If you’re following us on social media, you might have noticed a monthly image featuring Baron von Olsträd and our C911-P pressure switches. What’s up with that?
In the fall of 2022, we won FM Approval for C911-P, and this meant we could start selling them for use in NFPA86 compliant combustion systems. It was time to brainstorm ways to make potential customers aware of our new product.
We featured our C911-P in web and print ads with an industry trade publication. It became a focus on our website. Blogs were composed, explaining pressure switch operation and breaking down what our product has to offer. But we wanted to do something unusual too, for our amusement, and hopefully your own.
Baron von Olsträd is a character we created over a decade ago, soon after we rebranded our parent company as Olsträd Engineering. Due to the uniqueness of our new name, and its stylistic similarity to many company names in Europe, we started to get questions. Can I speak with Mr. Olsträd?
There was no Mr. Olsträd! The name was completely made up. And we started wondering… why not make up a Mr. Olsträd, too? So we did. Baron von Olsträd has mainly lived in our inter-company posters, in our handbook, and in our hearts, until we decided to increase our social media presence.
Baron von Olsträd was soon the subject of every holiday post. Shortly thereafter, he became the subject of minor (and arguable) holidays as well. In early 2023, we decided to use him as a kind of spokesmodel for our pressure switch.
What makes an ad iconic? What makes an ad memorable? We started to think about the print ads from bygone eras, when brands would command full pages in popular magazines. And when we began researching these ads to see if they still held up, we couldn’t help but notice that many of them are delightfully strange.
Why not replace the products in these ads with our C911-P pressure switch, and the people (all of them) with Baron von Olsträd? Why not, indeed?
We say little or nothing when we post these images, though we started to include a QR code about halfway through the year, which leads interested parties to our C911-P product page when scanned. Probably should have done that from the start! Whoops.
Maybe you recognized what we were doing from some of the more well-known ads, but we’d be surprised to learn that anyone knew them all.
This retrospective is therefore your key to the riddle. Of course, we deviated a bit from classic ads in two notable cases. First, the Most Interesting Man in the World is certainly an ad campaign, but later it became a popular meme! Second, the wizard pondering his orb is a book cover, from The Lord of the Rings series, not an ad at all — but it caught fire as a meme in 2023.
Memes and ads have a lot in common! They hook us in the same ways. But as you can see, we mainly stuck to the script. And we have more planned for 2024!
These images, and the Baron von Olsträd character, are drawn by our VP of Marketing, Clint Hall. Clint draws all kinds of weird stuff in his spare time, most of which you can find on his personal social media accounts and on his Redbubble store.
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