'ZILLA: The sponsoring company gets short shrift, but the spot's creators say that's on purpose.
WASILLA -- Loons call. Poodles play. Kiddies wave. It's a sunny day at Wasilla Lake.
Then the screaming starts.
FurnaceZilla pounds through Wasilla, belching fire and filthy smoke as he stomps past Newcomb Wasilla Park and down the Parks Highway. A television reporter files a frantic breaking news story from just in front of Crusey Street. Up the Parks, a blond woman waves her arms in front of the old railroad depot that houses the Greater Wasilla Chamber of Commerce.
A 300-foot-tall forced-air furnace on a rampage -- now, that's going to grab some attention.
That's the plan, anyway. Stage 2 Studios LLC, a Palmer-based production studio, created FurnaceZilla for customer HeatSource Mechanical.
The FurnaceZilla spot ends with HeatSource co-owner Jennifer Rushing portraying a frustrated homeowner with the furnace that's acting up ... again. Up comes the question, "Do you have a FurnaceZilla in your home?" before fading to black.
An accompanying spot featuring HeatSource's co-owner Larry Rushing and employees won't air for a few weeks yet. But the outdated furnace monster does have a Web site -- www.furnacezilla.com -- and, yes, a MySpace page.
The crowd at a recent Wasilla Chamber luncheon loved FurnaceZilla at his debut. After all, Chamber board president Jason Hamlin, a Wasilla financial adviser, plays the frantic TV reporter. That arm-waving blonde: Chamber director Cheryl Metiva, who roared with laughter. The Rushings looked happy too.
Yet the 30-second ad now popping up on TV really provides no information about their company.
That's called viral marketing, say Stage 2 partners John Conn and Dave Board: Drop a catchy concept and use word of mouth instead of a more traditional sales pitch like you might see, say, on some Anchorage furniture store commercials.
Conn and Board sat down for an interview last week in their Palmer offices.
Q. I noticed FurnaceZilla had only three friends on his MySpace page. What's up with that?
A. Conn: Well, he's not a very likable character, actually. He's pretty loud and annoying. He likes to shout a lot. In fact, he oftentimes oversleeps his shouting appointments. So he has to get up a little bit later and do twice as much shouting.
Board: He's very smelly in the morning when he wakes up. He's got that whole mold thing going on ...
Conn: We're hoping FurnaceZilla will get some more friends. Definitely. He's got a lot of crushes ... You know, like the big boilers in the movie "Titanic"? A lot of people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet. He had a thing for those boilers. It just never came to fruition.
Q. Did you suggest FurnaceZilla to HeatSource? What was their reaction?
A. Conn: Dubious, not sure. When they first heard about it, they were like, well, we trust you but we're not exactly sure what this thing's gonna look like. Initially we were kind of talking about it: Yeah, it's going to be 300 feet tall; we'll composite it in. And they said, "OK, so it's a guy in a suit that looks like a furnace, right? Or it's like a Claymation model?"
Board: Well, and you gotta know Larry, the owner, he's a very pragmatic guy. He's in the HVAC industry so he wanted to see, OK, where are my dollars going? If I'm going to spend a lot of money on something but my business name isn't going to be in it ...
Because this is a viral campaign; for at least the first few weeks to months we're going to just run this, and it's running now with just Furnacezilla.com as the tag line. There's no branding for HeatSource or anything.
Q. How hard a sell was that?
A. Board: We had to pitch the idea that, yeah, this viral marketing isn't for everybody but if we can do something so cool that people in Alaska that are watching TV see this, get excited about it, they go to this Web site, and what's the first link on the top? E-mail this to a friend.
I think they were skeptical going into it, but thankfully they gave us a little bit of leeway and the response so far has been awesome. He said somebody came into their store the other day and said, um ...
Conn: They said, "I don't know anything about you but I'm going with you because you have the coolest commercial on TV."
Board: That's exactly what we want.
Conn: That's exactly what we're looking for.
Find Zaz Hollander online at adn.com/contact/zhollander or call 352-6711.
