TANGIER ISLAND — A series of ESPN3 commercials featuring Tangier Island began airing on national television Monday, introducing viewers to the remote Chesapeake Bay island — which, as Town Manager Renee Tyler says in one commercial, has “507 residents, one school and no cars.”Eight episodes of the advertising campaign posted on YouTube had already been viewed by thousands of people Monday morning.
The commercials will air during Monday Night Football on ESPN and are also posted on ESPN’s Facebook page, according to a spokeswoman for the Richmond-based Martin Agency, which created the advertising campaign.
The campaign bills Tangier as “the biggest sports town in America per capita.” The commercials show watermen going about their work and familiar island landmarks including the airstrip and the water tower.
They feature Tangier residents including Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge, Tyler and others touting the recent arrival on the island of broadband Internet access, including the ability to view live sports programming on ESPN3.
“Electronics enable Tangier to be as in touch as anyplace in the world, for good or for bad,” said John Pruitt, a retired journalist who grew up on the island. Pruitt is the founder of Tangier Pride Inc., a non-profit organization formed two years ago to support the preservation of the island and its unique way of life.
Pruitt said the commercials remind him of the folksy Ocean Spray juice ads that feature two men standing in a cranberry bog, “but these are real people,” not actors.
One episode highlights ESPN3’s college football programming and features resident Harold Pruitt, calling him “the island’s biggest FSU fan.” Pruitt concludes with a Florida State University Seminoles’ tomahawk chop.
In another, Dorthia Pruitt, wearing a Crimson Tide T-shirt, confesses to having a crush on University of Alabama head football coach Nick Saban.
The distinctive Tangier dialect is prominent throughout the commercials, each of which begins with a snippet of a sea chantey recorded by the Smithsonian Institution in the 1950s.
“It was really a once-in-a-lifetime experience to get immersed in life on Tangier Island and meet and work with such great people,” said the campaign’s creative director, Rob Shapiro of the Martin Agency.
Shapiro and a production crew spent a week on Tangier in late July filming the commercials, all of which use actual island residents, not professional actors.
The agency contacted the Eastern Shore of Virginia Tourism Commission in June about doing a campaign on Tangier after the Virginia Film office connected the two, Tourism Director Donna Bozza said at the time.
“We kept our fingers crossed that they would go for the ad campaign based on the authenticity of our wonderful Tangier and are so thrilled they did,” she said.
The tourism commission in the next two weeks or so will be posting on its website, http://www.esvatourism.org/, a behind-the-scenes video about the making of the commercials, Bozza said. That footage also will be sent to media outlets as a way to promote the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Tangier.
To see the commercials, search “Tangier ESPN” on YouTube.
