Before you attend your next brainstorm meeting, I have a little homework assignment for you. Watch a few hours of television. Take in a couple of good movies. Listen to some talk radio. Punch up The Lycos 50. Then grab the latest issues of People, Time and Rolling Stone magazines, and read them cover to cover.
I know, all that’s going to seem like information overload to some of you (and, to the others, perhaps a disdainful exercise in futility), but if you can stomach all the mind candy, the ideas will come rolling off your tongue. You’ll recycle a few references to popular culture and have everyone at that meeting – and, ultimately, your customers – singing your praises.
Trust me. Using current events and popular culture to call attention to an advertising or direct marketing campaign is a card any experienced creative knows is worth playing once in a while.
For instance, in the early ‘90s, a direct mail package I wrote for Science News featured the line, “things that make you go h-m-m-m…” in big, block letters on the outer envelope. Not only was this the name of a hit song at the time – not to mention a sketch on the old Arsenio Hall Show – but it was also a decidedly different, hip way of promoting the magazine. While I’ll never be able to prove the viability of this offbeat catchphrase, I can say that this package had a long, multi-year run as the magazine’s control, winning a couple of major industry awards for its creativity and performance along the way.
That was then. Today there’s a surfeit of ads out there paying homage, either sincerely or sarcastically, to what’s in the news. It’s a quick, relatively easy way to ride the coattails of someone – or something – already much bigger.
I’m thinking of the loud, cheesy Toyota Corolla TV commercial that spoofs MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” – like it or not, you can’t help but notice it.
Or those ingenious, ubiquitous “got milk?” ads from America’s Dairy Farmers and Milk Processors that have painted painfully silly white moustaches on every celebrity and his or her brother, in an audacious attempt to help glamorize the otherwise plain liquid refreshment.
But I also have in mind all the ads using this national election year to parody politics. Among others, Chick-fil-A jumped on the patriotic bandwagon recently with a full-page, full-color (red, white and blue – naturally) ad in Parade, The Sunday Newspaper Magazine, featuring one of its “spokescows,” sandwich board and placard in hooves, donning a classic straw boater hat and beseeching us to, “Vote Chargrilld Chikin” [sic].
Okay. I guess we’ll just have to trust the bovine animal’s recommendation.
And Captain Morgan Rum weighed in with its “Captain Morgan for President 2004” campaign, complete with slogan (“The Party Without the Politics”), bumper sticker and, yes, website, where you’ll find this call to action: “We call on everyone – of legal partying age – to join our cause, our mission … and, of course, our rockin’ party. In addition to standing side by side with like-minded spirits, your support will serve to guarantee and protect the universal right that drives us all: the quest to find that next GREAT bash!”
Yikes. Even by the Captain’s standards, that may be a little over the top. But surely he knows the demographic profile of his constituency and how to swing the vote in his favor.
And finally, most brazen of all, W Ketchup is using product to promote politics – or is it vice versa? – and issuing this warning: “Choose Heinz and you’re supporting Teresa Heinz and her liberal causes, such as Kerry for President.”
H-m-m-m, fair broadside or not, I’m still not buying that one.
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