Opinion: On Protecting Trucking’s Image

By Jeff Johnson, Staff Reporter

The first job of an adman is to grab your attention so that he can then convince you that you need what he’s got. It’s not surprising, then, that a couple of recent advertisements have sparked truckers’ frustration with negative portrayals of the industry. For what better way is there to make people listen up than to play to their worst fears — in this case concerns about driving alongside big trucks.

Shell Oil Co. aired a commercial in August that showed a big rig barreling by a stranded young couple trying to change a tire on the side of the road. Accounting firm KPMG ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal in May that featured a towering, full-page truck above the tag line “ . . . there’s nothing worse than not knowing what’s going to hit you.”

Both ads were far from smear jobs — you see more unbalanced portrayals of trucking in the news each week — but they sent the undisguised message that trucks are to be feared. They were another drop in the pool of negative public perception of trucks that so many positive industry programs have tried to dry up.

So the industry was justifiably upset and responded with enough complaints that the ads were pulled and apologies swiftly issued.

But if trucking is going to holler at the negative commercials, it ought to applaud advertising campaigns like that of Shady Brook Farms.

The turkey and chicken sellers are running commercials — two of which feature truckers — that try to drive home how single-mindedly devoted the Virginia-based company is to fresh products. The ads end with the line, “We’re kind of freaks about freshness.”

One of the commercials shows a Shady Brook trucker who hangs flower boxes on the side of his cab. The other features a company driver so inspired by newly cut grass on the roadside that he stops his rig to revel in the smell.

“Everything we sell under our brand is only the freshest products,” said Jim Hoagland, director of marketing at Shady Brook. “So when we decided to define ourselves based on that concept, we naturally turned to how important our distribution system and truck fleet are to that.”

Hoagland said the ads have been a tremendous success for the company and generated a positive response from its drivers, too – “although they say they’ve gotten some ribbing from other truckers out there on the road.”

The commercials are a cute way to show how committed Shady Brook Farms is to getting its poultry to your kitchen in the same unspoiled state as it left the packing plant. In telling that story, the ads also show truckers as good guys and committed employees instead of the highway menaces conjured by KPMG and Shell.

And if you’re looking for another positive trucker portrayal, check out the Nashville Network in January. The cable broadcaster will air a program called “18 Wheels of Justice.”

The program follows the adventures of Michael Bowman, a special agent for the Department of Justice forced into the federal witness relocation program because of his efforts to imprison a crime boss played by Watergate-figure-turned-radio-talk-show-host G. Gordon Liddy.

Bowman assumes the identity of a trucker and, with the help of a high-tech Kenworth T2000 a la James Bond or Knight Rider, cruises about the country, coming to the rescue of those he finds in need of help.

How realistic the show is remains to be seen, but something tells me the secret agent trucker won’t confront real-life driver problems such as running out of hours and having no place to park or having to wait for a shipper to get its act together.

However, programs like the Truckload Carriers Association’s Highway Angel and Goodyear’s Highway Hero awards have shown that casting the trucker as a hero isn’t just television make-believe.

Positive programs like those, combined with crime-fighting truckers and freshness-freak drivers, go a long way toward counteracting headlines that scream about killer trucks.

But the purpose of “18 Wheels of Justice” and the Shady Brooks Farms spots wasn’t to be industry image programs, so if you believe that one good turn deserves another, then you know who to get your Thanksgiving bird from and where to turn your television dial next year.