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WEIRD MARKETING
Customers offered a free wedding inside a giant mobile hot dog
By our News Team | 2023
Fun-loving American sausage brand shuns mundane marketing promotions in favour of the weird and the absurd.
Some marketing promotions leave you admiring their slick and sophisticated presentation. Others…well, they just leave you scratching your head.
Oscar Mayer, a US meat producer known for its hot dogs (‘weiners’ in American slang), as well as for its off-the-wall promotions, recently attracted widespread attention when it offered loving couples the chance of a free wedding in Las Vegas.
Photo credit: Oscar Mayer via Businesswire
The catch: They had to be happy to get married in a chapel designed to look like a giant hot dog on wheels!
Known as the ‘Wienermobile of Love’, the not-very-subtle yellow and orange vehicle has been part of the brand’s promotional strategy for some time, with the Oscar Mayer PR team saying they “receive thousands of requests each and every year to be part of couples’ big days”.
A wedding ‘seen through meat-coloured glasses’
For the latest promotion, which took place on the weekend of 15-16 April, couples were invited to apply for “a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a wedding [seen] through a pair of meat-coloured glasses”.
“Weddings are often described as the happiest day of couples’ lives, but getting to that point is not always a cakewalk. Between rising costs, large guest lists and oh-so-many opinions, 72% of couples report feeling stressed about planning the big day,” the company says in a breathless press release.
“Oscar Mayer is bringing some much-needed relief by providing couples the chance to trade in the hoopla of a traditional wedding in favour of something stress-free and fun: an elopement to the Wienermobile outside the iconic Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.”
Apart from its odd taste in wedding arrangements and its 8m-long hot dog on wheels, Oscar Mayer is also known for other out-of-the-ordinary promotions – including a musical quartet that plays ‘weiner’ (‘sausage’) whistles and a wonderfully odd wiener cake.
“Oscar Mayer has a legacy of sparking smiles and bringing levity to the everyday, particularly when things have gotten too serious,” the company states.”
You can watch a TV news report on the Wienermobile wedding promotion here.
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