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Inside Track: Car gets a lift to ad firm lobby
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It's kind of like getting that proverbial ship into the bottle. The ad agency Carmichael Lynch wanted to display a vintage Subaru 360 in its Warehouse District lobby on behalf of its yearlong work with the auto manufacturer. The only problem is, Carmichael Lynch's lobby is on the 10th floor.
So, on a September weekend, workers took out one of the 9-foot-wide 10th-floor windows in the Wyman Partridge Building, attached the 900-pound car to a crane and hoisted it upward. The whole operation took several hours. The European-style Subaru, which Carmichael Lynch found in Wisconsin, is from the late 1960s and is the forerunner of today's Subaru line of vehicles.
Carmichael Lynch landed the $200 million Subaru advertising account last fall and produced its first ads for the automaker this spring. The agency's website puts it this way: "Love. It's what makes a Subaru, a Subaru."
The classic Subaru 360 will join a pair of customized Harley-Davidson motorcycles -- another client ("We don't do fear") -- in a once-roomy Carmichael lobby.
Fishing for customersIrwin Jacobs is getting back into the aluminum boat business. In a recent letter to dealers of his Genmar line of boats, Jacobs said Genmar is going to build a new, cheaper line of aluminum boats because the existing aluminum market has gotten too pricey.
Jacobs said Genmar plans to build a state-of-the-art factory to build the boats at a location to be determined by the middle of next year. The boat line will have a new name. He said Genmar intends to "substantially decrease the wholesale and retail prices" in all segments of the aluminum boating market. When aluminum boats were introduced some 30 years ago, Jacobs noted, they were considered entry-level boats for recreational fishermen.
Expanding a boat-building enterprise while consumers are cutting back on disposable spending may seem counterintuitive, but Jacobs says he's confident in the plan.
"With the proposed commitment from Genmar, it is obvious that we are very optimistic about the future of the boating industry and believe that the recreational boating market will once again be reemerging bigger and better than ever before," Jacobs told his dealers.
Threatening wordsBahram Akradi, founder and chief executive officer of Chanhassen-based Life Time Fitness, has called for a boycott of any political candidate, state or federal, who continues to run negative advertisements after Oct. 20.
On Thursday, Akradi wrote a long, angry three-page missive skewering political attack ads, and e-mailed it to his many friends and acquaintances, who he says number "in the thousands."
Akradi, who founded Life Time Fitness in 1992, is hoping that his letter will course through the Internet -- like those mass text messages sent by political campaigns -- and ultimately put enough pressure on candidates and the media to stop running the ads.
"No gray area here, friends -- if they continue to do nothing but run these slimy, depressing, unintelligent, personal attacks than [sic] they WILL NOT receive our vote!" he wrote. "These ads insult the intelligence of any reasonable person with common sense."
"If they choose to ignore us, and continue their usual tactics, they will do it at their peril," he wrote. "Than [sic] they will be out looking to land real jobs from people like us."
DAVID PHELPS, CHRIS SERRES
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