Utah Businesses Have Faith That Ads Shalt Not Offend

SALT LAKE CITY —  The early Mormon settlers wouldn’t have approved, but times change:

Billboards tout the lifts at a nearby ski area as roomy enough for four: “Wife, wife, wife, husband.”

Ads for a local beer ask drinkers, “Why have just one?”--a question that’s particularly apt for a suddenly famous brew called Polygamy Porter.

And just blocks from the renowned Mormon Tabernacle, you can sing your heart out at a new piano bar called the Tavernacle.

Get it?

Taking a gentle jab at the state’s predominant denomination is hardly the marketing tool for everyone in the conservative business community here. But for a daring few, it draws all the attention of a torrid embrace at a church picnic.

For Greg Schirf, the brewer who rolled out Polygamy Porter in November, sales have gone forth and multiplied. Publicity generated by the refusal of a billboard company to use his ads didn’t hurt; according to Schirf, demand for his microbrew has jumped from 500 cases a month to more than 3,000.

“It’s gone bananas,” said Schirf, who settled in Park City after drifting there as a hippie carpenter in the early 1970s. “We can barely keep up with production.”

For their part, Mormon officials publicly take a good-natured view of the ribbing. While polygamy still is practiced in pockets of the state, the church banned it in 1890 so that Utah could gain statehood.

“Most of us just chuckle at this and don’t take umbrage,” said Bruce L. Olsen, a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “There’s no reason to get uptight about these kinds of things.”

Billboard Company Draws the Line

Even so, state alcohol officials tried to ban religious references in ads but were rebuffed in court. And a billboard company that Schirf’s Wasatch Brewing Co. had used for years drew the line at posting a Polygamy Porter ad urging customers to “take some home for the wives.”

“There was some underlying speculation that powerful people didn’t want the billboards up with the Olympics coming,” Schirf said.

He has relished for years his edgy ads--and the publicity that comes with them.

“You suffer from a minority complex being in the beer business in Utah,” he said. “You have to be creative.”

A brewer since 1986, he merged two years ago with the company that puts out St. Provo Girl, a spoof of the imported St. Pauli Girl. Ads for the beer feature a buxom, dirndl-clad blond and play off Mormon culture. One of them mocks the standard locution used here to avoid swearing: “If you just said, ‘Oh my heck!’ this beer probably isn’t for you.”

“The Mormons loved it,” said Schirf, who was raised a Roman Catholic in Milwaukee. “It was an in-joke.”

Debating Wisdom of ‘Latter-day Suds’

Schirf says he tests his ideas on focus groups and has rejected a few. His injunction to “baptise your taste buds” made the cut--but even Schirf ruefully admits that his brainstorm for a beer called “Latter-day Suds” might be over the top.

On the other hand, he doesn’t have much to lose: “If I offend a Mormon inadvertently, he never bought my beer anyway,” Schirf said. “I can’t lose a customer I never had.”

That’s not the case at the Brighton Ski Resort, a small ski area 25 miles east of here that relies on local business and whatever tourists it can lure from bigger and glitzier areas like nearby Park City.

To do that, Brighton’s billboards have asked visiting skiiers: “This is Utah. Why be wedded to one resort?”

Brighton even has had some fun with the name of revered Mormon pioneer Brigham Young: “Bring ‘em young!” a billboard exclaimed. “Kids 10 and under ski free!”

The current three-wives-and-a-husband campaign has generated only a few complaints, said Randy Doyle, Brighton’s manager.

“I’ve run it past hundreds of church members, and generally everyone takes it in the humorous light it was intended,” said Doyle, a Mormon himself.

Doyle suggested that such ads even could be positive for the church, giving leaders a comfortable opportunity to explain the reality of Mormon practices.

“It’s certainly a better platform than the Tom Green trial,” he said, referring to the defiant Utah man convicted on federal bigamy charges last year.

The owners of a new piano bar here called the Tavernacle weren’t out to explain doctrine when they named their business. “Tavernacle” was suggested by a New Jersey friend who thought that was the name of the famed Mormon choir.

“She wasn’t really up on the culture,” said Scott Alexander, one of the bar’s owners.

In any event, nobody has complained.

‘I’ll Be Back,’ Says the Mormonator

“People here are really a lot easier on themselves than people from out of state think,” Alexander said.

A T-shirt at a downtown shop that sells souvenirs for tourists and novelty items for missionaries underscores the point.

It shows “the Mormonator,” an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike in shirt and tie.

“He left friends and family,” it says. “He traveled far from home to find you. Don’t think you can get rid of him by pretending you’re not home.”

The Mormonator has the last word, a la Arnold: “I’ll be back,” he says.