I find it interesting when something so obviously ridiculous makes it through all the different layers of a corporation and their outside consultants. The marketing department, the advertising agency and even the printer missed the obvious on this one at a local gas station chain.
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jeffreyw
I think they are in on the joke, myself.
donnah
Huh. In my family, when they get gas it’s the one thing they all return.
RossInDetroit
Every time I drive past a Super 8 Motel I marvel at a concept that was implemented without ever being said out loud.
PTirebiter
@jeffreyw: Yea, I have to agree. It obviously adds talk value to an otherwise pretty boring product.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw:
@PTirebiter:
Not only in on the joke, but deliberate from the get-go.
Napoleon
@SiubhanDuinne:
Where is your lounge act appearing?
M-pop
False advertising!
Poopyman
@jeffreyw: 4thed.
I always wondered about the “Eat and Get Gas” signs, too.
jeffreyw
They gave me a Chihuahua?
Schlemizel
speaking of giving people gas – The Minnesota GOP announced that they are $2million in the hole after some incredibly stupid spending decisions. $700k of that is for legal fees when they demanded a recount in the last Governors election. Observers knew from the get-go there was no way they were going to change the results but the party leaders were no thinking with their big heads.
Meanwhile, the party of family values had to replace the leader of the State Senate when it was discovered she was boinking her media consultant. If you have not read the open letter from Minnesota’s GLBT community for destroying her marriage you should, its a day brightener:
http://gawker.com/5870531/gays-apologize-for-destroying-scandal+plagued-republicans-marriage
Michael Bersin
Ah, yes. Chuck Wagon and the Wheels and their 1979 album Please Pass the Gas.
HIPPIEBILLY & NO-HIT WONDERS
“…This Tuscon [sic], Arizona outfit staked a pretty good claim to being the world’s most obnoxious country band, what with several albums full of classic bad novelty songs, such as “Red Hot Women & Ice Cold Beer,” “You Only Say You Love Me When You’re Drunk” and (my favorite), “You Shot The TV (But You Were Aiming At Me).” The Wheels, however, will always be most identified with their uncompromised country music anthem, “Disco Sucks,” which has as much resonance now as it did in 1979…..”
WereBear
It was on purpose… to get people talking. Which it has.
zzyzx
When I lived in Las Cruces, there was a western themed gas station named Bar-F. Oddly enough, it had changed its name when I went back there a few years later…
RalfW
I just had marketing failure at United Airlines. They sent me a survey link to ask me about my recent flight.
The link didn’t work.
So now, I re-remember the horrible holiday flight I’d managed to forget about, I can’t tell them about it to get it off my chest, and since I was looking at their stupid non-satisfaction non-event, I ended up going to my mileage plus account where I discovered that 7000 miles had expired.
So now I hate United Airlines. Again.
Schlemizel
@zzyzx:
Saw a bar with the name “Bar Fly” once but they spelled it as one word, BARFLY. I assume it met the same fate.
Elizabelle
@jeffreyw:
I liked the poem.
Amir Khalid
I am reminded of the butcher shop whose sign said “You Can’t Beat Our Meat”.
SiubhanDuinne
@Napoleon:
At the Gaslight, of course.
@WereBear:
Exactly!
GregB
There was a long standing landmark on route 101A in Merrimack NH.
The sign read: Eat here and get gas.
Link.
Me thinks those marketers knew what they were doing. Crude marketing is in these days. There is a talk radio station in near the seacoast that has as a bumper tag line to the effect that they are proud to be in the gutter.
Ken
Ads like this work in this context, where drawing attention can result in an immediate sale. I’m less convinced they’re useful on television – sure, everyone remembers the horse farting in the woman’s face, but what was that selling? Doritos? Lite beer? Car insurance?
gnomedad
But they might share it.
Xboxershorts
Bean there, done that.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw:
That was funny.
RossInDetroit
In northern MI there used to be a service station/store at the intersection of two county roads between Coleman and St. Louis. The sign just said
‘GAS LIQUOR AMMO’.
Truth in advertising and no frills.
shpx.ohfu
One of my vendors sent me a year end email bragging about their technological expertise. It was addressed to (Contact First Name).
RossInDetroit
@shpx.ohfu:
I used to work in IT at an insurance company. One of my jobs was coding text that appeared in customer statements. I was constantly at war with Customer Service over grammatical clangers that they composed. They always won, and we looked ignorant to any subscriber who passed English 101. That company is no longer in business.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken:
“Rick Santorum for President”
BruceFromOhio
@Schlemizel:
ROFL
Tom Johnson
So I’ll put on my professional marketers hat for a second and agree with the above that this sign was deliberate. In our media saturated environment, the hardest thing is to get people’s attention. This sign is actually a good lesson in that: the “give them gas” part gets attention and demands explanation. The explanation (“the gift they won’t return”) is is also the sales pitch — what we in the business call the “call to action”. (Although, technically, it’s kind of a weak CTA. Stronger, though perhaps not any more effective, would be something like: “Buy your gasoline gift cards here.”)
The sharp vertical layout of the sign, by the way, indicates that this banner is designed to go into wasted space on the gas station — that is, space not originally designed for marketing. This use of wasted space is one of the reasons the marketing environment is so cluttered. There are ads everywhere.
That clutter dulls the senses demanding weirder and more frequent messaging to break through. It’s kind of a marketing arms race: you put your wasted pace to work marketing, and I have to respond in kind, but adding a more eye-catching message (“Farts Here!”). That drives you to go even farther, which drives me to..well, carried to the extreme it implies that all marketing will be about full-frontal nudity.
Which is fine with me, really, except that beauty nd hotness will eventually become not the exception but the norm, and the way to attract attention will be horrifying images of obesity and deformation. The harbinger of that terrible fate is those online ads that have abandoned indistinctly beautiful stock photography models in favor of ugly, scary, homeless-looking people. Bad enough, I say, but remember: in the future, the ugly, scary, homeless-looking people will be naked.
Yikes.
RalfW
@Schlemizel:
And these asshats want us voters to continue to give them the power to set budgets for the state? They can’t even balance their own party budget, how the frack are we to trust them with several billion dollars?
I just don’t get how they continue to sway the media with their “party of fiscal responsibility” meme. We live in a fact-free culture. If anything destroys global humanity, it will be our willful embrace of denial and turning away from facts.
Halteclere
There used to be a wine shop near where I live called “The Wine Therapist”. A visiting cousin asked what “The Wine The Rapist” was!
From the fonts that were used I could see how she read what she read.
Gromitt Gunn
For me, few business names can top “In and Out Oil and Lube.”
RalfW
@Tom Johnson:
I just yesterday read an article on how Sao Paulo, Brazil has been billboard-free for five years and now businesses are basically OK with it. They’ve realized that they do little to promote sales.
RossInDetroit
There used to be (still is?) a Gay’s supermarket chain in Minn. Slogan: “Shop the Gay Way”. Do they do irony there?
RalfW
@Gromitt Gunn: Kum & Go gas.
The best is the exit for Mason City, IA. Across the street from the Kum & Go is a Pump ‘n Munch.
Such a filthy town those Iowans live in.
I’m sure they’ll all vote for Santorum tomorrow.
jprfrog
Have you seen the TV ads that advise “Take a Sheet”?
Any ad that makes me laugh is going to win a second look at the product. The Republican Presidential Caucus Race (shades of Lewis Carroll!) is no longer funny, just boring.
Gex
Yeah, they didn’t miss it. Feature, not a bug.
RossInDetroit
A popular local spot for roadside photographs is the I-75 sign for Exit 69 – Big Beaver Road. That’s one direction you don’t forget.
Villago Delenda Est
@RalfW:
Supply side economics.
Reagan won the Cold War.
Off budget Savings and Loan (and bankrobber son) bailout.
Hillary killed her lesbian lover, Vince Foster.
Saddam has WMDs.
Global climate change is a hoax.
Faux Nooze.
There you go!
BruceFromOhio
@Tom Johnson: Its already begun. The animated woman with unhinged arm-waving and a revolving red light reminiscent of a fire truck on her head has already showed up in the wasted space to the right of my Yahoo inbox, exhorting lower interest rate mortgages. Are there automated billboard blimps in our future, shouting out repeated marketing messages, a la “Blade Runner”? I see rampant acceleration towards the non sequitor ads: gimmicks that catch your eye for but a moment in the hopes you will seek further info, or remember a brand name when making that impulse buy. See Cavemen, Geico.
Houston, Texas could take a page from Sao Paulo: state route 59 into the city from the north east is one of the ugliest, most wretched patches of metropolitan landscape ever created, with a proliferation of giant billboards on immensely tall towers littering the flat land as far as the eye can see.
YellowJournalism
Business in my hometown:
Cut Rate Auto Parts
Big upper-case letters in bold red.
Ella in New Mexico
@zzyzx:
LOL! Now they’re “Valero’s”.
When did you live in Cruces?
Citizen_X
@BruceFromOhio:
Hey now, I take exception to that. What about US 45 into Houston from the north? Or US 10 into Houston from the west? Or 59 into Houston from the south? Or…
Wait a minute. Is there a pattern here?
Origuy
@Citizen_X: Ugly billboards at every entrance to Houston? Truth in advertising?
I’ve never been to Houston, actually. Its reputation precedes it.
Gromit
A couple of years back a local gas station had a sign up promoting 2 for 1 hot dogs with the tag line “So nice you’ll taste it twice!”
Jamey
NE Pa, last station before the NY border on rural Rte11: “Deals on gas you cannot pass.”
Sorry, Mistermix, rubes do wordplay. And they vote…
BruceFromOhio
@Citizen_X: 59 out towards Sugarland could be downright purty, if you can look past the strip malls and billboards.
That is, heading *away* from Harris County. =)
Amir Khalid
Some years ago I came across a news story about an Austrian village named — quite innocently, by its German-speaking inhabitants — Fucking. It was apparently very popular with American tourists, who liked taking pictures of the sign with the village’s name…
Schlemizel
@Amir Khalid:
The used to be a restaurant next to the dam on Gull Lake in Northern MN. Its name was “Best restaurant by a Gull dam site”
Fiona
I like the signs on rural groceries, usually on the doors, handmade…
Eggs
Nightcrawlers
Milk
Steverino
Don’t forget the Sofa King: “Our prices are Sofa King low!”