by Bailey White
Staff Writer
She has flowing red hair, a voluptuous figure and long legs perched atop a spark plug. She’s Autolite Annie, the new award-winning mascot for Autolite Aviation Spark Plugs that features the look of a 1940s pin up girl.
Her creation led to the marketing team at Unison Industries, the company that relaunched the Autolite spark plug design in 1999, being named Marketing Team of the Year by Sales & Marketing magazine. The collaborative effort of Unison’s marketing team, the Robin Shepherd Group and illustrator Russ Wilson, Annie is a throwback to the nose art World War II airplanes.
“The product was originally introduced in the 1940s,” said Brian Wenzel, the marketing communications manager at Unison. “We wanted to produce our own icon to produce results relatively quickly.”
To reach that goal, the team wanted to create an image whose retro design is reminiscent of the era during which the spark plug was first introduced. Annie, with her platform shoes and tightly fitting mechanic’s uniform, represents that time period.
Annie appears on posters and T-shirts emblazoned with phrases such as “It’s time to change your plugs,” a reference to the switch Unison hoped mechanics would make from the Champion brand of spark plugs. An ad in Trade-A-Plane magazine featured Annie with the line, “Keep ‘em Flying,” which was introduced as a response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and borrowed from a phrase used by the Army during World War II to recruit pilots for the war effort. In keeping with the tradition of airplane art, Annie has been painted on the nose of an Exxon Flyin’ Tiger plane.
Autolite Annie posters can be purchased on Unison’s website.
“We’ve found the reaction was very positive,” said Jim Melvin, director of marketing at Unison, adding sales of her posters, stickers and T-shirts at trade shows has been phenomenal. “There were lines 10 deep.”
Sales of the Autolite spark plug have significantly increased since Annie was introduced. She’s received three ADDY Awards for excellence in advertising and was featured in an exhibition at New York’s Museum of American Illustration.
The marketing team behind Annie includes Dan Ryan, Jim Melvin, Brian Wenzel, Dan Warchol, Mike Weaver, Fred Sontag, Angela Milligan, Harry Fenton, Donna Myers, Joe Logie and Adam Mohler.