The Marketing Genius Of Snow

Tell my family... I'm bloated

As I write this from my comfortable cave in the greater Atlantic Seabaoard megalopolis, there's a forecast of snow for later in the week. It would be the first of the season in what has been a particularly warm winter, and as this part of the world averages a few feet of the white stuff per year, we're all taking it with the usual shrug and bear it cadence of tough East Coast people.

Oh, wait! Actually, people are losing their minds. Like always, really.

Perhaps I'm prejudiced by my upbringing. I spent my college years in one of the snow capitals of North America (Syracuse). There, everyone either didn't have a vehicle, or had one that they could handle in snow., because they pretty much had to, what with yards of the stuff coming down every year. We then lived in the Bay Area for several years, which meant that snow was something that you visited at altitude, rather than something you actually had happen to you, without a choice. But as we moved back here nearly a decade ago, we're back in the realm of SNOWPACALYPSE.

It starts with the warnings, each one slightly more dire than the last, about 4-5 days before the SNOW EVENT. Assuming that the forecast stays wet and white, we then get a constantly changing estimation of how much will stick, loving descriptions of various degrees of wind chill, and to the minute descriptions of what will happen and when. Which are almost never accurate, and which no one will call to task for inaccuracy later.

As we get closer to the Big Day, we move to media coverage of the increasing amount of near panic from local residents, which creates a Prisoner's Dilemma of grocery shopping around perishables. You might not drink milk or eat eggs or bread on a daily basis, but by the 24 to 36 hour mark before precipitation occurs, especially if it's during a traditional commuting hour, you will find yourself elbow to throat with people who will treat the acquisition of such items as a life and death moment.

During the actual Snow Event, you'll probably be... well, doing what you normally do on a quiet night at home. Watching some show or movie on your content provider of choice, or working from home if your gig allows it, because the plain and simple of precipitation is that most of us won't have our lives too dramatically inconvenienced by it. So long as the power doesn't go out, the most that is going to happen is that you won't get to do exactly what you want to do, assuming it's an activity that's outside of your home, for some small period of time. Maybe you'll also have to do a bunch of cold and wet yardwork when it's all over.

Oh, and if the whole thing turns out to be not such a big deal, and the weather prediction professional turns out to have entirely exaggerated the threat?

Well, there's always the next storm. Which generally shows up in less than a week, and everything resets, with no one retaining any memory of the past SNOWPACALYPE. While the rest of the nation quietly, or not so quietly, snickers at just how unable to deal with any kind of disruption everyone in the Megalopolis seems to be.

I've got to tell you folks, as a marketing and ad pro, I'm deeply envious of such professional opportunities. When in our lives do we get a captive audience of wildly present people, ready to take all of our content without a first thought? Or any kind of penalty for being wrong? We're in the wrong business.

(Oh, and if the coming storm turns out to be entirely worth the hype, and the Blizzard Of '16 causes fatalities, civic unrest and extraordinary expense? Well, then, at least you'll finally feel justified for hoarding all those groceries.)

Happy surviving!

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