If you spend.. oh, even half an afternoon driving around Columbus OH, you'll see this odd ad on the side of any given COTA bus, with some leering dude with creepy pink eyes. And he's saying "Auto Insurers Make Me See Pink."
Here's a bit of history behind Three-C auto, the upstart auto-body shop that faced down the insurance industry and won:
Bob Juniper, who had spent 20 years reconstructing smashed pieces of metal, turned out to be a marketing pro. He wrote the ads by hand in the evenings at home, recorded them at a radio-station studio, made decisions about where to place them.It's really kind of an amazing story, and I had no idea that Three-C had branched out into such diversified pursuits:
The Three-C campaign was picked up by the trade press, and soon other shops were calling, wanting to use the same material in their markets. In 1994, Juniper and Hughes started a separate company, Jupiter Marketing & Advertising ("that's Jupiter, like the largest planet, not like my name"), to copyright the material and sell the best ads -- Three-C has tried 50 so far -- and to do ad placement. Vaughn Owens, who joined the operation last year, says wryly, "We're probably the only collision-shop-focused marketing agency in the world." Some 30 shop owners in 15 states have done business with the now-$2-million marketing company.
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