Marketing and advertising are tricky beasts to tame. We’ve seen a massive amount of ads on social media. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok- all of it. Ads everywhere! It’s absolutely unending. HatLaunch has seen their efforts on this front not pay off quite the way they wanted. So they’ve decided to mix things up with a Used Hot Dogs campaign, website, NASCAR track, and former driver Kenny Wallace. Sound weird? It might be, but it’s actually pretty ingenious and noble.
HatLaunch & New Marketing
The company, HatLaunch, well, sells hats. Custom hats and apparel, really. They’ve been around for around eight years. Based out of Illinois, they know that NASCAR is a good avenue for their products. Earlier this month, the state hosted the Illinois 300 race at the World Wide Technology Raceway. HatLaunch decided to show up there and try something different. They’d previously advertised on social media. However, they completely abandoned that this time around.
The company recruited two people over a period of two weeks to create a fake company called UsedHotDogs.com. Yup, Used Hot Dogs. A hot dog reseller. It was entirely fake, but the website looks completely real. You can go on there and “sell” your already partially eaten dogs. At the raceway, the marketing team made clothes and banners with the website name. The crazy thing about it is that there’s no outward indication that it’s tied to HatLaunch. It ended up causing intentional confusion that drove people to the website and discussing it online.
Local Success & Kenny Wallace
Eventually the connections were made, and CEO Robert Hamm proclaimed how successful things were. “We got more attention out of a hot dog joke than we have gotten out of some very expensive ad campaigns,” Hamm stated in a press release. He was also extremely enthusiastic about the fact that this marketing money was put back into the local area. “You do not need an agency or a six-figure budget to get people talking about you. You need a good idea and a willingness to spend it in your own backyard.”
The success had led to a partnership with former driver Kenny Wallace, the younger brother of Rusty Wallace. Rusty is known for his delightfully goofy personality. There are some drivers who made more of a name for themselves based on their pre- and post-race interviews and broadcasting. At least more of a name for themselves than they did on the track. Kenny was one of them. By no means untalented, just not competitive enough to win at the highest level. Kenny is wonderfully wacky though, so it makes perfect sense for him to throw in with a fake used hot dogs company.
Hats off to HatLaunch
This is really a story that should be championed. A business owner decides to buck the trend of social media sponsorship. Instead, he hires a local team; they come up with a used hot dogs marketing stunt, and that money recirculates in the community. This is great stuff. Our hats (not sponsored, sadly) go off to HatLaunch. It would be amazing to see more companies take this route and think and act locally.
