Although he’s never had a proper name, the Esso (or Exxon) Tiger remains one of the world’s most recognizable advertising mascots, featured in a memorable series of 1960s ads that promised motorists that buying the right gasoline would “Put a Tiger in Your Tank.” Here’s the history of the Tiger and the slogan, which actually preceded the familiar cartoon mascot.
Esso was originally a trademark of Standard Oil of New Jersey (Jersey Standard), one of eight separate Standard Oil companies created when the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil Trust back in 1911. In 1959–1960, Jersey Standard merged with Texas-based Humble Oil & Refining Co., but until the early ’70s, they and their subsidiaries continued to sell gasoline under various regional brand names, including Esso, Humble, Oklahoma Oil, Carter, Pate Oil, and Enco.
So, depending on where you were located, the familiar cartoon tiger may have been the Esso Tiger, the Enco Tiger, or the Humble Oil Tiger. In 1972, the company rebranded as Exxon Corporation USA so they could finally use a single corporate name across the entire U.S., but some foreign subsidiaries continued to use the Esso name.
The ancestor of the Esso Tiger was a more ferocious-looking mascot adopted in 1953 by the UK subsidiary, Esso Petroleum Company, to mark the return of branded gasoline. (Since the war, British filling stations had only been able to sell generic low-octane “Pool” petrol.)
The tiger mascot was associated with the new Esso Extra premium fuel, and was used throughout the 1950s.
In April 1959, Oklahoma Oil Co., a Humble subsidiary in the Midwest, introduced the famous “Put a tiger in your tank” slogan. It was the brainchild of Emery T. Smyth, a copywriter with the Chicago office of Neeham, Louis & Brorby, Oklahoma’s ad agency, and originally ran in newspaper ads in Chicago and Indianapolis. The agency also came up with the gimmick of distributing tiger tails that could be hung from a car’s gas cap.
Carter Oil Co., a Humble subsidiary in the Northwest, also picked up the slogan to promote its Carter Extra high-octane gas with “Vitane.” The “bring power back alive” tagline recalled Bring ‘Em Back Alive, the 1930 book by big game hunter and animal trader Frank Buck. Carter gave this campaign a big push, with a massive ad campaign, gas pump decorations, merchandise for kids (like a plush tiger toy that sold for $1.59 with the purchase of 7 gallons of gas), and even tiger “paw prints” leading up to the pumps.
These campaigns were visible enough to inspire blues artist Willie Dixon to pen a moderately lascivious novelty song entitled “Tiger in Your Tank,” which Muddy Waters played as part of his set at the Newport Jazz Festival in July 1960. Waters’ studio version of the song came out on Chess Records in September.
By 1963, Humble had had very good results with the “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” slogan and tiger theme in every market where they’d tried it. It was catchy, colorful, easy to remember, and easy to riff on. Humble and its ad agency, McCann-Erickson, decided to develop it into a massive international campaign, hiring market research firms to find the most effective ad direction. The researchers found that consumers preferred a friendlier “storybook” tiger to the fiercer variety featured in the British Esso ads, so McCann-Erickson hired illustrator Bob Jones to create a more cartoony tiger character.
The first ads with the new mascot appeared in the U.S. in May 1964. Here are some more of the early ones:
The ads were accompanied by an aggressive merchandising campaign: The Tiger appealed strongly to kids, and so there were stickers, coloring books, and tiger plush toys, which sold in large numbers.
There were also TV and radio spots.
Response to the campaign was extremely good, both from consumers and distributors. Unsurprisingly, Humble decided to continue the Tiger campaign for the next few years. Here are some ads from 1965–1966:
Most distributors and dealers loved these “Tiger in Your Tank” ads, and thought they were extremely effective in driving business.
These ads made a big splash in popular culture, and the “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” slogan became a meme for many years afterward.
Translated versions of these ads began running in Latin America later in 1964, and the campaign expanded to Europe and Japan in 1965. Naturally, the slogan needed some adjustments for other languages.
Many of the foreign ads were basically the same as the U.S. ads with translated copy and headlines, but there were some market-specific ads as well. The cartoon dialogue in this German ad reads:
– Hey! We’re doing 190 [km/h] — do you have a tiger in your tank too?
– Stupid question! My coat’s caught in your door!
The cartoon dialogue in this Italian ad says something like, “Overtaking is where he shows his stuff!”
In addition to pump gasoline, Humble made racing fuels and racing lubricants, and they naturally enlisted the Tiger to promote their competition success as well. Here are a few of those ads from 1967:
It’s a bit weird that the above ad mentions A.J. Foyt, but not his Le Mans co-driver, Dan Gurney, who actually drove the winning car (a Ford GT40 Mark II) across the finish line. However, Humble had an existing endorsement deal with Foyt, who was also featured in various other period Esso/Enco ads.
The Esso Tiger ads were so ubiquitous that they inevitably became the subject of jokes, and a couple of savage parodies from MAD Magazine.
One could not accuse MAD of pulling its punches.
As with any marketing campaign, the popularity of the Tiger ads couldn’t go on forever, and the concept was eventually pushed a little too far. In 1968, the UK subsidiary and McCann-Erickson came up with the idea of building a new campaign around the question of whether the Tiger should continue. This kicked off with an unusually solemn March 1968 ad in which the Advertising Manager of Esso announced:
For many years the Esso Tiger has symbolised the true superiority and quality of Esso products. To the millions of users of Esso petrols and oils, he is a friendly, familiar figure.
But now he must go.
We have decided that the Tiger has finally out-lived his usefulness. There is just no place for amusing animals in a modern marketing strategy.
From now on we will only give you facts: logical and incontrovertible tacts about Esso products. We will show you the advantages in quality, performance and price of Esso Extra.
But without the Tiger.
This announcement is being made because we feel that with the passing of the Tiger, an era in our advertising ends with him.
A lot of people took this to be an actual obituary for the campaign, which drew wistful reactions even from those who thought the whole tiger thing was overdone. Esso Petroleum Company also received a number of letters from little children offering to adopt the Tiger.
However, that mournful response turned somewhat sour when the public realized that the “Advertising Manager” was actually an actor (Peter Ducrow) and “The end of the Esso Tiger” was really the opening salvo in a new campaign called “S.A.V.E. the Tiger,” which kicked off about 10 days later with the above ad, presenting the Tiger’s response.
“S.A.V.E. the Tiger” had nothing to do with wildlife conservation — the acronym stood for Safer motoring/Added protection/Vigorous performance/Extra care. (The asterisks in the above UK ad indicate British petrol grades — two-star was regular, four-star was premium, five-star was super premium.)
Humble subsequently extended the campaign to the U.S. and other markets, where it generally got about the same reaction it had in the UK. In retrospect, it was probably a miscalculation, a little too self-conscious and cynical for people who had been charmed by the earlier ads.
The campaign ended with the Tiger declaring victory, but Humble and McCann seemed to conclude that it was time to give it a rest. The Tiger signs and merchandise didn’t disappear from gas stations, but the ads dropped off for a while.
When Humble rebranded its U.S. operations as Exxon in 1972, with a new logo designed by Raymond Loewy, they revived the Tiger for a series of ads announcing the name change, counting on the familiar mascot to reassure the public that “while we’re changing our name, we’re not changing our stripes.”
For the most memorable of these ads, Exxon got permission from 11 other companies to use their advertising mascots: Nipper, the RCA Dog; Mr. Peanut; the Morton Salt Girl; Ajax White Knight; The Smith Brothers; Elsie the Borden Cow; the Jolly Green Giant; Dutch Boy; White Owl Cigars’ Whitey the Owl; Old Dutch Cleanser Lady; and Speedy Alka-Seltzer.
In the ’80s, Exxon and Esso sometimes featured images of real tigers in their advertising, but McCann-Erickson recommended deemphasizing the cartoon mascot. Exxon renewed its U.S. trademark registration in 1985, but by the late ’80s, they actually threatened to drop distributors who failed to remove their remaining cartoon Tiger signage.
Exxon then revived the cartoon Tiger in the early ’90s, hoping to soften their public image in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. This time, they focused less on gasoline than on their company-owned convenience shops, which were rebranded as Tiger Marts beginning in 1991. Exxon also opened bigger stores called Tiger Express shops, also using the updated cartoon Tiger mascot.
This antagonized Kellogg, which sued Exxon in October 1996, claiming that Exxon was infringing and also diluting Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger trademark. Tony the Tiger had come first (launched in 1952), and while Kellogg had not objected to the Esso Tiger mascot when his main purpose was to sell gasoline, they thought that Exxon resurrecting the character (which Kellogg argued that Exxon had essentially abandoned) to promote snack foods was not only stepping on their toes, but also threatening to tarnish Tony by causing the public to associate him with Exxon’s environmental catastrophes. Both companies pushed the federal courts for summary judgment in their favor; a district court mostly agreed with Exxon, but the appeals court reversed that decision, and the matter finally went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000. The high court ruled that the Kellogg lawsuit could go forward, but the companies eventually settled rather than go to trial, and ExxonMobil still has Tiger Mart and Tiger Express shops in some markets.
Despite these sour notes, the original Esso/Enco/Humble “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” ads were one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time, still recognized and fondly remembered more than 60 years later.
Related Reading
Roadside Classics: A Tiger On Your Roof and Other Gas Station Memorabilia (by Jeff Sun)
Automotive Product Mascots – Equipment and Services (Part 1) (by Jeff Sun)
Automotive Product Mascots – Fuel and Vehicles (Part 2) (by Jeff Sun)
One of my father in law’s favorite jokes.
” There’s a swarm of bees flying down the highway, half of them stop at a Standard Oil station. The other half stop at a Sinclair station. Except for one lone bee, which stops at an Esso station. Moral of the story?
There’s an Esso bee in every crowd!”
Love the joke.
Driver gets stuck on the side of the after running out of gas. A bee stops by his open window and asks what the issue is. Bee says no problem and he and his hoard of bees fly into his tank. Few minutes go by, the bee returns and says “you’re good to go – just the pump the accelerator once and turn the key” Car starts right up and the fuel gage reads full. Surprised, the guy asked “how did you do that!?
Bee says simple “BP”
Great trip down memory lane. In Ohio, the Standard Oil company was Sohio, and Esso/Enco/Humble/Exxon and Mobil were novelties we saw when we traveled. In 1972, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly drew a cartoon rebranding Nixon as Nixxon. Loved having a Sohio credit card back in the day as there were reciprocal credit privileges with all of the Standard Oil companies. And all of the oil companies have sold off their credit divisions and Sohio is now BP. Those were the days.
Had a cousin that owned a Chevron station in the 60s. Chevron advertised a filter that promised pure gasoline at the time. My cousin was surprised at the number of customers that came in wanting the filtered gasoline. The power of advertising can be very powerful.
I don’t think that most of the general public knew the name Dan Gurney in 1967. Still, Denny Hulme got a mention so Dan was due. I think there are only three universally known auto racers in the USA. Andretti, Foyt, and more recently Earnhardt. Soon two of them will fall into obscurity like Barney Oldfield. Auto racing had a higher profile in the ’60s but still not like baseball or football.
I think the issue was that Gurney had endorsement deals with other companies: Around the same time, Gurney appeared in Castrol and Fram ads, and of course there was the 1967 Mercury Cougar Dan Gurney Special.
Thanks Aaron for a great deep dive into the Esso Tiger! I think I was the perfect age for McCann-Erikson’s tiger campaign starting in 1964. I was 3 and I vividly recall being totally in love with the tiger throughout the rest of the 1960s. I was indeed one of the kids who compelled my parents to shell out for the tiger tail to hang out of the gas filler cover. I was sorely disappointed (for reasons I cannot entirely recall) when Esso rebranded as “Exxon”, and seeing the new Exxon signage going up was depressing.
That said, I do love the creepy aspect of Esso’s earlier international mascot, the oil drop. In your ad images, one can see the oil drop sharing the page with the tiger for a while, particularly in non-US markets where I think it was always more prevalent. I have more about that (and the tiger too) in my article on mascots – https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/advertising-blog/automotive-product-mascots-fuel-and-vehicles-part-2/
Love seeing the ad for the Esso sweepstakes and the chance to win a Marlin. We entered that. I was pulling for the typewriter, Tyco racing set, or even the garage door opener (something like a garage door opener was absolutely magic to me…up until I finally bought one of my own when I was about 45). But all we got were the key fobs. Of course, I still have those.
Thanks, Jeff — I’ve now added links to your mascots posts as well.
Wow – all of this was wonderful to read and look at. I admit, I never actually thought much about Exxon’s tiger mascot before this. I never would have guessed that the mascot itself came to Exxon from the UK originally, by way of Oklahoma Oil. As someone who enjoys mascots and their designs, I think that Esso/Exxon ad with 11 other mascots is one of the best I’ve seen!
And I’d love to have been a fly in the wall of the Supreme Court chambers listing to the justices deliberate on the merits of various cartoon tigers.
I just checked, and my local Exxon convenience store is still branded as a Tiger Mart:
The Tiger was quite different from Oklahoma Oil’s previous mascot, Oklahoma Ethyl – seen here with a human likeness:
You can find the briefs from the SCOTUS petition on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/micro_IA40386019_1774/micro_IA40386019_1774%202.%20Opposition%20Brief/), but I suspect the actual SCOTUS deliberations were not that interesting.
As I understand it (I did not read all the various court briefs very closely!), Exxon essentially claimed that because Kellogg had known about the Esso Tiger for many years and never squawked, the federal courts should just shut the whole suit down in summary judgment rather than letting it go to trial. The district court ruled one way on that, Kellogg appealed, the appeals court disagreed with the district court, and Exxon asked the Supreme Court to overrule the appeals court. SCOTUS weighed in, and then sent it back to the district court to sort out the details.
Much of it ended up being convoluted legal theories about how trademark law ought to work: whether Kellogg had the right to sue and on what grounds. The way it eventually shook out, neither side was going to get what it wanted at trial, and so they decided to settle instead.
The most entertaining part of the court documents is watching the various justices struggle with what to call the Exxon Tiger, since he never had an official name.
Thanks – that’s interesting reading.
Exxon’s description of the post-Valdez Tiger is a bit over-the-top, though:
“Today’s tiger is now cast in a more humanitarian role. He is polite to the elderly, plants trees for ecology and has an overall concern for the environment.”
Goodness. Couldn’t the just have said “He’s a cartoon, and he’s fun…”?
TornAuto has a really funny joke. Ii have never heard it which is sad considering that I am a jokester. I will keep it on file in my cranium. The one tiger in the tank joke that I know cannot be placed on this site. it starts off, “How can someone get a tiger in my tank,… (censored).
And if you like more old Esso ads featuring the Tiger. 😉
Remember these?
….
This Chrysler Canada brochure is a pretty blatant knock-off, with a cartoon tiger that appears on most of the pages. The “tiger in your tank” campaign was used in Canada by Imperial Oil which still uses the Esso brand for its retail operations.
I didn’t realize that the Plymouth tiger under you hood was a Canada only thing. My father had a 1965 Plymouth Fury II wagon and I was always trying to get him to buy Esso gas so we would have a tiger under the hood and a tiger in the tank. However, he preferred to by gas from B/A all the way (British American Oil) most of the time. However he did concede once or twice and we did have a tiger tail hanging from the gas cap for a while.
A fun read with my morning coffee. I was another ’60s kid captivated by the Esso (here in Canada) tiger. I remember the tiger tails and various promotional items quite well. They were also a major sponsor of Hockey Night In Canada on TV, which was a Saturday night staple in our house just like the rest of the country.
There are still a few Esso stations around here in BC but they seem to be slowly disappearing. Maybe it’s time to bring the Tiger back!
I remember the tiger tails, I got one and had it on the handle bars of my bicycle, the *instant* I left it unattended some other kid pinched it =8-( .
I had no idea of the depth and breath of this tiger marketing .
-Nate
I vaguely recall the Tiger, from Maryland, in 1965 but we were gone by 1966. By the time I started driving I was in San Diego and I know Chevron wasn’t in on Tony. Thinking back I mostly patronized Shell for many years for some reason. So I never saw a Tiger tail. However, being the home state of Union Oil I did see a lot of those reddish Union 76 balls on top of antennas. I know I have one somewhere around the house. Somewhere. Plus everybody who drove across the Bay Bridge would have seen the red ball everyday through 1993. One of the many great signs around the Bay.
The tiger ads were in my late Elementary thru Jr high years. Remember going to our local Esso on York Rd and getting the tiger tail and putting it on Mom’s ’63 Ford wagon. It was a fun idea.
I was another kid enthralled by the tiger, and begged my mother to buy gas at the tiger’s station. But she was a diehard Shell customer. Which never gave away anything cool. He said, with almost no bitterness at all. 🙂
One of my favorite Esso Tiger finds is this Japanese mug, complete with little paper box that it came in. Although personally, I much prefer the Uniroyal Tiger for cool car related tiger mascots!
I was trying to remember the year my parents and I went to Mica Dam which was being built at that time. On our way home dad noticed we were running close to empty and was making threats about his daughter having to go for gasoline. We came into Revelstoke, basically on fumes, but he didn’t stop at the first sighted station, he went a little further to the ESSO station. That year I recall them having a promotional using pull tab tickets where you could instantly when prizes. If dad had not gone to the ESSO station, I would not have won an Instamatic Camera, which I had for a number of years. This is when I remembered the Tiger in Your Tank. I wish I could remember what year that was. It had to have been in the late ’60’s. I thought perhaps 1967, because of Canada’s centennial, but not sure.
I remember the tiger tail, but we never had one.
Thanks for this little write up, I had not realized it had gone on for so long.