Lynn Cottrell thought she was getting a spam call when someone offered to feature her family’s business, Cottrell Boatbuilding, in a Super Bowl ad.
“I was just in my kitchen, because our office is in our home, and our shop is here too,” Cottrell said. “And I was making a pie on a Saturday afternoon, and the phone rang.”
On the other end of the line was a production company in Los Angeles, telling Cottrell her family’s business was being considered for Google’s “50 States, 50 Stories” campaign.
“And of course my initial reaction was, yeah right, how much do you want me to pay you? Because I assumed it was a scam,” Cottrell said with a laugh.
But once the Cottrells received more information and realized it was for real, there was little doubt that they wanted to be involved.
On Super Bowl Sunday, the family operation that makes wooden rowboats in Searsport will be featured in a statewide ad for Google as part of a national campaign highlighting a different business in each state.
The campaign focuses on how small businesses are using Google AI technology to help support and grow their operations. Each of the 50 ads will run in that business’ specific state.
In the Maine-focused ad, which is already online, Cottrell says, “We’re better builders than we are writers, and we didn’t realize how helpful AI could be.”
The ad also features her husband, Dale, and two of their sons, Ben and Seth, who all work at the business together.
“It’s nice working with your family. We’ve been building wooden boats in Maine for over 40 years,” Dale Cottrell says in the ad.
“We’re a pretty small company,” Lynn Cottrell told the Bangor Daily News, adding that a production team arrived on Halloween to spend a day filming the ad.
“They were here the whole day,” Cottrell said. “They did a bunch of filming in the shop, and they did a bunch of filming in the office, and all around. And then we went out on a lobster boat that belongs to a friend of ours, and they filmed us rowing in one of our boats. It was a really cool thing, it was really fun.”
Cottrell said she doesn’t know what to expect in terms of impact, given that they serve a fairly niche market of people looking for wooden rowboats that can range in price from $13,000 to $40,000.
“We feel really honored. Maine has a tremendous amount of small businesses. We’re like the small-business state,” Cottrell said. “And out of all the businesses that they could have chosen, they chose us.”
Sunday’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles kicks off at 6:30 p.m. and might be the first Super Bowl that Cottrell tunes in for.
“I’ve never watched the Super Bowl,” Cottrell said. “And I didn’t even know that people watch it just for the commercials.”