Volume 2, No. 12. June 28, 2002
Tale
gating
In the Texas Panhandle sometimes the only sign of human life you’ll see
is a truck hauling grain or milk down a two-lane blacktop criss-crossing the
arid plains. And on that truck, you might see a billboard advertising Wonderland
Amusement Park in Amarillo, Texas.
“It’s
sort of like bus benches or taxi cabs, but it’s on trucks, because that’s
who goes through the area,” said Paul Borchardt, president of Wonderland
Park. By “area” he means “region,” a geographic reach of
27,000 square miles. “You have to be careful whose trucks you put it on.
You want only those who will keep their trucks clean.”
His
choice is a local trucker with a fleet of about 20 rigs who hauls grain to the
elevators and railroad yards. The advertisements are placed on a large sheet
of mylar which is stuck on an aluminum board hung on the back of the truck.
“They wanted to put it on the sides, but I wanted it on back,” Borchardt
said. After all, on the area’s two-lane highways, many drivers spend a
long time looking at the back of a truck. As Borchardt noted, “Frequency
of signboards is a good thing.”
Borchardt
has secured another medium to get his message out throughout the region: the
weather. On top of the Texas Tornado roller coaster sits a weather station
and video camera with the capability to zoom and rotate 360 degrees. The local
CBS Television affiliate's weather reports include broadcasts views from the
Wonderland Cam. The park also sponsors weather reports on local radio stations,
who get their meteorological data from the Wonderland weather station, data
which also appears on the park’s web site. So, whereas in most cities the
typical tag line for weather reports is “the temperature at the airport
is. . .” around Amarillo deejays and forecasters say “The temperature
at Wonderland is. . .”
“Everywhere you go, everybody says what the weather is at Wonderland,” Borchardt said. “If they think of weather, they think of Wonderland."
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