Makes you want a hot dog real bad
It's been two years since the infamous floating hot dog ad, and one year since I wrote about how it came together
If you lived in Arizona during Covid in 2020 there’s a strong chance you remember when Gov. Doug Ducey finally got on board with Arizonans masking up to slow the spread. He untied the hands of local governments in June 2020 and then this happened on July 30, 2020.
It was through a coordinated campaign where the state government partnered with some of the biggest advertising agencies in Arizona to create a hot dog falling from the sky using a surgical mask as a parachute. But that wasn’t all. It fell with the baseball song (on the organ where everyone yells “charge!” at the end) playing in the background of the video. Just watch it.
I dove into those records for the Arizona Mirror finding the details of how it was created, who was involved and other ideas that were turned down in favor of a hot dog.
It was a fun, harmless story that annoyed Ducey’s office, but it’s a day that should – and will – live in infamy.
But here’s a bonus for all of you readers: I didn’t write about all of the records I had received. So here is everything that was turned over in that request from last year including some ideas from former Republican secretary of state candidate Beau Lane who wanted Arizona to enter in a friendly competition with Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis (because when it comes to people’s lives during a pandemic let’s have Arizona and Florida duke it out to see whose state can wear more masks and take selfies).1
For some reason they redacted Gov. DeSantis from the mock up tweet, but they kept in Florida.
If it was a competition, Arizona would have lost on almost every level given how many times the state became a hotspot for the virus, Ducey’s lack of mitigation efforts, the high death rate, low vaccination rate, copious conspiracy theories about the pandemic and efforts to instead increase the spread rather than decrease.