14 most memorable local ads
"I got it! I got it! I got it!" - Happy Motors "Trailer load, after trailer load, after trailer load"/"Now go play in the yard." - The Barn Nursery "Charles Pitman is the way to go. Call 877-9800." - Law Offices of Charles G. Pitman, Attorney at Law "Out where we mark it up just a liiiiiiiitle bit."/"Where you buy the Totten-pickin' furniture, and not the building." - Totten Discount Furniture "We'll beat your best deals. Reeeeeeeeeegardless!" - Marshall Mize Ford "If it's got our name on it, you've got our word on it." - Hunt Nissan "Hey buddy"/"Making life a little better, come home to HullCo." - HullCo Exteriors "We buy golf clubs. We buy golf clubs. We buy golf clubs. We buy golf clubs. We buy golf clubs." - Mike's Golf Shop "Your everything store" - Kinder's Furniture Mall "You should be driving a Kia!" - Kia of Chattanooga "When you buy one pair, you get the second pair absolutely free." - Eyear Optical "Lake Winnepesaukah, by gum!" - Lake Winnepesaukah "Experience the downtown difference." - Moutain View Ford Lincoln "Check into Check Into Cash"/"kaching" - Check Into Cash
Everybody remembers the chicken.
"I got it! I got it! I got it!" he - or it - yelled, through the tubes of thousands of TV sets humming across the greater-Chattanooga region in the late 1980s and into the mid-90s.
One Reddit user, bobalewy, recites this from memory: "Hey! You need some cash? You need some money? Come on and see me, brother! We gonna make you happy at Happy Motors!"
It's been 20 years or more since the commercial aired on TV, and Happy Motors no longer exists. Carey Brown, former owner of the used car lot, sold it off in 2007, and the Rossville shop - famous for the rooftop chicken - closed. Bill Valencia bought and renamed the company Easy Money Title Pawn and Payday Loans and moved it to a singular, yellow location off Ashland Terrace. Still, people remember the name Happy Motors. They remember "I got it!"
And that's exactly the point, say those who drive home their names with repeated slogans on TV ads. The commercials may not win any Emmies, but they are memorable in the minds of many consumers.
About five years ago, Danny Skates, owner of Jackson Chevrolet Buick GMC, Inc., in Lafayette, Georgia decided to give TV advertising a shot. Skates has been in the car business for 40 years and has operated the Lafayette store for 21 years. It was Skates himself who decided to appear in Jackson Chevrolet's commercials.
"To give it a little more of a personal feel," he says.
He wanted people to know that Jackson Chevrolet is owned and operated by the folks you go to church with, see at the grocery store. And in a town of 7,000 people, it's hard to hide. Skates goes to church with over 600 people. Going on television meant he was under greater pressure to get it right, to treat customers like neighbors and to do what he promised. But it was a fair trade, he says.
The Jackson team got together and brainstormed. Where do you even start coming up with a commercial?
"It was much harder than I ever anticipated," Skates says.
He cares less about the individual sale or item advertised, and more about gaining name recognition among local buyers. He wanted it to be creative, something people would remember - "like that old boy who used to own Happy Motors."
At the mention of the name, his son Damon chimes in: "I got it! I got it!"
"We didn't want to get that creative," adds Skates. "That was probably OK because nobody ever knew who it was."
Valencia says all these years later, he doesn't know who was in the old chicken suit, or why Happy Motors' mascot became someone in a chicken onesie.
"I really couldn't tell you," he says. "I believe it was Carey's idea."
Valencia came onboard with Carey Brown in 1993, after the chicken commercials had been made, and during the commercial's rise to fame.
"Everybody remembers 'I got it! I got it!" he says. "Sometimes you get an idea, you run with it and if it works, you keep going."
He says Brown never disclosed where he got the idea. But Brown, and now Valencia, got a lot of mileage out of the famous fowl. Valencia had to buy a new chicken suit, which is nearly identical to the old one, because "we wore out the first one." The old rooftop chicken is somewhere stored away under a shed, according to concerned Internet bloggers.
Valencia runs a commercial for Easy Money every now and then, usually for one whole week a month because it's so expensive. Like Skates, Valencia said the point of his TV spots is not to highlight a specific sale or promotion, it's "just to remind people that we're still around."
The commercials air on local TV only, because "that's what we want," says Valencia. "Local customers."
Recently, Valencia says another payday lending operation with the name Easy Money has opened, and the company is in no way attached to his Easy Money. Another good reason for a commercial to clear the air.
"We've been in business 20 years, so we must be doing something right," says Valencia.
The old Happy Motors commercial is one of the only requests WDEF Channel 12 has received since it began broadcasting old archive material for nostalgia sake. But the station was unable to locate the commercial. Valencia himself doesn't know where the original is.
"I've got a couple of different versions here and there," he says. "Now the original one, I don't know where it is."
Danny Skates, meanwhile, is content to simply remember the old Happy Motors chicken, and not become it. He's sticking with a simple model: stand in front of the camera and tell potential customers that Jackson wants their business.
"There's no big secret in business, other than taking care of the customer the way you want to be taken care of yourself," he says. "I'm here. If you need to talk to me, I'm in the dealership."
When it comes to Jackson's commercials, Skates has tried out a couple of slogans, though he isn't sure how memorable they've been.
One was "a great place to buy your next car."
The other, Skates grins a little and repeats: "At the end of commercial," he says, "I'd say 'Let's trade cars.'"
This article appears in the February issue of Edge magazine.