The promotion, dubbed "ME-470," is the result of an American Idol-inspired contest that asked the toll road's users to write stories about why they love this expensive stretch of asphalt. The E-470 Public Highway Authority received hundreds of entries, ranging from silly to sentimental, and posted the finalists online.
That's where you'll find a seventeen-stanza ode to the road by Claudia M.: "I'm an author, you see/With events here and there/And I take E-470/With nary a care."
And this, from Jeff N. : "When I think of what E-470 means to me, I get choked up, I know it sound sappy but my job takes me so far away from home in town and with traffic being so bad, not only was I having to get up to leave early... But I also did not get home until after dinner had already been served and my kids had already eaten and were ready for bed."
In July, the finalists were invited to a "Road to Stardom" event at Southlands Shopping Center, where they auditioned for a multimedia ME-470 blitz, which includes appearances on radio and billboard ads, as well as a sign at Denver International Airport. Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe impersonators helped officiate as the road warriors, who earned $50 tolling credits for their efforts, testified about their love of the tollway.
An E-470 employee panel picked five winners — a soccer mom, an exercise fanatic, a shopper, a harried dad and the aforementioned poet — to be featured in the campaign. Besides going public with their love of the road, they'll each get another $500 in tolling credits.
All told, E-470 spent $360,000 on the campaign, money that could have gone a long way toward paying some of those tolls. But they say that money wasn't the object, since the tollway is 99.17 percent on target for revenue projections. "This campaign is about selling the benefit of the road," says Cassie Jones, account director with O'Brien Advertising, which created it. "These folks were so fired up."
I love you, man: Bud Light knows what Mexicans like: beer and white women.
At least, that's what a choice billboard at Colfax Avenue and Monroe Street seems to indicate, with its pronouncement that the beer is "tan buena como la güera que te está mirando." For those not in the know, the word güero is on par with gringo, a term used by Mexicans to refer to their pasty neighbors to the north. Güera, then, would be the female form of this, and this cocksure little ad plays off that to speak to Denver's ever-growing Mexican community, basically proclaiming that Bud Light is "as good as the honky woman checking you out."
That's one new twist on that whole desperate housewife/lawn-boy scenario — but maybe a little presumptuous, Bud Light. Off Limits has drunk plenty of your beers, but we haven't come across one as good as some cracker bitch peeping our shit.
Still, for odd beer translations, it doesn't come close to the blunder that the Coors Brewing Company made more than a decade ago, when the Spanish version of its "Turn It Loose Tonight" slogan translated to "Take a Dump Tonight" — or, even worse, "Suffer From Diarrhea."
