Let’s remember when the killjoys at the Seattle Times exposed a hoax Ivar’s restaurant perpetuated, on this day in 2009 (November 12)
For some reason, the people behind Ivar’s restaurant pulled off a weird hoax that lasted a good three months before the Seattle Times ruined everything.
From HistoryLink and Peter Blecha:
On Thursday, November 12, 2009, The Seattle Times reports the debunking of a marketing hoax that had both bemused and mystified locals since it was launched in mid-September. At that time news accounts marveled over information provided by Ivar’s Inc. — the corporate entity that directs and manages the Seattle-based seafood restaurant chain founded by longtime waterfront character, Ivar Johan Haglund (1905–1985) — regarding their alleged “discovery” at the bottom of Elliot Bay.
In essence, what Ivar’s president, Bob Donegan, claimed then was that on August 21 — just off Alki Beach — teams of hired divers had successfully located and brought to the surface the first of three old advertising billboards. A photograph published in The Seattle Times on September 18 showed workers aboard a vessel hauling one of these apparently vintage, 7-foot-by-22-foot stainless steel signs supposedly fresh from the depths. With period-appropriate graphics, and hokey text — “Ivar’s Chowder. Worth surfacing for. 75¢ a cup,” or, “Diver’s special. Kids 12 & Under Eat Free with regular entrée. Includes Jell-O” — the signs did have a certain nostalgic charm about them, and some of us longtime locals wanted to believe that funny old Ivar had pulled another on us. Which it turns out he — or his minions — had.
…
It turns out that the whole premise to this billboard escapade had sunk back on October 23, when a trade publication, Nation’s Restaurant News, reported in a little-noticed piece that the submarine-oriented sign story was a giant hoax. The Times followed up. “Donegan says he wasn’t to reveal the hoax until after the ad campaign ended this month, but decided to come clean when the industry publication called.”
We now know that the billboard was not steel but rather painted wood; that Seattle advertising veterans, Heckler Associates (2701 1st Avenue) helped devise the campaign; that a $250,000 budget was allocated for creating the hoax and pushing it with TV and radio ads. And that the hoax worked. As the November 12 Seattle Times piece noted: “In September, sales of clam chowder more than quadrupled when compared to September 2008, from 19,000 cups to 83,000 cups.”
So, the submerged billboard caper of 2009 ended — just prior to the campaign’s original target date for winding down at the end of November. But some locals still have lingering questions about it. Lacitis, for one, essentially asked how and why the hoax ever took hold? His answer? Because: “People you wouldn’t expect to lie, did.”
He went further, noting that Donegan was “a Yale School of Management grad, a board member of everything from the Seattle Historic Waterfront Association to the Seattle Chapter of the Boy Scouts,” who went “skipping past the line of truthfulness. … Donegan perpetuated the lies by saying his company was sending samples of the paint to be tested for lead, trying to figure out when they might have been painted.”
As for Dorpat: He lent “legitimacy to the fake billboards even though he knew otherwise.” Luring Dorpat on board with the plan was “very important to give the hoax credibility.” Yet, Dorpat was unrepentant, insisting to The Seattle Times that the whole scheme was “the first really Ivaresque example — since his passing in 1985 — of a public promotion by Ivar’s built on a grand fiction. … This was romance, a delightful fiction to which we readily and willingly suspended our disbelief or we are pestering scrooges. …To the point about me being a public historian who should ‘keep clean’ of such playfulness, I answer, ‘keep clam.’”
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