Sometimes driving a message home is all about timing. And when you’re on the open road, it feels like you’ve got nothing but time.
Thanks to a total eclipse in April, a concert in May and then a convention in June — taking me to Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, respectively — I’ve become quite familiar with Route 40 over the past few months. Driving through the Southwest is a treat. You get a fantastic view of the gorgeous red and orange rock formations, mesas and hills that inspired Chuck Jones to create the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.
It’s also full of tractor trailers, moving trucks and other intimidating cargo haulers sharing the road. Often these are splashed with advertising and logos, hoping to attract new drivers or new customers. We saw many, many blandly designed wraps and decals urging us to consider becoming a long-haul truck driver. “Great pay! Flexible schedule!” Yawn.
While billboards still dot the landscape along any highway, tractor trailers are generally not plastered with ads. There are a few reasons for this. Trucks move all over the country, making it hard to target a specific market or track impressions. It’s also expensive to plaster ads on a truck, and they get dirty and look unappealing pretty quickly on the road. Last of all, it’s a brand risk to slap your name on a moving vehicle. A bad driver — or worse, a bad accident that makes the news — could throw your cheerful ad into a very negative context.
So, when I spotted a bright teal gravel truck in the distance with some well-designed words on it, my curiosity was piqued. In plain, readable font, the truck offered a simple dialogue:
Gravel: How you doing?
Sand: I’m fine.
We laughed for what seemed like miles. My family loves a good dad joke. And the next time we saw a teal gravel truck, I hit the gas in order to get closer to it. Advertising is supposed to make us change our behaviors — and believe me, purposefully driving closer to the back of a gravel truck is not typical for me. The next one urged us to “Get her the rock she’s always wanted.” There’s a whole fleet of these, and I’ll be on the lookout to read the rest of these corny one-liners. They are now my interstate highway Pokémon.
The teal trucks belong to West Coast Sand and Gravel, and I reached out later to drop their marketing team a note of thanks for the laughs they provided during our long road trip. Jamie Perard, the sales manager for West Coast Sand and Gravel’s Arizona office, thanked me for the fan mail and said it’s been a great program for them for the past eight years.
By itself, a bad joke is just a bad joke. But in the context of driving for hours through a vast, lonely desert, and coupled with an eye-catching color (opposite to the oranges and beiges of the Southwest, I noticed), that joke became a perfect marketing message.
When she’s not hopscotching around the Southwest, Celestia Ward works as Imagine’s PR coordinator, helping clients tell their stories — with or without corny jokes.