I still remember how Esso sponsored Hockey Night in Canada. The “Put a Tiger in your Tank” ads appeared during the game; and hockey’s “three stars” tradition hearkens back to Esso “Three Star” brand of gasoline. For a while, Esso gave away tiger tails that you could hang from your rearview mirror. When my Dad filled up with Esso gas, I got the tiger tail. Lost them years ago, though.
Esso gave up on the tiger mascot for a while, but he came back in the 1990s, when the convenience stores at their gas stations were named “Tiger Express,” and a friendly tiger was happy to sell you gas, smokes, potato chips, soft drinks, and newspapers. Then, something happened, and Esso no longer had the tiger, and the stores were renamed.
As for auto insurance ads, I think most of those started when states began requiring minimum liability, and providers of cheap liability only policies started springing up.
Phillips 66 sponsors Big 12 basketball so I see a lot of their ads during the games, and this is pretty much it. The ads are rarely about the gas itself, more about the experience at their store.
Well, there is and they’ve tried to do it (“Our exclusive premium gas additives will add to the life of your car”) but I don’t know how much anyone cares.
I hear quite a few gas commercials on the radio which may be slightly more effective (and cheaper, anyway) since you’re actively in your car and driving past gas stations as it happens. As Lord Feldon mentions, Speedway is big on trying to lure you over with offers of coffee and doughnuts or other non-gas products.
I hear a lot of gas station ads on the radio too. Mostly about additives. The few I see on tv are about snacks in the store, like someone said unthread.
We had one of those, and i had a Texaco ride-on firetruck. There was a station near us - Martin I believe - that I remember giving out toy old-fashioned cars with the purchase of gas. And many gave out drinking glasses. I remember my parents looking for station that gave S&H or plaid stamps.
WhenI was a kid, it seemed like gas was in the low $.30s for a long time!
We had a Texaco at the end of our block in Chicago. “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star…”
I did… we got that commercial in fairly heavy rotation for a little while.
Still… most of the oil company commercials aren’t really touting their gas, but rather something about their eco-friendliness, or in the case of BP, how they are working to restore the Gulf Coast from Louisiana eastward. No idea why they’re playing them in Texas though; our coastline wasn’t affected by the big spill.
And like several others have said, this is because gasoline is a commodity product with very little to distinguish it between brands. The few attempts at advertising branded gasoline that you do see (Shell and Chevron primarily) are centered around cleaning additives like the Shell V-Power and Chevron Techron additives, because that’s about all you can really differentiate gasoline by.
They’re still around in some places. I remember getting a green bar of soap in the shape of the Sinclair dinosaur- thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Remember these? The same chain also gave away bright orange styrofoam balls that you stuck on the end of your antenna. One time the attendant gave us a bunch and we stuck them in the spokes of our bicycle wheels.
