Garfield is wearing a jogging suit, fishing and playing golf at a Florida retirement development. Snoopy is selling life insurance in New York. Popeye is hawking Kodak cameras. Wimpy is thinking of switching from hamburgers to Lipton soup.
Some of the nation`s most famous comic strip characters are earning millions for their creators as well as their agents this year, plugging everything from T-shirts to real estate.
Not included are the characters in Doonesbury, who don`t sell anything. Creator Garry Trudeau doesn`t rent out his strip.
Soon, Garfield, the chubby cat, will be splashed across 130 billboards along a stretch of highway in northeastern Florida where a subsidiary of ITT Corp. hopes to entice prospective buyers to pull off the road to visit model homes.
On every third billboard or so, Garfield sighs, ”Live the good life at Palm Coast.”
Gerry Sorkin, director of marketing for ITT-Community Development Corp., said he considered many other personalities for Palm Coast, located about 30 miles north of Daytona Beach. His marketing research indicated ”most people feel good about Garfield.”
”We looked at all of the comic strip characters and some television characters in terms of exposure and adaptability to what we had to sell overall and really Garfield came out on top, Sorkin said. ”The cat itself is sort of happy-go-lucky–not so philosophical, but with the intention of enjoying the good life.”
There may be a risk that the billboards will deter some prospective buyers who dislike Garfield, or cats in general, Sorkin acknowledges, but he says he didn`t think it was a significant one.
”There is always some risk that somebody`s not going to like what you do on billboards, on television or in magazines,” he said. ”There are some people who don`t like Donald Duck, but they are few and far between.
Palm Coast might have like to have had Donald Duck on its billboards, but Disney has teamed up with Arvida Corp., the Floriday development company, and Disney characters are not available.
He says he considered Big Bird, Bullwinkle and others but decided their exposure wasn`t as great as Garfield`s. ”We didn`t even look at Doonesbury, because the characters are totally unidentifiable as far as breadth of market,” Sorkin said.
Doonesbury`s creator wouldn`t have rented his characters to Palm Coast anyway. ”He`s just not into it,” said Norma Stanley, publicity coordinator for Universal Press. ”We`re hoping he`ll change his mind.”
Earlier this year, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., the stodgy dowager of the insurance industry, surprised the competition by announcing it would put the bulk of its $25 million advertising budget this year into a Peanuts ad campaign.
”It really began with Linus and his security blanket, with Linus saying something about security and Metropolitan Life,” said Bob Weinstein, assistant vice president of marketing for Metropolitan Life. ”It sort of grew into using all the Peanuts characters.”
Weinstein says Metropolitan will not try to measure the success of the ads until the end of this year, but he says the company did extensive marketing studies before launching the $20 million Peanuts campaign in January.
”We did a lot of focus groups and one-on-one interviews,” he said.
”Every time we showed a Peanuts ad to people they responded–9 out of 10 times positively.”
In one ad, Shroeder is sitting at his piano. Lucy says, ”Iv`e heard creative people are terrible money managers.”
Shroeder responds: ”On the contrary,” and he explains the benefits of a Metropolitan individual retirement account.
Neither the clients nor the licensing companies will disclose how much it costs to use a character. A spokeswoman for United Feature Syndicate, which licenses Garfield for creator Jim Davis, says a license could cost ”anywhere from $100 to $1 million depending on what you`re promoting.”
She says about 220 businesses, including American Express, have contracts to use Garfield.
Snoopy, who plugs everything from Cheerios to golf bags, and Garfield are some of hottest comic strip characters this year, but many others are in prolific use.
The prehistoric snake, ant and turtle in B.C. by creator Johnny Hart have promoted Pitney-Bowes` copy machines for years.
”We find his style very friendly to our equipment; the B.C. characters talk about current things and people, and they adapted very well to talking about copy machines,” sid Kirk Jewett, vice president of advertising for Pitney Bowes in Stamford, Conn. ”It`s been highly successful for us.”
Popeye has druk Dr Pepper, driven Toyotas in ads with Olive Oil and taken pictures with Kodak video cameras.
Wimpy, the hamburger freak in the Popeye strip, is being tested in a commercial for Lipton Soup, says Ita Goldzman, director of domestic licensing for King Features Syndicate.
Blondie has made sandwiches for Dagwood using Kraft cheese. Dagwood is soon to be munching Dailey pickles and installing home insulation for Guardian Fiberglass, Goldzman says.
The British character Little Miss has been selling Arby roast beef sandwiches and Olivetti office machines.
Publicists for the characters say they are often flooded with requests for certain personalities and have to discard jnes that would not portray the image they want the characters to convey.
”With Cathy, they wanted her to do toilet paper, and we said no,” said Stanley of Universal Press, which syndicates the Cathy strip, created by Cathy Guisewaite.
She says Cathy would be well suited for a diet ad, and the company is now negotiating with Weight Watchers.
”We get requests practically every day for one thing or another,” said Nancy Nicolelis of United Feature Syndicate, which licenses Snoopy, Garfield and others. ”We would not do a liquor company. That`s not the image we wnat Snoopy and Charlie Brown to project.”
United Features, meanwhile, has high hopes for a new character called Robotman, a lonely robot who wears a whirligig beanie and befriends a middle class kid.
The strip, by creator Jim Meddick, made its debut in February. United Feature already is picturing Robotman promoting hightech products, such as satellites and cellular phones.
While some characters are more versatile than others, the publicists say any of the figures can relate well to one product or another. Even Hagar the Horrible has about 20 licenses for products such as mugs and greeting cards.
