Viking purple and gold can be seen all over Snohomish County these days, on busses, print ads and even on television.

Snohomish County PUD has teamed up with the Lake Stevens High School cheerleaders to promote their ‘Conservation Sensation’ advertising and to let people know that changing your light bulbs is a small step in saving energy and money.
“The purpose of the campaign is conservation and to get people to replace their fluorescent light bulbs to incandescent light bulbs, which last 13 times longer,” Mike Thorne, spokesman for PUD said.

PUD wanted to take local, everyday people and make them spokespeople for their new campaign.
“We have always used customers who have been involved in conservation. We thought that it was better to have the customers do the talking and not the PUD,” Thorne explains. “This year we had the cheerleaders, Rick Steves,  Everett Firefighters, Dwayne Lane Motors and even a barbershop quartet.”

Choosing Lake Stevens as the place to go for their cheerleader ads was a no-brainer.

“We had a great relationship with the school district and we wanted to do a commercial with cheerleaders,” Thorne said. “We think that Lake Stevens has a great Superintendent and he has been great to work with.”

Last April, the Viking Cheerleaders were called into a special meeting. Their coach Suzanne Lewis, told them it was great news.
“Our coach sent out a text the night before which said emergency meeting tomorrow,” cheerleader and Lake Stevens senior Natalie Evangelisti said.  “When we heard it was for a T.V. commercial we were ecstatic. It was something that nobody at our school has ever done before. We were the first.”

 When the girls first arrived at the studio and heard the cheer that PUD had put together for them, they were a bit surprised. Feeling like the cheer was, well, a little old-fashioned, the team decided to use one of their favorite cheers and change the words.

“We felt that it would be really neat if we rearrange the words to one of our cheers because the town already knew that cheer and it would be a reference to our home town,” Cheerleader Daniela Montelongo said. “It was a lot of fun and we felt pretty lucky because there are a lot of squads in the area that could have done it.”

“We joked around that it was an old school cheer,  so we switched one of ours around we thought it was a good fit,” Evangelisti said. “Now when we do the cheer at the games, some of the girls get mixed up.”

The experience was more than just fun and games for the girls. They actually ended learning a lot about conservation and energy efficient light bulbs.

“I think the best part was actually seeing the ad come out on the busses, the back of the newsletters and on television, “ Montelongo said. “We learned that the light bulbs are really useful because they save about half the energy a regular light bulb does. It was all about going green.”

“After I told my family about it we switched a lot of our light bulbs to the energy efficient light bulbs,” Evangelisti said. “The fact that we changed our light bulbs was pretty cool.”
The ad campaign will continue throughout 2010.


 

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