(The following story by Frank Bentayou appeared on the Cleveland Plain Dealer website on May 12.)
CLEVELAND, May 12 — These are not the usual graffiti, rude slogans spray-painted on the rolling billboards that thousands of railroad freight cars might become if the rules change.
But the big mobile displays that train spotters now see along Florida’s Atlantic coast do pack a visual wallop.
That’s just what a pair of Cleveland guys intended. They want people to see splashes of commercial color racing past all over North America.
Their company, Freight Train Media LLC, with headquarters here, steams along some Florida tracks behind a simple premise: that freight cars from the Sunshine State to the Rockies, Mexico to New England could be the next great advertising medium.
They just need to be tricked out with the right eye-grabbing messages and wheeled to wherever outdoor audiences will see them – maybe over and over and over again.
“You can just imagine what kind of impact messages might have,” company co-founder Patrick Morin said. He’s a 40-year advertising veteran who runs Cleveland ad firm PJ Morin. “You’re waiting at a rail crossing, and they’re rolling by, 100 cars with these colorful images on their sides.”
He foresees brand advertising, Nike swooshes, Coke logos, Chevy, the Cleveland Indians, State Farm Insurance and on and on.
Morin and his squash and tennis buddy Fred Johnson, a third-generation railroad man, hatched the idea in 2005 over a discussion of train-car history.
“There have been no ads on freight cars here since the 1930s,” Morin said. “It’s because of a rule of the Association of American Railroads,” a trade organization for much of the North American industry.
How Rule 84 of the AAR came into being is itself a story. “There were lots of ads on freight cars in the early 1900s,” Johnson said. He knows railroading, which he, his father and his grandfather worked in.
A few years ago, he sold a local family business that made cranes to position lengthy track sections for welding. At 57, he’s semi-retired, commutes between Cleveland and Frisco, Colo., and remains a rail enthusiast.
“Miller High Life beer, Kraft cheese, Armor and Swift meat packers, they were big advertisers,” Johnson said. The problem was logistics. Companies and union workers hated it when a car with a Swift & Co. ad would show up at an Armor meat-packing plant for loading.
They complained bitterly. The AAR, embarrassed and praying for calm, created Rule 84, banning billboards on railroad cars that might get routed from one company to another and tick off a freight customer with the wrong ad.
“It’s not a law,” Morin said. “It’s a rule.” He thinks if he shows the AAR that what happened 80 years ago to upset meat packers won’t happen today, the group will abolish the rule. “In the 1930s, they didn’t have computer-controlled logistics to keep track of cars,” Johnson said. “We do now, and the AAR understands the old rule is outdated.”
Meanwhile, he and Morin aren’t just playing squash. They made a deal with the Florida East Coast Railway, an independent little freight mover that has operated along U.S. 1 since 1895, rolling freight on 351 miles of its own track.
Why the F.E.C.? As Johnson pointed out, “It doesn’t exchange its freight cars with other railroads,” so AAR Rule 84 doesn’t apply to it.
Morin, ever the ad guy, looked at the marketplace and began making cold calls to potential advertisers.
One was to the Florida Marlins. Yes, the same outfit that robbed the 1997 Indians of a Major League Baseball World Series championship.
Sean Flynn, Marlins’ vice president of marketing, said something clicked when he heard the whole story. “It was definitely of interest, a new way to break through the clutter to help grow our brand and get our message to more eyeballs.”
As a marketing test, the Marlins bought the surfaces of two F.E.C. freight cars and dressed them up with ads on each side.
As it happens, a Marlins pitcher, former rookie of the year Dontrelle Willis, bears the nickname “D-Train,” a great fit with the ad campaign. On one brightly printed plastic panel, D-Train winds up amid outsized text that screams, “You gotta be here!” Slugger Hanley Ramirez, the National League 2006 rookie of the year, taking a big swat at a pitch, appears on a bigger-than-life ad, too.
Oh, and the Marlins are Miami’s team. Not all beisbol fans there want ad messages in English. One train car screams, “ØVeni Vivelo!” roughly “You gotta be here” in Spanish.
So far, Flynn said, the response “is pretty favorable.” At the end of the season he and his colleagues will assess the campaign and decide whether to continue next year.
They can catch plenty of eyeballs on Florida’s densely populated Atlantic Coast. Trains rumble right through Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and other cities between there and Jacksonville, the end of the F.E.C. line.
Morin said he’s patient. He will wait out the test runs on trains in Florida and AAR action on Rule 84 before pushing hard to sign up national advertisers. But he and Johnson clearly envision long-term success with this vision of multiple rolling ads.
Not every advertising professional loves freight train media, though. Take David Gianatasio, who writes for AdFreak, the daily Internet blog of industry trade magazine AdWeek, published in Boston. He put up a blog in March ridiculing the concept.
Who is the target audience? he asked. “People stuck in cars at railroad crossings, shaking their fists in anger as the train thunders past? Or those jittery souls whose homes and businesses abut the tracks?” Both, he suggested, might be “fairly unreceptive.”
Gianatasio’s editor, Tim Nudd, who runs AdFreak, echoed the writer’s sentiments. Considering miles of freight cars emblazoned with ads, he said, “I find it hard to believe that my life would be improved to see endless Reebok ads flash past.” Nudd called the net effect “more ad clutter.”
Of course, Morin has a different take. He also has a plan. Put ads on coal cars that get loaded at the mine head, don’t linger in rail yards anywhere (where graffiti artistes might “tag” them with unsavory words and images) and offload at securely guarded power plants.
“They keep moving on busy rail corridors, so they have plenty of visibility” through rural, suburban and urban areas, he said. “The closest thing they compete with is billboards. There are ads on trucks, but the key is that you can have 100 images dragged by a locomotive. With a loud whistle. It’s hard to avoid. It’s an event. People look.”
Ultimately, if railroaders could keep spray-can saboteurs at bay, it’s possible 1.3 million freight cars could carry, say, Pepsi’s image.
The entrepreneurs have another card up their sleeves, too. The charity card.
They agreed to give part of the proceeds of every freight train ad to Operation Lifesaver, which promotes safety at railroad crossings and rail yards and along open tracks.
The nonprofit says more than 360 motorists died in almost 3,000 collisions at U.S. railroad crossings last year, and nearly 1,000 people were injured or killed walking or playing on railroad tracks, equipment or track rights of way.
More safety awareness, the group said, could reduce such accidents.
So in the future, if you hear that lonesome whistle blow, then see scores of McDonald’s arches clickety-clacking across the horizon, don’t think of it as just another commercial assault. Consider the cause of railroad safety.