Update: in March 2004, “Off” received the Ad◆Q™ Award for Outstanding Advertising! A huge thanks to Harvey Research, Inc. for recognizing us with this award. And now back to our regularly scheduled explanation….

In late 2003, S&S wanted a follow-up ad to “Trust,” which had recently completed a successful run in Wildland Firefighter magazine. Since the former ad’s inception, we had added an additional member to our Wildland® line: the Wildland® Ultra XT™. Now, the Ultra XT™ is a pretty impressive little truck—and I use the term “little” quite loosely. Riding a 6×6 ATC chassis, the Ultra XT crawls up a 45° incline like a caterpillar, even with 2,000 gallons of water on its back. It ain’t cheap, but it’s worth every penny—when we built the first one for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the crew assigned to it kept getting bribed by other firefighters, just to take a ride in the thing.

The bottom line is that the follow-up ad was to feature not only the original Wildland®, but to let people know that S&S offers a wide range of off-road apparatus. “Off” features the natural progession from the diminuitive Attack 1® to the monstruous Ultra XT, thus earning the title of the most responded-to ad in Wildland Firefighter’s recent history.

Growing up in New Jersey has its benefits, not the least of which is the sheer number of diners around. Now, before you try and tell me that wherever you live has a lot of diners, please let me explain: a diner is not just a restaurant, and “McDonald’s with the Diner Inside” just serves to prove how clueless Ronald and Grimace actually are (although the new Chicken McNuggets are actually quite good!). I’ve seen lots and lots of places that claim to be diners, but outside of New Jersey (where they’re seriously all over the place), the only true diner I’ve ever discovered was a severely underrated place called “Nirvana” in Lafayette, Indiana—and they don’t even seem to realize what they have! That’s the beauty of a diner: there’s really no way to articulate what it is that makes a diner so much more than a mere restaurant, but once you’ve been to one, you’ll know. (If you ever head out to New York City or North Jersey, take a trip out Route 3 and stop at the Tick Tock. You’ll see what I mean.)

Now that I’ve gotten out my 2¢, let’s talk about this project: there once was a little diner called The Princess. It was on Route 23 in Wayne, New Jersey, and was nearly identical to the locally famous Pompton Queen Diner. Right up to its sale in mid-2002, the Princess was a great place—my family was probably there at least twice a month—so when one of my professors instructed us to redesign an existing menu, The Princess leapt right to my mind.

This project was created entirely in Macromedia® Freehand®. It was created using only Pantone® colors (three, to be exact), and is here downsampled into a 3.7MB PDF.

As a society, we’ve become extremely used to seeing photographs of things—so much, in fact, that a lack of photography can often be as much of an attention-getter as a photo. The same professor that had us do the menu redesign had us redesign the art for a CD. We needed to come up with a folding booklet, graphics for the disc itself, and a jewel case insert for the back—all without resorting to photography. It was a very interesting design process; the use of textures instead of photographs proved a challenge, but one which I was able to meet most appropriately.

The CD for which I created this design is The Darling Buds’ Crawdaddy. I bought it on a whim in an Orlando, Florida shopping mall (while there on a layover) back in 1992, and it’s been one of my favorites ever since.

This project was created entirely in Macromedia Freehand, using only Pantone colors (two, to be exact), and is here downsampled into a 3.9MB PDF.

At the beginning of 2003, S&S introduced its new low-cost elliptical tanker, the Infinity III™. The challenge was to advertise a fire apparatus of which no photographs existed—it hadn’t actually been built yet.

The distinguishing characteristic of the Infinity™ line is its Infinite Tank Warranty™, which provides full coverage on the tank for the life of the product. I decided to take advantage of this concept by comparing the Infinity III to other things that are “built to last.” Furthermore, as the apparatus itself could not be featured in the ad, I decided that the best graphic depiction thereof would be the roman numeral III (which distinguishes the Infinity III from its predecessors). The ancient ruins of Stonehenge were a perfect match for both of these criteria.

The silhouette of Stonehenge was created in Adobe® Illustrator®, with texture applied in Adobe® Photoshop®. The setting sun was likewise created in Illustrator, with sunspots and lighting affects applied in Photoshop. The sky is a series of Photoshop gradients, the grass tiled from earlier S&S photos. The shadows were created by distorting the original graphics and applying transparency in Photoshop. My vision for the Infinity III’s introduction is captured in the image on the left.

Unfortunately, when the ad was submitted for approval, it was strongly criticized on the grounds that it was “too intellectual.” Many people, it was thought, would not be able to identify Stonehenge. Furthermore, it was felt that people would not readily grasp that the Infinity III was a fire truck, and that they would not be interested enough to visit to the web site. I was asked to revise the ad to include a picture of a modified Infinity II® (no one, it was felt, would know the difference) along with S&S’s logo and phone number. The final version (right) draws the eye away from Stonehenge completely. Most people don’t even notice that it formed a roman III. However, as the customer (or in this case, the employer) is always right, I settled for the latter version, which ran in several magazines and was prominently featured at the fire industry’s national training conference in April.

This ad first ran in the January 2003 issue of Fire Engineering magazine.

2003 was certainly a year of changes for S&S. In addition to the new Infinity III, S&S also introduced their new, low-cost pumper. My team was in charge of coming up with a name for the new apparatus and then getting the word out to the public. We decided to take advantage of the public perception of the Infinity line: high-quality and “built to last.” As such, the new pumper was named Indure™.

The head of Sales wanted to continue promting the Infinity III with the aformentioned “Built to Last” ad. However, we had also purchased a full-page of black-and-white ad space, and we agreed that this would be a good medium for Indure (which, like the Infinity III, had not yet been built). I played around with a grayscale version of the company logo, almost immediately inverting it to see what that would look like. The inverted version reminded me of a spotlight, which in turn brought to mind Batman’s signature “bat signal.” Since Indure was designed for city use, this seemed a fitting application.

The cityscape is from a CD-ROM of stock photography. By dropping out the starry background, I was able to create a cloudy sky (which the signal would necessarily illuminate) in Photoshop. The ray of light connecing the signal to the imaginary spotlight on the ground was created using Photoshop filters, then dropping out the area around the buildings.

This ad first ran in the February 2003 issue of FireRescue magazine.

Concurrent with the two previous ads was a push to promote S&S’s new low-cost apparatus in the state of Indiana. While S&S sells to many departments and governments around the world, the higher-ups felt it important to have a greeater presence in our own home state. I was given the task of creating targeted mailers to promote both the Infinity III and Indure to Indiana departments, with the following criteria:

• Each flyer must feature a prominent photograph of the truck (which, as mentioned earlier, did not yet exist).
• Each flyer must include our new featured, low-cost chassis, the 2003 GMC Topkick 8500 (of which we had no photos).

To create the illusion of the apparatus, I decided to use the original engineering (CAD) drawings on which these apparatus were to be based. By pulling said drawings into Illustrator and Photoshop, I was able to take bits and pieces of earlier apparatus and combine them into a fairly convincing mock-up of the forthcoming ones. I must admit, however, that the chassis was a little bit harder. While the GMC chassis was, of course, included in the drawing, we still did not any photos of it. As such, I was forced to take a photo of an old (and, to be frank, rather ugly) GMC chassis and alter it to more closely match the chassis in the drawings.

While the graphics used in these flyers are not among my favorites—I couldn’t even use a deep black for the inside of the binoculars, in the interests of saving ink—I’m particularly pleased with the taglines. Since these flyers were intended for a very limited audience (that of Indiana fire departments), I decided to play up the “local manufacturer” aspect of S&S. The initial Q&A at the top of the page is designed to bring the apparatus close to home—“It’s right in your own back yard!”â?"and if I may sound my own siren for a moment, “The only apparatus that begin with IN” is a beautiful use of double entendre. (Actually, when my wife and I discussed it that evening, we determined that it was actually a quintuple entendre. See if you can find all five meanings!)

These flyers were mailed to every Indiana fire department in January, 2003.

The Infinity III version was updated later in the year for use in additional mailers, at which time several Infinity IIIs had been built and I was allowed to use whatever chassis I saw fit. (The Topkick hadn’t been selling very well, anyway.) I was also instructed to use as much ink as necessary to produce a good-looking flyer. I’m sure you’ll agree that the later version (right) looks a heck of a lot better.

Continuing our push to sell apparatus to Indiana departments, we decided to take advantage of the Indiana Volunteer Firefighters Association’s quarterly newsletter. The IVFA newsletter presents a slight challenge, as it is printed on standard newsprint with only black and red inks. It is therefore essential that all hints of blue and green be removed from the ads, so that the remaining red shows up exactly as desired.

For the February 2003 issue, I was asked to create a two-page spread advertising the following:

• Infinity III™
• Indure™
• 2003 S&S Open House
• North Tree Fire International’s Live Fire Training at S&S

I laid out the entire two-page spread in Adobe PageMaker (the only desktop publishing program then at my disposal). To promote the Infinity III and Indure, I decided to devote a full page to reinforcing the Indiana-based mailers we had sent out in January. Given the audience, I reused the tagline “The only apparatus that begin with IN.” Furthermore, since neither an Infinity III nor an Indure had been completed, I used the same photos as the earlier ads, dropping out the aforementioned green and blue. This left the second page for promoting the two upcoming events at the S&S factory. As part of the advertising, I was to include a mail-in form, encouraging area departments to R.S.V.P. for the events. I divided the second page roughly down the middle, making the entire half-page into a combination advertisement/sign-up sheet for each event. I then used Photoshop to create a soft, red watermark for each half—an S&S rescue pumper for the Open House and a shot of North Tree’s Live Fire Trainer for the Training—and overlaid them with black text. To instill a sense of urgency, I left the final day of training—which was already full—on the sign-up sheet, covering it with the word “FULL” in large, sans serif letters.

These ads ran in the February 2003 issue of the IVFA Newsletter.

About a dozen years ago, the United States Bureau of Land Management came to S&S and asked them to take over production of their model 667 fire apparatus. Since then, S&S has continually improved upon the original design of what is now known as the S&S Wildland®. In the ensuing years, however, the term “wildland” has become a lot like the term “Band-Aid®”: everyone knows there’s only one Band-Aid® (the one made by Johnson & Johnson), but nobody calls the other brands “adhesive bandages.” And just as numerous adhesive bandages seem, at first glance, to be indistinguishable from Band-Aids, so do many off-road fire apparatus look almost identical to the Wildland®. When the time came to advertise the Wildland, I decided to expound upon this theme by promoting it as exactly what it is: the original.

I began by dropping out the background on a photo of a recent Wildland® apparatus. I then converted it to grayscale, lowered the resolution significantly, and printed out a copy on the Sales Department’s office printer. After stacking a pile of blank copy paper under this single copy, I took several high-resoultion digital photos of the copier, the best of which I cleaned up in Photoshop. I also introduced the backgroundless Wildland into its natural, off-road habitat. I combined the photos into a single document, fading the former into the latter. It was a perfect contrast of two very distinct photos: the former, a copy; the latter, the original. I added the tagline, “Trust the original,” and worked with Sales to craft the perfect copy text. (The tagline, by the way, has since become synonymous with ads for the S&S Wildland®; its simplicity and versatility make it one of my favorite creations.)

This ad first ran in the March 2003 issue of WIldland Firefighter magazine.

As Summer 2003 approached, S&S was working on a Highland™ apparatus to show off during their upcoming Tour of Alaska. The Highland has always been quite difficult to describe: it’s sort of like a pumper, sort of like a light brush truck, and sort of like a rescue apparatus—but it’s not exactly any of the three. I decided to take the Highland’s greatest weakness—how to describe it—and turn it into a strength. The unspoken riddle at S&S had always been “What is the Highland?” However, rather than promote Highland as something to figure out, I thought it better to promote it as the solution.

The layout of this ad was greatly influenced by its message. In promoting the Highland as simple, I decided not to clutter up the background with anything overly complex. A simple gradient would suffice, and a blue hue would help the apparatus to “pop” out of the page. It would seem that the President and head of Sales agreed; the first draft I showed them was sent to the printer, exactly as originally presented.

This ad first ran in the May 2003 issue of FireRescue magazine.

In August, 2002, S&S attended the Texas A&M Municipal Fire School in College Station, Texas. Shortly beforehand, we were contacted by a company that was putting together a packet of 3×5 cards to be handed out at the conference. At this time, S&S was pursuing a desire to be all things to all people: whatever kind of apparatus you needed, they could build it for you. As such, I was asked to come up with a two-sided, 3"×5" ad that would promote all of our various models and the most important features thereof.

At this time, S&S was producing twelve basic models of fire apparatus. I knew there was no way we could get all twelve onto a 3"×5" card without making all of them nigh impossible to see. Furthermore, with all the features offered by the twelve different apparatus, I’d be hard pressed to list them all in a full-size magazine ad—at least, not in one that anyone would actually read. As such, I decided to break the card down into two separate but similiar sides. On the first side, I would feature three of our municipal apparatus. On the second, I would showcase three of our off-road apparatus. Each truck would be accompanied by a single feature that made the S&S model stand out from the pack.

As it turned out, this concept found its way into significant additional advertising. I would eventually blow it up to a full 8½×11" handout and extend the concept—all twelve trucks, no listed features—for a future magazine ad.

The 3"×5" cards were featured at the Texas A&M Municipal Fire School; the full-page ad (right) first ran in the November 2003 issue of FireRescue magazine.