Gas Attack Advertising

In my last post I referred to the fact that oil companies get two minutes of your undivided attention every time you fill up your tank. It would make SO much sense to put a few basic cable channels up there and divert your attention from the price. If they put on an adult channel, they could charge five bucks a gallon with no complaints. Everybody would run gas out on the pavement trying to stretch their viewing pleasure just a half gallon longer.

Shell used to run ads with two identical cars fitted with little glass tubes to prove they both had the same amount of gas – but one car had Shell platformate in its gas and the other didn’t. From a side-by-side standing start the car with platformate always went farther before running out of gas. They didn’t mention that every decent gasoline had platformate, so naturally a car without it didn't do as well. My father use to fume over those ads and their implied criticism of other gasolines. “It’s like lining up two Fords and taking four spark plugs out of one of them. The one with spark plugs is going to run better, but you can’t conclude from that that Fords are better than Buicks!” He was perfectly right, of course, and nobody cared.

Exxon's advertising approach has always appealed to the engineering side of our customers. Exxon and its predecessors were always known as the engineers among Big Oil firms. By profession, by preference, and by personality. When other oil companies passed out little brochures showing hot chicks in sports cars, we passed out little charts showing that engines clogged slower on Exxon Supreme.

Once we tried image advertising with placards on top of the pumps. The one that sticks in my mind showed this pasty faced pudgy forty-ish dude with the kind of beard a seventeen year old would shave in shame. He’s driving along in a cream-colored convertible and the caption talks about how he’s in love with his car. We’re not speaking figuratively, here – he's named the damn car Lucille! But Lucille has a Secret Love. Her heart is set on – yep -- Exxon Supreme! For two minutes, every customer got to consider that buying Exxon gas would classify them with this scrungy geek who is so weird he’s emotionally involved with his car and such a loser that the car has dumped him for twenty gallons of flammable liquid! Exxon's answer to the Marlboro Man!

I do remember one really cool ad in the ‘70’s. This black dude with a big ‘fro was sitting cross-legged on the hood of a car, and he raised his head and his hands up like a guru greeting the sunrise. The hidden headlights on the car came up in perfect synch with his movements. It was a great visual image; energizing, uplifting, eye-catching! I think it ran twice on national TV before one of our managers pointed out that it contained no information about our products. They replaced it with something about the viscosity of our lube oils being uniform at high temperatures.

BP is making great headway now as the “green" oil company. They even publish lists of the projects they’re putting in. Furnace air preheat, cleaning heat exchangers; all these things that are in fact very good steps for conserving energy and reducing greenhouse gasses.
You know else what all those things are? They’re my work list from thirty years ago! Exxon did all that stuff when crude was twenty-five dollars a barrel. Then crude went down to ten bucks a barrel, and we still have people looking under old office furniture trying to find any return on those projects. Did we ever brag about the environmental impact? No way. We let BP wait thirty years, put in the projects when they actually make a profit, and get credit for loving the planet.

Once we had a big ad campaign about changing to a new gasoline additive that would (what else?) keep your engine cleaner. We set the date for the Big Change. Come to your friendly Exxon dealer MONDAY MORNING and we Will! Clean! Up! Your! Engine!
The new additive went into the into the tanks, then into the pipes, and the tank trucks, and the filling station pumps. And everything it went into filled up up with goopy brown Jell-O. It turned out the stuff reacted with tiny amounts of water and it plugged all our systems with this nasty slop that we had just told the world was our new wonder cleaning additive.
By superhuman effort, at least one part of every system was cleaned out and super-dried so that come Monday, the new additive in its non-goop form was in at least one pump in every filling station. And just outside New York Harbor, floating face down in the wake of an Exxon tanker, was the body of the guy who had recommended we should advertise this big change in advance.

From then on, anything new was fully tested and put into effect FIRST. After we were sure it was OK we would quietly change the charts in our little brochures. Nobody cared; they were interested in whether the hot chick in Shell’s brochure was really Miss October. Shell would start rumors like that but they never revealed if she had platformate or not.