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A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS:­ Eye-catching fleet graphics capture audiences' attention simply by driving past them.

Carrier Transicold's X2-Series

R-O-M Corp.'s Center ZoneMaker

TACOS ON THE MOVE:­ Old El Paso's fleet graphics make stomachs rumble during drive-time.

Trucks are everywhere, and they're moving through dense areas of population as they transport food and beverage products from warehouses to retail outlets.

This is nothing new, but what's covering the trucks is.

The past decade has seen an explosion in graphic advertisements adorning the outside of these vehicles: huge, bright explosions of color that beg for consumer attention as they motor past people on the road. These rolling ads are often wrapped around trucks in ingenious fashion, delighting ob-servers in their complexity and design.

"Companies that have their own trucks and trailers are outdoor advertising entities," says Shelley Smith, president of Epic Media Group, an El Segundo, CA-based marketing and media company that has been helping to brand fleets with advertising campaigns for years. "Fleets offer the unique opportunity to advertise virtually for free."

"Today it is getting harder to reach customers through traditional advertising," says Thomas Moore, executive director of the National Private Truck Council, Alexandria, VA. "Audience viewership is in massive decline, which is attributable to hundreds of new cable stations, TiVO, commercial-free radio and the Internet."

"Our customers report that it has become a real challenge for the advertising departments to deal with the high cost of reaching traditional media audiences, which shrink daily," Smith says. "However, the consumer audience in traffic is growing every day."