Last week we mentioned how experience is everything when it comes to productivity in the workplace. Well, while riding the subway to work today, I looked up and saw an advertisement for Manhattan Mini Storage, a popular storage facility in New York City. The company is known for its clever, punchy subways ads, appealing to gays and even skewering Vice President Dick Cheney, and this one is no exception: “What’s more limited? Your close space or her experience?” it reads atop a photograph of what is clearly intended to look like Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin. The reason the ad caught my attention is because if Manhattan Mini Storage was a national company, it’s not likely they would have gone with this kind of partisan ad. New York is famously liberal and even the Republicans on Wall Street aren’t as socially conservative as Palin. The company knows this and isn’t afraid to step on the toes of the city’s few loyal Republicans in its quest to get the attention of its target audience: Manhattanites who scoff at the idea of Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency and just don’t have enough space in the tiny studio apartments.
Experience Unnecessary
Vampirism Goes Viral
While the quality of HBO’s new vampire drama is questionable, the pay net set up Alan Ball’s True Blood with a pretty nifty marketing campaign, including viral and alternate reality game components, a MySpace page, multiple websites, a comic book, blood-splattered wanted posters and, of course, a fake product called TruBlood. A large billboard advertising the “synthetic blood nourishment beverage” with the clever tagline “Real blood is for suckers” could be seen at one of the entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan for weeks leading up to the premiere of True Blood before being replaced with an ad for the actual show. A website dedicated to the fake product asks visitors to input the century of their birth, after which you can browse the various flavors (types A, B, O, etc.), take a quiz and even purchase real merchandise (ladies boy briefs are currently sold out). Talk about viral!
Agri-Advertising: The Next Big Thing?
Forget music. Advertising might be the most universal language. As reported by local NBC affiliate KGW and picked up by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, a farmer in Sherwood, Oregon created a maze in his cornfield featuring the likenesses of the two presumptive presidential candidates, senators John McCain and Barack Obama. The farmer created the design with the hope of encouraging people to get out and vote in November. A few questions remain: Who is the farmer’s target demographic? And what were those alien marketing execs trying to sell us with this cornfield billboard?
