Giant heads in the clouds

Marketing is a craft, not an art. One proof is that you don’t always have to be creative or original. In fact, that can even be detrimental.

Why? Because marketing is all about getting results, and marketing professionals have been testing different methods for getting results for generations. Can you do better than they do based on the idea you had in the shower this morning? Well, maybe, but the odds are against it.

If you’re a movie studio that has just spent tens of millions of dollars on a movie, you really want results—and posters are one of your most important ways of doing that. So it’s not surprising that studios have fallen back on a variety of tried and true formats. (This one has been dubbed “Tiny People on the Beach, Giant Heads in the Clouds.")

What can we learn from this? We could conclude that the more money is involved in a project, the more formulaic it is likely to be. But on the positive side, we might note that these formulaic movie posters actually do a good job of conveying what the movie will be like. And at least for me, seeing these dozens of posters grouped by category makes me realize that I have a high tolerance for formula. On some level I’m aware that I’ve seen this format dozens of times before, yet I still find myself wanting to see some of these movies.

Pond at dusk

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is mobbed during the Cherry Blossom Festival, but it is beautiful—and much more peaceful—the rest of the year.

During the winter the garden closes at 4:30, but yesterday I spent the last couple of hours there. This photo captures the mood, though it’s one I took a couple of years ago. Many more can be seen at Flickr. 

Visit sunny Colombia!

This one is puzzling. American Airlines is promoting flights to Colombia.

The photo is inviting, to be sure—it makes this corner of Colombia look a little like Florence transplanted to the seashore. Still, is Colombia really a hot new vacation destination? American Airlines seems to think so: Bogota is one of only a handful of cities mentioned by name on their Travel Deals page, along with Montego Bay and Steamboat Springs.

Lonely Planet, the go-to guide for adventurous travelers, sends a mixed message. Their country summary begins on an upbeat note.

Colombia’s back. After decades of civil conflict, Colombia is now safe to visit and travelers are discovering what they’ve been missing. The diversity of the country may astonish you.

Here’s the second to last paragraph:

In darker days people used to say, ‘if only it weren’t for the violence and drugs, Colombia would be paradise.’ Well the drugs may still be here but the violence is gone, at least for now, and it is, indeed, paradise.

But in the very last paragraph, there’s this.

Travel Alert: Travelers should exercise vigilance at all times due to the level of violent crime. Although kidnapping and homicide rates in urban areas have dropped in recent years, they remain high.

Hmmm.

I’ll assume that American Airlines is not trying to drum up business among drug lords. Then what’s going on? Maybe they’re appealing to the Lonely Planet crowd (though backpackers are not a very lucrative market). Maybe the Colombia poster is meant to signal that they’re an international airline, not just “American.” I’m not sure.

Dark humor

In this season of family reunions and holiday sentiments, there are times when you need a dose of dark humor.

My brother Keith recently asked for recommendations of literature that is dark and funny. I came up with the list below, roughly arranged from funnier to darker. (The ratio of darkness to humor in some works, like Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, is so high that I find them hard to enjoy.)

Funnier
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young
Hokum, edited by Paul Beatty
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (and lots of other Vonnegut)
The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Darker

More suggestions are welcome!

Gentlemen, this is vodka

The Ketel One ad campaign of a few years ago was a quiet triumph for copywriters everywhere. The first time I saw one of their billboards in Soho, it stopped me in my tracks. Just a few words in the corner of a big white billboard. No photos. No drawings. Not even any color.

Plus, the ad made the brave assumption that it was addressed to the single, solitary drinker of this particular Dutch vodka. It picked one of the seven classic emotional motivators*—exclusivity—and ran with it.

The writers behind this campaign must have had nerve—and so did the executives who approved it. (It couldn’t have been a committee.) The campaign had its critics, but I’ll bet it worked.

Maybe the old campaign had run its course, but it’s now been replaced by one that could be for almost any liquor. I don’t hate it as much as some do, but in trying to target its audience, it starts by excluding all women and apparently focuses on young white guys with creative-type office jobs (in an ad agency?) who feel some nostalgia for the Mad Men days. Not a big group.

*The seven are Flattery, Fear, Greed, Anger, Guilt, Exclusivity, and Salvation.