Dear Loyal Readers,
You recently enlightened me on the topic of BBQ in mall food courts and I once again need to drink from your well of wisdom. When traveling in the Greenville area not too long ago I noticed a Skylight Inn ad on television. As you’d expect, it was a pretty low budget ad, which featured the tagline: “It’s a barbecue fact, not fiction, wood cooked barbecue smokes the competition.” Needless to say, there was nothing particularly exciting about the ad… except that I’d never seen a TV ad for a NC barbecue place before.
I asked Samuel Jones of the Skylight Inn about the ad and he said they’d started running it relatively recently and that it was paying big dividends in drawing in more customers (I guess that is the point of ads, so I am not sure why this fact surprised me but it did). Anyway, I’m curious whether other North Carolina BBQ joints have run TV spots. An exhaustive/exhausting three minute search of You Tube proved fruitless (porkless?), but I imagine some of the bigger joints must advertise on local stations. Please englighten me.
Your’s in our shared quest to educate the world about every obscure detail of North Carolina barbecue culture,
Porky
Filed under: 'Cue Culture | Tagged: Advertising, Shameless, Television |
BBQ Jew 
The ad for Jones Barbecue that you mentioned is the first one I can recall seeing. I live in Greenville and was surprised by how many people I know who live in neighboring counties found out about Pete Jones from that TV ad, though.
Like Naco, I don’t ever recall seeing a TV ad for a NC barbecue joint. Then again, how much newspaper, radio, or other ads to you see from BBQ restaurants, either?
They used to say the smell of the smoke from the pit was all the advertising you needed!
Saw an advertisement for “Smithfields Chicken & Barbecue” a few years ago, but you are right, there just aren’t many.
[…] and apparently crowds have grown in recent years as the younger Joneses have started, gasp, advertising on TV. Not that The Skylight Inn was exactly under the radar to begin with, as evidenced by the James […]