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Bank contest winners have chance to bag $1-million

By wire services
Published March 21, 2006

It's not every day a bank lets you climb into its armored truck and carry off a sack of cash.

Tampa's Christopher Green, one of 15 winners in AmSouth Bank's Million Dollar Your Kind of Bank sweepstakes, gets that chance in May.

To encourage people to open accounts in its seven-state region, AmSouth will fly Green and the others to Orlando. They will enter an armored car and choose from among 1,000 money bags, 999 holding $10,000 apiece and one holding the $1-million grand prize. Green is a customer at the bank's Hyde Park branch.

As part of the same promotion, AmSouth is donating $75,000 to Give Kids the World, a charity that supports wish-granting programs for sick children.

A fish, a monkey, a kangaroo - Americans just can't get enough of the animals swimming, swinging and hopping onto wine labels.

In the super-competitive business of selling wine, animals give new brands an edge. When a beast is on the label, Americans buy that new wine twice as often as the competition, according to the marketing information company ACNielsen.

Critters help labels stand out on crowded wine shelves. A curly tailed monkey swings across the label of Monkey Bay, a New Zealand brand. A loon paddles on the red-and-gold label of California's Smoking Loon.

A kangaroo - actually, a yellow-footed rock wallaby - helped get the trend going. Introduced five years ago, Australia's Yellow Tail "was a spectacular success," said Danny Brager, vice president of ACNielsen's alcohol beverage team.

"And I think it taught the industry a lesson: You don't need to get bogged down into the details of wine pretension or snootiness to be a success, if you have the right product," Brager said.

Most "critter" wines are priced between $8 and $12, according to ACNielsen. It's more than just critters, said Jon Fredrikson, a San Francisco Bay area industry consultant.

Labels in general have grown more appealing, he said. There is Yellow Cab, which has a Checker yellow taxi cab, and there is Twin Fin, showing the back of a classic convertible at the beach.

Annual sales of wines with animal labels or names reached more than $600-million last year, ACNielsen said, while overall sales were nearly $4.07-billion. ACNielsen records its sales data from supermarket point-of-sale purchases.

--Information from Times staff writer James Thorner and the Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified March 21, 2006, 02:30:40]