … and it captures your attention.”

Kre8 Media’s founders would like to expand to other major cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, Habibian said.

Visit kre8outdooradvertising.com.