Bright Lights, Small Town for Tom Bodett

Tom Bodett wasn’t trying to be all that clever. He was just filling a few extra seconds of radio time.

It was about a year ago, and he was recording a series of radio commercials for the budget lodging chain, Motel 6. When he finished his folksy monologue, there was still a smidgen of time left on the tape. So he smoothly chipped in, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”

That phrase, of course, has since become Motel 6’s commercial slogan. And Tom Bodett has quickly become to Motel 6 what Bill Cosby is to Jell-O pudding. In his homey monologues, Bodett talks like the guy who sells rabbit feed at the local general store. “Look for a Motel 6 wherever you’re going, unless it’s Pinball, Idaho,” says Bodett, explaining that there’s no Motel 6 there, so you may have to stay with relatives. “If you’re headed there, you’re on the couch, pal.”

All of this gosh ‘n’ by golly talk has made veritable folk heroes out of both Bodett and Motel 6. That was hardly the case a few years ago, however, when Bodett was a little-known commentator on National Public Radio, and Motel 6 was a low-price lodging chain in a heap of trouble.

Now, things have improved considerably for both the company and its spokesman. Both have not only seen their wallets fatten, but have also become household words. Along with the good fortune, however, comes a lot of big-time decisions for a company and a spokesman who are rather unaccustomed to the glare of the national spotlight. Now, Motel 6 is aggressively talking about expanding into all 50 states. And Bodett is boning up to host his own nationally syndicated radio show.

“I imagine there will be a day when this Motel 6 stuff all comes to an end,” said Bodett, whose radio variety show, “End of the Road,” is scheduled to premiere in September on 100 commercial radio stations.

As for his new-found Motel 6 fame, “this all came out of the blue,” he said, “and it will some day return to the blue.” For now, Bodett is making the most of it. And so is Motel 6. “We take every opportunity to merchandise on his name,” said Hugh Thrasher, executive vice president of marketing at Motel 6.

Indeed, you can buy T-shirts that say, “We’ll leave the light on for you,” at many of the nation’s 438 Motel 6s. At the same time, at least two rival Tom Bodett fan clubs are now recruiting members. Bodett has compiled two books of his radio commentaries, and the book jackets mention that he is the radio spokesman for Motel 6. And if the line is busy when you call Motel 6’s national reservations number, you’ll hear a recording of Bodett telling you to hang in there until your call can be answered.

Meanwhile, Bodett has just signed an exclusive four-year contract with Motel 6. “I was getting wooed by a lot of other products,” said Bodett. “I was even starting to nibble at one of them.” That company was Nissan. Its ad firm, Chiat/Day, tried to coax Bodett to be a pitchman for the giant Japanese auto maker’s line of trucks. That prompted Motel 6 to quickly sign Bodett to an exclusive contract. “Besides,” said Bodett, “I don’t want to become the Ed McMahon of the radio,” he added, in reference to the many products that McMahon endorses.

But if Bodett wanted to, he probably could become McMahon’s radio equivalent. Some radio stations report that listeners are requesting replays of the Motel 6 advertisements. “Despite all the negatives associated with cheap motels,” said Howard Cohen, chairman of the Los Angeles ad firm, Cohen/Johnson Inc., “the ads give you permission to go there.”

Indeed, the Motel 6 campaign ranks as “one of the most successful radio campaigns I’ve tested in years,” said Lee Wineblatt, president of the Pretesting Co., an Engelwood, N.J., company that monitors the effectiveness of radio commercials.

Not that there aren’t some critics. At rival Red Roof Inns, executives there say that the uncanny popularity of Bodett may actually detract from his Motel 6 pitch. “He’s become bigger than his message,” said David Wible, director of marketing at the Hilliard, Ohio-based chain. And Bodett admits that the ads are pretty silly. “Sure, the ads can be silly, but they’re not offensive,” he said. “They don’t make a fool out of anyone but me.”

The campaign is very inexpensive to produce. Although Motel 6 executives won’t say what the ads cost to make--or disclose the terms of Bodett’s contract--industry executives estimate that the company probably spends less than $25,000 annually to produce the ads. But this year, the company intends to spend nearly $8 million broadcasting them, up from $6 million last year.

Being part of such a wildly successful ad campaign never entered Bodett’s mind a few years ago. Back then, the resident of Homer, Alaska (pop. 2,209), was doing offbeat news commentary on the NPR show, “All Things Considered.” It so happened that David Fowler, then a copy writer at the Dallas ad firm Richards Group, was driving down the road in his pickup truck, and heard one of Bodett’s broadcasts. He liked Bodett’s voice and called him for a tape. Bodett obliged, but the tape mostly sat around in Fowler’s drawer for the next year.

Then the ad firm landed the Motel 6 account. And, as Fowler remembers it, “the stars sort of came together.” It wasn’t easy convincing Bodett to record a commercial, recalls Fowler, now a senior writer at the San Francisco ad firm Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein. “He’d never done one before, and he wasn’t very anxious to start.”

After all, the 33-year-old Bodett is a homespun kind of guy. In fact, the one-time construction worker built his own home, 15 miles from town and up a long dirt road, where he lives with his wife and 3-year-old son. “Most people in Homer still think of me as a home builder,” said Bodett. “They treat me like a normal guy, so I continue to feel like one.”

But outside of Homer, his commercial reputation has since grown taller than sweet corn in Kansas. And why not? After five consecutive years of declining occupancy, last year room occupancy at the Dallas-based chain rose 6%, said Motel 6’s Thrasher. He credits the ad campaign--the first in the company’s 26-year history.

Now, competitors are following suit. Red Roof Inns, the chain’s closest rival, began its first-ever national ad campaign two months ago. It has tapped comedian Martin Mull as spokesman. “We’re not just responding to Motel 6,” said Wible, the marketing director. “We’re responding to the growing competition in the industry.”

Well, it won’t get any easier to compete with Bodett. Last week, he flew to Chicago to record a dozen new radio spots. One of them is a sing-along, where he asks radio listeners to sing out loud the Motel 6 reservations phone number. In another, he discusses the coming elections and opines that candidates would be a lot more “fiscally responsible” if they stayed at Motel 6s.

Although Bodett usually stays at Motel 6s when he travels (no charge, of course), he sometimes stays elsewhere. For example, during his recent visit to Chicago, Bodett checked into the Park Hyatt. But if the Hyatt gets any requests from folks wondering what room Bodett stayed in, they might want to think twice before answering. After all, in one radio ad from last year, Bodett tells listeners that he is broadcasting the commercial from Room 201 of the Yuba City, Calif., Motel 6.

Of course, he didn’t. But never mind that. Since that ad aired, things have never been the same at that motel. “People keep calling asking to stay in that room,” said Lucy Davis, a reservations clerk at the motel. “They say they want to stay in the room where Tom Bodett slept.”

Moving Day for 2 Thompson Executives

There wasn’t room in the same office for both of them. So, on Monday, the ad firm J. Walter Thompson unveiled a major shuffle at the top in its New York office.

Less than one week after naming James Patterson to the newly created position of chairman and chief executive of its U.S. operations, the agency said that the former head of the New York office, Stephen G. Bowen Jr., is moving to the agency’s Chicago office, where he will remain president of the ad firm’s U.S. operations. After Patterson was named to the post last week, there was widespread speculation that Bowen would leave Manhattan.

Patterson, however, tried to put the change in a positive light. “The fact that so much of our business lies outside New York,” he said, “argues for having a key member of management located outside New York as well.”

Firm Is Going to N.Y. Any Questions?

The ad firm is, perhaps, best-known for the anti-drug commercial about a guy who cracks an egg into a hot frying pan. In the ad, the guy compares the burning egg to the brain of a person on drugs. He then asks: Any questions?

Well, the question now is, why did the Los Angeles ad firm that created that campaign, Keye/Donna/Pearlstein, announce Monday that it plans to open a New York office? For one, the agency is rumored to be chasing several large East Coast accounts. For another, “that’s where the money is,” said Paul Keye, the chairman of the firm. Could the Big Apple eventually become its headquarters? “Our main goal is to build a strong presence in Manhattan,” said Keye. “But I suppose anything’s possible.”

Chiat/Day Signs Off on a Salsa Account

Is the highly competitive salsa products business too hot to handle for Los Angeles’ biggest ad agency? Last week, the ad agency Chiat/Day said it resigned the $2-million account for La Victoria Foods because of “creative differences,” said Bob Wolf, president of the Los Angeles office.

Officials at La Victoria, based in City of Industry, declined to comment on losing Chiat/Day. But one local ad agency chairman said, “Chiat/Day is a different agency today than it was when it got the account” a year ago. That is, the agency has since picked up the giant Nissan business. Meanwhile, Pace Foods, a San Antonio-based salsa products maker, has continued to gain market share on La Victoria, said the ad executive, and “that continues to plague La Victoria.”

But there was also good news at Chiat Day on Monday when the company’s Los Angeles office was awarded the $7-million Eye Care Centers of America ad business, one of the nation’s largest optical chains. The San Antonio-based firm’s advertising was previously handled by Faber & Associates of Tempe, Ariz. Jack Gunion, president of Eye Care, said the 41-shop chain plans major expansion over the next year.

Idea Worked Well but Plan for Sequel Fizzled

More and more these days, individual advertisers are buying entire sections of magazines and newspapers in order to get people to notice their ads.

But in the May issue of Life magazine--its 2,000th issue--the New York advertising agency DDB Needham tried a different twist. It coaxed Life’s editors into printing a 56-page section with photos of all 2,000 past Life covers. The ad firm then turned around and bought all 14 pages of advertising in the section, and sold it to 12 clients, such as Amtrack and Michelob.

The gimmick was so successful that DDB recently contacted Sports Illustrated about doing the same thing for its 25th anniversary swimsuit issue--due out next spring. But, said a dejected Paul Zuckerman, senior vice president at DDB, “They already turned us down.”