© NKY.Cincinnati.comThe Creation Museum has placed billboards featuring dinosaurs near heavily traveled interstate routes across the country.
The comic-book-style dinosaurs are located on more than 100 billboards as far away as Dallas, Orlando., Fla., and Sacramento, Calif.
Ken Ham, co-founder of Answers in Genesis, the apologetics ministry that developed the Creation Museum, said the locations of the billboards demonstrate the broad appeal of the attraction.
"Most of the people who come to the Creation Museum come from outside of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky," Ham said. "We've had a number of visitors from California and a couple of Christian schools bused kids up from Texas, so putting billboards in those places is not a reach."
While most scientists maintain dinosaurs have been extinct for millions of years, Answers in Genesis teaches that the world is only a few thousand years old and dinosaurs roamed the Earth until very recently.
Dinosaurs play a prominent role in Creation Museum exhibits, which include a Dinosaur Den with fossilized eggs and a triceratops skeleton casting.
The museum has attracted 1.6 million visitors since it opened in May 2007 and averages more than 800 visitors each day.
Previous advertising campaigns have included the use of print and television outlets, but Ham said the billboard campaign is a more cost-effective way to cross-promote and reach a broad audience.
"We don't have the marketing dollars that the big commercial operations have," Ham said. "One of the things we want to do is get people to go to the Creation Museum website and get connected to our other sites as well."
Ham said the response to the billboards has been very positive among museum supporters and the characters should also help increase brand identity and name recognition for the museum."We have no concrete estimates on how the billboards are doing, it's all subjective, but we have had a lot of testimonials," Ham said. "We have had people asking for T-shirts and other items, so it will be an ongoing project."
There has been criticism of the ad campaign in some circles.
"One of the ways that I determine (if something is) effective is how much those that oppose us object to what we do," Ham said. "We've had some incredible opposition from the secularists, and there have been accusations that we have been trying to entice children into the Creation Museum. Well, no kidding - we are trying to get everyone into the Creation Museum."
The billboards are primarily located on major interstate routes and near tourist attractions. Ham said the billboards are not designed to tout the Ark Encounter, the attraction envisioned for Grant County that will feature a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark.
"It's really just trying to capitalize on the type of traffic flow at those places," Ham said. "It's not a precursor to Ark Encounter advertising, although the success of this campaign shows us that when the time comes for that to open, we will certainly use an extensive billboard campaign."
There has been speculation that the Ark Encounter project is in jeopardy, and Ham admits financing the project has been more challenging than anticipated. The project will now be built in phases and there has not been an official groundbreaking at the site, which was initially projected to open in 2014.
Ham insists that the project is moving forward and said the $5 million in donations listed on the Ark Encounter is just a portion of the total fundraising effort.
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