Esuvee

» see esuvee.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2005 I was a student in Ankara without a car, in a country where an SUV was a rich person's vehicle rather than a family default. Esuvee was aimed at American men aged 21 to 39 who already owned one and drove it like a sedan. I would not have been in the target audience even if I had lived in Ohio.

The campaign launched on 31 January 2005. The consumer protection agencies and attorneys general of all fifty states, along with Washington DC and two US territories, put twenty-seven million dollars behind it. The money was not theirs. It came out of a $51.5 million nationwide settlement with Ford Motor Company over allegations that Ford's marketing had misled people about how its sport utility vehicles should be driven and loaded, the Explorer above all.

So a settlement about advertising was spent on advertising. That is the shape of the whole thing, and it is worth sitting with for a second before getting to the mascot.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the beast ~

The Esuvee was a large shaggy animal rendered in CGI, with people riding on its back. The whole idea rested on one instruction: an SUV handles like a truck and not like a car, so stop steering it like a car. Putting a rider on a bucking animal turned the higher center of gravity into something you could feel rather than something you had to be told. The tagline asked how you ride.

The campaign had four points and the last one carries the weight. Handling and loading both come back to that center of gravity, which is what actually rolls a vehicle over. Tire pressure was the third. The fourth was seat belts, because roughly eighty percent of the people who died in SUV rollovers had been thrown out of the vehicle.

~ the funny part ~

Sixty-seven percent of adults in fatal SUV rollovers were young men, which is who the money chased, and you do not reach a 24-year-old in 2005 with a pamphlet. esuvee.com was a Flash site with a game on it. Sitting in the source of a fifty-state legal settlement was the Flash detection script Colin Moock wrote and everybody on the web copied, checking whether your browser had player version 6.

A safety campaign whose central image is a monster you ride drew a lot of mockery online and got remembered anyway, which is more than most public-service advertising manages. What people retained was never the four points. It was the animal.

~ what got buried with it ~

The last time esuvee.com served the campaign was the end of April 2007. There is no archive capture at all for 2008 or 2009, and when the crawlers pick the domain back up in July 2010 it is a parking page with a captcha wall on it. Today it loads a blank document that pushes you straight to a lander. The mascot outlived the money by about two years, and the domain has now outlived the mascot by nineteen.

The rollover problem got solved by something other than a beast. Electronic stability control became mandatory on new American passenger vehicles from the 2012 model year, and rollover deaths fell. Esuvee was what the legal system could buy in 2005 while the engineering fix was still being argued over.

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