The Santa Fe Truck, a big tractor-trailer rig featuring four-color illustrations on its sides and rear to promote Santa Fe, has been launched in Florida. The mobile billboard will roll through some of the most populous parts of the country in the next week or so.

It's part of an experiment by Santa Fe-born Patrick Barker, a Florida-based trucking company owner who came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the side of the fleet of trucks he uses to haul seafood from Florida to the northeastern U.S. and elsewhere.

Barker attributed the implementation of the ad campaign to Santa Fe entrepreneur and hotelier John Smallwood, whom he called "a marketing expert."

In addition to a southwestern landscape and two Indian silhouettes, the ad bears the slogan "Santa Fe, The City Different," and the logo, Web address and toll-free phone number for the Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The Santa Fe Truck made its first run a week ago — a four-day route delivering seafood from Cocoa, Fla., to Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, Ala., New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston, Austin and back to Cocoa.

Since the Santa Fe Truck is a test to see if using trucks as mobile billboards might be a viable way to make money, he didn't charge the city of Santa Fe anything for the truck journeys.

"We had to pay the design costs," said Keith Toler, executive director of the Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau. "It was less than $2,000."

Barker said the design process involved the creation of vinyl decals that were applied to the truck's trailer.

"They were able to produce very good replicas on a large scale," he said. "It was wonderful."

Toler said it's too early to tell if the truck will help bring more visitors to Santa Fe. "We don't have any stats on it yet," Toler said Thursday. "It's been running less than a week."

The colorful semi earned its share of responses from curious motorists, according to Barker.

"The driver (heard) a lot of positive comments," Barker said in an interview from his home and business in Florida. "Every place he stopped, people came up to him to talk about it. We will see if it generates a lot of business in Santa Fe."

The truck has since embarked on what the trucking industry calls "a dedicated team route," this one running for about a week from Cocoa as far north as Boston, then westward to Memphis, Tenn., and Little Rock, Ark., before heading south and back home to Florida.

Although the truck undoubtedly has gotten some attention, the Eastern U.S. isn't one of Santa Fe's primary feeder markets, Toler said. Most tourists come to Santa Fe from California, Texas and other Western and Southwestern states.

Nevertheless, he said, the ads provide "great exposure to the East Coast without having to pay for it."

The Barker family, which first came to Santa Fe in 1890, owns Barker Management, a property management company, and Barker Realty, a real-estate agency.

Patrick Barker, a 1977 graduate of Santa Fe High School, has been in the trucking business for 20 years. His company is Select Seafood. For his advertising venture, he created a new company called Trukad.com.

Contact Bob Quick at 986-3011 or bobquick@sfnewmexican.com.