Monday, May 14, 2007
Advertising companies compete for people talented at sign spinning.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Jeremy White was holding a sign advertising 5 pizza deals at Little Caesars in North Hollywood when two young men stopped their white pickup truck.
After noticing his strong arms and athletic frame, they made him an instant offer. "We can pay you 10 an hour. Give us a call," White recalled the men saying.
A few days later, the 20-year old met them at a North Hollywood park where coaches with clipboards barked at dozens of teenagers doing push-ups, part of a regimen preparing them to spin arrow-shaped signs for tanning salons and new homes. Four days later, White quit his Little Caesars gig to join the men's company, Aarrow Advertising of San Diego.
The payoff was immediate: 10 an hour, almost double his previous wages. During his second day on the job, a passer-by was so impressed with his spinning that she gave him a 250 Croton watch. Within a month, he got a raise to 15 an hour. "I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm one of the best out there," White said.
Industry term
White is part of the competitive world of "human directionals," an industry term for people who twirl signs outside restaurants, barbershops and new real estate subdivisions.
Street corner advertising on human billboards has existed for centuries, but Southern California -- where the weather allows sign-spinners to work year-round -- has endowed the job with style.
Local spinners have cooked up hundreds of moves. There's the Helicopter, in which a spinner does a backbend on one hand while spinning a sign above his head. In the Blender, a spinner twirls the sign behind his back. Spanking the Horse gets the most attention. The spinner puts the sign between his legs, slaps his own behind and giddy-ups.
Thanks to growing demand, the business has turned cutthroat. There's a frenzy of talent poaching. Spinners battle one another for plum assignments and the promise of wage increases. Some of the more prominent compete for bragging rights by posting videos on YouTube and Google Video, complete with trash talking. One YouTube comment reads, "i don't know if you stole my tricks or i just do them better."
Special spinning moves are guarded fiercely.
Aarrow keeps dozens of moves in a "trick-tionary," which only a handful of people have seen, said co-founder Mike Kenny. The company records spinners' movements and sends them in batches to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "We have to take our intellectual property pretty seriously," he said.
Aarrow requires its 400 employees to attend monthly boot s, where their skills are judged and physical fitness tested over three hours.
"It's competitive," said Randy Jenks, 20, an Aarrow "spin-structor." Afterward, he ran up a tree and bounded off with a back flip to pump up his students.