And on Tuesday we studied Marketing!

Another thing about NYC is the lengths that marketers will go to in order to tap into the largest single market in the USA. Good Ol Manhattan. You get the normal stuff, Times Square (one big ass billboard), Planes flying overhead writing in smoke (yeah, they still do that here) and the myriad of playbills and restaurant menus stuffed under my door each night.
With the new TV shows coming up this fall, the pressure is on to be creative in order to get the advertising out. This morning, I was handed a free NEW YORK TIMES as I walked into the subway to go to work. The fake headline on the fake overlay of the real times was “Woman becomes President” It was in fact an advertisement for a new show in the fall that stars Geena Davis. Pretty effective, though I will never watch the show. The second unique advertising trick I saw was for a show called “My name is Earl”. These poor young women were walking around Times Square in black t-shirts with video monitors on the front running 30 second TV ad loops of the show. The sound systems (also part of the shirt) were cranked up so that you could hear the advertisement over the sound of the cars an people in Times Square. We were in line for a club opening, waiting to get in for our free booze (I managed to get a ticket by chance) and these poor women were walking up and down the line getting verbally abused because their video shirts were so obnoxious. You could see the pain in their faces, even they had no plans to watch the show after that experience.

I can see it now, some young marketing executive pitching the idea in a boardroom like it was the best plan in the world. Boy was that wrong. Though I was impressed with the creativity…..

On a side note, I am despondent that as a race we have the ability to put satellites in orbit and yet most men cannot complete the simple task of flushing the urinal…. There is something wrong with us…