Serta USA Today ad touts FR
David Perry -- Furniture Today, February 6, 2005
Hoffman Estates, Ill. — Serta turned up the heat on promoting its FireBlocker line of fire-resistant bedding with a full-page ad in a recent USA Today.
The bedding producer found its ad in an unusually prominent position in the first section of USA Today's Jan. 21 issue, next to a full page of coverage of the Bush inauguration.
It was the first full-page ad in the issue, and it carried a bold "consumer advisory" headline superimposed over a picture of Serta's trademark Counting Sheep.
The message read: "More than 700 people in the United States die in bedroom fires each year. Effective Jan. 21, 2005, Serta became the only major mattress manufacturer to include open flame retardant materials in the production of all Serta bedding nationwide."
The ad also called out the competition, adding: "Not Sealy, not Simmons ... only Serta."
Officials at Sealy and Simmons had no comment on the ad.
The ad cited the National Fire Protection Assn. as the source for the number of deaths in bedroom fires.
A Serta official said the ad doesn't mean to suggest that Serta has only recently made its FR bedding broadly available. The FireBlocker protection was a specification throughout Serta's lines last year, the official said. By last May, all of Serta's national accounts had FireBlocker-protected bedding, as did many of Serta's other retailers. The rollout of the new FR lines continued throughout the year, by the end of which the "vast majority" of Serta's dealers were carrying the lines, the official said.
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