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* BC TEL uses plan ‘B’ to build its brand

What do Chevron Canada and DC Comics have in common?

They’ve both killed Superman.

dc, as you’ll recall, bumped off the Man of Steel a few years ago, only to resurrect him with equal fanfare a short while later.

In Chevron’s case, the deed was done back in 1977, just one year into the petroleum company’s ‘Your Town Pump’ campaign.

It all started when Trevor Simpson, then an account supervisor for McKim Advertising in Vancouver – which handled the Chevron business at the time – received a puzzling phone call from the company’s lawyer.

The legal counsel was apparently concerned about Chevron’s latest busboard, which featured the image of a superhero and the line, ‘Our gasoline contains no kryptonite.’

The lawyer wanted to know whether any other gas company’s products contained this bizarre element. Simpson was compelled to point out that kryptonite is, in fact, a mythical substance found only in the pages of a children’s comic.

Perhaps even more worrisome was the fact that the lawyer had already approved a tv spot based on the same premise.

When the lawyer took a second look at the ‘Superman’ spot, he said that Chevron couldn’t use the character without the permission of DC Comics. So Simpson got on the phone to the New York publishing house and asked if they’d permit the superhero to appear in a little campaign in Canada.

dc, as Simpson recalls, basically laughed in his face. In what could only be described as a quintessential case of bad timing, it turned out that the comic publisher had already made arrangements with bigger guns – and that a feature film based on the character was being shot even as they spoke. There was no choice but to kill the spot.

‘I had to go tell my client, `Oh guess what? We just made you this commercial and it’s never going to see the light of day,” says Simpson, who today is Chevron’s marketing consultant. ‘He was not a happy camper.’

Without a doubt, it was a low point in the annals of Chevron advertising. For the most part, however, the Vancouver-based company has been remarkably happy with the ‘Your Town Pump’ campaign – so happy, in fact, that it continues to run the campaign today, more than 20 years after its inception.

Indeed, ‘Your Town Pump’ has become something of an institution in the b.c. market, where Chevron operates approximately 200 gas stations.

The original concept was created by McKim in 1976. Simpson, who has been involved with the campaign in one way or another for the past 19 years, says that no one at the time expected it to have such legs. Quite the contrary, in fact.

The original spots featured a voice-over atop visuals that were (by today’s standards) rather silly: dancers, horses, tanks and the like. A lot of people, Simpson recalls, wanted to see the approach changed.

‘It wasn’t that popular with employees of Chevron,’ he says. ‘There was a sense that it was too out there, that it wasn’t serious enough for an oil company.’

However, when the company researched the advertising against that of the competition, it turned out that people actually liked the spots. ‘They thought they were funny,’ Simpson says.

And so it was decided that the company would continue doing the spots – and regular campaign evaluations, as well – until research indicated that there was no point in doing so. To date, there have been close to 100 executions.

The challenge today is making sure the message remains fresh and relevant, says Alvin Wasserman, president of Chevron’s current agency, Vancouver-based Wasserman & Partners. ‘It’s difficult.’

On the up side, a lot of the preliminary work is already done for the agency. Because the company has stuck with the same approach for so long, consumers can generally identify a Chevron spot within the first couple of seconds. Which means that it’s possible to deliver a message in just 15 seconds. ‘You can’t do that with a Shell commercial or a Petro-Canada commercial,’ he says.

Wasserman likens the Chevron campaign to absurdist literature, because the ads are so simple and pared-down.

The tv spots feature a ‘Chevron man’ in a variety of skits. All of the action takes place on a pure white set, with the pumps in the centre. Although the ads today are a bit more sophisticated than they used to be, they’re still instantly recognizable. And the ending is always the same: the company name, followed by the mnemonic ‘ding-ding’ of a gas station’s hose bell and the tag, ‘Your Town Pump.’

The basic theme is a simple one that has been tried in just about every retail category, from doughnut shops to department stores: the small neighborhood joint as a friendly place to visit.

‘Ultimately, you want to buy from people you like,’ explains Wasserman. In part, the idea grew out of a reaction against the multinational oil companies, which were less than beloved during the latter part of the 1970s.

The earliest spots featured voice-overs only. Then, in 1980, the Chevron man was introduced. It was a concept that worked wonderfully for four years – until the original actor died in a tragic accident.

‘That was a real crisis point,’ recalls Wasserman. The company and the agency grappled for some time with the dilemma: Should the concept be yanked entirely? Eventually, they elected to try finding another spokesperson – a decision that led to an extended (and ultimately successful) talent search in Los Angeles and Toronto.

Comic timing is critical to the success of the tv commercials. Witness a popular spot entitled ‘That’s It,’ which promoted the Chevron credit card.

Based on an old Jack Benny skit, it featured the Chevron man quickly miming all the actions required to apply for the card – after which he said, ‘That’s it,’ and stood in front of the camera looking bored for several seconds.

The spot wasn’t just funny, Simpson says – it was successful. Perhaps too successful.

‘They ran this commercial, got floods of applications and weren’t equipped to deal with it,’ he says. ‘So even though it was quick to apply, it took a long time to get your card.’

It was about this same time that Wasserman decided to flex his muscle as the new creative director on the account, and arrange for filming of the spots to be moved from Toronto to Vancouver.

‘We had to make a point of supporting the local scene,’ he says. ‘We were writing it here, we conceived it here – why couldn’t we just film it here?’

As he quickly discovered, the reason had little to do with hometown pride, and a lot to do with resources. One of the key ingredients of the spots – a large white backdrop – just couldn’t be found in Vancouver. Chevron was eventually forced to have one built there especially for the filming of its spots.

Any campaign that has been running for 20-plus years can be expected to have hit the occasional pothole along the way – and ‘Your Town Pump’ is certainly no exception.

There’s the whole episode involving the ‘Superman’ spot, for one. And then there’s Chevron’s self-serve spot from the mid-1980s.

The original storyboard for the spot featured a woman being taught how to drive by a male instructor. Even though the woman has trouble driving (the car lurches at the end of the spot), she finds it easy to use Chevron’s self-service gasoline pumps.

An account executive at the time was troubled by the sexist overtones in the spot. So the agency came up with a typically 1980s solution: Make the driving instructor female, too. Problem was, Chevron still ended up getting piles of complaints – from driving instructors.

‘We all hated that commercial,’ says Simpson, who notes that its run was mercifully short.

By 1989, it was clear just how much of a difference the campaign had made. Chevron, which had started out with 14% of the market, was at that point close to having doubled its share. (It now enjoys a 20-25% share.)

‘We were seeing the dividends of having a consistent message year after year after year, whereas our competitors continually chopped and changed their campaigns or stopped advertising for periods of time,’ Simpson says.

Still, the campaign can’t go on forever. Wasserman, for one, expects it to come to the end of the line sometime in the relatively near future. He predicts that there will be one or two more pools of commercials, each consisting of four to seven spots. (Chevron focuses mostly on tv, with a bit of radio. It uses print in rare instances only, for specific promotions.)

Wasserman is quick to add, however, that the final call rests with the client.

The creatives would have changed it long ago, he notes. But market research keeps lending support to the campaign.

‘It consistently beats [competing] campaigns, some of which have many multiple times spent on production,’ he says. ‘That’s why it’s so hard to kill the thing.’

All the same, Wasserman says, discontinuing the campaign may eventually be necessary for the health of the brand.

‘After a while,’ he explains, ‘classic threatens to become vintage, and vintage becomes old.’

Nothing illustrates this dilemma better than the example of the soldier pump – the single pump that was, until a few years ago, the primary focus of every single tv spot.

That pump can scarcely be found at any of the stations anymore, Wasserman says. But updating the tv spots by replacing the small soldier pump with modern gas pumps would have meant doing away with the company’s most enduring symbol. (Not to mention the fact that the new pumps just aren’t aesthetically pleasing: ‘They’re big and broad and not as cute.’)

In the end, a compromise was reached, and the soldier pumps now appear during the final few seconds of each spot.

‘But this is one of the reasons why [the campaign] will have to go,’ Wasserman contends. ‘Because [the soldier pumps] will be in antique stores soon.’