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The Wacky Wheels of Commerce
America’s marketing mavens…know how to drive home a point. By Brad Herzog |
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TROLLING INTO THE SHOP of Prototype Source is a bit like stepping through the looking glass. In this nondescript warehouse in Santa Barbara, California, sits your basic 27-foot-long hot dog on wheels, gutted in preparation for restoration. Backed up to the titanic tube steak is a chassis bearing a trio of sculpted Volkswagen Bug–sized mounds resembling foil-wrapped chocolate candies—two Hershey’s Kisses and a Hug. It is a surreal sight, the unlikely melding of, say, Henry Ford and Willie Wonka.
The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and the Hershey’s Kissmobile are perhaps the two most recognizable examples of product mobiles, a nomadic form of advertising experiencing a renaissance of sorts these days. Larger-than-life brand icons are no longer rarities on the nation’s highways. It isn’t all that uncommon for two of them to cross paths—a bizarre encounter for fellow motorists. There was a time in Wichita, for instance, when the Meow Mix Mobile, an 18-foot calico that goes from 0 to 60 in “a whisker over 12 seconds,” found itself tailing Red Lobster’s Clawde, a 3,000-pound crustacean mounted atop a Ford pickup.
These wheeled wanderers aren’t wacky just for the sake of wackiness. They are centerpieces of carefully planned mobile marketing campaigns, serving as roving goodwill ambassadors and media magnets while creatively making connections with consumers. “If a consumer can touch, taste, see, smell, drive, and interact with brand ambassadors, they’re going to have a more memorable experience with that brand,” says Jeff Corder, marketing director at Chicago-based Marketing Werks, one of a handful of firms that specialize in planning and implementing mobile marketing campaigns. “No offense to standard forms of advertising, but how many times do we use the clicker to bypass a commercial? As opposed to pulling up to a stoplight and having a two-ton Kiss pull up next to you.”
There have been product mobiles almost as long as there have been automobiles. The first of its kind was a Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers truck in 1918, followed by a car shaped like a vacuum cleaner, another in the shape of a Heinz pickle, and a huge moving can of V-8 juice. One of the earlier product mobiles was the Zippo Car, a Chrysler Saratoga custom-built (at a cost of $25,000 in 1947) with two enormous, neon-flamed Zippo lighters rising above the roof. The car was taken off the road in the 1960s and left at a Pittsburgh-area dealership. By the 1970s, the dealership was out of business, and the Zippo Car was missing—a mobile-marketing mystery. Zippo constructed a replica for the vehicle’s fiftieth anniversary, but all efforts to locate the original have been unsuccessful. Then again, who hasn’t misplaced a lighter at one time or another?
In the world of roaming promotions, nothing has so endured like the Wienermobile, an automotive icon of such stature that a 1952 model is on permanent display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The first hot dog hot rod was a 13-foot version unveiled by Oscar Mayer in 1936. The Wienermobile roamed America in various incarnations for the next four decades—until the company mothballed its fleet in favor of television advertising. By 1970, product mobiles seemed to be fading out of style.
But all good things make a comeback. In 1986, Oscar Mayer celebrated the golden anniversary of its frankfurter fleet by dusting off one of the cars from storage. Reaction was so positive that the company commissioned a whole new fleet. Today’s version, the sixth redesign of the wiener, includes GPS-satellite technology, a hot-dog-shaped dashboard, relish-colored seats, and a bun roof.
Prototype Source was asked to design the return of the Wienermobile and has since produced nearly two dozen additional “sculpted vehicles,” as company vice-president Dorian Duke prefers to call them. “It’s actually the majority of our business now,” he explains. “At one time, it was just a small percentage.” Indeed, at any one time, a visit to Prototype Source might reveal a couple of employees installing giant black sunglasses on the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Mobile or affixing a foot-wide monocle on Planter’s Mr. Peanut, who spreads the word via Mr. Peanut’s Hot Rod. Leaning against a massive refrigerated Hershey’s Hug, Duke notes, without irony, “It gets pretty strange sometimes.”
These motoring masterpieces, which can cost as much as $500,000 and generally take about six months to complete, are products of the latest in industrial design—art with moving parts. Mr. Peanut’s head rotates. The Meow Mix cat’s motorized tongue flicks back and forth through the radiator grill. The Eckrich Meats Fun House includes squirting flowers and a working barbecue.
On the Kissmobile, the silver-coated Kiss is the cockpit for the pair of drivers, who carry a lofty title. (“I love having a business card that says ‘Chocolate Ambassador’ on it,” says 24-year-old Gretchen Garber. “I swear, my mom has it framed.”) The second, gold-clad Kiss opens up to a big-screen TV with a karaoke machine, while the Hug in the back is a refrigerator large enough to hold 230,000 chocolates. Details are fine-tuned down to the Kisses embroidered on the seats and the chocolate-scented exhaust.
At the same time, the vehicles, of course, have to be functional. Although Al Unser Jr. once took the Wienermobile out for a spin at Indianapolis Speedway and broke 100 miles per hour, product mobiles are built more for sturdiness than for speed. Many of them travel as much as 50,000 miles each year—hitting everything from the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl to parades and grocery-store openings. Oscar Mayer estimates that 90 percent of Americans have seen the Wienermobile.
In fact, although nearly one thousand wiener wannabes apply each year to become an Oscar Mayer “Hotdogger,” only about a dozen applicants are invited behind the wheel. They trek to the company’s headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, and submit to a two-week, er, crash course—known as Hot Dog High—that covers everything from promotions to parallel parking. The graduates who cut the mustard swear a Hotdogger oath that includes the words, “I salami swear….”
Product-mobile pilots are more than just drivers. They hand out samples, organize jingle contests, manage karaoke stages, and chat with local news media. Theirs is primarily a public-relations position and, for some of the more successful vehicles, a means of good works on wheels. The Kissmobile, for instance, has a long-standing partnership with the Children’s Miracle Network.
But the product mobile is, above all else, advertising that finds the consumer by whatever means necessary, whether it’s a giant cat-and-dog mobile for Pfizer or a Wild Thornberrys Fun House for Nickelodeon. For every promotional vehicle on the road, there are dozens (such as a giant pantyhose container and a motorized tub of margarine) that never panned out. Then again, there is no accounting for taste. Like Spam. There are actually three Spammobiles roaming the nation, each a huge, smiling can of mixed meat on wheels, a mobile kitchen from which a small crew prepares and delivers sample-sized Spamburgers. Naturally, these chauffeur-chefs call themselves “Spambassadors.”
Product mobiles are as eclectic as they are eccentric, but all elicit one common reaction: People adore whimsy on wheels. Few things in life are guaranteed to evoke a smile. Some people hate mimes, for instance, or have an aversion to babies. But who doesn’t like a wacky mobile?
Drivers stop for a tank of gas and find six or eight cars pulling in behind them. They return to their product mobile in the morning to find myriad handprints left by picture-posers and notes on the windshield begging, “Please come to my wedding!” At night, the frequent flashes from photographers in passing cars can be mistaken for a lightning storm. And any slow cruise past an elementary school is bound to lead to a Pied Piper–like chase down the street.
Says Garber, who spent eight months as a Chocolate Ambassador, “It’s funny when you leave the Kissmobile for a normal vehicle, because you’re driving along and you expect everyone to be looking at you or waving. You find yourself waving to nobody.”
Still, life on the road in an icon isn’t always a trunkful of chocolates. There have been accidents (Mr. Peanut once lost a chunk of his fiberglass top hat to a poorly marked underpass), occasional protests (PETA members have crashed Wienermobile appearances), and wisecracks from passersby (motorist to Zippo Car driver: “Hey, got a light?”). A couple of years ago, there was even an incident in which two Hotdoggers were pulled over by police after mistakenly turning onto a restricted road near the Pentagon. They were released rather quickly, the Virginia State Police spokesperson realizing that the “hot dog posed no threat to us.”
Indeed, the world is a safer place knowing that no wiener is above a good grilling.
Published in ATTACHE. Used by permission.
The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and the Hershey’s Kissmobile are perhaps the two most recognizable examples of product mobiles, a nomadic form of advertising experiencing a renaissance of sorts these days. Larger-than-life brand icons are no longer rarities on the nation’s highways. It isn’t all that uncommon for two of them to cross paths—a bizarre encounter for fellow motorists. There was a time in Wichita, for instance, when the Meow Mix Mobile, an 18-foot calico that goes from 0 to 60 in “a whisker over 12 seconds,” found itself tailing Red Lobster’s Clawde, a 3,000-pound crustacean mounted atop a Ford pickup.
These wheeled wanderers aren’t wacky just for the sake of wackiness. They are centerpieces of carefully planned mobile marketing campaigns, serving as roving goodwill ambassadors and media magnets while creatively making connections with consumers. “If a consumer can touch, taste, see, smell, drive, and interact with brand ambassadors, they’re going to have a more memorable experience with that brand,” says Jeff Corder, marketing director at Chicago-based Marketing Werks, one of a handful of firms that specialize in planning and implementing mobile marketing campaigns. “No offense to standard forms of advertising, but how many times do we use the clicker to bypass a commercial? As opposed to pulling up to a stoplight and having a two-ton Kiss pull up next to you.”
There have been product mobiles almost as long as there have been automobiles. The first of its kind was a Pep-O-Mint Lifesavers truck in 1918, followed by a car shaped like a vacuum cleaner, another in the shape of a Heinz pickle, and a huge moving can of V-8 juice. One of the earlier product mobiles was the Zippo Car, a Chrysler Saratoga custom-built (at a cost of $25,000 in 1947) with two enormous, neon-flamed Zippo lighters rising above the roof. The car was taken off the road in the 1960s and left at a Pittsburgh-area dealership. By the 1970s, the dealership was out of business, and the Zippo Car was missing—a mobile-marketing mystery. Zippo constructed a replica for the vehicle’s fiftieth anniversary, but all efforts to locate the original have been unsuccessful. Then again, who hasn’t misplaced a lighter at one time or another?
In the world of roaming promotions, nothing has so endured like the Wienermobile, an automotive icon of such stature that a 1952 model is on permanent display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The first hot dog hot rod was a 13-foot version unveiled by Oscar Mayer in 1936. The Wienermobile roamed America in various incarnations for the next four decades—until the company mothballed its fleet in favor of television advertising. By 1970, product mobiles seemed to be fading out of style.
But all good things make a comeback. In 1986, Oscar Mayer celebrated the golden anniversary of its frankfurter fleet by dusting off one of the cars from storage. Reaction was so positive that the company commissioned a whole new fleet. Today’s version, the sixth redesign of the wiener, includes GPS-satellite technology, a hot-dog-shaped dashboard, relish-colored seats, and a bun roof.
Prototype Source was asked to design the return of the Wienermobile and has since produced nearly two dozen additional “sculpted vehicles,” as company vice-president Dorian Duke prefers to call them. “It’s actually the majority of our business now,” he explains. “At one time, it was just a small percentage.” Indeed, at any one time, a visit to Prototype Source might reveal a couple of employees installing giant black sunglasses on the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Mobile or affixing a foot-wide monocle on Planter’s Mr. Peanut, who spreads the word via Mr. Peanut’s Hot Rod. Leaning against a massive refrigerated Hershey’s Hug, Duke notes, without irony, “It gets pretty strange sometimes.”
These motoring masterpieces, which can cost as much as $500,000 and generally take about six months to complete, are products of the latest in industrial design—art with moving parts. Mr. Peanut’s head rotates. The Meow Mix cat’s motorized tongue flicks back and forth through the radiator grill. The Eckrich Meats Fun House includes squirting flowers and a working barbecue.
On the Kissmobile, the silver-coated Kiss is the cockpit for the pair of drivers, who carry a lofty title. (“I love having a business card that says ‘Chocolate Ambassador’ on it,” says 24-year-old Gretchen Garber. “I swear, my mom has it framed.”) The second, gold-clad Kiss opens up to a big-screen TV with a karaoke machine, while the Hug in the back is a refrigerator large enough to hold 230,000 chocolates. Details are fine-tuned down to the Kisses embroidered on the seats and the chocolate-scented exhaust.
At the same time, the vehicles, of course, have to be functional. Although Al Unser Jr. once took the Wienermobile out for a spin at Indianapolis Speedway and broke 100 miles per hour, product mobiles are built more for sturdiness than for speed. Many of them travel as much as 50,000 miles each year—hitting everything from the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl to parades and grocery-store openings. Oscar Mayer estimates that 90 percent of Americans have seen the Wienermobile.
In fact, although nearly one thousand wiener wannabes apply each year to become an Oscar Mayer “Hotdogger,” only about a dozen applicants are invited behind the wheel. They trek to the company’s headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, and submit to a two-week, er, crash course—known as Hot Dog High—that covers everything from promotions to parallel parking. The graduates who cut the mustard swear a Hotdogger oath that includes the words, “I salami swear….”
Product-mobile pilots are more than just drivers. They hand out samples, organize jingle contests, manage karaoke stages, and chat with local news media. Theirs is primarily a public-relations position and, for some of the more successful vehicles, a means of good works on wheels. The Kissmobile, for instance, has a long-standing partnership with the Children’s Miracle Network.
But the product mobile is, above all else, advertising that finds the consumer by whatever means necessary, whether it’s a giant cat-and-dog mobile for Pfizer or a Wild Thornberrys Fun House for Nickelodeon. For every promotional vehicle on the road, there are dozens (such as a giant pantyhose container and a motorized tub of margarine) that never panned out. Then again, there is no accounting for taste. Like Spam. There are actually three Spammobiles roaming the nation, each a huge, smiling can of mixed meat on wheels, a mobile kitchen from which a small crew prepares and delivers sample-sized Spamburgers. Naturally, these chauffeur-chefs call themselves “Spambassadors.”
Product mobiles are as eclectic as they are eccentric, but all elicit one common reaction: People adore whimsy on wheels. Few things in life are guaranteed to evoke a smile. Some people hate mimes, for instance, or have an aversion to babies. But who doesn’t like a wacky mobile?
Drivers stop for a tank of gas and find six or eight cars pulling in behind them. They return to their product mobile in the morning to find myriad handprints left by picture-posers and notes on the windshield begging, “Please come to my wedding!” At night, the frequent flashes from photographers in passing cars can be mistaken for a lightning storm. And any slow cruise past an elementary school is bound to lead to a Pied Piper–like chase down the street.
Says Garber, who spent eight months as a Chocolate Ambassador, “It’s funny when you leave the Kissmobile for a normal vehicle, because you’re driving along and you expect everyone to be looking at you or waving. You find yourself waving to nobody.”
Still, life on the road in an icon isn’t always a trunkful of chocolates. There have been accidents (Mr. Peanut once lost a chunk of his fiberglass top hat to a poorly marked underpass), occasional protests (PETA members have crashed Wienermobile appearances), and wisecracks from passersby (motorist to Zippo Car driver: “Hey, got a light?”). A couple of years ago, there was even an incident in which two Hotdoggers were pulled over by police after mistakenly turning onto a restricted road near the Pentagon. They were released rather quickly, the Virginia State Police spokesperson realizing that the “hot dog posed no threat to us.”
Indeed, the world is a safer place knowing that no wiener is above a good grilling.
Published in ATTACHE. Used by permission.