In 2020, just a few days after the election in November, Rudy Giuliani held a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Nothing unusual about that. Except that it was Four Seasons Total Landscaping (FSTL), not the Four Seasons Hotel. No relation. And no explanation, either. If anyone at the landscaping company knows why Giuliani chose to host his press conference there, they’re not telling. Perhaps the upcoming documentary will say.
The strange choice of locale caught the internet’s fancy. By the end of the day, Yelp had to close down the page for the business when it was inundated with parody reviews, all referencing the news conference. T-shirts appeared for sale from hundreds of venues featuring the venue, with any number of witty jokes about what looks like a mistaken booking. Or something out of an SNL skit.
Two months later, FSTL is still riding the unpredictable wave of viral internet fame. On the company’s website, shirts and posters for sale reference the press conference. And perhaps the biggest coup – on Super Bowl Sunday, the company was the subject of online freelance marketplace Fiverr’s Super Bowl ad.
The ad features Marie Siravo, owner and president of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, swooping around the world’s most advanced landscaping company in a golf cart apparently designed by Tesla, showing off how far her company has come since they found themselves at the “right place, right time,” and hit it fantastically big. It even pokes lighthearted fun at the popular joke that Giuliani only scheduled the press conference there because one of his staffers mistook it for the Four Seasons Hotel.
“When opportunity knocks on your corrugated garage door,” she says in the commercial. “You roll that puppy up!” The slogan is already on t-shirts on their site, if you liked the pithy, self-deprecating humor of the ad.
And according to FSTL’s Facebook page, Fiverr flew some of their crew to Mexico to make the commercial and put them up, where else, in a Four Seasons hotel.
Photo: A landscaping company crew reseeds a lawn. Credit: Polina MB / Shutterstock.com
