The Primo’s Italian Restaurant in Elizabethton is the most recent local restaurant to be selected for the Community Tabletop Promotion from ABC TOPS. Part of the promotion involves installing brand new custom-designed tables featuring high-quality advertisements from local businesses inlaid into the top of the tables. Monterrey hosted an Installation Celebration unveiling luncheon this week, as an opportunity for the business owners who purchased ads on the new tabletops to meet and network with each other. Over 25 local business owners and their special guests attended the luncheon. Primo’s owner, Moe Farrouki, said “Everyone loves the new tables. Our customers have made several comments already about how beautiful and entertaining they are. We’re honored to have been chosen again to be one of the top local restaurants supporting our community with this tabletop advertising format. The design and production folks have done an excellent job of delivering a high-quality product.”

Representing ABC at the event, local distributor, Elmer Purkey, said, “Primo’s has been one of the most popular projects my team has completed during the past seven years. The selected restaurants must meet our high standards of customer satisfaction, community support, and popularity. We custom design the tops to match the theme and décor of each restaurant. Then we offer a limited number of advertising spaces to local businesses and organizations. After each ad is created and approved, we build, ship, and install the tables. We typically repeat the process every three years as long as the restaurant maintains their status as one of the top five local restaurants.”

Purkey, who is the company’s top distributor in the Southeastern United States, is a native Tennessean from Morristown. His distributorship works with top restaurants on this promotion in Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. According to Purkey, “Our selected restaurants, the advertisers, and the patrons all benefit in various ways from the project. It’s a win, win, win situation. Restaurant tabletop advertising is a good example of the local community working together to support each other in a non-confrontational and entertaining way. It is especially rewarding for me personally to be able to have the opportunity to help local business owners to network together and promote their companies with such a unique and cost-effective format.”

The custom tabletops are manufactured by ABC Advertising Agency, a 60-year-old full-service advertising company headquartered in Sedalia, Mo. The company founder, William Crabtree, first came up with the concept while sitting in a restaurant waiting on a client who was late for a lunch meeting. According to Crabtree, “One day, as I was waiting on a client who was running late for an appointment at a local restaurant, I found myself reading the back of the sugar packets on the table to pass the time. Then I noticed another customer reading a ketchup bottle. Everyone has probably done that from time to time. That’s when it hit me, ‘if people will read those things then they will probably read anything.’ We tested the idea out in a few markets, got three patents on our product, and started marketing to a few top restaurants. Now our tabletops are in over 5,500 restaurants nationwide, and our restaurant tabletop advertising business is growing like crazy.”