The ETC marquee might be the fastest way to see your name in lights.

Many of us dream of having our name up in lights and when you work at or visit ETC that becomes a very real possibility! International guests, fundraiser events, conferences, and college rivals all have a shot at getting their names on the ETC marquee. Milestone birthdays, retirements, and major company events are all celebrated as part of ETC’s unique corporate culture.

Heather Robins, Building and Events Coordinator at ETC in Middleton, has the fun job of keeping the ETC marquee messaging up to date and within guidelines. There are only so many letters you can fit on a single line, and only so many words you can create with the letters we have.

The day we discovered that ROSCO 120 was a perfect match to our existing stock of red plastic letters was a good day. All of a sudden, we were able to create any symbol or character in any language for our international guests. This came in quite handy when Arabic-speaking guests came for a visit many years ago. We crafted a welcome message by cutting letters out of the red gel, hung them on the marquee, and waited for the smiles. Unfortunately, we later found out that the words were hung in reverse order;  thankfully they were still touched by the effort.

A few other marquee fun facts:

• The ETC marquee is banded in faux chrome trim. When co-founder Fred Foster went to purchase the hundreds of feet of the material needed for the project, the guy in the shop exclaimed, “…what does your truck look like?!”
• The lights under the ETC marquee are incandescent bulbs that have an impressively long life. Our facilities department says they can’t remember changing a single bulb for the first 11 years the marquee was running.
• We have all standard letters and punctuation in both a large and small size, except for the exclamation point. We’ve only been able to order that single punctuation mark in the smaller size so all marquee excitement is, well, a little less exciting.
• A custom light cue exists just for photo ops on the Marquee. This cue is activated from the balcony on the opposite side of Town Square.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit the ETC marquee in person, we’ve put together a brief photo gallery of a small sampling of photos from the past several years that showcase just how much we like to celebrate around here.